For the first time, the signature that appears on greenbacks has been changed while the Treasurer of the United States is still in office. New paper currency is now signed Dorothy Andrews Kabis instead of Dorothy Andrews Elston, a result of the Treasurer’s marriage last September to W. L. Kabis.
Our article on the Carlisle Indian School (“The Great White Father’s Little Red Indian School,” December, 1970) questioned the wisdom and results of trying to “civilize” the red man. One graduate who apparently remained close to the old ways, at least outwardly, was the gentleman pictured below. His photograph was supplied by Robert A. Murdock, executive director of the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, in Richmond. Mr. Murdock reports that the picture was taken by his wife’s great uncle, Jack Harrah of Montana, in 1934. The inscription on the back says: “Flathead Chief—‘Sam Resurection.’ Has fine home but lives in tepee back of house. 90 years old. Personal friend & guide for Teddy Roosevelt in all his hunting trips in U.S. Graduate of Carlyle College.”
As Mr. Murdock observed, “If accurate the inscription…reveals the inability of Carlisle to completely transform all of its students.”
For another look at the American Indian, in the years immediately after the high point of his resistance to white incursions, see pages 40-41 of this issue.
A restorer was already busy trying to save the Ben Shahn mural in the Bronx Central Post Office in New York City when the article in which it was featured, Edward Laning’s “Memoirs of a WPA Painter,” appeared in our October, 1970, issue. According to the General Services Administration, the restoration was more complex than was anticipated because of the “strange reaction of the plaster on the tempera, aided by the accumulation of 30 years of dirt.” In addition, Karel Yasko, special assistant to the commissioner, Public Buildings Service, G.S.A. , had this welcome news to report :
Our next salvation is directed at the Edward Laning murals on Ellis Island. This is a direct result of your story. I had been informed previously that they had deteriorated beyond recall but when your photograph indicated that at least one was seemingly intact, we felt compelled to try to save it.…
Considering the toil, time, and hardship it took to build the Panama Canal (see page 64), it seems almost flippant to report that a three-foot-long model cruiser named Ancon II last year became the smallest vessel ever to pass through the Canal. The boat, built from a kit by Major Kenneth Thomas of the U.S. Air Force, made the journey from the Atlantic side to the Pacific in eight and a half hours. Ancon II carried two and a half gallons of fuel for her nine-tenths-of-a-horsepower engine. She could reach nine knots when fully loaded, twelve knots as she became lighter. The boat was guided by a radio transmitter and was lifted from one level to another through the locks by being tied to a control boat, aboard which was a Canal pilot. Major Thomas paid seventy-two cents for the fifty-mile transit, the minimum rate for a ship in ballast.
Eyewitness accounts are the raw material of recorded history. Although frequently inexact, since they depend on the subjective impressions of biased observers, they are nevertheless indispensable. When important events have been recalled in words by a number of witnesses or participants, something like the true shape of the past emerges from the obscurity of time, lighted in many dimensions, with one partial light kept m proper balance by another. We begin to see what it must have been like to be there when these things happened.
John Dos Passos died last September, much to the sorrow of this magazine, to which he had contributed frequently in recent years. He had turned from the novel to formal history, but in his youth he had already shown a great flair for bringing the past to life in idiosyncratic "prose poems," of which the following is a fine example.
--The Editors
Steinmetz was a hunchback,
the son of a hunchback lithographer.
He was born in Breslau in eighteen sixty-five, graduated with highest honors at seventeen from the Breslau Gymnasium, went to the University of Breslau to study mathematics;
John Faulkner, like his more famous brother William, was a novelist, but he was also a painter. During the decade before his death in 1963 he painted a series of oils and water colors that he called “Scenes of the Vanishing South,” portraying his home town of Oxford, and Lafayette County, Mississippi. Some were painted from his memory of his boyhood, and others from the daily life of Beat Two, the hilly northeast sector of the county that is the scene also of most of his fiction. (A Mississippi county is composed of autonomous “beats,” each under its elective supervisor of roads.) Having come upon hard times as a commercial airline pilot in Memphis, John moved to Beat Two in 1938 as manager of a farm William bought. It was a short-lived venture, being devoted to producing mules at a time when mules were already obsolete; but John began to write then and produced in time eight books of fiction as well as a number of short stories and a posthumously published book of reminiscences about William.
In the summer of the year 1944, in a time of world war that is already history to my children’s generation but remains vividly personal to mine as a moment of (in retrospect) astonishing simplicity and idealism, I found myself pointing a jeep in the direction of Pisa and Florence. On the so-called forgotten front in Italy, the Wehrmacht held the northern side of these cities; the line dividing their riflemen and ours was the river Arno.
The big show of the European war was being played out on the newly opened second front in Normandy. Along the French Riviera a diversionary side show became popularly known as the champagne war. Since the German 88’s had not been informed that our Mediterranean theater had lessened in strategic importance, they were still to be reckoned with.