NAWSA SUBJECT FILE Adams, Abigail Triumphantly in One Motion Picture... ...A LOVE STORY lived to the world's greatest music...played by music's greatest artists! "CARNEGIE HALL" BORIS MORROS presents "CARNEGIE HALL" with FRANK McHUGH MARTHA O'DRISCOLL HANS YARAY OLIN DOWNES JOSEPH BULOFF Produced by WILLIAM LeBARON Directed by EDGAR G. ULMER Production Supervisor, Samuel Rheiner Original Story by Seena Owen Screenplay by Karl Kamb A FEDERAL FILMS PRODUCTION RELEASED THRU UNITED ARTISTS MARSHA HUNT WILLIAM PRINCE And in the order of their appearance: WALTER DAMROSCH BRUNO WALTER THE NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC- SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA LILY PONS GREGOR PIATIGORSKY RISE STEVENS ARTUR RODZINSKI ARTHUR RUBINSTEIN JAN PEERCE EZIO PINZA VAUGHN MONROE & HIS ORCHESTRA JASCHA HEIFETZ FRITZ REINER LEOPOLD STOKOWSKI and HARRY JAMES THE OLD ADAMS HOUSE, WHOSE ORIGINAL STAIRWAY AND FLOORS ARE AS FIRM AS WHEN THEY WERE BUILT IN 1731, STANDS STANCH— PORTRAIT of John Adams overlooks the sofa where he sat as Gilbert Stuart painted. CONGRESSIONAL DESK where John Quincy Adams collapsed is now in library. DOWN THESE STAIRS John Quincy once mutely led young Henry to school. DESK in the study used by two Presidents was also used by Brooks and Henry. 76 LY IN QUINCY, 8 MILES SOUTH OF BOSTON KNIFE CASES were John Adams'. Wine decanter (center) belonged to John Quincy, has a special pocket for ice. JOHN QUINCY ADAMS 1767-1848 JOHN ADAMS 1735-1826 CHARLES F. ADAMS 1807-1886 BROOKS ADAMS 1848-1927 HENRY ADAMS 1838-1918 ADAMS HOUSE Home of a historic family is now a national shrine filled with relics of its famous sons Architecturally the big, comfortable house at left is a good but not distinguished specimen of 18th Century American style. Historically it is one of the few truly great American houses. It is the ancestral home of the Adams family of Quincy, Mass., which perhaps more than any other single family has figured in and made U.S. history. Ironically, for a house which sheltered some of the most ardent of American patriots, it was built by a Tory planter in 1731. John Adams, the first nationally distinguished member of the family, bought it in 1787. He was an ambitious, strong-willed young attorney who once defended John Hancock on a charge of wine-smuggling shortly before the American Revolution but who also defended the British troops who fired on Americans in the Boston Massacre. A signer of the Declaration of Independence, he was influential in securing Washington's appointment as commander in chief when hostilities broke out. When they ended he helped draft the peace treaty, became first Minister to England and then Vice President under Washington. He succeeded Washington as second President in 1797. In 1801 he retired to the house he has christened Peacefield, a title that for him held eloquent connotations, where he died in his study on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration he had signed. Peacefield, known to all succeeding generations of Adamses as the "Old House," passed to his son, John Quincy Adams, who had already followed his father into the White House as the sixth President. Later John Quincy became a militant antislavery congressman from Massachusetts. He died in 1848 shortly after collapsing with a stroke at the congressional desk he refused to leave (second picture from left). His son, Charles Francis Adams, inherited the house and became Lincoln's notable Minister to England during the Civil War. He successfully prevented Britain from delivering two "ironclads" with which the Confederate government might have broken the North's blockade. When Charles Francis died after retirement to the Old House, to which, like the others, he made additions, its ownership passed to his sons. Two of them, Henry and Brooks, were prodigious writers and searching historians. Both did much of their writing at the Old House and it figures prominently in the Education of Henry Adams, which describes one period in which young Henry's refusal to go to school came to the attention of the sixth President (center picture, left). Over the years in which they were born, married and died in it, these generations left in the Adams house many fascinating relics: the portraits of George and Martha Washington which John Adams commissioned Edward Savage to paint for $46.67 (the receipt is still on the back of the canvas), the cradle (p. 78) that rocked five Adams generations, the clock bought from Willard of Lexington around 1770 (still running), the collection of family canes at the foot of the stairs, two gilt chairs Charles Francis bought at an incongruous White House sale of President James Madison's furniture, the zodiacal globe that delighted John Quincy, the prolific Adams diaries and journals. Shortly before Brooks Adams died in 1927 he expressed a hope that the Old House might remain as the last Adamses left it. The wish was fulfilled. The house was maintained privately for about 20 years by the Adams Memorial Society until last December, when it became in fact what it had been unofficially for years: a national shrine. Now under the auspices of the National Park Service, the Old House will be visited by several thousand people this year. In it they will see how a great American family lived. CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE 77 Adams House continued West Bedroom contains fine tiled fireplace, cradle that rocked two U.S. Presidents, the big bed in which two Abigail Adamses died, in 1818 and 1889. Adams Library is in a separate building which was put up by Charles Francis Adams in 1870 to house the family's prodigious collection of books. 