January 2011

On August 12, 1834, a twenty-eight-year-old Swiss-born youth named Peter Rindisbacher, who was just beginning to attract international attention with his colorful and realistic drawings of Indian life along the mid-western United States and central Canadian frontiers, died in St. Louis. In a brief obituary the Missouri Republican noted his passing: “Mr. Rindisbacher had talents which gave every assurance of future celebrity. … He possessed a keen sensibility and the most delicate perception of the beautiful.”

“The police … are virtually in a state of mutiny. Their hearts are not in their work, they have no pride in their office, they have the inclination to evade duty, give service grudgingly, and are constantly praying for a change. A sullen, discontented and discouraged army will not win battles. …”

A contemporary sociologist, describing the current crisis in the American police? No, it is William McAdoo. describing the New York Police Department shortly before he became its commissioner in 1904.

In the November, 1885, issue of St. Nicholas magazine there appeared the first installment of a romantic novel about a little American boy who inherits a British title and goes to England to live with his rich, grumpy grandfather in a suitably elegant castle. This is their first meeting: “What the Earl saw was a graceful, childish figure in a black velvet suit, with a lace collar, and with lovelocks waving about the handsome, manly little face, whose eyes met his with a look of innocent good-fellowship.” The story was an instant success; published as a book the next year, it was a best-seller. And so the sons of countless impressionable American mothers were condemned to velvet page-boy suits, lace collars, and the crowning burden—long, flowing curls. Little Lord Fauntleroy had arrived upon the American literary and sartorial scene.

It was a bright day for the Republic, that afternoon of May 15, 1815, when the U.S.S. Constitution victoriously dropped anchor oil the Battery at New York. Of all the gala homecomings that Castle Clinton’s low brown walls would witness in the next century and a half, none would be charged with more patriotic fervor.

For the citizen of 1815 recognized in this ship, as clearly as the historian who would teach his great-grandchildren, a prime instrument that had done much to make the United States a power to be respected both on the seas and in the capitals of the world. In the war just ended, beyond settlement of old scores and salving of old wounds, he sensed that from a resident of a somewhat apprehensive renegade colony he had changed into a citixen of the world. And for this in large part he thanked Old Ironsides.

Just forty years ago this month—on the evening of February 26, 1930—at Broadway’s old Mansfield Theatre, there was uttered for the first time the most awesome entrance cue in all of theatrical history. “Gangway!” shouted the angel Gabriel. “Gangway for de Lawd God Jehovah!”

The context of that line was a play of eighteen Biblical scenes in which the Lord, sometimes walking the earth and sometimes watching it from aloft, was shown to he both guide and follower of mankind along its uncertain way. The play was utterly unaffected. It was also radical: it was conceived as if seen through the eyes of blacks; the Lord was, logically, black too. There were no white roles.

The play was The Green Pastures. It became, on the spot, part of America’s dramatic canon; it would win a Pulitzer prize for its author-director, Marc Connelly.

In the last issue this magazine commenced regular and intensive coverage ot conservation and historic preservation, signifying our deep concern for the widely endangered physical heritage of America. This month we are pleased to announce that this concern is to he backed up by a group of awards, totalling $50,000, to be given by the American Heritage Society, the organization launched last July to bring together our two scholarly and founding groups, our history-publishing operations, and the readers whose interest supports us.

The Society speaks for history and for preservation in a time of violent change. Its publishing arm has long provided important financial support for the work of our two sponsors, the American Association for State and Local History and the Society of American Historians. Now, to broaden its activity in this vital field, the Society will divide $50,000 this spring in grants to twelve local, nonprofit groups who are active in conservation and preservation.

Henry Ford said history was “bunk,” but it was, perhaps, only a slip of the tongue. What we left behind us at most of the noted historic scenes of 1969 was junk, as these three familiar photographs attest. The mark of man, especially American man, is litter, and everyone has an excuse overcrowding at Bethel, where the future leaders of our world swarmed like May flies; the problems of bringing back bulky and possibly contaminated equipment from the moon; and in New York at the end of the World Series, natural exuberance. But there is always an excuse. “We have met the enemy,” as Pogo says, “and he is us.”