A GATHERING OF RECENT BOOKS, videos, recordings, and other items of special interest to the readers of American Heritage, selected and recommended by the editors.
BOOKS
Full Service
Pump and Circumstance Glory Days of the Gas Station
by John Margolies, Bulfinch, 128 pages
The American Gas Station: History and Folklore of the Gas Station in American Car Culture
by Michael Karl Witzel, Motorbooks International, 160 pages
Two very handsome and engaging books give us a look at a fading world. Gas stations will exist as long as internal combustion propels us through our lives, but the morning time of Georgian or Deco buildings glossy with tile, of free road maps and guys in visored caps checking your oil—that’s gone forever. Both these books retrieve it admirably, and although Witzel’s offers more gasstation history, it is the illustrations that allow us to share the authors’ passion for their subject: the cap badges and giveaway toys, matchbooks and postcards and attendants’ uniforms, and the advertisements showing families in their DeSotos on the road to radiant tomorrows and clean rest rooms.
Six-Foot Peanuts and Spongeorama
The New Roadside America
by Mike Wilkins, Ken Smith, and Doug Kirby, Fireside, 287 pages
“Will your precious days of leisure end in another excursion to the dull wastelands of Six Flags, Busch Gardens, and Disney?” ask the authors at the outset of this most American of guidebooks. “Or has the restless spirit of true tourism gotten hold of you?” That’s the spirit that compels you to drive that extra fifty miles to see the World’s Largest Olive (Lindsay, California), the Pig Driving a Cadillac (Hot Springs, Arkansas), the Wonderful World of Tiny Horses (Eureka Springs, Arkansas), the Five-Story-Tall Chicken (Marietta, Georgia), or Jayne Mansfield’s Death Car (St. Augustine, Florida). They’re all here, along with hundreds and hundreds of other attractions, some quite grand (“The World of CocaCola Pavilion opened in 1990, a $15 million, forty-fivethousand-square-foot shrine to what Coca-Cola humbly calls ‘the most successful product in the history of commerce—”), but most of them parched and desperate little heartbreakers, the alligator farms and stuffed multiheaded animals that embody the entrepreneurial spirit at its most poignant. It’s hard to imagine how the authors could have catalogued so many of these attractions even in their collective three lifetimes, but the work is clearly a labor of love, albeit love fortified with a sharp and sardonic wit.
The Return of the Native
Henry James: Collected Travel Writings
Library of America, two volumes: “Great Britain and America,” 846 pages; “The Continent,” 845 pages
Henry James spent much of his childhood, before the Civil War, shuttling between America and Europe with his father and siblings. He sought to regain that peripatetic feeling in his later life, as he wrote the pieces and books collected here, from the 1870s to just before his death. With his typical meandering grace, James recalls his first childhood impression of London on “a wet black Sunday” in March, when “no doubt I had a mystic prescience of how fond of the murky modern Babylon I was one day to become.” In 1907 he revisited his native America after twenty years as a pseudoEnglishman. The result was The American Scene. Taking a turn past the “impudent” commercial skyline that has grown up in lower Manhattan, James observes the “multitudinous skyscrapers standing up to the view, from the water, like extravagant pins in a cushion already overplanted.” The town seems dirtier, taller, more commercially heated up than he remembered, and he remarks on its tremendous “infusion” of immigrants.
The companion volume gathers James’s travels to the Continent, including a short, unexpected piece he wrote in 1914 about the Volunteer Motor-Ambulance Corps in France. Three months into the war that would end much of his world, James could write, “We Americans are as little neutrals as possible where any aptitude for any action … that affirms life and freshly and inventively exemplifies it, instead of overwhelming and undermining it, is concerned.” He died two years later, leaving behind a lifetime of far-flung observation to complement his novels.
