Three Decades Ago This Magazine Launched a Durable American Trend
Over the years American Heritage has broken many stories of national importance. The purported pre-Columbian Vineland Map of North America, the case for Thomas Jefferson’s having fathered children with Sally Hemings, the Duke of Windsor’s pro-Nazi views, and FDR’s secret Oval Office tape recordings all were revealed in our pages first. But the American Heritage article with by far the greatest cultural impact was none of these. That distinction goes to “A Man’s Life,” written by Carla Davidson (who is still on our staff) and published 30 years ago this month.
The subject was the artist Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, who made 16 oil paintings of anthropomorphized dogs in the early 190Os for Brown & Bigelow, a Minnesota calendar firm. The paintings are mostly about poker but also depict dogs engaged in other manly pursuits, like playing pool, watching a baseball game, and arguing a breach-of-promise suit. Over the decades the Coolidge paintings were occasionally revived as promotional items, mostly for liquor or tobacco companies, but by the early 1970s they were virtually unknown.
Davidson recalls how she found out about Coolidge: “My mother and I were antiquing, and she spotted two paintings for $300 apiece. That seemed like a lot of money, so it never occurred to me to buy them; instead I sent a photographer and had them shot. I’ve been kicking myself ever since. Of course, the antiques dealer is probably kicking himself even more.” And well he might; in 1998 a Coolidge dog painting sold at auction for $74,000.
The resulting article elicited the greatest outpouring of letters in American Heritage’s history—even more than we got after putting Jane Fonda on the cover or calling Robert E. Lee overrated. Almost everyone wanted to know where to get copies of the paintings. The art world took notice as well. In the April 1973 issue of Antiques, an advertisement for an estate sale showed one of Coolidge’s paintings with the note “Reproduced ‘American Heritage,’ February 1973.” From the antiques world, the fad diffused to dog lovers, to the general public, to cultural ironists, and back again.
Coolidge’s dogs can now be found on ties, shirts, mousepads, and even wall
tapestries made in Lebanon by no doubt puzzled local weavers. His poker scenes have been parodied everywhere from “The Powerpuff Girls” to an ESPN commercial. The phenomenon has spread around the world. A lesson plan for South African students, missing the point somewhat, asks: “The artist Cassius Marcellus Coolidge produced a series of paintings showing dogs playing poker. What do you think he was trying to say? Bear in mind that these pictures were painted in the 1910s, shortly after Queen Victoria’s reign.”
An economics textbook uses a dogsplaying-poker painting to illustrate the concept of elasticity of demand. Weird Al Yankovic, the ultimate arbiter of hipness, mentions Coolidge’s work in his classic song “Velvet Elvis.”
Coolidge’s genius lay in his perfect matching of subjects and activities. Sad clowns playing gin rummy, or kids with big eyes playing Parcheesi, would not be nearly so powerful. But is it art? We think so. The dogs’ artistic pedigree is impeccable. Scholars with lots of time on their hands have traced the arrangement of figures in at least two Coolidge paintings to 164Os canvases of human cardplayers by Georges de La Tour. Most telling of all, the photographer William Wegman has appropriated Coolidge’s idea and posed his own dogs in a variety of humanlike poses. It all goes to show that in today’s art world, the sublime and the ridiculous are never far apart. In this case, in fact, it’s hard to tell which is which.
Finally, for those who are not satisfied with reading about history but must experience it themselves, there is a video game you can purchase (see http:// dogsplayingpoker.tv). It gives you a fictitious bankroll and lets you actually take a seat in the dogs’ card game. The dogs are animated, and on the wall above them is a picture of men playing poker. Afraid of getting kicked out of the game for being the wrong species? Don’t worry. On the Internet no one knows you’re a human.
Why Do We Say That?
“Podunk”
A gazetteer of mythical America would be sprinkled with such picturesque placenames as Buzzardsborough, Crow Corners, East Punkinton, Gopherville, Mudville (where mighty Casey struck out), and Weazletown, all of them indicating small towns or boondocks. (Boondocks, by the way, is a relic of the Philippine Insurrection of 1899-1902, when U.S. troops pursued rebels into the hills and jungles; the word comes from bundok, Tagalog for “mountain.")
