Category: Time Magazine

Paddling Upstream

Alvin Josephy passed away almost two decades ago, but time and again, during this coronavirus/Black Lives crisis, I have heard him shout in my ear that when our history books don’t lie about Indians, they ignore them.

When the NYT sends a reporter to the Navajo Nation to document the terrible impact of Covid-19 on the people, the world reads and sighs—and then the story goes to the back pages or to no page at all. When George Floyd is killed by police in Minneapolis, and Indigenous singers and jingle dancers from many tribes go to the site of the killing to pay homage and honor the man, a video from Indian participants sneaks out on Facebook. Indians and their tribute are barely visible in the national press.

When people come into the Josephy Center where I work and get the first pages of the Nez Perce story—the one about Wallowa lands left to the Joseph Band of the Nez Perce by solemn US Treaty in 1855, and then snatched away from them in an 1863 treaty after the discovery of gold—they shake their heads, maybe pick up a book about the Nez Perce, and go their ways. This story of past injustice gets told and retold more often than most Indian stories, but the fact that Nez Perce and other tribal people are still here is not part of the current American story.

Sometimes I feel like I am paddling upstream—and then I think of the years that Alvin labored to tell the Indian side of history, and think it’s a wonder that he kept at it so long and so hard.

When Alvin found the Nez Perce story in 1951, it captured his mind and soul. But he was working at Time Magazine, where publisher Henry Luce thought modern Indians “phonies” who should just get on with being Americans. Time editors followed Luce’s lead, and Alvin worked on his first two Indian books, Patriot Chiefs and The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest, without support or encouragement from Time.

When he published Patriot Chiefs, in 1961, Indians—many of whom had fought for the United States in WW II, thanked him for calling them patriots. But a historian at the Western History Conference asked him why the hell he was writing about Indians; “no one cares about Indians.”

After Patriot Chiefs, Alvin moved from Time to American Heritage, and there he hired and mentored historian David McCullough. They remained friends—McCullough emceed Alvin’s 80th birthday party in Jackson Hole in 1995. Unfortunately, I didn’t read McCullough’s award winning biography of John Adams until after Alvin died, so did not get a chance to ask him why he thought McCullough failed to address the issue of Indians in the first days of the Republic in his book. I wonder now if Alvin felt a sting with McCullough’s dismissal of Indians, who had become his own focus in writing and advocacy.

In 1969, Josephy’s Indian Heritage of America was nominated for an American Book Award. The New York Times said that it contained more information on Indians in one volume than most small American libraries had on their shelves. But its lack of impact on the standard historical narrative in American textbooks must have bothered Alvin. In 1973, in an article in Learning Magazine titled “The Forked Tongue in U. S. History Books,” he documented the lies and omissions regarding Indians in California textbooks of the day.

There are other upstream stories, but I’ll end this rant with Alvin’s 1992 book, America in 1492: the World of the Indian Peoples before the Arrival of Columbus. In the Introduction, he reminds us that 500 years earlier Columbus had landed in the Bahamas among a people he misnamed “Indians,” and a tribe he misnamed “Caribs,” or “cannibals.” Alvin wrote that “no adverse impact visited on the Indians by the 1492 voyage… was more profound in its consequences than Columbus’s introduction of Western European ethnocentricity to the Indians’ worlds.” The newcomers asserted the superiority of their “religious, political and social universe” over those of many “different indigenous peoples from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego…” The ethnocentricity that began with Columbus continued through Alvin’s day—and continues to the present day.

The final Josephy words that ring in my ears are from visits to bookstores as we traveled together to speeches and book signings for his 2001 memoir, A Walk Toward Oregon. He’d look for his books, and finding them with the “butterflies… dinosaurs, and dodo birds,” he’d mutter that “Indians don’t have history or biography, you know.” They have anthropology, and are consigned to “museums of natural history, not human history.” Next to the seashells and butterflies on bookstore shelves.

His was a hard but glorious fifty-year paddle.