78 From a letter to John Adams, in Philadelphia from his wife, Abigail Adams, Braintree, March 31, 1776 .........I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remeber, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation....... "Remember The Ladies" "Better than a dozen speeches to make real to us the great heritage of idealism and achievement handed down to us by the great American women of the past and to illuminate the landmarks we have passed." This, in effect, summed up the comments made by the members of the audience as they filed out of the Grand Ball Room of the Waldorf-Astoria on Sunday evening at the conclusion of the program of dramatic sketches presented by Carola Bell Williams. In a series of eight "mono-dramas" (so called by Mrs. Williams because, while suggesting several characters. they make use of only one performer), Mrs. Williams visualized for her audience significant episodes out of the lives of eight American women who have contributed greatly to the American woman's march of time. Her title for the series, "Remember the Ladies," was lifted bodily from "a saucy letter" which Abigail Adams, wife of the second president of the United States, wrote to her husband while he was away from home attending that session of the Continental Congress at which the Declaration of Independence was signed. "I long to hear," she wrote, "that you have declared an independency. And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire that you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. . . . If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation." The sketches presented Abigail Adams at her multifarious duties and occupations at her home in Braintree in America's year of destiny, 1776; Mrs. Proctor, proprietor of the Proctor Tool Company of Salem in 1778, when her factory was busily engaged in turning out tools for the new-born American army; Lucy Larcom, one of the factory girls of Lowell, on her way from church, in 1840; Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell in the basement room she occupied in 1850 while she was struggling to win recognition as a physician; Sara Josepha Hale at her desk in 1854; Clara Barton at Fredericksburg Landing in 1864; a "female typewriter" of the early 1870's; and Susan B. Anthony in a railroad station on her way to the celebration of the eightieth birthday of Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1895. Many of the delegates and visitors to the convention were so impressed with the effectiveness of Mrs. Williams' presentations as a means of getting over what they are trying to accomplish through their club programs that they asked the the INDEPENDENT WOMAN state where and how Mrs. Williams' services can be secured. The answer is: by getting in touch with her agent, E. G. Haynes, 225 Broadway, New York City. Carola Bell Williams as Abigail Adams reads the "saucy letter" she wrote to her husband demanding that he "remember the ladies" MINA GLASGALI Reprinted from the August 1944 INDEPENDENT WOMAN Carola Bell Williams Playwright and Actress In "Remember the Ladies" Plumbing History Pity the Poor Presidents WHEN John and Abigail Adams moved into the unfinished White House in 1800, the luxury of the presidential palace was bitterly denounced by Congress. Yet the average citizen today probably would refuse to trade his present home for the White House of 1800, lacking as it was in plumbing and heating equipment. In fact, the entire history of American plumbing can very well be traced in the development of presidential bathing facilities. In 1800 water was carried to the White House from a spring six block away. In the summer, the aristocratic Mr. Adams bathed himself in the Potomac. During Jefferson's time necessary outhouses were made available. Water was still being carried to the White House in Dolly Madison's era, altho other great houses had theirs running--hot and cold. The Monroes and the J. Q. Adams family presumably took their baths in relays behind the kitchen stove, like their humbler fellow citizens. It took a frontiersman, Andrew Jackson, to get running water in the kitchen, plus a hot and cold shower for himself. Van Buren was the first to have a real bathroom. Cleveland extravagantly demanded two. Teddy Roosevelt had 10, and later presidents have added many more.--Ruth Cross and Kay Grable. meal on our back lawn. Dec. 31 Played hookey and downtown by myself, with nary a thing on my mind except to get more sunflower seeds for the birds. Made the rounds of four seed stores, just to gossip. Took family out to dinner at fashionable hour of 6:30, down at Floyd Yee's neighbourhood chopsuey emporium. Back home to an evening with a murder mystery book. And so to bed. Year's over. We're sorry - Sometimes your copy of Better Homes & Gardens may be a little late in reaching you. We're truly sorry about this. Better Homes & Gardens has made so many new friends lately that it just isn't possible to print all copies early enough. We've just added a wing to our plant to house four new high-speed color presses. Two of them are now in operation. Before long we hope to be giving you the regular service you expect from Better Homes & Gardens. BETTER HOMES & GARDENS GUARANTEES money back or satisfactory adjustment if you buy any article of merchandise that is not as advertised therein. Mrs. Adams' Letter to 'John' On