October 11, 2007
A Dying Language III

Posted by Richard F. Snow at 11:00 AM  EST

John Steele Gordon is of course quite right about the withering of Morse code; it seemed quite inevitable when I read it, but the melancholy certainty had never before occurred to me. In his response, Fred Smoler quotes me as having used the term “lightning slinger.” It’s a term the railroadmen themselves—who were never as poetic and self-consciously picturesque as the steamboat men—really did use, although the phrase may have been more regularly applied by newspapermen when writing about something admirable a railroad telegrapher had done: “ALERT LIGHTNING SLINGER SAVES MAIL TRAIN.” But even the workaday term they more often employed, “brass-pounder,” has a clink of quotidian glory to it.

I got very attracted to this telegraphic world during its last hours and, guided by the photographer David Plowden, think to this day I came closest to dying in Mansonian circumstances than I ever had before or—I hope—since. David is the great recorder of the vanishing works of the nineteenth century on the American continent, especially the surviving relics of the world of steam that powered it, and when in the late 1970s he heard I was driving to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan with my wife and young stepchildren, he said I had to stop at—what? Saunders Gap? Eely?—because there I would the see last working HORIZONTAL railroad telegraph key: just like the key you hammered up an down, but a bit easier on the hand because this one you could rattle from side to side. He gave me scrupulous instructions on how to get there, and on a hot, buzzing August morning we set out for the place.

There was the depot with its bay. There was nothing else whatever for 15 miles in any direction. There were no wires, and I imagined they hadn’t recently been redirected underground for ecological purposes. The tracks were still there, simmering with black rust. Also there, slowly approaching us from the depot, were a band of people who evidently lived in it and clearly weren’t employees of the Calumet & Northern. I’ve always been too scared to see The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but you know what I mean. They wanted to know why we’d come down a four-mile dirt road to visit them. Hoping that truth and fatuity might prove strong allies, I told him that we heard the last horizontal sending key in North American rail service was right in that building, and we'd come to offer it our respects.

I won't say that the whole atmosphere changed with my squeaky declamation, but at least one of them smiled a little, and another grunted “Shut down,” and we smiled and waved and thanked them again and again and edged back to our little rental piece of crap Dodge Aspen and were permitted to resume our lives uneaten.

Discuss this post	Permalink

March 12, 2007
Chicago II

Posted by Richard F. Snow at 11:15 AM  EST

Here is Rudyard Kipling enjoying himself in the city, which described as "inhabited by savages,” from his American Notes, published in 1891:

“I know thy cunning and thy greed,
Thy hard high lust and wilful deed,
And all thy glory loves to tell
Of specious gifts material.”

I HAVE struck a city—a real city—and they call it Chicago.

The other places do not count. San Francisco was a pleasure-resort as well as a city, and Salt Lake was a phenomenon.

This place is the first American city I have encountered. It holds rather more than a million of people with bodies, and stands on the same sort of soil as Calcutta. Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages. Its water is the water of the Hooghly, and its air is dirt. Also it says that it is the “boss” town of America.

I do not believe that it has anything to do with this country. They told me to go to the Palmer House, which is overmuch gilded and mirrored, and there I found a huge hall of tessellated marble crammed with people talking about money, and spitting about everywhere. Other barbarians charged in and out of this inferno with letters and telegrams in their hands, and yet others shouted at each other. A man who had drunk quite as much as was good for him told me that this was “the finest hotel in the finest city on God Almighty’s earth.” By the way, when an American wishes to indicate the next country or state, he says, “God A’mighty’s earth.” This prevents discussion and flatters his vanity.

Then I went out into the streets, which are long and flat and without end. And verily it is not a good thing to live in the East for any length of time. Your ideas grow to clash with those held by every right-thinking man. I looked down interminable vistas flanked with nine, ten, and fifteen-storied houses, and crowded with men and women, and the show impressed me with a great horror.

Except in London—and I have forgotten what London was like—I had never seen so many white people together, and never such a collection of miserables. There was no color in the street and no beauty—only a maze of wire ropes overhead and dirty stone flagging under foot.

A cab-driver volunteered to show me the glory of the town for so much an hour, and with him I wandered far. He conceived that all this turmoil and squash was a thing to be reverently admired, that it was good to huddle men together in fifteen layers, one atop of the other, and to dig holes in the ground for offices.

