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
Hidden Strength
FDR’s Splendid Deception
(revised edition) by Hugh Gallagher, Vandamere Press, 242 pages.
When this pioneering book was first published a decade ago, it ended forty years of silence about the true extent of Franklin Roosevelt’s paralysis, the genuine gallantry of his struggle to overcome its effects, and the extraordinary collaboration between President and press—unthinkable in our adversarial time—that kept the brutal truth of FDR’s condition from the American electorate. The author, himself a polio paraplegic, managed to convey as no biographer ever had before—and without a mawkish moment—what it must have been like for this vigorous, athletic young man to find himself imprisoned in a wheelchair and then to fight his way to the pinnacle of American political power in spite of it. The vivid, moving story set forth in this newly revised edition (which includes several newly discovered photographs) should provide inspiration for anyone struggling against any sort of handicap.
The Lessons of War
Prodigal Soldiers How the Generation of Officers Born of Vietnam Revolutionized the American Style of War
by James Kitfteld, Simon & Schuster, 476 pages.
James Kitfield’s Prodigal Soldiers begins with the story of Barry McCaffrey, who graduated from Andover and went to West Point in 1959, when the Regular Army was at the height of its postwar prestige. By 1966 McCaffrey was a first lieutenant in the 82d Airborne in Vietnam. He and his troops were sent to relieve a Marine firebase and were quickly surrounded, sniped at, and shelled by North Vietnamese Army troops while NVA gunners shot down medevac helicopters. By morning all the American troops and a third of the South Vietnamese battalions with them were dead or wounded, and the living were facing near-certain massacre. Magically a lone American gunship appeared. Barry McCaffrey mostly recovered from his wounds, incurred through faithful service in pursuit of a grossly misconceived strategy, within a month; it would take the U.S. Army more like twenty-five years.
Prodigal Soldiers is the story of how after Vietnam men like McCaffrey went on to reinvent their profession, overcoming considerable institutional resistance and winning at least a partial and temporary victory over the most deadly enemies they had faced in the war: grotesque interservice rivalries, hopeless doctrine and tactics, and political aims incompatible with military logic and necessity. Some very competent observers greatly underestimated their ultimate success, as did the Iraqi leadership in 1991. This is a fine book, and the uncanny British and French Bosnian replay of some of our Vietnam-era blunders makes it timely and important.
IF YOU’RE IN
England
Many people think that salvaging artifacts from the sunken Titanic amounts to something ghoulish, like grave robbing. “The Wreck of the Titanic,” now on view at the Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England, is the first exhibit of just such items: clothes, machinery, dishes, and papers, stolen back from the ocean after more than eighty years. According to the deep-sea explorers, corpses didn’t last. Only the tumble of things that amused or comforted them while they were alive did. Of course it is eerie to see something ephemeral like a row of cigarettes emerge unscathed when so many perfectly good people did not, and so this firsthand exhibit, a fitting memorial to the eeriest of all ships, actually only deepens the mysteries surrounding the Titanic. (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, England SE10 9NF, 011-44-81-858-4422.)
This Was New York
Terrible Honesty Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s
by Ann Douglas, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 576 pages.
“Culture follows money,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to his friend Edmund Wilson in the 1920s, and few eras could have borne him out more completely. Ann Douglas takes that maxim to heart in her history of the decade as it was played out in New York. She stitches together anecdotes and personal histories from 120 of the era’s leading players—from Dorothy Parker to Duke Ellington to Josephine Baker to Walter Winchell.
To Douglas, the rapidly urbanizing country’s cultural center shifted during the Great War from the New England of Emerson to the New York of the appealing scoundrel mayor Jimmy Walker. The city was a consumer capital of ad copy, Broadway hucksters, sports lingo, Freudians, bootleggers, modernists, and jazz. These elements “mongrelized,” she writes, to produce the brash entertainment industry that became the nation’s great export for the rest of the century. “This was the first generation to grasp the supremacy that mass culture would acquire,” she writes.
