Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs of World War II in the Pacific
by Gavan Daws, “William Morrow and Company, 448 pages.
“Asia under the Japanese was a charnel house of atrocities,” writes Gavan Daws in this strong, somber, important book. “POWs, civilian internees, and Asian natives starved, beaten, tortured, shot, beheaded. The water cure. Electric shock. Vivisection. Cannibalism. Men strung up over open flames or coiled in barbed wire and rolled along the ground. . . .” We in our time are far more familiar with Germany’s wartime misdeeds than with those of Japan. Part of this is because of postwar politics, when we were helping the country become our bulwark against communism in Asia, and partly, perhaps, it is because America brought the war to an end with a weapon that raised powerful moral questions of its own. But the result was that the 140,000 Allied prisoners, victims of systematized racism second only to what the Jews suffered under Hitler, had no official history written about them. Daws has tried to redress that with his compelling study, and since the heart of his narrative is the tales of the prisoners themselves, the work has drama and immediacy. He brings a muted fervor to his tale (he notes with quiet irony that no POW in Asia has ever gotten reparations for his sufferings, while our government has made available twenty thousand dollars for every Japanese-American citizen who was interned), and it is often hard, heartbreaking reading. But you might want to bear with it. After all, Japanese prison camps killed more than ten thousand Americans, and this book, so far, is their only memorial.
A Long Shadow
George Wallace American Populist
by Stephan Lesher, AddisonWesley, 587 pages.
In the late 1960s George Wallace toured the country calling for death to draft dodgers and a return to unfettered States’ Rights, whipping up working-class anger. Stephan Lesher covered him for Newsweek, and in this fascinating biography he describes how the infamoi firebrand from Alabama became one of the most influential national political figures of his time. His five million votes made Wallace the spoiler in the 1968 presidential election, but his greatest importance is measured in the number of outsider candidates since who’ve adopted much of his program in softer tones. Lesher contends that every successful presidential candidate from Nixon to Clinton has borrowed from Wallace’s playbook: Jimmy Carter’s anti-Establishment run for the White House in 1976, for instance, or Reagan’s call for downsizing and local control. The disaffection that powered Ross Perot’s expensive third-party candidacy was identified by the Wallace operation some twenty-five years before, when the governor tapped “a new, xenophobic political consensus among Americans who chauvinistically venerated their nation while fearing and resenting the institutions governing it.”
War Bards
The Columbia Book of Civil War Poetry From Whitman to Walcott
edited by Richard Marius, Columbia University Press, 543 pages.
Richard Marius, a fine novelist and essayist, has drawn on both those skills to assemble this uncommonly good—and uncommonly good-looking—anthology. The poems, by writers ranging from John Greenleaf Whittier to John Updike, have clearly been assembled by a good storyteller; there is an actual narrative momentum to the book, although it also rewards the reader who wishes to sample it at random. Walt Whitman is here, of course, represented perhaps most strikingly by “The Artilleryman’s Vision,” of which Marius says, “Probably no better description of combat emerged from the Civil War.” Ambrose Bierce, who was in the grimmest of the fighting, writes in a moving combination of bitterness and respect on the death of Ulysses Grant; Innes Randolph muses on the three hundred thousand Federal soldiers killed: “They died of Southern fever/And Southern steel and shot;/I wish it was three millions/Instead of what we got.”
The poems are complemented with a wellchosen selection of contemporary photographs and annotations that are succinct, illuminating, and tough-minded. Of a Melville ode on Lincoln’s death, for instance, Marius writes: “A poem promising vengeance against the South. Southern apologists later made much of such sentiments. In reality the South was treated as leniently as any conquered people had been treated in the history of the world.”
The People’s Dollhouse
The White House in Miniature
by Gau Ruckland, photographs by Kathleen Culbert-Aguilar, W. W. Norton, 203 pages
John and Jan Zweifel’s twenty-by-sixty-foot model of the President’s house has charmed more than forty million Americans on its travels around the country, and it makes a weirdly absorbing subject for a coffee table book. There is somethin hypnotic about the Zweifels’ tiny halls of power, a convincing enough national symbol that Dutch terrorists attacked it with axes and pair when the exhibit visited Holland in 1982.
Gerald Ford made the Zweifels’ dream possible by allowing the couple inside to measure White House rooms in 1975, and since then they have kept up with every decorating change. One section of the book shows nine scale versions of the Oval Office, containing Abraham Lincoln’s case of worn books, Lyndon Johnson’s three televisions for simultaneous news broadcasts, and Richard Nixon’s matching yellow drapes and armchairs. The White House library is fully stocked; the state rooms’ wood floors gleam or bear woven Oriental rugs the size of .45 records. The grounds have posted guards and bubbling fountains and a Rose Garden with garnish-size shrubbery. In case the pictures in this terrific book make you want to see the actual model, its permanent home is at the House of Presidents in Clermont, Florida.
