January 2011

In “A Black Cadet at West Point” in our August issue, John F. Marszalek, Jr., claimed that a recent history of the Academy by Thomas J. Fleming failed to give a full account of the case of Johnson Whittaker, the black cadet who was investigated and court-martialled for alleged self-mutilation, among other charges. In West Point: The Men and Times of the United States Military Academy (1969), said Marszalek, Fleming “goes into some detail on the court of inquiry, but says nothing of the subsequent court-martial”; and Fleming was quoted as writing that although “the definitive truth will probably never be known,” nevertheless, “any fairminded examination of the case would find the evidence heavily against him [Whittaker].” This, Mr. Marszalek implied, is not a balanced view.

Long before anyone ever heard of ecology, pollution was a problem. As far back as 1880 the Passaic River in northern New Jersey had lost its pristine quality. Pollution was the reason, caused chiefly by carbolic acid discharged by a paper mill and raw sewage dumped into the river by communities along its shores. As a result Newark and Jersey City had unusually high death rates from typhoid fever. Despite steps to control the worst offenders, conditions were not much better when the sardonic cartoons above appeared in the Newark Sunday Call in 1902. “How would you enjoy being a figurehead on the polluted Passaic?” the caption writer asked.”… it is to be hoped none of the craft that bears them will poke their noses further up than Newark Bay.”

A personal tragedy in the mid-1950’s led to my discovery of the Bari disaster. When my mother’s illness was diagnosed as Hodgkin’s disease, a form of cancer that originates in the body’s lymph tissues, a local doctor told me that a new drug treatment was being used in a few hospitals in the nation, nitrogen mustard.

I made contact with the Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York City and promptly received from Dr. Cornelius P. Rhoads a reprint of a speech he had given to a medical society. “Dusty” Rhoads had been chief of the Medical Division, Chemical Warfare Service, U.S. Army, at the time of the Bari disaster, and the incident was mentioned as the ultimate source of the nitrogen mustard treatment for Hodgkin’s disease and leukemia. My curiosity as a writer was aroused, and I immediately set out to learn more about it. Meanwhile, my mother was given the nitrogen mustard, and according to medical experts, the drug prolonged her life for approximately a year.

AMERICAN HERITAGE SOCIETY TOURS OF ARMS AND MEN A NEW LOOK OUR ENGLISH COUSIN THE WIZARD WINS SPOON RIVER: A CORRECTION THE LEGENDARY GOLDING A FEW THOUGHTS ON AMTRAK A REBUTTAL FIGURING AHEAD: THE PASSAIC IN 1902

Because of the American Heritage Society tours, which began this year, we are now happily receiving a whole new class of mail, and of a very rare and old-fashioned variety: thank-you letters. Our travellers clearly enjoyed what one, a teacher, called her “fantastic week of history.” It left her “a bit overwhelmed and saturated but also impressed and satisfied.” A rarebook dealer who joined in the same adventure writes that “From the Hudson to the Mohawk, Sunnyside to Fort Ontario, and the WaldorfAstoria to Le Moyne Manor, the New York tour last week was continuous pleasure to me.” Clearly, one of the main joys for our travellers was “getting behind the curtain”—avoiding the crowds, seeing things quietly, getting into interesting private homes, and being received as guests by curators, owners, even governors, all of them custodians in one way or another of the visible past. This month our second round of tours is underway in various parts of the country.

After reading the article on Ouster’s Last Stand (“Echoes of the Little Bighorn”) in our June issue, Colonel Alfred B. Johnson, of Alexandria, Virginia, questioned two points made by the author, David Humphreys Miller. The colonel said that, contrary to a footnote in the story of Joseph White Cow Bull, the Indians could not have captured repeating rifles during the battle, because the troopers were armed only with singleshot, breech-loading arms. He also expressed doubt about a footnote in the story of Dewey Beard that said thirty-one soldiers were killed during the massacre at Wounded Knee.

The interpretation of history, we are all aware, is ever changing. Wilbur R. Jacobs, a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, now questions whether it is not the time to re-evaluate our ideas about the American West. Writing for the American Historical Association Newsletter of November, 1970, in an article entitled “Frontiersmen, Fur Traders, and Other Varmints, an Ecological Appraisal of the Frontier in American History,” Professor Jacobs says:

Some historians not only look at the past but also try their hand at glimpsing what the future holds. Such a one is the famed British historian Arnold Toynbee. The following is an interview with him conducted by a scribe of the London Sunday Times who calls himself Atticus:

Professor Arnold Toynbee, who’s currently revising his mammoth, 12-volume Study of History , must be our most controversial historian. His reflections on the prophet Muhammed caused a riot in India in 1969 (four dead; 67 injured). “I was very surprised,” said Toynbee. “I’m pro-Muslim.” His Study of History brought some loud protests from fellow historians like Hugh Trevor-Roper. He called Toynbee’s learned study a “windy soufflé” and accused him of egotism, obscurity and intellectual hanky-panky.

A photograph we ran in the April issue, that of Charles P. Steinmetz and Albert Einstein (“Dos Passos: The Wizards Meet”), occasioned a letter from C. P. Yoder, of Nazareth, Pennsylvania, who began his career in electrical engineering as a laboratory assistant at General Electric in 1910. Mr. Yoder, now curator of the Pennsylvania Canal Society, recalls: The unique personality of Steinmetz, together with his genius as a mathematician, provided much meat for the publicity department … [from which] many exaggerations and myths developed. One much-publicized story that is no myth was his strong attachment to black stogie cigars. It is indeed rare to find a picture of Steinmetz that does not include his favorite cigar. Sometime prior to 1910 General Electric issued an order prohibiting smoking in the company’s offices. When Steinmetz did not appear for several days, he was discovered working in his private laboratory at his home. When his absence was questioned, he merely remarked, “No smoking, no Steinmetz.” Obviously, the order was quickly rescinded.

The editors regret that in the article by Edward Laning entitled “Spoon River Revisited,” in the June, 1971, issue, we inadvertently failed to give credit to the copyright owner of the selections by Edgar Lee Masters that were used. Two poems that were quoted, ” Anne Rutledge” and “Lambert Hutchins,” are from Spoon River Anthology , the credit for which should read: Copyright ©1914, 1915, 1916, 1942, 1944 by Ellen C. Masters. The credit for the prose passage from Edgar Lee Masters’ The Sangamon should read: Copyright ©1942, 1969 by Ellen C. Masters. We extend our humble apologies to Mrs. Masters, the poet’s widow.