But it was also a time of “terrible honesty” for a generation sworn against the old certainties and sentimental thinking they believed had led to the Great War. As the book depicts these writers and artists and musicians leaving farms and small towns for the big city, it builds a larger picture of the era: of nightclubs where the races mingled in a “charged collaboration,” of the rise of primitivist art, of a city of jutting new skyscrapers—”a supreme example of the elated and mongrel spirit of the age.”
Transcendent Transcendentalist
Emerson The Mind on Fire
by Robert D. Richardson, Jr., University of California Press, 656 pages.
On March 29, 1832, Ralph Waldo Emerson, twenty-eight, lonely, losing his faith, and generally desolate, went to open his wife’s tomb and see her remains. She had died the year before. He never wrote what he discovered peering into that abyss, but by the end of the year he had resigned his Unitarian pulpit, sold his furniture, boarded a ship for Europe, and launched into the lifelong search into the mysteries of life and faith that gave the world transcendentalism. Robert D. Richardson, a professor at Wesleyan and biographer of Thoreau, traces that life’s journey in a compelling, authoritative new biography. Emerson meets Wordsworth, Carlyle, and Coleridge, nurtures Thoreau, discovers and champions Whitman, immerses himself in classic Greek philosophy, ancient Eastern mysticism, and the newest science, always seeking, always approaching the world with an open heart and a tough mind and sharing what he finds, the great American public intellect. His life emerges as not only eventful but enduringly important, for what mattered to Emerson still matters to us. As Richardson puts it, “It is the ambition, if it has not yet been the fate, of transcendentalism to provide a soul for modern liberalism and thereby to enlarge the possibilities of modern life.”
RECORDINGS
Encyclopedia of Black Pop
The R&B Box 30 Years of Rhythm and Blues
Rhino R2 71806 (six CDs).
The term rhythm and blues was coined in 1949 by an editor of Billboard to replace “race music” as the label for pop records marketed to blacks; the compilers of this massive set define it variously as “a 25-year period of adaptation, evolution, and revolution in African-American popular music,” “the heartbeat, the rhythm, and the life story of the ‘human condition’ sung from the heart,” “the Saturday function that coexisted with the Sunday church service,” and, most unarguably, “a broad range of musical sounds and styles.” The selections in the set follow the mainstream of black pop from 1943 to 1972—from Louis Jordan and Illinois Jacquet and Dinah Washington to Lou Rawls and Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin. In between are scores of hits (there are 108 tracks in all) like “Maybe,” “Duke of Earl,” “Spanish Harlem,” “Earth Angel,” and Big Mama Thornton’s original “Hound Dog.” Rhino’s usual full and imaginative annotations fit all the songs into a cohesive chronological narrative, making the set an instructive historical document as well as a good five hours of solid entertainment.
A Take on Two Cities
Landmarks of Los Angeles
by Patrick McGrew and Robert Julian, Abrams, 288 pages.
Cityscapes of Boston
An American City Through Time
by Robert Campbell and Peter Vanderwarker, Houghton Mifflin, 220 pages.
To judge from these two picture histories, Los Angeles has saved almost as much of its noteworthy old architecture over the years as Boston has thrown away. Leafing through the descriptions of some 570 registered structures in the Landmarks of Los Angeles, you can’t help being impressed by how much still stands in a city whose reputation is so unsentimentally up-to-the-minute. The architect Patrick McGrew and writer Robert Julian begin with vestiges of Spanish settlement and move chronologically through nineteenth-century cottages to the discovery of oil near Los Angeles in the 189Os and the fanciful estate houses that grew out of that. The Bradbury Building—recently a twenty-first-century setting for the film Blade Runner—was built in 1893 by George Herbert Wyman, who himself had been inspired by a passage from Edward Bellamy’s futuristic novel Looking Backward; it houses its open elevators and five floors of iron stairways in a spacious atrium beneath the city’s first skylight. The Hollywood sign, originally a realtor’s lure for “Hollywoodland,” went up in 1923 and was designated a landmark more than fifty years later.