Freedom Train Display Massachusetts is not only the cradle of liberty but also the place where women began writing their congressman to express their beliefs as free people, as thousands of people will learn when they see a letter on the Freedom Train whose visit will end Boston's Rededication Week. "Der John," the letter reads: "Be more generous and favorable to the ladies than your ancestors were." It was signed by Abigail Adams; wife of America's second president and mother of its sixth. She and Mercy Warren, first historian of the Revolution, expressed their opinions by mail when their husbands were occupied with public affairs. Mrs. Adam's letter to "John" will be one of more than 100 documents to be viewed on the Freedom Train Oct. 11 and 12 here. Plans for Rededication Week, preceding the train's arrival, were given impetus yesterday when it was learned that leaders of all faiths would participate in a gigantic patriotic procession Oct. 12. Invitations have been sent to Archbishop Cushing, Dr. Norman B. Nash, presiding bishop of the Episcopal diocese of Massachusetts, and Rabbi Herman H. Rubenovitz, president of the Rabbinical Association of Boston. In this unique, colorful parade, citizens from all walks of life, from baseball stars to welders—will march in the garb of their occupations, the committee in charge announced. More than 20,000 persons will participate, John H. Breen, committee chairman, said. Acceptances have been received from nearly 300 organizations. Principal speaker at the Sunday ceremony on the Common parade ground will be Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Marchers will converge on the Common from four parts of the city, giving thousands of citizens who presumably will be unable to view the Freedom Train's exhibits a patriotic spectacle to remember. The train will be open to public inspection at North Station Oct. 11 from 10 A. M. to 10 P. M. and at South Station the next day at the same hours. Birthplace of Abigail Adams To the Editor of the Herald: I note that the Federal Housing Administration wants to remove the old house which is the birthplace of Abigail Adams, wife of President John Adams and mother of another President, John Quincy Adams, to make way for a housing development in Weymouth. What better piece de resistance could a development have as its center attraction than such a historical house and setting? I cannot imagine the citizenry of Massachusetts permitting its removal to another location any more than they would acquiesce in case the land around either Plymouth Rock or Bunker Hill was wanted for a "housing development" and the projectors of such plan asked that these monuments be taken else elsewhere. Just imagine! New Yorkers have just saved Castle Garden from spoilation, thanks be! Cannot these iconoclasts in other States be likewise stopped? GRIDLEY ADAMS New York. Mrs. John Adams, Wife and Mother ABIGAIL ADAMS. By Janet Whitney. 357 pp. Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown & Co. $4. By JOHN LYDENBERG ABIGAIL SMITH—descended from generations of prominent New England divines and political leaders—deserves to rank as founder of the extraordinary Adams family almost as much as her husband, John Adams, son of an unknown Massachusetts farmer. One cannot read Abigail Adams' letters or this biography of her without feeling that her Puritan conscience, fortitude and conviction of righteousness made an essential element in the Adams amalgam. As many subsequent Adamses pointed out, Abigail was a character in her own right, not merely a pale feminine copy of her famous husband. For nearly half of their first thirty-five years of marriage she was separated from John Adams. Alone on their Braintree farm, she raised four children and managed forty acres during the turbulent years of the Revolution. In her spare time she carried on a remarkable correspondence with her husband and her many friends and relatives. Although without formal schooling, she had read the eighteenth-century classics, Shakespeare, ancient history, and of course the Bible, with care and discernment. She wrote with a verve, piquancy, and fluency that, for all its unpretentiousness, has been seldom equaled in American letter-writing. And from her letters Mrs. Whitney has constructed an informative and lively book, filled with dialogue and with accounts of Abigail's feelings toward the long separations from her husband, the education and training of her children, and the diplomats and political leaders she encountered. BUT it proved a difficult task to bring Abigail to life while scrupulously avoiding what the author calls "the pitfalls of that horrid hybrid, 'fictionized biography.' " For Mrs. Adams engaged in no independent activities that could be memorialized in a tale of dramatic accomplishments. She was instead bound by family duties and the customs of the day to a ceaseless round of domestic routine. Thus her biography inevitably reduces itself in part to a vicarious biography of her husband. But we can only see John Adams' struggles and achievements through a keyhole before which flit fascinating figures in the historic drama. We are not permitted to participate any more than was an eighteenth-century New England wife. We can admire the charm and hate the duplicity of characters caught in the flashing tableaux, but we cannot feel or understand the men and the issues in their real complexity. Such are, I suppose, the inevitable limitations of a biography of a woman who is merely brave, intelligent, and moral; until