He said that Chicago was a live town, and that all the creatures hurrying by me were engaged in business. That is to say they were trying to make some money that they might not die through lack of food to put into their bellies. He took me to canals as black as ink, and filled with untold abominations, and bid me watch the stream of traffic across the bridges.

He then took me into a saloon, and while I drank made me note that the floor was covered with coins sunk in cement. A Hottentot would not have been guilty of this sort of barbarism. The coins made an effect pretty enough, but the man who put them there had no thought of beauty, and, therefore, he was a savage.

“Then my cab-driver showed me business blocks gay with signs and studded with fantastic and absurd advertisements of goods, and looking down the long street so adorned, it was as though each vender stood at his door howling:—“For the sake of my money, employ or buy of me, and me only!”

Have you ever seen a crowd at a famine-relief distribution? You know then how the men leap into the air, stretching out their arms above the crowd in the hope of being seen, while the women dolorously slap the stomachs of their children and whimper. I had sooner watch famine relief than the white man engaged in what he calls legitimate competition. The one I understand. The other makes me ill.

And the cabman said that these things were the proof of progress, and by that I knew he had been reading his newspaper, as every intelligent American should. The papers tell their clientele in language fitted to their comprehension that the snarling together of telegraph-wires, the heaving up of houses, and the making of money is progress.

I spent ten hours in that huge wilderness, wandering through scores of miles of these terrible streets and jostling some few hundred thousand of these terrible people who talked paisa bat through their noses.

The cabman left me; but after awhile I picked up another man, who was full of figures, and into my ears he poured them as occasion required or the big blank factories suggested. Here they turned out so many hundred thousand dollars’ worth of such and such an article; there so many million other things; this house was worth so many million dollars; that one so many million, more or less. It was like listening to a child babbling of its hoard of shells. It was like watching a fool playing with buttons. But I was expected to do more than listen or watch. He demanded that I should admire; and the utmost that I could say was:—“Are these things so? Then I am very sorry for you.”

That made him angry, and he said that insular envy made me unresponsive. So, you see, I could not make him understand.

About four and a half hours after Adam was turned out of the Garden of Eden he felt hungry, and so, bidding Eve take care that her head was not broken by the descending fruit, shinned up a cocoanut-palm. That hurt his legs, cut his breast, and made him breathe heavily, and Eve was tormented with fear lest her lord should miss his footing, and so bring the tragedy of this world to an end ere the curtain had fairly risen. Had I met Adam then, I should have been sorry for him. To-day I find eleven hundred thousand of his sons just as far advanced as their father in the art of getting food, and immeasurably inferior to him in that they think that their palm-trees lead straight to the skies. Consequently, I am sorry in rather more than a million different ways.

In the East bread comes naturally, even to the poorest, by a little scratching or the gift of a friend not quite so poor. In less favored countries one is apt to forget. Then I went to bed. And that was on a Saturday night.

Sunday brought me the queerest experiences of all—a revelation of barbarism complete. I found a place that was officially described as a church. It was a circus really, but that the worshippers did not know. There were flowers all about the building, which was fitted up with plush and stained oak and much luxury, including twisted brass candlesticks of severest Gothic design.

To these things and a congregation of savages entered suddenly a wonderful man, completely in the confidence of their God, whom he treated colloquially and exploited very much as a newspaper reporter would exploit a foreign potentate. But, unlike the newspaper reporter, he never allowed his listeners to forget that he, and not He, was the centre of attraction. With a voice of silver and with imagery borrowed from the auction-room, he built up for his hearers a heaven on the lines of the Palmer House (but with all the gilding real gold, and all the plate-glass diamond), and set in the centre of it a loud-voiced, argumentative, very shrewd creation that he called God. One sentence at this point caught my delighted ear. It was apropos of some question of the Judgment, and ran:—“No! I tell you God doesn’t do business that way.”

He was giving them a deity whom they could comprehend, and a gold and jewelled heaven in which they could take a natural interest. He interlarded his performance with the slang of the streets, the counter, and the exchange, and he said that religion ought to enter into daily life. Consequently, I presume he introduced it as daily life—his own and the life of his friends.

Then I escaped before the blessing, desiring no benediction at such hands. But the persons who listened seemed to enjoy themselves, and I understood that I had met with a popular preacher.

