November 8, 2005
The Echo of a President Posted by Julie M. Fenster at 05:00 PM EST A little more than a hundred years ago, when America was manipulated by false reports into fighting the Spanish-American War, the United States was left afterward in occupation of the Philippines. It would have been hard to find a country farther away or more foreign. As the years dragged by and our Army remained, the Philippines teetered constantly on the edge of anarchy, revolution, civil war—or something else even more chaotic than the unrest fomented by the occupation. Insurrectionists attacked American soldiers, often in gruesome style. Far from home, fighting a frustrating foe, the soldiers responded with the torture of captured Filipinos. By 1902, when Theodore Roosevelt was President, the methods used by U.S. soldiers were becoming public knowledge. In response, some Americans expressed the belief that torture was necessary for the greater good. Some were outraged. Some didn’t care what happened to Filipinos anyway. President Roosevelt, who knew something about war, having been a soldier, and about courage as well, fired off a telegram to the American Commander in the Philippines: THE PRESIDENT DESIRES TO KNOW IN THE FULLEST AND MOST CIRCUMSTANTIAL MANNER ALL THE FACTS. . . . FOR THE VERY REASON THAT THE PRESIDENT INTENDS TO BACK UP THE ARMY IN THE HEARTIEST FASHION IN EVERY LAWFUL AND LEGITIMATE METHOD OF DOING ITS WORK. HE ALSO INTENDS TO SEE THAT THE MOST VIGOROUS CARE IS EXERCISED TO DETECT AND PREVENT ANY CRUELTY OR BRUTALITY. AND THAT MEN WHO ARE GUILTY THEREOF ARE PUNISHED. GREAT AS THE PROVOCATION HAS BEEN IN DEALING WITH FOES WHO HABITUALLY RESORT TO TREACHERY MURDER AND TORTURE AGAINST OUR MEN, NOTHING CAN JUSTIFY THE USE OF TORTURE OR INHUMAN CONDUCT OF ANY KIND ON THE PART OF THE AMERICAN ARMY.
November 8, 2005
Nonsense on Stilts, Part II Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 09:35 AM EST Then there’s the question of Vietnam veterans’ getting spat on when they came home. Since the mid-1980s some commentators have been calling these stories an “urban myth,” and a recent article on this site said such tales were “apparently apocryphal.” The chief text supporting this view is The Spitting Image (1990), by Jerry Lembcke. (Lembcke’s last book before that one was Capitalist Development and Class Capacities: Marxist Theory and Union Organization, which, according to a sympathetic review, “argues for a restoration of the classical Marxist position” on labor and complains that “much of the U.S. Left has marginalized the working class.”) Lembcke admits the difficulty of “proving a negative” (i.e., that no spitting incident ever occurred), then intrepidly sets out to do just that—and claims success. His main piece of evidence is that he did not find any “documented” cases of spitting on veterans, of incidents captured on film or written about in contemporary publications. This is a rather extreme case of the modern American delusion that if something didn’t happen on television, it didn’t happen at all, and to his credit, Lembcke offers another proof: “Anti-war activists could not have been spitting on veterans while at the same time befriending them in off-base coffeehouses.” Therefore, since “relations between veterans and the anti-war movement were empathetic and mutually supportive” (after all, newspapers and the organizations’ own archives say so), “the image of spat-upon veterans must be false.” But facts are stubborn things. While Lembcke was writing his book, the journalist Bob Greene published a column in the Chicago Tribune asking Vietnam veterans a simple question: “Were you ever spat upon when you returned home to the United States?” He received more than 1,000 responses, many more than could be printed in the newspaper, so in 1989 he published a book called Homecoming. The book contained 60-plus recollections by veterans who had, indeed, been spat on, along with roughly equal numbers from (a) vets who said they were never spat on and (b) ones who said they were not spat on but were abused or mistreated in worse ways. Lembcke’s reaction? They’re all liars, every one of them. Seriously, that’s what he says. After all, “these claims surfaced fifteen years after they supposedly happened” (the fact that no newspaper columnist asked for the veterans’ recollections before then is evidently a minor point). He also complains that Greene posed a leading question; to be properly scientific, he should have asked something neutral, like “What were your homecoming experiences?” Moreover, Lembcke writes, “Weren’t hippies too passive to be spitting on anyone, much less on people they allegedly considered to be trained killers?” Finally, he cites “the curious fact that many of Greene’s spat-upon veterans claimed the spitter was a girl or a woman. Told this, students of gender behavior are likely to respond, ‘It has to be a myth. Girls don’t spit.’“ Anti-war protestors acting unladylike? Just plain impossible, says Lembcke. Step right up, folks! Watch as Lembcke the Magnificent snaps his fingers, twitches his nose, shouts “Hey presto!” and makes five dozen veterans disappear! You won’t believe it! (Note: Lembcke the Magnificent is also available for parties, bar mitzvahs, seminars, and teach-ins.)