a woman violates some of the canons set for her by this masculine society she is scarcely first-rate biographical material. "ABIGAIL ADAMS" is at its best in pictures of life around Boston in the early years of the Revolution. It gives an admirable, intimate account of the worries besetting a rising Boston lawyer who jeopardizes his career by radical opposition to the ruling groups. And here we first note Abigail's vein of Puritan iron; she showed no feminine timidity, gave nothing but conscientious encouragement when John determined to risk his neck and his family's safety. The book shows well the woman's side of civil war, the alarums and rumors, the scourges of dysentery and the lack of medical care, the plagues of material shortages and inflation. Before Bunker Hill she writes: We now expect our sea coast ravaged. Perhaps the very next letter I write will inform you that I am driven away from our yet quiet cottage. * * * We live in continual expectation of alarms. Courage I know we have in abundance; * * * but powder—where shall we get a sufficient supply? And later: "Our house is a hospital in every part." "Sickness and death are in almost every family in the province. Almighty God! restrain the pestilence." But the book tells less than one would like of the daily farm routines. Abigail's management of their farm supplied the chief source of income for many years. Her unpublished letters must contain information on the detailed problems of crops, livestock, planting, harvesting, marketing —details which are needed to round out our picture of the hardships of a lonely woman struggling to survive in a community depending for its own survival on its agriculture. When the story shifts to Adams' experience as foreign diplomat and domestic statesman (no Adams, of course, was ever a politician), its character changes somewhat. We still get many charming and revealing pictures of Mrs. Adams' reactions, such as her comments on the Paris opera ballet: The first dance which I saw upon the stage stocked me. The dresses and beauty of the performers were enchanting; but no sooner did the dance commence than I felt my delicacy wounded and I was ashamed to be seen to look at them. Girls clothed in the thinnest silk and gauze, with their petticoats short, springing two feet from (Continued on Page 33) Abigail Adams. A Portrait by Benjamin Blythe, 1764. Braintree and the Adamses' Birthplace. A Sketch by Eliza Quincy. A. Lincoln and His Biographers PORTRAIT FOR POSTERITY. By Benjamin P. Thomas. 329 pp. New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press. $3. By ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER JR. THE image of Lincoln as we know it is formed, of course, at several removes. It comes to us filtered through the minds of the men who put down on paper their own images of Lincoln; and each biographer introduced his own set of refractions and distortions. Benjamin P. Thomas, scholar, former teacher and a director of the Abraham Lincoln Association, has set himself the task of surveying the principal biographers, culling their private enthusiasms and prejudices from their notes and correspondence, and giving some indication of their contribution to the image we possess today. The first generation of Lincoln biographers was dominated by the remarkable and touching figure of William H. Herndon, Lincoln's law partner. Whatever Herndon's eccentricities and errors, he has left subsequent biographers inestimably in his debt. His tireless work of collecting and interviewing in effect created sources which would not have existed but for his effort. Moreover, he was almost invariably generous in the use of his material—a generosity in striking contrast to the pettiness of John G. Nicolay, one of the "official" biographers, who appeared to regard the life of Lincoln as his personal monopoly. Herndon was the first of what Mr. Thomas calls the "realistic" school—the biographers who were confident that Lincoln's greatness would survive the full truth. His ventures in unsavory detail—particularly in regard to Lincoln's birth, his love life and his religion—shocked those who wanted him as a demi-god with all the trappings. Ward H. Lamon's life, the first written out of the Herndon material, had the further disadvantage of being ghosted by a Buchanan Democrat. Contemporaries, finding it suspect on several counts, recoiled from realism. The Herndon approach alarmed Robert Lincoln especially and probably accounted in part for his sequestration of his father's papers. Only his father's secretaries— Nicolay and Hay—were granted access. This process rendered necessary an obsequious attitude toward Lincoln and a resultant censorship which impaired the value of the Nicolay-Hay life, for all its solid qualities. The Nicolay and Hay Lincoln tended to become a quasi-classical figure, obscured by the inflated rhetoric of the late nineteenth century. PUBLIC opinion at first supported the idealized portraits. But the passage of time brought an increasing desire for the facts and an increasing readiness to accept them. Ida Tarbell figures in Mr. Thomas' account as the transition biographer. Her honest concern for documentation and evidence ushered in a new generation of critical biographers: the prolific William E. Barton, the exhaustive Beveridge, and a whole series of academic historians. The critical biographies (critical, that is, of the evidence, not necessarily of Lincoln) reached their climax with the writings of James G. Randall. MR. THOMAS recognizes the