Later on, when I had perused the sermons of a gentleman called Talmage and some others, I perceived that I had been listening to a very mild specimen. Yet that man, with his brutal gold and silver idols, his hands-in-pocket, cigar-in-mouth, and hat-on-the-back-of-the-head style of dealing with the sacred vessels, would count himself, spiritually, quite competent to send a mission to convert the Indians.

All that Sunday I listened to people who said that the mere fact of spiking down strips of iron to wood, and getting a steam and iron thing to run along them was progress, that the telephone was progress, and the network of wires overhead was progress. They repeated their statements again and again.

One of them took me to their City Hall and Board of Trade works, and pointed it out with pride. It was very ugly, but very big, and the streets in front of it were narrow and unclean. When I saw the faces of the men who did business in that building, I felt that there had been a mistake in their billeting.

By the way, ’Tis a consolation to feel that I am not writing to an English audience. Then I should have to fall into feigned ecstasies over the marvellous progress of Chicago since the days of the great fire, to allude casually to the raising of the entire city so many feet above the level of the lake which it faces, and generally to grovel before the golden calf. But you, who are desperately poor, and therefore by these standards of no account, know things, will understand when I write that they have managed to get a million of men together on flat land, and that the bulk of these men together appear to be lower than Mahajans and not so companionable as a Punjabi Jat after harvest.

But I don’t think it was the blind hurry of the people, their argot, and their grand ignorance of things beyond their immediate interests that displeased me so much as a study of the daily papers of Chicago.

Imprimis, there was some sort of a dispute between New York and Chicago as to which town should give an exhibition of products to be hereafter holden, and through the medium of their more dignified journals the two cities were yahooing and hi-yi-ing at each other like opposition newsboys. They called it humor, but it sounded like something quite different.

That was only the first trouble. The second lay in the tone of the productions. Leading articles which include gems such as “Back of such and such a place,” or, “We noticed, Tuesday, such an event,” or, “don’t” for “does not,” are things to be accepted with thankfulness. All that made me want to cry was that in these papers were faithfully reproduced all the war-cries and “back-talk” of the Palmer House bar, the slang of the barber-shops, the mental elevation and integrity of the Pullman car porter, the dignity of the dime museum, and the accuracy of the excited fish-wife. I am sternly forbidden to believe that the paper educates the public. Then I am compelled to believe that the public educate the paper; yet suicides on the press are rare.

Just when the sense of unreality and oppression was strongest upon me, and when I most wanted help, a man sat at my side and began to talk what he called politics.

I had chanced to pay about six shillings for a travelling-cap worth eighteen-pence, and he made of the fact a text for a sermon. He said that this was a rich country, and that the people liked to pay two hundred per cent, on the value of a thing. They could afford it. He said that the government imposed a protective duty of from ten to seventy per cent on foreign-made articles, and that the American manufacturer consequently could sell his goods for a healthy sum. Thus an imported hat would, with duty, cost two guineas. The American manufacturer would make a hat for seventeen shillings, and sell it for one pound fifteen. In these things, he said, lay the greatness of America and the effeteness of England. Competition between factory and factory kept the prices down to decent limits, but I was never to forget that this people were a rich people, not like the pauper Continentals, and that they enjoyed paying duties.

To my weak intellect this seemed rather like juggling with counters. Everything that I have yet purchased costs about twice as much as it would in England, and when native made is of inferior quality.

Moreover, since these lines were first thought of, I have visited a gentleman who owned a factory which used to produce things. He owned the factory still. Not a man was in it, but he was drawing a handsome income from a syndicate of firms for keeping it closed, in order that it might not produce things. This man said that if protection were abandoned, a tide of pauper labor would flood the country, and as I looked at his factory I thought how entirely better it was to have no labor of any kind whatever rather than face so horrible a future.

Meantime, do you remember that this peculiar country enjoys paying money for value not received? I am an alien, and for the life of me I cannot see why six shillings should be paid for eighteen-penny caps, or eight shillings for half-crown cigar-cases. When the country fills up to a decently populated level a few million people who are not aliens will be smitten with the same sort of blindness.

But my friend’s assertion somehow thoroughly suited the grotesque ferocity of Chicago.

