NEW HAMPSHIRE’S OLD MAN IS RUBBLE, BUT OTHER STONE FACES REMAIN
When the rock formation known as the Old Man of the Mountain crumbled into rubble in New Hampshire’s Franconia Notch State Park this spring, the entire state went into mourning. How long the outcropping existed is unknown. It is mentioned in local Indian lore, though stories of Indians actually worshiping the face seem to have been exaggerations. The first recorded white men to see it were Francis Whitcomb and Luke Brooks, who spotted it in 1805 while surveying a road. As early as the 188Os the Appalachian Mountain Club reported that the face was slipping, a victim of the same natural forces—humidity and extremes of hot and cold—that had created it. In 1916 a Massachusetts quarryman named Edward H. Geddes spent eight days installing a system of adjustable steel cables to shore it up. Further supports were added in almost every subsequent decade.
As the years passed, the Old Man had more work done than an aging Hollywood actress. Vegetation was killed to improve the face’s appearance, and cracks were filled with a mixture of wire, epoxy, and fiberglass, to the point where one stern environmentalist recently scorned the site as “hyper-real” and compared it to “the badlands of Disneyland or the duplicate of the Lascaux caves.”
Despite all these efforts, an inspection revealed that by the time of the crash most of the rock between the face and the mountain had softened into dirt and gravel. In the end less than 25 percent of the face was firmly anchored, and it collapsed of its own weight. Such a fate was far from unexpected; the 1938 WPA Guide to New Hampshire said, “It is remarkable that these ledges have not long since crashed into the depths below.” (It also noted that “no scenic feature of the White Mountains is so much photographed by amateurs and with such disappointing results.”)
Yet all is not lost for lovers of stone faces. An exhaustive list at www.geocities.com/marmotamonax/Faces/Index.html gives information on hundreds of humanlike rock formations in the United States, some named generically (Profile Rock, Old Man of the Rocks, The Face in the Rock), some specifically (there are many Washingtons, including one Martha, as well as several Lincolns, a Webster, and even a JFK), and some whimsically, as in the Elvis-like Pompador Rock in California. Indian Rock is another popular name, and according to www.topowest.com, there are still at least a dozen geographical features in the United States called Negro Head—in poor taste by modern standards, though one suspects they used to be even more so.
Finally, in 1976 the Viking space probe took pictures of a rock formation on Mars that at sufficiently low resolution is said to resemble a human face. Is this proof that extraterrestrials with bad eyesight once visited Earth? You can decide for yourself. Although no package tours to the site are currently available, pictures of the face can be seen on thousands of Web sites, such as www.marsnews.com/focus/face, along with a variety of fanciful explanations for its existence.
WHY DO WE SAY THAT?
“POLITICALLY CORRECT”
Politically Correct has been one of the most inflammatory catch phrases of our time and also one of the most resilient. Popularized in the 1970s and the 1980s by the left, the phrase was essentially co-opted by conservatives in the 1990s. Liberal activists initially employed politically correct as a positive standard in debates on sexual, racial, ethnic, cultural, and environmental issues. For example, Toni Cade Bambara declared in an essay in The Black Woman, an anthology she edited in 1970, “A man cannot be politically correct and a chauvinist, too.”
To be politically incorrect in activist circles came to invite the severest possible criticism. For instance, some 20 men and women filed a sexual-harassment complaint against a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1990 after they claimed he straight-facedly suggested that in the interest of political correctness Penthouse magazine’s centerfold “Pets” should be called animal companions.
Overreactions of this sort gave conservatives the opportunity to turn politically correct back upon the original users. People who write indignant letters to the editors of newspapers seem to be especially fond of this tactic. A couple of recent examples: “I read where Disneyland is caving in to the political correct crowd—again—this time by removing guns from skippers on the Jungle Cruise.” (Los Angeles Times, September 9, 2001) “Sir, included with my copy of The Times today was a very nice Christmas card from my ‘paper person.’ Since a girl’s name had been given I assume the person is in fact a paper girl, but I cannot help wondering what politically correct influences have prevented her from using that term.” (Times of London, December 21, 2002)
The origins of politically correct—P.C. for short—are murky. Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book (1966), which includes many references to “correct” and “incorrect” ideas (at least in the English translation), may have helped popularize the phrase. It predates Mao, however.
Howard M. Ziff said in a 1991 letter to the Chronicle of Higher Education that he remembered hearing politically correct being used by “Marxists and progressives” in the early 1950s as a euphemism for party line. (By the by, party line pre-dates the Old Left, and Lenin, too, for that matter. Sen. Thomas Hart Benton, of Missouri, used it in a political context as long ago as 1834.) And Vladimir Nabokov employed the phrase in his 1947 novel Bend Sinister. ”… it is better for a man to have belonged to a politically incorrect organization than not to have belonged to any organization at all.”
