January 2011

The crowded events of this century have made it easy for us to forget what a relatively new country we are and how close to the surface our past lies. One grisly reminder came to light last April near Great Bend, Kansas, and was reported in the Kansas State Historical Society Mirror .

Spring rains had brought Walnut Creek to flood, and an astonished farmer watched the torrent expose a mass grave containing eight skeletons. The farmer called the Barton County sheriff, who determined that the skeletons were not the product of recent wrongdoing. At this point the Kansas State Historical Society tackled the mystery and came up with the story of a grim and bloody day over a century ago.

Today Mary Cassatt is usually considered America’s foremost woman painter, but in the nineteenth century most Americans found it hard to take either women painters or impressionists very seriously. Her work won recognition first in France, and France was the country in which she found congenial colleagues—other painters whose work stimulated and excited her. Her subject matter could not have been more traditional or, in fact, more ladylike. She painted mostly portraits of members of her family—partly, to be sure, because they were willing models who charged no fees—and fully a third of her pictures are of mothers and children. Because her brushwork and composition are untraditional and her colors are light and bright, her work was considered avant-garde during her lifetime. Now her paintings seem gentle, loving, quiet, and proper. On the following seven pages AMERICAN HERITAGE presents a portfolio of her beautiful work.

At eight o’clock on the evening of June 14, 1926, a very old woman—blind and suffering from advanced diabetes—died in her chateau on the edge of the tiny village of Mesnil-Theribus, some thirty miles northwest of Paris. At her funeral, because she held the Legion of Honor, there was a detail of soldiers, and because she was chatelaine of the manor house, the village band played and most of the townspeople followed her coffin to the cemetery. There was nothing extraordinary in this; it is a not uncommon ritual in the villages of France. But an observant visitor to the old woman’s chateau and to the cemetery in which she was buried would have been struck by two quite astonishing things. In the beautiful high rooms of the house were paintings of a rare quality—paintings by Monet, Pissarro, and Courbet—and on the tomb in which she was laid to rest was this inscription: Sépulture de la Famille CASSATT native de Pennsylvanie États-Unis de l’Amérique

TALKING WITH FALA THE UNEASY CHAIR FACES FROM THE PAST BAD DAY AT WALNUT CREEK

Artist Leo Hershfield has supplied us with this charming reminiscence of an unusual visit to the White House in 1944, before it was the citadel of ominous mysteries that it seems today. “During an interval when I was an artist-correspondent I thought up assignments for myself. One of the less successful was the ‘interview’ with Fala at the White House. The white-jacketed doorman led Fala and me to a room adjoining the Oval Room and left me alone with my subject. That was an eerie affair. Voices, muffled, far off somewhere in the White House. The room with the microphones and one of F.D.R.’s wheelchairs. I think this was where the President made his Fireside Chat broadcasts. I sketched Fala who was an aging dog by that time and, after sitting up and rolling over (two tricks he had down pat but performed lethargically) he dozed off under the full-length portrait of President Garfield.

Wallace Stegner’s excellent biography of Bernard De Voto, The Uneasy Chair , which we had said would come out late this year, will now be published by Doubleday & Company in late February, 1974. An article adapted from the work appeared in our August, 1973, issue.

Beneath the gaudy exterior and hoopla of American political parades of the nineteenth century is concealed a sober truth about ourselves. The banners used in such parades were designed to convert onlookers to a new political faith or to reinforce existing beliefs. While one school of American historians dismisses such material as the mere claptrap of political rhetoric in this country, others see the banners as providing greater insights into the psychological springs of voter behavior than do the party platforms or newspaper editorials traditionally interpreted by intellectuals as the substance of campaign debate. The fact is that yesterday’s mass electorate could probably understand the complex issues of past generations no better than contemporary voters can comprehend complex issues today. Recently, scholars have attempted to understand past voter behavior by careful analysis of ethnic, religious, party, and class differences rather than by studying campaign arguments.

In the year 1854 a young man named George Washington Eastman rather reluctantly maintained a residence in Waterville, New York. The reluctance arose from the fact that while the hamlet was pleasant enough, its population of a few hundred souls offered no scope for the ambitions and needs of a father of two little girls, with a third child on the way. George Washington Eastman was a teacher of the arts of business, and to find pupils he was obliged to leave his wife Maria, and little Ellen and Emma, for regular trips to Rochester, some seventy miles to the west. As a busy stop on the Erie Canal and a flour-milling center with other growing industries, Rochester furnished a supply of young men to enroll in Eastman’s Commercial College, which he opened there to instruct them in “Commercial Penmanship and Book-Keeping by Double Entry,” as used in all branches of “Trade and Commerce, Including Wholesale, Retail, Commission, Banking, Manufacturing, Shipping and Steam-Boating, Individual Partnership and Compound Company Business.” The cost—diploma included—was twenty-five dollars.