Cityscapes of Boston examines its subject block by block, with a before-and-after scrutiny both informative and sometimes depressing. The architect Robert Campbell’s text is full of strong native opinion: this is a story of change both for better and for worse. One of the best ideas Bostonians had over the centuries was to build level rows of splendid town houses on landfill; two of the worst were Government Center and Harbor Towers. The car, which made modern Los Angeles possible, undermined many of the old walkable Boston neighborhoods, writes Campbell, perhaps too gloomily. The bright spots in this history include Boston’s vibrant North End and Centre Street, where “change occurs in the way one wants it to, bringing not rupture but rejuvenation.”
IN THIS ISSUE
Michael S. Durham, author of “Mound Country,” recently wrote Guide to Ancient Native American Sites, which catalogues nearly 150 archeological locations (Globe Pequot Press, 260 pages). “The story didn’t come alive for me,” he writes, “until I was able to go and see for myself: to climb the mounds, hike through canyons to cliff dwellings and stand on ledges gazing at images chipped into the rock face by prehistoric artists.” The book maps the sites state by state and provides useful phone numbers and contacts. For another good guide to mound country, try Indian Mounds of the Middle Ohio Valley: A Guide to Adena and Ohio Hopewell Sites by Susan L. Woodward and Jerry N. McDonald (McDonald & Woodward Publishing Company, 130 pages). At one time, the authors tell us, eastern North America may have held as many as several hundred thousand mounds and earthworks in various levels of concentration and complexity; only in the last two centuries did most of them give way to modern civilization. This book features forty-one sites, with maps, travelers’ information, and photographs of once-buried treasures.
The Lincoln Highway, subject of Philip Langdon’s affectionate essay, is covered in greater historical detail in The Lincoln Highway: Main Street Across America, by Drake Hokanson (University of Iowa Press, 160 pages). To find out more, write the newly reborn Lincoln Highway Association at RR 1, Box 73, Jefferson, IA 50129; its telephone number is 515-386-4521. Its annual June conference will be held this year in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Anyone intrigued by Diana Ketcham’s description of the picturesque garden just outside Paris that so impressed Thomas Jefferson will enjoy her book Le Désert de Retz (MIT Press, 134 pages). With a well-researched text, period illustrations, and recent photographs by the noted landscape photographer Michael Kenna, the book makes the scope and intent of this complex architectural conceit intelligible to modern viewers. Built on the eve of the French Revolution, the hundred-acre garden contained twenty follies recapitulating the history of world architecture. For the past several decades the garden has been neglected, its structures overgrown with weeds, with the result, Ketcham writes, that “what the eighteenth century devised as an artificial ruin became in the twentieth century a literal one.” It has recently been restored and is the only one of France’s late-eighteenth-century picturesque gardens that remain in anything resembling their original forms. Ketcham also recommends Howard C. Rice, Jr.’s classic study Thomas Jefferson’s Paris (Princeton University Press, 156 pages), which shows in words and engravings the city that dazzled the future President from the time of his arrival in 1784.
Jack Kelly, whose story on gangster-era Chicago features the notorious Al Capone, recommends Robert J. Schoenberg’s Mr. Capone (Quill/Morrow, 480 pages) as the finest of all Scarface biographies.
If you want to know more after reading Paul G. Labadie’s account of his visit to the replica Alamo that John Wayne built for his 1960 movie, try Donald Clark and Christopher Andersen’s book John Wayne’s The Alamo: The Making of the Epic Film (Carol Publishing Group, 172 pages). The book should satisfy the Duke’s and Davy Crockett’s fans alike.
Geoffrey C. Ward discusses in his column “The Life and Times” the edition he has prepared of the revealing and heartfelt diaries of Daisy Suckley, Franklin Roosevelt’s confidante and distant cousin. It is out this month, as Closest Companion: The Unknown Story of the Intimate Friendship Between Franklin Roosevelt and Margaret Suckley (Houghton Mifflin, 430 pages).
John Steele Gordon’s April column “The Business of America” grew out of his fondness for Jerome Kern, of whom no biographies but plenty of recordings are currently in print, including one of the “lost” Kern musical Sittin’ Pretty. Although it was a hit in the twenties, Sittin’ Pretty was never recorded until this decade—first because Kern banned its performance anywhere but in a live theater and later because the full score was buried for years with other manuscripts in an old Warner Brothers film studio in Secaucus, New Jersey. In 1990 it was faithfully recorded by John McGlin for New World Records (80387-2, two CDs).
