Of the world’s major capitals, Washington, D.C., was long considered an incongruity —a provincial Southern town wrapped in the sleepy embrace of its single client, the U.S. government. In David Brinkley’s Washington Goes to War, we are given the city in World War Il at the moment of its sudden and dramatic transformation into a world center.
Brinkley’s voice and eye inform his book, although the first person is never used. Still, when he describes an event as seen by “a young reporter,” we know who he means. His tone is in turn funny, ironic, and once in a while angry, and his words march in a cadence that has become familiar to television viewers. It is an engaging, not intrusive, sense of the author that we find here.
As gently as a Frank Capra film, Washington Goes to War summons up life in a small city in the last days of peace: “It was still possible in 1941 to walk through the White House gate and into the grounds without showing a pass or answering any questions, since the White House was not yet considered much different from any other public building in the city. Until a few years before there had been no gates at all, and on summer days government employees had lounged on the White House lawns eating picnic lunches out of paper sacks.”
Brinkley also evokes the nighttime noise of insects slamming against a screen porch and the “iron moan” of a trolley turning a curve out on Wisconsin Avenue. Later, as war dominates the city, we find Eleanor Roosevelt showing up to boost morale at the drab, inadequate housing hastily thrown up for the Waves. She invited the young women to climb in the President’s car one at a time and instructed them to “write home and tell your mothers you’ve sat in President Roosevelt’s limousine.”
Less warmly, Brinkley depicts the frenzied social quadrille of Washington’s “best” families and the way Axis representatives, held in classy West Virginia resorts right after Pearl Harbor, squabbled among themselves to the point where “the State Department feared the diplomats would soon be stabbing each other in their beds with sharpened knives stolen from the dining room.”
Among his hundreds of interviews are those with blacks, both resident and newly arrived, who watched their own circumstances deteriorate at worst or barely improve at best in the war’s booming economy. He recounts their struggle for housing in the nation’s capital and for the right to eat at a lunch counter there. With brisk disdain Brinkley observes the antics of senators from Texas, Alabama, and Mississippi during a filibuster aimed - successfully —at retaining the poll tax. Eventually a motion to cl’f4ture was imposed, “and, as the script called for, it was duly voted down. Curtain. Applause. The poll tax lived.”
Presumably this Senate testimony was taken from the Congressional Record, but one can only guess because the book lacks specific notes to the chapters (three pages of general acknowledgments appear at the end). Brinkley’s account is so richly anecdotal that one wants to pin down some facts, and find out more about others. Moreover, this solid history of the war years doesn’t even have an index. It deserves better. That aside, Washington Goes to War tackles a vast subject with grace and humor.
The American Automobile
Advertising from the Antique and
Classic Eras
By Yasutoshi Ikuta; Chronicle Books; 120 pages.
“Columbia cars are BUILT in Hartford, Connecticut, a city where close caliper machine work has been a habit for 70 years.” That’s the entire selling copy on a 1910 Columbia Motor Car Company ad, and it doesn’t smack much of the bravado and eroticism that would be used to sell automobiles as the century wore on. But there are no calipers in the picture that accompanies this severe information. Instead a distinguished older couple hurries down the steps of a house a little larger than the Executive Mansion to greet the pretty young woman who has just arrived. Her young man is handing her down; the chauffeur is touching his visor in salute; and the agent of all this joy, the Columbia that brought them, stands in the drive, ablaze with polished brass and crimson paint and casual power. The Columbia ad team knew they weren’t just selling transportation.
There are 120 advertisements for automobiles in this book; they were produced between 1902 and 1936, and it is probably not surprising that all but a very few, very early ones are at least as concerned with ambience as they are with engineering. This is also a rather churlish and obvious point, given the really ravishing world that these pictures open on. All are reproduced in color, and the scenes they show are every bit as seductive today as they were when the Lozier was still to be found “at the country club, on the boulevards, at the seashore, in the mountains, wherever you meet people of wealth and discrimination.” There are a good many people of wealth and discrimination to be found in these pages, and their houses are here too —Tudor and Georgian palaces worthy of the magnificent machines in their garages. Sometimes the owners are motoring through romantic, beautifully rendered landscapes —frequently of autumn, which, as everyone knows, is the finest time to go driving —but more often they are simply standing in picturesque arrangements with their cars.
