The Real Dr. King

Richard Lischer, Professor of Homiletics at the Divinity School of Duke University, argues in this excellent study of Martin Luther King Jr.’s rhetoric that once the civil rights leader became generally admired by both black and white Americans, his followers softened many of his published sermons, editing out his less universal references and less harmonious moments on the pulpit to fit the image of the preacher of Gandhian love. A vital part of him was lost in the process, contends Lischer, who began the project after a student told him she found the great orator’s words “pretty dry” reading. Lischer was puzzled and was moved to use audiotapes to correct the sanitized transcripts and to analyze King in his full, heated eloquence. “As no preacher in the twentieth century and no politician since Lincoln,” he writes, ” [King] transposed the Judeo-Christian themes of love, suffering, deliverance, and justice from the sacred shelter of the pulpit into the arena of public policy.”

The King Lischer found worked with about a hundred set pieces, which he inserted into whatever sermon he was giving as his feeling dictated. His famous “I Have a Dream” sequence, which grew partly from a SNCC volunteer’s prayer and which King had previously delivered in Detroit, was not even written into the original draft of his speech at the Lincoln Memorial. In King’s hands Sheriff Bull Connor became “pharaoh” as he elevated local conflicts and expanded the movement, and “ordinary Southern towns became theaters of divine revelation.” Lischer’s researches result in a kind of biography of King’s political vision. “Not only his admirers but even his most adamant critics have not fathomed the depths of his militancy,” he writes. But in the end King, disappointed by white America and not ready to go over to the black-power movement, at last fell back on the religion that had made him who he was.

How We Got So Clean

Unlike other American obsessions—with violence, or race, or celebrity—the national preoccupation with cleanliness has brought true benefits and set a standard for therest of the world. Suellen Hoy’s book is a history of American social progress, especially since the Civil War, which for her purposes is the Dark Ages.

European visitors to the antebellum Midwest saw mud and flies and tobacco spitting everywhere and clean water almost nowhere. Even in the established Eastern city of Philadelphia, at the time of the Revolution, thirty thousand people shared 120 public wells. Before 1850, writes Hoy, “more than four out of five Americans lived in preindustrial, hygienically primitive situations on small farms or in country villages.” Cholera epidemics prompted water-system reforms in the big cities; changes in domestic and personal habits took longer. The important part was convincing average Americans that cleaner was better, and much of Hoy’s book chronicles efforts to get the message out, from Mrs. Beecher’s advice in the 1840s through Sylvester Graham’s model of clean living in the decades after. The following advertisement appeared in a 1920s magazine directed at social workers: “Mrs. Rizzuto would like to live up to our standards of cleanliness. But her methods are so primitive, so ineffective. She’s sadly in need of coaching on American ways of keeping house. And when you’re teaching her, suggest Fels-Naptha Soap.”

After World War II the national pursuit reached its frenzied height. The boom in household appliances caused a near tripling in electricity use, and advertising expenditures doubled, focused on an eager new target—the American housewife. Americans were using more water in their new homes with “more bathrooms per family than any other nation on earth.” It was a long way from muddy frontier days.

Mental Illness Through the Years

In 1865 a New York newspaper reported patients at New York City Lunatic Asylum “tripping the light fantastic toe” during a “lunatic ball,” a common activity in the more enlightened institutions of the nineteenth century. These surreal dancing parties were just one of many experiments in the uncertain, sometimes harrowing history of America’s treatment of mental illness that the authors of Madness in America, Lynn Gamwell and Nancy Tomes, have compiled in a grimly fascinating account. The early medical community, guided partly by the Enlightenment belief that a loss of reason equaled a loss of humanity, treated patients by subjecting them to physical abuse and displaying them in cages. Later on such harsh methods became rarer, but developing scientific theories were so riddled with social prejudices and halfformed ideas about evolution that they caused their own kinds of damage. An 1840 census, for example, found many insane blacks in the North but none in the South—clear evidence, pro-slavery advocates argued, that blacks could not function as free people. We gained the terms highbrow and lowbrow from the theory that base and unstable instincts “were apparent in [the] sloping forehead, or low brow” of non-Caucasians. Class biases thrived in asylums where the working classes labored while their wealthier counterparts were pampered, and gender biases were rampant, such as the theory that hysteria was an inherently female condition. Until ideas about the forces of the unconscious mind slowly emerged, in the late 1800s, the distortions of the sane world reflected themselves exactly in the worlds of the mentally ill.