Floating Cities
Crossing & Cruising
by John Maxtone-Graham, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 311 pages
John Maxtone-Graham claims right off the bat that America’s greatest export is cruise-ship passengers. The ships may be almost entirely built and owned abroad, but the vast majority of customers have always come from this side of the ocean. That may explain why Americans are the greatest fans of the legendary liners that once crossed the Atlantic in great numbers. No one is more passionate about these lost ships than MaxtoneGraham, who has previously written two volumes on ocean travel. His latest volume is a curious hybrid—one only he could pull off. In Crossing & Cruising, he alternates chapters on the early transatlantic vessels with ones on the newest and most luxurious cruise ships. This allows fans of the former to skip the chapters on the latter, and vice versa. And yet, if you care about ships at all, you probably won’t want to miss any of it. Curiously, as evocative and romantic as are Maxtone-Graham’s chapters on the Aquitania and the Normandie, even more intriguing are the author’s comments on the newest arrivals with their atriums and balconies. With a keen eye, he instructs us on just what works and what does not, how the arrangement of cabin furniture or the placement of a deck can make a passenger feel either subtly uncomfortable or sublimely at sea.
TRUTH & FICTION
On the Bum
Kings in Disguise
by James Vance and Dan Burr, Kitchen Sink Press, 192 pages
The ragged pair at the heart of this big comic-book novel of hobo life are a thirteenyear-old boy named Freddie, who is searching for the father who deserted him, and his older companion, known as the King of Spain, Freddie’s protector and guide to the freight trains and flophouses and hobo jungles that form the backdrop for a classic coming-of-age tale. Anyone Freddie’s age will enjoy this story as it steeps the young reader in gritty Depression detail. The author, James Vance, has been scrupulous about thirties hobo slang—“jocker,” “yard bull”—and the artist, Dan Burr, gets the period cars, haircuts, magazines, and slouchy hobo clothes dead right. Along his road to early manhood, Freddie rides the rods, learns to read hobo code on houses, sings the “International” with a group of strikers and is tear-gassed with them, and even befriends a convincing old Jesse James impersonator. This is an entertaining primer of hard times.
South by Southeast
Key West Tales
by John Hersey, Alfred A. Knopf, 240 pages
Hersey, the author of Hiroshima and fifteen works of fiction, finished this final collection of short stories shortly before his death last year. He drew on his experience living in Key West but went beyond it too in wonderful stories about John Jay Audubon killing hundreds of birds for art and pleasure; a nineteenth-century preacher who is also the town’s richest salvager of shipwrecks; an unrelaxed President Truman sipping Old Grand-Dad on vacation; and a number of obscurer modern subjects. He writes in the opening story, “The sun shines bright and hot on Key West; this is a climate that is kind to bright-blooming greenery and to joys of the flesh—frisky trysts, rum and rumpled bedsheets—and so it is that many of the citizens are well acquainted with mischief. …” Perhaps the most moving story involves a set of Key Westers today and their friend who is dying of AIDS. These stories make an unusual evocation of a timeless place—as a nineteenth-century wreckers’ town, a twentieth-century playground, and more.
Electric Circus
Viva Las Vegas: After-Hours Architecture
by Alan Hess, Chronicle Books, 127 pages
Many of us hold Las Vegas at disapproving arm’s length, thinking it’s the last place we’d ever want to go. Just wait until you read Alan Hess’s admiring history of the city that began as a wagontrail stop across the Western desert and became a modern synonym for tastelessness, flash, and illusion writ on an ever-grander scale. Hess’s enthusiasm is infectious; he simply loves the twohundred-foot neon signs, the theme architecture in which paddle-wheel steamers bloom in the desert next to Roman amphitheaters that promise orgies of getting and spending. Hess speaks kindly of “Italian marble floors and pink-andwhite leather sofas, lilac carpeting in the casino, and violet and magenta walls.” He tells of chandeliers that “took the form of flying saucers and spinning planets.” And he also brings to his chronicle of hotels and signs and behind-the-scenes money the cooler, analytic sensibility of an architectural historian who sees in Las Vegas a “potent urban model” of today’s car-oriented commercial strip.
The book is filled with wonderful color photographs as persuasive as the text; they carry with them a certain weight of nostalgia. And by the last picture—of “Del Web’s Mint“—you feel real regret for an undulating pink neon sign’s loss in 1988. More recently the Dunes’s eighteen-story minaret-topped sign (still a survivor when Hess’s book was published) vanished in a great, enormously publicized fireworks of an explosion that in itself was being filmed for a movie. So perhaps it’s a good idea to get out there soon, before Las Vegas decides to reinvent itself all over again.
