January 2011

In the summer of 1841 Philip Hone, the New York merchant and politician whose diary has been such a rich mine of illuminating comment upon his contemporaries, “went on another pleasant excursion up the [Hudson] valley to Tarrytown.…” One of the sights of that idyllic countryside to inspire his diaristic pen was the new country villa of his old political rival, General William Paulding.

“In the course of our drive we went to see Mr. Paulding’s magnificent house, yet unfinished, on the bank below Tarrytown. It is an immense edifice of white or gray marble, resembling a baronial castle, or rather a Gothic monastery, with towers, turrets and trellises; archways, armories and airholes; peaked windows and pinnacled roofs, and many other fantastics too tedious to enumerate, the whole constituting an edifice of gigantic size, with no room in it; which if I mistake not, will one of these days be designated as ‘Paulding’s folly’…”

Few Americans remember even hazily what they were doing on the night of June 13, 1942. John C. Cullen remembers exactly what he was doing. He remembers with special vividness his activities at around twenty-five minutes past midnight. At that moment of time he was patrolling the lonely Atlantic beach near Amagansett, Long Island, 105 miles east of New York City. He did this every night—a six-mile hike. At that moment he was coming out of a thick patch of fog to run head-on into what seemed to be a Grade B movie thriller, but which turned out to be real life, with intimations of real death.

Cullen was twenty-one, a rookie coastguardsman, unarmed. America, at war with the Axis powers more than three thousand miles away, was yet worried enough about invasion, sabotage, and sneak attacks that houses were blacked out and coastlines were watched. Many good citizens thought this an excess of caution. Cullen himself says now that the last thing he expected to encounter was a party of invading Nazis just landed from a German submarine.

Our issue this month is full of venerable institutions, if we may use both those words rather broadly; and the things that have happened to them, taking the long view, are fine examples of what makes history so endlessly fascinating. Several institutions are changed almost beyond recognition, like the three-hundred-year-old Hudson’s Bay Company, whose dramatic tale we tell on the following pages. Or they have a new “image,” like the philosophical squire of Topeka, Alf M. Landon, interviewed on page 93 in his eighty-third year. Some institutions that might have been thought certain to endure for centuries, such as the Amoskeag mills (page 110) and the Everglades (page 97), are in dire peril, while others look very much the same, like Jay Gould’s mansion, Lyndhurst (page 46), where the table is still set for a dinner that seems to be indefinitely postponed.

Another institution that looks much the same, albeit refurbished on the outside, is the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The Constitution of the United States declares in the plainest possible English: “The Congress shall have Power … To declare War.” Yet in the last twenty years Americans have fought two major wars—in Korea and in Vietnam—without a congressional declaration of war. Apart from the question of who has the right to send the armed forces into serious combat action, Vietnam has been a glaring instance of momentous foreign policy carried out with only the most cursory control by Congress.

Naturally, many Americans opposed to the Vietnam war are crying outrage. Many others, for or against the war or somewhere in between, ask a worried question: What has happened to the traditional constitutional procedure whereby the President leads in international affairs but Congress has a potent check on him when the decision involves life and death for the nation’s young men and sweeping consequences for the whole country? Is there no way to bring foreign policy back under greater popular control, by restoring the congressional role or through some other technique?

HUDSON’S BAY ASSETS

1670

1 leaky ketch

1 abandoned canoe

2 or 3 pairs of used snowshoes

1 naturally air-conditioned log hut

1 small load of beaver pelts, partially exchanged for baubles, bangles, and brandy

14 employees

38.8% of Canada

1970

Sir: A much stronger word than Congratulations is needed to express my admiration and gratitude for your publishing Charlton Ogburn’s article “Catastrophe by the Numbers” (December, 1969). It is most lucid and courageous. That it should appear first in AMERICAN HERITAGE is indeed a magnificent testimony to your genuine concern not only for our country’s heritage but for its future.

It is inevitable that some will remonstrate— those who are a part of that all too large a group who prefer the pleasant world of fantasy to the harsh world of reality. Others, thanks to you, will for the first time be enabled to see the horrors of overpopulation as an American problem. For too long our simplistic concern for the hungry masses of India has blinded us to the crisis in our own back yard.

Sir: … I feel Charlton Ogburn’s statements about Robert Kennedy’s reproductive prowess were erroneous as well as in poor taste. If the more than 214,000,000 descendants of the Robert Kennedys inherited their wealth, wit, wisdom, and dedication, then I say the world owes the Kennedys a debt of gratitude. Someone once said to me she hoped Ethel had twenty children. I was appalled at the thought until she explained that as far as she was concerned one of the obligations of the rich is to have as many children as they can. It makes a lot of sense. The world could only improve if the rich were to have as many children as possible while the poor were attempting to “control themselves.”

If I feel I can afford three, four, or more children, and as long as I don’t become a burden on the nation, then how dare anyone tell me to stop after one or two? On the other hand, if this insane government of ours would dis courage the poor by refusing welfare to anyone with more than two children, I guarantee a drastic drop in the birth rate as well as welfare costs.

Sir: … I have grave doubt ot the appropriateness in a magazine of history of a section on conservation. I have no doubt of the inappropriateness of certain language in Mr. Ogburn’s article.

I refer to the language at page 116, “Congress, no longer palsied before native obscurantism or the medieval theology of the Vatican, has—admirably— appropriated substantial funds for rerearch into human reproduction and for the dissemination of information on contraceptive techniques.”

Also the statement at page 117, that “The Vatican has changed its mind in the past, and can and must change it again.”

The unflattering and controversial references to the late Senator Robert Kennedy in this article also seem to me to be highly inappropriate.