Jacques Barzun instructs us that you don’t know America unless you know baseball. And when I think of suburbs—which I did in reading John R. Stilgoe’s “The Suburbs” (February/March)—I searched for that sine qua non of their history, namely Brooklyn.
Brooklyn was the very first modern American suburb, a niche achieved because the confluence of technology and nature offered easy accessibility to Manhattan. Its boosters took advantage of an innovation in transportation—the steam ferry. Service to Manhattan began in 1814, quickly resulting in the growth of the neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights. And this was just the beginning.
By 1830 the pace of Brooklyn’s population increase surpassed Manhattan’s. At mid-century, laments surfaced about people of wealth deserting the city for the attractions of this peripheral locale. And by 1860—over two decades before its much-regaled bridge—Brooklyn had become distinctly more than a suburb, ranking third in size of population, behind New York City and Philadelphia, among the cities of the nation. Brooklyn’s urbanization proved so rapid that some contemporary observers were blinded to its suburban beginnings.
Brooklyn has been dropped, regretfully, from modern-day major league baseball standings, but it should remain forever first in the annals of suburban history.
Michael H. Ebner Lake Forest, Ill.
Dr. Stilgoe replies: The most casual examination of old flashlights, hand tools, and factory machinery reveals the ubiquity of the “made in Bklyn” stamp. By the 1940s the former collection of suburbs had blossomed into a tightly knit, proud, prosperous borough, having abandoned (in 1898) its status as a separate city. Brooklynites chose neither suburban nor urban status, but instead opted to amalgamate themselves into a large urban entity. Perhaps the wistful nostalgia for the long-vanished baseball club masks a more subtle and serious longing to be a free city again. Once upon a time, most Americans knew of Brooklyn as a city; now it remains a shadow of itself, something called a borough, something that must be explained in odd political and economic terms. I did not mention Brooklyn because I have only begun studying the suburbs that became, cities and that later abandoned cityhood for amalgamation.
First TV President
I was interested in David McCuIlough’s “Letters of a Most Uncommon Common Man” (December 1983). The letters he quoted tell us a lot about our thirty-third president.
But President Truman was not the first to appear on television. President Roosevelt spoke at the opening of the New York World’s Fair on April 30, 1939. Obviously the author meant that President Truman was the first President to address the United States from the White House by television.
John Bowen Hampden, Me.
The Munich Murders: A Correction
Our June/July issue contained a particularly unfortunate typographic error. In his article “The Final Act,” Vance Bourjaily wrote, “Terrorism swept the world, most incredibly in the slaughter of Israeli athletes and Arab commandos at the Munich Olympics.”
Neither the editors of this magazine nor Mr. Bourjaily would suggest that there is any parallel between the killing of the athletes and the death of their murderers. The sentence should have read, “Terrorism swept the world, most incredibly in the slaughter of Israeli athletes by Arab commandos at the Munich Olympics.”
Our apologies to those of our readers who were, rightly, offended by this mistake.
—The Editors
The Worst Wife in the Colonies
The article “Take My Wife—Prithee” by David Sherwood in your April/May issue suggests that a husband posted his wife mainly to cut off her credit.
I have a handbill that was printed by one of my ancestors and posted all over Chester County, Pennsylvania, and once you have worked your way through its catalog of Mrs. Taylor’s shortcomings, you will see from the last paragraph that her husband composed his bulletin to justify his separation from her.
I do not claim descent from this “dissolute Harlot.” She was John Taylor’s second wife, and she bore him no children:
“If Silence in Season be a laudable Virtue, it is also certain that there is a Time to speak: But the Case is sometimes dubious and difficult to determine which is most eligible, publick Declamation, or silent Disregard. To answer the Lies and Clamours of a dissolute Harlot, is doing her too much Honour, when her lewd Life and scandalous Practices have sunk her beneath all Notice. On the other Hand, entire Silence may strengthen the Beast in her Wickedness, and encourage those idle Rascals, her Councellors, who are fond of the Office, to assist her in the Invention of Lies, and then to be the Porters.
“Malicious Clamours, and spiteful Lies, this profligate Woman makes the Business of her Life; and in that Faculty she is the very Pattern of him by whose Instigation she spends her Days in that detestable Practice.
