By David Plowden; W. W. Norton & Company; 160 pages.
It’s a fair bet that David Plowden is the only major American photographer ever to have left Yale for a job as assistant to the trainmaster on the Great Northern Railroad in Willmar, Minnesota. But Plowden has always loved trains. His first memory is of seeing a locomotive from the lower berth of a Pullman; the first picture he ever took, at the age of eleven, was of a steam locomotive. One of his teachers, the photographer Minor White, told him that unless he took pictures of his “damned engines and trains” and got them out of his system, he would never photograph anything else. In time Plowden went on to photograph other things; but he never did get trains out of his system, and this magnificent book is his elegy to the vanished era when the railroad was the emblem of our civilization.
Plowden’s fellow cameraman O. Winston Link, whose book of railroad photographs was reviewed in these pages several months ago, used every sort of strobe light and technical trickery. Plowden takes exactly the opposite course, composing his pictures with an artist’s eye but recording their content with the most scrupulous realism. It is a tribute both to his skill and to his subject matter that the results are every bit as romantic and dramatic as Link’s wonderful fustian.
The well-produced pictures range from railroading at its most impressive—a tall-flanked 4-8-4 rounding a grade on the Reading in a fury of steam and smoke—to smaller and more intimate views bequeathed us by the railroad landscapes: the earnest little brick buildings at trackside, the drying laundry in a Vermont backyard glimpsed from a Delaware & Hudson bridge.
Plowden is an accomplished writer, and the book commences with a marvelous account of a midwinter epic in 1955, when, with the usurper diesels failing in the bitter cold, Plowden took a hair-raising ride in the cab of 2505, a thirty-year-old mountain-type, as it pounded toward St. Paul. It was the last run of a steam engine on a Great Northern passenger train. “Almost all the tangibles of that time are gone…,” writes Plowden. “The Great Northern…has become part of the Burlington Northern system. St. Paul Union Station is no longer a station. The Fast Mail and all the passenger trains on the Willmar division are gone, too.
“The 2588 [another steam engine] survived. It is preserved like a stuffed bison behind a chainlink fence next to the station at Havre, Montana. The 2505 fared better, I believe. It has gone to Valhalla.”
The New History and the Old: Critical Essays and Reappraisals
By Gertrude Himmelfarb; Harvard University Press; 209 pages.
“Mickey Mouse may in fact be more important to our understanding of the 1930s than Franklin Roosevelt.” With this pronouncement a devotee of the “new history” recently let fly another rhetorical attack in a long and bitter academic war between the practitioners of the old history and the new. In this collection of essays Gertrude Himmelfarb enters the fray to mount her own counterattack against the new historians.
The “new history” is no longer very new. Indeed, it was in 1912 that the historian James Harvey Robinson announced its birth. He and the new historians who followed him rejected, according to Himmelfarb, the premises of the old history: “that the proper subject of history is essentially political and that the natural mode of historical writing is essentially narrative.” Robinson called for a history of the “common man” that would reject the traditional historical concern with great men, great events, and great ideas to rewrite history “from the bottom up,” utilizing the findings of anthropologists, economists, psychologists, and sociologists. Today the new historians retain Robinson’s agenda basically unchanged, although their approaches to the past have grown even more complex and diverse and now make use of computer technology.
In recent years, Himmelfarb argues, a revolution has taken place in the American academy. The new history has waged war and triumphed over the old. It is now the reigning academic approach to the past; it has, in fact, survived for several generations to become the established mainstream of American academic history. There are at present serious historians who know or can practice no other kind of history.
The distinction between the new and the old history, however, may not be so precise. Thomas Macaulay, the great nineteenth-century Whig historian, in the famous third chapter of his History of England, described the condition of daily life, work, manners, morals, and culture. Capturing the ethos of a particular time has been one of the historian’s tasks since classical antiquity. Details of daily life served this function then as now. Gertrude Himmelfarb, while not a particularly avid enthusiast of such approaches, recognizes their value; it is the dominance of social history and the assumed superiority of the new history that she vehemently objects to.
Himmelfarb points out the weaknesses of this new orthodoxy and, with a sharp and abiding sense of the high stakes involved in these academic disputes, reminds us of the values of the old. In her affection for the old history, she may not be alone: “As the new history loses the glamour of novelty, the old acquires a new allure. More and more often one hears confessions of nostalgia for an old-fashioned history that has dramatic movement and literary grace; for a political history that regards constitutions and laws as something more than ploys in the manipulation of power; for an intellectual history that takes serious ideas seriously, as ideas rather than as instruments of production and consumption…”
They Went That-a-way
By Malcolm Forbes with Jeff Bloch; Simon and Schuster; 336 pages.
At first glance Glenn Miller, Thomas Jefferson, Buddy Holly, Sigmund Freud, Aeschylus, and Sid Vicious might not seem to have a great deal in common. But they all are fellow members in the vast fraternity of death. This book tells how they joined.
Malcolm Forbes has selected 150 men and women from the past three thousand years and described how each of them died. Actually, there’s more to it than that: They Went That-a-way isn’t simply an amalgam of forensic data but rather a series of short biographies. The weight of these is canted toward the subject’s passing, and the deaths tend to illuminate sharply and succinctly the lives that preceded them. Ulysses Grant goes out with the same resolve he showed at Fort Donelson twenty-three years earlier, struggling against the mounting pain of his cancer to finish the memoirs that will salvage his family’s fortune; Montgomery Clift drifts into the thirteen-year slide that one friend called “the slowest suicide in show business”; Stephen Foster writes “Beautiful Dreamer” in the few days left to him; the much decorated Audie Murphy, asked how people survive a war, replies, “I don’t think they ever do”; George Eastman, before putting a pistol to his chest, writes a note: “To my friends: My work is done. Why wait? G.E.”
Among its other pleasures, this lively compendium is almost certain to be the only reference work you’ll ever own in which the entry on Jimi Hendrix is followed directly by the one on Wild Bill Hickok.
