Texas textbooks rewrite U.S. history

A fascinating look at how conservatives wield their power.

Last week, the Texas Board of Education debated the statewide curricula, most notably the social studies curriculum. These board members are elected officials— not experts or professional historians— though according to the March 12 issue of The New York Times, “some members of the conservative bloc held themselves out as experts on certain topics.”

Certain ones? Which?

What upset people, however, was not the makeup of the Board, but its decisions. The aforementioned bloc (10 of the 15 members) espouses conservative values— they question Darwin, they believe the founding fathers were guided by Christian principles and they dislike Thomas Jefferson for coining the term “separation of church and state.”

Imagine conservatives disliking Jefferson, he of states's rights.

On this last point, the Board decided to replace Jefferson on a list of Enlightenment thinkers students should know with Calvin, Aquinas and Blackstone. It also neglected to add notable Hispanics to the history of the Mexican-American War. Nuanced defenses of McCarthy and criticism of Johnson’s Great Society were included in the curriculum, however, comprising a neat, Republican package that passed along party lines, 10-5.

History according to the conservatives.

The influence of this decision goes beyond Texas. Since Texas is the second most populous state, textbook publishers tailor their American History texts to Texan standards. And since the most populous state, California, is so persnickety about its curriculum, Texas really sets national standards for what students will learn. This is especially true given the primacy of the textbook in America. Indeed, the textbook is the cornerstone of public secondary civics education and far more influential than the teacher. The teachers who write test questions from their own words and research are far fewer than the mass of underpaid, overworked, non-history majors who pull test questions straight from the book. In too many classrooms, practice questions at the end of chapters stand a good chance of becoming actual test questions.

The saving grace is that most high school students don't give much attention to history class, ignore much of what terachers say, and forget the answers they've provided to test questions as soon as the test is over.

So if most students are simply learning by rote in public schools, what they are memorizing is very important. Since these schools are public, it is not just a matter of what parents want students to learn, but what parents and special interest groups can lobby politicians to include in curricula and thus force students to learn (unless attentive parents intervene). Because make no mistake— anything run by the government is ultimately backed by a monopoly of coercive force. Thus, this debate about an American history curriculum is really a battle over what will be the state-sanctioned, monolithic account of how things were.

Clearly this article comes from a liberal viewpoint, but, anything run by the government is ultimately backed by a monopoly of coercive force? What exactly does that mean? What the right wing says?

Everyone ought to stop fooling themselves. There is no one authoritative history, in America or anywhere else. Bias is inherent to historiography. No matter how closely a historian scrutinizes sources and attempts to balance one account with another, by the very selection of some sources over others, a particular account is written; not all sources can be included, and that is OK.

Truth must still be sought, though, and certain histories will do this better than others. Simply because there is no one irrefutable account does not make all accounts equally valid or valuable. It would behoove the people of this nation to start compiling the truths of their own stories and presenting them alongside many others, rather than jostling to write their own pages in the state-approved story book of what really happened. This can take the form of textbook-free classrooms that rely on articles and primary sources or free association of like-minded individuals to educate their children in a certain tradition (read: private schools). Embracing our differences has always made us stronger as a nation, and it is what will keep us ahead in the coming decades, even as European countries wrestle to redefine what it means for them to no longer be ethnic nations. The beauty of this civic nation is forged in the fires of pluralism. E pluribus unum: “Out of many, one.”

By NATHAN STRINGER

Published: Thursday, March 25, 2010

The Torching of Atlanta

A Currier and Ives depiction of Union troops as they took Atlanta on Sept. 2, 1864.



















Bonds, Russell S. (2009). War Like the Thunderbolt : The Battle and Burning of Atlanta. Westholme Pub Llc 2009















Wortman, Marc. (2009). The bonfire: the siege and burning of Atlanta. New York: PublicAffairs.

a taste of Paine

Who was Paine? Depending on whom you ask, he was ­either an uncompromising free-thinker who made possible the popular embrace of the ­Declaration of Independence, or "a filthy little atheist," as Teddy Roosevelt once ­described him. A seditious subject of the English crown or an honorary French citizen chucked in the Bastille. Or just a fiercely American idealist with too much interest in brandy and democracy and not enough in fashion or personal hygiene.

The painting, a bust circa 1792 by Laurent Dabos of Toulouse, seems to have been lost until only a few years ago, when it surfaced in England. It's a flattering portrait, but—not surprisingly, perhaps—on the back of the canvas an anonymous hand appears to have scribbled something of an insult to Paine.

Atticus Finch and the limits of Southern liberalism

A revisionist view of Atticus Finch.