Ticket to Ride
Railroad Signatures Across the Pacific Northwest
by Carlos A. Schwantes, University of Washington Press, 360 pages
Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America
by Henry Kisor, Times Books, 384 pages
Both authors are roughly of an age, and they both fell in love with trains as children in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Schwantes listened to his grandfather’s tales of a youth spent on the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad, and Kisor would wait on a late afternoon at the depot of a small New Jersey town for an “almighty rumble: a big black Ten-Wheeler bringing my father home from Manhattan on the Erie railroad.” These memories might as well have been tattooed; such experiences are hard to dig out of the skin, as the awe of the child becomes the passion of the man.
Schwantes, as his title indicates, has picked the great railroads that carried, for better or worse, civilization to the Pacific Northwest in the form of settlers and tourists. The railroads, dozens of them, grew cities, and they grew an American passion for the wilderness. They “not only decided what travelers saw of the Pacific Northwest by where they located their tracks and stations,” Schwantes writes, “but also determined when they saw it. They usually arranged the schedules of premier passenger trains to cross flatlands by night and mountains by day, thereby reinforcing a common prejudice that plains were boring and mountains picturesque.”
With their brilliant senses of promotion—one railroad official is quoted as saying that “the West is purely a railroad enterprise. We started it in our publicity department”—it is not surprising that the same publicity departments made sure that photographers and advertising artists were on hand to document their miracle every inch of the way. Schwantes fills his book with magnificent photos and reproduces a wide selection of posters and brochures in color. They, perhaps even more than the absorbing text, are worth the price of admission to this journey.
Zephyr, Henry Kisor’s detailed account of several trips aboard one of Amtrak’s most popular Western trains, is in no way derailed by his own sense of the romance of train travel. History is present here as he tells of the old California Zephyr, running between Chicago and Oakland, just as it does now, the stations it served, the dining-room menus, the glass-domed observation cars, the castes that separated the members of the crew, and the “on-board factotum,” the Zephyrette, who made everyone feel secure and cared for. But we are not lost in the mists of time here; Kisor mostly focuses on the present rail experience, its pleasures and drawbacks. The difficult passengers, the mechanical failures that result from running the trains too hard on too tight a budget, the plastic cutlery, and the late arrivals are commonplace; all this the Amtrak passenger knows. But we know less of the backstage life of an Amtrak production, and a successful trip (it does happen) is like a stage play, as Kisor describes it, in its split-second timing, its diverting scenery, and its talented crew and cast. Kisor gives us wonderful portraits of the conductors and crew chiefs, the porters and the chefs, especially one John Davis, a cook with a mission: He simply wants to be the best. With his secret sauces, his spices and herbs paid for from his own pocket, and his sense of what’s right (“A good chef wants his lettuce torn, never cut”), he doubtless is.
VIDEOS
Duck and Cover
The Atomic Cafe
directed by Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader, and Pierce Rafferty, First Run Features, 88 minutes
In a way, nothing makes the point that the Cold War is over like watching old nuclear-defense films. When The Atomic Cafe first played in theaters a few years ago, the arms race was still on, and the effect of seeing it was one of bitter irony. Viewing it out from under the Cold War is a different experience. This survey of early films about the bomb makes a fascinating introductory history of the surreality of the war that ended in 1989.
The movie opens appropriately with footage of the 1945 Trinity test in New Mexico and then moves on to one of the Hiroshima pilots testifying in a blank voice. In 1946 the U.S. Army made atomic tests on tiny Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. In an extraordinary sequence an Army representative explains the benefits of the bomb to a cheerful group of Bikini inhabitants gathered on a beach. Later, Tony, the paper boy, out on his suburban route, performs the duck-and-cover when he sees the bomb flash. Such clips can make an easy target, but one of the smart things about The Atomic Cafe is that it presents them without any narration. Since the conclusion of our deadly nuclear rivalry with the Soviets, this dark film has gained a happier ending.
Northern Lights
Black Robe
directed by Bruce Beresford, Samuel Goldwyn Company, Vidmark Video, 105 mins.
In this grimly beautiful 1991 film about a Jesuit priest’s ordeal in the seventeenth-century Canadian wilderness, the Canadian actor Lothaire Bluteau plays Father LaForgue, who leaves France in 1634 to convert Indian souls. LaForgue, whose closeset dark eyes show back his stony faith to anything that surprises him, hires Algonquins to guide him upriver; they see him as a spooky figure- a “black robe,” after his Jesuit frock —and he feels only pity for them. LaForgue’s party is ambushed, and several are taken prisoner by the Algonquins’ enemies, the Hurons.
