As a lifetime radio fan, I greatly enjoyed Alice Goldfarb Marquis’s “Radio Grows Up” in the August/September issue. However, I noted two small errors in the account. Marquis says that New York’s WHN is now WMGM. WHN did carry the call letters WMGM in the fifties when the station broadcast a Top Forty format and was owned by Loews Corporation. It reverted to WHN in the early sixties, when Storer Broadcasting purchased it and changed the format. WHN is now owned by Mutual Broadcasting System and broadcasts country music.
Marquis also mentioned that the Federal Radio Commission refused to renew the license of WCRW (Chicago) because of its excessive advertising. This decision must have been overturned, because WCRW is still on the air in Chicago, broadcasting five hours a day of Spanish-language programing and sharing its frequency with two small stations, WSBC and WEDC.
Kenneth R. Masson Chicago, Ill.
Radio Reactions
Ms. Marquis’s otherwise excellent summary of “Radio Grows Up” contains an error. The crystal radio sets of the early twenties didn’t use germanium; instead, it was galena, a much cheaper and more plentiful crystal, which then sold for twenty-five cents apiece. Ask any old-timer!
Richard N. Thayer Cleveland, Ohio
Radio Reactions
It is my recollection that we used a chunk of galena as a rectifier in building the early radio sets. One contact was through the mounting clamp, the other through a very delicately adjusted “cat’s whisker,” a stiff wire spring. I believe the germanium rectifier was a later development and may have eliminated the cat’s whisker contact, which was always quite frustrating, the signal being very intermittent.
Chamberlain Ferry Lyme, Conn.
Radio Reactions
As a collector of old radio broadcasts, I read with pleasure “Radio Grows Up.” Afterward I replayed my four reels of CBS “News of the World” broadcasts from late August to November 1939.
What strikes the listener now are the haunting reports from William L. Shirer in Berlin. There he was, beset by obvious censorship, still trying to tell America the mood and nature of the Nazi beast. In mid-September, Shirer, back from the Eastern front, tried to drop hints, underline rumors, venture reports on the imminent fate of the Polish Jews. If millions heard, no one listened.
By contrast, Edward Murrow, based in London, was still echoing the words of the government—a kind of British standoffishness he didn’t shed until the bombing of Britain. Eric Sevareid, broadcasting from Paris, was also learning on the job. Paris was not a place to be in 1939. There were rumors, occasional border skirmishes, and little else.
Except for Shirer’s warnings, the broadcasts offer few insights into the early days of the war, but they are a fascinating reminder of times and events long since gone.
Jerry Shnay
Park Forest, Ill.
Saints or Sinners
In “Southern Women and the Indispensable Myth” (December 1982), what documentation does Shirley Abbott have for her insistence on the exceptional cruelty practiced by Southern women on their slaves? Catherine Clinton in her book The Plantation Mistress does not deny that whippings took place but found that “a majority of those slaves who were not working in the household itself reported favorable treatment from the mistress.” Also, “of the minority of slaves who alleged cruel treatment, only 10 percent claimed that the mistress had whipped or beaten them.” Quoting an authority on slave narratives, Clinton says, “The slave generally saw the mistress of the plantation as a positive influence in the slave system.”
In Catherine Clinton’s book the plantation mistress comes off as a person who had a lot more work to do than Scarlett O’Kara ever did, especially while her husband was away (a good deal of the time), did her work remarkably well, and despite occasional human lapses, deserves a better place in history than Abbott accords her.
H. J. Quin
Sumter, S.C.
Shirley Abbott replies: Mr. Quin has apparently not understood the point I was trying to make. What I wrote was that a large number of plantation mistresses “must have been intelligent, capable, and kind-hearted,” and I never once questioned that they worked hard. Contrary to the literary and political myth, however, they were not ministering angels in the Ellen O’Hara fashion but human beings. As I further pointed out, it is worth noting that in John Blassingame’s massive collection, Slave Testimony, with its firsthand, documented accounts, a significant number of slaves told of cruel treatment at the hands of white women. For other evidence of that kind, Mr. Quin might read Gerda Lerner’s biography of the Grimké sisters, or the writings of the Grimkés themselves. I am glad Catherine Clinton is so confident that the slaves admired their owners’ wives. To me, that’s wishful thinking—a surmise. Surely, at this late date, we can all agree, however, that whether Southern ladies were saints or sinners, slavery was evil, damaging to black and white souls alike.
