In the December 1982 issue, Peter Andrews, writing of the conquests, musical and amorous, of Louis Moreau Gottschalk, nineteenth-century pianist and composer, states that during a triumphal tour of Spain, Gottschalk was “romantically linked with … the queen’s sister, Dona Luisa, and the Countess de Montijo, who was soon to become the wife of Napoleon III.”
The author has confused the Empress Eugénie with her mother, Maria Manuela de Montijo. She was the countess. The daughter, Eugénie, was called Mademoiselle, or, sometimes, Countess of Teba.
I hope Mr. Andrews does not mean anything serious in using the phrase “romantically linked,” which in our modern usage has come to mean a liaison. True, the Andalusian beauty had many suitors. But she told Napoleon III that she was a virgin. Louis Napoleon believed her. And so do I.
Gerald Carson
(Author of “The Dentist and the Empress,” June/July 1980)
Mother-Daughter Muddle
The author replies: I have no wish to slander Eugénie—whose self-proclaimed reputation for sexual probity was the bored talk of the Continent—with the indiscretions of her more pliant mother, as Mr. Carson argues so persuasively that I have done. Mr. Carson’s letter does raise some questions, however. First, I said only that the two were “romantically linked” in court gossip. This I believe to be true, although I hope it is understood that court gossip is no more binding than a Rona Barrett column. Perhaps one reason for the haste of Gottschalk’s departure was to protect Eugénie’s name. But my article referred only to the rumor, not to the fact. Second, there is some confusion as to who is the countess of what. The excellent Chambers’s Biographical Dictionary identifies Eugénie as the Countess de Montijo. If Mr. Carson’s research identifies her as the Countess of Teba, I accept the correction. Regardless of the title, however, the person we are talking about here is almost certainly Eugénie, who would have been about twenty-six at the time of Gottschalk’s visit to Spain.
Andersonville Defended
I will not deny that Andersonville (“Hell and the Survivor,” October/November issue) in 1864 was a vastly overcrowded prison pen where disease and malnutrition took a frightful toll, but to say that it was “the worst” is to fly in the face of history. The Federal prisons at Elrnira, New York, and Point Lookout, Maryland, produced higher percentages of death than did Andersonville, with less reason for doing so. The Confederate prisoners also suffered from disease, malnutrition, and sadistic guards, but in a land of abundance, while those in Southern prisons suffered more due to a breakdown of transportation and supply.
Let us hear no more of Andersonville’s horrors and Henry Wirz’s unfounded crimes, for to cast stones at the South’s prison system is but to bury Northern self-righteousness under an avalanche of dead men’s bones.
Thomas Lemmons
Chairman, Historical Committee
Sons of Confederate Veterans
Jackson, Miss.
In fact, the introduction to Charles Hopkins’s account of his imprisonment states that “contemporary historians are inclined to believe that the Southern prison camps were no worse than their Northern counterparts…”
Hoover Underrated
I have always loved Mr. MacLeish’s poetry—in fact almost everything he did was monumentally impressive. But it still hurts me now, more than fifty years later, to hear or read the castigation that has come Herbert Hoover’s way ever since he left office. It seems amazing to me that a scholar such as Mr. MacLeish (“America Was Promises,” August/September issue) could have forgotten Hoover’s service to Belgium and France, after World War I broke out, in the distribution of food and clothing. Or his service to Eastern Europe after the Armistice in 1918. Or the fact that he and his associates formed a private charitable organization called the European Children’s Fund, which fed and clothed literally millions of orphaned, destitute children. It wasn’t only good intentions, or Lord Bountiful; his magnificent gifts for administration and organization made these programs work.
When the stock market crash came, Hoover sincerely believed that distress was only temporary, but after 1931 he had no support in the House to listen to his recommendations for relief—in spite of which he managed to get the Reconstruction Finance Corporation enacted, at a cost of $2 billion. But there always has to be a scapegoat, and he was it. He didn’t chuckle, twinkle, or sparkle, and he wore funny collars. But he deserved infinitely better of the republic than he received.
Mrs. John Markle
Haverford, Penna.
Small-Town Weekly: Correcting the Record
I have read John Cole’s article “If You Ran a Small-Town Weekly” in your October/November issue with outraged mortification. I am in the position of the man who called the editor to say: “You know that story you ran yesterday about me making a million dollars last year in the stock market? Well, there were some things wrong with it. It wasn’t the stock market, it was retail clothing. And it wasn’t last year, it was ten years ago. And it wasn’t a million, it was three million. And it wasn’t me, k was my uncle. And he didn’t make it, he lost it.”
