A gathering of recent books, videos, recordings, and other items of special interest to the readers of American Heritage, selected and recommended by the editors.
BOOKS
Beyond Conspiracy
Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK
by Gerald Posner, Random House, 607 pages
The conspiracy-book industry seized on last fall’s thirtieth anniversary of the Kennedy tragedy for its latest barrage. Among all the new volumes, Gerald Posner’s calm and definitive study, Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK, arrives at the most truly radical conclusion: “One man, acting alone, killed the President.” He asserts that the Warren Commission’s 1964 report was flawed but correct after all.
The more you know about Oswald, Posner shows, the more inescapable it seems that he was the unassisted killer. As he convincingly demonstrates, the adult Oswald simply wasn’t stable enough to have played a major role in an elaborate farreaching conspiracy that stayed secret. Posner also sets straight the long-debated facts of the Dallas shooting and analyzes the Warren Commission’s investigation. There is a probing chapter on Jack Ruby, an excellent appendix on ballistics, and a fascinating look at the Zapruder film, using computer enhancement to trace the trajectories backward from the bullet wounds. This book’s flimsy predecessors are no match for it.
The Indispensable Man
Washington
by Douglas Southall Freeman, Collier Books, 792 pages
Douglas Southall Freeman spent the last eight and a half years of his life working on his monumental seven-volume biography of George Washington. Fifteen years after his death in 1953, an able abridgment appeared. Richard Harwell, who distilled the original 3,582 pages down to 754, wrote that “Washington’s life … has withstood many bad books. Freeman’s is certainly one of the few that it has deserved. George Washington is the true and complete story—fully researched, felicitously written, and unembellished by foolish myth or by false and pretentious piety.” Now the one-volume Freeman is back in print, in a hefty, handsome paperback edition. It is both a wholly absorbing narrative and a salutary reminder that its subject is every bit as great as you were told he was in grade school.
Modern Screen
Phil Stern’s Hollywood: Photographs 1940–1979
by Phil Stern, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 116 pages
Anyone who ever pored over movie magazines—especially those of the 1950s—will devour this book in one sitting. The work of a longtime Hollywood photographer, it gives us a backstage look at the same stars Modern Screen and Photoplay presented in cool, groomed perfection. Here is Slim Pickens in mid-yawn on location, and there is Lauren Bacall on the Blood Alley set, her hair in pincurls. These people must have felt easy around Phil Stern, and he makes his studies of them look easy too. But there is plenty of art in his work; close-in angles, moody lighting, and swift, vigorous action create movie gods and goddesses as seductive in private moments as they were in the glossy mold of the fan mags. One criticism: The book is oddly scant on information. Only occasionally is there more than a brief identification, and when Stern does present fuller captions, they have nothing to do with the photo being shown. Moreover, a number of pages in this slim volume were simply left empty. Nevertheless, what is here is weirdly compelling.
Up From Prodigy
W. E. B. Du Bois Biography of a Race, 1868–1919
by David Levering Lewis, Henry Holt, 735 pages
In the first of what will be two volumes on the extraordinary life of the black historian, sociologist, and activist W. E. B. Du Bois, David Levering Lewis follows his subject’s growth from the dutiful, gifted son of a frail mother and absent father in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, through his prime years of eloquent outrage at the helm of The Crisis, the NAACP monthly magazine he founded. “Under similar circumstances we would fight again,” Du Bois wrote as black American soldiers returned from Europe in 1919. “But by the God of heaven we are cowards and jackasses if now that the war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land.” After his impressive rise through the academic ranks (at Harvard he studied with George Santayana and William James), Du Bois became an intellectual force for activism and openly broke with black leaders like Booker T. Washington when he considered them too accommodating. This superb book is equal to its hero’s fiercely brilliant career. The second volume will follow Du Bois from age fifty-one until his death in Ghana on the eve of the 1963 March on Washington.
Mass Transit
722 Miles: The Building of the Subways and How They Transformed New York
by Clifton Hood, Simon & Schuster, 335 pages
New York’s subway system has embodied the spirit of the city, for better and for worse, since its opening in 1903. The system was proposed in 1888 by Mayor Abram S. Hewitt, a fierce nativist who saw mass transit as the only way New York’s homegrown population could escape the encroachment of foreign hordes. He would have been shocked to see the polyglot town that resulted when subway lines allowed immigrants to establish new enclaves throughout the city.
