|
September-October 2003
|
Cambridge 02138 |
||||||
 |  |
| Preparing Herring-Burgess #1 biplane for its maiden flight | Moving. Herring is at the controls. |
| Courtesy of Burgess Aviation Museum, Plum Island Airfield, on loan from Bartlett Gould Collection | |
Most importantly, the first airplane flight in New England occurred almost two months earlier than Lenger reported. On February 28, 1910, the Herring-Burgess #1 biplane, piloted by Augustus M. Herring, took off from the frozen surface of Chebacco Lake in Hamilton. The host for the flight was Norman Prince '09, LL.B. '11, a Law School student who, as legend has it, invited W. Starling Burgess '01 and Herring to try out their flying machine at his family estate while his parents were in Europe and young Prince was supposed to be studying. (Prince later cofounded the Lafayette Escadrille, a corps of American aviators who flew for France prior to the U.S. entry into World War I. He was killed in a crash on a mission in 1916.)
Burgess (1870-1947) completed his undergraduate studies at Harvard but left without receiving his diploma. The Marblehead yachtbuilder became interested in aviation following the first public demonstrations by the Wrights in 1908. In early February 1910, Burgess displayed his first aeroplane at the Boston Aero Show held at the Mechanics Hall on Huntington Avenue, a noted center of interest in aviation. Herring had been experimenting with flying machines since 1895, when he began testing gliders on the south shore of Lake Michigan with Octave Chanute, considered the father of aviation. The inventive, ambitious Burgess and the mercurial but persistent Herring were a good match in this endeavor—Burgess provided the craftsmanship; Herring the aeronautical knowledge.
Following the single flight on Chebacco Lake, Burgess moved his operation further north, to Plum Island in Newbury. During the spring and summer of 1910, the Plum Island aviators thrilled the local populace with test flights over the marshes and dunes. (One of the better flyers, William Hilliard, was reported by Lenger as the pilot of the first airplane flight in New England. The date reported by Lenger, April 17, is indeed the date of the first flight at Plum Island, but the pilot of that first flight was again Herring, not Hilliard.)
The Herring-Burgess biplanes were not particularly airworthy, but at the September Harvard-Boston Aero Meet, Burgess's craftsmanship impressed the best aviators in the English-speaking world—the Wright Brothers and Claude Grahame-White. The Wrights and Burgess signed the first known aircraft manufacturing license, and Burgess built Wright flyers for several years thereafter. Grahame-White, the dashing English aviation hero wonderfully described in Lenger's article, purchased several of Burgess's airplanes, believed to be the first export of airplanes from the United States. Burgess went on to design and build more than 100 airplanes, including the world's first flying wing and the first airplane to both take off from and land on water.
The events of 1910—and later Burgess aircraft—are documented in a photographic display in the Burgess Aviation Museum at the Plum Island Airfield in Newbury/ Newburyport.
Edward S. Russell '78
President, Plum Island Community Airfield Inc.
Byfield, Mass.
REPARATIONS
In "The Price of Slavery" ("Right Now," May-June, page 12) Harbour Fraser Hodder reports about a survey conducted by Professor Michael Dawson and others in which blacks and whites were asked whether they support federal initiatives —apologies and monetary payments—to address past wrongs.
Securing reparations for the descendents of American slaves has been an ongoing attempt, by organizers of those conceived to be "outside the conventional electoral system," to raid the U.S. Treasury. "Regarding monetary reparations to descendents of slaves," Hodder writes, "two out of three blacks voiced support, against a mere sliver (4 percent) of the white respondents...." Well, no kidding. This isn't a "racial gulf of 63 points," it's a taxpayer gulf, a point supported by the survey result that "more affluent blacks of both sexes are less likely to support federal payments for...slavery...."
Dawson expresses "surprise" at the "visceral reaction" this issue provokes. The "visceral reaction" is that of a person whose pocket is about to be picked.
Completely ignored in squaring accounts are the following:
—The more than 500,000 white lives in the Civil War taken in the struggle to end slavery—a blood payment.
—The trillion or so taxpayer dollars already spent in the "War on Poverty" and similar government programs (not to mention the multimillions spent by private charities), which largely accrued to the black sector of the population.
—The amount, and basis for discrimination, of reparations, viz., how a blood relationship with a particular slave may be established, given the paucity of records and the passage of time, and, in the absence of records, what might be the "presumptions" of slave ancestry necessary to establish a draw on the Treasury. These issues are pregnant with further divisiveness.
It seems to me that people of good will and their elected representatives can formulate an expression of national sorrow and regret for the fact of slavery in the United States. Monetary reparation is an issue without a rational basis—the bill has been paid.
Frederic H. Smith III, M.B.A. '67
Peachtree City, Ga.
Hodder misrepresents both the terms of General William T. Sherman's Special Field Orders, No. 15, of January 1865, and the land provisions of the Freedmen's Bureau act of March 1865.
She writes that the general "granted the now legendary '40 acres and a mule' to 40,000 freed slaves along the Atlantic coast." The short response to this statement is: Not quite, no, and no one fully knows. At no point in this order does Sherman promise "freed slaves," in the general sense conveyed by Hodder's language, 40 acres. The reserved land was to be distributed to heads of families, and in parcels of any size up to but not surpassing 40 acres. At no point does Sherman make provision to supply mules to those heads of families. A subsequent directive did make possible the loan of unserviceable mules to settlers, but this was not a provision of the original order. At no point does Sherman write of the settlement of 40,000 freedpeople. That figure appears much later, when in the fall of 1865, General Rufus Saxton estimated the number of former slaves he and his subordinates had helped settle on the reserve since its creation in January.