Stripping Away the Darkness as Murals Are Reborn

Slideshow

Summers with Lincoln

Summers with Lincoln: looking for the man in the monuments. (2008). James A. Percoco.
New York : Fordham University Press.

Fun read. Informative. For the devoted Lincolnite, mostly, but good for everyone who wants to learn some history.

Books From the Great Depression

Peter Conn selects unsurpassed novels about the Depression

1. Now in November
By Josephine Winslow Johnson
Simon & Schuster, 1934
A fictional account of one family's experience on the land, Josephine Winslow Johnson's best-selling novel won the Pulitzer Prize before sinking into undeserved obscurity. The Haldmarnes leave an unnamed city for the countryside when Father loses a good job in a lumber mill and with it any hope of financial security for his wife and their three daughters. The mortgaged farm to which the family moves yields little: The novel's central section is a day-by-day reckoning of the land's collapse into baked and cracking clay during the killing drought in the Great Plains of the 1930s. "Now in November" is one of the most convincing and hair-raising depictions of the Dust Bowl in the literature of the Depression. Unfortunately, history would find room for only one Dust Bowl novel, John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath."
2. The Big Money
By John Dos Passos
Harcourt, Brace, 1936
Norman Mailer often said that John Dos Passos had written the great American novel in the three volumes of the "U.S.A." trilogy. "The Big Money" was the final volume in the series, and its success put Dos Passos on the cover of Time magazine. The novel deploys several narrative techniques in an effort to tell the whole story of America's march toward the Crash. Long conventional storylines alternate with stream-of-consciousness monologues, brief biographies of famous and infamous Americans, and "newsreels" made up of newspaper headlines, popular songs and advertising slogans. "The Big Money" opens at the end of World War I and concludes in the early years of the Depression. The final scene presents a vagrant trying to hitch a ride: The open road to American opportunity has become a dead end. Dos Passos's sustained, bitter and often funny exposé of Roaring Twenties excess is the best fictional explanation ever written of how Americans got themselves in the biggest economic mess in their history.
3. Appointment in Samarra
By John O'Hara
Harcourt, Brace, 1934
John O'Hara's first and best novel tracks the final three days in the life of a young man named Julian English. He is 30 years old, charming and good-looking, married to an attractive woman, and successful as the manager of a Cadillac franchise in a town called Gibbsville. Julian is also a dangerous drunk and a moral trifler, filled with envy and insecurity, a man with no discernible convictions. His rapid decline in the course of the novel is an emblem of moral exhaustion. "Appointment in Samarra" is set in 1930, after the Crash but before the advent of the New Deal. O'Hara always insisted on the precision of that date: His failed hero registers the sense of impending and general collapse.
4. The Good Earth
By Pearl S. Buck
John Day, 1931
A Pulitzer Prize winner, Pearl S. Buck's "The Good Earth" was also the best-selling novel in the U.S. for both 1931 and 1932. The book would shape American perceptions of China for two generations. The main characters, a poor farmer named Wang Lung and his wife, O-lan, are recognizable human beings, not mere Oriental stereotypes, who do their best to survive in a punishing world of famine, bandits, war and plague. Why did a book about an obscure rural family in a distant land sell so well in the early Depression years? To begin with, Buck was a fine storyteller, and her images of the Chinese countryside are memorably vivid. Beyond that, the novel resonated with the realities of Depression America: The portraits of suffering but resilient Chinese farmers spoke eloquently to Americans trying to make sense of their own diminished circumstances.
5. The Day of the Locust
By Nathanael West
Random House, 1939
The best novel ever written about Hollywood appeared in the last years of the Depression. A young artist, Todd Hackett, has come to the West Coast to paint the legions of bored and lonely men and women who migrate to California in pursuit of a dream they never find. The studios' celluloid fantasies mock the deprivation of the country throughout the 1930s, providing escapist entertainment in the midst of despair. The novel is punctuated with scenes of violence -- drunken brawls, bloody cockfights, sexual assault -- that unfold in the glow of Southern California's legendary warmth and sunshine. In the climactic scene, a murderous riot provoked by a movie premiere provides a "real" counterpart to Todd's painting, "The Burning of Los Angeles."
Mr. Conn's "The American 1930s: A Literary History" has just been published by Cambridge University Press.

Lincoln's Bicentennial Soundtrack

Our nation was striving in the 19th century to establish suitable venues for the performance of European music and also to prove that American composers could write music just as good as the imported kind. After all, in 1840 the director of the Paris Opéra dismissed an offer by the American composer William Henry Fry to pay all the costs of mounting his opera "Leonora" there, declaring: "In Europe, we look to America as an industrial country – excellent for railroads but not for art."