There are many aspects to the story—engineering, social, economic—and Hood covers them all. He goes into particular depth on the political details, which at times can make a New York subway map look simple and which confirm a familiar maxim about public works: As hard as they are to design and build, keeping them going is often an even bigger challenge. Hood’s book will be instructive not only to New Yorkers and transit buffs but to anyone interested in our nation’s infrastructure.
“The Hot Bach”
Beyond Category The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington
by John Edward Hasse, Simon & Schuster, 479 pages
The Duke Ellington Reader
edited by Mark Tucker, Oxford University Press, 536 pages
Today Duke Ellington stands higher than ever as a towering figure of American music. Right now he is the subject of a traveling exhibition from the Smithsonian (“Beyond Category,” at the Museum of the City of New York through March 20 and then in other cities through September 1996), a major new biography, and an excellent critical collection.
Beyond Category is an affectionate musical biography by the curator of the Smithsonian show. Hasse reconstructs the Duke’s growth from a teen-ager playing rags for seventy-five cents a night to one of the great American composers. Ellington still hasn’t received the biography he deserves, but this good artistic portrait begins to restore the damage done by James Lincoln Collier’s patronizing attempt.
The Duke Ellington Reader ably charts the debates and triumphs along the way and makes a fine history of jazz itself. “This colored band is plenty torrid,” went the first New York review of Ellington, in 1923. John Hammond’s 1935 essay “The Tragedy of Duke Ellington” bemoans the composer’s attempts at longer, more ambitious pieces. Later articles by the likes of Ralph Ellison, Whitney Balliett, and Stanley Crouch more than make up for such early pomposities.There are also terrific interviews; in one, the trombonist Tricky Sam Nanton says of his boss, “He’s a genius, all right, but Jesus how he eats!” The Ellington Reader reveals both the genius and the man.
The Record of the Founding
The Debate on the Constitution
(2 volumes) edited by Bernard Bailyn, Library of America
Without this collection, to get what it contains you would have to read The Grand Convention alongside The Federalist Papers and What the Anti-Federalists Were For and then spend countless bleary hours going through hundreds of old pamphlets. And you would miss not only the elegance and clarity of the Library of America’s production but also the sense it contains of the ferment of argumentation at the time the Constitution was proposed. The two-volume work restores the debate’s original uncertainty and includes small newspapers’ opinions as well as those of the victorious Federalists. It follows the national argument like the transcript of an unbelievably eloquent electronic town hall.
The Federalist Papers are reprinted in full and with many of their counterpart responses. The volumes contain a first-rate index, useful chronologies, and biographies of known and little-known figures.
Life in Utopia
Without Sin: The Life and Death of the Oneida Community
by Spencer Klaw, Alien Lane, Penguin Press, 337 pages
Founded in 1848, the Oneida Community thrived for thirty years in upstate New York, a record that makes it America’s most successful experiment in communal living. Under the charismatic leadership of John Humphrey Noyes, some three hundred members supported themselves manufacturing traveling bags, animal traps, and lazy Susans. Work was shared, children were reared communally, and adults practiced a form of free love Noyes called “complex marriage.”
“The inevitable frustration of elaborate schemes for making people happy and good,” the author writes, “is, of course, the stuff of comedy. But if the Oneidans were not quite so happy or so good as outsiders were given to believe, they were happy and good enough so that it is impossible … to contemplate the collapse of Noyes’s daring scheme for human betterment without a stabbing sense of loss.” Spencer Klaw spent years study ing .the written records left by the community, and he illuminates a time and place in our history that resonates in the news stories that emerge from time to time from places like Guyana and Waco.
Into Battle
Suddenly We Didn’t Want to Die: Memoirs of a World War I Marine
by Elton E. Mackin, Presidio, 264 pages
Fifteen years ago a boxful of limp old onionskin arrived in our offices. The manuscript told the story of a young Marine private who had fought his way from Belleau Wood to the Meuse, in the process surviving some of the bitterest action the Western Front had to offer. It was terrific. We ran a full sixteen pages of it and only wished we could publish the whole thing. Now someone has, and it takes its place among the finest accounts of the soldier’s lot in the First World War. Now and then Mackin superheats his prose with youthful floridity, but there is real eloquence here, along with fierce vignettes recounted with clarity and perfectly controlled understatement. Northeast of Vierzy, for instance, Mackin’s outfit faces a German advance. The Marines spot a battery of French 75s coming their way, flag them down, and the rapid-firing guns save the day. But a German shell lands directly on four French officers standing by their guns studying a map: “Of men and map there was but a reeking hole, smoke-clogged and rancid. No other trace was left.
