Letters of the Century: America, 1900-1999

Book by None

Introduction

In 1955, the day after Jonas Salk announced that he had found a vaccine for polio, an expectant mother in Nyack, New York, sat down to write him a letter. The gratitude she expressed in this letter still mingles, on its pages, with a note of relief and longing, and an echo of recent pain.

The difference between knowing that Americans were grateful to Jonas Salk and reading this letter to him is like the difference between knowing the words of a song and hearing it sung. Letters give history a voice.

This book celebrates that voice, as it has changed and deepened, whispered and shouted, wept and teased, laughed and pleaded, throughout the letters written during the last hundred years in America. Yet this is not a book about letters. It is a book about the twentieth century, as told in letters. The 423 letters printed in this volume are arranged chronologically--with the hope that as you read them, you will feel as if you are hearing successive verses in a national ballad.

Throughout the last hundred years--beginning, in fact, with the very first letter in this book--observers have lamented the fact that people don't write letters anymore. Yet letters have described most of the century's major events, have reflected or reflected upon most of its social and cultural trends, have captured most of its political passions, and have been written by most of its principal figures. We may think we've heard the whole story, but that story resonates more deeply when we read the century's letters.

Part of the reason for that resonance is the immediacy of letters. Letters are what history sounds like when it is still part of everyday life. While aftershocks from the San Francisco earthquake continue, a man who owns a clothing store recounts the terror of watching it burn. A teacher who doesn't yet know how many friends of hers have been killed describes being forced to leave her home during the St. Louis race riots of 1919. A nurse living in Honolulu tells her brother in Ohio how the smoke looks over Pearl Harbor just a few hours after the bombing. Immediate and evocative, letters witness and fasten history, catching events as they happen. Sometimes letters even shape those events: the order to drop the bomb on Hiroshima; the Lindbergh baby ransom note; Nixon's letter of resignation.

In addition to immediacy, letters have intimacy, and this, too, gives history resonance. Lord Byron wrote: "Letter writing is the only device for combining solitude and good company," and the safety of that combination seems to inspire the courage to be honest. Dreams are confided in letters--both the nightmares and the hopes. Love is confided in letters--without fear of hearing laughter. Sex and jealousy, money and drugs: all of these are subjects that the intimacy of letters allows. A young man dying of AIDS describes to his parents how he wants to be buried. A woman tells her mother about having an abortion. An illegal immigrant reveals for his family his journey across the border.

A lot of the joy of reading letters comes from hearing the ring of unaffected truth. People describe things in letters, in passing, that they take for granted but we need not. The pack of wolves passing the schoolhouse near the shack of a lone woman homesteader. The code words for ordering liquor during the dry days of Prohibition. The overcrowded schedule of a doctor's loyal secretary during the 1950s. The Kennedy calendars adorning the walls of ramshackle houses in Mississippi during the summer of 1964. These are the little details that refresh even the most familiar events.

The same thing happens with the most familiar people. When Charlie Chaplin was offered his first film contract and sat down to write an ecstatic letter to his brother, he could not have known that that letter would survive him: as a consequence, we get to hear all his youthful, unsophisticated enthusiasm--misspellings and all. When Janis Joplin went to San Francisco to try out for Big Brother and the Holding Company, she wrote home to her parents in a tone of girl-down-the-block contrition that completely defies her Woodstock image. Rock Hudson and Bill Gates, Frank Lloyd Wright and Lady Bird Johnson, Elvis Presley and Groucho Marx: in their letters in this volume, they all reveal unexpected sides of themselves. Henry James burned most of the letters he received precisely because he feared for the privacy of the letter writers. E. B. White once lamented "A man who publishes his letters becomes a nudist--nothing shields him from the world's gaze except his bare skin." But fortunately, he wrote that lament in a letter, and the letter was saved.

