Frank Johnson: The P.S. Letter

December 22, 1961

SECRETARY OF WAR’S SON HANGED FOR MUTINY
“MUSHROOM CLOUD” KILLS 30,000 OF U.S. COAST
ENEMY TROOPS INVADE VERMONT
ELDER STATESMAN WEDS EX-MURDER SUSPECT

Dear Reader:

If you read these headlines on the morning of April 1st or any other day of the year, for that matter you’d find them hard to believe.

But they’re true.

Each of them describes an actual event in your country’s past. Each has been covered (without sensationalism, with scholarship and verve) in recent issues of AMERICAN HERITAGE, the magazine of liberty.

America’s history is a mosaic rich with such surprises full of clashing colors and curious designs. Taken all together, the effect is sometimes gaudy, often glorious, always fascinating to read and see.

And that is the story which AMERICAN HERITAGE has to tell.

Since the magazine began over seven years ago its way of telling the American story has attracted more than 340,000 subscribers. We’d like to suggest here that it’s time you joined them, for long enough to see for yourself why so many educated Americans who have tried this magazine in book format have become its fans and collectors.

To make the thought worth having right now, we have included a temporary and excellent, half-price offer. Our point is simply to give you an easy and economical way to see how truly satisfying the cultivation of your sense of history can be. Gibbon called history “the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.” And certainly the headlines that start this letter fir that definition. But AMERICAN HERITAGE is also interested in politics and its angry sister, war. It proves into records of wealth and poverty, looks at literature and art, reports scandal and virtue, records progress, and sometimes shows nostalgia for what progress destroys.

This is a magazine full of loud explosions and quiet discoveries, of floods and ceremonies, old car and carriages, fine glass and fast horses, not to mention frauds and prophets, crators and artists, scientists and doctors,

Minstrels and mutineers. For example, take those rather garish headlines:

The unfortunate young man hanged at sea in 1842 was the 18-year-old son of John Canfield Spencer, President Tyler’s Secretary of War. He had been convicted, in a hysterical shipboard trial, for inciting a mutiny (the only one recorded in the history of the U.S. Navy).

The mushroom cloud accompanied a volcanic eruption which destroyed the entire town of St. Pierre, on Martinique, and its 30,000 inhabitants, in the year 1902.

The enemy troops were a group of enterprising (but amateurish) Confederate soldiers who decided to augment Rebel funds by robbing three banks in, of all places, drowsy little St. Albans, Vermont. And they got away with it, after a fashion.

The elder statesman was Gouverneur Morris. In 1809 he married Nancy Randolph, a member of Virginia’s first family who had been tried and acquitted, years before, of the murder of her own illegitimate child.

AMERICAN HERITAGE is also a treasure-house of fine illustrations. The miniature pages picture in the folder accompanying this letter can only hint at their variety and the excellence of their reproduction. (Every big, 8-3/4 by 11-1/4 inch issue contains 112 pages, with more than 100 pictures 25-35 in full color.) Because most of them simply cannot be seen in any other place, these alone would make back issues worth cherishing.

And indeed, 96% of our subscribers do save every copy: AMERICAN HERITAGE is made to look and to last like a fine book. It is bound in hard covers, and contains no advertising. Moreover, there is no such thing as an out-of-date issue. Each adds to a useful, permanently valuable reference shelf.

How much is it? Quite a lot, as most magazines go. But AMERICAN HERITAGE is not costly in terms of value receive; note the press comments on the folder.

The regular price is $3.95 a copy, $15 for the six bi-monthly issues of a year’s subscription. But you may try the next ten months (five issues) of AMERICAN HERITAGE for less/u than $2 a copy.

The postpaid card enclosed and you’ll seldom see another like it enables you to receive your first AMERICAN HERITAGE before you pay anything.

And then you may send, in three equal monthly installments, a total of $9.87 half the cost of the same five issues ($19.75) if purchased singly. Should the magazine fail to meet our description here or your expectations, tell us. We’ll cancel your subscription and refund whatever we owe you on undelivered copies.

I think you’ll enjoy AMERICAN HERITAGE. And I hope you’ll welcome this chance to get acquainted, while the offer remains open and the card is handy. Mail it today?

Thank you!

Sincerely,

James Parton
Publisher

P.S. An early response guarantees you will start with the extra-big and colorful Christmas issue. We’re more than seasonally jubilant about the December AMERICAN HERITAGE for a number of good-looking, good reading reasons:

–The Old Showman’s Last Triumph. This 12-page picture-story recounts P.T. Barnum’s spectacular conquest-by-circus of London in 1889. Royalty and rabble alike gaped at the “stupendous, historical classic drama of Nero: The Destruction of Rome” (1200 People! 380 Horses!). The article is based on a magnificent album of posters, programs and color pictures Barnum put together for his favorite daughter reproduced here for the first time in this country.

–The Sunny Master of Sunnyside, by Curtis Dahl. The beloved creator of Rip Van Winkle and Ichabod Crane bustles back to life in this sparkling visit with Washington Irving. The article is accompanied by a portfolio of paintings by the great Irving illustrators. Among them will be a gatefold picture in full color and nearly a yard wide of Peter Stuyvesant’s hilarious ragtag army entering New York, based on Knickerbocker’s “History of New York.”

–The Great Deception, by Moshe Decter. Part of an AMERICAN HERITAGE series entitled “America and Russia,” which examines the entire history of this relationship over nearly two centuries. Mr. Decter illumines the history of the Communist Party in American and analyzes the reasons for the support it gained among so many American intellectuals during the ’30s.

–Captain Cook’s American, by E.M. Halliday. For Connecticut-born John Ledyard, life as an under-graduate at pre-Revolution Dartmouth failed to satisfy his craving for adventure. He found it as a seaman aboard the H.M.S. Resolution, under the command of the ill-fated Captain Cook. Ledyard became the first American to see Alaska and Hawaii. Brilliantly illustrated, in color and monochrome, with scenes from Ledyard’s travels, from Tahiti to the Nile.

And there are stories on: William Jennings Bryan’s contributions to the American progressive movement…a scandalous early New England breach-of-promise case, brought by a determined literary lady against a young (much younger) man of the church…an obscure Virginia lad who foiled the kidnap of Jefferson and other Revolutionary leaders by Royalist troops…and much more.

You’ll like it. See for yourself?

J.P.

This 1961 test letter contains an example of what Frank Johnson calls “the working P.S.”