January 2011

To the Editor,

We feel that in his article on Colonel Aaron Burr (A MERICAN H ERITAGE , February, 1966), John Dos Passos reveals himself as a writer of fiction, as a propagandist and as a distorter of the truth rather than as an historian. From beginning to end, the article uses ugly words, gross misrepresentations and amazing misuses of facts. …

At the beginning of the article, readers are presented with three alternatives: 1, Burr was a traitor (which never has been proven); 2, Burr was a “Con-Man” (a position which he would have disdained); or 3, Burr was a mere adventurer (the facts are quite to the contrary). It would have been much better to have offered this point of view: Burr was the one who saw the possibility for the development of the great Southwest and who tried to hasten it. … a patriotic American who wanted to become a leader in making Texas an American state and who wanted a leading part in setting Mexico free from Spain.…

It was n strange army that made the American Revolution—overwhelmingly amateur and commanded by farmers, lawyers, physicians, hooksellers. With the hayseed generals and the chawhacon colonels mingled the French volunteers.

The French were diverse: some were self-sacrificing idealists, like Lafayette; some were devoted and competent officers, like Pierre Charles L’linfant, who later made the plan of the city of Washington; some were outright ne’er-do-wells, fleeing their own ill fame at home. The French had little in common except the courage to cross perilous seas and do battle for a nuhle hut desperate cause. Most of them proclaimed their eagerness to die for America’s freedom from England, France’s ancient enemy; hut most of them harbored mixed motives —republican enthusiasm, delight in adventure, and ambition for glory and distinction—at a high rate of combat pay.

The machine was the cash register. The clangor of its bell fell pleasantly upon the car, whether activated by dollars and cents, pounds and pence, francs, marks, florins, lire, pesetas, or pesos.

The man behind the bell was an Ohio farm boy who promoted a novel counting device of wheels and springs grandly encased in an ornate bronze or nickel sheath. When a clerk pressed a key the machine gave out with its joyous tintinnabulation. In the beginning no one had heard of the cash register. But John Henry Patterson changed all that. To do it he had to invent American Salesmanship.

To the state of Louisiana and the parish of Winn, John M. Long brought his family from Mississippi in 1859. In Louisiana, counties are called parishes, and Winn, in the north-central part of the state, was destined by incorporation to be the poorest of the poor: when the land was divided, Winn got what nobody else wanted. It is hill country. (Former President Calvin Coolidge, visiting Louisiana in 1930, asked Huey Long what part of the state he came from. Replied Huey, “I’m a hillbilly—like yourself.”) It is Baptist country. (Huey recalled that a Methodist preacher moved to Winn and would have starved to death had it not been for the charity of the Long family.) It is a parish of small farms and cutover timber lands. The people there have said that they make a living by taking in each other’s washing. This is Winn Parish, where, as one historian has described it, “a man would skin a flea for the hide and tallow.”

The Constitution could not be more specific: “No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States.” Yet, in the nearly two centuries since these words were written, the American people, despite official disapproval, have chosen a political elite resembling a nobility in everything but name. And it is far more than a matter of a few Roosevelts and Adamses.

Twenty-two families—among them the Bayards (below), the Muhlenbergs, and the Washburns (next page)—have sent four or more sons to Congress. An astonishing total of 700 families have sent two or more, accounting for nearly 1,700 of the 10,000 men and women elected to the federal legislature since 1774. Currently, seventeen United States senators are in some manner connected with dynasties.

Who are these “people’s dukes,” as Stewart Alsop calls them?

The five-cent ferry ride across New York Harbor from Manhattan to Staten Island is still a popular excursion, but New Yorkers who take it almost invariably catch the next boat back. It is their general belief that “there’s nothing on Staten Island.” This wooded, hilly island, one of the five boroughs of New York City, does not possess a single fashionable restaurant, discothèque, or amusement of any kind more elaborate than a neighborhood tavern or bowling alley. Its 238,000 people live mostly in small, rather shabby “towns"—among them, Great Kills and Bull’s Head—or in monotonous rows of small homes in new developments. Here and there an odd Dutchiness shows in an old gambrel-roofed house, but too often buildings have been covered with an uninspiring surface of tar-paper imitation brick.

Alice Austen, the accomplished amateur photographer who was belatedly recognized as one of the greatest of her time (see frontispiece, page 2), lived most of her life on Staten Island. The result was a fine picture album of upper-class life on the Island as the nineteenth century rounded pleasantly toward its close. Feeling that the rural vistas of Staten Island, vulnerable to time, deserved to be kept for future enjoyment, Alice also took many pictures like the one above of Richmondlown—a pretty country village about (in 1898) to become, almost incredibly, part of New York City. A turn of the page will show lier fine winter study of the Narrows as seen from her own front yard; on succeeding pages a selection of pictures illustrates Island social life, which she fondly described as “larky.” The

Coming from an Old World intensively cut over, cultivated, and grazed by domestic animals, Europeans were awed and often overwhelmed by their first glimpses of North America—the clouds of sea birds enveloping rocky islands off Newfoundland, the waterfowl crowding sandy beaches and inland rivers, the stately forests with their “tribes” both feathered and furred that knew not the yoke of man.

The vindication of Charles Wilkes has continued clown to the present day. Although the shadows cast on his discoveries by vengeful persons have been dispelled over the years—after all, the Antarctic coast is there, and it has proved to be a continent, just as he said—one important segment of his claims was not entirely cleared of doubt until recently. His very first glimpses of Antarctica, beginning on January 16, 1840, remained unverified. Some of Wilkes’s officers claimed at his court-martial that he had falsified his log and had claimed the early sightings only to achieve priority over the Frenchman Dumont d’Urville, who had made his first landfall on January 19 some four hundred miles to the west. These charges were refuted at the trial by other witnesses who swore that land had been sighted; the accusations were easy enough to dismiss as the fabrications of disgruntled subordinates. Not so easy to cast aside were the sailing reports of later mariners who had cruised—in deep water and out of sight of land—right over the positions where Wilkes had charted mountains and named them: Ringgold’s Knoll, Eld’s Peak, Reynolds’ Peak.