January 2011

Not so long ago, indeed well within a lifetime, there was no “dearth of heroes” in this country, to quote the title of our opening article a little out of context. At the end of what John Hay called our “splendid little war” with Spain, there seemed to be a plethora, and the occasion shown above still exudes the pride and joy of that moment. The setting is the Hudson at New York, with Grant’s Tomb on the far left, and the event is the spectacular naval parade in honor of Admiral George Dewey and his thunderous victory over a Spanish fleet at Manila Bay on May i, 1898. He lost not a man, and totally destroyed the enemy. The scene above occurred on September 29, 1899.

Soon after Reginald Marsh’s death in 1954 an art magazine asked me to write about him. When I turned in the article the editor said he liked it but he had one reservation: “You say, ‘In my opinion he was the greatest artist of his time.’ Do you mean that? Greater than Picasso?”

“Yes,” I answered.

When the article came out it was headed “Homage from a colleague to the chronicler of New York life on paper and canvas marks the opening of a memorial exhibition at the Whitney Museum.”

1. 1. Ice axe.
2. 2. Post axe, used for cutting mortises in beams.
3. 3. Lard squeezer.
4. 4. Armrest, often used during long church meetings.
5. 5. Feather-bed patter, used for smoothing out feather mattresses and quilts.
6. 6. Wheel race, used for measuring the circumference of a wheel before fitting it with its metal rim.
7. 7. Candlemaker. Wicks were tied to it and dipped into hot wax.
8. 8. Leather, or beaming, knife, used for dressing hides.
9. 9. Hay saw.
10. 10. Screw, used for loosening sugar in a sugar barrel.
11. 11. Wheelwright’s reamer, used for boring hub holes.
12. 12. Froe, used for splitting wood into shingles.
13. 13. Round shave, or scorper, used to smooth the inside of a barrel and also to make bowls of wood.
14. 14. Hook pins, or drift hooks, used to peg beams together temporarily when laying a framework on the ground, before raising a house.

Slavery and Racism in the North-South Dialogue, by C. Vann Woodward.

Little, Brown and Co., 301 pp. $7.95

Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, by John W. Blassingame.

Oxford Univ. Press, 272 pp. $7.95

We are still seeing slavery through a glass, darkly, and small wonder. For the legacy of race conflict, slavery’s deformed child (or perhaps its parent), remains with us, refusing to be banished by all our piety and wit.

In December, 1936, Oswald Garrison Villard, longtime liberal editor of The Nation, wrote his friend Representative Maury Maverick ( 1895-1954), of San Antonio, Texas, that he wanted to inform the public of the congressional burdens caused by the New Deal’s economic emphasis. He asked that Maverick’s secretary send him a statistical breakdown of a week in the life of a congressman.

One summer evening in the mid1960’s there was a concert on the porch of an old hotel in western New York State. Gingerbread pillars towered three stories into the darkness above the conductor, and figures leaning from the windows were silhouetted against the yellow rooms behind them. Below the porch, where the lawn sloped away to a lakeshore, the audience strolled back and forth or sat on the grass beneath old-fashioned Japanese lanterns that had been strung between the trees. As though on cue, a round, brightorange harvest moon rose over the lake, making a white path across the water to the other shore. The orchestra swung into “The Blue Danube.”