January 2011

COPYRIGHT © 1978 BY SCOTT BLAKEY

In April of 1967 Life magazine published the photograph at left. It puzzled and alarmed Americans. The picture shows an American POW, held by the North Vietnamese, bowing deeply, woodenly, to his captors. His face is expressionless, his movements robotlike. The picture occasioned angry charges of brainwashing, drugging, or torture.

The full story behind this shattering photograph is now told for the first time in a book about the prisoner who did the bowing—Lieutenant Commander Richard A. Stratton. Stratton was a Navy flier, based on the U.S.S. Ticonderoga . He was brought down in North Vietnam—by the malfunctioning of his own rockets—in January, 1967, and was then tortured and forced to make a “confession. ”

“If one loves old photographs, with all their compelling I magic, there is no happier a hunting ground than the I Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress.” So writes Oliver Jensen, the former editor of this magazine, in the introduction to America’s Yesterdays , a unique collection of some of the library’s least-known pictorial treasures, which American Heritage will publish this fall.

This picture is a remarkable document for a couple of reasons. First, it may well be the oldest surviving photograph of San Francisco, as well as the oldest made anywhere in America’s Far West. Second, the historic scene it presents existed for less than three months before it disappeared utterly. The daguerreotype was discovered in November, 1977, among the library possessions of a New Hampshire house, and is now owned by a New York dealer in Americana. After it was called to our attention, our investigation into its antiquity led us to Gladys Hansen, director of special collections at the San Francisco Public Library, and her investigation led her to the following news item in the San Francisco Alta California for March 19,1850:

The place is the fledgling community of Windsor, Connecticut: I the time, an autumn day in the year 1651. A group of local I militiamen has assembled for training exercises. They drill in their usual manner through the morning, then pause for rest and refreshment. Several of the younger recruits begin a moment’s horseplay; one of these—a certain Thomas Allen—cocks his musket and inadvertently knocks it against a tree. The weapon fires, and a few yards away a bystander falls heavily to the ground.

There is nothing amusing about wounds, especially those suffered in battle. But Major General Henry A. Barnum clearly carried his with panache. Wounded in the left side at Malvern Hill in 1862 during the Civil War, he was left for dead on the battlefield. His relatives back home in Syracuse, New York, were given the bad news, and his funeral was preached. But Barnum had endured—to be captured, sent to Libby Prison, and exchanged. His wound never healed, however, and Dr. John K.

SOMEONE THERE WAS WHO DIDN’T LOVE A WALL YES, HE COULD THE GUNS OF FEBRUARY/MARCH OH, FOR THE DOUGHS OF YESTERYEAR A GLIMPSE IN THE MIRROR

In our December, 1977, issue Roy Bongartz described the splendid hoopla that developed when the revolutionary Mexican muralist Diego Rivera went to work for American capitalists—particularly the bitter run-in with the young Nelson Rockefeller when the painter decided to put the face of Lenin into a mural for Rockefeller Center. Now several readers have reminded us that what came to be known as the “Battle of Rockefeller Center” drove essayist E. B. White to poetry in The New Yorker . The year was 1933, and the poem was entitled “I Paint What I See, a Ballad of Artistic Integrity”:

Those who recall “The Man of a Thousand Faces,” by Oliver Jensen in the February/March, 1978, issue, will remember the panoply of faces which accompanied the article—each belonging to President Calvin Coolidge, and each bearing the same gelid frown, as if in disapproval of the photographer, his fellow subjects, and the whole idea of photography. Looking at the pictures, one was moved to wonder if he ever smiled—if, indeed, he could smile.

Yes, he could—and we can prove it. Consider the photograph of the President above, shown with Elihu Root on the left and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Coolidge is not merely smiling; he is grinning outright.

John G. Mitchell’s article on the history of the National Rifle Association and its stand on the right to bear arms (“‘God, Guns, and Guts Made America Free,’” February/March, 1978) engendered a respectable amount of mail, some of it quite heated. One reader, for example, maintained that the article was “about as subtle and unbiased as a bullet fired in anger,” and went on to declare that “guns truly represent an American heritage. I get pretty annoyed with these selfappointed do-gooders who want to classify me with crazies, nuts and murderers and take away my heritage.”