What makes all this so appealing is the quality of the illustration. A series of 1913 Fierce-Arrow advertisements is accompanied by Art Nouveau watercolor drawings precise and luminous enough to hold their own against copy like this: “Not only has the Fierce-Arrow turned the tide of imported cars so that there are today far less in proportion than some years ago —not only that, but the Fierce-Arrow in American hands has invaded Europe, giving greater satisfaction to its owners than a native car on its native heath.”
Hoover Dam
An American Adventure
By Joseph E. Stevens; University of Oklahoma Press; 326 pages.
“Another great achievement of American resourcefulness, skill, and determination” was how President Franklin Roosevelt described the Hoover Dam upon its dedication in September 1935. Five thousand men had worked through extremes of heat and fatigue seven days a week for more than four years to build the 726.4-foot-high wedge of concrete between the sheer rock banks of the Colorado River. Their labor, combined with brilliant engineering, had brought this —“the great pyramid of the American West,” as Joseph Stevens calls it, “fount for a twentieth-century oasis civilization” —to completion two years early and millions of dollars under budget. Today it is still the largest dam in the United States, and a major tourist attraction.
Raising Hoover Dam presented difficulties of an unprecedented magnitude. The site was in a barren, scorching desert on the border of Nevada and Arizona. The canyon in which the Colorado River ran made it necessary to cut diversion tunnels through nearly a mile of solid rock. An entire town, Boulder City, Nevada, had to be built from scratch to house the workers and their families. Perhaps most important to the government and building company, public opinion had to be kept favorable through the inevitable tangle of accidents, labor unrest, and lawsuits. Stevens covers this ground lucidly, but the greatest virtue of his book is that he is more interested in the lives of men like W. A. Jameson, the only worker who came close to fulfilling the myth about the man buried in Hoover Dam, than he is in engineering or politics. Stevens’s deft narrative shows how a group of hungry, jobless drifters, pulled from improvised squatters’ camps that sprung up around the site during the worst of the Depression, became a seamless construction team. They learned their jobs quickly and remained productive, aware of the hordes of men on the outside willing to work any hours under any conditions for a regular paycheck.
Hoover Dam’s supply of power and water spurred the development of America’s Southwest, particularly Los Angeles; the workers’ understandable craving for entertainment made nearby Las Vegas what it is today. But perhaps the biggest achievement of Hoover Dam was that it helped renew the self-confidence of a nation that had begun to doubt its ability to assert its will.
Chicago Architecture, 1872–1922
Edited by John Zukowsky; Prestel-Verlag, Munich; 480 pages.
Chicago, capital of American architecture and symbol of American industrial power and dynamism, was, as the authors of this beautifully illustrated and lavishly produced collection of essays make clear, born in fire and destruction.
In 1871 Chicago had just supplanted St. Louis as the trade hub of the continent, transformed by the newly built railroads into the livestock and meatpacking capital of the world. Then, in October, the great Chicago Fire gutted nearly two thousand acres of the young city’s commercial heart. In the years following the fire, some of America’s greatest architects rebuilt the city from the ashes. With an abiding faith in progress, and an optimism seemingly redoubled by the immensity of the disaster, the Chicago architects constructed skyscrapers, department stores, exhibition halls, mansions, apartment houses, hotels, clubs, auditoriums and theaters.
