One day in the mid-1840’s, old John Quincy Adams, then congressman from Massachusetts, sat motionless, bolt upright, for a full sixty seconds while a young man named Mathew Brady took his daguerreotype. We can see the bald, bullet head sunk into the upright collar of the time, the eyes staring clearly out of the deep-lined face, the actual look of a tired old man whose work was done. Although Brady photographed Andrew Jackson and John Tyler about the same time, Adams was the earliest President who ever faced a camera. With him, the scales fall off the eyes of our history.
How different it might, quite easily, have been! The camera obscura, a device which brought an image through a pinhole onto a piece of paper, to aid in sketching, was known to Leonardo da Vinci, who died in 1519. In the same century, lenses, correcting mirrors and even a portable box were added to this artist’s device, which lacked only a method of preserving the captured image. As it was, as early as 1727, one Johann Schulze discovered the effect of light on silver nitrate. A few men tinkered with his discovery, and there seems to be good evidence that one Joseph Nicéphore Niepce of Chalon-sur-Saône succeeded, sometime after 1816, in fixing permanently a number of images, but the first photograph we have today is a picture of a corner of his studio made by a friend of Niepce, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, in 1837. If—and it is a small, understandable if—someone had stumbled on the combination a century earlier we could look on Johnson and Pitt, see Washington and Bonaparte in life, witness the Terror and the American Revolution as they actually happened.
But the date remains 1837. Before that, as far as the pictorial record is concerned, war comes down to us from the Egyptian frieze and the Roman triumphal arch in a stylization which lingers in our own military art, in the delightful crudities of Amos Doolittle and heroic groupings of Benjamin West. Here are the generals, tastefully posturing in dress uniform; there a man leaps forward with the flag; a few paces behind behold a pathetic death scene, the dying man’s friends gathered about him, all of them politely ignored by the enemy. The real face of war, grubby, spread out and poorly arranged from the standpoint of artistic composition, was first glimpsed in the Mexican War by an unknown photographer, and in the Crimea by Roger Fenton, an Englishman who recorded the ports, the dismal battlefields and the groups of generals (most of them named after sweaters, or vice versa) posing in ridiculous cocked hats. There is, of course, no motion, no action. That had to wait for faster film and less cumbersome apparatus.
It was a half century before George Eastman began to place an easily operated camera in the hands of an army of amateurs, and a little longer than that before the photograph was widely used in print—in newspapers, magazines and books. In the meanwhile, the national attic filled up with photographs, daguerreotypes, stereopticon views and other pictorial materials which were never published, or seen by very few. Much of this treasure trove, alas, has been swept away, but a great deal remains—hi private hands, in museums, in the archives of local historical societies, in the vast Library of Congress. It has been leaking out more and more in recent years, in the form of picture histories.
This year’s crop of such books is the most impressive yet. Never was there such a display of American history even if, on close inspection, the range of subject is rather narrow. There are two books on Buffalo Bill, two on the Model T Ford and at least a dozen on the West. The Civil War, antique automobiles, and railroading, all regular favorites, are represented, making it painfully clear that the authors, or the publishers at any rate, are not very venturesome.
By their very nature, picture books must be subject to different standards of criticism from those applied to the purely written word. For one thing, any given word may be used time and again by author after author without risk of becoming tiresome. For another, it makes very little difference how well the written word is printed, or how tastefully the pages are arranged; both of these matters, however, are important in picture books. The successful picture historian is the one who taps at least one new or forgotten archive. Beyond this he must have some knowledge of design and layout, and know how to organize related scenes and present what he has found.
He must learn how to write text and captions which move along with the pictures, placing them in his argument so that the book reads smoothly, neither too endlessly detailed nor too superficial. Captions which merely bark “Oil!” or “Sanctuary” or “Texas Is Big” only serve to infuriate, and the day is past when the author can get away with placing his pictures helterskelter, or tucking them away in a special section, sending the reader after them with commands to hunt down Fig. 4 or Plate XXVII.
Certain limitations are forced naturally upon picture books, especially those which depend primarily on photographs. The still camera can record action, anger, laughter, war, peace and a thousand exterior manifestations of things. It can only approximate how and why and philosophical concepts, and there are many doors, of mind and spirit, through which it cannot penetrate at all.
Other limitations, however, come less naturally. They are, we are told apologetically, imposed by economics. The average picture book this year—any recent year—has a bright-colored jacket which only belies the grayness within. One volume, A Currier & Ives Treasury, by Colin Simkin (Crown: $10), does employ fourcolor printing. But even this, an otherwise pleasant collection of the lithographs which gave us our stereotyped vision of the Nineteenth Century, is far off in its color work from the originals. With this exception, nearly all the current picture histories have been printed in a dull, black-and-white offset lithography which drains the life and sparkle out of the pictures.