Perhaps no name would appear more often in such a gazetteer than Podunk. A byword for more than 150 years for a small and insignificant place, it still crops up regularly. “On the Campaign Trail from Podunk to D.C.” was the title of a forum at the annual convention of the Asian American Journalists Association in Dallas this past August.
Whence Podunk? Whereas Buzzardsborough and the others were made up with tongue in cheek, imitating the quaint folk names that adorn the land, such as Skunk’s Misery
(the original name of Scranton, Pennsylvania) and California’s Jackass Flat (so called on account of a burro that was flattened there in 1885 by a locomotive), Podunk is a true place-name. An Algonquian term, translated variously as “a boggy place” and “a neck or corner of land,” it was attached to various localities in colonial times in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York. Historically, it is associated most closely with a small tribe, the Podunks, whose principal villages in the seventeenth century were situated a few miles northeast of Hartford, in the area still watered by the Podunk River, a tributary of the Connecticut.
In the 184Os wits started using Podunk to poke fun at small towns. A series of eight “Letters From Podunk” began appearing in the Buffalo, New York, Daily National Pilot on January 5, 1846. The grandiloquent opening of the initial letter gives the flavor of the whole:
“Messrs. Editors: I hear you ask, ‘Where in the world is Podunk?’ It is in the world, sir; and more than that is a little world of itself. ... a bright and shining light amid the surrounding darkness. I look back, sir, with pride upon the day when I located in the then unincorporated burgh of Podunk.... Here I began my career as master of the arts and.... Here, too, I courted the smiles of dame Fortune, and of fairer Dolly Miles— the former I won easily, and Dolly, after I had ‘sparked’ her every night for two years ... at last acknowledged herself unable to withstand some feeling verses which told at once the story of my passion and my love.”
The anonymous author’s brand of humor must have been popular at the time, for the “Letters From Podunk” were reprinted widely and seem to have been chiefly responsible for establishing the term in the national psyche. And so it is that the name has been appropriated for everything from a fictitious university to a rock band, and that Father Tom Reese, editor of the Jesuit publication America, can be quoted in the Los Angeles Times of March 27, 2002, as saying of Cardinal Roger M. Mahoney of Los Angeles, “He’s not the pastor of a Podunk Parish.”
—Hugh Rawson
The Man Who Looked at Snowflakes
A Vermont Farmer Preserved the World’s Most Ephemeral Art for Posterity
Wilson Alwyn Bentley (1865-1931) spent his entire life on his family’s farm in Jericho, Vermont. He never married, and he devoted most of his time to a pursuit that would occur only to someone who could willingly endure 60-plus Vermont winters: taking pictures of snowflakes. His life’s work was published in 1931 under the title Snow Crystals, a few weeks before his death from pneumonia. William J. Humphreys, who supplied the text for the book, later wrote: “Bentley lived alone, poor in worldly goods to the verge of distress, but rich beyond avarice in his vast and unique collection of snow-crystal pictures.” Bentley himself was equally enthusiastic: “Under the microscope, I found that snowflakes were miracles of beauty; and it seemed a shame that this beauty should not be seen and appreciated by others.” The book remains in print (Dover Publications, $18.95), and the Jericho Historical Society reproduces some of his best pictures, plus prints, T-shirts, and more, at www.snowflakebentley.com.
Screenings
James Bond
Has anyone ever adequately explained how a British secret agent became an American cultural idol? Well, for one thing, Bond wasn’t English; his creator, Ian Fleming, made clear to us at the outset that Bond was the product of a Scots father and a Swiss mother. Brought to life by Scan Connery, Bond seemed both deadlier and more ingratiating than the traditional English Bulldog Drummond type of hero while at the same time more sophisticated than American private eyes.