The Cole article is a continuous fabrication that violates my history, goals, character, and credibility and does disservice to my chosen profession. In the single page you permit me, it is impossible to refute point by point a four-page feature article. Briefly then:
John never “ran” a small-town weekly, let alone mine. I was full owner, editor, and “runner” of the Kennebunk (Maine) Star and majority owner with the same titles of its metamorphosis, the York County Coast Star, now owned by The New York Times. With photocopies and letters I have convinced you of these things.
John misrepresents my investment in all ways (total $30,000, all mortgaged, not $100,000; down payment $5,000, not $1,000; bank mortgage note $5,000, not $100,000; etc.); number of starting employees (2, not 5); starting circulation (total 1,280, not 3,000); paid subscribers (200, not 2,000); coverage area (2 towns, not 5); area population (6,700, not 20,000); size of the newspaper when I bought it (4 pages, not 8); and almost all other details in similar proportions. He says the former owners misrepresented things to me (they didn’t); that all employees walked off the job the first day (they didn’t even contemplate it); and on arid on—too many for this space.
Most insulting is that John totally ignores my role at the newspaper, the one he claims for himself. Throughout he claims complete editorial responsibility, although not only was I editor, shaping policy, but I did more writing of all sorts—reports, features, editorials—and more copy editing. Since he had no stake whatsoever in the business, his agonizing over his personal financial risk is fantasy.
Most degrading are the preposterous references to my prior career, enthusiasms, and methods. I am repeatedly represented as some kind of wheelerdealer racetrack frequenter and smalltown business entrepreneur. I was, among other things, a writer, Navy fighter pilot, head of overseas interests for a trade association, manager of large mills, and finally assistant to the president of a diversified company whose stock was traded on the New York Exchange, before I quit in 1958, at age thirty-five, to buy the Star. I paid the asking price, much more than it was worth, and never offered less. That is my proud, if naive, custom. The sales agreement and bank loan John calls the convoluted result of my wheeling and dealing was the simplest of documents and was retired in ways he contradicts. He even goes so far as to say we had equal money problems because we both had two children, although he knew my three very well.
I am mystified by these erroneous transgressions, particularly so because John enjoys his reputation as reporter and defender of the truth and because we have called one another friends for over a generation. He has written generously of me and my career in the past.
More grievous to others, the aspiring weekly people as well as the regulars, is Cole’s dismissal of weekly journalism of record as a disappointing, picayune affair, rather beneath his notice. While in practice it is all too often (like other forms of journalism) neither ennobling nor vital, it can be so, more, perhaps—more personally, more directly—than almost any of the others. If one does it right, one lives beset with the hardest kind of unrelenting work, dealing with issues and ethics of intimate concern to one’s readers. If the arena is small and the scale is modest, the weekly editor has unique immediate effect on the people and turf he defends, and he does it without support or reference to other opinion, because only he takes journalistic notice of what only he can affect.
During John’s experience with the Star (the first two years and five months of my ownership), it grew from babyhood to toddlership. Seventeen years later its size had grown from 4 pages to 80, its circulation from 1,280 to 15,000, its coverage area from 2 towns to 15, its gross from printing and newspaper from $23,400 to $1,750,000, all under circumstances of extreme severity even in weekly journalism. It became one of the largest and perhaps the finest weekly of record in America, with awards and honors to defend the title. To have it dismissed, and my role discarded, in a national publication of historical reputation, adds injury to the many degradations. I wish John’s article could all be somehow erased from the record.
Alexander B. Brook
Sag Harbor, N.J.
Small-Town Weekly: Correcting the Record
The editor replies: In assigning Mr. Cole to write a factually correct account of his experiences, we relied on his reputation and his word. We were mistaken to do so and regret not having followed our usual fact-checking procedure. Mr. Brook was seriously misrepresented, and we apologize to him, to his friends and associates, and, not least, to our readers.
What If?
I read with interest and nostalgia the article “What If?” by Marcus Cunliffe in the December 1982 issue of the magazine. During my second year at the University of Virginia—in 1931–32—a special one-semester course entitled “Roman Archaeology” was offered, given by a visiting professor from Johns Hopkins. Several of us signed up—some no doubt because they saw an easy way to get three credits. After a few weeks about ten of us were still there—fascinated with the course. The night before the final exam, the good professor advised us that any sort of cramming would be useless and suggested we all take in a good movie.
How right he was! The exam consisted of one question: “If Carthage had won the Punic Wars instead of Rome, discuss the subsequent effect on the history of Europe and America. ” Wow! We all tore into that one—filling lots of exam books. Nobody flunked.
Boris Sokoloff
Berwyn, Penna.
What If?
What prompted me to write is the illustration by Neal McPheeters on page 20 showing the Bowie knife used to stab Secretary of State Seward on the night Lincoln was shot. Your artist obviously went to extraordinary pains to try to track down the actual knife and did an excellent job of reproducing it.