The Australian director Bruce Beresford, who also made Driving Miss Daisy and Breaker Morant, employs a harsh realism. From the first scenes in the New World you see mud everywhere. When the group travels, the water is tin-colored and the sky a winter-gray, and the woods are as menacing as they are unspoiled. When LaForgue finally reaches the Huron colony, his faith has been tortured but is intact.
Despite the best reviews, this film passed almost unnoticed amidst the noise about Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves. Its hard-edged imagining of life in the north three hundred years ago deserves a second chance.
Gods With Dirty Faces
Baseball’s Golden Age The Photographs of Charles M. Conlon
by Neal McCabe and Constance McCabe, Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
Charles M. Conlon worked most of his life as a newspaper proofreader, but he spent his summers from 1904 to 1942 as the pre-eminent photographer of baseball. His portraits of players appeared year after year in The Spalding Base Ball Guide, Sporting News, and elsewhere, and several of his pictures, such as one of Ty Cobb making a vicious, dirt-spattering slide into third base, are familiar but anonymous masterpieces. Conlon’s finest art lay in his still portraits of players standing around the field, looking like dirty farm boys. There is so much waiting in baseball, and he exploited this for beautiful studies of Honus Wagner’s strong, grimy hands gripping a bat and of the umpire Silk O’Loughlin solemnly demonstrating his (now universal) “safe” call. His portrait of a pouty Babe Ruth seems a commentary on the game’s pressures until you realize he’s just waiting to get back to the gum wad stuck on his cap.
The publisher has made an elegant art book out of these revelatory baseball pictures; the 1913 series showing Eddie Cicotte’s right hand in its knuckler pose around a baseball belongs in the Museum of Modern Art as much as does any photograph of French peasants.
Bible for Bridges
Landmark American Bridges
by Eric DeLony, Little Brown, 152 pages
This book is both a visual delight, with photographs of some ninety great American bridges, many of them in color, and a trove of economically presented information, and it can serve equally well as a coffee-table picture book and as a serious desktop reference. The author, Eric DeLony, is the chief of the Historic American Engineering Record, an organization founded in 1969 to document America’s industrial and engineering heritage, and he is one of the nation’s leading experts on bridge history. He has arranged his selection chronologically, beginning with a 1764 stone bridge in Ipswich, Massachusetts, and finishing with the VerrazanoNarrows bridge in New York. The spans described and shown in between, and the short introductions and timelines for the five chapters they fall into, combine to tell the whole story of the development of bridges in America, from wood and stone through iron to steel and concrete. If you find bridges beautiful or historically fascinating or both, this book is a pleasure.
Why the Soviet Union Died
The Ghost of the Executed Engineer
by Loren R. Graham, Harvard University Press, 128 pages
This is not a book about American history by any definition; it is about Russian history. But the story it concisely tells throws such sharp light on a main event of this century—the fall of the Soviet Union—that the editors recommend it unhesitatingly. The ghost of the title is that of Peter Palchinsky, a prominent civil engineer who, advising on some of the Soviet Union’s biggest early industrialization projects, lobbied hard for balanced, thorough study of all the economic and human costs of each undertaking and alternative ways of doing it. The Party simply wanted its illconceived, grandiose orders followed, its five-year plans carried out at any price. “More than a little irony exists in the professional engineer’s call for attention to human needs over technology while the Party leader emphasized technology over all else,” observes the author, a professor of the history of science at MIT. In 1928 Palchinsky was seized from his home and executed. Soon engineers no longer felt any freedom to criticize or even adequately study projects that the state ordered. Graham shows how their pervasive fear helped gradually reduce the most rapidly industrializing nation in the world into a paralyzed, impoverished monster that by the 1980s could have no idea how even to deal with freedom and real opportunity when they finally came. The story is as gripping as it is tragic and important.