“We were startled by a burst of hearty laughter, and turned to find Gene Clevenger, the Missouri mule, arms crossed over his belly, rolling in the wheat in an uncontrollable spasm of mirth. It wasn’t funny, yet we had to smile. His laughter was infectious, and while we puzzled some and could not understand, we joined in, too. At long last, after the paroxysm had subsided somewhat, we asked for an explanation.
“Gene tried to give it to us through his chuckles and tears.
“‘But Gene,’ someone said, ‘What in hell—just what in hell was there to laugh about?’
“Half convulsed, Gene pointed weakly down and gasped, ‘Oh, Jesus, I bet they was surprised.’”
IF YOU’RE IN SAN MARINO, go to the Huntington
The Huntington Library, in San Marino, has long been known for its extraordinary holdings, including tremendously broad and deep collections in American history. Now through the end of August, the Huntington offers what may be the largest gathering of Lincoln material ever seen in one place. Titled “The Last Best Hope of Earth,” the show concentrates strongly on Civil War material but also offers personal memorabilia, including the President’s marriage license and the white gloves he wore to the theater on the night of his assassination. The curators hope the public will draw from this assemblage of two hundred items the message that this is still Lincoln’s America, still the last best hope.
VIDEO
Alive
The Donner Party
directed by Ric Burns, Direct Cinema, 81 mins.
It is the great cautionary tale of the westering frontier, the group of emigrants who jumped off from Independence, Missouri, in the spring of 1846 and raced winter across half the continent only to have it catch up with them when they were a day’s journey away from safety. Then the worst winter ever recorded in the Cascade Range volleyed its snows down upon them, sealing them high in the Sierra Nevada for mortal months. From a grisly tale of despair and cannibalism, Ric Burns—who, with his brother Ken, produced the PBS Civil War series—has fashioned a remarkable epic of folly and courage and human resilience that is the more remarkable for the fact that despite the scarcity of archival photographs, he keeps a tense and engrossing narrative pelting along from the documentary’s beginning to its most satisfying conclusion.
Terms of Debate
The Congress Dictionary
by Paul Dickson and Paul Clancy, John Wiley & Sons, 400 pages
Especially since Congress became available live through cable television, we have needed a guidebook as thorough and good-humored as this one to explain precisely what our lawmakers are saying. Dickson and Clancy have put together a lexicon of three thousand words and phrases, some dating to the earliest years of the Republic but most, like Teflon or wonk, much newer. In addition to clear explanations of everyday Hill terms like floor manager, the book offers pithy explanations for globalony (“murky international thinking”) and vehicle (“bill that is moving through Congress and may be loaded down with other measures”). The Watergate crisis has provided a nonsense suffix for most scandals since. Under You (which lawmakers traditionally don’t say on the floor), Dickson and Clancy cite the 1989 fight over John Tower’s nomination to be Defense Secretary. That debate grew so contentious that senators were snarling, “You can have the floor.” This book, both pleasurable and useful, contains an appreciative foreword by the former House Speaker “Tip” O’Neill.
RECORDINGS
Meet the Beats
The Beat Generation
Rhino Records, three-CD set
In a conversation with John Clellon Holmes in 1948, Jack Kerouac said of his disaffected, angst-ridden friends, “We’re a beat generation!” He grew awfully tired over the next two decades of hearing his quip mockingly applied to every feckless college kid who grew a goatee or wore a beret. The beats inspired enormous amounts of ephemera, but they also left behind a solid corpus of genuine literary merit.
This collection contains ample amounts of both. After perhaps one too many perky jazz themes by musicians with questionable beat credentials, along comes William Burroughs to growl an excerpt from Naked Lunch and blow them all away. Jack Kerouac, his voice soft and lisping, recites with enough vigor and lilt and music to shock anyone who has struggled through his printed work.
There are oddities here—Rod McKuen versifying beat-style, Perry Como vaguely attempting bebop—as well as gems from hard-to-find masters like Lord Buckley and Slim Gaillard. Allen Ginsberg climaxes the anthology with a sly reading of his poem “America”; and a picturepacked fifty-six-page booklet documents it all. The Beat Generation is a fascinating, lively chronicle of a literary and social movement whose influence persists today, and of American society’s confused, ambivalent reaction to it.
