Senator Robert F. Kennedy, a son of America’s promise, power, and privilege, knelt in a crumbling shack in 1967 Mississippi, trying to coax a response from a child listless from hunger. After several minutes with little response, the senator, profoundly moved, walked out the back door to speak with reporters. He told them that America had to do better. What he was seeing, as he privately told an aide and a reporter, was worse than anything he had seen before in this country.
Regarding "Blackface: the Sad History of Minstrel Shows" in your Winter 2019 issue, I applaud American Heritage for providing a historical context to the current controversy about the use of blackface by Governor Ralph Northam and Attorney General Mark Herring of Virginia in the 1980s.
I suppose we should not necessarily crucify the perps, who were students at the time, but they should have been taught better. For whites to put on blackface as a supposedly harmless prank underestimates the bitter truth of Jim Crow with all its cruelties.
The minstrel shows had an enormous impact on American folk culture and popular music, as your article shows. But they were part and parcel of the perpetuation of racism, and in the end there was nothing funny about it in this time and century.
We are still far, far away from burying racism at the crossroads with a stake in its heart.
--Bernard Weisberger, Evanston, IL
On February 19, 1862, with armies drilling for the spring Civil War campaigning season, President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation. “It is recommended,” he wrote, “to the People of the United States that they assemble in their customary places for public solemnities on the twenty-second day of February instant, and celebrate the anniversary of the Birthday of the Father of his Country, by causing to be read to them his immortal Farewell address.” That was all.
Lincoln didn’t say anything about “sale-a-brations” or “Buy George” savings on dinette sets. He certainly didn’t realize that through the years his original concept of a near sacred holiday for the reading of Washington’s most succinct manifesto would blur into a meaningless thing, a Monday without mail called Presidents Day.
The 91st “Wild West” Division was one of nine American divisions that assaulted German positions in the Meuse-Argonne on September 26, 1918. As befitted its name, the 91st was originally assembled from draftees inducted from the Rocky Mountain west. Their first days in action were indeed wild, as they attacked toward the enemy-held village of Gesnes against well-entrenched machine guns. Green though they were, the westerners fought with honor, but paid an ugly price. Among their number was the father of a future Hollywood movie star.
The Assault Begins
Editor's Note: Nina Burleigh was National Political Correspondent for Newsweek and has written for numerous publications including Time, The New York Times, New Yorker, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. She is the author of seven books including a biography of James Smithson, The Stranger and the Statesman. Portions of this essay appeared in her most recent book, The Trump Women: Part of the Deal, about the women who have had the most profound influence on President Trump's life (formerly published as Golden Hand
The recent furor over the use of blackface by Virginia's governor and attorney general while they were in college reminds us of a sad chapter in our history – the long tradition of minstrel shows in which whites covered their faces with burnt cork or grease paint in order to profit from denigrating African-Americans.
We reprint below a 1978 article from American Heritage by historian Robert Toll, one of the first scholars to study this uniquely American form of popular culture and its impact.
Fifty years ago, AMERICAN HERITAGE began a six-part series on George Washington written by the famous biographer of the first President, James Thomas Flexner.
After the fighting—after Trenton, Valley Forge, Monmouth, and Yorktown—after all the sleeplessness and the care, George Washington longed to return to the reassuring routine of his beloved Mount Vernon. This dream of return came true just before Christmas of 1783; already past fifty, the General looked forward to spending his remaining years at his favorite occupation, that of a Virginia country gentleman. He had plans to expand and embellish his ancestral home, to improve his land, and to put in order his neglected financial affairs. He also relished the thought of again riding for pleasure, of limiting with his dogs, of merely silting on his veranda and watching the familiar Potomac flow placidly to the sea. The General was, in fact, full of those hopes and those longings which have occupied the thoughts of all returning soldiers. It is this period of Washington’s life that the noted biographer and historian James Thomas Flexner treats of in the narrative that follows.
On February 12, 2019, the U.S. Senate passed conservation legislation that if signed by the president will protect millions of acres of land and establish four new National Parks. Among them is the new Mill Springs National Monument, site of the first Union victory in the Civil War. We asked historian Jack Hurst, author of a respected trilogy of books on the Western theater of the Civil War, to tell us why this forgotten battle deserves more attention. Portions of this essay were excerpted from one book in his series, Men of Fire: Grant, Forrest, and the Campaign that Decided the Civil War (Basic Books). –The Editors