edited by Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris; University of North Carolina Press; 1,634 pages.
Sometime in 1912, the story goes, William H. Campbell invented “the South’s favorite candy.” He mixed peanuts and marshmallow into melted caramel, dipped it in pure milk chocolate, and took the concoction home for his infant son to try. “Goo goo,” the child gurgled happily, and Goo Goo Clusters were born. You find things like that in The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, and you also find excellent brief accounts of subjects ranging from Jacksonian democracy to Huey Long. There are essays on the speech of whites and blacks, the development of a political “Southern strategy,” how to make different kinds of gumbo, and the civil rights movement.
The book is divided into twentyfour sections, beginning with “Agriculture” and ending with “Women’s Life.” Each is introduced by an essay and is divided into entries that range in length from a few paragraphs to several pages. “Black Life,” for instance, contains entries on architecture, creolization, folklore, and migration, as well as on film images of blacks, literary portrayals of blacks, funerary customs, and land ownership. In “History and Manners” you can find a fine outline of Southern cultural history (written by Wilson, a professor of history at the University of Mississippi) and a disquisition on the significance of Moon Pies, Jack Daniel’s, and mint juleps.
The editors have included sections on the development of the good old boy and on agrarianism in literature, on stock-car racing and on debutantes. There isn’t much formal narrative history in this encyclopedia, but we already have the Encyclopedia of Southern History for that. What this book does, and does vividly, is begin to answer Faulkner’s call to “tell about the South. What it’s like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.”
Respectfully Quoted
A Dictionary of Quotations Requested from the Congressional Research Service
edited by Suzy Platt; Library of Congress; 520 pages.
Sooner or later almost everyone in Congress wants to remind almost everyone else that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. And if they want to make sure they get the quote right, they check first with the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress, which will tell them that although everyone thinks Jefferson said it, the closest the CRS can come is “The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance,” from John Philpot Curran’s “Election of Lord Mayor of Dublin” speech before the Privy Council, July 10, 1790. The CRS will turn that citation up quickly, too, because the operation has had a lot of experience finding such things; for three-quarters of a century now, the CRS has been verifying quotations that members of Congress want to use in public debate.
“Through the years,” writes Charles A. Goodrum in the introduction to this useful and highly diverting reference work, “this matter of quotation verification became big business.” Most of the questions about quotations—and in time there came to be thousands every year—were fielded by a unit called the Congressional Reading Room, whose “staff began to detect three kinds of citations that seemed to stand apart from the routine traffic: the hard ones, the repetitive ones, and the impossible ones.” Fifty years ago the increasingly hard-pressed researchers created the CRR Quote File.
The simple fact that certain quotes found their way into the file is intriguing: “Remember, democracy never lasts long,” John Adams said. “It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” Goodrum writes, “You wonder what was happening to the Member that he needed that John Adams quote—and indeed, what happened to Adams the day he said it!”
The file also contains statements whose authors have never been established. The one Mark Twain quote that everyone knows—“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years”—apparently had its genesis in the September 1937 issue of the Reader’s Digest. And “Politics is the art of the possible” was said not by Mr. Dooley but by an equally clear-eyed if somewhat sterner political theoretician, Otto von Bismarck.
The twenty-one hundred quotes that make up this book have all been culled from the CRR Quote File, and although the entries are cross-indexed as they are in any other such volume, this is a different sort of quotation book. Most books of quotations, says Goodrum with satisfaction, “are compiled by learned literateurs who sit in silent rooms reading the words of wise people and asking, ‘I wonder if that thought might be useful to somebody?’ These quotations have already answered that question. They have already been used by somebody, and others have already heard them, have already decided they want to use them again. …”
The Bishop’s Boys
A Life of Wilbur and Orville Wright
by Tom D. Crouch; W. W. Norton & Company; 606 pages.
When Orville Wright was buried in Dayton, Ohio, in 1948, four jet fighters swooped low over the cemetery and dipped their wings in honor of the first man ever to fly. Forty-five years earlier above the windswept hills of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, heavier-than-air flight began when Orville spent twelve seconds aloft in the wood-and-cloth aircraft he had built with his brother Wilbur. Tom Crouch’s absorbing new biography of the Wright brothers explains how two bicycle makers from Dayton managed to succeed where others with far greater technical credentials and a lot more money had failed.
