January 2011

The death of a small town in America does not count for much. Small towns succumb to dams, farms to factories, forests to subdivisions; wilderness depreciates into real estate, mountains are divided by interstate highways, and wild rivers learn to mind their manners.

In this, the second installment of a three-part series by Barbara W. Tuchman from her forthcoming book, now retitled The Utmost Try: Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–45 , the turmoil and conflicts that have torn China apart come into focus as Japan launches her long-feared invasion. StilwelLis again on hand to witness the momentous turn of events after seven years spent back in the United States.

Savannah: the name begins with a whisper and ends with a sigh, inciting dreams of a nevernever South, of belles and balls, soft accents and gentle courtesy, magnolias and Spanish moss, and all the rest. If all that ever existed, it doesn’t any more; not anywhere, not in Savannah.

On first acquaintance Savannah belies the romantic suggestion of its name. When the wind is wrong, which it often is, the aroma of Confederate jasmine in bloom mixes with the stink from the Union Camp paper mill —the largest of its kind in the world and Savannah’s biggest taxpayer, biggest payroll, and most obvious nuisance —to make an essence known as “Savannah Perfume.” Savannah’s namesake river suffers Savannah’s raw sewage added to its heavy burden of upstream waste, and it is claimed with only the slightest giveaway smile that ships anchor in the river to have the barnacles poisoned off their bottoms.

Brevet Major General G. A. Custer and about 215 soldiers of the 7th Cavalry had been massacred at the Little Big Horn only a little more than three years before. Geronimo and his Apaches would not surrender for another seven years. The date was October 6, 1879, and the good burghers of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, were treated to the sight of a band of blanketed Indians parading through the old colonial town toward the abandoned army post on the outskirts. True, the “savages” were youths and children, but they were Sioux, members of the same tribe that had helped to do in Custer.

An eyewitness recalled, “They were a wild outfit - badly clothed, dirty and unkempt, and altogether bearing the impression of being uncivilized.” Outlandish or not, Indians were to be a feature of Carlisle life for the next four decades. The ragged Sioux were the first students in the new Carlisle Indian Industrial School.

On a lantern-lit Chinese barge poled by boatmen over the dark Pel Hai Lake in the Imperial City, a party from the American Embassy enjoyed a serene excursion under a full moon on the evening of July 7, 1937. In the group were Colonel and Mrs. Stilwell and their daughter Nance; Ambassador and Mrs. Nelson Johnson; Colonel John Marston, commander of the Marine Embassy Guard, and his wife; and Stilwell’s journalist friend John Goette.

As any really thoughtful statesman knows, it is one of the ironies of history that great decisions often have entirely unexpected consequences. Until men are given the gift of prophecy, “Forgive them; for they know not what they do” is an appropriate motto for those who judge political performances. But in some cases, “Congratulate them; for they know not what they do” might be as apt.

It is hard to say which version applies to the congressmen who passed the Johnson-Reed immigration restriction act of 1924. In that year they heeded a warning sounded by a New England poet some twenty years earlier. “Wide open and unguarded stand our gates,” Thomas Bailey Aldrich intoned, and through them, he warned, poured a “motley throng” of immigrants. If not checked, they would soon tear the clustered stars from Liberty’s brow and trample them in the dust.

Millions of Americans have Scotch-Irish ancestors, for when this country gained its independence perhaps one out of every ten persons was Scotch-Irish. Few descendants among these millions, however, know much about their ancestors—about what the hyphenated name implies, where the original Scotch-Irishmen came from and why, or what part this vigorous folk played in early American history.

History offers very few sharp beginnings and endings, preferring, it would seem, a series of continuums. Yet it does offer sharp contrasts. Take, for example, the business of immigration. We have two articles about the so-called melting pot in this issue, one on the Scotch-Irish (who “melted” so completely that many educated people are hard put to say exactly who they were) and one on the Negro as a migrant to the cities (where he has practically not melted at all, with results in your daily paper). And thoughts about these matters inspire us to run the two pictures here. Above, around 1910, is the ferry from Ellis Island, disgorging new Americans at the height of the rush of new peoples to our shores. Now look below: here is an Ellis Island ferry, if perhaps not the same one, abandoned and sunk at her moorings at an Ellis Island that has gone out of business.

I am one of those people who grew up, I am now aware, in a household that was completely bourgeois. I didn’t know it as a child, of course, but the chief sign of my family’s middle-class status was not the fact that my parents subscribed to the Saturday Evening Post , or drove a green Nash with spoke wheels, or played bridge several evenings a week. It was that the nubbly, offwhite stucco walls of our house in the suburbs boasted two paintings (or rather, reproductions of paintings) by that prolific, pre-pop master of mass-appeal art, Maxfield Parrish.