April 2021

Editor's Note: Have your own letter to the editor? Send it to editor@americanheritage.com!

To the editors,

Among the many nuggets embedded in your feature (February/March 2021) inviting ten historians to offer assessments of the Trump presidency with special attention on the events outside the Capitol on January 6th, one in particular caught my eye. David Stewart is worried that "we have not yet reached a turning point in dealing with the forces unleashed by Trump's constant agitation."

Valid concern, as far as it goes, but is there a need to do more, much more, than simply wait for the Trump venom to course through our body politic? Do we need to consider a more drastic national craniotomy to resolve the current paralysis, changes that will refresh our elections and bring long-term vitality to our governance?

Editor's Note: Brent Glass is Director Emeritus of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and the author of 50 Great American Places: Essential Historic Sites Across the U.S., from which this essay is adapted. 

Editor’s Note: David Michaelis is the author of seven books, including the bestselling biography, N. C. Wyeth. Portions of this essay appeared in his recent monumental biography, Eleanor, the first one-volume biography in six decades of the longest-serving First Lady.  

Eleanor Roosevelt always wanted things to happen faster.   

On February 1, 1968, two African American men working for the publics works department in Memphis, Tennessee were killed when a garbage compactor, triggered by an electrical surge during torrential rain, closed with them inside. It was a horrific event, and the last straw for other sanitation workers, many of them black, who had toiled for too long and for too little pay for the city. Twelve days later, nearly 1,300 of them walked off the job in protest, demanding that the city recognize their union, increase wages, and improve the abysmal working conditions.