One good indication of the new regard in which Scott Joplin is held is the fact that RCA Victor has recently issued his complete piano works on their Red Seal label. Prior to this the Red Seal has been used almost exclusively for straight classical works. (Among the few exceptions are recordings of Enrico Caruso singing “Over There” and Fritz. Kreisler playing “Poor Butterfly.”) Dick Hyman is the pianist for the record set, and Rudi Blesh, the author of our article on Joplin (June, 1975), wrote the booklet that accompanies the records.
STARS OF THE TWENTIES
Those who enjoyed James Abbe’s photographs of Hollywood personalities of the fervid twenties (December, 1972) will be glad to learn that a large selection of them is now available in a book called Stars of the Twenties. The volume was compiled by picture editor Mary Dawn Earley and published by Viking Press.
EXCLUSIONS
We have learned that the number of persons denied their seats in the Senate by exclusion is considerably greater than the figure Allan Damon offered in “Congress” (October, 1974). The Senate recently released a study that corrects all previously published accounts, including those on which our author relied. Entitled Senate Elections: Expulsion and Censure Cases (gand Congress, ist Session, Document No. 92-7), the new compilation lists forty-eight cases in which exclusion was sought. As a result of hearings, the study shows, “there have been 38 instances where the claimant was actually refused a seat.”
COLLINS COVER
An interesting curiosity has come to light in the wake of our article on the ill-starred Russian-American telegraph (June, 1975). George Cheren of South Miami, Florida, a member of the American Society of Polar Philatelists, has sent us a photograph of an old cover (envelope) bearing an optimistic engraving that shows the half of the globe the line was to cover. The Polar Philatelists, says Mr. Cheren, “study and write on polar and subpolar history and life, as reflected in or commemorated by stamps and philatelic items, including postal history. We try for original source research wherever possible.” Their publication is called Ice Cap News.
REMEMBER THE ALLAH-MO
Last winter in a grand if rather farfetched gesture, Sheik Masoud AlSharif Al Hamdan of Saudi Arabia wrote a Houston lawyer asking him to arrange for the sheik to buy some Texas real estate. The desired land was state-owned and occupied by the Alamo. “My son learned how to fly in San Antonio,” the sheik is quoted as having written the lawyer. “He used to visit the Alamo, and he loved it. Please contact the proper people and see if we can buy it. I want to present it as a gift to my son.”
The lawyer suggested that the sheik set his sights a little lower and think of another gift—perhaps a Texas ranch.
THE IMMOLATION OF JUMBO
Those who followed the sad story of P. T. Barnum’s mighty Jumbo in our August, 1973, issue will be grieved to hear that the elephant’s remains were destroyed last April in a fire that swept through the P. T. Barnum Hall at Tufts University’s Medford campus. But all is not lost. Canny showman that he was, Barnum had Jumbo’s bones and skin mounted separately after the elephant was knocked into eternity by a Grand Trunk freight locomotive. Barnum donated the hide to Tufts and the skeleton to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where it remains, stark and sound.
REMINGTON METAMORPHOSIS
Brian W. Dippie, author of the study of Frederic Remington in our April issue, has sent us a fascinating story about the genesis of a Remington painting:
Perhaps you might be interested in a few comments on the oil chosen for the cover. I toyed with introducing this very painting in my text both to amplify the drift of my argument about Remington’s use of personal experience as a means to larger ends—the presentation of his vision of the Wild West—and to provide another angle of his racial attitudes. Simply put, the group of cavalrymen you isolated on your cover is directly based on a field sketch Remington made in 1888 of some Negro troopers he rode with in Arizona. It appeared above the caption “A Camp-lire Sketch” in his article “A Scout with the Buffalo-soldiers” (Century, March, 1889). The only major compositional change in the oil A Cavalryman’s Breakfast is the figure of the scout, though even it is anticipated in the field sketch. The great difference, of course, is that when Remington worked the sketch up into a full-blown oil, he made his Negro troopers white. Thus the painting serves as a reminder of just how consciously wrought Remington’s image of the Wild West actually was: he rejected and selected the various elements that eventually added up to the real West in the public’s mind. Remington rode on patrol with black troopers, and his article about the experience shows him to have been detached but properly respectful toward them. He always judged things by a martial standard, and his comments on the “buffalo-soldiers” speak for themselves: “As to their bravery, I am often asked, ‘Will they fight?’ That is easily answered. They have fought many, many times.” Nevertheless they would have no part to play in the West of his mature paintings and sculpture, lor Remington’s West would always be the last bastion of white masculine Americanism. Thus no black troopers appear in any of Remington’s famous action scenes, and one consequence is that until recently they formed no part of the popular image of the Indian-fighting army.