“In the Space of eleven Years, when I too tamely suffered the Proud insulting Strumpet to domineer in Pomp and Splender, she destroyed my Substance above Twelve Hundred Pounds, beyond what a good Wife would have us’d in honest and reasonable Expences, by the Havock she made in my House and Store, to cloath her Bullies, to feed and see her Favourites, Emissaries and Letter-Carriers with large Gifts, Beef, Bacon, Flour, Butter, Wool, Cloth and Money; of which she had too much by my too great Indulgence, and much more by the use of a false Key.
“In cloathing herself, her Pride drove her to Madness: A Dozen costly Suits, at the same Time in Store, the best Silks and Sattins, besides other Suits, Calicoes, &c. with a Redundance of fine Linnen, could never suffice her Ambition; and so shamefully was she given to Gluttony, that if she had not been frequently relieved by Physick, she had long since put a Period to her Life by incredible Quantities of rich and strong Victuals, fat Fowls, Butter, Cream, &c. But what was yet more Develish, (I being much from home, having the Surveys of two Counties on my Hands,) her common Practice was to keep my Motherless Children with very different Fare, sometimes little better than meer Garbage; not at all to save Charges, but to indulge her hellish Pride: For she would often give her Servant Wenches some of the Best, and when she road abroad, which was but almost every Day, she would leave them the Key of Her Closet with free Liberty to cram, but with a strict Charge to let my little Children have only the Honour of Spectators. She encouraged the saucy Sluts to abuse and beat my Children, and if they spoke of making their Moan to me, those impudent Wenches would insult them with these Interrogatives, D’ye think I care for your Father ye Bastard? D’ye think I care for your Father ye Toad? No Musick could be more charming to Madam, than to hear her Bull-bitches bark at my Children: The Devil dancing in her Eyes, spoke the Satisfaction of her Heart, while she sat in her Great Chair, as Proud and well pleas’d as Semiramis Queen of Babylon when she had wall’d the City round.
“To recount one half of this wicked Woman’s vile Practices, would tire the Patience of Socrates, and fatigue the Strength of Hurcules: She us’d her utmost Endeavours to excite my Workmen, as well as Servants, to disregard my Orders in every Respect: She attempted often to cheat Customers in Weight and Measure, on Purpose to drive them from my Shop, and ruin my Trade.
“Many Times I resolved (tho’ too faintly) on a Separation, and many reasons of my long Delay are both difficult and needless to account for; the Thing is now accomplish’d, to my great Satisfaction, and my Tranquility is much enlarged by the interiour Assurance I feel, that all the Clamours of that deceitful Harlot can never make me think that right is wrong; or repent of doing my self Justice: The united Voices of her Cullies can but add nothing to nothing, and the wrong Censures of better Men, through Ignorance, will find the same Effect.” John Taylor. August 20, 1745.
Richard K. Stevens, Jr. Philadelphia, Penna.
Vietnam Dissent
Col. Harry Summers, Jr., presents “The Bitter Triumph of Ia Drang” (February/March 1984) as a “good place to start” for those who “still find the Vietnam War difficult to understand.”
A much better starting place on the trail to understanding is with the American subversion of the Geneva Accords. We didn’t support the 1956 unification elections because we saw a communist, Ho Chi Minh, as the probable winner in the presidential election. A Vietnam under Ho, however, would have posed no more of a security threat to us than Yugoslavia. We need not have killed hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese people and ravaged their land, costing us fiftysix thousand American lives and billions of dollars. It is even likely that, without U.S. intervention, Vietnam would not have become a Soviet client state.
We started to lose the war when we dropped support for those critical Vietnamese elections. It might have been a blunder for the Vietnamese to have elected a communist president, but it would have been their folly.
As a sentry dog handler at Tuy Hoa Air Base from October 1967 to October 1968, I guarded those planes that flew napalm into the central highlands. What I saw was that poor battlefield analyses were secondary errors that followed our mistaken judgment to wage war when neither democracy nor our national security was at stake. That was the tragedy.
George R. Cartier Azusa, Calif.
Lonely Fan
May I add an anecdote to John Kobler’s “Bravo Caruso!” in your February/March issue?
In the summer of 1921, when my father was a lad, his family and some neighbors from New York set out on a cross-country trip. Outfitted by Abercrombie and Fitch and traveling in Cadillac touring/camping cars, their little expedition frequently attracted notice as it braved the ruts that served as our nation’s roads in those days.
At one stop for gasoline and provisions in a sleepy, dusty little Southwestern town, they were approached by a resident. The man timidly introduced himself and, gesturing to the cars’ New York license plates, asked if the strangers were from the city itself. My grandfather allowed that they were.