There was a surprising familiarity in the voices of these letters, despite all the dizzying changes of the twentieth century. A fledgling journalist writing home from New York City in 1916 to explain her antiwar protests could be any young woman of any decade reveling in her independence. Likewise, the slightly self-pitying college musings of Carl Van Doren may have been written in 1909, but in spirit they are no different from any number of soul-searching letters, and they are a touching reminder that even great men have to search for their beginnings. War letters, apart from references to specific battles, are remarkably similar in tone. So are letters of bigotry, and letters of love. Through all the advances and setbacks, people, it turns out, didn't change all that much. We kept finding men and women we thought we knew--including ourselves--in the letters we read. The thrill of voyeurism mingled with the wonder of recognition. We hope you will feel this too.

Because this is not a book about letters, you will not find a lot of speculation about how letter writing has changed over the century. Obviously, there's less of it now, at least of an intimate sort. (The post office reports that, while the volume of letters has increased, less than 2 percent of it is now personal mail.) Obviously, too, e-mail has taken over, with its oft-lamented knack for scattering ideas, observations, and potential memories to the wind. And it's true that e-mail lacks a lot, at least in romance. Reading a typewritten John Reed letter at Columbia University, you can see that he pounded the period key so hard that every sentence ends with a tiny hole. You can sense the force of his feelings in a way that e-mail may never allow. (You can also see that this champion of the masses used dollar signs to cross out his mistakes.) But if e-mail is a threat to real letters, it is nonetheless reviving certain skills of communicating that became rusty with the telephone, and it is giving anyone open-minded enough to try it the joy of putting thoughts into words that they can see. (There are also more similarities than one might suspect between mail and e-mail. At the turn of the century, hundreds of books were written on the etiquette of correspondence, and in tone and content they are remarkably similar to the Internet's "netiquette" tips today.)

We come to the question of e-mail with a special bias. This book could not have been completed without the Internet, or at least not completed on time. From virtual exhibitions (such as those on the invaluable Library of Congress site) to on-line library catalogues to e-mail exchanges with experts in various fields, we found the Web an indispensable--and ever-growing--resource. In the last months of our research, we found some wonderful documents on the Web that had simply not been there when this project began.
The research for this book took nearly four years and provided us with the joy of a scavenger hunt and the edification of a college course. It gave us something to look for in flea markets, at bookstores, and on our friends' bookshelves, and, incidentally, a topic of conversation to last a lifetime. Our rough estimate is that we read about a half a million letters to choose the 423 that are here. It's an estimate that reflects letters found on the Web, in anthologies, biographies, the Library of Congress, the National Archives and Records Administration, presidential libraries, historical societies, company archives, university archives, numerous other archives and manuscript collections, friends' attics, and, in one case, our dentist's mother's house.

Our rules for what we would and would not include evolved. Early on, we decided that memos and telegrams would count as correspondence, but that we should resist the temptation to consider press releases, presidential statements, court opinions, advertisements, or affidavits. A few times, we allowed ourselves to print a letter that was never intended as a private communication but used the form as a conceit. The most famous example of this is Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail," which we felt was too important to exclude. Similarly, James Baldwin's letter to his nephew in The Fire Next Time is probably one of the most beautifully written letters in this volume. Though it is more an essay than a letter, you will find it here nonetheless.

We rejected some letters when they turned out to be entirely fictional, parts of epistolary novels that were not labeled as such. We lost other letters when we found out that they were apocryphal. Cary Grant, for example, was once supposed to have received a cable from a magazine fact-checker asking "HOW OLD CARY GRANT?" and to have answered it "OLD CARY GRANT FINE." To our lasting regret we discovered that, according to Grant, the story had been made up. According to another, apparently fanciful, tale, some friends of Mark Twain, not knowing where he was, sent out a birthday card addressed "Mark Twain, God knows where." Some weeks later, they supposedly received a note from Twain that said only "He did."

Other letters failed to make the cut because they were written in one period to describe another--for instance, a friend's aunt in 1985 describing Armistice Day: the letter was wonderful, but we had to respect the chronology. Still other letters aren't here ...