Letterpress printing, save in one book, seems to have been financially out of the question this year. Yet this exception, Changing America, by Andreas Feininger (Crown: $5.95), a fine study of the landscape and the gradual effect man has made upon it, from the cliffdweller’s adobe house to the great cities, puts all the others to shame.
With only such an occasional exception, American picture-book-making seems to pace briskly backwards. Divided We Fought, the best single-volume Civil War picture book to date, was better printed than later volumes, indeed fully as well handled from a printing standpoint as the 10-volume Photographic History of the Civil War which Francis Trevelyan Miller put out in 1912. No recent railroad book has matched the quality of Lucius Beebe’s Highball (1945), and none of the new books devoted to line engravings is up to the standard of Washington Irving’s illustrated Life of Washington (1855–59). For real printing quality in line work, one must return to the Nineteenth Century.
The reasons are clear enough. The publisher who contemplates a picture book is caught in a trap. He must offer something that will seem worth forty times the price of a current picture magazine. But, afraid to gamble on a sale of more than five to ten thousand, he must avoid letterpress, with its high initial cost, and find a cheap method. If he dared plan on selling fifty thousand, the differential might vanish, but he dares not. And so, at the publisher’s editorial conference, there are certain suggestions:
Gotta keep it under ten bucks (answer: offset).
Gotta bulk it up (answer: rough, thick paper).
Get Jerry to lay it out (Jerry gets $400 for four weeks’ work).
The combination of Jerry, “bulk” and offset (which can be good but usually isn’t) is deplorable, from the standpoint of keeping the historical record of this country.
The argument that sales of ten thousand copies will not warrant a better production is true on the record, but is self-defeating since the poor quality and high price combine to limit sales. Actually there have been two outstanding successes this season in picture-book publishing: the book of Steichen’s great photographic show, The Family of Man, which has sold over 350,000 copies, and Life’s magnificent The World We Live In, which has grossed $6,000,000. Both of these books, to be sure, were marketed mainly outside the normal channels of book distribution, but that is perhaps a significant clue.
A more direct comparison may be found in the art field, where the Skira and Harry Abrams books have built up a wide market by offering high quality reproduction of art works at a reasonable price. A real opportunity awaits the publisher who can open up a similar market for good picture books, historical or otherwise.
The New Picture Books
The Frontier Years, by Mark H. Brown and W. R. FeIton (Holt: $10), perhaps the best of this year’s picture histories, is also the most limited in time and space. It is built around the life of one man, L. A. Huffman, a photographer who came to Fort Keogh on the Yellowstone, in Montana, in 1878 and remained in that area until his death in 1931, taking pictures of just about everything that happened or appealed to him there. In his photographs—and in the letters and notes he left behind, which the authors quote extensively—he left a record of a raw, rough portion of the West as civilization moved in and made over the land. Some of the pioneers themselves deplored the change and agreed with Badger Clark:
”… I loved my fellow man the best When he was scattered some.”
Of all the tragedies which time wrought in the land Huffman loved, none was so great as that which overtook the Indians, whom he photographed superbly in all their strange, impassive dignity. No two races, the authors point out, understood each other less than the white man and the red, and the white man wrote the histories. Here is a glimpse of the other side, of men who were honest and truthful until the alien race taught them otherwise. Here is the red man, according to Huffman, after twenty years of white supervision: “And some of these withered ones with the furrowed faces, with habiliments and dwellings neither savage or civilized, their faces tell me a sad, sad tale, for only yesterday I saw him in his lodge of skins; his robe was glossy, and upon the inside of the rude dwelling there was the odor of white clay, the pungency of willow bark and the incense of sweet grass; and he walked uprightly and proudly, and the covering upon his feet, the skin of beasts, was gayly tricked out with the quills of the porcupine, dressed and tinted by the loving hands of the women of his household; but now that indescribable something in the courage and the general tout ensemble of the red men and women that was so apparent in these people is gone and they are woefully changed.”
The American West, by Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg (Button: $12.50), is a gaudy thing of Indian scouts and desperadoes, miners and cardsharps, barrooms and bagnios. Mr. Beebe, the last of the great dudes, has mined a good many pictorial lodes of western Americana but his biggest strike was made in the files of the Police Gazette. The authors are at their rollicking best when dealing with such “pretty waiter girls” of San Francisco’s Barbary Coast as The Galloping Cow, The Roaring Gimlet, Lady Jane Gray and The Little Lost Chicken. They linger lovingly at the famous pleasure dome of the Everleigh sisters, who dazzled the cow barons of Omaha with a $15,000 goldplated piano played by a professor in evening dress.