See now and judge! In the village of Isser Jang, on the road to Montgomery, there be four Changar women who winnow corn—some seventy bushels a year. Beyond their hut lives Purun Dass, the money-lender, who on good security lends as much as five thousand rupees in a year. Jowala Singh, the smith, mends the village plows—some thirty, broken at the share, in three hundred and sixty-five days; and Hukm Chund, who is letter-writer and head of the little club under the travellers’ tree, generally keeps the village posted in such gossip as the barber and the mid-wife have not yet made public property.

Chicago husks and winnows her wheat by the million bushels, a hundred banks lend hundreds of millions of dollars in the year, and scores of factories turn out plow-gear and machinery by steam. Scores of daily papers do work which Hukm Chund and the barber and the midwife perform, with due regard for public opinion, in the village of Isser Jang. So far as manufactories go, the difference between Chicago on the lake, and Isser Jang on the Montgomery road, is one of degree only, and not of kind. As far as the understanding of the uses of life goes, Isser Jang, for all its seasonal cholers, has the advantage over Chicago.

Jowala Singh knows and takes care to avoid the three or four ghoul-haunted fields on the outskirts of the village; but he is not urged by millions of devils to run about all day in the sun and swear that his plowshares are the best in the Punjab; nor does Purun Dass fly forth in an ekka more than once or twice a year, and he knows, on a pinch, how to use the railway and the telegraph as well as any son of Israel in Chicago. But this is absurd.

The East is not the West, and these men must continue to deal with the machinery of life, and to call it progress. Their very preachers dare not rebuke them. They gloss over the hunting for money and the thrice-sharpened bitterness of Adam’s curse, by saying that such things dower a man with a larger range of thoughts and higher aspirations. They do not say, “Free yourselves from your own slavery,” but rather, “If you can possibly manage it, do not set quite so much store on the things of this world.”

And they do not know what the things of this world are!

I went off to see cattle killed, by way of clearing my head, which, as you will perceive, was getting muddled. They say every Englishman goes to the Chicago stock-yards. You shall find them about six miles from the city; and once having seen them, you will never forget the sight.

As far as the eye can reach stretches a township of cattle-pens, cunningly divided into blocks, so that the animals of any pen can be speedily driven out close to an inclined timber path which leads to an elevated covered way straddling high above the pens. These viaducts are two-storied. On the upper story tramp the doomed cattle, stolidly for the most part. On the lower, with a scuffling of sharp hoofs and multitudinous yells, run the pigs, the same end being appointed for each. Thus you will see the gangs of cattle waiting their turn—as they wait sometimes for days; and they need not be distressed by the sight of their fellows running about in the fear of death. All they know is that a man on horseback causes their next-door neighbors to move by means of a whip. Certain bars and fences are unshipped, and behold! that crowd have gone up the mouth of a sloping tunnel and return no more.

It is different with the pigs. They shriek back the news of the exodus to their friends, and a hundred pens skirl responsive.

It was to the pigs I first addressed myself. Selecting a viaduct which was full of them, as I could hear, though I could not see, I marked a sombre building whereto it ran, and went there, not unalarmed by stray cattle who had managed to escape from their proper quarters. A pleasant smell of brine warned me of what was coming. I entered the factory and found it full of pork in barrels, and on another story more pork un-barrelled, and in a huge room the halves of swine, for whose behoof great lumps of ice were being pitched in at the window. That room was the mortuary chamber where the pigs lay for a little while in state ere they began their progress through such passages as kings may sometimes travel.

Turning a corner, and not noting an overhead arrangement of greased rail, wheel, and pulley, I ran into the arms of four eviscerated carcasses, all pure white and of a human aspect, pushed by a man clad in vehement red. When I leaped aside, the floor was slippery under me. Also there was a flavor of farm-yard in my nostrils and the shouting of a multitude in my ears. But there was no joy in that shouting. Twelve men stood in two lines six a side. Between them and overhead ran the railway of death that had nearly shunted me through the window. Each man carried a knife, the sleeves of his shirt were cut off at the elbows, and from bosom to heel he was blood-red.

Beyond this perspective was a column of steam, and beyond that was where I worked my awe-struck way, unwilling to touch beam or wall. The atmosphere was stifling as a night in the rains by reason of the steam and the crowd. I climbed to the beginning of things and, perched upon a narrow beam, overlooked very nearly all the pigs ever bred in Wisconsin. They had just been shot out of the mouth of the viaduct and huddled together in a large pen. Thence they were flicked persuasively, a few at a time, into a smaller chamber, and there a man fixed tackle on their hinder legs, so that they rose in the air, suspended from the railway of death.

