January 2011

Gloomy enough, all of this, to be sure. Yet the automobile can be blamed too much. The development of the American city has followed its own pattern, and “urban sprawl” had set in well before the requirements of the automobile had had any substantial effect. If urbanization has brought a host of grave problems it appears that it is the city itself, rather than the means men use to get in and out of it and to and fro inside it, that needs examination.

Such an examination, much less emotional and also much more comprehensive and scholarly than the one just cited, is provided in The Urbanization of America, 1860-1915 , by Blake McKelvey, who undertakes to study what might be called the metropolitan character in America and tries to see just what was going on in the period before the motorcar took over.

One of folklore’s most romantic figures, the American cowboy, evolved, reached his zenith, and then nearly disappeared, all in little more than half a century. He left behind fewer authentic pictures of himself than the number of false images projected by television in a single week.

It is ironic that the most complete photographic record of the working cowboy was produced by a man who merely wanted to gather raw material until he could study art and become a sculptor of western life. In the meantime, Erwin E. Smith of Konham, Texas, undertook to learn at first hand all there was to know about the things he wished to remember. “I knew that the life wouldn’t wait; the technique would,” he said. “So I put oil Doston and the art schools as long as I could.” Such was the genesis of the greatest collection of cowboy photographs ever made.

The Year of Change The Automobile Finding a Community

The United States is always turning a corner. Nothing ever quite stays fixed. No matter what period you select for examination, it always seems to be a moment of transition, when one age is giving way to another. Although it is the common fate of mankind to feel that the golden age lies somewhere in the past, in this country we forever appear to be just leaving the golden age; it is the time we ourselves knew, bafflingly changing its character just when we had concluded that it was permanent; and if we are compelled to brood about the future it is because the future is always beginning to take shape before our eyes.

Man is a contrary sort, driven by a desire to eat his cake and have it too. He wants incompatible things, and although this gets him into all kinds of trouble it may be the source of his strength. His desire for opposite extremes leads him into life-saving compromises, and the simple fact that no compromise lasts very long compels him to keep on tinkering. Because he never can get what he wants he keeps on trying. This often costs him more than he can afford to pay, but it may be good for him; at the very least it keeps him from getting stagnant.

Yet that was not all of it. The new republic not only had thirteen separate subdivisions; it also had territories—first the untracked, almost wholly unsettled domain then known as the Northwest, a bit later the tremendous stretches of the Louisiana Purchase. The established communities along the seaboard were already beginning to throw off new communities in the open country beyond the Alleghenies, and this process obviously would continue. So while the new states were setting up their own governments and framing a central government to handle national affairs, it was also necessary to find the means by which entire new states could be created and brought into the national organization.

Some seven years ago, in the December, 1956 issue of AMERICAN HERITAGE, there appeared the remarkable saga of Manjiro, the shipwrecked Japanese waif who was rescued and brought to the United States by a Yankee whaling captain. Since this account was published, however, significant evidence relating to what is perhaps the most dramatic incident in Manjiro’s later career has turned up. In the following article, Miss Emily V. Warinner, author of a biography of Manjiro, Voyager to Destiny (Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), describes this new information. Though the story of the storm-racked voyage of the Kanrin Maru is, in her words, “a footnote to history,” it is not without importance: a man who had hitherto seemed merely a picturesque character is now revealed as a figure who played a major role in ending Japan’s long era of self-enforced isolation. —The Editors