January 2011

The Ozarks—a young reporter from Kansas City named Charles Phelps Cushing thought in 1910—were “not stunning Rocky Mountains, just graceful old hills. And the backwoods-type inhabitants of the region, though they were hardy and quaint, clearly were living a hundred years or more in the past.” Cushing’s curiosity was piqued. “I began to wonder who they were and where they came from” and, he added with presentiment, “why weren’t there any worth-while pictures of them?” So with folding camera in hand, Cushing made his way into southern Missouri, close to the border with Arkansas, and was astounded by the extent of the region—”a great rugged plateau” of worn-down, ancient mountains cut by wild valleys where, it was said, “darkness drops quickly on cabin dooryards.” The hills made road building difficult, and what few trails existed could only be traversed on foot or by horse.

Daniel J. Boorstin, recently appointed Librarian of Congress, and one of the most distinguished of American historians and social critics, recently gave a series of lectures in England, to be published later this month by Random House, Inc., under the title The Exploring Spirit . “The Therapy of Distance” is one chapter of the new book. —The Editors

Centennials don’t make sense. It should be evident that a hundredth anniversary is a mere numerical happenstance without historic significance. Yet our schools teach history by the numbers, and we talk about “Eighteenth-Century Civilization” or “The Gay Nineties.” These decimal labels derive from the simple fact that we have ten fingers; this kind of numerology is not helpful to an understanding of the past. History is a flowing stream that must not be dammed into stagnant puddles of decades or centuries.

But if anniversaries are illogical, their observances may be significant. They are, in fact, of great historic interest because they reveal the self-images of nations. The Centennial Exhibition of 1876 was such a revelation.

In the last week of October, 1918, 2,700 Americans died “over there” in battle against the kaiser’s army. The same week 21,000 Americans died of influenza in the United States.

The epidemic was by then raging over most of the populated globe, yet where the outbreak had begun was unclear. Some medical men blamed Chinese workers brought to France to dig trenches. A Spanish medical commission proved, at least to its own satisfaction, that the sickness had originated in Russian Turkestan. The Russians, and most of the world, attributed it to Spain. Months before, an influenza epidemic had swept that country like a tidal wave, afflicting eight million people. This earlier outbreak had been mild, however, with few if any deaths directly resulting from it. But, fairly or not, the deadly contagion now gripping the world became known as the Spanish influenza.

In the December, 1973, issue we ran the sad news that the St. Johnsbury & Lamoille County Railroad had gone out of business, thereby endangering the world’s shortest covered railroad bridge, which protected ninety feet of the Vermont line’s right of way. However, Robert L. Hagerman of Morrisville, Vermont, tells us that service has been revived: Of your selection of handsome photographs of American bridges by David Plowden I’m happy to report that the railroad using the covered bridge that appears on page 47 has not been abandoned as reported in the caption. It was a close call, however, and the St. Johnsbury & Lamoille is still not out of the woods—either literally or figuratively (the tracks are overgrown with brush in some places).

We regret that our December, 1975, frontispiece, which showed Isaac Minor standing by the immense granite boulder that was to supply the stone for his mausoleum, disturbed Mary Cotter, the manager of the Greenwood Cemetery Association in Arcata, California.

Ms. Cotter wrote to tell us that we were wrong in our assertion that Minor was buried elsewhere: “He is buried in the mausoleum. He was encrypted December 14, 1915, the place of death being Arcata, California, and the undertaker a Mr. J. A. Todd, now deceased. It would certainly make us feel better if some form of retraction could be made, as there are still members of the Minor family living who plan on being encrypted in said mausoleum.”

Mr. Wilson K. Minor, Isaac’s grandson, also wrote to inform us that—notwithstanding our statement to the contrary—at least three of Isaac’s children are not buried in the mausoleum.

Thomas A. Bailey, the distinguished history professor emeritus at Stanford University, has taken exception to our editorial judgment in connection with material he submitted to us on the Lusitania . We are pleased to print herewith his letter to us: “Who Sank the Lusitania? ” is a review-article that appeared in A MERICAN H ERITAGE , December, 1975. Written by editor E. M. Halliday, it combines a generally favorable appraisal of The Lusitania Disaster , authored by myself and Captain Paul B. Ryan, with an unfavorable appraisal of an unpublished article that we had also written on another book on the same subject.

A number of people wrote us about an anomaly that occurred in the article on Melville and Hawthorne in our December, 1975, issue. Among those who picked it up was John Maass, whose piece on the Centennial Exhibition appears in this issue. He writes: “The 1820 portrait of a bold brunette on page 20 makes an effective contrast to the picture of the fair and prim Mrs. Hawthorne. But it does not depict Mrs. Herman Melville, who was born in 1822.”

True enough. The portrait we incorrectly identified as that of Melville’s wife is in fact of his mother, Maria Gansevoort Melville. Below, to set things straight, is a photograph of Mrs. Herman (Elizabeth Shaw) Melville.

Cal Dunbar of West Yellowstone, Montana, who served as a Marine sergeant in World War II, has some interesting footnotes to add to William Manchester’s article in our December, 1975, issue: As an ex-enlisted Japanese language interpreter with the Fleet Marine Force, Pacific, I really enjoyed “The Man Who Could Speak Japanese.” The article has all the flavor, color, and authenticity of the period—particularly in regard to the manner with which Marines who could really speak Japanese were treated by the other Marines of all ranks.

Many airlines flourished in the shadow of Transcontinental Air Transport during the rather chaotic days of the late 1920’s and early 1930’s. William Voigt, Jr., of Blackshear, Georgia, worked for one of them, and was reminded of his experiences by the article on TAT in our December issue: My line was SAFE way, our nickname for Southwest Air Fast Express, Inc., with headquarters in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I, as a reporter for the Oklahoma City Times , was chosen as station agent for SAFE way at Oklahoma City, a position I held until October of 1930, when the line was sold to Universal, predecessor of American Airlines, and abandoned. I went in hoping to become public-relations chief of the line but functioned instead as station agent.