The Big-Band Sound
Swing That Music! The Big Bands, the Soloists, the Singers—1929–1956
Smithsonian Collection of Recordings A4-19881 (four CDs)
Here is a definitive compilation of almost five hours of classic big-band music, collected, mastered, and annotated with the Smithsonian’s usual care and authority. It offers ninety-four selections, arranged chronologically, from a young Bing Crosby’s “After You’ve Gone” in front of the Paul Whiteman Orchestra in 1929 to Dizzy Gillespie’s suave “I Can’t Get Started” in 1956. (The latter song also appears in a classic Bunny Berigan version and as sung by Billie Holiday with Count Basic in 1937.) Most of the tracks are with singers; they include Mildred Bailey, Peggy Lee, Billy Eckstine, Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, and Sarah Vaughan, to name just a few. The bands include Armstrong’s, Galloway’s, Webb’s, Hines’s, Goodman’s, both Dorseys’, James’s, Shaw’s, Ellington’s, Krupa’s, Herman’s—just about everybody’s. The accompanying book is handsome and very informative, with an essay by the late Martin Williams identifying big-band music as a genuine melting pot that brought together blues, jazz, popular song, social dance music, and the cult of the soloist. The set was previously issued on LP and cassette in 1987; it has been revised and sonically refurbished for CD, and it sounds excellent.
Cowboy Music
Songs of the West
by various artists, Rhino Records 71263, four CDs
This is not music of the West of American history or of the West today; it is music of the West of pure unashamed imagination, of Gary Cooper at high noon, of “Bonanza,” and of Marlboro cigarettes. Disc One, “Cowboy Classics,” offers eighteen tunes like “I Want to Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart” by Patsy Montana. Most of them were written on Tin Pan Alley, of course. Disc Two, “Silver Screen Cowboys,” gives us the singing stars of the screen West, among them Tex Ritter, Slim Pickens, and Rex Alien. Disc Three zeros in on Gene Autry and Roy Rogers; Disc Four finally gets to the most iconic Western music of all, Western themes from television and movies. They’re all here: “The Magnificent Seven” (a.k.a. the Marlboro theme), “Gunsmoke,” “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” “Rawhide,” and more. By the time you get to Roy Rogers singing “Don’t Fence Me In” you may agree with Cole Porter’s lyric: “I want to ride to the ridge where the West commences / gaze at the moon till I lose my senses …”
If you’re in Chicago, go to the Berghoff
The stockyards are gone, and every city has skyscrapers of its own now, but the robust Chicago of the 189Os lives on in the somber mahogany splendor of the Berghoff bar. With stained glass at the street end and heavy chandeliers shedding a mellow tea-colored light and people coming in out of the raw winter weather for a restorative pint of the house’s own double dark, it is easy for the visitor to get a sense of the dynamic, working city in what Theodore Dreiser called its “furnace days.” 17 West Adams Street.
BOOKS
The Whole War in One Book
A World at Arms: A New History of World War II
by Gerhard L. Weinberg, Cambridge University Press, 1,126 pages
Four and a half years into it, the fiftieth anniversary of the Second World War has found a chronicle worthy of the occasion. The diplomatic historian Gerhard L. Weinberg has compressed the endless complexities of the global struggle into a coherent—in fact, hypnotic—narrative, offered up in a single, handsome volume. The scholarship is superb and wide-ranging (the German-born author is at home in Nazi-era archives often passed over by other historians), the prose has bite and clarity, Weinberg does not shrink from making judgments, and his tale is leavened with mordant wit and underpinned with moral clarity. This is surely the finest one-volume history we have of the most important event of our century.
Jeffersonian Zeal
Indispensable Enemies The Politics of Misrule in America
by Walter Karp, Franklin Square Press, 327 pages
For many years before his sudden death in 1989, Walter Karp was both a good friend and a valued contributor to this magazine. In the latter capacity he was the author of a delightful series on unusual American museums and how they reflect the personalities of their founders. But Walter always felt his true vocation was the defense of the best traditions of the American Republic, which he conducted tirelessly in innumerable articles and several books. The first of these books, Indispensable Enemies, has just been issued in paperback. In it the author calls with Jeffersonian passion for the reestablishment of liberties he sees as having been eroded by a long history of collusion between the two parties, determined to preserve the status quo. It’s controversial stuff, but few readers will be unmoved by the valor of Walter’s convictions, the powerful historical scrutiny to which he subjects them, and the clarity with which he makes his case.