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Alvin Josephy, the Listening Man

Gordie High Eagle, Millie Zollman, Albert Barros 

On Sunday at the Josephy Center we honored Alvin with Nez Perce drums and talk and a new exhibit highlighting some of the milestones in his life. This all followed the opening of a splendid Nez Perce Art Show. The show, mounted in celebration of the Nez Perce National Historical Park’s Fiftieth Anniversary, features art that tribal members make for each other—the buckskin shirt, cornhusk bag, moccasins, beaded horse regalia and headdresses worn for ceremony and parade. It’s here for June, then goes to the History Center in Lewiston, Idaho.

The Josephy exhibit stays put!

And, it seems to me, the story it tells—and the honoring of him on Sunday made this explicit—is that Alvin Josephy was a “listener.”

Bobbie Conner, the director of the Tamástslikt Cultural Institute on the Umatilla Reservation, spoke emotionally about conversations between her grandfather and Alvin in the 50s and 60s. Alvin, she said, listened to Indians, and tried until the very end, especially with his work at the National Museum of the American Indian, to get  Indians to tell their own stories and the rest of us to listen to them. On his visit at the opening of Tamástslikt, she said, Alvin commented on it portraying the “Indian” side of the story. He hoped that the national museum would do the same.

Cliff Trafzer, who holds an endowed chair in Indian studies at my alma mater, UC Riverside, says much the same thing in the introduction to the history section of a Josephy Reader Marc Jaffe and I are working on. When white historians were busily restating what other white men—it was mostly men, although we must remember Alice Fletcher and a few others—had said about Indians, Josephy took the “radical” step of listening, of asking Indians for their stories, the stories passed down in families and at tribal gatherings, sometimes for millennia.

In Alvin’s last book, Lewis and Clark Through Indian Eyes, he asked Indians to do that, to tell their family and tribal stories about Lewis and Clark. We know the Captains’ and the Corpsmen’s stories pretty well by now, but no one, Alvin wrote in reviewing Stephen Ambrose’s  Undaunted Courage for the New York Times, had bothered to ask the Indians about their side of Lewis and Clark’s journey.

So he and fellow editor Marc Jaffe did ask them. And produced a delightful collection of the personal and the tribal. Once, shortly after publication of the book, one of the Indian essayists and storytellers asked me what I thought of it. I told her I loved her piece and liked most of the pieces in the book very much, but I did express a little disappointment in one author. She put her finger in my chest and told me in no uncertain terms that Alvin had asked Indians to tell their stories as they had been told and wanted them told in their families and tribes, not “the stories you white guys want to hear.”

I retreated. She had said it all.

On Sunday, young Alvin, or Alvin Josephy III, talked about his father’s early dream of becoming a journalist. In the memoir, A Walk Toward Oregon, Josephy says something about newsprint and ink “getting in his blood.” The early interviews—for his high school newspaper—of H.L. Mencken and others—exhilarated him, and must have given him courage to go off and get stories from President Cardenas and Leon Trotsky in Mexico, in 1937, when he was 22 years old!

And the listening and the courage carried him to WOR Radio, to Archibald McLeish’s war propaganda department, to the Marine Corps and Guam and Iwo Jima. It took him to Time Magazine and to the Nez Perce story. Alvin was touring Lewiston with the local bigwigs, and it included a stop at the Nez Perce tribal agency headquarters. The young man at the agency desk, Bill Stevens, on learning that Alvin was with Time Magazine, asked him if he knew the Nez Perce Story.

Alvin listened—and the line of his listening lead directly to our listening, over 60 years later, to the Nez Perce artists and drummers this weekend in Joseph, Oregon.