limitations of mere technical competence before the great phenomena of history. "While study of documents is essential to fact-finding," he writes, with perhaps undue caution, "there is reason to doubt that we can really get to know Lincoln solely through 'prosaic documentation.' " The great biography of Lincoln must be in last analysis an exercise of the poetic imagination. In seeking to probe the essential mystery of Lincoln, it will have to travel much farther than documents alone will carry it. The nearest thing we have to such a biography, of course, is the life by Carl Sandburg, of which Mr. Thomas gives an appreciative account. Mr. Thomas does more than discuss the various books. He reports what the biographers felt as they were writing, indicates their interconnections and their conflicts, and shows something of the proportions of the Lincoln cult today. One regrets that he has omitted any consideration of the deliberately denigratory lives. But he has made a valuable and readable contribution to the Lincoln literature; and another assist must be scored up for the Rutgers University Press in its current campaign on behalf of Lincoln scholarship. BOOK REVIEW, SEPTEMBER 21, 1947. 3 A Sports Writer's Feuilletons IT BEATS WORKING. By John Lardner. Illustrated by Willard Mullin. 253 pp. Philadephia, Pa.: J.B. Lippincott Co. $3. By JOHN HORN FOR the past nine years a two- column box of humor has brightened the essentially humorless pages of Newsweek, a magazine devoted to the weekly mastication of news for readers too busy for daily newspapers. The news has been none too good these past nine years, but the column has been consistently good. Titled "Sport Week," the column wasn't designed to be an incongruity. Its title leads one to believe that its author, John Lardner, theoretically was devoted to the weekly recording of sports events. But you can't separate humor from a writing Lardner, as three generations, including Ring's, have discovered to their delight (the reading public of John's small fry, who are unpublished, is admittedly still small). "It Beats Working" is a collection of Lardner's weekly essays for Newsweek. The columns, edited into handy, integrated chapters, are not so much sports as they are Lardner, and they are fun to read. A sports aficionado, seeking technical know-how about a specific method of building the body and/or killing time, will get nothing more from Lardner than the author's account of an Intercollegiate Yacht Racing Association annual championship series. The race, explains Lardner, was won by Williams on a foul on a right-of-way at a buoy turn in the third E sloop race, with a score of 37 1/4. This is skillful reporting, and there are, no doubt, many fans who look for such hair-splitting accuracy in their sporting chronicles. Mr. Lardner tips his hat, when he wears one, to them and the sports writers who supply the demand. But it is really not his line of work. In a preface to these literate essays, he confesses barefacedly that he is an entertainer, one who tells "stories of jokes about people in a certain line of work, who seem stranger than other people because they have no privacy." THE stories and jokes in this collection concern well-known characters of the sports world- Larry MacPail, Max Baer, James Joy Johnston, Clark Griffith, Lou Nova, Ted Williams, Tony Galento, etc.-as well as lesser-known, minor, but fascinating figures, like Allen LaFever, the cow-lifter; the fight announcers Harry Balogh and Joe Humphreys; Billy Taub, the sports-minded clothier; Toots Shor, from the inn of the same name. Men of baseball and boxing, Lardner's favorite sports, dominate the author's menagerie. Look elsewhere for a recital of the triumphs and failures of these men in their sports, complete with past performances and batting percentages. Lardner prefers the revealing incident that illuminates character; for example, Max Baer being hit by a punching bag, Lou Nova's chin receding to the point of retirement, and the simultaneous monologues that pass for dialogue between Larry MacPhail and Leo Durocher. Lardner is also one of the keenest spotters of trends in the business. He was in the van to warn the nation of the Deadly March of Culture led by Prof. John Kieran and Information Please, of Hitler's diabolical scheme to win the Davis Cup by anschlussing neighboring tennis starts, and that Vince DiMaggio was eating his way out of Pittsburgh and the major leagues. His theory on elongated basketball player, although brilliant, is still untested: players over six feet in height to perform on their knees of machine guns to keep off the galloping goons from the backboards. TO be sure, Lardner pays sober tribute to the honesty and dignity of man, when he comes across these attributes as he did in Little Bill Johnston, who refused to be a tennis bum, and Jack Johnson, the Negro heavyweight champion, who said, "Whenever you write about me, just please remember that I'm a man, and a good one." But the author's tongue-in-cheek approach, which unlike mumps he will never get over, is devilishly to the point--as in the pieces on Bill Stern, Happy Chandler and Avery Brundage--when he captures men in the awkward act of thrusting their feet into their mouth. If there's anything deader than yesterday's newspaper, it's the account of a sports event the day before, a sad fact attested by many sports anthologies. Lardner escapes this fate by writing about people, lightly, literately and winningly. He is undated, too, perhaps because he writes of sports once a week, which he admits "is very pleasant to be able to do, rather than never." Willard Mullin, whose impudent illustrations of sports appears daily in The New York World- Telegram, adds fifty appropriate light touches of graphic humor. Mr. Casey's Journalistic Anecdotes MORE INTERESTING PEOPLE. By Robert J. Casey. 