January 2011

Sir: … The point at issue in my article was Senator Muskie’s decision to support the declassification of the Prestile. In the light of the state’s claim that Vahlsing had violated antipollution regulations thirty-one times in the previous five years, this support cannot be justified. Trouble was inevitable.

It is true that the Prestile was polluted long before 1965. But the town of Mars Hill had invested in a treatment plant, and its efforts were undone by the potato wastes. Indeed, I wrote that by 1965 “The Prestile’s quality was B only on the W.I.C.'s [Water Improvement Commission] books; in fact, it had become an open sewer.”

I do not defend Maine’s antiquated pollution laws. I simply said that the proposal to lower the Prestile’s classification was a device to circumvent even those deficient laws.

Sir: I read with great interest the article “The Policeman’s Lot” in the February, 1970, issue. However, I do have one correction. On page 11 there is a picture of

women doing exercises with the caption “Those above are members of the New York department’s class of 1923” … [but] the picture you show is the graduating class of the Delehanty Institute Policewomen’s Course in the year 1923. The man standing on the right-hand side of the picture, with the sweater on, is the late M. J. Delehanty, founder of the institute. …

D. R. Howland
Vice President
The Delehanty Institute New York, New York

The information for our caption came from Spring 3100, the official magazine of the New Tork City Police Department.—Ed.

Before advising Americans on how to manage their empire, it is first necessary to convince them that their empire exists. This is no easy task, for the comment of the nineteenth-century Cambridge historian Sir John Seely, who said of the British Empire that it was acquired “in a fit of absence of mind,” could, until very recently, be far more appropriately applied to the present imperial role of the United States. Until the Vietnam conflict blew up into a heated domestic political controversy, most Americans were so absent-minded about their dominion over far-flung palm and pine that the schoolboy’s question, “Does the United States have an empire?” could truthfully be answered, “Yes, but they’ve forgotten about it.”

Inevitably, most of the personal records of life on the-American frontier that have lcome down to us are masculine and epic in tone. Guns and battles and duels and expeditions, cattle drives and buffalo hunts and the carving out of empires —men were the ones who forged that drama, and for the most part the ones who had their say about it. So the quiet, hard, meaningful daily life of village and house and field that went on behind it is sometimes hard for us to glimpse.

Aside from being the only private in Fancho Villa’s army, my father had another distinction—he was probably the only man ever to be dragged into an army at the end of a harness. But, as any fair-minded person will coneede, he was not trying to avoid military service; he was simply resisting an outrageous expropriation of his personal property.

His sudden “enlistment” occurred on a sultry October afternoon in the dusty little plaxa of Bachimba, Chihuahua. My father had come to town to purchase a harness at Don Epifanio’s general store, and many years later he could still recall the strange, ghostly silence that seemed to hover in every doorway as he entered the square. Only an occasional child greeted him when he clomped along the wooden sidewalk, half dragging an old cart with squeaky wheels. He was slightly more than seventeen years old.

The distance between Charleston, South Carolina, and Franklin, North Carolina, is just about three hundred miles—a comfortable day’s drive over well-paved, scenic highways. For Thomas Griffiths the journey was a good deal more arduous, and it took him a good deal longer to accomplish, particularly since he didn’t really know where he was going.

Thomas Griffiths was the brother of Ralph Griffiths, editor of the Monthly Review , a popular periodical in England in the middle eighteenth century. Ralph Griffiths, in turn, was a friend of Josiah Wedgwood ( 1730–1795), the great English potter. Wedgwood’s success as a manufacturer during the Industrial Revolution was due to many factors, not least to his ardent passion for improving his product by constant research and invention —the carrying out of a lifetime of experimentation not only in seeking new raw materials but also in mixing them in different proportions and firing them under different conditions of temperature and atmosphere.

Footnoting the history of our Puritan ancestors are the legends left on stone among the countless burying grounds of early New England. These gravestones with their poignant inscriptions and symbolic imagery possess an eloquence rarely matched in the annals of colonial literature. They speak directly to all who confront them, echoing the past and reminding us of the incredible hardships endured by those early pioneers. On their crumbling surfaces one can trace the history of our nation—its wars and epidemics; its religious and political attitudes; its changing fashions in art and rhetoric; and, above all, the moving accounts of personal tragedy that tried the souls of its people.

Death concerns us notably in this issue—the death of a great President (page 8) and the ways in which death strikes all men (see our article on tombstones, page 20). A “lovely and soothing death”—to use Walt Whitman ‘s words—is not accorded to many. Only a felicitous few pass away in quiet repose. One such was William Ellery of Rhode Island, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, who died on February 15, 1820, aged ninety-two. A friend described his death in a letter to the National Gazette and Literary Register , in the old-fashioned and moving passage below. We learned of it while browsing through Volume XII of that fascinating if obscure work, Sibley’s Harvard Graduates , written by Clifford K. Shipton for the Massachusetts Historical Society. Ellery was one of thirty members of the Class of 1747.

Editor’s note: For many years professional baseball contained a shadow land in which some of the finest players in the game spent their athletic careers earning hardly any money and precious little fame. These players, of course, were black men, barred from organized baseball by an unwritten but seemingly unbreakable agreement that the big leagues were for white men only. In 1947 the late Branch Rickey smashed that barner, once and for all, by bringing in Jackie Robinson to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Since the color line was erased, the talented Negro ballplayer has been able to gam the headlines and the high salary brackets; the years in which organized baseball pretended that he did not exist are over.