Dismissive.

America had no railroads in 1809, when Lincoln was born in Kentucky. Indeed, his birth occurred just a few weeks before Thomas Jefferson, a keen amateur violinist and music collector, handed over the presidency to his friend James Madison, whose redoubtable first lady, Dolley, presided over the first inaugural ball in the federal capital's history, and brought a taste for French music and elegance to the Executive Mansion.

And so a tradition started.

The Lincoln family left Kentucky for Indiana in 1816, shortly before a remarkable musical figure, Anthony Philip Heinrich, arrived there from Philadelphia. Heinrich installed himself in a log cabin in Bardstown, Ky., taught himself composition, and in 1820 produced a collection of songs and pieces for violin and piano loftily entitled "The Dawning of Music in Kentucky," Opus 1. A second volume followed, prompting a critic to call Heinrich "the Beethoven of America" because of the relative complexity of his music. Heinrich went on to even greater complexity, composing large-scale orchestral works with titles like "The Washingtoniad, or the Deeds of a Hero" and a "Grand National Heroic Fantasia: Scintillations of 'Yankee Doodle.'"

HWPL, of course, has: the score to his Opus 1; a CD of The ornithological combat of kings, and a couple of other CDs which include music of his (one of those, The wind demon, has a piece by William Henry Fry, who helped found the New York Philharmonic Symphony Society).

Lincoln was 17 when the U.S. celebrated the 50th jubilee of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1826. On that day, Jefferson and John Adams both died. And on that same day, in Pittsburgh, was born the first American song composer still widely remembered, Stephen Foster.

Quite a coincidence.

Lincoln apparently enjoyed Gottschalk's music, and when the 9-year-old Venezuelan piano prodigy Teresa Carreño played at the White House in 1863, she performed several Gottschalk compositions to please him. Afterward, at the president's request, she improvised a set of variations on one of Lincoln's favorite ballads, Septimus Winner's "Listen to the Mocking Bird."

Lincoln was also an opera lover. En route to Washington in 1861, he took in a performance of Verdi's "A Masked Ball" at New York's Academy of Music, and throughout the war years he attended operatic performances in Washington whenever he could.

Scandal & Civility

Scandal & Civility
by Marcus Daniel
(Oxford, 386 pages, $28)

Politics and the press have not always been as tame as they are today.

To get some perspective on such views [that the Founding Era was one when Olympian political figures and impartial, public-spirited newspapers guided the nation in its times of crisis], one need go no further than "Scandal & Civility," Marcus Daniel's detailed study of the American press in the 1790s. The idea that this critical period was marked by a calm spirit of reasoned debate is a myth, as Mr. Daniel shows, and a deeply misleading one at that. The postrevolutionary age witnessed the unexpected rise of fiercely contending political parties; an increasingly bloody French Revolution that divided Americans into warring camps; a string of crises, such as the Genet affair, the Whiskey Rebellion, the XYZ affair; and the passage of the Alien and Sedition acts punishing dissent. It would not be too strong to assert that every step along the way the very survival of the nation was at risk.

Jefferson opposed the Alien and Sedition Acts as unconstitutional, stating that they stepped on states rights.

And what role did newspapers play? A profound one. As Mr. Daniel amply shows, they stoked debate with abandon as well as with a mean- spiritedness and partisan passion that make today's scuffles seem tame by comparison.

Ah, the good old days.

One of the most famous editors of the age was Philip Freneau, an ardent Republican and once "penniless young poet," and the publisher of the National Gazette, a semiweekly newspaper. What makes Freneau so interesting is that George Washington's secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, hired Freneau to work as a minor clerk at the State Department; however, his real responsibility was to galvanize, through his newspaper, Republican opposition to the administration he served. Rival journalist Richard Fenno, who was himself aligned with Washington rather than Jefferson, accused Freneau of being a "demon of slander," and Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, who often felt the sting of Freneau's articles, condemned Jefferson for paying Freneau with public funds, though to no avail.

The more one knows about Jefferson the more his halo crumbles.

Sick of the constant tirades against the government, an outraged President Washington called on Jefferson to put a stop to Freneau. Remarkably, Jefferson refused, insisting the National Gazette had "saved our Constitution." But if Washington felt the pain of Freneau's attacks, it was nothing compared with what he suffered at the hands of another Republican, Benjamin Franklin Bache, who published the Aurora, a newspaper whose inimitable motto was Surgo ut Prosim ("I rise that I might serve"). A grandson of Benjamin Franklin, the worldly Bache was no run-of-the-mill journalist, which only gave more force to his criticisms. He labeled "unconstitutional" Washington's actions on behalf of the Jay Treaty – a 1794 agreement with Britain, reviled by pro-French Republicans, concerning trade, sovereignty and the looming specter of war – and called for the president's impeachment. Remember, until then Washington was seen as virtually untouchable.

