I am very excited about this week's TIME cover and cover story. It is a departure from TIME'S normal practice of putting living men on the cover. But in this case, the 177th anniversary of the Declaration of American Independence, we thought an exception was a good idea.

TIME has often done atmosphere stories on how the country celebrates the Fourth of July holiday: the picnics, the band concerts in town parks, death on crowded highways, and sweltering fun on packed beaches. However, the story of what we celebrate is often lost in how we do it. This year seemed a good time to pause and recall how it all started.

Writer Paul O'Neil, assigned to do the story, began to visit battlefields and reread American history ("Apparently you can read about the Revolution for the rest of your life"). TIME Cartographer Bob Chapin started his research for the two color maps of Revolutionary War battlefields, and a four-page layout was planned on early American art in the Cooperstown museum.

The cover picture is a reproduction of part of Gilbert Stuart's famous painting of George Washington known as the Athenaeum portrait. It is owned by the Boston Athenaeum and is on permanent exhibition at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. (Stuart did one Washington portrait in 1794, but destroyed it. He felt that Washington's false teeth distorted his face, and Washington refused to remove them while sitting. A second portrait was done on commission from Senator William Bingham, who presented it to the Marquess of Lansdowne.)

The Athenaeum portrait was begun in 1796, when Martha Washington persuaded her husband to sit for Stuart once more. But the portrait was never finished (see cut for full canvas view). Explanations vary as to why it was not finished. One version: Stuart promised to deliver the painting to Martha when completed, but purposely failed to finish the canvas so that he could keep it to make copies. He painted and sold at least 70 such copies, one of which now hangs at Mount Vernon.

After Stuart's death, the portraits of both Washington and his wife Martha were offered for sale, first to Congress and then to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. But there was no interest in buying them. In 1831 members of the Athenaeum raised subscriptions and bought both portraits for $1,500.

A few days ago I received an interesting letter from one Kurt Maeder. a political refugee from East Germany. Maeder wanted to reinstate a TIME subscription which he had bought back in 1946 when he was a German prisoner of war in Fort Meade, Md. The subscription was interrupted when he went home to Soviet-occupied Germany.

Even as a P.W., wrote Maeder, one of the things he remembered about life in America was the freedom to read: "I remember my time in America, where most of my comrades who were able to read your language studied your magazine. In Europe we don't have magazines giving in a brief and attractive way news about political and economic events in the U.S. and abroad . . . Copies of TIME are highly valued behind the Iron Curtain. Single copies are sold for as much as 25 marks in East German Currency. That means half the amount a common worker earns a week. A man living in free America can hardly imagine what it means to be cut off from information. He will never really understand the feeling growing in a man doomed to read the Communist-censored papers day by day. year by year . . .

"My friends and I used to bring back copies of TIME from West Berlin by taping them under the seats of railway carriages. After reading, we gave them away for nothing because we wanted other men to know the situation in the free world ... It is necessary that people in the U.S. should understand the difficulty people in the eastern slave states have in getting news of the outside world."

I am happy that in his new West German home in Oberhausen, Baden, Subscriber Maeder will now be able to enjoy reading the world's news each week.

Cordially yours,

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