January 2011

“Sailing is like dancing, see, and I love to dance.” The boat that Captain Allan Aunapu likes most to dance with is the Clearwater (above)—the first Hudson River sloop built in this century.

Overexposure to excessive noise is the major cause of hearing loss in America. Nearly everyone, in fact, has lost hearing ability without realising it. Power-driven appliances have made American homes the noisiest on earth, and “relaxing quietly at home” is fast becoming a thing of the past, for people never do get accustomed to noise. According to medical evidence, instinctive reaction to loud noise is fear and an impulse to escape. The heartbeat increases, arteries constrict, pufnis dilate. One prominent scientist asserts that violent noise may even harm unborn babies.

Out on the street things are worse still. Air compressors, pile drivers, jackhammers, sirens, traffic, all add up to a noise level known to destroy hearing cells at prolonged exposure. “The saving quality heretofore, ” says one report, “has been that community noise has been a short-term exposure … as the power use of both home and street increases, steps must be taken to limit the noise output. ”

When I was very young, I thought Andrew Carnegie lived in Moberly, Missouri (population 12,000, smack dab between St. Louis and Kansas City), because he gave Moberly what we natives called the “Libary.” Possibly he lived in the big red brick house at the end of Fifth Street, the one with the tennis court and the curved drive, or perhaps in the yellow stone mansion with tall white nillars on West Reed Street. They were both immense solid buildings similar to the library, and certainly appropriate as a dwelling for a man of Mr. Carnegie’s importance.

“History,” writes Professor John A. Garraty in the introduction to his new book, “is made up of facts, but also of opinions … Opinions are easily formed, but are as evanescent as ice in August. … those that retain their plausibility longest are those developed in minds steeped in knowledge of the past.” The book, entitled Interpreting American History: Conversations with Historians , represents one man’s search not for the facts but for the meaning of American history, from the nation’s beginnings down to the present day. It will be published soon by Macmillan.

Henry Steele Commager, professor of history at Amherst, is an important scholar, a well-known public lecturer, a man of wide-ranging interests, and a prolific writer. His The American Mind is a major analysis of intellectual trends m the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and his Growth of the American Republic , written with Samuel Eliot AIorison, has long been a leading textbook. 7he subject of this interview, the development of American nationalism and the shaping of the American character, has been of continuing concern to him throughout his career.

PROFESSOR GARRATY: Professor Commager, to what extent was nationalism forced upon Americans by the need for common defense during the Revolution?

Among students of American diplomacy between the two world wars, Professor Robert H. Ferrell of Indiana University ranks as one of the most productive and provocative. His Peace in Their Time: The Origins of the Kellogg-Briand Pact and his American Diplomacy in the Great Depression: Hoover-Stimson Foreign Policy, 1929-1933 are each marked by solid scholarship and lively, colorful writing. Professor Ferrell is also editor of the series The American Secretaries of State and Their Diplomacy and, with Howard H. Quint, of The Talkative President: The Off-the-Record Press Conferences of Calvin Coolidge . As the interview reveals, Professor Ferrell has some highly original and stimulating things to say about post-World War I foreign relations and the Presidents who made and earned out American policy.

Arthur M. Schlesmger, Jr., Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at the City University of New York, is one of the most prolific, highly regarded, and controversial of all American historians. The Age of Jackson, The Age of Roosevelt (3 vols, to date, ig$j-6o), and A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House are his best-known works. Professor Schlesmger has also, however, maintained a continuing interest in politics and public affairs, having served as a special assistant to President Kennedy and written extensively about current politics. In this portion of his conversation with Dr. Garraty he discusses the domestic-policy records of the Presidents from Truman to Johnson, and the changing nature of the Presidency itself.