Imagine calling for Washington's impeachment.

Nor did Bache stop there. At the same time that his paper praised revolutionary France's bloodthirsty dictator, Maximilian Robespierre, as the "embodiment of virtue," he derided Washington as a "Demi-God of a Turkish seraglio." Others joined the fray: One writer spoke of Washington's "childish ambition"; another said that Washington was "cowardly"; a third that he was "insipid." Bache himself blasted Washington as "guilty of the foulest designs against the liberty of the people."

Robespierre virtuous, Washington demigod of a harem.

In an age when our newspaper industry is increasingly embattled, "Scandal & Civility" serves as a timely reminder of just how vital a thriving news culture is to the well-being of our democracy. The book, it should be said, is the outgrowth of a doctoral dissertation and is at times marred by the jargon one finds in graduate seminars. But it neatly presents an animated portrait of the postrevolutionary era, when opinionated, brash, irreverent newspapers were indispensable. They are no less indispensable to us today.

The Presidential Bookshelf

Books on POTUS include these two.

The Wizard of Tuskegee

Up From History (excerpt)
By Robert J. Norrell
(Harvard University Press, 508 pages, $35)

After decades of neglect, Booker T. Washington is the subject of a timely reappraisal

A century ago, the most consequential black person in America was a biracial man who had been abandoned by his father and raised by his mother, and who favored a nonconfrontational style of politics. Sound familiar?

Eerily so. Booker T. Washington was seen as a sort of Uncle Tom in times when radicalism and defiance were the orthodoxies. But ...

Washington went on to advise four U.S. presidents and he dined at the White House with fellow Republican Theodore Roosevelt, a black first. His 1901 autobiography, "Up From Slavery," was translated into seven languages and became the best-selling book ever written by a black. Andrew Carnegie called him the second father of the country. Many of America's other moneyed men, including John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan, were admirers and major benefactors. Harvard and Dartmouth gave him honorary degrees. Mark Twain and William Dean Howells sang his praises, the latter calling him "a public man second to no other American in importance."

Must recall that TR was an heir to Lincoln; Republicans both. Progressives. Democrats had bee Copperheads, Dixiecrats. As for B.T. Washington, there was more, much more.

For two generations after his death, Booker T. Washington remained widely appreciated. Numerous schools, parks, streets and black-owned businesses were named in Washington's honor. He was the first black to have his likeness appear on a U.S. postage stamp and commemorative coin. In 1942, a Liberty ship was christened the Booker T. Washington. And in 1956, marking the 100th anniversary of Washington's birth, President Dwight Eisenhower created a national monument to the former slave.

Think: in 1942 the Army was segregated, and a ship was named for Washington. But then came the protests.

But Washington's star began to dim in the 1960s, when the style of civil-rights advocacy was given over to protest, condemning authority and challenging the status quo at every turn. The thrust of Washington's message was self-improvement. His focus was the development of the black population of the rural South. His unwillingness to practice protest politics, however, has earned him the scorn of many modern-day critics, who dismiss him as too meek in his dealings with whites.

Why couldn't he be respected, and built on? Ideologic orthodoxies require conformity to the party line.

In "Up From History," a compelling biography, Robert J. Norrell restores the Wizard of Tuskegee to his rightful place in the black pantheon. Just as important, Mr. Norrell explains how ideological imperatives can cloud clear thinking, even among historians who should know better.

Mr. Norrell, a history professor at the University of Tennessee, says that this "present-mindedness of historians writing about race" is a function of the fact that many had themselves been activists and admired the accomplishments of civil-rights protest. "A presumption entered the thinking and writing that protest was correct," he writes, "and for most the only legitimate, means of improving minority conditions. By the mid-1960s Washington was understood to have been the enemy of activism, the Uncle Tom who delayed the day of freedom."

Making of a Mogul

William Randolph Hearst is a mythical giant in American life. A newspaper mogul, a powerful man who was listened to, and whose newspapers were read, he was also the object of Citizen Kane, called by many the best American film of all time.

He was a newspaper owner and publisher. As with every form of the written word, editing is crucially important. In this review, in the first sentence of the second paragraph, this glaring gaffe jumps out: Ah, but there was a time – not so long ago in the grand scheme of things – when people not only read newspapers but waited with baited breath for the latest edition to hit the street.
Baited? To catch fish? Or bated, as in reduced, lowered, restrained? Indeed bated.