349 pp. Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company. $3. By Meyer Berger MR. CASEY'S follow up on his "Such Interesting People" confirms what most newspaper men knew-that no one matches him for journalistic anecdote. He has a free swing in storytelling. His punch-lines have echoing impact, and the incidental backroom terms that creep into his yarns come out astonishingly clean. In this volume he writes wistfully of what he modestly labels "one of the wildest periods of journalism" as contrasted with what he calls the "factory" (current ) school. His cuts at antiseptic reporting and editing should delight city room gaffers everywhere, and light fires in younger eyes. Mr. Casey lets up, now and then, in his blunt attack on fancy-pants news-handling. He weakens to the extent that he says he sees no great loss to the trade in the abandonment of wire-tapping, bribery, abduction, physical violence and good piping as aids to getting out an interesting paper. Then a touch of sadness creeps back into his copy and he says that there is less strong-arming in modern newspaper work "since the auditors have taken over the editing." Ink-stained wretches cowering in plush city rooms will pause in their reading, at this point, to murmur a soft-very soft- "Amen." THE best way to review this work would be to lift enough of the Casey anecdote to make 600-700 words, and to offer them up pretty much as a diamond salesman shows his purest gems to the retail jeweler, but the publishers might scream. Anyway, most of the stories concern legendary reporters, caption writers and city editors who helped fix on Chicago its international reputation for gun-butt-and-bludgeon tradition; who made of every homicidal drab an object of pity and copious tears. Mr. Casey, writing of the great Walter Howey when Howey ran The Chicago Examiner, says he was a "leader able to communicate an almost fanatical enthusiasm" to striplings on the staff. How his scoops were sometimes achieved through the merry use of tapped wires, convincing bluster and other journalistic hoop-de-doop makes amusing reading, though, of course, there are polite corners where such passages will make for eyebrow acrobatics and patrician censure. The stories built around Harry Reutlinger of The Chicago Herald-American, who can get more out of a telephone than the late A. G. Bell could have though possible, are probably the best in this collection. They should be an education to young men and young women who have taken their basic journalism in so-called halls of higher education. The last line of the chapter headed "Ghost of the Morro Castle" holds one of the Casey panzer blows. In the fifth chapter, "Rise of... (Continued on Page 33) Life-History of an Honest Cop NIGHT STICK. By Lewis J. Valentine. Introduction by Fiorello H. La Guardia. 320 pp. New York: The Dial Press. $3.50. By C. V TERRY AS former Mayor La Guardia remarks in his preface, this terse, hard-hitting book is truly the story of an honest cop. The late Commissioner Valentine has labeled it an autobiography: it is more the history of the metropolitan Police Department he did so much to revitalize during his eleven-year-tenure. Its story, and his own, are told in unvarnished prose, which is all to the good; the rugged candor of the teller is evident on every page, along with an iron-jawed determination to do a hard job well. When the commissioner quotes Emerson to the effect that "there is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue," you believe every syllable - even without the commissioners chapter and verse. The present record of den-raiding (the word is chosen advisedly) begins with an earnest young patrolman pounding a beat in a Brooklyn slum in 1903: it moves (as briskly as a night-stick rattling down a picket-fence at midnight) through young Valentine's first brushes with organized corruption; it takes him up those first few heart-breaking rungs in the ladder, lands him in the midst of his first big job with the Confidential Squad - whose task was to break up graft within the department itself. From this point on, the Rogues' Gallery grows more sinister with each page. Few whodunit carpenters can match the commissioner's forthright account of the means he employed to harass such public enemies as Dutch Schultz, Vincent Coll and Murder, Inc.; few psycho-thrillers can top the sheer factual horror of his description of Robert Irwin, the mad strangler, as he swings into action. And Hollywood itself would be hard put to invent the sagas of Slick Willie (the operator who enjoyed his acting almost as much as his stick-ups), Gordon Hanby, who always killed with courtesy, Gerald Chapman, who mixed erudition with his mayhem. All this and more is set down with clinical detachment - often as unemotionally as though these battles of wits were mere entries on a precinct blotter. The commissioner's very lack of pretension make his notations more effective: since truth is stranger than fiction, an occasional episode would seem all but incredible in the reading, were it not so calmly underplayed. Quite as interesting as the actual duels with gangdom are the blow-by-blow accounts of police methods, from the line-up to the laboratory. Mr. Valentine