Oh! it was then they shrieked and called on their mothers, and made promises of amendment, till the tackle-man punted them in their backs and they slid head down into a brick-floored passage, very like a big kitchen sink, that was blood-red. There awaited them a red man with a knife, which he passed jauntily through their throats, and the full-voiced shriek became a splutter, and then a fall as of heavy tropical rain, and the red man, who was backed against the passage-wall, you will understand, stood clear of the wildly kicking hoofs and passed his hand over his eyes, not from any feeling of compassion, but because the spurted blood was in his eyes, and he had barely time to stick the next arrival. Then that first stuck swine dropped, still kicking, into a great vat of boiling water, and spoke no more words, but wallowed in obedience to some unseen machinery, and presently came forth at the lower end of the vat, and was heaved on the blades of a blunt paddle-wheel, things which said “Hough, hough, hough!” and skelped all the hair off him, except what little a couple of men with knives could remove.

Then he was again hitched by the heels to that said railway, and passed down the line of the twelve men, each man with a knife—losing with each man a certain amount of his individuality, which was taken away in a wheel-barrow, and when he reached the last man he was very beautiful to behold, but excessively unstuffed and limp. Preponderance of individuality was ever a bar to foreign travel. That pig could have been in case to visit you in India had he not parted with some of his most cherished notions.

The dissecting part impressed me not so much as the slaying. They were so excessively alive, these pigs. And then, they were so excessively dead, and the man in the dripping, clammy, hot passage did not seem to care, and ere the blood of such a one had ceased to foam on the floor, such another and four friends with him had shrieked and died. But a pig is only the unclean animal—the forbidden of the prophet.

Discuss this post	Permalink

December 7, 2006
Been There, Done That

Posted by Richard F. Snow at 05:00 PM  EST

In 1956 John Masters published a wonderful memoir called Bugles and a Tiger. By then he had been living in America for years pursuing a highly successful career as a novelist, but this book told of a very different life indeed, that of an officer in the old Indian Army commanding Gurkha troops on the Northwest Frontier. It followed him from his days in Sandhurst, the British West Point, in the mid-1930s up to 1939 and the outbreak of World War II.

I just recently learned he had written a sequel, The Road Past Mandalay, that takes him through the war, and I found a copy. It’s every bit as good as its predecessor—which is to say, about as good as a memoir can be—but at the beginning it gave me a feeling of dislocation. That’s because Lieutenant Masters and his Gurkha battalion are sent to Iraq, and here are names—Basra, Fallujah, Baghdad—very familiar to twenty-first-century Americans, along with the narrow old streets, the parched landscapes, the unpredictability of allies, the logistical miscalculations and all the rest. To someone who doesn’t know a great deal about the opening phases of World War II in the Middle East, it’s surprising and slightly eerie.

Here’s Masters: “We were going to Basra in fulfillment of a treaty pledge to protect Iraq should its recent independence be threatened by anyone; and it was certainly being threatened by Germany; or shortly would. It was strictly a standard trooping movement. Nothing had been loaded or packed for an assault landing . . .”

Then, having steamed into the Persian Gulf, Masters is called by his colonel, Willy Weallens (who in the face of incessant calamity has a favorite, all-purpose phrase that I think could offer comfort to any of us: “Oh, well, worse things happen at sea”).

“’We’re going to make an assault landing,” he said...

“Jesus Christ. No assault landing craft, only the ship’s lifeboats. No covering fire. . . . Where in hell was the reserve ammunition packed? The mortar bombs? Who was responsible for this bloody mess anyway? . . .

“The company commanders arrived and Willy explained what had happened. Some weeks earlier an Iraqi politician, Rashid Ali, had, with three others, formed a cabal and overthrown the government. The Golden Square, as the cabal called itself, was pro-Hitler. They had just informed England that Iraq did not need to be helped, since she was not threatened by anyone, except indeed the force now steaming from India to her assistance. She would resist the landing of that force, and would get help wherever she could . . .”

In the event, they were able to land unopposed. But soon Masters finds himself lying in a sweltering marsh listening to another unit “fighting their way into the old city to give us all more elbow room. They had located a strong post held by a few Iraqi regulars, and the brigadier ordered us to support them in an attack. Willy and I drove into the narrow, stinking alleys to co-ordinate details with their colonel. We found him in a battered police station his battalion had captured during the night. He looked tired but cheerful and he had a peculiar gleam in his eye.