The Uncrowned King
By Kenneth Whyte Counterpoint, 546 pages, $30

In 1895, William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951) arrived in New York City from his family home in San Francisco to assume the position of owner and publisher of the New York Morning Journal, a name he immediately shortened to the New York Journal. Once Hearst was installed in his Park Row office, he soon leapt into national prominence; how he managed this breakthrough is the subject of Kenneth Whyte's "The Uncrowned King," an engaging chronicle of Hearst's first three years in New York.

In 1883, freshly expelled from Harvard, he convinced his father, Senator George Hearst (who filled a seat vacated by death for a few months in 1886, then won and served from 1887 until his death in 1890), to let him run the San Francisco Examiner. He ran that newspaper with hucksterism, and moved onto New York in 1895 to run one of 17 dailies then published.

Mr. Whyte offers a sympathetic account of Hearst, presenting him as someone far different from the megalomaniacal Citizen Kane-esque brute of legend. Mr. Whyte's Hearst is eccentric, to be sure, but he is also an earnest general in the vanguard of the paper wars and a virtuoso of the front-page salvo.

Whatever the case, in New York Hearst learned from Joseph Pulitzer (New York World) and Charles Dana (New York Sun): banner headlines, heart-tugging human-interest stories, tendentious crusading, scoops (facts be damned). Hearst gleaned everything he could from Pulitzer and Dana before he surpassed them.

"The Uncrowned King" centers on the two major news stories gripping the U.S. during Hearst's early years at the Journal: the 1896 presidential election, pitting the upstart Democrat William Jennings Bryan against William McKinley; and the Cuban theater of the Spanish-American War.

Ah, yes, yellow journalism. Election in 1896: Jennings Bryan versus McKinley; Spanish-American War.

Bryan lost the election, but Hearst gained tremendous credibility with the Journal's election reporting, Mr. Whyte says. He reports that The Fourth Estate ("A Newspaper for the Makers of Newspapers") praised the Journal for covering the race "in splendid style" and cited the 1.5 millions copies sold of the paper's election edition as evidence that readers trusted the Journal even though its candidate had lost.

Bryan railed about a "Cross of Gold" and gained much support from farmers and other borrowers, and was opposed by East Coast lenders (no one in the West loaned money?), and yet Hearst supported him (curiously to this observer).

Mr. Whyte devotes nearly half of "The Uncrowned King" to the Spanish-American War, specifically the dueling among the major dailies to secure news from Cuba. This was America's first post-Civil War fight as a united nation – or at least it was united behind the cause of Cuban independence after Hearst's relentless campaign to shame a reluctant President McKinley into war. Amid rising tensions between the two countries in 1898, an explosion sank the battleship Maine in the Havana harbor. The cause of the blast was murky, but Hearst seized on it as the ultimate war-worthy outrage. Mr. Whyte acknowledges that the paper practiced some "atrocious journalism" during this period, but he also brings to bear a refreshing sense of context.

Whyte exonerates Hearst: the paper's reporting suggesting that the ship had been sabotaged was based on credible sources, he says. The coverage was "nowhere near the acme of ruthless, truthless journalism."

Hearst wound up on the ground in Cuba as a correspondent. On his return he found himself at the pinnacle of the newspaper world – a successful publisher, acclaimed editor, even a writer of some repute. But he was also reviled in many quarters, particularly by other publishers. A scathing Lincoln Steffens article "became a foundation stone of a Hearst legend that would continue to grow in scale and perversity and culminate in the fine but scurrilous motion picture, Citizen Kane."

The myth exploded:

But then, typically and to his credit, Mr. Whyte tests the conventional wisdom by consulting the autobiography that Steffens wrote many years later. It turns out that Steffens regretted writing the piece because he had been pressured by his editors to take a hatchet to Hearst. Steffens confessed that he had "compromised" with his colleagues "to keep my job." Hearst was "a great man, able, self-dependent," the old reporter wrote. "He had no moral illusions; he saw straight as far as he saw, and he saw pretty far."


One of many New York Journal front pages devoted to news about the destruction of the battleship Maine in 1898. Top: William Randolph Hearst in the early 1900s.

Pigeon Trainer in World War II, Dies at 84

Obituaries can be great research tools. I learn a great deal from reading them. This is a particularly interesting one.

In January 1942, barely a month after Pearl Harbor, the United States War Department sounded a call to enlist. It wasn’t men they wanted — not this time. The Army was looking for pigeons.

To the thousands of American men and boys who raced homing pigeons, a popular sport in the early 20th century and afterward, the government’s message was clear: Uncle Sam Wants Your Birds.