“Ah,” said the man. “Well, I don’t mean to bother you, but I just thought you might like to know that Enrico Caruso has died.”
The group of travelers expressed their surprise and regret. My father’s family had season tickets to the Metropolitan Opera and had frequently heard the great tenor sing.
At this a weight seemed to fall from the man, and his face brightened a little. “You know,” he said, “I’ve been wanting to share that news with someone all day. But I’m the only opera lover in this town and nobody seems to know who Caruso is and nobody cares!”
The fellow went away finally contented, and my father never forgot that totally human encounter.
Richard D. Smith Princeton, N.J.
Extraordinary Kick
APRIL 9, 1984—As an old historian of college football, I couldn’t help but be intrigued by the sentence on page 58 of the April/May issue in which Professor Kazin reports that Buzz Law of Princeton “kicked a goal from behind his own goalpost.” This would have been more than a hundred yards, at least forty yards longer than anything that Charlie Brickley of Harvard or Pat O’Dea of Wisconsin ever accomplished. I suspect that it ought to have been “punted” from behind his own goalposts.
APRIL 24—I just happened to be browsing in the National Collegiate Athletic Association Football Guide, and noticed that the major school record for a punt is 99 yards by Pat Brady from Nevada-Reno back in 1950; of more familiar teams, there is George O’Brien’s 96-yard punt for Wisconsin in the 1952 Iowa game. The fieldgoal record is 67 yards, shared by three players—Little of Arkansas, Erxleben of Texas, and Williams of Wichita State. Of course, the NCAA does not have statistics for the old-time games, so there is a tiny possibility that Law did what Kazin says he did, but nobody should wager the rent money on it.
Ivan Kaye Scarsdale, N. Y
Initial Confusion
May I point out a small error in the April/May article “Avery”? The firm of William A. Boring and Edward C. Tilton is mentioned as designers of the U.S. Immigration Station on Ellis Island. The error is in Mr. Tilton’s middle initial, which was not C but L, for Lippincott.
Mr. Tilton was my father. I studied architecture under Dean Boring at Columbia, and it is possible my father’s name was assumed to be Edward Charles, since mine is on record there as Charles Edward.
It is noteworthy that the buildings at ElHs Island won a gold medal for the firm at the Paris Exposition of 1900.
Charles E. Tilton St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands
Still Only a General
The “Time Machine” section for February/March contained an error. Maj. Samuel Shaw could not have been carrying a letter from President Washington, since George Washington did not take the oath of office as President until April 30, 1789, long after the Empress of China had returned.
Lawrence M. Troy Oceanside, N. Y.
‘Holland’ Amplifications
The caption to the photograph of the Holland on pages 42-43 of the April/May issue is slightly in error in stating that the two monitors in the background were first used in the 1870s. That is quite correct for the ship in the far background. She’s the Terror, laid down in about 1874 and completed in 1893. The nearer ship, however, was brand new.
She’s recognizable at a glance as one of the Arkansas class of monitors authorized in a fit of congressional panic on May 4, 1898. Masthead detail identifies her as the Florida, later renamed Tallahassee, built by Lewis Nixon of Elizabethport, New Jersey, and commissioned on June 18, 1903.
The ship in the photograph is obviously in commission—ensign flying, fire in the boilers, and crew’s laundry strung up to dry. Which means that the earliest possible date for the photograph is the summer of 1903.
John D. Clark Newfoundland, N.J.
‘Holland’ Amplifications
Back about 1922 I had a chance to climb on and into the first Navy sub in that Bronx park. My father took me (age seven) to see it. He made a big point of the designer being Irish, more perplexing to me than the submarine itself. Any boy could see how that worked, but an Irishman named Holland?
William J. Colihan, Jr. Essex, Conn.
‘Holland’ Amplifications
The two-page picture of the Holland undoubtedly was taken at Annapolis, as the Holland spent half of her service life there for the training of cadets, officers, and enlisted men. The Holland was struck from the Navy Register of Ships on November 21, 1910, and sold for scrap in June 1913.
The recovery of the British Holland is quite remarkable. With all the fine pictures of the hulk, it seems a shame not to have one taken in her prime. So I’m enclosing a picture of No. I (below) at her launching at Barrowin-Furness on November 2, 1901.
Eugene B. Canfield Vestal, N.Y.
‘Holland’ Amplifications
In his article “The Holland Surfaces,” the author fails to mention that John Philip Holland tested his submarine in the Passaic River in 1878. One of his early submarine models, the Fenian Ram, is on display in Paterson, New Jersey. During the time when the Beatles were so popular, the good citizens of Paterson awoke one morning to find that the Fenian Ram had been painted yellow after the Beatles’ song, “The Yellow Submarine.”