Messrs. Beebe and Clegg, who now run the famous old Territorial Enterprise at Virginia City, Nevada, are naturally partial to this greatest of all the bonanza towns, the capital of the Comstock Lode. But they grant the claim of little Bodie, which San Francisco papers like to place in Nevada but which was really inside the California border, to its rank as the wickedest town in all the West. “The smoke of battle,” wrote an awed correspondent, “hardly ever clears away altogether in Bodie.” The tale was told of a miner who was moving his family to the dangerous town when he overheard his little daughter praying: “Good-bye God, we’re going to Bodie.” The Bodie Free Press, however, always maintained that what the little girl really said was “Good! By God, we’re going to Bodie!”
The Settlers’ West, by Martin F. Schmitt and Dee Brown (Scribners: $7.50), devotes itself to the soberer aspects of the western saga. Here are the covered wagon pioneers, who built their first houses of sod and made their fires of buffalo chips or even of prairie hay, and who wanted the West to be as much like the East as they could make it.
Tales of the Mississippi, by Ray Samuel et al (Hastings House: !7.50), is filled with the lore of river boats and river people. There was, for instance, George H. Devol, slickest of the steamboat gamblers. One night on the Robert E. Lee a fellow whom he had just cheated of $800 at monte pulled a Colt pistol.
“See here, friend,” he said, waving the roscoe, “that is all the money I have got and I will have it back.”
“Did you think I was going to keep the money?” asked Devol coolly.
“I knew very well,” said the fellow, “you would not keep it. If you had, I would have filled you full of lead. I am from Texas, sir.”
As he pulled out a roll of money, Devol whispered to the Texan: “I didn’t want to give you the money before all those people because then they would all want their money back too; but you offer to bet me again and I will bet you $800 against your pistol.”
Pleased, the Texan handed his pistol to a stakeholder. Devol threw the crooked cards and the Texan, naturally, picked the wrong one. Grabbing the pistol, Devol pointed it at the man and said: “Now, you’ve acted the wet dog about this and I will not give you a cent of your money, and if you cut any more capers, I will break your nose.”
He could have, too, because Devol was the head-butting champion of the lower Mississippi. When a gambling victim gave him trouble, Devol would lower his head and rush at the man, aiming to hit him between the eyes. Doctors told Devol that his skull was an inch thick over the forehead and opponents who hit it barefisted reported that it felt “like a cannon ball.”
Mathew Brady: Historian with a Camera, by James D. Horan (Crown: $7.50), presents a number of interesting Brady pictures that have not been published before, along with many that have had far better reproduction elsewhere and some that are too poor to deserve reproduction anywhere. Messy layout combines with the poor printing to obscure the greatness of Brady’s photographic achievement.
Buffalo Bill and the Wild West, by Henry B. Sell and Victor Weybright (Oxford: $6.95), is a spirited story of the Indian scout who lent himself so well to the arts of promotion that he ended up as the incarnation of the West. The authors, one of whom—Sell—is a kinsman of the game old showman, have written a splendid text which could well stand independently from the nostalgic pictures.
Pictorial History of American Presidents, by John and Alice Durant (Barnes: $10), is a workmanlike assembly of pictures and text which ought to find a good market in an election year.
Tin Lizzie: The Story of the Fabulous Model T Ford, by Philip Van Doren Stern (Simon & Schuster: $3.98), is an affectionate history of the little car that changed the whole pattern of American life.
Civil War in Pictures, by Fletcher Pratt (Holt: $10), is made up of drawings from Harper’s Weekly and other illustrated papers of the period. This is how the northern public actually saw the war, for photographs were not reproduced at the time. Fortunately for the eyes of their readers, the weeklies were able to reproduce the original drawings, instead of printed copies, and to give them greater size as well as better printing than they get today.
The American Wars, by Roy Meredith (World: $10), is a record of battle art from the French and Indian Wars to Korea. Even the Revolution had such distinguished artists in uniform as Colonel John Trumbull [who painted the head of Washington on the cover of this issue] and James and Charles Willson Peale. By World War I the Army had a staff of artists under the Corps of Engineers and by World War II combat artists were sketching under fire in every theater. This record of combat art would be far more impressive if it were reproduced in its original color and more impressive still if it did not have to stand comparison with the work of the war photographers. Perhaps the bright, theatrical brush of the painter suited the formalized actions of another age, but the grim, relentless eye of the black-and-white camera seems to make the truest record of modern war.