In “American Characters” Gene Smith this month revisits one of his early literary idols, James T. Farrell and finds that the critics were right: He said everything he had to say in Studs Lonigan: A Trilogy Comprising “Young Lonigan,” “The Manhood of Studs Lonigan,” and “Judgment Day” (University of Illinois Press, 912 pages).
Pulp Fiction
Over My Dead Body The Sensational Age of the American Paperback: 1945–1955
by Lee Server, Chronicle Books, 108 pages
As pulp magazines died off after the Second World War, the lurid paperback arose and flourished in their place. The first softcovers were nonlurid hardcover titles repackaged for an audience grown used to portable Army editions. Very quickly, however, publishers discovered a large market for paperback originals with titles like Nude in Mink; Lady, Don’t Die on My Doorstep; Hitch-Hike Hussy; and Benny Muscles In, lascivious and streetwise stories that made steady work for a generation of writers. The Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt had early success writing about molls and gumshoes; John Faulkner’s novels of backwoods brothels were shorter and sexier than his brother William’s books. The genre’s first star was Mickey Spillane, with his pitiless hero, Mike Hammer.
The charm of this entertaining book lies in its reproductions of many of the books’ covers. Lee Server, also the author of Danger Is My Business, an illustrated history of the pulp magazines, points out in his fond, expert text that in the fifties the cheap paperback was as explicit as popular art got. The so-called Rembrandt of the pulp illustrators was James Avati, who used people from his small New Jersey town as models for his desperate characters. Over My Dead Body is voluptuously produced in suitably overripe colors.
Editor in Chief
Genius in Disguise Harold Ross of The New Yorker
by Thomas Kunkel, Random House, 512 pages.
The first issue of The New Yorker appeared on the newsstands seventy years ago last February. It would have taken a prescient reader indeed to see in the publication’s feebly hectic contents the embryo of the most influential magazine in American history. How Harold Wallace Ross ranted and prodded and provoked his creation into becoming something that approached his platonic vision is the subject of this briskly told, wholly absorbing biography.
“A more unlikely literary avatar than Harold Ross is hard to imagine,” writes Thomas Kunkel, “for he was a man of spectacular contradictions.… Ross’s personal reading ran to dictionaries (Fowler’s Modern English Usage, particularly) and true-detective magazines. He was a prototypical Westerner whose magazine embodied Eastern urbanity. He was a coarse, profane man with a near-perfect ear for language.”
Born in 1892 in the hard-handed world of the Colorado silver mines, Ross led a knockabout career as a reporter before joining the Army, where he edited the enormously popular soldiers’ magazine Stars and Stripes during the First World War. One of his writers in the first New Yorker years saw Ross’s editorship as “the chargings-about of a man in a canebrake, trying blindly to get through to the clearer ground he is certain must lie beyond.”
Ross found that clear ground eventually, and very high ground it turned out to be. In later years many of the superb writers he gathered about him half-consciously conspired to formulate a cheery myth of Ross as a sort of semiliterate idiot savant whom they both restrained and directed. Kunkel demonstrates with verve and humor that he was a far better, far more interesting creature than that.
Man of Letters
Liebling at The New Yorker Uncollected Essays
edited by James Barbour and Fred Warner, University of New Mexico Press, 320 pages.
With a war on in Europe in the fall of 1939, Harold Ross of The New Yorker replaced his long-time Paris correspondent, Janet Planner, with the younger and presumably more expendable A. J. Liebling. Liebling had been writing appreciations of bookies and Times Square con men; now he captured week by week the mood of Paris as the German troops advanced. At first he met nervous revelers in cafés; by June 1940 he was writing, “The morning’s citations include the names not only of aviators and soldiers who have died but of postmen killed delivering letters under fire in the invaded provinces.” Twelve of his Letters from Paris appear in this excellent collection of pieces from a brilliant journalistic career, but the most truly superb story is “The Case of the Scattered Dutchman,” about a corpse that in 1897 washed up half in the Bronx and half on the Lower East Side. The clever newsboy who solved the crime gave his story to Liebling fifty years later, and the mystery builds to a grim cop epiphany: “If the pieces fit, it’s the same stiff.” Libeling’s great books on food, the war, the press, horseracing, and politics go in and out of print. It’s a pleasure to see a new collection of his best magazine writing.