“’Morning, Willy,’ he said as we arrived, and then at once, ‘Do you know where our two-inch and three-inch mortars are? The ones that were N.A. [army notation for “not available”] all over India? . . . The Iraqi Army has them.’

“This turned out to be true. The British government had been supplying Iraq and other ‘allies’ with modern arms, leaving none for the regular battalions of the Indian Army, a force which even Mr. Churchill came to learn was of more value to our cause than the Arab conscripts now busily supporting the Golden Square’s Nazi-inspired revolution.

“We put in a brisk attack, alongside the 2/7th Gurkhas, more to get at our mortars than out of any pique at the enemy, who fired a few shots and fled. We settled down to hold Basra until more troops came, to release us for operations further upcountry.”

In time they were upcountry: We “captured the Euphrates crossing at Falluja in a smart, fierce fight. The road to Baghdad lay open. . . . We got orders to fly to Mosul, three hundred miles farther north. The Golden Square had fled, and the Iraqi army . . . signed an instrument of surrender in Baghdad; but there was no knowing whether the garrison commanders in the rest of the country would adhere to it. Mosul we had to have at once, to prevent the German bombers using it; but the very presence of the bombers would stiffen any resolve the local commander might have to fight on . . .”

Then British history diverges from ours (so far), for it’s on to Syria and, after that, Iran. “We were to continue our advance at 1400 hours. But we did not, for a signal came that the Persians had surrendered. The lunch turned into a party. We found some of our beer and whisky ration and, joined by anybody who happened to be traveling on the road, sang and ate and drank till late at night.

“We settled down to make a camp near Karind, and train for whatever might befall us next. We had started the great war for democracy by invading three neutral countries against the wishes of their inhabitants or, at least, of their governments. The supply of opponents was now running out. Surely our next move must be to the big one—to the Western Desert, to fight Rommel.”

Masters went on to become a brigadier and receive high decorations for gallantry. He did not return to Iraq, but he leaves us with an arresting observation made by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s far-sighted lieutenant Harry Hopkins, who visited there not long after Masters had moved out: “The Persian Gulf is the a--hole of the world, and Basra is eighty miles up it.”

Discuss this post	Permalink

June 16, 2006
Vanderbilt Celebrates Himself

Posted by Richard F. Snow at 12:30 PM  EST

In his posting of June 12, John Steele Gordon speaks of the bronze freize that Commodore Vanderbilt commissioned to celebrate his life and works on the facade of his new freight depot in downtown Manhattan. It is perhaps not surprising that this project wasn’t unanimously embraced by the shareholders of the Hudson River Railroad, who, after all, had footed the bill; many would have agreed with George Templeton Strong’s condemnation of this “hideous group of molten images.” But I tend to agree with the New York Herald writer that John quotes: “This beautiful work is a monument of the genius and progress of the age.”

Discuss this post

Permalink

April 17, 2006
Mathew Brady vs. TV News

Posted by Richard F. Snow at 11:30 AM  EST

In his recent exchange with Josh Zeitz about the greater power of current battlefield images as opposed to those of the Civil War, my colleague John Steele Gordon writes, “Mathew Brady photographs, haunting and gut-wrenching as they were, are not 24/7 color footage in your living room, any more than a wind-up gramophone playing 78s is an iPod.”

This is, of course, perfectly true in a technical sense; and yet it’s important to remember the terrific emotional impact photographs of the Civil War era had upon those who saw them at the time. Mathew Brady’s photographers Alexander Gardner and James Gibson reached the scene of the awful fighting at Antietam almost while the battle was still in progress. They took 70 pictures of the field, and close to a third of them show corpses.

Brady exhibited the photographs in his New York City gallery, and the effect of the shattered caissons and rows of dead—on an audience most of whose members were alive when the camera had been invented—can scarcely be exaggerated. A New York Times reporter wrote, “Of all objects of horror one would think the battle-field should stand preeminent, that it should bear the palm of repulsiveness. But on the contrary, there is a terrible fascination about it that draws one near these pictures, and makes him loth to leave them. You will see hushed, reverend [sic] groups standing around these weird copies of carnage, bending down to look in the pale faces of the dead, chained by the strange spell that dwells in dead men’s eyes. It seems somewhat singular that the same sun that looked down on the face of the slain, blistering them, blotting out from the bodies all semblances to humanity, and hastening corruption, should have thus caught their features upon canvas and given them perpetuity for ever.”