I know because the knife is in my collection of Lincoln assassination relics, along with the manacles kept on Payne, the wielder of the knife, and the noose that was used to hang him.
—John K. Lattimer, M.D.
New york, N.Y.
What If?
I find it disconcerting that while Marcus Cunliffe says that “what if” conjectures have intrigued him since his teens, he fails to mention a single work of speculative or science fiction in his article.
Mr. Cunliffe mentions that there have been various fantasies concerning the Civil War. He notes Churchill’s scenario as well as Thurber’s comic satire. Yet he ignores the wonder and sadness of Ward Moore’s 1952 novel Bring the Jubilee, which meticulously traces the outcome of life in America after the “Southron War for Independence” has been won. Later in his article he states that the historian William E. Leuchtenburg couldn’t conceive that American history would have been the same if Roosevelt had been assassinated in 1933. But he never once mentions Phillip K. Dick’s tragic novel of alternate reality, The Man in the High Castle (1962), which has counterfactual history depart at that exact point when FDR was/was not shot.
While failing to mention Dick, Moore, or any other authors of science fiction novels dealing with alternate history, some of Mr. Cunlif f e’s scenarios seem to come very close to breaking his own “rules” on counterfactual history. George Washington having sons would seem to violate “basic historical data,” and the question “What if there had been no tape-recording system in Nixon’s White House?” might be better put as “What if the Watergate break-in had never been discovered and, thus, few knew of the existence of the Nixon tapes?”
To have as fine a historian as Marcus Cunliffe seemingly shrug off a branch of speculative literature, especially one dealing so specifically with history, is disheartening. Why does such a rift between science fiction writers and professional historians have to exist when it comes to “counterfactual” speculations? To me the historical and the speculative (as in speculative fiction) complement each other and should go hand in hand.
Michael Korolenko
Brooklyn, N.Y.
What If?
I enjoyed Marcus Cunliffe’s “What If?” but I notice he stuck to the academically “safe” examples. Generally regarded as the best speculation on a world where the South won the Civil War is not the Churchill essay but Ward Moore’s novel, Bring the Jubilee, which is less optimistic and more realistic than Churchill’s scenario. And I’m surprised that he omitted Robert Sobel’s For Want of a Nail (1973), a largely economic history of British North America following the crushing of the rebellion by Burgoyne at Saratoga.
Also interesting historically is L. Sprague de Camp’s short novel, The Wheels of If, in which the crisis points are the Synod of Whitby (which I had to go look up after reading the story) and the Battle of Tours, plus having the Viking contacts with America continued and Vinland being a modern nation. De Camp even goes into linguistic changes, a rare thing in alternate histories.
Robert Coulson
Hartford City, Ind.
Korean Echo
I must tell you of what is the most emotionally moving incident that has ever come to me. Last week I had a long-distance phone call from California. It proved to be a lady who had read my article “Winter of the YaIu” (December 1982) and whose husband was one of the men killed when the 57th Field Artillery was overrun. He was the first sergeant of headquarters battery. For over thirty years she had longed for some account of what happened to him. Normally the commanding officer or the adjutant or someone would have written her, but in this case they were all killed, and the few survivors could not contact everyone. The Army could only report him missing in action and then declare him dead when the war was over. She has read everything on the Korean War she can find, but there are very few histories of that war written and none in any real detail that would tell her what she wanted to know. She was just looking through the magazine when there it was. I was able to give her a few more details, but I did not know her husband. However, the nature of his duties was such that my own battery commander and first sergeant must have met him while we were attached to the 57th. They had two children, a boy then four and a girl then two. The children cannot remember their father, and she ached to be able to tell them something of how he died. I could only assure her that she could tell them (now adults) that their father died with courage and dignity doing his duty to the last. She said his last letter mentioned the terrible cold, but that he wrote that since he had spent most of his life in the Army, he was content with his lot and believed he was where he should be. There was much pride in the Army then. Many men felt that duty and honor were more important than life. At the end of our talk she said: “I am satisfied at last. It’s all over, and my mind is at ease. Now I can put it all behind me.” The realization that I had brought some comfort after over thirty years of waiting left me limp. I am most grateful I could do something for her, but I did not sleep that night thinking about it.
James H. Dill
Little Rock, Ark.
Our Pleasure
I have received the handsome magazine containing reproductions of my watercolors done for the W. P. A. Arts Project (“Interior America,” December 1982). My gratitude is boundless. In those strange, creative days I never dreamed of having my work shown in such splendid color process. The reproductions are brighter than the originals. I am happy to know that the entire collection of watercolors is being kept for posterity at the National Gallery of Art. I will offer a prayer for all the dear souls who have taken care of the papers all the years and finally presented them in a book of class and distinction.