Frontier Politics
The Rivals: William Gwin, David Broderick, and the Birth of California
by Arthur Quinn, Crown Publishers, 352 pages.
“This is the story of two men,” the author writes, “—of how they achieved great power and how through their implacable rivalry they destroyed each other.” The gold rush brought every sort of prospector to California, including political fortune seekers hoping to ride the movement for statehood all the way to the U.S. Senate. William Gwin, a former Southern planter, stepped off the steamer Panama at San Francisco in June of 1849. He traveled up and down the territory promoting statehood, attended the Constitutional Convention at Monterey in 1850, and (along with the explorer John C. Frémont) became one of the state’s first two senators.
Gwin’s future nemesis, David C. Broderick, arrived out West the same spring; he had graduated from the New York slums and Tammany Hall. In time this street-fighting Democrat became the perfect goad in the state Democratic party to the genteel Senator Gwin. Their long rivalry drives this skillful book to its sad finish, while the state of California grows magnificently around them. Arthur Quinn, a Berkeley professor of rhetoric, shows how Broderick battled the state’s first anti-immigrant vigilante movements and struggled to maintain a tenuous populist alliance while the aristocratic Gwin brought home the projects that built his state. Finally, campaign rhetoric in the ugly climate of the slavery crisis led one of them into a fatal duel in 1860. Quinn delivers an intelligent and satisfying political saga.
An Indian View
Killing Custer
by James Welch with Paul Stekler, W. W. Norton, 320 pages.
The novelist James Welch was born on the Blackfeet Reservation in eastern Montana and grew up hearing stories about how his great-grandmother had survived the U.S. Cavalry’s massacre of 173 Blackfeet, mostly women and children, on January 23, 1870. Welch approached this book and the documentary screenplay that inspired it by asking himself why the fabled slaughter of George Armstrong Custer and his troops six years later was so much better known than that one. Did Custer’s end require so many retellings? Perhaps not, but the story of the victors who defeated him needed one.
Killing Custer attempts to give the winners’ side of the famous 1876 battle. The book breaks little original ground but is nevertheless a fresh and highly readable account of the victory. He alternates between Indian accounts (“It was just like hunting buffalo,” one warrior recalled) and tales of his own researches for the film he helped make. At least half a dozen warriors later claimed to have killed Custer, and the fact that he was left unscalped is sometimes cited as proof of the Indians’ grudging respect for him; Welch says it’s unlikely he was recognized, and his close-cropped, prematurely bald scalp wasn’t worth taking. Welch describes a personal moment of connection with what happened at the Little Bighorn: “At night you are alone with your imagination. Especially if the moon has lit up the battlefield for you. … You can see down the hill where hundreds of Indians were crawling on their bellies, on hands and knees, darting from yucca plant to yucca plant, all the time advancing. You can see the waves of horsemen charging … the soldiers in a blind, terrified panic.” One way or another James Welch has found his way back into the battle’s heart.
IF YOU’RE IN
Lowell, Massachusetts
Lowell was America’s first planned industrial city, founded in 1825 on a site along the Merrimack River that afforded abundant waterpower. For several decades farmers’ daughters flocked to the textile mills of Lowell and other factory towns throughout New England; then, starting in the 185Os, the work force shifted increasingly to immigrants. Lowell’s cheap power and labor have long since been eclipsed by other regions, domestic and foreign, but today the city has a new selling point: its rich working-class history. The Lowell National Historical Park (246 Market Street, Lowell, MA 01852, Tel: 508-970-5000) gives ample evidence of how clean and pleasant an industrial town can be when there’s no industry left to mess things up. Streets along which mill girls once hurried to start their fourteen-hour days are lined with Cambodian and Greek restaurants, and the canals, now mostly scenic, glisten smartly in the morning sun. Museum exhibits detail the crowded, steamy, cacophonous conditions millworkers had to endure, while a restored boardinghouse shows how the energetic Yankee women of Lowell’s early years devoted their scarce free time to self-improvement. A pair of native sons, James Abbott McNeill Whistler (who denied his Lowell roots) and Jack Kerouac (who celebrated his), are commemorated—Whistler with an art gallery in the house where he was born, Kerouac with a garden of modernistic sculptures etched with excerpts from his works. There’s even the New England Quilt Museum. Together these sites show how Lowell’s mills and its generations of workers have combined to weave the fabric of American life.
