January 2011

In the nearly thirty years that have passed since President Harry Truman issued the directives to support the partition of Palestine and afterward to recognize the State of Israel, the motivations of the President have been the subject of extensive historical discussion. A school of revisionist historiography has emerged which argues that President Truman’s Palestine policy was motivated by the purely political consideration of wooing the Jewish electoral vote. This argument casts a shroud of suspicion over the Truman Presidency, and portrays the birth of Israel, one of the most seminal events of modern times, as somehow illicit and ignoble. I had the privilege of serving as White House Counsel during this period and was in a position to observe the attitude of the President and the role of the State Department toward the Middle East. I am gratified that my recollections ofthat period are confirmed by documents now available. It is clear to me that the facts totally refute the assumptions of the revisionists.

No one knows whether it was a British regular or a minuteman who broke the morning stillness at Lexington with the “shot heard ‘round the world” (also heard by Paul Revere). If it was a minuteman, the chances are excellent that the gun, ball, and powder he used had at one time or another been hidden in the house above, situated on a farm some two miles from Concord’s North Bridge. Built in 1705, at the time of the Revolution the house was in the possession of Colonel James Barrett, commander of the Concord militia, and for some time prior to the Lexington affair it had been used as a virtual armory for colonial rebels. As a major British move became more and more likely in the spring of 1775, much of the arms and ammunition was taken deeper into the countryside, but a good deal was still here on the morning of April 19.

Hells Canyon is awesome. There is no other single word that can adequately describe it. Incredibly deep, austerely magnificent, it slashes between the states of Oregon and Idaho like a raw and gaping wound. To stand on the rim and gaze into that vast hole is to know humility as few places can teach it; to venture into it is to enter a place apart, a separate world-within-a-world where the old scales and comfortable concepts of size and distance fade into irrelevancy. “The grandeur and originality of the views presented on every side,” wrote Benjamin L. E. Bonneville, one of the canyon’s earliest explorers, “beggar both the pencil and the pen. Nothing we had ever gazed upon in any other region could for a moment compare in wild majesty and impressive sternness with the series of scenes which here at every turn astonished our senses and filled us with awe and delight.” Little seems changed since Bonneville’s time, nearly a century and a half ago.

George Washington had his Martha, John Adams his Abigail, and when most people think of James Madison, it is the famous Dolley who usually comes to mind. But there had been another woman in Madison’s life long before he met the widow Dolley Payne. Her name was Catherine Floyd, daughter of Colonel William Floyd of New York, and she broke Madison’s heart.

In 1783, while he was in Philadelphia serving as a member of the Virginia delegation to the Continental Congress, Madison fell in love with Miss Kitty. He was at the time thirty-two, and Kitty only sixteen, but this seemed to be no obstacle to their courtship. In April of that year, Madison wrote to his good friend Thomas Jefferson, “Since your departure the affair has been pursued. Most preliminary arrangements although definitive will be postponed until the end of the year in Congress.” Anticipating their forthcoming nuptials, the couple exchanged miniature portraits of themselves painted by Charles Willson Peale, and when the Floyds left Philadelphia to return to New York, Madison accompanied them as far as New Brunswick.

Our vision was obscured by flying fur when we ran a photograph in last October’s Readers’ Album which purported to show jack rabbits fleeing a dust storm down the main street of a Kansas town. Among our readers who pulled the fur away was Thomas P. Elliott, president of the Barnes County Historical Society in North Dakota, who wrote us:

Carol M. Heyne, public relations coordinator for New Idea Farm Equipment Company of Coldwater, Ohio, feels we did the organization an injustice when, in last August’s issue, we mentioned that it was manufacturing red, white, and blue manure spreaders for the Bicentennial.

“This is not a fact!” says Mrs. Heyne. “We never retailed, nor made available for retail, red, white and blue spreaders.

“However, earlier this year, one of our Model No. 224, 10-ton manure spreaders was hand-painted with red, white and blue stars and stripes and trimmed with golden eagle decals. This spreader was displayed, along with a banner reading, ‘Proud to be a part of America’s Agricultural Heritage,’ at several fairs and farm shows this year.

“The decision that a spreader would be painted patriotic red, white, and blue, was made largely because our founder, Joseph Oppenheim, was the inventor of the manure spreader, which dates back to 1899.

We recently received a letter from Michael Rosen, a long-time Colorado resident, who took issue with our spelling of Alfred Packer’s first name in a caption on page 87 of our October, 1976, issue. Packer, of course, was the man accused of having killed and eaten major portions of five companions while snow-trapped on a hunting expedition on the shores of Lake San Cristobal in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains during the winter of 1873-74. “Regarding your caption for Jackson’s Lake San Cristobal photo,” Mr. Rosen writes, “local folklore insists that Mr. Packer’s first name is too often mis-spelled, as it is in reality Alferd , not Alfred. I am a Boulder, Colorado, resident, and a University of Colorado graduate, and have eaten many a Packerburger in the Alferd A. Packer Memorial Grill,” Mr. Rosen concludes.