Digging Into Digging
Although Robert Friedman’s “Digging Up the U.S.” (August/September) is generally a fine article, I was somewhat dismayed by his statement that in Virginia in the 1930s and 1940s, “Any excavating for artifacts had to be done at a prearranged distance from the site, and sometimes, as at Colonial Williamsburg, the two groups [archaeologists and architects] almost came to blows.” Having done the research for a book on the history of archaeology in Williamsburg, I can state without equivocation that in the years from 1931 to 1957 no explosive differences of opinion surfaced between Colonial Williamsburg’s architects and archaeologists. On the contrary, its archaeologists were architectural draftsmen on the senior architect’s own staff.
Differences of opinion had arisen between anthropologically trained and architecturally trained archaeologists at Jamestown, however; but they had nothing to do with Colonial Williamsburg. I am sure, too, that neither group would concede that they were “excavating for artifacts.” Both were digging for historical information, and then differed only in that some were more interested in one kind of artif actual data than were others. The allocation of digging areas did not preclude either group from the archaeological sites, as Mr. Friedman suggests. The division at Jamestown was, for a short time, between structures and adjacent areas, and in Williamsburg between architectural and garden archaeology. By the 1940s such distinctions no longer existed, and there is no evidence to indicate that any animosity clouded the work at either place.
I. Noël Hume
Resident Archaeologist
Colonial Williamsburg, Va.
Inspiration?
Thank you, from an old sailor (I served aboard the Essex-class carrier Valley Forge after World War II), for the seafaring issue (April/May). The story of the Essex disaster was particularly interesting because of its repercussions throughout American literature of that period. Also, could that story be the origin or inspiration for the poem “The Yarn of the Nancy Bell” by W. S. Gilbert? This is about a shipwreck, too, and a sample verse suggests the connection:
For a month we’d neither wittles nor
drink,
Till a-hungry we did feel,
So we drawed a lot, and, accordin,
shot
The captain for our meal.
Will Pearson
Salt Lake City, Utah
Big Guns
Talking about battleships in his interview, Captain Beach misses the point that one of the battleship’s greatest assets is its guns. He is correct about range but ignores the number of rounds carried for the guns as opposed to missiles. A ship is only as good as its station-keeping abilities, and limiting its number of rounds surely affects that ability.
A Cruise missile costs far more than a sixteen-inch round, and I am left with doubts about the cost effectiveness of interdicting fire against an isolated incident involving, say, a company of men and three or four tanks raiding an outpost. I would also bet my bottom dollar that a sixteen-inch shell not only carries more conventional explosives than a Cruise missile, but within its range, countermeasures against that incoming round are virtually impossible, whereas the Cruise can get hit.
Finally Beach forgets the one great advantage of the sixteen-inch shell. It can be armor-piercing and will penetrate places the builders and shooters of Cruise missiles only dream of. Anyone who lias seen the onshore destruction caused by the big gun will concur. I wonder how Iwo Jima would have gone had it undergone a Cruise bombardment and how many of those deep bunkers that sixteen-inch guns took out would have been functioning at H hour.
James C. Pearson, Jr.
Staten Island, N.Y.
Captain Beach replies: Where Mr. Pearson and I disagree is in the relative importance of range. As a basic principle, a warship whose weapons can’t reach the enemy is helpless. Thus our battleships at Pearl Harbor, and the Prince of Wales and Repulse off Malaya two days later, were sitting ducks to their attackers. Their great guns were useless. Surface warships today must have long-range, self-propelled weapons with electronic guidance. Cruise missiles for attack and antimissile missiles for battle-group defense, all under computer control. Guns they may have as well, but a battle will be fought at a range of hundreds of miles and will be all over before any guns can be fired.
At Iwo Jima, nearly forty years ago, our fourteen- and sixteen-inch guns did yeoman service, and our Marines blessed the battleships that carried them. But the Cruise missile as we know it today did not exist. If the Japanese defenders had had 1980-type Cruise missiles, our ships would have been under fire for a whole day before they could have gotten within gun range, and, to say the least, the attack on Iwo Jima would have been very differently conducted.
In any event, we are fortunate indeed that the four Iowa-class battleships, Iowa, New Jersey, Missouri, and Wisconsin, are big enough and versatile enough to support both missiles and guns. The United States is very lucky to have them available, now that the need is here, and it is good to have them to put back into service. Pearson is clearly a lover of great ships, as I am, and obviously hopes, as I do, that the necessary modifications will not spoil their looks.