RECORDINGS
A Pick of Rags
That Demon Rag! American Popular Music from the Ragtime Era
For nearly a decade now, the twelvemember Paragon Ragtime Orchestra has been touring the country in the ghostly footsteps of the thousands of “theater orchestras” that once played in every hotel, vaudeville hall, and fair-sized restaurant. Few of them can have played with more bite and sparkle than the Paragon. Ragtime has been called the folk music of the American city (although, unlike the jazz that supplanted it, it was always a written music), and indeed, there is a sense of urban hurry to these numbers; the bright clamor of, say, “That Hindu Rag,” is full of that confident turnof-the-century energy that is usually characterized as “—optimistic.” One can sense our modern cities rising to the canny swagger of these tunes, just as one hears our own era taking shape in the years that pass between Arthur Pryor’s ebullient “Cakewalk Contest” of 1899 and Jerome Kern’s ravishing 1914 “They Didn’t Believe Me.” And it’s a pleasant surprise to discover the ubiquitous “Melancholy Baby” scrubbed clean of sixty years of nightclub smoke, making her debut in a winsome 1912 two-step.
How Long Blues
The Blues: A Smithsonian Collection of Classic Blues Singers
four CDs, four cassettes
This is a satisfying survey of classic blues, that immense body of American music grown on the skeleton of a simple, repeating twelve-bar harmonic scheme. Listen to it straight through, and you’ll hear the acoustic picking of Blind Lemon Jefferson give way to Walter (“Furry”) Lewis’s bottleneck effects, then the addition of trumpets, banjos, harmonica, and stride piano, until, toward the end, Muddy Waters’s early electric plays over a ticky-tacky drumbeat on “Louisiana Blues” in 1950. Some major artists (Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson) may seem underrepresented, but breadth is the thing here, and their recordings are very widely available. Here you will find, for instance, Sara Martin singing “Death Sting Me Blues”—”an example of the second-rate singer who occasionally produces a masterpiece,” according to the thorough and respectful notes that accompany the recording—and Blind Willie Johnson’s 1927 “Dark Was the Night,” a wordless chant that sounds like a spiritual hummed over a sitar.
The American Piano
The American Romantic
Alan Feinberg, piano, Argo 430 330-2 (one CD)
The American Virtuoso
Alan Feinberg, piano, Argo 436 121-2 (one CD)
The American Innovator
Alan Feinberg, piano, Argo 436 925-2 (one CD)
If the long, broad legacy of American piano music doesn’t have much of a public audience, it’s partly because this country long seemed a concert-music backwater far from the European mainstream in which the instrument arose. The pianist Alan Feinberg has been exploring this backwater, finding it a rich, complex ecosystem of its own, and recording his discoveries on CDs—three of them so far—filled with surprises. The first, titled The American Romantic, offers the works of three prominent composer-pianists of three separate eras: the New Orleans-born matinee idol Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-69), portraying now the delicacy of falling leaves and next the splash of dazzling variations on “God Save the Queen”; America’s first woman symphonist, Amy Beach (1867-1944), offering hushed late-Romantic intimacy; and Robert Helps (b. 1928), a New Jersey native whose brief pieces engage in a kind of musical dialogue with the European Romantic past. The second CD, The American Virtuoso, highlights six masters of keyboard display from Gottschalk through Gershwin; its pleasures include the former’s Civil War rouser “The Union,” the latter’s “The Man I Love,” taken to the pianistic hilt in an arrangement by Gershwin’s contemporary Percy Grainger, and two glittering, sentimental turn-of-the-century showpieces by Edward MacDowell. The third CD, The American Innovator, turns to Americans who have taken the piano to new frontiers, and it is filled with wonders. Henry Cowell, around 1923, has the performer strum the piano’s strings to eerie effect in “The Aeolian Harp”; Ruth Crawford Seeger, in 1930, has him pound out a jagged succession of octaves in a brisk, harsh number without bar lines; John Cage, in 1940, makes the piano into a one-man percussion band with a surprisingly exhilarating sound. The album ends with Thelonious Monk’s “Ruby My Dear,” transcribed to follow one of the many ways he performed it, and after all the variety preceding it, this step into pure jazz seems nowhere out of place.