The tone of this account suggests the writer barely distinguished between images of the battlefield and the field itself. So it was with Oliver Wendell Holmes, who had actually visited Antietam after the fighting, seeking his son who had been wounded there. After seeing the photographs, he wrote, “Let him who wishes to know what war is look at this series of illustrations. These wrecks of manhood thrown together in careless heaps or ranged in ghastly rows for burial were alive but yesterday. . . . Many people would not look through the series. Many, having seen it and dreamed of its horrors, would lock it up in some secret drawer, that it might not thrill or revolt those whose soul sickens at such sights. It is so nearly like visiting the battlefield to look over these views, that all the emotions excited by the actual sight of the stained and sordid scene, strewed with rags and wrecks, came back to us, and we buried them in the recesses of our cabinets as we would have buried the mutilated remains of the dead they too vividly represented.”

Brady’s series of Antietam photographs sold well for the next three years, the thousands and thousands of viewers almost certainly experiencing feelings similar to those that vexed Holmes when he wrote, “It was so nearly like visiting the battlefield . . . that all the emotions excited by the actual sight . . . came back to us. [It] gives us . . . some conception of what a brutal, sickening, hideous thing it is, this dashing together of two frantic mobs to which we give the name of armies . . .”

Discuss this post

Permalink

December 14, 2005
Keens and the Missing Mutton Chop

Posted by Richard F. Snow at 04:10 PM  EST

I was startled to learn today that a tangible link with the past I have several times enjoyed (not cheaply, but with far less expenditure than, say, a trip to Venice) is a fraud. This discovery also answered a question I’ve asked myself a number of times: Why, if it tastes so good, is mutton available only in one restaurant in a city in which you will have no difficulty finding a place that will serve you dogs’ eyes in rose water?

In his review of Keens Steakhouse, the New York Time restaurant critic Frank Bruni reveals that the house’s famous mutton chop is not mutton at all!

It hasn’t been for quite a while. Bruni explains that during World War II, “deprived Americans ate more mutton than they wanted, and as it later fell farther and farther out of fashion, getting fresh mutton of reliable quality became iffy. At some point Keens had to turn to lamb, choosing a cut with a winged shape that mimicked the mutton chop of yore.”

I never saw that chop of yore, but I can tell you that what Keens puts before you in its stead is a highly impressive piece of architecture, tall, oval—and delicious. But even if the dish were still capable of disgusting a country that had managed to accustom itself to Spam casserole, Keens would be well worth a visit.

The restaurant stands today where it has since 1885, at 72 West 36th Street, just east of Sixth Avenue. It is a marvel. Here is how the amiable restaurateur George Rector (himself the son of the owner of the famous turn-of-the-century Manhattan restaurant Rector’s) described it in 1939: “On its way uptown, New York’s entertainment district paused at Fourteenth Street, leaving Luchow’s [the greatest of the city’s now all-but-vanished German restaurants] behind it, moved on to Twenty-third Street, Madison Square . . . and paused again at Thirty-fourth Street, Herald Square, before it reached its present magnificence at Times Square. It was while Herald Square was flourishing with theaters instead of Macy’s that Keen’s took root and grew. Across the street was the stage door to the old Garrick Theater, and the Lambs Club was in the same building. In fact, the Lambs were there first, and, when the chop house opened, John Drew, William Gillette, Clyde Fitch, and many others were its first, and thereafter regular, patrons.

“In keeping with this theatrical heritage, the walls are now decorated with old prints of the theater and old playbills . . . dating back to the earliest days of the American theater. All of these are of great interest . . . but the most notable of all, no doubt, is the program President Abraham Lincoln held in his hands at Ford’s Theater on the night he was assassinated by the actor John Wilkes Booth.”

They’re all still there, just as Rector describes them. And so are the pipes: “Another extraneous feature of interest is the hundreds, if not thousands, of clay pipes racked along the beamed ceilings. In a chop house, after a good, substantial dinner, men of arts and letters like to sit about the table and talk things over while they smoke their pipes. I don’t know why anyone would ever want to smoke a clay pipe—perhaps it is because men look so philosophical while doing it—but anyway, they did at Keen’s, and it was hard to get the pipe there and home again without breaking its long, fragile stem. And so the custom developed of leaving the pipe in the charge of mine host. The pipe was given a number, the number was registered in the name of the owner, and the pipe was stowed safely in its rack to await another visit.”