Frances D. Peacock Clifton, N.J.
Recently, one of our picture editors came across an account of a descent in the Holland that is certainly the first submarine voyage ever taken by a journalist. Franklin Matthews braved the depths for McClure’s Magazine in 1899; his description of his adventure in the “diving torpedo boat” reads in part: “When one goes … in the ‘Holland,’ there is a certain tremulous feeling as one climbs down the barrel-like turret and finds himself in a brightly-lighted steel cave …
“You hear the top of the turret clamped down, and then you look about somewhat nervously to see what is to be done next. The pilot or commander in the turret rings a little bell, and one of the five men in the crew turns a wheel, and you see that the boat is under way, running along the surface …
“You look up at the tiny deadlight over your head, as you sit on your camp-stool, and you see the water dash over the glass in little waves. You hear the man in the turret give some order to the man at his feet; the floor tips slightly, and you know the descent has begun. You are so interested that nervousness disappears. Some one calls attention to a gage [sic] over your shoulder, a glass tube containing a column of mercury, which shows the exact depth to which the boat has dived. You are intent on watching that when suddenly you look at the deadlight again. You see it covered with water of a most vivid green color, and then you eyes go back to the gage. In a moment you begin to watch the crew …
“There is nothing to see but a little compartment filled with machinery, in which a few men half creep about and turn this or that wheel or push this or that lever, with entire complacency and no evidence of hurry or alarm. … In a few minutes the sensation of being under water becomes commonplace, and you begin to pity the people on the tugboat following you and who are perhaps worrying lest some dire thing will happen to you. Except for the cramped quarters, the sensation is practically the same as being in the engine-room of a liner at sea, fifteen or twenty feet below the surface of the water. …
“After a little more than twenty minutes, we were on the surface again. The turret was undamped, the air rushed down into the compartment, and the heavy feeling on the ear-drums for an instant showed that we had been breathing an atmosphere with a pressure slightly different from that on the surface of the water.”
Hemingway Celebration
I am writing to express thanks and admiration to Alfred Kazin for his perceptive article on Ernest Hemingway in your April/May issue. Hemingway’s biographer Carlos Baker said that it will be past the year 2000 before a definitive biography can be written. It seems to me that this article has moved the deadline up by a couple of years at least.
Last year some of us thought it high time that Oak Park begin an effort toward establishing a Hemingway Museum. The Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park was granted a state charter for that purpose.
Although a museum won’t be appearing soon, a celebration was held on July 21, the eighty-fifth anniversary of Hemingway’s birth, the thirtieth anniversary of his being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and of all things the three hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the landing at Duxbury, Massachusetts, of the family founder, Ralph Hemingway.
The celebration involved a dinner, films, reminiscences by people who knew him, and open house at a number of places: the high school classroom where he studied freshman English, the church he attended, the house where he was born, and the house where he grew up and wrote his first stories, as well as the library and the Historical Society.
Morris Buske, Chairman The Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park, Ill.
Bigger and Earlier
I would like to add a few comments to Oliver E. Alien’s article “A Tree Grows in America” (April/May).
In June 1980 the last and smallest of the ailanthus trees in the front of my parents’ home in Fairfax, Virginia, fell down. This tree had previously been topped, decades earlier, by a high wind.
My parents’ home is Hope Park. It was probably built by Edward Payne in the mid-1700s, and it later belonged to George Washington’s friend Dr. David Stuart. When our family took possession, there were three very large ailanthus trees growing in the front yard.
In the 1960s the tree that was in the center was approximately one hundred and fifty feet high and had a girth of at least twelve feet. The rings on which horses had been tied were grown over and were fifteen feet high on the tree.
In addition to its smell this tree also attracts certain insects, but that is not all bad. Fireflies are much attracted to the trees, and there is nothing like a Virginia summer evening watching the spectacle of small lights streaming up from the group of trees.
Old timers in the area told us that these ailanthus trees were originally brought to Hope Park to promote a silkworm industry, but the insects could not survive the winters. Thus, seeing the obvious age of these trees, I believe ailanthuses came to Virginia earlier than the 1880s. When the last tree fell, we could see how hollow an ailanthus is. The hollow root system is also an excellent rabbit warren. The wood burns well, and the tree grows about fifteen feet the first year, but it is fairly hard to cut and even worse to split.