A New Magazine
The Armchair Historian
One year (six issues)
A welcome newcomer to the small firmament of popular magazines devoted to history, this trim, goodlooking bimonthly published in Chicago compresses a great deal of interesting material into a thirtytwo-page compass. Among the offerings in the first issue is a review of Patrick O’Brian’s superb—and superbly accurate—novels of British sea life in Nelson’s day by John Lehman, who, as a former Secretary of the Navy, knows something about maritime concerns. The second issue looks at subjects as diverse as the Islamic revolution, American shortcomings at the Yalta Conference, and Ted Turner’s epic movie about the Battle of Gettysburg. This last, by the way, draws pretty high marks from so knowledgeable an observer as Shelby Foote, who was impressed by Martin Sheen’s portrayal of Lee (“It was a very daring performance. … Sheen managed to communicate that he was somewhat off-balance, nervous, that he was caught in the fly-paper”) and Tom Berenger as Longstreet (although “I wish I could have given him fifty dollars and told him to go buy himself a better beard”).
Jazz Master
Thirteen Pictures: The Charles Mingus Anthology
Rhino Records R2 71402 (two CDs)
The composer and bassist Charles Mingus, who died in 1979, was something of a lone giant on the landscape of jazz. He came of age in the swing era but emerged from it a relentless, uncompromising innovator who never ceased surprising with his brilliant, dense, rugged music. This collection of recordings from between 1952 and 1978 offers an excellent survey of the wide range of his creativity. He improvises alone at the piano with quiet lyricism, leads small groups that stretch blues, soul, and gospel materials in new directions, and plays elaborate extended works up to twenty-seven minutes long with as many as two dozen other musicians and instruments as diverse as contrabass clarinet, piccolo, cello, and oboe. The masterpieces here include “Meditations on Integration,” “Pithecanthropus Erectus,” and “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat.” As they amply demonstrate, he often took great risks in trying to combine large-scale structure with improvisatorial freedom for his players, but never without extraordinary energy and comrhand and intelligence. He made jazz sway and stomp with a ragged complexity unlike anyone before or since.
BOOKS
History of Trains
The American Railroad Freight Car: From the Wood-Car Era to the Coming of Steel
by John H. White, Jr., Johns Hopkins University Press, 644 pages
This extraordinarily comprehensive tome is for anyone who lived through the glory days of rail freight or simply wants to know more about it. For instance, White delves into the bizarre world of freight classification, where different goods were assessed different fees for the most arbitrary of reasons. This system eventually got so complicated that there were listings for such arcana as slippery elm bark and yak fat. After minutely describing the business aspects of a freight line and the life of its workers, the book goes even deeper into detail about particular types of specialized cars: eight-wheel gondolas and hoppers, refrigerators, livestock cars, as well as the familiar caboose. The technology of the cars receives similarly exhaustive treatment: thirty-seven pages on couplers and draft gears, for example.
White, who recently retired as curator of transportation at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, has written a book that while eminently readable will also serve as a standard reference for decades. Whenever his successors need to know something about freight cars, White’s book will likely be the first place they turn. The same should be true for anyone interested in how a growing America was powered, built, and fed.
Where Slaves Lived
Back of the Big House The Architecture of Plantation Slavery
by John Michael Vlach, University of North Carolina Press, 258 pages
John Vlach, an anthropologist at George Washington University, has assembled some two hundred pictures of leftover plantation cabins, kitchens, and other outbuildings, most of them taken during the Depression, to create a kind of ghost town of American slavery. His subject is not only these plain yet significant structures but how they functioned. He takes a careful inventory of the typical number and size of all the buildings that made up a plantation except the main house: stables, cabins, spinning or weaving houses, tobacco and cotton presses, rice mills. He draws on 1930s Federal Writers’ Project interviews with former slaves to help explain what’s in the pictures. The small grim slave cabins and floor plans appear neutrally, like exhibits, yet the considerable pride slaves took in the world they had made shines through. As an aggrieved group of South Carolina freedmen wrote to President Andrew Johnson just after the war, asking for their former master’s property, “This is our home. We have made these lands what they are.”
Civil War Art
Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: The Civil War in Art
by Harold Holzer and Mark E. Neely, Jr., Orion Books, 336 pages
What happens when you take hundreds of artists, from the most mediocre to Winslow Homer, train them in a tradition of military art that prizes the grand and the heroic, and then send them out to paint an often harrowingly ugly, brutal war between brothers? That, in effect, is the question asked by this collaboration by two leading Lincoln scholars, one of them a Pulitzer Prize winner. They have amassed and reproduced in color some 280 paintings of the war; they write in their introduction that “we considered them as part of a great effort to comprehend the Civil War, and the opportunity for comparison offered by this approach revealed meanings in the works about which we had never before read.”