November 7, 2005
Nonsense on Stilts Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 10:40 AM EST We’ve all heard the old gag about how an economist stranded on a desert island could open a tin can: Assume a can opener. It’s not just economists, though. Some historians like to claim a similar privilege: Whenever they’re confronted with an inconvenient fact that disproves their thesis, they simply assume a conspiracy. Consider the case of William “Boss” Tweed. In 1977 Leo Hershkowitz published a book called Tweed’s New York: Another Look. In it he asserted that Tweed was not a crook but merely a clever politician, and that all the charges and accusations against him were elements of a partisan plot. Hershkowitz’s book was recently the subject of a sympathetic article on this site, and over the years a few historians have endorsed parts of the thesis it contains. Others, pointing to reams of incriminating documents and Tweed’s conviction on 204 criminal counts, disagree. Yet Hershkowitz was contradicted long ago by an expert far more knowledgeable than any historian: Tweed himself. In 1877 he wrote out a lengthy, detailed confession of his numerous and far-reaching defalcations. He then went before New York’s board of aldermen and testified in person for two weeks about the city’s pervasive corruption. As Kenneth Ackerman explains in his recently published biography Boss Tweed, the deposed ringleader named names and gave dates and produced supporting documents. When recipients of Tweed’s bribes protested that he was lying, for example, he proved his charges with receipts, letters, and canceled checks. What is Hershkowitz’s reaction to all this? He points out, correctly but irrelevantly, that Tweed expected to be freed from jail for confessing (though in the end he never was). He repeatedly puts the word “confession” in quotation marks and inserts phrases like “if Tweed really wrote it.” And that’s it. Poof! Shazam! Hershkowitz waves his Historian’s Magic Wand (patent pending), a cloud of smoke appears, and the truth vanishes. Oh, and pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
November 3, 2005
The Genius and Tradition Behind a Great Guitar Posted by Allen Barra at 09:00 AM EST Wayne Henderson lives and works in Rugby, Virginia, a community in the Blue Ridge Mountains with a population of seven. (He jokes that he and his fellow residents have to take turns being “the mayor, the preacher, and the town drunk.”) He’s an American original, perhaps the finest living guitar maker in the world, an artist equally at home at Carnegie Hall or entertaining rescue-squad workers at a potluck dinner. In a wonderful new book, Clapton’s Guitar: Watching Wayne Henderson Build the Perfect Instrument (Free Press, $25), Allen St. John articulates Henderson’s vision, leading us through the steps by which a few strips of wood and a half dozen steel strings become the means for transforming inspiration into sound. Ostensibly the story of how Henderson (winner of the prestigious National Heritage Fellowship) built a guitar for the British rock legend Eric Clapton—after keeping him waiting for 10 years—Clapton’s Guitar is only a guitar book in the sense that The Orchid Thief is a only book about gardening. St. John makes the case for the transformative power of certain objects and the not-so-quaint notion of craftsmanship. The book is as much the story of a man as of an instrument, and of the characters who stop by just to watch. Henderson’s shop is perched, both literally and figuratively, on the outskirts of the twentieth century, in a place that, give or take a few power tools, hasn’t changed much since his mother was born almost a hundred years ago. Henderson boils the instrument’s thin rosewood sides over a hot plate to get them to bend, and he finds rare and valuable tonewood in the most unlikely places; one instrument was built from a piece of Brazilian rosewood that was once a table in Truman Capote’s yacht. St. John writes likes Henderson’s guitars play, clear and resonant. And with harmony, too, bringing in another master guitar builder, Massachusetts-based T. J. Thompson, to occasionally offer alternative methods of attaining guitar-craft perfection. Clapton’s Guitar centers on a poignant irony: Henderson is a practical businessman quietly trying to stem the course of modern commerce. For 200 years American capitalism has been about figuring out ways to take handmade goods and mass-produce them quickly, cheaply, and efficiently. Every day when he pulls on his baseball cap and picks up a bottle of Titebond, Henderson resists the pull of time. The golden-age instruments that he replicates were built on an assembly line at the Martin guitar company factory in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, during the depths of the Great Depression. The only way to recreate that magic is with one man working alone in a tiny shop, taking a pile of wood and a sharp whittling knife, and “cutting away everything that doesn’t look like a guitar.” When Henderson fills in a tiny gap hidden in the bowels of a guitar with a sliver of mahogany no thicker than a sheet of looseleaf paper, a detail that the owner of the guitar will never see, it’s a small triumph over the culture of good enough. St. John’s attention to his own craft is worthy of his subject. He picks up on some delightful details, such as Henderson’s penchant for writing semi-obscene messages inside his heirloom guitars. If the instrument is treated with lifelong care, no one will ever see his rude notes. We can be thankful that Eric Clapton, and not Pete Townshend, was the one who commissioned Wayne Henderson.