in the fingerprint darkroom is just as convincing as Mr. Valentine in a prowl car on some killer's trail. The evil that swarms from these pages will make the reader's spine curl at times, the thrill of the pursuit, and the deep satisfaction when one more crime is scotched at the source, is no less compelling. The commissioner's story carries through his retirement in 1945, and closes with an absorbing chapter on his investigation of Japanese police methods, at the request of General MacArthur - an investigation completed only a short time before his death last December. Mrs. John Adams' Letters (Continued from Page 3) the floor, poising themselves in the air with their feet flying and as perfectly showing their garters and drawers as if no petticoats had been worn, was a sight altogether new to me. She deplores "the tendency of these things, the passions they must excite." But on second thought her sense of beauty almost overcomes her tendency to moralize: "Their motions are as light as air, and as quick as lightning. They balance themselves to astonishment. No description can equal the reality." But we become more and more entangled in the Adams feuds. Here, Mrs. Whitney's fascination for her heroine leads her to adopt at face value the occasionally self-righteous narrow views of the Adamses. We are not only shown how Adams' Puritan upbringing led him to distrust Franklin because of the good Doctor's more liberal ways with women; we are in effect told to accept all of Adams' suspicions of Franklin's judgments, motives and loyalty. So too with the Adams-Jefferson imbroglios. Mrs. Whitney might simply have shown that Abigail's attitude toward Jefferson was sharper and less forgiving than her husband's. Instead, the author carries on the family grudge as though she were the last, crotchety inhabitant of the Quincy Adams Mansion. She describes the political battles of the Seventeen Nineties in purely personal terms, as though no social or economic issues existed. She castigates the vicious Republican press with a vigor worthy of John Adams himself, but she gives no hint that Federalist papers supporting Adams carried equally scurrilous attacks on Jefferson. Similarly one-sided is her treatment of John Adams' "midnight appointments" and the subsequent changes in office instituted by Jefferson. In his "Life of John Adams," John's grandson, Charles Francis Adams, could say judiciously that Jefferson was probably not intending any such petty hostility," as was implied in his dismissal of John Quincy from a minor political post. Yet Mrs. Whitney insists that Jefferson "had done his best to slap him (John Quincy) down," and describes Jefferson's explanations to Mrs. Adams as "specious, twisted thought." In yet another respect the author identifies herself too closely with her subjects. A distinguishing characteristic of most of the Adams family was their refusal to run with the pack, their inability to court popularity. They stubbornly avoided all tricks of demagoguery; they steadily refused to compromise their high ideals. But this proud integrity often led into that Puritan self-righteousness and spiritual aloofness that sought a leadership of the elite rather than genuine popular rule. Mrs. Whitney seems oblivious to this recurrent Adams trait, and quite unaware of the fundamentally undemocratic implications of the Adamses' disregard for the desires and whims of the people. Thus she falls readily into such over-simplifications as her statement that John Quincy's "Publicola" articles, "like his father's before him, were not aimed at stirring up the passions of the uneducated mob but at appealing to the reason of the intelligent" -i. e., to the well-born and well-to-do. But the book is, in the last analysis, the story of Mrs. John Adams, wife and mother. As such, the occasional political naivete merely reflects the central character. We see colonial and revolutionary Boston, the courts of Europe, the Capitol of the United States during its first decade under the Constitution, as a woman- a particularly sensitive and intelligent woman- would see them. It is a fresh view of familiar events, invested with the charm and homely intimacy of Abigail Adams' letters and personality. Casey's Journalistic Anecdotes (Continued from Page 4) the Asterisk," Mr. Casey pauses briefly to pay tribute to the great geniuses of the pipe (pipe dream) school in journalism- to Brisbane and to the authors of The New York Sun's incredible "Moon Hoax." He turns from the tomb to say bitterly: Certainly the artisans of those days followed a set of rules that have since become standard in the presentation of news. There may be some quarrel with this suggestion by editors of the brief-and-bulletin school who apparently are looking toward the happy day when pure reading will be excluded from newspapers entirely and the precious white space can be devoted to the display of more interesting matter such as photographs of debutantes and ward committeemen, night club announcements and truss ads. O noble Casey, keep your strong right foot on their chests. Mr. Casey, in this same chapter, cites some of the virile composition that got into the Chicago dailies when journalistic giants still made the terrain tremble. One of the most startling is a story of Edwin A. Lahey in The Chicago Daily News. Even Mr. Casey, advocate of the pungent passage, still thinks of this with awe. He writes, "The remarkable feature of this effort is that John Craig, city editor of The Chicago Daily News, printed