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New Intern—and a Life Magazine find

Dave Struthers, a recent graduate of Stanford University from Sacramento, California, is our new Josephy Library intern. He started yesterday, and we started him tracking down the Time Magazine “color” spreads that Alvin did from 1951-61. We have about a dozen old mags here, with color articles on Oceanography, The Interstate Highway System, the Amazon, Central Asia, US National Forest, The Amazon, etc. In a note from the publisher in one issue, Alvin is credited with traveling 400,000 miles in four years on such assignments!
In this, Alvin’s “centenary year,” we aim to get all of the Time Magazine issues he had anything to do with—my recollection is that he was charged with doing one 8-12 page color spread per month. Maybe we can eventually figure out how to post them electronically…

July 2, 1971

But I couldn’t resist a morning diversion, and the result of which, courtesy Dave, is that we can give you, electronically, the complete article that Alvin wrote for Life Magazine July 2, 1971, “The Custer Myth.” Again a recollection—why didn’t I write this stuff down at the time!—is that Alvin was at the Custer Battlefield in conjunction with the making of “Little Big Man,” the Dustin Hoffman film, for which he was a technical advisor. He was traveling with Indian friends, most likely people who were involved with making the movie, people who shriveled as the “interpreter” called Crazy Horse a “savage.”  Here is the entire magazine article in digital form. Notice that Alvin uses the occasion to publish a photo of the mass grave at Wounded Knee in 1890.

                                                                  More to come!

Alvin, Henry Luce, and their times

“You don’t know what it was like to work for Henry Luce!” Alvin blurted, and ran from the room to fetch an old folder. Alvin, Betty, daughter Allison and I were in the Josephy family living room in Greenwich, looking at home movies which had been transferred to a VCR tape. The scene was Mexico in the mid fifties. The kids—teenager Diane and the younger Alvin, Allison, and Kathy—were cavorting for the camera in and around a gorgeous swimming pool. The camera occasionally switched to a pipe smoking Alvin, wearing a bathing suit, hunched over a typewriter set on a small table at the edge of the pool.

I knew that Alvin had been working for Time Magazine when he found the Nez Perce story, that he had been waiting in Los Angeles to go to Utah to do a story on that state when a telegram from Henry Luce, whose flight had been forced down in Boise, advised him to “forget Utah and do Idaho.” Alvin’s subsequent trip to Idaho included small plane hopping around that state, visits with dignitaries in Lewiston, and meeting the Nez Perce at Lapwai.

Later, in A Walk Toward Oregon, I would get the full story of his post WW II work for a Luce owned string of Southern California newspapers, their collapse and his time with friend Herb Chase, who bought seven of the 30 in the string, and, finally, and his move back East to take a job with Time.

He was to do a weekly “News in Pictures” feature and less frequent color specials with Time’s major departments—medicine, business, art, etc. He would be there throughout the 1950s, and, by Alvin’s own account, he was a promoter of American progress and development, lauding nuclear power, dam and levee building, intense forest cutting and management, and other things that contributed to a “World of Tomorrow” vision he had carried since seeing General Motors’ immense Futurama exhibit at the 1940 New York World’s Fair.

There were glitches at Time and with Luce. A big color special on the Crusades that Alvin and his photographers had spent months preparing was personally axed by Luce, who wanted no reminders of the Crusades, “Christendom’s greatest defeat.”At the time, Luce was campaigning editorially against the Mossadegh government in Iran, where the popularly elected Prime Minister was nationalizing the oil industry and generally taking an anti-Western stance. Luce, the son of Christian missionaries, wanted no reminders of Islam’s triumphs.

And he did not want a story on Southwest Indian art, or anything Indian. Luce was an assimilationist, who thought Indians should just get on with it and join the conquering main stream. Holdouts, in his mind, were “phonies,” and Time would not treat with them.

The great irony of course is that Time and Luce got Alvin to Idaho and the Nez Perce story, and although he worked on for another eight or nine years at Time, while gradually increasing his own interest in Indians and a different view of Western development, he would eventually break with the magazine and its views of Indians and America, take a job at American Heritage, and write books and magazine articles on Indians and a more sustainable view of man and the natural world.