The Bishop’s Boys provides a fascinating chronicle of the process of invention, as well as a rich portrait of an extraordinarily close-knit family, headed by the imposing Bishop Milton Wright, a leader of the Protestant United Brethren Church. Bishop Wright was an uncompromising and litigious man; in 1889 he forced a national schism within his church. His sons inherited those qualities. They spent years mired in patent suits against rival airplane builders, most notably the aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss.
A strict and loving father, Milton Wright also sparked Wilbur and Orville’s interest in flight in 1878, when he bought the boys a rubber bandpowered toy helicopter designed by the French aeronautical experimenter Alphonse Penaud. The brothers were CSI enthralled. “We built a number of copies of this toy, which flew successfully,” Orville recalled decades later. “But when we undertook to build the toy on a much larger scale it failed to work so well.”
For the adult Wright brothers aeronautics began as something of a sophisticated hobby that occupied the winter months, when sales of bicycles declined. Despite a lack of formal technical training, they were true engineers, painstakingly methodical and almost inhumanly patient, encountering frequent failures and occasional success and facing “the grit and wind of each new day with a clean tie and fresh celluloid collar.” Much of their drive came from their clergyman father, who in 1910, at the age of eightyone, flew in a plane piloted by Orville above an Ohio prairie. Orville feared the experience might unnerve the old clergyman, but the bishop “shouted above the combined roar of engine, propellers, and slipstream: ‘Higher, Orville. Higher!’”
Enchanted Drawings
The History of Animation
by Charles Solomon; Alfred A. Knopf; 336 pages.
Charles Solomon knows about animation. His definitive history of the art 154 form, Enchanted Drawings, traces its development from the traveling magiclantern shows of seventeenth-century Europe to 1988’s cartoon-and-live-action smash Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Solomon explains animation technology in clear prose and harbors a remarkable command of animation minutiae (for example, that the Smurfs were adapted from a popular Belgian comic strip known as “The Whatchamacallits”). His sly analyses of cartoon content make this illustrated volume more than just a marvelous picture book. On Popeye and Bluto’s admiration for Olive OyI, for instance, he explains: “It was never clear just what the two men saw in their skinny, often capricious inamorata: their devotion to her has to be taken as a given.”
Much of the book is devoted to dissecting the career of the unquestionable king of animation, Walt Disney. Solomon documents the watershed Mickey Mouse sound cartoon Steamboat Willie (1928), the artistically exquisite and financially phenomenal Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), the brilliant Fantasia (1940). Still, Disney emerges as a troubled, complicated man: “Walt almost seems to have been a human Rorschach test: everyone who worked with him saw something different.” And Solomon’s full-blown portrait of Disney eradicates a longstanding myth—he was cremated upon his death in 1966, not frozen, as many believe.
The author writes with tangible affection for animation, but Enchanted Drawings is also rich with tales of the medium’s wrong turns and failures. He assails the racist stereotypes of cartoons of the 1930s and 1940s and is particularly incensed by the poor quality of much of today’s animation, calling the cartoons of Saturday-morning television “a vast landfill.” Other low points are more comically described: Solomon devotes an entire chapter to cartoon training films of World War II, animated shorts often narrated by Ronald Reagan with titles like Malaria Mike, Four Methods of Flush Riveting, and How to Get a Fat Jap Out of a Cave. And everyone who has ever wondered why Nancy and Sluggo continue to inhabit the newspapers will be grateful for his brief but searing dismissal of a 1942 adaptation of Ernie Bushmiller’s comic strip: “As ‘Nancy’ had never been funny in the newspapers, there was no reason to expect it to be funny on the screen, and it wasn’t.”
High Honor
Recollections by Men and Women of World War II Aviation
by Stuart Leuthner and Oliver Jensen; Smithsonian; 338 pages.