As the authors demonstrate, these architects employed innovations in construction techniques and materials to make public buildings of unprecedented scale and strength. Such innovations were the product not only of the architects’ ingenuity but of the disastrous fire itself. The Nixon building, designed by the German émigré Otto H. Matz, for example, had survived the Great Fire because its structural members were covered with concrete and plaster of Paris. With Elisha Otis’s development of the passenger elevator, and the evolution of the steel frame that could replace bulky, self-supporting masonry walls, construction of tall office buildings began in earnest.
John Wellborn Root, Solon Spencer Beman, Henry Ives Cobb, Otto H. Matz and other architects developed a distinctive Chicago School style. Louis Sullivan made a major contribution to the urban landscape with his elaborately and individualistically ornamented tripartite structures that consisted of base, shaft, and capital, like a Greek column. Later, Sullivan’s great student Frank Lloyd Wright focused on the design of smaller private residences. He and his followers popularized the prairie-school philosophy of residential design, a style characterized by rambling, open, horizontal spaces.
But it was Daniel H. Burnham, perhaps more than any other Chicago architect, who reshaped the city. He hoped to create a fusion of all the best elements of European design, and many of his office buildings and his department stores, with their large atriums, were based on Parisian models. Burnham was chief of construction for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, which served as a catalyst for the creation of substantial cultural and public structures that became permanent additions to the Chicago skyline: the University of Chicago, the Art Institute, the Museum of Science and Industry, and the elevated railroad system.
All this activity, from the end of the Civil War to the years just after the First World War, produced a distinctively American form of public building that drew on European traditions of design and in turn influenced modern European architecture profoundly. The two uniquely American architectural products, the high-rise office building and the prairie-style low-rise house, came out of this period of Chicago building.
Fortunately, the authors of this collection do not focus solely on the physical appearance of Chicago’s great buildings; they go on to examine their effect on the city’s image of itself as a proud, strong, uncomplicated town, an expression of American greatness.
From Front Porch to Back Seat
Courtship in Twentieth-Century
America
By Beth L. Bailey; Johns Hopkins University Press; 208 pages.
For as long as men and women have met, attracted each other, and fallen in love, they have wondered how it happened. The event, however frequent, is never commonplace. It has always held a certain fascination for those experiencing it and for many on the sidelines too. Throughout the ages and, as this well-written, well-researched book shows, increasingly in the twentieth century, courtship has been a matter not only for malicious gossip and heartfelt discussion but also for earnest instruction and serious scholarship.
The book begins with a recapitulation of the rituals of nineteenth-century courtship in the middle and upper classes. Men requested permission to call on women at home and were granted the privileges at her and her family’s discretion. These decisions were not based on the fellow’s good looks or sex appeal, or even how much the young lady liked him, but on the basis of “suitability, breeding, and background.” Such meetings were not, according to Bailey, dates per se. The advent of dating, spurred by the invention of the automobile, “moved courtship out of the home and into the man’s sphere.” And yet, Bailey tells us, what is most interesting about this change is what stayed the same. The family no longer exercised control; the individuals themselves did—but according to Bailey, they no more listened to the dictates of their hearts than their parents had.
Courtship in the twentieth century observed the laws of supply and demand. Before World War II, women were viewed as precious commodities and treated as such. During and after the war, the supply of eligible men dwindled, and demand for them rose accordingly. “Increasingly, authors of these [advice] books [urged] women not to be too picky. If you’re only ‘so-so,’ the argument went, and men are scarce, you’ll never get a husband if you wait for your’ideal.’”
The themes of competition, economics, and social pressure presented in this book shed light on the institution of courtship. But the illumination is that of a fluorescent lamp, not of candles. “The word love scarcely appears [in this book],” Bailey writes in her introduction. Such an omission, although possibly enhancing the work’s scholarly integrity, could result in a cold, even bitter presentation. Bailey manages to avoid such a reduction by the quotes and anecdotes she has scattered throughout her book. She lets us hear so many different poignant and humorous voices, of columnists, sorority girls, callow suitors, and even a “historian of masculinity,” that we recognize and greet the hopefulness and vulnerability so characteristic of human beings falling in love.