November 2, 2005
More History Comes to the Village Posted by Richard F. Snow at 12:25 PM EST I live a few blocks south of Fred Allen and, like him, in hermetic twenty-first century fashion watched the now-famous Halloween parade on television though it was whooping and roiling past a hundred yards away. The next morning I left my apartment and was on the way to work when I saw, at the north end of Washington Square Park, near the arch dedicated to the park’s namesake, someone holding aloft a big sign that read: US TROOPS HOME NOW. Naturally I thought this was about Iraq. Antiwar protests happen often enough in Washington Square—but it seemed to show uncommon zeal to be rallying at eight o’clock in the morning. Then I noticed that the man holding the sign had an afro of a frizzled immensity that I hadn’t seen in years. “Hey! Hey! LBJ!” the people around him started chanting, “How many kids did you kill today?” Clearly the job was getting to me. I got closer to the demonstration and saw that the street beyond the park was an automotive Valhalla: here was a Studebaker Lark, there an Oldsmobile Toronado, a Triumph TR-3, and that keenly-missed symbol of New York City life, a Checker cab. Oh, I thought, a good 30 seconds after I should have; They’re making a movie. They were indeed. There were a couple hundred protestors, all dressed in period costume. Each costume was carefully assembled, although among the hippies was a scattering of men whose clothes seemed to have been drawn from photographs of the Civil Rights marches of half a decade earlier: skinny neckties and fedoras. Someone called “Action!” just the way you’d imagine, and banners were lofted, signs waved, and the demonstrators moved south down Fifth Avenue while cops looked on from 1960s prowl cars. I watched, fascinated. The man next to me, who seemed about my age, was not so transported. “Once was enough,” he said to me and moved off. It was deeply strange to stand there, surrounded by the Chevys and Mustangs of my youth, while the blighted, frantic, glamorous year of 1969 surged about me. As the marchers went past, I looked more carefully at the signs. They were executed with high professionalism. Many of them looked like Sly and the Family Stone album covers; others had peace doves that might have come off Christmas cards. Then a 15-foot-tall Uncle Sam puppet swayed past, an oppressor’s cigar in his right hand. I didn’t recall anything like that in the demonstrations of 40 years ago. An immense, cunningly articulated skeleton followed Uncle Sam, and then another one of those beautifully-finished posters, this one showing soldiers and flower children and enjoining the viewer to make love, not war. It all looked just great, and I went on to work thinking how much more esthetically pleasing those long-ago marches on Washington would have been if only Hollywood had choreographed and equipped them.
November 1, 2005
The Past Is a Foreign Country Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 12:00 PM EST I live a block and a half from the route of the Greenwich Village Halloween parade, and over the years I've watched it grow up from an oddball neighborhood event to a commercial big deal. It neither begins nor ends in Greenwich Village now; it just passes through on the area's widest avenue, and swaths of paraders here and there through it honor corporate sponsors like Jet Blue. It maintains its mild eccentricities, though. Last night, watching it on TV (I'd rather get a bird's eye view in my living room than be buried in the crowd not far from my door), I saw people dressed as all sorts of pop figures from the past: Marie Antoinette, a surprisingly convincing self-portrait of Vincent Van Gogh with his ear bandaged, Grant Wood's American Gothic, the board game Twister, every major character in The Wizard of Oz (repeatedly). But the most surprising thing I saw, and really the most exotic of anything, amid all the superheroes and vampires and transvestites and TV characters, was also the most truly historical. It stuck out like nothing else the whole night, though I saw it only briefly, in the corner of the screen, and couldn't catch the whole context. Somebody was parading up Sixth Avenue holding up a sign that said REMEMBER THE MAINE.
| 