Politically correct also appears—and in a modern sense, referring to proper use of language—in H. V. Morton’s In the Steps of St. Paul (1936). Discussing St. Paul’s reasons for addressing his converts as “Galatians,” Morton points out that “Phrygia was famous for its slaves—so famous that the name Phryx denoted a slave all over the Empire—and Lycaonia was notorious for bandits and thieves. To use such words [Phrygians and Lycaonians] would have been equivalent to calling his audience ‘slaves and robbers.’ But ‘Galatians,’ a term that was politically correct, embraced everyone under Roman rule.”
By far the oldest-known example of politically correct in writing comes from a 1793 decision of the United States Supreme Court, Chisholm v. Georgia. Fred R. Shapiro, librarian and lecturer at Yale Law School, reported in the Autumn 2002 issue of Verbatim that a search of legal databases enabled him to find the phrase in an opinion by Justice James Wilson. Again the context involved the proper use of language:
“The states, rather than the people, for whose sakes states exist, are frequently the objects which attract and arrest our principal attention. … Sentiments and expression of this inaccurate kind prevail in our common, even in our convivial, language. Is a toast asked? The United States,’ instead of the ‘People of the United States, ’ is the toast given. This is not politically correct.”
So the question becomes: Does the current use of politically correct build directly upon past usage, or has the phrase been coined independently one or more times? The lack of written examples throughout the nineteenth century makes one suspect the latter. From 1793 to 1936 is a long time for a word or phrase to exist without leaving a paper trail. But etymology has something in co’mmon with paleontology. A new example—a new bone—may be unearthed at any time, and then old theories about lines of descent may have to be revised.
—Hugh Rawson
POSTERS OF PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
A TRAVELING EXHIBIT RECLAIMS A NEGLECTED CINEMATIC LEGACY
For the first 50 years of the American film industry, if any black performers appeared in movies, they were usually confined to a narrow range of small parts. The same went for those who worked behind the scenes. The exceptions were so-called race movies, aimed at African-American audiences, which allowed blacks the same latitude for dramatic expression, from cheesy to profound, as their white colleagues. Many of these films have been lost, but their promotional posters survive, as do those from later days, when black performers began moving into the mainstream. A century of these fascinating historic documents has been collected in Close Up in Black: African American Film Posters, a traveling Smithsonian Institution exhibition that will open at the California African American Museum, in Los Angeles, on August 2 and tour the country for the next two years. Collectively, the posters provide a unique reflection of the larger story of African-Americans’ struggle for equality. Information on this and many other traveling Smithsonian exhibits can be found at www.sites.si.edu.
ON EXHIBIT
Gordon Lillie—a gunfighter, rancher, buffalo hunter, and Indian agent better known as Pawnee Bill—was inspired to go West as a teenager in 1874 after reading the adventures of Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill Hickok in lurid weeklies and dime novels. Lillie soon started a touring Wild West Show of his own, demonstrating that the myth of the Old West is nearly as old as the Old West itself. All this makes it appropriate that the Hopalong Cassidy Museum, scheduled to open in early August, will be located in the Prairie Rose Chuckwagon Supper (www.prairierosechuckwagon.com), a “western complex” in Wichita, Kansas, where tourists can eat barbecue served by cowboys and then enjoy “an evening of western music and entertainment in a climate-controlled, family-friendly environment.” Besides holding a 250-seat theater to screen Cassidy’s 66 films and 52 television shows, the museum will exhibit a wide range of memorabilia from the “King of Merchandising Cowboys,” including comic books, lunchboxes, “Hoppy food products,” and children’s bedroom suites. There will also, of course, be a gift shop.
After being hidden away for two years, the Constitution is about to resume its traditional position of importance—the four-page paper Constitution of 1788, that is, which has been in storage since 2001 while the National Archives and Records Administration (www.nara.gov) renovated its exhibition space. Charters of Freedom, which also includes the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, will go on display in September in the rotunda of the National Archives Building, where it will eventually form the centerpiece of “The National Archives Experience,” with interactive exhibits and a 275-seat theater. Reinstallation ceremonies begin on September 7, as replicas of the charters are carried on horseback from Philadelphia, their city of origin, to Washington, D.C.; the originals can be viewed starting September 18.
SCREENINGS
DANCES WITH WOLVES
Released in 1990 and now available on DVD, Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves was, incredibly, the first Western ever to win the Academy Award for Best Picture (unless one counts Cimarron, 1931, from the Edna Ferber novel, which is often listed in video guidebooks under “Drama”). Given the dearth of Westerns coming out of Hollywood these days, it may very well, along with Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, be the last.