Richard Topus was one of those boys.

Now, I might have known about Army pigeons (should they have been Air Force pigeons? I wonder), but I do not remember so.

World War II saw the last wide-scale use of pigeons as agents of combat intelligence. Mr. Topus, just 18 when he enlisted in the Army, was among the last of the several thousand pigeoneers, as military handlers of the birds were known, who served the United States in the war. A lifelong pigeon enthusiast who became a successful executive in the food industry, Mr. Topus died on Dec. 5 in Scottsdale, Ariz., at the age of 84. The cause was kidney failure, his son Andrew said.

Richard Topus was born in Brooklyn on March 15, 1924, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. Growing up in Flatbush, he fell in love with the pigeons his neighbors kept on their rooftops in spacious coops known as lofts. His parents would not let him have a loft of his own — they feared it would interfere with schoolwork, Andrew Topus said — but he befriended several local men who taught him to handle their birds. Two of them had been pigeoneers in World War I, when the United States Army Pigeon Service was formally established.

Of course his parents wouldn't let him have pigeons; they were Jewish.

Pigeoneers. What an interesting word - and concept.

Pigeons have been used as wartime messengers at least since antiquity. Before the advent of radio communications, the birds were routinely used as airborne couriers, carrying messages in tiny capsules strapped to their legs. A homing pigeon can find its way back to its loft from nearly a thousand miles away. Over short distances, it can fly a mile a minute. It can go where human couriers often cannot, flying over rough terrain and behind enemy lines.

By the early 20th century, advances in communications technology seemed to herald the end of combat pigeoneering. In 1903, a headline in The New York Times confidently declared, “No Further Need of Army Pigeons: They Have Been Superseded by the Adoption of Wireless Telegraph Systems.”

Never say never, no?

In all, more than 50,000 pigeons served the United States in the war. Many were shot down. Others were set upon by falcons released by the Nazis to intercept them. (The British countered by releasing their own falcons to pursue German messenger pigeons. But since falcons found Allied and Axis birds equally delicious, their deployment as defensive weapons was soon abandoned by both sides.)

Now, who figured that British falcons would only eat German pigeons?

But many American pigeons did reach their destinations safely, relaying vital messages from soldiers in the field to Allied commanders. The information they carried — including reports on troop movements and tiny hand-sketched maps — has been widely credited with saving thousands of lives during the war.

Incoming pigeon, colonel. No, seriously, sir. Orders from HQ. No, I am not being sarcastic, sir.

Mr. Topus enlisted in early 1942 and was assigned to the Army Signal Corps, which included the Pigeon Service. He was eventually stationed at Camp Ritchie in Maryland, one of several installations around the country at which Army pigeons were raised and trained. There, he joined a small group of pigeoneers, not much bigger than a dozen men.

Camp Ritchie specialized in intelligence training, and Mr. Topus and his colleagues schooled men and birds in the art of war. They taught the men to feed and care for the birds; to fasten on the tiny capsules containing messages written on lightweight paper; to drop pigeons from airplanes; and to jump out of airplanes themselves, with pigeons tucked against their chests. The Army had the Maidenform Brassiere Company make paratroopers’ vests with special pigeon pockets.

American industry contributed to the Allied effort in many ways. Maidenform did more than make bras for Betty Grable. Patriotism takes all forms, and shapes.

After the war, Mr. Topus earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in business from Hofstra University. While he was a student, he earned money selling eggs — chicken eggs — door to door and afterward started a wholesale egg business. In the late 1950s, Mr. Topus became the first salesman at Friendship Food Products, a dairy company then based in Maspeth, Queens; he retired as executive vice president for sales and marketing. (The company, today based in Jericho, N.Y. and a subsidiary of Dean Foods, is now known as Friendship Dairies.)

I know Friendship cottage cheese.

Though the Army phased out pigeons in the late 1950s, Mr. Topus raced them avidly till nearly the end of his life. He left a covert, enduring legacy of his hobby at Friendship, for which he oversaw the design of the highly recognizable company logo, a graceful bird in flight, in the early 1960s.

From that day to this, the bird has adorned cartons of the company’s cottage cheese, sour cream, buttermilk and other products. To legions of unsuspecting consumers, Andrew Topus said last week, the bird looks like a dove. But to anyone who really knew his father, it is a pigeon, plain as day.

Nice touch.

Finding a gem weeding

Continuing to weed biographies as an ongoing project. Up to the Rs: Richelieu, Robeson, Rockefeller. One of the Rockefeller books I evaluated was entitled David, the grandson of the old man. On the back of the book (New York, L. Stuart; 1971) I found a blurb on a book written by Ferdinand Lundberg, America's 60 Families (New York : Vanguard Press, c1937).