The authors arranged the paintings not chronologically but by categories—landscape art, marine art, cycloramas, home-front scenes, art about blacks, and more—with essays on each variety. The result is not only a handsome volume and authoritative collection of images but also an enlightening study of how the war changed art and art changed the perception of war.
Ursine Anniversary
Smokey Is Fifty
Smokey the Bear’s fiftieth year as an American icon is being marked with an exhibit that was launched in February 1994 at Atlanta’s Fernbank Museum of Natural History and that will travel to a number of cities before ending up in August at a gala one-day birthday party in Washington, D.C. Even before the bear ambled onto the scene to remind us that “only you can prevent forest fires,” the Forest Service knew that nine out of ten of all the fires destroying millions of acres of forest and rangeland (thirty million in 1941 alone) were caused by humans—both criminal and careless. But it wasn’t until 1942, when a Japanese submarine managed to land shells near a California forest, that a sense of urgency about protecting needed resources brought the Wartime Advertising Council to plan a safety campaign. The first Smokey was unveiled on August 2, 1944, the work of a well-known illustrator, Albert Stachle. His instructions were: The bear should be black or brown, with an intelligent, appealing, and slightly quizzical expression. Also, he must wear the traditional forest ranger’s hat. A bear by committee, perhaps, but Stachle fulfilled his mission admirably, and thanks to an ad campaign born in the flames of war, that serious but kindly face has enthralled generations of children and brought them to treasure the natural landscape.
Her Lost City
New Orleans in the Twenties
by Mary Lou Widmer, Pelican Publishing, 207pages
Mary Lou Widmer has already written entertaining histories of the Crescent City in the 1930s, —40s, and —50s. In those she mixed stories from her own life in New Orleans with details of the city’s coming of age; a photograph of her high school prom might appear near a picture of a 1940s Mardi Gras. Having now used up much of her own experience, she fills out New Orleans in the Twenties with earlier family lore. It is an amble through a town in which some streets were still paved with ballast blocks from European ships and the average per capita income was $131. Top-hatted chimney sweeps roamed the city, shouting, “Ramoner la cheminée!, ” while King Oliver and Louis Armstrong invented a new kind of music. The town was awash in geniuses, charlatans, and bathtub gin. Widmer profiles the great saloons that became “restaurants” during Prohibition, including Tom Anderson’s and Lamothe’s. The Anheuser-Busch Brewery got through by converting to ice-cream production.
The first chapter begins with a picture of Audubon Park opposite one of Widmer’s mother’s wedding in 1924, and from there the private and public histories run parallel until the stock market crash at the end. Widmer, who is also a romance novelist, covers it all in cogent, conversational style, as if she had meant to tell a good family story and wound up dreaming an entire city in the process.
Backroads
West of the Thirties: A Story of Discoveries
by Edward T. Hall, Doubleday, 182 pages
In a most agreeable memoir Edward Hall, an anthropologist now entering his eighties, looks back to his days as a very young man employed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs on a New Deal project in Arizona’s Navaho and Hopi lands. “I lived in a country within a country,” Hall recalls, “a place where the trappings of modernity were barely visible.” Hall’s job was to oversee crews of Indians as they blasted rock and laid roads and generally worked to improve government lands; he was providing employment in “the least known, least visited, and least understood part of the United States.” Sixty years later he sets down his memories as freshly as if he were just venturing forth on that journey. Of the Navahos he writes, “I know truly, though inadvertently, that they sang me into being.”
American Landscape
Tallgrass Prairie
text by John Madson, photographs by Frank Oberle, Falcon Press, 112 pages
With its large format and spectacular color photographs, this volume surrounds the reader with the richly distilled essence of surviving prairie land. As John Sawhill, the Nature Conservancy’s president, notes in his foreword, this is a subtle tapestry; lacking the drama of mountain, desert, or crashing waves, the prairie has nonetheless firmly established its grip on the American imagination. Today, Sawhill writes, the prairie we can still see evokes “an idealized vision of a landscape as perfectly empty and impressive as it was when the first settlers pushed their way out of the great Eastern forest and onto the plains.” On every page of this book and in every season the prairie shows why its image endures, perhaps nowhere more impressively than in fulland double-page photographs of southwestern Missouri’s Coyne prairie, as early summer phlox, paintbrush, and lousewort flame from its tangled grasses. This land, a caption notes, “is the rarest of the rare”—privately owned since 1886 and never once plowed. Except in pictures, this private patch will keep its own secrets, but for “addicted prairie hunters,” as the author calls them, the volume offers an excellent resource in a directory of sixty-seven tallgrass prairie sites in fourteen states- some hardy survivors, some careful restorations. Most of these are open to visitors, those heirs of the first pioneers who yearn to stride waist-deep and pleasantly lost in their landscape legacy.