This pipe register, says Rector, contains “a good many signatures that are autographs,” among them those of that inseparable duo Theodore Roosevelt and Eamon de Valera, George M. Cohan, of course, and, joining them in recent years, Dr. Ruth Westheimer and Liza Minnelli and Stephen King.

“For all its memories, no restaurant can thrive much past the day of its last good meal,” Rector goes on, and, like the rest of his 66-year-old observations, this one holds true. Frank Bruni liked his meal at Keens, and you will like yours.

Of course, there have been changes—but remarkably few. Even though the restaurant stood closed for years during New York’s disconsolate late 1970s, it is again the place Clyde Fitch would have recognized. The posters and playbills still sing their ancient shrillnesses from the walls, and the pipes hang in their skeletal infinities above you. The name has lost its apostrophe—for a century it was Keen’s—and it is no longer an “English Chop House” but a “Steakhouse.” The mutton chop is not, as it was billed on a 1937 menu, $1.65.

But I know of no better place to get a sense of a vanished Manhattan, or a feeling of present well-being. If you can’t stay for the (non) mutton chop, go into the dark magnificence of the bar. You can still order the “suggestion of the day” for Friday, June 25, 1937: “TOM COLLINS Consisting of: 2 oz. Dry Gin; Half Lemon or Lime Juice; Sweetened with Sugar; Soda Water; Chopped Ice.” Just don’t expect to pay “35c.” for it.

Discuss this post

Permalink

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.

Discuss this post

Permalink

September 9, 2005
Should We Rebuild?

Posted by Richard F. Snow at 03:00 PM  EST

There’s been some talk in recent days about simply letting New Orleans go: The town had a great run, but now it’s time to concede the game to nature, whose imperatives the city has taunted since its earliest years. The money and effort involved in rebuilding could more prudently be spent elsewhere.

And I suppose that’s true—the “prudently,” I mean. But New Orleans has never been a prudent city. Few of our cities have: San Francisco straddling a volatile flaw in the planet’s crust; Manhattan on its preposterous little sliver of an island; Los Angeles summoning the water on which it survives through a not entirely benign alchemy.

New Orleans has also always been “challenged” ( to use the annoying goody-goody word the TV stations have affixed to this catastrophe). Over 40,000 of its citizens died of yellow fever between 1817, when records were first kept, and 1905, when the city was host to the last epidemic of the disease in America. One of these scourges killed the Confederate general John Bell Hood and his wife, leaving ten orphaned Hoods all under the age of ten. But the city has always been more than a dangerous goad to nature.

When in 1908 the playwright Israel Zangwell declared America a “melting pot,” he was almost certainly thinking of New York City, a crucible where the heat was intense but the ingredients had come of their own accord. New Orleans is different. The ancestors of many of the people we’ve been seeing in the wrenching newscasts came to this place against their will and under conditions worse than those in the Superdome. Many of their neighbors came at bayonet point, as it were, when the British kicked them out of Canada once the French and Indian War was over. These of course were the Acadians—the Cajuns.

Under the lower heat of their particular melting pot, the Africans and the French—and the Spanish, and all the rest—gave their country and the world the most wonderful lesson about the resilience and ingenuity of the human spirit. The society they eventually formed was restless, sometimes brutal, ravaged by every horseman of the Apocalypse—and increasingly bright, buoyant, and shining with genius.

So we have jazz, and a city in a swamp that for generations everybody has wanted to visit.

New Orleans is America’s Venice, a place of spooky, wise ancient buildings that have seen it all yet still can throw off the occasional sunken flash of immediacy, of sexuality, of fun. And so much of that fun is the product of a long, painful struggle to overcome every kind of affliction that the world can deploy.

I think we have to rebuild New Orleans just the way Italy has so far rescued Venice from the marauding waters. New Orleans is our Venice without that ancient state’s dispiriting redundant history of murdered doges. Of course it WILL be rebuilt. It is easy to forget amid the happy chaotics of Mardi Gras that this is a great commercial center which generates a substantial portion of America’s wealth. But it is also an irreplaceable part of America's soul.

Discuss this post

Permalink