At the home movies that night in Greenwich, we were still in Time mode, and the sight of Alvin typing away in his bathing suit had me in stitches. “Now there’s a workaholic!” I opined. Betty and Allison joined in, and Alvin ran from the room and retrieved the weathered folder, which held a 60 page report on the social and economic conditions in mid-fifties Mexico. The price of a month-long family vacation in Mexico was apparently this “background” report on conditions in the country, not for publication, but for Luce’s edification.

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Josephy and David McCullough—the narrative historian

Always, for Alvin, “story” was the important notion in “history.” He insisted on accuracy, trusted the testimony of individuals, and was disgusted by some of the stilted prose and arcane argument of the academics. He loved the idea of history permeating our lives. And capturing its excitement and making it available to the greatest number of citizens was done by writing clean prose and telling good stories.

In 1961, Alvin left Time Magazine for an upstart hard cover magazine called American Heritage. In 1964, he hired a literature major from Yale who had worked for Sports Illustrated and the Unlisted States Information Agency to join him. Multiple Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Awards later, David McCullough would say that American Heritage was his “graduate school.”
…

In the fall of 1984, I went to Jackson Hole, Wyoming to sit in the audience as the Snake River Institute honored Alvin Josephy with a weekend of readings, speeches, films and discussions about “The Next Hundred Years in the American West.” It was an august crew—George Horsecatcher and Terry Tempest Williams, Hal Cannon, Teresa Jordan, Jack Loeffler, Ed and Betsy Marston, Tim Egan, Bill Kittredge, Drum Hadley, Gary Snyder, David McCullough and more rose to say a few words about Alvin and read a poem or tell a story or think aloud about the West to come.

McCullough began with a story about American Heritage. He and Alvin were in the office during the big east coast power failure and resulting “blackout” of 1965, and the two of them carefully walked all of the office secretaries down flights of stairs and to their homes or safe stopping places. I think Ed Marston’s picture of Alvin and Teresa Jordan, later printed in High Country News, was their reaction to that story.

Alvin and David were obviously old friends, men who shared a notion of history, the importance of history, and the telling of it. McCullough went on to talk about history, and a Disney effort to own and control some Civil War sites—could history become commercial property in the next 100 years?

What McCullough didn’t detail that day was his transition from history editor and history lover to historian. I found the answer in a 1999 Paris Review interview.

He had grown up in Pennsylvania with stories of the Johnstown Flood, had later found a trove of photos of the flood at the Library of Congress, and gone back to read books. They didn’t match what he knew about Pennsylvania and Johnstown, and he resolved to write the story himself. But how to begin?

“One evening, in New York, at a gathering of writers and historians interested in the West, my boss, Alvin Josephy, pointed to a white-haired man across the room. He said, That’s Harry Drago. Harry Sinclair Drago. He’s written over a hundred books. I waited for my chance and walked over. Mr. Drago, I said, Alvin Josephy says that you’ve written over a hundred books. Yes, he said, that’s right. How do you do that? I asked. And he said, four pages a day. Every day? Every day. It was the best advice an aspiring writer could be given.”

David McCullough left American Heritage and went on to become the leading writer of popular, well researched narrative history books of our time, books on the Brooklyn Bridge and Panama Canal, and Pulitzer Prize winning books on presidents Truman and Adams. He became a popular host of American Experience programs on Public Television, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, our nation’s highest civilian honor.

And throughout this distinguished career, McCullough has promoted and maintained the values of narrative history. In the Paris Review interview, he said that “The problem with so much of history as it’s taught and written is that it’s so often presented as if it were all on a track—this followed that. In truth, nothing ever had to happen the way it happened. Nothing was preordained. There was always a degree of tension, of risk, and the question of what was going to happen next… No one knew Truman would become president or that the Panama Canal would be completed.”

On receiving a National Book Award, he put it this way: “There’s no secret to making history come alive. Barbara Tuchman said it perfectly: ‘Tell stories.” The pull, the appeal is irresistible, because history is about two of the greatest mysteries—time and human nature.”

Alvin Josephy couldn’t have put it better.

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