RECORDINGS
Ives Masterpieces
Charles Ives
Universe Symphony (completed by Larry Austin); Orchestral Set No. 2; “The Unanswered Question”
Cincinnati Philharmonia Orchestra, Gerhard Samuel, conductor, C. C.M. Percussion Ensemble and Chamber Choir, Centaur CRC 2205 (one CD).
Charles Ives
Symphony No. 4; “The Unanswered Question”; also, Amériques, by Edgard Varèse
The Cleveland Orchestra, Christoph von Dohn․nyi, conductor, London 443 172-2 (one CD).
Charles Ives
Piano Music Piano Sonatas Nos. 1 and 2 and other works
Nina Deutsch, Piano, VoxBox CDX 5089 (two CDs).
Charles Ives worked on and off for most of his life on a magnum opus he called the Universe Symphony. He never expected, or even intended, to finish it. It was to be “a presentation and contemplation in tones, rather than in music as such, of the mysterious creation of the earth and firmament, the evolution of all life in nature and in humanity to the Divine.” In other words, it was about as hopelessly ambitious in scope as a human undertaking can be. He didn’t get very far with it, unsurprisingly, but he did suggest that “in case I don’t get to finish this, somebody might like to try to work out the idea.” That is what the composer Larry Austin has spent most of the last twenty years doing. The result may be more Austin than Ives, but it commands respect as an attempt to get at what Ives was attempting, and it is fascinating. In its thirty-eight minutes it moves from original chaos through the creation and humanity to heaven and “the rise of all to the Spiritual.” The one long movement starts in absolute stillness and very gradually grows over its first eighteen minutes to a sea of lapping, crisscrossing waves of percussion rhythms before brass instruments, and then strings and a wordless choir pull in and the sea of sound continues to grow. At the climax some very loud moments of near tunefulness lead into a growing quiet that culminates in eight seconds of screaming silence several minutes from the end. It doesn’t sound like anything else by Ives—or by anyone else—but it does reach very far indeed in the direction Ives seems to have been seeking and suggests why he was heading that way.
The Fourth Symphony is cosmic Ives of a more familiar cast. Its first movement is a choral setting of a classic American hymn, “Watchman, tell us of the night, What the signs of promise are. …” The three succeeding movements expatiate on that inquiry; the tumultuous second is, in the composer’s words, “a comedy in the sense that Hawthorne’s Celestial Railroad is comedy,” and it surges with trademark snatches of march music and tunes like “Yankee Doodle” and “Reveille”; the third movement is a restrained fugal reflection on the hymn “From Greenland’s icy mountains …”; and the fourth draws together elements of the three previous ones in a kind of musical apotheosis. The Cleveland Orchestra’s fine new recording also includes Ives’s epigrammatic six-minute masterpiece “The Unanswered Question” and the French avant-garde composer Edgard Varèse’s 1921 work Amériques, a sort of New World Rite of Spring complete with sirens that give much of it something of a fun-house air.
Ives’s supreme tribute to transcendentalism, the Concord Sonata (its four movements are titled “Emerson,” “Hawthorne,” “The Alcotts,” and “Thoreau”), gets an excellent reading by the pianist Nina Deutsch in her two-CD set of the composer’s major piano pieces. It is one of a number of bargain-priced VoxBox sets of solid performances of American concert, band, and vocal music. A free catalogue of them is available from the Vox Music Group, 560 Sylvan Avenue, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 07632.
American Symphonist
George Whitefield Chadwick Symphony No. 3; also, works by Samuel Barber
The Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Neeme J․rvi, conductor, Chandos 9253 (one CD).