IN THIS ISSUE
Shirlee Taylor Haizlip’s article “Passing” reports on the outpouring of letters and calls she has received from readers of her book The Sweeter the Juice: A Family Memoir in Black and White (Simon & Schuster, 271 pages). That response testifies to the volume’s fascination and power. It is a gripping exploration of the phenomenon of “passing” as illustrated by her discovery of its devastating effects within her own family.
The work of the Herter Brothers—those master craftsmen, decorators, and cabinetmakers to the latenineteenth-century elite—is the subject of a handsome picture history from Harry N. Abrams Publishers and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston: Herter Brothers: Furniture and Interiors for a Gilded Age, by Katherine S. Howe, Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, and Catherine Hoover Voorsanger (Abrams, 272 pages).
In this month’s “The Life and Times,” Geoffrey C. Ward recommends two recent books about Abraham Lincoln: Lincoln in American Memory, by Merrill D. Peterson (Oxford University Press, 496 pages), an engaging history of Lincoln’s changing treatment by his successive biographers, and The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America, by Mark Neely, Jr. (Harvard University Press, 207 pages), a model of scholarship and concision that takes Lincoln from humble birth to tragic death in just 207 pages.
The Art of Death
Soul in the Stone Cemetery Art From America’s Heartland
by John Gary Brown, University Press of Kansas, 246 pages.
The photographer John Gary Brown defines the heartland broadly enough to take in Colorado and even New Mexico in his surprising picture survey of cemetery art and sculpture. After Louis J. Baker, an apprentice stonecutter in Bedford, Indiana, was killed by lightning on his way home, his co-workers capped his grave with an exquisite limestone model of his workbench, down to chiseled nails, cloth, broom, tools, and a cornice he had been working on. In Nebraska City, Nebraska, the insurance salesman N. C. Harding and his family lie beneath a full-size marble replica of a rolltop desk that he designed for himself. And the monument built by John M. Davis in Hiawatha, Kansas, is even grander. It follows life-size likenesses of Davis and his wife from courtship through Mr. Davis’s accidental loss of a hand to a visit from the angel of death, and it ends with a bearded widower seated beside “The Vacant Chair.” The assemblage of sculptures cost Davis most of his fortune and took Italian carvers eight years to complete. At the close of this splendid book the author worries over the future of cemetery art, with sculpted “naked ladies and cowboy boot vases” definitely on the wane across America.
Atomic Words
The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes
edited by Arnold Rampersad; David Roessel, associate editor, Knopf, 576 pages.
“What is poetry?” Langston Hughes asked as an old man. “It is the human soul entire, squeezed like a lemon or a lime, drop by drop, into atomic words.” Not all of the 860 poems collected here fit that model of compression; many are dashed-off sketches or riffs, but they can make an evocative record of what was in the air at the time. Hughes’s work begins in the Jazz Age, takes up the radical styles of the thirties, joins in the revival of patriotism of World War II, and ends in the triumph of the civil rights movement. It can be strong or silly, bluesy or strident, rhapsodie or childlike. The book starts with “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” the poem with which Hughes announced himself in 1921, when he was nineteen.
That year he went to New York, whose after-hours world inspired an aesthetic he would use through much of his life: “EVERYBODY/ Halfpint,— / Gin? / No, make it / LOVES MY BABY / corn. You like / liquor, / don’t you, honey? / BUT MY BABY / Sure, Kiss me, / DON’T LOVE NOBODY / daddy. / BUT ME . . .”
Everything Hughes did came out of passionate engagement. A first-rate collection of his work has long been overdue.
Revolutionary Confinement
Eastern State Penitentiary Crucible of Good Intentions
by Norman Johnston, with Kenneth Finkel and Jeffrey A. Cohen, University of Pennsylvania Press, 116 pages.
Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary began in 1821 as a revolutionary experiment in prison reform and ended in the 1970s as a dangerously crowded relic. When it first opened, it was the most influential prison in the country, holding 250 prisoners in solitary confinement under a house regimen of enforced individual reflection and religious instruction—a far cry from the harsh British corporal punishments of nonetoo-distant memory. Alexis de Tocqueville, in 1831, was intrigued by it; Charles Dickens, visiting ten years later, was not: “I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body. . . .”
In the long run the prison’s design proved more influential than its methods. Within its Gothic fortress walls, a huband-spoke layout allowed each prisoner a small exercise yard. Over the next century its radial plan was copied all over the world. But by 1900 the slightly enlarged Eastern State was squeezing nearly twelve hundred prisoners into 760 cells, and enforced solitude had given way to the massive crowding of the modern prison. The Eastern State Penitentiary was made a landmark in 1965, and this intriguing, illustrated account of its controversial history makes the case for the prison’s full restoration. The book accompanied an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1994.