Hodder's summary of the land provisions of the Freedmen's Bureau act is perhaps even more misleading. Congress did not give, as she states, "Southern blacks 40 acres to farm for three years." The act provided for the assignment of not more than 40 acres to every male citizen (a category that included former slaves and loyal white refugees) with the expectation that the recipients would be permitted to rent their plots for up to three years, during which they could elect to purchase the land outright from the government.
Land for the freedpeople was a hotly contested topic as war gave way to peace, and one that defies easy generalizations. Certainly, there were those in Lincoln's, and later Johnson's, administrations who, along with countless former slaves, understood that the best freedom would be one grounded in land. But accepting that notion in principle left unanswered the question of how former slaves would come to possess their own land. Sherman offered one extraordinarily radical response. Congress, in March 1865, offered a more moderate proposal by limiting the acquisition of government-controlled land to male citizens of means.
Susan E. O'Donovan
Assistant professor, Afro-American
studies and history
Cambridge
CREATIVE TOUR GUIDES
Thank you for referencing my article "Everyone's Wild About Harry" in "The College Pump" (July-August, page 92). Shortly after the article appeared in the Harvard Library Bulletin, I heard a tour guide speak yet another myth about Harry Elkins Widener worth repeating: "If Harvard ever neglects to have flowers delivered to the Widener Memorial Room, the entire library becomes the property of the City of Cambridge."
Denison J. Beach
Cambridge
THE TROUBLE WITH TENURE
It is not hard to figure out why Anita Levy of the American Association of University Professors ("Letters," July-August, page 6) thinks so highly of tenure. Who wouldn't want a guaranteed lifetime job teaching five to six upper-level courses eight months a year in one's field of interest for very healthy pay?
But she and her colleagues are in a better position than most Americans to protect their intellectual freedom. They do not need to be set above the mob as a special class. What tenure has become is a privileged institution used by those who hold it to perpetuate their own privileges and to exclude dissenters, not all of whom are people of color by any means.
In my English department at a large state university, one woman was granted tenure six years before she had published a single book. She was, however, the close friend of the chair. When, three years later, still unpublished and with no special rewards to boast, she wanted her husband, let go from another university, to get a job, her friends managed to have one created for him. Since he was from India and dark skinned, they used the myth of his being an affirmative-action hire to slip him into a tenure-track job without peer review. Tenure is an arbitrary system, not a meritocracy.
Any freshman sociology student will recognize that power entrenched gets abused, nepotism such as this being only one of the crimes. The worst part of tenure is that while the tenured travel from conference to conference reading their papers to each other at state expense, underpaid and benefitless adjuncts do the hard work of the university without protection. The creation of a leisure class requires a toiling class. Nor does tenure encourage the timid. Every dean knows that the threat of denying salary increases, study leaves, and sabbaticals is more than enough to keep most of the tenured professors in line.
To find people willing to take risks, you have to go outside of the tenured ranks to teachers who, because of the oppressive atmosphere created by the Tenured Lords, put our jobs and careers at risk just by writing letters like this one.
David R. Williams '72, M.T.S. '75
Fairfax, Va.
IMMUTABLE SUMMER HOUSES
The excerpt from George Colt's book Big House ("Open Book," July-August, page 24) certainly struck home. While we have remodeled our California house many times in our 30 years here, the New Hampshire house remains resolutely unchanged. There are notes about the plumbing in my mother's hand posted in the bathrooms, and years-old directions for getting to our house by my father (Nathan Comfort Starr '17, Ph.D. '28) in the desk drawer.
But the note the grandchildren always quote is the hand-lettered sign taped to the side of the fridge, next to the dishwasher. In big letters the sign said, "NO WOODEN HANDLES IN THE DISHWASHER, PLEASE." Two years ago, when that old 1953 refrigerator died (a wonderfully designed GE, with a foot treadle for hand-less opening and rotating shelves), we bought a new one. The old fridge, with the plea about wooden handles still affixed to the side, went out to a truck to be hauled away, with the sign facing the rear. I actually waved goodbye to the sign and the fridge. I felt as though I was throwing away a piece of my mother's personality, our family's history. At the beginning of this summer, I wrote in heavy grease pencil on the side of the new fridge "No wooden handles in the dishwasher, please."
And yes, there are keys in the basket by the front door that have been there for generations. No one knows what they open. Maybe someday....
Penelope Starr '57, M.C.P. '64
San Anselmo, Calif.
ADDENDA
A report ("Brevia," July-August, page 78) that Robert A. Caro, Nf '66, had won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in biography, and that Nicholas Dawidoff '85 had been a runner-up in that category, neglected to note that the other finalist in biography was also a Harvard affiliate: Lewis Lockwood, Peabody research professor of music, for his Beethoven: The Music and the Life.
Also in "Brevia," the caption to the architects' rendering of the School of Dental Medicine's building under construction might have noted, but did not, that Rothman Partners Architects designed the new facility.
SPEAK UP, PLEASE
Harvard Magazine welcomes letters on its contents. Please write to "Letters," Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware Street, Cambridge 02138, or send comments by facsimile to 617-495-0324, or by e-mail to yourturn@harvard.edu, or use our Internet site, www.harvard-magazine.com. Letters may be edited to fit the available space.