Charlie Willis, nicknamed Whiskey, and some buddies had spent most of the night racketing around Honolulu, so they’d only had a few hours’ sleep when the Japanese came past Kaneohe Naval Air Base on their way to Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. “I looked out the window and saw a fighter go over with red circles on its wings. We figured out what was going on, pulled on our clothes, went running down the stairs, and jumped in my car. We were heading for our airplanes, which was rather stupid, because it takes about an hour to launch a PBY from the ramp into the water. I was racing to the base as fast as I could drive when a bomb hit my car. It turned upside down and caught fire. We all spilled out, and I started running for the hangar. A fighter hit me with machine-gun fire and splattered my leg, arm, and head. I managed to roll into the bushes and was out like a light for 24 hours.” During that time “the Navy came around for the body count” and found in the jeep a skeleton that Willis had discovered a few weeks before when a bulldozer sliced into an ancient burial mound during some runway improvement.
“When they finally found me in the bushes they took me to the infirmary and asked who I was. 1 said, ‘Charlie Willis.’ They said, ‘You can’t be Charlie Willis, he’s dead.’ They told me about the bones and I said I wanted those bones, they were mine. They said, ‘We know, that’s what we told your mother.’” He reached his parents by telephone during his own funeral service.
So Whiskey Willis and the United States of America entered World War II; four years later Willis, now with two Navy Crosses, was flying missions in the Pacific, and America was possessed of the world’s mightiest air force. Stuart Leuthner has sought out some of the men and women who built that air force and has talked to them about it; he was joined in his interviewing by Oliver Jensen, one of the founders of this magazine. By the time their task was finished, they had spoken at length with twenty-eight of the men and women who brought us victory in the skies against Germany and Japan.
There are plenty of aerial heroics here—as in Tom Lanphier’s shooting down of Yamamoto, the architect of the strike that brought Willis out of his bed that Sunday morning—but what gives the book its resonance is the fact that the authors have taken down the personal wars not only of fighter pilots and bomber crew members but of the immense support group that got them in the air, including the women who riveted the planes together, for instance, and the surgeons who treated the fliers’ wounds. The reminiscences range from the reflective to the hair-raising to the grimly amusing, but all ring absolutely true; they are full of life, of eccentric and intimate information. Leuthner and Jensen have been uncommonly good listeners, and what they have assembled here is more than a bunch of good war stories; it is a compelling patchwork history of a titanic enterprise.
Ghost Signs
Brick Wall Signs in America
by Wm. Stage; ST Publications (407 Gilbert Avenue, Cincinnati, OH 45202); 109 pages.
Even in a town that devours itself as voraciously as New York, dim survivors everywhere remind us of the city that was here before. When the noon light falls on the brick front of an art gallery near the American Heritage offices, you can make out on the legend: “To Let/Carriages/Coupes/Hansoms/Victorias/Light Wagons/Horses taken in board by the month.” A building is torn down, and there, surprisingly bright on the suddenly naked wall of its neighbor, the legend SEGARS or WHEELWRIGHT can be seen for a few months before a new building rises to shield it from the elements for another century. For five years or so the editors of American Heritage have puzzled over how to prepare a story on this directory of a vanished civilization; but we could devise no way short of the insanely expensive expedient of hiring a photographer to travel across the country scanning old brick walls. So we are grateful to Wm. Stage, who has done just that.
Stage has gone from St. Louis to Peoria, Portland to Philadelphia; he has consulted with such specialists as Harley E. Warrick, the sole remaining Mail Pouch sign painter; and he has gathered an impressive compilation of the fading relics: the book is full of worn brick walls bearing square-shouldered letters saying HORSE SHOERS and ICE COLD BOTTLED BEER 5 and MOUND CITY BUGGY COMPANY.
The author is generous with tips for those who would follow in his archeological footsteps: Cincinnati, for instance, “abounds with vintage wall signs. Vast portions of the city, in fact, remind one of nothing so much as a field museum of nineteenth and early twentieth century architectural styles.” It is in Cincinnati that Stage found the H. H. Meyer Packing Company’s sign. Not content merely to enjoy the painting’s brace of partridges “the finesse of which cannot be attenuated by six decades of exposure to the elements,” Stage managed to track down Gus Holthaus, whose grandfather Arnold painted the sign. Another veteran sign painter explained succinctly why this pleasing tradition is on the verge of extinction: “The story I heard on CocaCola is that they stopped their wall ads because their logo was so identifiable after fifty years that people didn’t exactly see it anymore unless it was on TV with a lot of people running around.”