Border Skirmish
Dan Stuart’s Fistic Carnival
by Leo N. Miletich, Texas A&M University Press, 240 pages
Texas was still a rough state in 1895, but it did not formally sanction prizefighting. Still, the Dallas sportsman Dan Stuart could not have known the crisis he would cause when he announced he would hold a bout between James J. Corbett and Bob Fitzsimmons for the world’s heavyweight championship. As a nod to the law, he advertised the match not as a fight but as a “fistic carnival.” The power struggle that followed, with Texas’s governor, Charles A. Culberson, makes terrific reading. The Dallas Pastors’ Association denounced the “brutalizing” event, and the governor threatened to shoot the “felons” who gathered to see it. Stuart considered moving his “exhibition” to Mexico or to the Indian Territory that would become Oklahoma. Corbett volunteered to paint himself red and wear feathers.
The October match was pushed back until February; Congress passed and President Cleveland signed legislation outlawing boxing in the territories; and a boxer named Peter M‰her stood in for Corbett, who retired from the ring in disgust. After the fight was rescheduled for El Paso and a sandstorm wiped out its chances there, Texas Rangers searched for Stuart’s secret next location, while President Porfirio D²az of Mexico ordered up the cavalry in case the carnival drifted south. At last Stuart settled on a large sandbar in the middle of the Rio Grande.
The fight itself was over in less than two minutes, but that’s only a coda to the saga. The El Paso writer Leo Miletich has uncovered a tragicomic story of frontier politics, business, and American sport, and he tells it with appropriate exuberance.
She Has Everything
Forever Barbie The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll
by M. G. Lord, William Morrow and Company, 326 pages.
From the day Barbie was created, her reign as the queen of dolls has been troubled and controversial, but she has always been popular. Ruth Handler, cofounder with her husband of Mattel Toys, found the inspiration for Barbie on a trip to Switzerland in the mid-fifties, when she saw a German-made doll named Lilli with the body of a pinup and icy-blonde looks. The Handlers transformed Lilli into a California girl and submitted her to a motivational researcher for a battery of marketing tests. Then Mattel unleashed her on America in 1959. She has never left.
Forever Barbie exhaustively documents Barbie’s life, starting in her made-in-Japan years, when women handsewed her tiny costumes, follows the countless changes in her wardrobe, and delves deep into her central paradox: She is a very sexual doll based on male fantasy ideals but created by a woman for girls. The combination has perplexed, excited, and angered generations of girls and women.
Barbie’s legacy, according to Lord: one Cindy Jackson, who spent fifty-five thousand dollars on cosmetic operations to turn herself into “a living doll"; Superstar, an eerie documentary about the anorectic entertainer Karen Carpenter that features a cast of Barbie dolls; and a flock of performers and artists who have used Barbie in their work. Forever Barbie is packed with photographs and always lively, if slightly overloaded with information and analysis. But then, this little plastic dynamo has always been good at getting attention.
RECORDINGS
A Father of Folk Music
Lead Belly’s Last Sessions
Smithsonian/Folkways 40068-71 (four CDs).
Huddie Ledbetter, a.k.a. Leadbelly, born in rural Louisiana in 1885, wellknown songster by the turn of the century, convicted murderer in 1918, discovery of the folklorist John Lomax in 1933, and frustrated would-be recording star from then until his death in 1949, sat down in the New York living room of the jazz scholar Frederic Ramsey, Jr., in the fall of 1948 and spun out several evenings of song and reminiscence, accompanied only by his twelve-string guitar. The result is a unique anthology of music that seemed archaic at the time but would fuel the folk and blues revivals of the following decades. He sang unaccompanied hollers and chants and field calls; he performed his signature tune, “Irene,” twice; “Rock Island Line,” which he had also introduced; “Midnight Special” and “Easy Rider"; the stirring “Titanic,” which he had sung decades before with Blind Lemon Jefferson ("Jack Johnson wanted to get on board, the captain he says I ain’t haulin’ no coal, fare thee, Titanic, fare thee well"); a raw, pre-pop-music “House of the Rising Sun"; and dozens of other songs sad, joyous, humorous, and angry. He did them all with unrelenting enthusiasm and intensity. The three evenings amount to both an invaluable historical document and a timeless musical one and now appear on CD for the first time.
The Tops of Pops
Louis Armstrong: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: 1923-1934
Columbia/Legacy C4K 57176 (four CDs).