Lundberg's book is about the American plutocracy. Thirty years later he would write The rich and the super-rich; a study in the power of money today. (New York, L. Stuart; 1968).

Of some interest

Two questions, a visit

In the afternoon I was asked two reference questions, and Dr. Eisenberg visited.

First, a graduate student who said she had four kids at home came to do work on her PhD dissertation, and wanted books on differentiated instruction. That proved to be, as I anticipated, far too specialized an academic subject for a public library. Hewlett-Woodmere has quite limited book resources on educations (Dewey 371 and 378), but database resources are plentiful. I got her on Galenet and ERIC. That pleased her.

A website (of the Macomb, Michigan School District) defines Differentiated Instruction as a flexible approach to teaching in which the teacher plans and carries out varied approaches to content, process, and product in anticipation of and in response to student differences in readiness, interests, and learning needs (Tomlinson, 1995, p. 10).

A college website has an entire web page on differentiated instruction.

Second, a young woman who turned out to be a teacher (high school, perhaps) was looking for a book containing scripts on Twilight Zone episodes. HWPL does own such a book: As timeless as infinity: the complete Twilight Zone scripts of Rod Serling. Well, it's not complete.

Hardly complete; there were 5 seasons (36, 29, 37, 18, and 36 episodes). At any rate, the script the teacher wanted wasn't in the book. It was The Shelter (episode 3, Season 3). She planned to use it by juxtaposing it to some other element. Sounded interesting. She had a printout with other titles from other libraries, and was planning to do some more searching.

I told her about LILRC (the Long Island Libraries Resources Council), a consortium of Long Island libraries. Her home library, I told her, would be able to giver her a pass to, say, Hofstra University, if she found that Hofstra had something useful. "I didn't know about that," she said, adding "and I thought I knew libraries pretty well."

Dr. Eisenberg, a retired MD who visits the Library every once in a while (to get books for his wife), stops and schmoozes with as many people as possible when he does so. He can stay for a solid fifteen minutes with one person. Yesterday I told him about the new book I'm reading, Lessons in disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the path to war in Vietnam. We had a short discussion about Bundy, the Viet Nam War, and presidents. Always pleasant to speak with him.

Up From Bleed, Blister and Purge

Frontier Medicine
By David Dary
(Knopf, 381 pages, $30)

To think that I wince when I get a needle; reading just the review is ... er, incredible? Awe-inspiring? Gruesome?

In December 1809, Jane Crawford, 45 years old and living in a small log cabin in backwoods Kentucky, thought she was pregnant. Her belly was so enlarged that local doctors agreed that she was set to deliver her long-overdue twins. These physicians enlisted the aid of Ephraim McDowell, a highly regarded general practitioner from nearby Danville, who determined that Crawford was not pregnant but suffering from a massive ovarian tumor. "I gave to the unhappy woman information of her dangerous situation," McDowell would later write. "She'd appeared willing to undergo an experiment."

1809. Imagine how primitive medicine was then; I know that in the Civil War, a half century later, it was rudimentary.

Up until that point in medical history, before anesthesia or antisepsis, a fatality was the most likely outcome of abdominal surgery. McDowell knew as much, but insisted that the procedure was essential for Jane Crawford's survival.

No anesthesia for surgery. I get anesthesia for dental work.

McDowell made a nine-inch vertical cut into his patient's abdomen. For 25 minutes, Crawford endured unbearable pain while singing hymns and repeating Psalms. First, McDowell scooped out 15 pounds of a "dirty, gelatinous looking substance," then he excised 7.5 pounds of actual tumor, including the ovary and a portion of the Fallopian tube. Once all the tumorous material had been removed, McDowell turned his patient on her left side to allow the accumulated blood to escape, then he carefully replaced Crawford's intestines, which had spilled out during the operation, and finally closed the incision with sutures and adhesive plaster.

Oy.

As Ms. Dary explains, the surgery itself was unremarkable in its simplicity but memorable for what happened afterward. Crawford received no pain medicines, no antibiotics, no intravenous fluids, no formal post-operative care, but she rode her horse home after three weeks and suffered no complications. She lived to age 78, the world's first known survivor of an elective exploration of the abdomen and removal of an ovary.

Amazing.

