January 2011

T he American provincials looked ridiculous. They had no military bearing. Their formations were ragged, and they argued with their officers. Sometimes they were so clumsy they made the regulars of the British army highly nervous—and with good cause. Like the time in 1758 when some of the Massachusetts men with General James Abercromby’s army in the campaign against Fort Ticonderoga were given permission to clear the charges from their muzzle-loading muskets by firing them off. “l’hère was a fine fiering of them for a spael,” reported Amos Richardson of Woburn, “and some of ouer men Did Shut one of the Reglers Throu the Head which killed hem Daed.” It is no wonder the British sometimes felt it was safer to face the French than accept the aid of their American friends. Well before this, about 1755, if tradition is to be believed, Dr.

By no strange quirk of fate, no unlikely chance or mysterious destiny, were Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt brought together in casual acquaintanceship. Even had they been wholly without ties of blood and family tradition, unsharing of the same family name and distant ancestry, the strangeness would have been in their not meeting as they pursued their highly mobile physical lives within that small social world, close-knit and rigidly exclusive, which both of them inhabited.

The port of Bari, Italy, was crowded on the afternoon of December 2, 1943, when Captain Otto Heitmann returned to his ship, the John Bascom , with the two thousand dollars he had drawn from the U.S. Army Finance Section to pay his crew. Bari was a pleasant, peaceful city on the heel of the peninsula, little changed by the war except that in 1943 American and British military personnel crowded Victor Emmanuel Street and Corso Cavour instead of the Germans, who had been forced to flee northward. Usually Heitmann enjoyed the time he had to spend at this port on the Adriatic Sea while his Liberty Ship was unloaded, but he was nervous this December day. There were too many ships in the harbor. Without even lifting his binoculars to his eyes he could see the Joseph Wheeler, Hadley F. Brown, Pumper, Aroostook, John L. Motley, Samuel J. Tilden , and Devon Coast , all jammed in the main section of the harbor or along the east jetty.

To many urban Americans in the 1970’s, fighting their way through the traffic’s din and gagging on air heavy with exhaust fumes, the,automobile is a major villain in the sad tale of atmospheric pollution. Yet they have forgotten, or rather never knew, that the predecessor of the auto was also a major polluter. The faithful, friendly horse was charged with creating the very problems today attributed to the automobile: air contaminants harmful to health, noxious odors, and noise. At the beginning of the twentieth century, in fact, writers in popular and scientific periodicals were decrying the pollution of the public streets and demanding “the banishment of the horse from American cities” in vigorous terms. The presence of 120,000 horses in New York City, wrote one 1908 authority for example, is “an economic burden, an affront to cleanliness, and a terrible tax upon human life.” The solution to the problem, agreed the critics, was the adoption of the “horseless carriage.”

“THIS IS NOT A CANOE”

Der Doppelschrauben Schnelldampfer Kronprinzessin Cecilie , loaded with about eleven million dollars’ worth of gold and silver bullion and more than one thousand passengers, was halfway from New York to Plymouth, en route to Bremerhaven. On the night of July 31, 1914, the man on duty in the little shack on deck that housed the wireless was subjected to an intense crackling on his ear set. “Urgent and Confidential … Urgent and Confidential,” followed by a message addressed to the ship’s captain: “Erhard has suffered attack of catarrh of the bladder. Siegfried.” The Marconi man at once took this message to the bridge. Captain Polack—“our precious Polack” to many Americans who had known him since the days, twenty years before, when he was second officer on another German liner, the Spree —recognized it as instructions in code, a code he had earlier been supplied with the means to decipher.

On October 10, 1775, Lieutenant General Thomas Gage took his last salute as commander in chief of His Majesty’s forces in North America and the next day sailed for England aboard the transport Pallas . As he wound up nearly two decades of dedicated service in the American colonies, almost no one saw him off; and after his arrival in London a fellow officer wrote of him as a “poor wretch [who] is scarcely thought of, he is below contempt …” while other countrymen joked about the possibility of hanging him. For nearly half of those years in the colonies Gage had been the most powerful official on the continent; honest, honorable, a faithful servant of his king, he had given all he had to his task, only to be despised by the Americans and abandoned by the British.

Appearances may be deceiving, but marriage in the United States looks as if it is in trouble. More couples—primarily young—are living together without the formality of marriage, and more couples—somewhat older and sadder—are ending their existing marriages in the courts. Some see in this the onset of American morality’s decline and fall. “Are we the last married generation?” asked columnist Harriet Van Home in a 1969 essay. “Well, if we are, prepare for anarchy, chaos, and a breakdown in all the civilized amenities.” True, those who dread the imminent death of marriage cannot find statistics of nonmarital pairings to support their fears. Such liaisons are not matters of legal record. But divorces are. And the records of them are coldly explicit. A Census Bureau report early in 1971 indicated that the number of divorced individuals in the population had risen some 33 per cent in the previous decade. While there were thirty-five divorced persons for every thousand married couples in 1960, there were forty-seven in 1970. The parade of couples to the courts to undo in repentance what they earlier wrought in mutual love is getting longer.

In recalling the adventures and the misadventures of an Army correspondent’s life in World War II (“At War with the Stars and Stripes ,” April, 1971) our author, Herbert Mitgang, unintentionally omitted the role played by David Golding. Mr. Mitgang now adds this postscript:
In a remarkable group of Army journalists Golding served as a legendary managing editor for our Rome edition, which was generally considered to be the finest of the Stars and Stripes publications. A former reporter for a film daily in New York, he brought a hard-hitting Manhattan newspaper wisdom to military journalism and, with his movie experience, managed to juggle various prima donnas on the staff, most of whom wanted to cover the front line instead of sitting back in the fleshpots of Rome and Naples.

For those of us who fondly recall and relish rail travel, the new government-operated railroad network known as Amtrak leaves much to be desired. Skepticism about the quality and frequency of service appears warranted, as the National Association of Railroad Passengers News pointed out in a recent article entitied “Enthusiasts.” Herewith, from that article, are quotations from three directors chosen by the nation’s railroads to serve on the Amtrak board as the lines’ representatives:

Louis W. Menk, chairman of the Burlington Northern, speaking on NBC ’S “Today Show” on February 26, 1970, said that “in my view we ought to let the intercity passenger train, the long distance passenger train, die an honorable death like we did the steamship, or the riverboats and the stagecoach and pony express.”