A small vignette about Bruce Catton passed through my inbox that I thought I would pass along. It is adapted from a Michigan State University book called Ink Trails: Michigan’s Famous and Forgotten Authors. It is not clear from the excerpt how long the piece was in the original. I find it interesting that Catton would be included in a collection about writers from a particular state; being from the Midwest certainly influenced his worldview, despite the number of decades he lived in Washington DC and New York City. It is revealing that he went back when it was his time to die. His boyhood house in Benzonia is now the home of the local public library.

As I have noted in the comments sections of other blogs, there has been a lot of piling on to Catton in recent years. Some of the criticism is fair. For one thing, he downplayed slavery as a cause of the war in an effort not to offend a portion of his readership. Reconciliation was what 1950s readers wanted and that is what they found in Catton’s offerings. He was also unfair to certain players, most especially George McClellan. Your humble writer remembers visiting Antietam for the first time a few years ago and pronouncing to our licensed battlefield guide that the Federals should have taken Burnside’s Bridge with no problem. It was not until our guide took us there that I realized that, well, it was not as simple as I had read in the Army of the Potomac trilogy. I consider it a teachable moment, with the lesson in humility duly learned.

I no longer read Catton but I still believe there is much there for readers to enjoy and profit from. One would have to balance out Catton’s lyrical prose with the more recent scholarship of Ethan Rafuse, Tom Clemens, the interpretive ranger staff at Antietam, and elsewhere to get a fuller picture of the war. In American Oracle David Blight has an especially lucid chapter on Catton‘s strengths and weaknesses. Whatever his failures, there is no denying the man’s writing talents and his influence, for better and worse, on our understanding of our civil war.

(image/Bruce Catton in the 1960s, LOC)

I just finished the draft of a encyclopedia article, which I am going to proofread tomorrow and email off to the editor. In the past year I have written a series of these, about eight altogether. Most, but not all, have had a Civil War-related aspect to them. This one is on the Union League and came out to about 1,250 words. I have been trying to build my resume and portfolio, and this has proved a useful way of doing so. Encyclopedia articles are a good way to build one’s writing chops because they teach a person how to write to spec, keeping to the rigid word count and focusing on the aspect of the subject the editor wants to highlight. They say if you want to write, write. This will probably be the last one I do. I am going to focus my attention on the summer at Governors Island, where I will hopefully give some tours and write some content for the website. Yesterday I pulled out my well-thumbed copy of Freeman Tilden’s Interpreting Our Heritage for a brush up. I do not read as much fiction as I used to, but decided to get back to it this summer. Yesterday I downloaded Shelton Johnson’s Gloryland to my Kindle and have been enjoying it a great deal. I intend to write more about the novel when I finish. You may remember Ranger Johnson from this video I posted awhile back.

Our temperature hit 92 today. Getting ready for summer here in the Big Apple.

The Civil War Monitor is a new, quarterly magazine that began publication in the fall of 2011. I became an early subscriber and cannot recommend the periodical highly enough. CWM also has a vibrant web presence, and recently Book Review Editor Matthew C. Hulbert gave me the privilege of reviewing The Civil War in Georgia, edited by John C. Inscoe. Enjoy.

I opened my mailbox this evening and inside was the first check I have ever received for my writing. Let’s just say I won’t be retiring anytime soon. It was a cool $75 for a series of four articles I wrote for a forthcoming woman’s history encyclopedia. That would be $75 combined for the set, not $75 multiplied by four. I dare not compute what it comes out to by word count. In all seriousness, we don’t do these things for the money, which is a gesture more than anything else. A few weeks I turned down even the token sum offered by a different publisher because it was a state library organization that I figured could better use the funds they offered for the two articles I wrote for them. (You can read them here and here.) It is all part of my effort to establish myself in the profession. Writing these six encyclopedia articles (average length=1,000 words) has taught me a great deal about not just the subjects, but about the publishing industry and process as well. I feel I am getting there.

Also in the mail was the Summer 2011 issue of New York History, the mouthpiece of the New York State Historical Association, which I joined last month. I have always been fascinated with the history of New York City, even before moving here in 1997. Now I am finding myself increasingly interested in the state as a whole. I am trying to become more active statewide. Joining NYSHA, and the National Council on Public History, which I did at the same time, seemed like good ways to do that.

Hey everybody, this is the 250th post here at The Strawfoot. It is one of two milestones: I began the blog one year ago this past Saturday. It has been an enjoyable and rewarding experience. When I first began I was typing on an old pc and we did not yet have internet access or television in our home (still no tv). To get online I had to sit on a stool in the corner to piggyback off our neighbor’s wireless, with his knowledge and permission I hasten to add. Now I’m typing these words on my Mac Air as I sit here listening to Simon & Garfunkel with a cup of coffee beside me. Before I began I did not even know the elementary aspects of how to start a blog; I relied on the expertise of some colleagues at work. Learning more about technology was an explicit, if secondary, purpose for my blogging. I reached a point where I felt the world was starting to pass me by in some ways. I still have much to learn, but I feel I am getting there.

