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January 2011
by Aljean Harmetz
Alfred A. Knopf
115 illustrations and photographs, 16 in color, $12.95
There’s nothing very deep here, just wonderful reading. It’s a play-by-play description of how Film No. 1060 was made in the days when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer ground out movies by the dozens, shuffling writers, directors, and actors around like Parcheesi pieces. It’s fun to learn how they adjusted, readjusted, and re-readjusted L. Frank Baum’s book, how they plucked actors out of their stable, how they created a convincing tornado and menacing trees. MGM tried to borrow Shirley Temple from 20th Century-Fox to play Dorothy, and chose Judy Garland when they couldn’t get her. Judy, by the way, was the next-to-lowest-paid star in the film. Only the dog Toto earned less.
NOTE: this article has been updated and reissued in the Winter 2019 issue. Click for the new version.
It is on our supermarket shelves, in our advertising, and in our literature. But most of all, it is in our entertainment. From Aunt Jemima to Mammy in Gone With the Wind, from Uncle Remus to Uncle Ben, from Amos ‘n’ Andy to Good Times, the inexplicably grinning black face is a pervasive part of American culture. Only recently have black performers been able to break out of the singing, dancing, and comedy roles that have for so long perpetuated the image of blacks as a happy, musical people who would rather play than work, rather frolic than think. Such images have inevitably affected the ways white America has viewed and treated black America. Their source was the minstrel show.
Over the past fourteen years , A MERICAN H ERITAGE has been proud to publish many excerpts from important new books selected with the guidance and counsel of Barbara Klaw, a member of our Board Editors, who has also edited the selections. We will continue to run such excerpts; and in addition we begin with this issue a regular column in which Ms. Klaw will briefly recommend other recent books that we think will engage the attention of our readers.
by Charles A. Lindbergh
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 81 potographs, $12.95
When Charles Lindbergh realized he was dying in 1974, he asked his publisher, William Jovanovich, to act as editor for the autobiography he wouldn’t be able to finish. Jovanovich, with the help of Judith A. Schiff, has now assembled the mass of incidents, thoughts, and judgments Lindbergh had been jotting down, sifting, and revising for almost twenty years.
It is a fascinating book. Lindbergh’s passion for science and technology clashed constantly with his surprising yearning for the primitive. All his life he promoted aviation, believing that (lying would benefit mankind, but he lived to experience the frightening detachment of dropping bombs from planes on human beings.
by Ted Morgan
Houghton Miffin, $10.95
It is flattering to read about a sophisticated French nobleman who has decided he’d rather be an American. Ted Morgan, a Pulitzcr Prize-winning journalist, was born Sanche de Gramont— le comte Sanche de Gramont. Raised, educated, and employed in both France and America, he decided in his forties that he’d had enough of his native country. The French were smug and rigid, he felt, and so he went through the lengthy business of becoming an American citizen. Scrambling the letters of “de Gramont,” he arrived at Ted Morgan—thoroughly American, comfortably unaristocratic. In this amiable book, he ranges through the American past and present, observing thoughtfully and with crisp affection his adopted land.
by Evelyn D. Ward
The Viking Press
40 photographs, $14.95
This book is a child’s-eye view of the Civil War, and of life before and during it on a modest Virginia estate called Bladensfield. Evelyn Ward wrote her reminiscences when she was an old woman to document for her descendants a vanished way of life. The childhood she describes with the precision of Laura Ingalls W’ilder was merry and loving, and her book-sunny, brave, and sad—is haunting. Peter Matthiessen, a grandnephew of the author and therefore one of the children of Bladensfield, contributes a graceful essay on the family and Bladensfield today.
”If you meet a man who has on an India-rubber cap, stock, coat, vest, and shoes, with an India-rubber money purse without a cent of money in it, that is he .”
Thus did one of his neighbors describe Charles Goodyear, a seeming lunatic who was trudging around the Eastern seaboard in 1837 trying to drum up interest in rubber products. He had been promoting the general usefulness of rubber for three years with scant success; the industry had already died, and everybody knew it.
A century earlier, French explorers had found Peruvian Indians making boots from the tough, clear sap of a native tree. The party brought some of this substance home with them, and for a few years “gum elastic” stirred mild interest in Europe. The’great British chemist Joseph Priestley claimed that it was good for rubbing out mistakes in manuscripts, thereby giving it the name by which it would forever be known. By-1820 rubber was being manufactured on a small scale, but it was too unstable to be of any real use-it became sticky in the heat, and rock-hard when cold.
Imagine a person of great wealth with a habit of giving away vast sums and lending more. In order to understand his character, we should examine how the money is dispensed and why. Who are the recipients? What does the donor expect of them in return? How does he react if his expectations are not fulfilled? By asking the same questions of a wealthy and seemingly generous government, we can acquire a similar insight into its character.
Two ships of Columbus’ fleet of discovery idled languidly in flat water along the treacherous north coast of the island of Haiti, their sails slack in the luminous starlight of a tropical night. It was Christmas Eve, 1492.
Columbus in his flagship, Santa Maria , accompanied by the commander of the little caravel Niña , was on his way to visit a native named Guacanagari, who bore the title of cacique (chief). He was one of five regional and mutually independent rulers of the big island which the Spaniards called Isla Española (Spanish Island) or simply Española.