A definitive collection of the greatest of all jazz musicians during his pathbreaking years: What more could you ask for? You could ask for notes that provide a closely observant, illuminating, entertaining guide to the eighty-one tracks, an expert lesson in their wonders, and that is what you get here, from the jazz scholar Dan Morgenstern and the saxophonist Loren Schoenberg. For instance, in “Big Butter and Egg Man,” Armstrong’s vocal “gives us a taste of his comédie acting of the day, in rather broad strokes. . . . But then, in one of those miraculous shifts of sensibility, he constructs a cornet chorus that is sublime, from the initial triple call through the supremely relaxed reinvention of the melody. (You can almost sense that young Lester Young . . . was hip to this solo.)” “Too Busy,” from 1928, “features one of the more inexplicable phenomena in the annals of recorded jazz, a singer who seems to have no talent whatsoever, yet is surrounded by some of the greatest musicians of all time. . . . The highlight: when [she] returns, Louis joins her in a vocal duet, scatting behind her imperturbably corny singing. It is a rare moment, and if anyone needs a definition of swing and the lack thereof, this is made to order.” If you love jazz at all or even are just curious, don’t miss this important exploration of one of its pinnacles.
VIDEOS
Basso Profundo
Paul Robeson
directed by Lloyd Richards, starring James Earl Jones, Kino Video, 118 minutes
Even before he gave Darth Vader his rumbling menace in the Star Wars films, James Earl Jones had one of the world’s most familiar voices. His great challenge in this one-man off-Broadway show was to use it to make his audience hear the even deeper and nearly as recognizable voice of Paul Robeson. He succeeded. Jones takes you on a fascinating twohour tour through an unparalleled life, telling the story of Robeson’s rise from perfect minister’s son to Rutgers’s first African-American football star, frustrated young lawyer, Broadway actor, singer, movie star, exile, worldrenowned concert singer, and civil rights advocate, a man repudiated for his opinions and accepted again only late in life. The script is full of his humor and articulate anger. It passes lightly over his Cold War defense of the Soviet Union, implying that in a kinder age he would have been entitled to even his most radically naive opinions.
The production is spare, filmed pretty much as audiences saw it almost twenty years ago. No one else can sing the way Robeson did, but Jones does very well.
Yiddish Primer
The Forward From Immigrants to Americans
directed by Marlene Booth, Direct Cinema, 58 mins.
Abraham Cahan arrived in the United States from Lithuania in 1 882, at the start of the wave of immigration that brought two and a half million Jews to America by 1925. The tens of thousands of Eastern European Jews crowding the East Side by the end of the century needed instruction in their new lives as Americans, and in 1897 Cahan founded a Yiddish daily paper, the Forward, to give it to them. He filled his newspaper with tabloid stories like “Half-Man, Half-Dog,” but he also explained canning, the fundamentals of baseball, and American hat styles. One interviewee in this fond, intelligent documentary recalls how his immigrant mother and grandmother learned from the Forward to accept a stranger’s “excuse me” when jostled in the street. Cahan also ran announcements of Socialist meetings, but they were less important to him than advice on basic citizenship. Besides, as he learned in four years spent away from the paper with the Sun and Commercial-Advertiser, manifestoes were not what sold newspapers. By the twenties, Cahan’s newspaper was the largest Yiddish daily in the world, with a circulation of 250,000. But the assimilation it had so strongly urged helped weaken its readership after World War II. This film was made to honor the Forward’s ninetieth birthday, in 1987. The paper is now a weekly with a loyal but elderly pool of readers; it is struggling toward its centenary admired but largely unread by the descendants of those for whom it was a guide.
Our Hallowed Ground
Last year, when protests from a. surprisingly effective group of historians and environmentalists discouraged the Disney Company from building a historical theme park near a former Civil War battlefield in Virginia’s Prince William County, the news made America’s front pages. For an organization called the Civil War Trust, though, that fight was only a skirmish in the larger campaign it has waged since 1991. Its members hope to buy up thousands of battlesite acres nationwide to save them from the bulldozer. The trust, an alliance of historians and business people, has already reclaimed fiftysix acres at Harpers Ferry’s Schoolhouse Ridge, where a housing development threatened to tar over the scene of Stonewall Jackson’s 1862 siege. It has also saved land at Mills Spring, Kentucky, at Missouri’s Westport Battlefield, and at Antietam.
The hardest work lies ahead. At the Wilderness, the Trust’s newsletter warns, a subdivision could soon rise on the battlefield’s most fiercely contested ground. A new highway is heading toward the Stones River, Tennessee, battlefield, and at Gettysburg a shopping mall may rise nearby as well as a “camping facility” right on the hallowed ground itself. To find out about becoming a charter member of the trust, write to the Civil War Trust, 1225 Eye Street NW, Washington, DC 20005, or call 800-298-7878. Members receive the organization’s quarterly watchdog publication, Civil War Landscape.
