January 2011

Amidst a flurry of angry missives attacking this magazine and author Walter Lord for alleged anti-southern prejudice in “Mississippi: The Past That Has Not Died,” in our June issue, there was one from the Honorable Tullius Brady, of the Mississippi House of Representatives. Says he: “The rest of this country will never bring one [white Mississippian] back into the Union. I want no part of it—socialism and egalitarianism are not for me.” We also received recently a charming note from Sir George Bull, Bart., of London, England. “When I was in Williamsburg, Virginia,” Sir George says, “I pulled the leg of the young lady in charge of the Historical Information Office by asking her on which side was Virginia in the Civil War. She rose beautifully, and in a delightful southern accent replied, ‘How can you ask, suh? Virginia was the heart and soul of the Confederacy!’ I apologized for the misunderstanding and explained that I meant our Civil War-that of 1642-48. This left her speechless—no one had ever asked her that.”

—The Editors

In March, 1942, John F. Kennedy was a twenty-four-year-old ensign in the United States Navy, doing administrative chores at Charleston, South Carolina, and chafing to get into action. It would be over a year before PT-Boat 109 went down in the South Pacific; meanwhile Kennedy spent some of his restlessness reading books on current affairs. One of them was Boom or Bust , by a Washington news correspondent named Blair Moody—himself later to become a senator from Michigan. Some of Moody’s observations stirred Kennedy, for they bore on what had recently become, for him, a most engrossing topic: international affairs. He sat down at a typewriter and knocked out a letter to Moody—not without some errors of typing and spelling—in which he challenged certain ideas about the causes of World War II, particularly with reference to German and British failures in armament policy that led (inevitably, Kennedy thought) to the infamous Munich Pact.

By the middle of the fifteenth century the detailed knowledge accumulated by the Norsemen about the lands in the West had passed out of European consciousness; the exploratory enterprise of the three following centuries in this direction depended largely on false premises; and not until the second half of the nineteenth century did it again become possible to draw an outline of Greenland comparable in general accuracy with that included in the Vinland Map. By its delineation of Greenland, casting a solitary shaft of light through the darkness of five centuries, the map makes its strongest claim on our curiosity; and it is this feature, perhaps even more than the delineation of Vinland, which most clearly seems to lift the map out of its period and might suggest—were the converging evidence to the contrary less strong—the work of a counterfeiter.

“Ages” vs. “Angels” A Stickney by Any Other Name Two Civil Wars

The spreading power of a great illustrator’s work can be beyond calculation; it is an imponderable force that works in hidden ways and eludes attempts at measurement. So it certainly has been in the case of N. C. Wyeth. He was an unmistakable personality, a man of enormous energy and great talent. He possessed a breath-taking imagination, constant and grand, which he poured into a series of dynamic pictures. He illustrated most of the great children’s classics, with fire that kindled sparks in tens of thousands of young minds.

On the next page begins an extensive portfolio selected from the works of N. C. Wyeth, together with a sampling of pictures by various members of the talented family he founded. For help in collecting and preparing the portfolio we are indebted to Mr. and Mrs. Andrew C. Wyeth, to Mr. and Mrs. John W. McCoy II, to Mr. and Mrs. Peter Hurd and others in the family. Our special thanks go to Dr. S. K. Stevens, Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission and a member of our Board of Advisors. Dr. Stevens and his colleagues have been arranging an impressive N. C. Wyeth exhibition, to run from October 13 through November 28, as the opening show in the Commission’s brand-new William Penn Memorial Museum in Harrisburg. Approximately 125 examples of Wyeth’s work will be on display: original illustrations for magazines and children’s classics, as well as easel paintings never before shown. There will also be some thirty pictures by his son Andrew and his daughters Carolyn and Henriette.