January 2011

For more than fifty years, the “largest sign in the world”—a city block long and four stories high—perched on the side of a hill on the edge of Griffith Park, Los Angeles, cruelly treated by time and weather. HULLYWOD , its broken letters read most recently; not too many years ago, they read HOLLYWOOD , and before that, when it was erected to celebrate the site of a fancy subdivision in the 1920’s, HOLLYWOODLAND .

By whatever name, and however decrepit, the sign was a symbol—one of the few surviving relics of Hollywood’s golden era, when the great studios were run like private fiefdoms by what author Ben Hecht called “undersized magnates,” when stars were discovered sitting at drugstore counters (or sometimes on bar stools), when moviemaking was still “fairy-land on a production line,” as screenwriter Otis Fergusson described it.

Western pioneers, by and large, were not a wordy lot. Nor were they much given to complaint. But the following letter surely sets some sort of record for taciturnity in the face of hardship. It was written from Fort Worth, Texas, in 1878 by James Fitzwilliam, an ex-Confederate who had headed west after the Civil War, to a sister back East from whom he had just heard after a period of years. Her half of the exchange is lost, but she evidently had suffered a severe reversal of some kind and had written to see whether he might send her some money to tide her over.

“I THEN WENT HUNTING BUFFALO…” AND STRAUSS, CREATED HE THEM “GIMME AN H! GIMME AN O! GIMME AN L!…” THE SWEET SMELL OF HISTORY THE 864-MEDAL MISUNDERSTANDING

It is very rarely that a book of history has an important impact on current events. That happy fate came to The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal , by David McCullough (Simon & Schuster, 1977), which American Heritage is pleased to announce is the winner of this year’s Samuel Eliot Morison Award. The prize is given annually for “the best book on American history by an American author that sustains the tradition that good history is literature as well as high scholarship.” President Jimmy Carter has remarked repeatedly that the treaties recently concluded, whereby ownership and operation of the Canal will eventually go to Panama, would never have passed the United States Senate had it not been for McCullough’s book.

This is all the more remarkable since the book is entirely historical and does not go into the current controversy over control of the Canal. “All through the Senate debates on the issue,” McCuIlough observes, “the book was quoted again and again, and I’m pleased to say that it was quoted by both sides. Real history always cuts both ways.”

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In the winter of 1915, Jeff Ward, ,owner of “The Big Store” dry goods establishment in Tazewell, Virginia, took the train to New York City to buy up-to-date items for the coming season. His visit evidently went well and to celebrate it—and his fortyseventh birthday on February 9—he had the versatile cameraman who ran the White Way Photo Studio at 1341 Broadway make this portrait showing multiple Wards in solemn communion with themselves. He was pleased enough with the result to order postcards made up for his friends.

by William Manchester

Little, Brown & Company
816 pages, 100 photographs and an 8-page map insert, $15.00

Douglas MacArthur was a man of staggering contradictions, and in this scrupulously researched and apparently fair biography, William Manchester doesn’t pretend that he can make all the conflicting pieces fit together. MacArthur’s bravery was legendary, sometimes carried to the point of foolhardiness: he would never wear a helmet in combat, he refused to have a bodyguard in postwar Japan, he wouldn’t even buckle his seat belt on a plane. Yet during the long, desperate fighting on Bataan, he only once made the fiveminute trip from his headquarters to the battlefront to bolster the morale of his discouraged, starving troops. Bitterly, they called him “Dugout Doug.”

by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

Houghton Mifflin Company 1,000 pages, 25 photographs, $19.95

In 1965 when Arthur Schlesinger wrote about John F. Kennedy in A Thousand Days , he called his book a memoir. This book he calls a biography, and he strives to keep a historian’s distance from his subject. But Robert Kennedy was a beloved friend, and there are sections here in which Schlesinger the biographer merges with Schlesinger the participant, the advocate.

The differences between the two Kennedy brothers were more striking than their similarities. Schlesinger characterizes JFK as a Brahmin, and Robert as a puritan; John as a happy, often merry man, and Robert as a sad one who used a grim, self-mocking humor to hide pain. Both men fought hard against social injustices—John because “he found them irrational,” Robert “because he found them unbearable.” And Schlesinger feels that the President was much the tougher of the two, in spite of Bobby’s reputation for ruthlessness.

by A. D. Suehsdorf

Random House
160 pages, approximately 250 photographs, 120 in color, $14.95

Mostly a lively nostalgic picture book of players and assorted baseball memorabilia, this scrapbook also includes a quick run-through of baseball history from 1876 to 1969, including some enchanting trivia. For instance, did you know that early baseball players had to double as pregame ticket takers? That at one time it took nine balls to walk a batter? That for one year (1882) ballplayers were color-coded—pitchers light blue, catchers scarlet, and so forth? Only their socks showed what team they were on.

Robert Kennedy and His Times The Great American Baseball Scrapbook American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur, 1880–1964

Charles Atlas often started interviews by stripping off his shirt and sitting at his desk half-nude. His physique was his stock in trade, and he knew that people wanted a look. They got an eyeful: chest forty-seven inches; waist thirty-two; biceps seventeen.