The main purpose of The Strawfoot was to engage more actively in the Civil War sesquicentennial. Blogging has forced me to think harder and examine my thoughts and presumptions. Friends and relatives will give us a pass when we misspeak or say something with which they disagree. Do that on the internet, especially about a subject as closely examined and emotionally charged as the American Civil War, and people will call you on it. There is very little comfort to be found in studying history, which is why some people prefer folktales to the truth. I have tried to be myself and to speak as honestly as I can without succumbing to bathos or narcissism. We owe it to the people who came before us.

The person who I owe the most to is my wife. The Strawfoot takes a great deal of time on a weekly basis and she has been patient and understanding through the entire process. It has been a lifestyle change and comes with its satisfactions. It’s been rewarding watching the statistics increase month by month. I know from reading people’s comments and emails that some readers have been following the entire time. It fills me with humility to know that people make a few out of their busy day to read what I may have to offer. I am looking forward to another fun and productive year.

The name Sam Vaughan probably does not ring any bells, but regular readers of the Strawfoot are undoubtedly aware of the man’s work. Vaughan, who passed away earlier this week, edited Bruce Catton’s Centennial History of the Civil War (The Coming Fury, 1961; Terrible Swift Sword, 1963; Never Call Retreat, 1965) for Doubleday & Company. Civil War scholarship moved on in the ensuing five decades, but the unititated could do worse than Catton’s trilogy for an overview of the conflict. (Doubleday also published Catton’s Army of the Potomac series in the 1950s, but Vaughan had no hand in that project.)

Vaughan was a good friend of conservative pundit William F. Buckley. It was he who convinced Buckley to write his Bradford Oakes Cold War espionage novels. He also collaborated with Democratic senators and erstwhile presidential candidates Hubert Humphrey and Ed Muskie. In a cruel twist of fate, Muskie’s autobiography was released the same day the Mainer bowed out of the 1972 presidential race. (For those unfamiliar with the story, Muskie was forced out of the campaign when he was photographed with what were apparently snowflakes on his cheeks. It was reported that they were tears, and Muskie was branded too unmanly to be president.) Needless to say, Muskie’s offering did not reach the upper echelons of any best seller lists.

Vaughan began at Doubleday in 1951, and in 1970 he was crowned president and publisher. He had a distinguished career, but there were some misses as well. In the early 1960s Vaughn went to Gettysburg to edit Eisenhower’s presidential memoirs. Eisenhower’s financial security had been secured when Doubleday published his World War 2 memoir Crusade in Europe in 1948. The now former president teamed with Vaughan on the two volume White House series, Mandate for Change, 1953-1956 (1963) and Waging Peace, 1956-1961 (1965). If you are looking for examples of dry, less-than-revelatory presidential memoirs, these are exhibits A and B. I wrote my masters thesis on Eisenhower’s foreign policy and, while I admire the general and president in many ways, I can’t say I learned anything of value from these doorstops. Crusade was never going to be mistaken for Grant’s Memoirs, but at least there he had an excuse; in the late 1940s Ike was considering a bid for higher office and did not want to antagonize such figures as Churchill, de Gaulle, and Konrad Adenauer, with whom he might have to deal on the world stage. Crusade was a lesson in tact and diplomacy. By the time he left office in 1961, however, Eisenhower no longer had these concerns. He could have offered readers more insight into himself and the world he did so much to change, but did not. Vaughan might have pushed Eisenhower harder but, still only in his late 20s, was probably too intimidated.

In the 1970s Vaughan edited Duke Ellington’s memoir Music is My Mistress with similarly disappointing results. The Duke was known for his impenetrable public persona but even by his standards Mistress is a letdown. Ellington was an intensely private man and no one was expecting him to kiss and tell after fifty some odd years in show business. And make no mistake, after half a century of living the musician’s night life Ellington had done his share of, uh, kissing. Still, one would have hoped for more candor from a man in his seventies looking back on life. Here again Vaughan might have done more to draw a sense of who Ellington was but, frustratingly, either couldn’t or wouldn’t. Doubleday published Ellington’s memoir in 1973 and the composer died the following year.

Despite these failures, Vaughan had a long, distinguished career and many more successes than failures. That so few people know who he was, oddly enough, is a testament to his achievement.

(image/Open Library)

I am sorry about the lack of posts these past few days but I took a few annual leave days this week and have been checking email/internet only intermittently.  We do not yet have internet access (or television) at home, which at least saved me the anguish of watching the Sox historic collapse the other day.  The past few days have been less vacation than working from home.  I am writing an article for an online publication and have spent the last few days concentrating on that.  Yesterday I wrote 1,000 words and cranked out an additional 500 this morning before heading out to my local branch library to check email, etc.  The goal is to write 1,000 words this evening and work on the draft over the weekend.  Still, it is not all work and no play.  A friend and I are going to the Bronx Historical Society tomorrow for the final weekend of this.

I will be back on Monday with more posts and will certainly let you know if/when the article is indeed picked up.

Have a good weekend.

PS–Rooting for my old hometown Rangers now that the Sox are gone.