The case histories and illustrations (many previously unpublished) that flesh out the text could form their own compelling book. They include ads for electric corsets to cure hysteria, a sheet-music cover for “Maniac Waltzes,” and a collection of keys made by would-be escapees. One patient’s haunting maps of his mental travels are reproduced, as is “landscape money” by the painter Ralph Blakelock, who suffered a nervous breakdown because of financial trouble and thereafter always carried a wad of bills that were actually landscapes painted on currencysized cloth. All are telling examples of the struggle to understand a world of illnesses still revealing itself today.

Was Revolution Inevitable?

The “long fuse” the British writer Don Cook refers to is the Seven Years’ War between Britain and France, a conflict that kept the English monarchy from focusing too hard on its American colonies. When it was over, in 1763, the crown departed from Sir Robert Walpole’s policy of “salutary neglect” and initiated a series of measures intended to maximize the colonies’ earning potential for the Empire. The Americans, who had grown used to semiautonomy while the great European powers battled, saw the new taxes as an assault on their New World freedoms. With help from King George III, Cook argues, the European struggle “laid the long fuse that would eventually splutter into revolution.”

This is a fresh way to look at the American story: Why didn’t we go the quiet way of Canada? Among other things, Cook blames the king’s overmanagement: George dated his memorandums by the hour, and his collected papers run to six large volumes. “The governing minds of England,” Cook writes, “could not understand how Americans, largely of English stock and professing loyalty to King George, had become a different people, how the very vastness of America was shaping the politics of independence and a new nation.” Instead England introduced an increasing number of taxes to support a standing army that grew from five hundred redcoats in the early 1750s to ten thousand only ten years later. From the Stamp Act of 1765 to the Battle of Yorktown, Cook asserts, the king refused “all thoughts of conciliation or compromise with the colonies.” Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Amherst, who captured Louisbourg in 1758, typified the official British view of the colonists in his diary: “They are sufficient to work our boats, drive our waggons, to fell trees and do work that in inhabited countries are performed by peasants. If left to themselves they would eat fryed pork and lay in their tents all day.”

Something urged the Americans out of their tents and into open revolt against the most powerful nation in the world. Cook argues that while the colonists derived new independence from their wilderness, the British did everything they could to ruin a good thing.

Shame and Bravery

If only important times could always inspire social histories as fine as this one. The authors begin with the infamously abrupt collapse of the Third Republic and the four-year occupation, following with tempered admiration de Gaulle’s exile activities in England and Algeria while the American government tries to sort out which of the French commanders to recognize.

Small bronze plaques today mark spots around the city where nearly three thousand Parisians fell in street battles in the occupation’s last days. Most of this lucid book is about Paris’s swift return to itself after the liberation. As soon as the Germans and Americans were gone, and despite the wreckage and poverty all around, the city was once again a cultural and intellectual world capital (one of the first monuments liberated, in fact, was the Comédie-Française, where the young Yves Montand stood sentry). From Vichy and the shelling of the Hôtel de Ville to the rise of existentialist philosophy was but a couple of years’ work. With the liberation, the authors point out, and with the second, economic “liberation” in 1947 by the Marshall Plan, came the beginnings of the modern French “lovehate relationship with the United States,” which has continued, hot and cold, ever since, like a “recurring fever.” The authors also expertly show how “the shame of Vichy” led some of the young of the next generation to hard Stalinist convictions. Anything but apathy again.