For another thing, unlike Fleming’s first Bond novels, Bond movies didn’t exploit the fears of the Cold War so much as divert us from them. As early as From Russia With Love (1963), the film plot was rewritten so that the real struggle was not between the free world and the communist bloc but between all the world’s intelligence agencies and technology-crazed pirates capitalizing on the ideological rift between East and West.
Shorn of the colonialist trappings that would have made him anathema in the sixties, Scan Connery’s James Bond became the movies’ first truly international hero. It’s been more than 40 years since the inaugural Bond feature film, Dr. No, was released, and in truth most of them haven’t been particularly distinguished. But the newly released Bond collection on DVD and the opening of the latest Bond film, Die Another Day, give us a chance to go back and re-evaluate some of the lesser-known gems.
You Only Live Twice (1967).
This is one of the better-known Bonds because of Connery’s presence, but it’s the least known of the first five, after Dr. No (1962), From Russia With Love, Goldfinger (1964), and Thunderball (1965). It may be the best of the Connery Bonds, which of course makes it the best of the Bond movies, period. Roald Dahl wrote the witty screenplay, and Donald Pleasence made his debut as Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Bond’s most enduring foe. Nancy Sinatra sang the lovely title song—for my money the last Bond theme worth remembering—and Scan Connery seemed to be having more fun as Bond than before or since. One important factor in the film’s enjoyability was that the gadgets— particularly the gyrocopter Little Nellie, which disassembled into a giant suitcase —were more ingenious than contrived.
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969).
The most underrated of the Bond films. The Australian George Lazenby was an acquired taste as Bond, but not at all bad once you grew accustomed to him. The great Diana Rigg is often called the best “Bond girl,” but the real secret to her appeal in the role is that she was the best Bond woman.
The Spy Who Loved Me (1977).
There’s no point arguing about it, but to original Bond fans Roger Moore (the only Englishman ever to play Bond) could never be the real thing. At best he was the Saint with an expense account. But if you opt for any of the Roger Moore Bonds, this is the one, with a sensational opening ski sequence and Barbara Bach as one of the most fetching Bond girls.
License to Kill (1989).
This wasn’t so much the most underrated Bond film as the most ignored. The Welshman Timothy Dalton was a superb choice for Bond, and if this entry was somewhat low in pyrotechnics, so much the better. The title is ironic. Bond, out of favor with Her Majesty’s Secret Service, is bent on per- sonal revenge, and for the first time in the series he appears somewhat vulnerable— in this case, appealingly so. Robert Davi, as a Latin American drug lord, is the first believable Bond villain since Robert Shaw’s Grant in From Russia With Love, while Carey Lowell is terrific as the first postfeminist Bond girl. The finale, a chase down a winding mountain road in 16-wheel semis, may be the most sensational ending to any Bond film.
GoldenEye (1995).
The first of the Bond films with the Irishman Pierce Brosnan, GoldenEye isn’t so much a film as a collection of well-executed set pieces beginning with an opening escape where Bond drives off a cliff on a motorcycle in pursuit of a plunging aircraft—well, you’ll just have to see it. Though too big and noisy, the film does have things to recommend it, including Dame Judi Dench as the new M and Famke Janssen as an assassin who crushes her victims to death with her thighs. Well, we all have to go sometime.
—Allen Barra
Editors’ Bookshelf
In 1991 the photographer Peter Woloszynski spent his first night in America in Charleston, South Carolina. He found the town unexpectedly magnificent, and it inspired him to spend two years traveling through the South getting inside of and photographing antebellum houses still lived in by descendants of their original owners. In Under Live Oaks (Clarkson Potter, 304 pages, $40.00) he presents his eloquent pictures with an accompanying text by the writer Caroline Seebohm, who brings to life the slow decline of the homes and their occupants. The houses, she writes, are “monuments to an illusion, and all the stories ever told cannot in the end put back together the ‘stray pieces of the past.’ As in the poignant image of a parlor in Montgomery, Alabama, empty except for an old family portrait hanging in lonely splendor over the fireplace, the lifeblood of these places is gradually draining away.”
