As you approach the village of Palos de la Frontera, some fifty miles west of Seville in Spain’s Analgesía, the squat little church of San J’orge looms in the foreground at the base of a rocky cliff that overlooks the tidal flats created by the mingling of the rivers Tinto and Odiel. The shallow estuary where the two rivers converge, known of old as the Saltés, is undistinguished scenically, an obscure corner of Spain virtually unknown to American tourists.
William Burke “Skeets” Miller, the Louisville Courier-Journal reporter who interviewed the trapped Collins and helped with the rescue operations, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the tragedy. A jew years ago Miller, who is now retired and living in Vermont, wrote a vivid memoir of his harrowing trips into the cave. The following excerpts are from that hitherto unpublished account:
It was my first trip into a cave, an amateur who knew nothing about it and had no fears—only eagerness.
Head-first we started into the hole, barely listening to the directions and advice offered by Homer [Collins] who, with a flashlight, followed for a short distance.
Every four years the American people—or at least somewhere between 55 and 65 per cent of those eligible to vote—draw aside the curtain to the voting booth, peruse a ballot, pull a lever, push a button or print a rubber-stamped “x,” and elect the next President of the United States. It is a common ritual, one familiar at least in theory to anyone who has reached the age of reason. So familiar, in fact, that we tend to forget that each man or woman who participates in this modest act is carrying on one of the oldest political traditions in human experience. For it should be remembered that the United States, one of the youngest nations in the world, is at the same time the world’s oldest practicing democracy.
Although he married only once, Thomas Jefferson had two families. The first was by his wife, Martha Wayles Jefferson; the second, after her death, was by her young half sister, Jefferson’s quadroon slave Sally Hemings. This was known and eagerly publicized by the anti-Jefferson press during his first term as President. Despite pleas of Republican editors to deny the liaison, Jefferson maintained then, and thereafter to his death, a tight-lipped silence.
In any President’s life the silences can reverberate as loudly as his speeches. Some have held that Jefferson’s silence reflected only disdain for the chief accuser, James Callender, who though a notorious defamer of the great was also a talented writer, a generally accurate reporter, and Jefferson’s former friend. Others have written that Jefferson had a necessity for privacy, which is true enough. But where a private silence is characteristic of a silence indulged in by a whole society, and where admission of guilt can result in oppressive social punishment, the silence can be a matter worth special study.
The works of Indian artists shown here and on the pages that follow portray in a somewhat chronological sequence the development of Indian painting, at the same time reflecting some of the indigenous iconography and the concerns of the foremost native painters. The various works appear in Jamake Highwater’s book Song From The Earth: American Indian Painting , to be published later this month by the New York Graphic Society.
A decade ago a serious recognition of American Indian painters was rare indeed, for the simple reason that few art critics considered that there was anything about Indian painting worth knowing.
The assumption, which was not a new one, happened to be wrong, as the following pages make clear. But in the context of the dominant culture’s long-held attitudes toward native Americans it was not surprising. Conquering peoples tend to write self-serving history, and as American school books have traditionally portrayed the Indians, they have been little more than one-dimensional stereotypes: savages, warriors, torturers, or, more benignly perhaps, hunters, ritualists, and skilled horsemen. In matters as lofty as the fine arts, notice generally passed them by. Only the Indians of Mexico and Central and South America who built great cities were admired in aesthetic terms—an admiration, incidentally, that failed to spare them from near-annihilation.
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A lively Victorian love story has emerged around an infant that we once erroneously described as General Custer’s child. Last February we published a letter from the western historian Robert M. Utley, who, speaking of a photograph that ran in the June, 1970, issue, said that the people shown on a porch in Fort Leavenworth were not Custer and his wife—as we had claimed —but rather the Indian fighter Albert Barnitz, his wife, Jenny, and their daughter Bertha.
This revelation prompted Betty Byrne, the Marquesa de Zahara, to write us from her home in Ireland:
I have just received a copy of your publication, which contains a picture of my grandparents Albert and Jenny Barnitz holding their baby daughter Bertha, who is my mother.
On Lincoln’s Birthday this year Tiffany & Co., the fastidious New York jewelry store, ran an advertisement in the equally fastidious New York Times under the heading “Abraham Lincoln said more than 100 years ago.” There followed ten quotes that presumably Tiffany thought would appeal to its clientele. Among them were “You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich,” “You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer,” and “You cannot really help men by having the government tax them to do for them what they can and should do for themselves.”
When the ad appeared, a number of people complained that the quotes sounded like nothing Lincoln had ever said. And they were right. A few days later Tiffany’s ran a short statement admitting that “President Lincoln did not pen these words” and apologizing for the mistake.