VIDEOS
History via Hollywood
The Last of the Mohicans
directed by Michael Mann, Twentieth Century-Fox Video
Colonial America has proved a strangely nettlesome subject for Hollywood. Full-blown features from 1776 to Revolution! have failed miserably with critics and at the box office. This one gets it right, turning the book into a thrilling, romantic adventure smart enough for grownups. As in James Fenimore Cooper’s classic novel, the action is set in 1757, during “the third year of the war between England and France for the possession of the continent,” according to the opening credits.
The acting is often riveting, but the movie’s real stars are the art direction and editing. The film is gorgeous, with stunning historical re-creations. Huge night battles are eerily illuminated by the smoke from firing cannon. Like all great adventure films, this one is not always plausible, but its characters are real enough, and it avoids the trap of canonizing its native Americans. It depicts the colonial frontier as a gorgeous, wild, romantic, and horribly dangerous place where the seeds for democracy are sown.
Memphis Belle
directed by Michael Caton-Jones, Warner Home Video
The critics tended to patronize this movie about an 8th Air Force bombing raid on Hamburg, when it came out a couple of years back: one said that the crew of the B-17 that gives the film its title seemed too young (!); another that they were too brave (perhaps he thought the P-51s were along to keep them from running away). A third said the character development was weak, but grudgingly admitted that the movie did convey the sweep and complexity of the air battle over Europe. In fact, Memphis Belle most impressively succeeds in suggesting the immense effort that went into our bombing campaign against Germany, and again fills the sky with the hardware that won it. The moviemakers are sensitive enough to fold in a patch of archival footage, a salutary reminder of the world of difference between the cleverest recreation and the real thing. Add to this a first-rate score and a hair-raising ride home from the target, and the result is a picture that deserves far more serious consideration than it received.
IN THIS ISSUE
Susannah McCorkle, who wrote “The Mother of Us All,” makes the following recommendations for recordings of Ethel Waters on CD:
“Ethel Waters on Stage and Screen (1925–1940) (Columbia Collectors’ Series A2792), is a good introduction to Waters for people who like standards. Her vibrant presence and dazzling musicality jump off the disc in her first pop song hits, ‘Dinah’ and ‘Am I Blue?’ Two 1930s revue songs written especially for her, ‘Harlem on My Mind’ and ‘Thief in the Night,’ catch her at her peak as she reveals an acting talent as original and spontaneous as her singing. The Dutch import Ethel Waters 1929–1939 (Timeless Records) duplicates five songs from the Columbia reissue but offers seventeen more by such greats as Harold Arlen, Jimmy McHugh, Irving Berlin, and Hoagy Carmichael, with an impressive roster of jazz musicians (Dorsey brothers, Benny Goodman, Benny Carter, Duke Ellington) and excellent liner notes and photographs. Highlights are ‘I Can’t Give You Anything but Love,’ ‘Come Up and See Me Sometime,’ and ‘I Ain’t Gonna Sin No More.’
“A French compilation, Ethel Waters 1926–29 (Classics Records), is breathtaking, even shocking, in its scope of material: from the stirring a cappella hymn ‘He Brought Joy to My Soul’ to the amazingly dirty ‘My Handy Man,’ both sung with equal fervor. This twenty-four-track collection, largely of ‘hot’ (rhythm) songs, is the least refined and most fun of all available Waters CDs. The accompaniment is mostly by solo piano, and the four tracks with Harlem stride pianist James P. Johnson, a powerhouse player who knew just when to be sensitive and subtle, are exquisite.”
Susannah McCorkle’s own most recent recording, From Bessie to Brazil (Concord Records), includes one Ethel Waters song, “Thief in the Night.” Ethel Waters’s lively autobiography, His Eye Is on the Sparrow, has been reissued in soft cover by Da Capo Press.
Dear Mr. Lincoln: Letters to the President (Addison-Wesley), is the subject of Geoffrey Ward’s column in this issue, and its author, Harold Holzer, wrote “Is This the First Photograph of Abraham Lincoln?”—also in this issue.
