January 2011

When in June of 1778 Sir Henry Clinton evacuated Philadelphia and moved his army of ten thousand British and German troops toward New York, Washington called his officers together to discuss strategy. Their decision—which, said Alexander Hamilton, “would have done honor to the most honorable society of midwives, and to them only”—was to keep watch on Clinton’s flank but to avoid a major action.

Washington thought differently. He wanted a fight and sent out an advance guard under Lafayette. But when the Americans came into contact with the British near Monmouth Court House, New Jersey, on the morning of the twenty-eighth, the cranky and unstable General Charles Lee had taken command. Lee wanted no part of a battle. When he saw one shaping up, he issued a series of contradictory orders that led to a confused, obscure fight in which groups of American troops drifted here and there aimlessly. Soon Lee’s whole force of five thousand was in retreat, the men staggering in the hundred-degree heat.

They are all gone now—those vivid, venal characters who for a half century up to World War IIAC moved with insouciant relentlessness across the spotted field of Boston politics. One could scarcely forget Honey Fitz Fitzgerald jigging on the top of a cab on Election Eve as he sang “Sweet Adeline,” or Jim Curley at a rally, mellifluously reciting the Lord’s Prayer and pausing to whisper to an aide: “Get the son of a bitch that’s heisting my coat.” But the lesser figures are recalled only by old men turning over memories of the gaslit polling places of their youth—Martin Lomasney, for instance, the lantern-jawed mahatma of Ward 8, who commandeered such loyalty in his ward that the dead annually rose from their graves to vote for him; or blue-eyed Pat Kennedy, behind his East Boston bar, explaining in a proper brogue why the spalpeens deserved the spoils.

When young Jack London described the Reno of 1892 as “filled with … a vast and hungry horde of hoboes,” he was reporting no isolated phenomenon; shaggy, rootless men—tramps or hoboes—could be seen in every part of the West from the 1870’s down to the Second World War. Beginning in 1869, when Omaha Bill beat his way on the first Union Pacific train to the Coast, they were to be seen on all the western lines. Robert Louis Stevenson watched two of these “land stowaways,” as he called them, “whip suddenly from underneath the cars, and take to their heels” while his train was standing in the yards at Elko, Nevada, in 1879. Freight trains heading for the Dakota wheat harvests thirty years later were black with transient riders, like roosting starlings.

COPYRIGHT © 1976, WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART

In an imposing observance of the nation’s Bicentennial the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City has devoted its entire building to a huge, exciting exhibition celebrating “200 Years of American Sculpture.” The show opened in March of this year and will run until mid-September. Altogether, more than two hundred sculptors are represented.

Assembling the exhibition from museums and owners across the country presented the museum staff with extraordinary logistic problems. Many of the sculptures had to be taken apart for shipment, and in one instance it took five days to reassemble a work when it finally reached the Whitney. Another piece, a delicate and intricate one, was accompanied by a curator who came along to make sure it was properly put together again. Because of the great number of individual sculptures included in the show—many of them very heavy, or very large, or very fragile—the shipping and insurance problems were formidable.

The white man’s peace at Appomattox in 1865 meant war for the Plains Indians. In the next quarter century six and a half million settlers moved west of the Missouri River, upsetting a precarious balance that had existed between two million earlier pioneers and their hundred thousand “hostile” red neighbors. The industrial energy that had flowed into the Civil War now pushed rail lines across traditional hunting grounds. Some twenty-five thousand soldiers were sent west to meet insistent demands for protection coming from stockmen and miners spread out between the Staked Plains of Texas and the Montana lands watered by the Powder, Bighorn, and Yellowstone rivers.

As we commemorate the anniversary of the founding of our nation we are conscious of a paradox: we have almost miraculously maintained the continuity of those institutions which the Founding Fathers created, but in large measure we have betrayed the principles that animated them. These principles are as valid as ever: that government derives its authority from the consent of the governed; that those who make government may alter or abolish it and institute new governments; that the power of all governments is limited by the Constitution; that the civil is always superior to the military, that the purposes of government are to establish justice and secure life, liberty, and happiness to the people; and that these principles are rooted in the very nature of things and are therefore designed to survive all the vicissitudes of history.

In the decade before the turn of the century Charles Erskine Scott Wood—the army officer who had participated in the subjugation of the Nez Perces and had recorded the speeches of their famed leader, Chief Joseph—sent his young son Erskine to spend two autumns with the chiefs band on the Colville Reservation, near where the Grand Coulee Dam, in the eastern part of the state of Washington, is now situated. The boy, who ordinarily attended private school in Portland, subsequently went on to Harvard and the Oregon School of Law. Today, as he nears his ninety-seventh birthday, he still practices law in Portland on a semiretired basis. At the request of A MERICAN H ERITAGE , Erskine Wood wrote the following memories of his visits with Chief Joseph as a teen-ager:

The face is familiar. Every American has scanned it a thousand times; it passes from hand to hand in millions of ordinary business transactions every day of the year. It is Gilbert Stuart’s image of George Washington, and it adorns, of course, the United States dollar bill. Yet not one American in a hundred could tell you anything of the artist whose perception of the Father of His Country would eventually become the most readily recognized portrait ever made of any famous person. This is too bad, for Stuart lived a tempestuous life, here and abroad, that makes an intriguing human story—and one that reveals some curious facts about just how that image of Washington came to look the way it does. Here a well-known biographer of Washington tells the story.
        --The Editors

On January 1, 1975, at the age of eighty-two, George D. Aiken of Vermont retired after thirty-four years in the United States Senate. A moderate Republican, he was known for his Yankee wit, crustiness, and independence (he traditionally breakfasted with the Senate majority leader, Mike Mansfield of Montana, a Democrat). For the last three years of his career in the Senate, Aiken—a member of the Senate Foreign Relations and the Agriculture and Forestry committees, as well as of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy—kept a diary, dictating his entries at the end of each week. They were dramatic years of change and tragedy that encompassed the bombing of Cambodia, the end of the war in Vietnam, new relationships with Russia and China, Watergate, and increasing economic difficulties. Here are excerpts from that diary, which has just been published by the Stephen Greene Press under the title Aiken: Senate Diary, January 1972-January 1975 . We begin the senator’s remarks with his entry for January 22, 1972.