Mr. Dary is masterly in his telling of the Crawford-McDowell tale, but he shows less facility when he discusses how this triumph fits into the larger universe of 19th-century medicine. In a recurring pattern, Mr. Dary uses his excellent research for compelling dramatic effect, as when he describes how Dr. William Beaumont, treating a Michigan fur trapper who had been shot in the abdomen in 1822, was unable to close the wound entirely. The doctor, afforded this window on the man's stomach, went on to make groundbreaking observations about the digestive process. With the Beaumont story, as with many others, Mr. Dary shows his customary brio but then seems to lose interest – as did this reader – when he ponders the meaning of it all.

Resourcefulness on the part of Dr. Beaumont, indeed. As for Mr. Dary, it seems that great research and narrative are not accompanied by equally gifted analysis.

Occasional inaccuracies, however, do not discredit the overall thrust of "Frontier Medicine" or the depth of Mr. Dary's research. He does an admirable job of pulling together stories about health care as practiced by Native Americans, Lewis and Clark, Civil War doctors and even 20th-century quacks. Moving briskly from one episode to the next, Mr. Dary is particularly effective at showing us the strengths and foibles of early American doctors, an often suspect class of professionals who now and again did more harm than healing. It is entertaining, enlightening material, but more analysis – of how these unrelated medical vignettes contributed to the process of professionalization that affected the education, training and personal lives of physicians – would have greatly enhanced "Frontier Medicine." History, medical or otherwise, is most useful when it strives to be more than a chronicle of tales – however diverting they might be – spun by a seasoned raconteur.

MacArthur's Reputation

The Question of MacArthur's Reputation
By Robert H. Ferrell
(University of Missouri Press, 111 pages, $19.95)

In an attack that Douglas MacArthur bragged about, and for which he received a medal, an important breakthrough was made on the Hindenburg Line.

MacArthur's heroism on the Châtillon soon became part of his legend and, in the coming decades, figured prominently in his biography. Within weeks of the breakthrough he was bragging about it.

Yes, this is the army man who defied his Commander-in-Chief, President Truman, the very same army man who insisted a line of nuclear weapons be drawn across the Korean Peninsula in order to slow down the Communists. Turns out that Douglas MacArthur was a blowhard. It was not just the liberals thought so; it was the truth. Spin control managed to suppress the truth for decades, but not forever.

MacArthur never fought shy of the limelight – and history has forgiven him, not least because of his heroic leadership in World War II and the Korean War. Yet it is shocking to learn that he wasn't actually present on the Côte de Châtillon on Oct. 16 and that he didn't lead his men through the wire; he was back at a command post behind the lines.

Thus, his words that division commanders must instill 'the fighting spirit' into their commands by personal presence and example' were empty. He lied.

I have long wondered just how heroic this Army officer really was; he seemed very much an usurper, a blowhard, a manipulator. Long ago I read that the well-known (I refuse to call it famous) landing in the Philippines that fulfilled his I shall return pronouncement was staged: he had the photographer take the shot again, so that he would look appropriately heroic. The thesis of this book seems to agree with that judgement.

The attack was led by two exceptional officers: Maj. Lloyd D. Ross and Lt. Col. Walter E. Bare. They instilled the "fighting spirit" in the 167th and 168th Regiments, and they rallied the lines. It is they who deserve the credit that MacArthur claimed for himself.

And his reputation was based on stolen credit. What kind of honor is that?

This extraordinary falsehood is the impetus for Robert H. Ferrell's "The Question of MacArthur's Reputation." Having written widely before on the Meuse-Argonne campaign, Mr. Ferrell was bothered by the contradictions in the accounts of Châtillon. He delved into the archives and, in this rigorously researched and densely constructed historical essay, demolishes MacArthur's pretensions. It isn't just that the general stole credit. When his men failed to take the Châtillon on Oct. 14, he ordered them on a suicidal bayonet assault, at night, against fortified positions. The protests of Ross and Bare saw the order countermanded, which probably saved MacArthur's career.

Reckless, too, not just a liar.

Mr. Ferrell makes little attempt to explain MacArthur's actions. He notes that Gen. John Pershing, the leader of the American Expeditionary Force, badly needed a victory. His first two attacks in the Argonne had failed dismally and the third was failing when Strom and his men sprang open the Dame Marie. MacArthur's regiments then gave the AEF a taste of success. MacArthur was a dashing and convenient hero. As the commanding officer, though, he would have enjoyed a large part of the glory even without claiming to have led the assault itself. Legends are made on the battlefield, where facts are often hard to establish. Mr. Ferrell has established a big one – that, in this case, MacArthur lied. It is up to future biographers to sort out what such a fantasy means to a soldier's reputation.

And I wonder how often this victory of MacArthur's is included in biographies?

Revolutionary Scamp

The drillmaster of Valley Forge.





The Granger Collection, New York

German soldier of fortune and American ally Baron von Steuben (1730-94)