January 2011

The reality of the Civil W;ir prison camp has long .since gone from Ii u man knowledge, The camps themselves have vanished, although in a few places there are quiet parks to mark their sites, each with a cemetery: thousands of men died. North and South, in those camps, and the headstones are there as reminders. Rut the names that once were so terrible, Andersonville and Elmira, Libby and (lamp Douglas and the rest, are just Civil War names now, out of a past that no one really remembers.

The reality of the Civil W;ir prison camp has long .since gone from Ii u man knowledge, The camps themselves have vanished, although in a few places there are quiet parks to mark their sites, each with a cemetery: thousands of men died. North and South, in those camps, and the headstones are there as reminders. Rut the names that once were so terrible, Andersonville and Elmira, Libby and (lamp Douglas and the rest, are just Civil War names now, out of a past that no one really remembers.

In the history of Utopias there is no other town in America quite like New Harmony, Indiana. Here, 150 years ago in a pioneer wilderness and within a span of a dozen years, groups of men and women put into practice not one but two of the major social concepts that flourished among American visionaries in the nineteenth century. First the town was the site of a religious community dedicated to the common ownership of property, and then it became the scene of Robert Owen’s most ambitious experiment in the achievement of human perfection. Here, on the banks of the Wabash, these two notions so deeply rooted in American idealism and development were demonstrated for all the world to see. The first, with a bizarre and added dedication to celibacy, paralleled devout communities like those of the Shakers; the other foreshadowed such freethinking ventures as Brook Farm and Oneida.

I dined a large company once or twice a week, Jefferson dined a dozen every day,” remarked the frugal New Englander John Adams in recalling early hospitality in the “President’s House” in Washington. “I held levees once a week. Jefferson’s whole eight years was a levee.” Other guests than Adams also left letters and memoirs recalling Jefferson’s dinner parties, the most elegant and agreeable they had ever known. And Thomas Jefferson himself recorded in his account books enormous monthly expenditures for food and for choice wines. But what did President Jefferson actually serve his guests? What would have been a typical menu at a White House dinner in 1806? What did it cost? Who were the staff who prepared it?

Just before dawn of a Monday early in July, 1895, a middle-aged man appeared on the hank of the Ohio River near Wheeling. West Virginia, and set a bulging gunny sack on the ground. His lace boasted side whiskers, a chin beard, and a mustache. He wore a derby. Behind a pair ol goldrimmed spectacles stared light blue eyes, the IeIt distinguished by a drooping lid. His teeth, as described by one ol his admirers, were “large and well-kept.”

The man removed his derby and looked around cautiously. Satisfied that he was alone, he began to undress. Alter stripping down to the bare skin, he made a neat pile ol his clothes and placed a suicide note on top. Then, to make sure the police would know beyond any possible doubt who had done himself in, he put an old silver pocket wauh ol German make, with his photograph inside the lid, on top of the note and the clothes.

Now, gunny sack in hand, he walked barefoot into the river, leaving his footprints in the mud right down to the water’s edge. He wanted the police to be absolutely certain that he drowned himself.

One of the most interesting and, on occasion, bitter disputes in modern American history concerns the sudden end, in 1919, of the remarkable friendship between President Woodrow Wilson and the adviser lie called his “second personality,” Colonel Edward M. House. Operating behind tlie scenes, self-effacing, tlie quiet Texan nevertheless nursed dreams of power; once, anonymously, lie wrote a novel about a man very like himself who becomes a hind of benevolent American dictator ( AMERICAN HERITAGE , February, 1959). As to what separated him from his chief. House seemed to think it was his and Wilson’s illnesses at a crucial time—as well as jealousies in the inner circle. His deathbed reflections on the subject, taken down by the late President diaries Seymour of Yale find kept secret for twenty-five years, were published in our August, 1963, issue, just before Mr. Seymour himself died.

Many of our readers, no doubt, will be glued to television screens on election eve next month. The new method of coverage, while it can still make foolish predictions, at least does not, like the newspapers shown in this little nosegay, go to press with the wrong winners. Alas for Presidents Hughes, Dewey, Tilden, and Blaine! And, as a kind of memento mori, we include the confident and oh! so wrong prediction of the 1936 Literary Digest poll.

From the time of Cheops to that of Frank Lloyd Wright, mankind has celebrated the architect—the designer who contrives shelter and structural grandeur for nature’s most thin-skinned and prideful animals. Not so honored has been a less obvious designer: the landscape architect, who, when man’s huddled dwellings threaten to stifle him, preserves or rearranges the natural surroundings to give vistas that will make him less forlorn.

Only a century ago, public parks and pleasure grounds of any considerable si/e were nonexistent in America. So, for the most part, were graciously landscaped private estates and other than hapha/ard college or school campuses. Except on the feudal baronies of the Hudson Valley and a few plantations of the South, where wealthy landowners gave some heed to the tailoring of their woodlands and meadows and to judicious planting of trees for shade and decor, landscape architecture was an art (and, indeed, a term) unknown. Few people went beyond mere landscape gardening—the formal, stylized cultivation of !lowering plants, rare or otherwise.