—Oliver Jensen
The Triumph of Right
You never quite know where you are going to find them. The men who can interpret the American dream in terms of the people who have to live with it, and who can take fire from what they have glimpsed and go out and work and fight to make the reality come a little closer to the substance of the dream- they wear no uniform and they are not typed, they can appear without warning in the most unlikely places, and when they go into action things are likely to happen.
An excellent case in point is provided in Adventures of a Slum Fighter, written by Charles F. Palmer.
Mr. Palmer was, and is, a prosperous real-estate broker in Atlanta. In 1934 he was perfectly typical of his craft; a solid, substantial, no-nonsense businessman, as little given to impractical daydreams as the next man, doing the day-to-day job and occasionally casting a wary eye in the direction of the strange New Deal goings-on in Washington.
Then he became interested in slum clearance. It dawned on him not only that slums are bad but that something can be done about them—that by a combination of government action and private enterprise, it is possible to replace slums with decent housing in a way that will leave everybody better off. Without warning he found himself a man with a cause, and he went forth to fight for it.
Adventures of a Slum Fighter, by Charles F. Palmer. Tupper and Love. 272 pp. $4.
He had his troubles. Sheer inertia was one; the ponderous unraveling of government red tape was another (he found the sainted Harold Ickes, incorruptibility and all, a man under whom things did not happen fast); simple troglodyte opposition to reform was still another. (Georgia’s Governor Eugene Talmadge proclaimed: “Slums are good for people: Makes ‘em stronger!”) But he kept at it, making a pest of himself in Atlanta, in Washington and in other places, and after many years and a paralyzing amount of effort he came to see his fight crowned with a substantial measure of success.
It took courage, perseverance and dedication—qualities which perhaps are embodied in ordinary folk more often than the pessimist is prepared to admit. Mr. Palmer traveled all over Europe, investigated slumclearance projects all the way from Britain and Italy to Russia and Germany, made his own moving picture to illustrate the possibilities, battled his way to the White House itself, and had the pleasure of seeing a good many blocks of unspeakable rabbit warrens replaced by modern dwellings in which Americans could live with some measure of decency. The fight is by no means over, and it will not be over for a long time, but a good deal has been done and much more will yet be done.
All of which makes an immensely encouraging book. Now as always there are people in America who go out to set wrong things right just because they believe that in America right ought to triumph over wrong. They have their troubles, they wear themselves out without getting thanked very much, and they never quite reach the goal. But they help make America a better place while they are at it.
Leader of Lincoln?
The grimmest face in the American picture gallery is that of old Thaddeus Stevens, the Pennsylvania abolitionist who forgot nothing, forgave nothing and made himself the living symbol of the so-called radical viewpoint after the Civil War—the view which saw the South as a set of conquered provinces that could and should be remade even at the expense of completely destroying the structure of the society which had existed there. In most accounts of the tangled, tragic reconstruction era, Stevens is cast as the villain.
Now comes Mr. Korngold to tell a different sort of story. He sees Stevens not merely as a humanitarian dedicated to the fight for the underdog, but as a man who was not vindictive or cruel; a statesman who was finally driven to espouse unrestricted Negro suffrage (with all which that entailed) solely by the intractability of the southern leaders who had lost the war but who refused to accept defeat.
Thaddeus Stevens: A Being Darkly Wise and Rudely Great, by Ralph Korngold. Harcourt, Brace and Co. 460 pp. $6.
More than that: Mr. Korngold argues that Lincoln was extremely reluctant to interfere with Negro slavery, that he was no particular friend of the colored race and doubted that the Negro could ever be assimilated in American society, and that he finally became the “great emancipator” largely because Stevens forced his hand. It was Stevens rather than Lincoln, as Mr. Korngold sees it, who accepted the challenge presented by the Civil War and made of the war a great instrument for broadening the base of American citizenship.
Stevens’ original reconstruction plan, Mr. Korngold insists, was comparatively mild. It would have given the vote to no Negro, taken the vote from no white man, confiscated no southern propetry and executed, imprisoned or exiled no southern leaders. It failed, as Mr. Korngold sees it, because of southern intransigeance, aided by the “soft peace” policy of President Andrew Johnson.
Here, obviously, is a sharply argumentative book. Mr. Korngold is pleading a cause, and he frequently overstates his case, especially when he shows Stevens leading Lincoln down a path Lincoln would not otherwise have followed. Nevertheless, this book has a good deal of value. It may help to put gnarled, brooding Thaddeus Stevens in a slightly different perspective, and it does suggest that a fresh look at the whole reconstruction period may be in order.