Dances With Wolves is one of a handful of odd, self-consciously revisionist Westerns (Arthur Penn’s highly politicized film version of Thomas Berger’s great novel Little Big Man comes to mind) that seem more dated in retrospect than the films they were supposed to supplant. Its story begins during the Civil War, when Kevin Costner’s disconsolate Lt. John Dunbar tries to get himself killed in battle only to be proclaimed a hero and offered his choice of assignments.
For unclear reasons, he is allowed to choose a command on the Plains. (The U.S. frontier army during the Civil War consisted entirely of pre-war regulars and had virtually no connection with the massive volunteer armies fighting in the East, but let that pass.) There he finds a tribe of Lakota Sioux (led by two superb American Indian actors, Graham Greene and Rodney Grant) with a natural bent for ecology, family, and racial tolerance.
The problem with the plot soon becomes apparent: Old or New Age Western, you still need bad guys. For that we have the Pawnees, evil and bloodthirsty and decked out in greasepaint and punkish hairstyles, looking more post-apocalyptic than the biker gang in The Road Warrior. Why one tribe of Plains Indians would be so noble while another was so brutish can only be ascribed to the mellowing influence of Kevin Costner; a few months of Lieutenant Dunbar would seem to be enough to turn savages into Frisbee-tossing Eagle Scouts listening to Windham Hill CDs.
The self-righteousness of Dances With Wolves derives from its confidence that it is the first film ever to be fair to American Indians, as if Westerns from the silent classic The Vanishing American, starring Richard Dix, to John Ford’s Cheyenne Autumn—and nearly every one in between—hadn’t attempted to do the same thing. Even the historically ludicrous Custer bio They Died With Their Boots On took care to identify the true villains as corrupt white Indian agents.
Far more balanced and nuanced than Dances With Wolves is a film that seems to have served as its inspiration, Delmer Daves’s Broken Arrow of 1950. No Western before or since has been so honest in its depiction of the brutalities that whites and Indians inflicted on each other and of the deep emotional scars caused by vengeful violence. And there is no more affecting portrayal of two men who struggle across the barrier of race hatred to become friends than fames Stewart as the Indian agent Tom Jeffords and Jeff Chandler as Cochise. Broken Arrow is often written off by modern historians because of its horrifyingly realistic depiction of Indian violence and the unfortunate fact that whites are granted most of the key Indian roles (though Jay Silverheels, who later became better known as Tonto, is a very effective Geronimo). Yet Broken Arrow is more firmly rooted in historical fact than the films that later set out to debunk it.
—Allen Barra
CIVIL WAR IMPRESSIONS
EDOUARD MANET DOCUMENTS A MAJOR BATTLE
As a teenager in the 184Os, Edouard Manet wanted to become a painter. When his father wouldn’t let him, he applied to a naval college. Failing to get in, he went to sea for a year. Then he applied to the college again and was turned down once more. Only then did his father let him become an artist. Thus it is no wonder that in 1864, when the Union and Confederate ships Kearsarge and Alabama fought off the coast of France, the former sinking the latter, Manet hurried from Paris to Boulogne to see the victor at anchor. The result, a year after he painted Olympia and Déjeuner sur L’Herbe, was The “Kearsarge” at Boulogne. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City (www.metmuseum.org), bought the painting a few years ago, and it’s now the focus of a show there through August 17, “Manet and the American Civil War: The Battle of U.S.S. Kearsarge and C.S.S. Alabama.” The exhibit also includes an oil Manet later painted of the battle itself, related works by Courbet, Monet, and Whistler, photographs, ships’ documents, and letters written by people who saw the battle.
EARLY INNINGS
MODERN ENTHUSIASTS TAKE PART IN OUR NATIONAL PASTIME-1880s STYLE
Vintage, base ball, the playing of baseball today using the rules and customs (and spelling) of the nineteenth century, emerged independently in the early 1980s at two living-history sites, Old Bethpage Village Restoration on Long Island, New York, and Ohio Village in Columbus. It has since spread all over the country and been organized in various leagues, most notably the Vintage Base Ball Association (www.vbba.org). Regional differences have evolved, with Western teams more given to theatrics, Eastern clubs favoring competition on the field, and Midwesterners adhering to the concept of a “gentleman’s game,” according to Drew Frady, who pioneered vintage ball in Colorado, barnstormed in the Midwest, and now captains my own team, the Gotham Base Ball Club in New York.