One Barber’s Story

Pasquale Spagnuolo, a native of Italy who spent fifty-five years grooming the likes of Johnny Carson, Winston Churchill, and James Thurber in his shop on West Forty-third Street in New York City, gives an endearing glimpse into the proud and meticulous world of the immigrant barber. When his wife, Connie, became ill, he writes, “to occupy my time and not feel sorry for myself, I wrote this book, after jotting down notes for more than twenty years.” In it, he tells all the most amusing tales of his career.

“Henrik Van Loon was a writer and historian who wrote from the late 1920s until his death in 1944. He was a big man, about six foot six and 300 pounds. He was addicted to a tickling sensation on his nose from my vibrator during a facial massage, which made him sneeze. … When he sneezed, it thundered the shop.” The author provides the steps for honing razors and for giving proper facials, reveals his advertising secrets (personalized letters inviting in new kids on the block), and finally, his Golden Rules for Serving the Public. Number thirteen: “If a client keeps his sideburns straight, always has a close shave, or keeps his mustache trimmed, compliment him, telling him that very few clients do that. Everyone likes to be praised. If he needs your suggestions, offer them. You will find that the client will have more confidence in you. …” One Barber’s Story cheerfully encapsulates the vanishing world of a loyal attendant and a great shave.

MAGAZINE

A State’s Magazine

Don’t expect to see much editorial space eaten up by debates over the etymology of Hoosier in this journal. The magazine’s subject is largely Indiana’s underreported artistic heritage. A recent issue contained an elegant essay about censorship, libraries, and the written word, by William Styron, whose first novel was published, minus some controversial language, by the Indiana firm of Bobbs-Merrill. There is an accompanying profile of his editor Hiram Hayden, a Midwesterner who left what he called the “flatland of bigotry and nasal infelicity” only to devote his professional life to the Indiana publisher, for whom he secured the young Styron’s manuscript with a hundred-dollar advance. Other issues have featured the accomplished Hoosiers Hoagy Carmichael and Joseph Moore Bowles, founder of the nineteenth-century magazine Modern Art. Articles on Indiana sculpture, the state’s wonderful hickory furniture, and its impressive arts-and-crafts movement have filled in much that we didn’t know. The magazine’s design is sleekly imaginative, its stories told with intelligence and verve.

IN THIS ISSUE

The story of shanghaiing days, evoked so frighteningly in David Neal Keller’s article, sadly has almost no available literature. For a full account of the rest of a nineteenth-century sailor’s life, though, try Rites & Passages: The Experience of American Whaling, 1830–1870, by Margaret Creighton (Cambridge, 520 pages). It draws heavily on the surviving journals of sailors and makes a convincing case that the life could be miserable even for those who volunteered. Geoffrey C. Ward’s September “Life and Times” column is about the men who conspired to loose the apocalyptic zealot John Brown on the world at Harpers Ferry, as described in a first-rate new history, The Secret Six: The True Tale of the Men Who Conspired With John Brown, by Edward J. Renehan, Jr. (Crown, 302 pages).

Laugh Tracks

The vast bulk of this very generous collection of American funny business comes from the last forty years or so, but some of it is positively creaky. Thomas Edison’s favorite comedian, Cal Stewart, plays a rube who describes getting a haircut in New York, recorded in 1915; Barney Bernard does “Cohen at the Telephone” a year later, a relentless carnival of mishearing and misunderstanding; Moran & Mack show where the creators of “Amos ’n’ Andy” got their idea; Smith & Dale do a “Dr. Kronkite and His Only Living Patient” routine that they first performed in 1908. Comedy that old is mysteriously fascinating to hear, if only for its confirmation of the amazing perishability of humor. The newer stuff that takes up most of these sides comes from a panorama of familiar names like Abbott and Costello, W. C. Fields, Bob and Ray, Tom Lehrer, Bob Hope, Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Dick Gregory, Henny Youngman, Phyllis Diller, Bill Cosby, Cheech and Chong, Steve Martin, Richard Pryor… . Go ahead. Laugh.