January 2011

At Ticonderoga, Lake George spills its waters northward into Lake Champlain, and for over a century whoever controlled the narrows there controlled the gateway to a continent. Travel through the dense American forests was arduous at best, impossible when supplies and trade goods needed to be taken along. If smugglers, traders, or armies wished to pass between the domains of Britain and France, between New York and Montreal, they had to go by water.

Within the last year or so the New York Times correspondent C. L. Sulzberger has written of President Nixon’s “evident populist feeling,” and another Times man, Anthony Lewis, remarked that Lyndon Johnson was “beyond doubt a genuine populist.” A number of observers have stressed the “populist strain” in the “Kingfish” from Louisiana in the iQ3o’s, Senator Huey Long; in Wisconsin’s Communistphobe of the igso’s, Senator Joseph McCarthy; in the 1968 Democratic Presidential nominee, Hubert Humphrey; and in the Alabama candidate for President in 1972, Governor George Wallace. John D.

In 1865, after a highly successful career as an art teacher and wood engraver in New York City, Henry W. Herrick returned to his family’s home in Manchester, New Hampshire, to care for his aging mother. He was forty-one years old, portly, dignified, and soon—with his tall silk hat and gold-headed cane—he became something of an institution in the culture-poor cotton-mill community, a pillar of the First Congregational Church and a founder of the Manchester Art Association.

Although he was a familiar figure on its streets, as an artist Herrick turned his back for the most part on Manchester’s bustling industrial heart and took his sketchbook instead to the quiet residential avenues that fed from it and, farther beyond, to the winding dirt roads that led into the New Hampshire countryside.

Did Thomas Jefferson, widowed at thirty-nine, take as a mistress Sally Hemings, the beautiful quadroon half sister of his late wife? This careful study of the known facts and of the long, bitter argument on the subject is the work of a seasoned scholar. Fawn Brodie, professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles, has published widely acclaimed biographies of Joseph Smith, Thaddeus Stevens, and Sir Richard Burton. The material she presents here is the basis, in part, of a forthcoming longer study. Although AMERICAN HERITAGE rarely prints all the scholarly apparatus supporting a story, in this inevitably controversial case we have included Mrs. Brodie’s notes.

--The Editors

One night in February, 1928, a technician from WABC, a pioneer radio station in New York City, finished adjusting his amplifying equipment in a nightclub at 35 East Fifty-third Street and signalled his readiness to the bandleader. The young man nodded and stepped to the microphone. Eight months out of Yale University, he was a self-taught saxophonist; his singing voice was thin and edged with nasal inflections that suggested his New England upbringing; he had himself never even listened to a radio. Nevertheless, he confidently cleared his throat, took a deep breath, and launched one of the most formidable legends m show business: “Heigh-ho, everybody—this is Rudy Vallée announcing and directing the Yale Collegians. …”

This is how it was in the old days. A family that wanted to go from here to there went by railroad train because there was no other way to do it. If the distance was very short, ten or a dozen miles only, you might hire a rig at the livery stable and let the horses do the work, and if you lived on deep water you might go all or part of the way by steamboat, but as a general thing to make a trip meant to take a ride on the cars. The process was slow by later standards, the journey was apt to be bumpy and dusty, and there were inflexible schedules to keep, but it was exciting, especially for children past the time of actual babyhood. It differed from modern travel in that the mere act of departure was a great event.

Sometimes the camera solidifies a modest moment in history in a way that reminds us sharply of securities we have left behind. These photos of District of Columbia public schools, taken in 1899, render the glow of the era of McKinley in the way that the spires of Oxford whisper of the Middle Ages. They are the work of a pioneer in documentary photography, Frances Benjamin Johnston. Readers of A MERICAN H ERITAGE have seen her work before, most extensively in a Tuskegee Institute portfolio in the August, 1968, issue. Though a well-born lady, with a high-society portrait clientele and access to White House parlors from Cleveland through Taft, she was no prettifier, and shot with unblinking honesty subjects as gritty as child workers in Pennsylvania mines. Yet the serious, straightforward studies shown here have a natural charm to them. When they were taken, Washington’s school system ministered to 45,560 pupils, using 1,159 teachers—only 155 males—and expending about $1,150,000 in a year.

Given the necessities of the times, the prevailing mood of the country, and the configuration of political power in Great Britain, the selection of Frederick, Lord North, as prime minister to His Majesty George in was no surprise. In 1770, when the king was forced to call for a general election, he sought a man who would execute his policies and pull the government together, and he turned to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and eldest son of the first Earl of Guilford. “If you don’t accept,” he informed North, “I have no one else,” and from that moment forward—for twelve destiny-laden years—the management of events was largely in the pudgy hands of a man who gave his master utter subservience and loyalty.

The United States was in a bit of a mess, as usual. There was trouble with the economy; trouble with the money; trouble on the farms. There were struggles between the races and cries for civil rights. The President was a Republican, and pretty well entrenched, although some of his party were furious with him and his administration. In fact, they were teaming up with the Democrats, and there were more opposition candidates for the coming election than one could keep straight. There was a big Negro convention, too, and an outspoken woman candidate. The son of a famous Massachusetts Presidential family was a quiet but probably willing liberal candidate. His name, of course, was Charles Francis Adams, for this was 1872.

It was 5 P.M. on Sunday, the fourth of February, 1945. After seven months of dispatches and a month of frantic preparation by the Soviets, the Big Three conference at Yalta on the Black Sea was about to commence. The senior representatives of the United States, Great Britain, and the U.S.S.R. had been invited to witness the opening and were assembled along the two long walls of the great ballroom of the Livadia Palace, the former summer playground of Czar Nicholas II . Once ornate, the great room was now quite bare except for huge drapes over the windows and a large doughnut-shaped table in the center. With other Americans, Major General R’fcssel Deane and I stood waiting. We were the two senior members of the U.S. Military Mission to the U.S.S.R. and had been in Moscow for the past sixteen months.