A Gotham Glossary
The City in Slang: New York Life and Popular Speech
by Irving Lewis Alien, Oxford University Press, 307 pages
Before half the country moved to the suburbs, the great engine of slang creation was the American city, especially New York. So argues the sociologist Irving Lewis Alien in his history of our street talk. Slang dictionaries over the years have presented popular speech alphabetically; this book is organized around themes that cover the urbanizing years from 1850 to 1950. Speakeasy, for instance, appears in an overall chapter on “The Sporting Life,” along with derivations for taxi dancers and piker joints. There are sections full of terms for restaurants, tall buildings (cloud-supporter rightly lost out to skyscraper), mean streets, and social types, and lists of epithets the rich and the working class have had for each other, including dinner pailer and Fifth Avenoodles.
Some of the best old words have to do with bars: A growler was a two-quart can of beer taken out. Young boys and girls were hired by saloons to “rush the growler” or “chase the can” to the customer ordering from home. The book ends with a discussion of modern suburbia. “—Urban,—” Alien laments, “has emerged as a codeword” for “congestion, dirt, violence in the streets,” instead of mere vice, culture, and sophistication. It’s shorter on pungent words than H. L. Mencken’s classic dictionary, but The City in Slang is well worth having.
Not Kid Stuff
Gettysburg: An Interactive Battle Simulation
Swfte International, Ltd. Requires Windows
Two of us sat down at a computer expecting to play an explosive video game exploiting the three momentous days at Gettysburg. What we got instead was a highly involved, even scholarly, computer re-enactment.
The battle can be played out multiple ways: Both sides as they actually fought, with progress reports on casualties, retreats, how many stationed on high ground or in woods; or, you can assume Meade’s command while Lee’s strategy remains faithful or vice versa. Two players cannot battle each other, since the purpose of the game is historical. Lee’s second-guessers should take charge of this Army of Northern Virginia in order to appreciate his skimpy options. We tried dividing Lee’s force on the first day of fighting, instead of advancing, but to disastrous results. Less dramatic fine tuning is also possible. You can change the marching orders of Baxter’s brigade at 12:45 P.M., for example, and otherwise leave the original strategy intact.
By video-game standards the graphics are unspectacular: each brigade gets a square icon, and yellow lines denote marching orders. Engaged troops are surrounded by an orange glow. And of course the flesh-and-blood generals might not hold to their basic strategies against your departures as the computer program insists. We did, however, learn something interesting about American history from just an hour of role-playing as General Lee. Civil War buffs may at last be able to take Cemetery Ridge or hold back Pickett from charging, just as they always wanted.
Deco All Over
Rediscovering Art Deco U.S.A.: A Nationwide Tour of Architectural Delights
by Barbara Capitman, Michael Kinerk, and Dennis Wilhelm, photographs by Randy juster, Viking Studio Books, 224 pages
Anyone for whom Art Deco suggests only brawny civic sculptures or post office murals entitled Progress will be surprised by this photographic survey of great surviving works from the American Deco movement. The photographer Randy Juster has sought out Art Deco structures around the country for almost twenty years, and his catalogue includes shrouded granite commodities traders, neon diners, movie palaces, stepped skyscrapers, Pueblo Deco from the Southwest, and a liner-shaped Coke bottling plant. Barbara Capitman, who died in 1990, was a founder of the Miami Beach Art Deco Historic District in the 1980s, and she also toured the country in search of Deco worth saving. That trip led to this charming book project. Deco, writes Juster in his preface, was “often innovative, but rarely revolutionary,” which may partly explain why it was embraced nationwide. The book is divided into chapter cities, and among its less famous highlights are the Kansas City Power Sc Light building, with a glowing, prismatic top, and the elegantly spare Tulsa Union Depot.