But they share a core concept: to isolate a year in the second half of the nineteenth century, research the rules and equipment of that era, find players, and then sew uniforms, turn ash bats on a lathe, and make balls—or contract those services out to one of the specialist firms that have sprung up with the revival. Our club, which started last year, made none of its own gear, and the cost to each player was $150. Vintage ballists are spared one expense, because for several decades after the sport began, the fielders wore no gloves, a fact that looms large when someone with a healthy pair of hands considers joining a club. Broken fingers are a hazard of the hobby.
Many teams research a historical club from their region, as we did, and adopt its name and uniform. Some teams even distribute nicknames from the original club among their members. Most teams also chatter, using terms drawn from the nineteenth-century game. At least one of those words —“Huzzah!”—is used throughout vintage ball as the standard cheer.
A typical match is an afternoon doubleheader in which the two teams take turns calling the year of the rulebook that will govern play. Teams can play under rules that range from the “town ball” of 1858 (no foul territory, one out per inning, runners retired by throwing the ball at them) to the recognizably modernish game of 1898. When our team hosts the Providence Grays, for example, we play the first game by our rules, 1864, and the second game by theirs, 1884. This makes for two very different experiences. In 1864 the pitcher tossed the ball underhand, which favored the hitter. The defense had an advantage, however, in the Bound Rule: A ball caught on a bounce was an out. By 1884 the Bound Rule was extinct and hurlers threw overhand, which resulted in the development of the first primitive gloves, worn by catchers.
Two sorts of people are drawn to vintage ball: athletes who seize the chance to play hardball in an amateur league and historians who are delighted to see their research brought to life. Soon enough, these distinctions disappear, as the athletes start reading up on their history while the historians find themselves working on their baseball fundamentals. Relations between vintage teams are very fraternal, and many matches conclude with what feels like a cast party: exhausted ballists from both sides in their dirtied uniforms—university deans, construction workers, lawyers, actors, journalists—draining ales, snacking, and talking about everything under the sun.
—Chris King
EDITORS’ BOOKSHELF
Robert E. Lee is not only one of the most beloved and admired of all Americans but also one of the most elusive, far more idealized than known. One of his ex-generals, Jubal Early, wrote after his death, “Our beloved Chief stands, like some lofty column which rears its head among the highest, in grandeur, simple, pure and sublime.” In Robert E. Lee, a new addition to the Penguin Lives series of short biographies (210 pages), Roy Blount, Jr., approaches Lee from a number of angles, considering his humor and his attitude toward slavery, for instance, and triangulates to a portrait that is tough, fair, and unsentimental. “If in considering his sad life we strive for too consistent a tone,” he writes, “we miss some of its jangly resonance.”
In Baseball in Blue and Gray (Princeton University Press, 145 pages), George B. Kirsch tells how, during the Civil War, baseball moved ever farther from its gentlemanly amateur roots, with admission fees, professionalism, rowdy fans, and gambling becoming increasingly common. As happened in many other walks of life, the war severed ties. When A. T. Pearsall of Brooklyn’s elite Excelsior club became a surgeon in the Confederate Army, “he attended to a few Union prisoners, including some former fellow club members. … when word of his whereabouts reached Brooklyn, the Excelsior club expelled him.” After the war baseball aided in reconciliation, as occupying Northern troops spread the game across the South. In “the first game of baseball ever played in Fayetteville, Tennessee, in October 1868,” for example, ”… the KKK club defeated ‘nine Carpetbaggers.’”
JACKSON’S BET
KEN BURNS RETRACES AN EPOCHAL JOYRIDE
I love to drive,” writes the filmmaker Ken Burns. “I love to drive. I can think of only a few pleasures in life that are more satisfying than getting into a car and starting out on a road trip. Especially if it’s new territory.” In his latest documentary, Horatio’s Drive, Burns pays tribute to what might be called the original road trip. It began in 1903, when a Vermont doctor named Horatio Nelson Jackson, spending an evening in a San Francisco club, impulsively accepted a wager that he could drive across the continent to New York in less than 90 days. He bought a 20-horsepower Winton touring car and proceeded to make the journey in 64 heroic, calamity-ridden days, becoming the first American to cross his country by automobile. If Dr. Jackson’s exploit, audacious though it was, might at first seem a bit too frail to support the weight of a feature-length film, Burns and Dayton Duncan—the writer, whose deep fascination with the story led to the movie—have managed not only to tell a spirited adventure story but to unfurl a superb panorama of the American nation at the last moment when we could see what the enormous energies of the nineteenth century had built—and just before the furious little machines that followed Dr. Jackson’s Winton rearranged everything. The show first airs on PBS on September 22; Duncan also wrote the excellent book that accompanies it.