it." Thus, throughout this thumping volume, Mr. Casey writes with his extraordinary pen, and serves up literary courses for man and beast. It is by no means a treat for newspaper men alone. It is a rare common fare. jean-paul SARTRE EXISTENTIALISM The first book to appear in American on EXISTENTIALISM by its leader and chief protagonist, JEAN-PAUL SARTRE. EXISTENTIALISM and JEAN-PAUL SARTRE are the postwar storm centers in philosophy and literature. The represent a "movement" involving the peculiar confusions the beset this generation in all aspects of its civilization. In this book, Sartre explains and analyzes the essence of the philosophy of EXISTENTIALISM. At your Bookstore, or order from: $2.75 LIMITED EDITION ORDER NOW! PHILOSOPHICAL LIBRARY, Publishers The Philosophical Library, Dept. T, 15 East 40th St., New York 16, N.Y. Please send me......copies of EXISTENTIALISM, by JEAN-PAUL SARTRE, at $2.75 per copy. Enclosed are $.......... NAME .................................... 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Name ___________________ Address _________________ City _____________________ State _________ 4409F Consumed (Continued from Page 6) had not been for centuries, so gallant, so bold, so simple are they." "They are not exceptional," she reports. "They had risen to the demands." As Chaya Grossman, the heroine of Bialystok, reminds us, "The heroes of the people are not its recognized leaders. The true heroes of a naton are small people, silent, unknown." To this group belong to Palestine "boys" who volunteered to parachute into the Nazis' Balkan fortresses. I recall with what positiveness Colonel Gibson, head of the British Intelligence in Istanbul, assured me in 1944 that the Jewish parachutists had been responsible for bringing back information of indispensable value--without which many operations could not have proceeded. There are "the boys" from Haganah who are are resisting the British (as well as the terrorists of the Stern gang and Wa Leumi) with no less skill and fervor. If all that it reveals had not really happened, "Blessed Is The Match" would still be a thriller. Unfortunately and unforgivingly, it is the burning truth. That truth arose rom the infernos in Dachau and Belsen. As the author poignantly says" "It took the hour of death to merge the most inveterate, intellectual differences, orthodox, atheist, nationalist, Communist, assimilationist." The book holds this truth constantly before our eyes. It poses the inevitable question: Where are the remnants of the lost people today? In Cyprus? In a police state in Palestine? Rotting away in camps in a resurgent Germany? The question follows: What have the victors to offer Jews? Cattle Baron DEATH OF A BILLIONAIRE. by A.B. Cunningham. 226 pp. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co. $2.50. A "Bullionaire" is not necessarily a billionaire. He is a man who has made a fortune in cattle. Such a one was Clancy Devoe, who has been shot dead during a Texas sandstorm. Sherrif Jess Roden happens to be in Texas at the time--or perhaps "happens" is not the right word. He is there because Molly Weldon lives in Texas and not far from the scene of the murder. Jess is courting Molly in his own clumsy way, but he is not making much progress. Be that as it may, his reputation as a detective has preceded him, and the local authorities ask him to help. Back in Kentucky, where he comes from, Jess Roden used methods of the Indian and the backwoodsman, letting the fields and the forests tell him the story of what had happened in them, be the Texas landscape and the sandstorm baffle him, and he has little use for his peculiar talents. Even though he does eventually point out the murderer, he is no longer Jess Roden we knew in Mr. Cunningham's earlier stories. To this extent, the book is a disappointment. I.A. "A valuable contributon to the art of better living." - N.Y. Times Book Review Emotional Problems of Living Avoiding The Neurotic Pattern by O. Spurgeon English, M.D. and G. H. J. Peason, M.D. "One of the best accounts of the psychology of the child." -Bul. of Menninger Clinic. "Many direct recommendations to parents which all should know and carry out." -Parents Mag. "There is hardly an intelligent parent who would not find useful pointers, or hardly an individual who would not gain insight into his own behavior." - Philadelphia Record. "Of immeasurable value to any individual interested in understanding himself or others." - The Family. SEVENTH PRINTING "Books that Live" At all bookstores $5.00 W.W. NORTON & COMPANY 101 Fifth Ave., New York 3 A BORZOI BOOK The finest one-volume history of Russia and the most widely read A HISTORY OF RUSSIA by Sir Bernard Pares 42, 275 copies sold 618 pages At all bookshops $5.00 "Two new chapters, on the war and the making of the peace, have been added...They have the same kind of provocative wisdom as the earlier chapters. The book remains unique it its field, the grate product of a lifetime of historical scholarship." - New York Herald Tribune Book Review. 11 maps, tables, charts, bibliographies. ALFRED A KNOPF A NATIONAL BEST SELLER The Years of the Locust By Loula Grace Erdman THE 10,000 PRICE NOVEL $2.75 At all bookstores DODD, MEAD THE NEW YORK TIMES "Difficult as the day is, — cruel as the war has been — separated as I am — I would not be any other than an American." — ABIGAIL ADAMS Amy Hill Duncan Christmas 1947 [Page 2] Abigail Adams Transcribed and reviewed by contributors participating in the By The People project at crowd.loc.gov.