If America’s musical legacy seems deficient anywhere, it’s in nineteenth-century works in the European classical tradition. Well, here’s an 189Os symphony better than you probably thought any American ever composed. Chadwick was born in Massachusetts in 1854 and trained at the New England Conservatory; he is said to have been an influence on Dvorák, but unlike that composer, he wanted little to do with Native American and black folk music. Nonetheless, his music is anything but stuffy; the symphony is cheerfully energetic and optimistic-sounding, a bit like Brahms here and Dvorák there, and all-American in its expansiveness. It couldn’t ask for a better introduction to modern listeners than this engaging recording.
All-American Movie Music
Aaron Copland: Music for Films
St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Leonard Slatkin, conductor, RCA Victor Red Seal 09026-61699-2 (one CD).
Aaron Copland might be called the national landscape painter of American composers; he is best known for evocative panoramas like Appalachian Spring and Billy the Kid. He painted classic American scenes in the music he wrote for Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s too, as is winningly shown here. The movies represented on this disc are The Red Pony, Our Town, The Heiress, Of Mice and Men, and The City; the views portrayed include a California ranch in the morning, the New England countryside, New York City in both the 185Os and the 1930s, and Thornton Wilder’s hushed fictional village of Grover’s Corners. Copland wrote that when he was composing the music for the documentary The City, “I learned the most basic rule: A film is not a concert; the music is meant to help the picture.” He also learned that the typical overripe, post-Wagnerian Hollywood sound was not for him. He composed movie music in a plainspoken, broad-spirited, sometimes nostalgic voice that stands strongly, warmly on its own and seems perfectly matched to the ail-American scenes he portrays. The topnotch American conductor Leonard Slatkin leads the St. Louis Symphony in glowing performances.
VIDEOS
The Unsinkable
Titanic
directed and written by Melissa Peltier, A&E Home Video, 4 hours, boxed set.
“To my mind, the world of today woke April 15, 1912,” wrote the Titanic survivor Jack Thayer, quoted in this ambitious and absorbing four-part documentary about what remains the century’s most shocking disaster. The story of the great doomed liner emerges from living witnesses and historians of the tragedy, and over the film’s four hours the fascination only grows. The idea for the ship was dreamed up over after-dinner brandy by the White Star line’s owner, J. Bruce Ismay; its construction took four years. For the few easy days of its maiden voyage from Southampton, in April 1912, the Titanic ruled the seas as the biggest, most elegant liner in the world.
Late on Sunday, April 14, the ship—which confidently carried lifeboats for a little more than half its 2,224 passengers —suffered its fatal collision with an iceberg. “To say a ship was unsinkable was flying in the face of God,” one woman remembers her mother saying on board. Frank Goldsmith, who escaped as a child, said later that the roar at a baseball stadium often horrified him as a reminder of the screams of his fellow passengers going under.
The film’s first three hours detail the ship’s construction, its brief but lavish life, and its tragic end. Part four chronicles the exciting rediscovery and exploration of its remains.
Big Ideas
Modern Marvels The Greatest Engineering Achievements of the 20th Century
A&E Home Video, 50 minutes each: “Mount Rushmore” “Empire State Building” “Grand Coulee Dam” “Panama Canal”
The Arts & Entertainment cable-TV channel recently aired these four stories of great works of American engineering. Two of the projects—the Grand Coulee Dam and the Panama Canal—were backed from the first by popular Presidents. The others, one of the world’s great sculptures and its then tallest building, began as local efforts that gradually acquired national symbolism. Mount Rushmore started as a scheme to lure vacationers to the byways of South Dakota, but the sculptor its backers enlisted, Gutzon Borglum, was such a dreamer he even wanted to carve Presidents’ complete torsos and a fivehundred-word statement about America.
The four programs convey not only the success of these projects but also their failings. The dirigible mooring mast atop the Empire State Building, added to ensure that the skyscraper would surpass the Chrysler Building, was worthless for tethering airships, which blew nearly perpendicular in Manhattan’s canyon winds.
The series strikes a good balance between technological and social history, showing who planned these monuments, who built them, and why and how they came off so spectacularly.
Monk Emergent
Straight No Chaser
directed by Charlotte Zwerin, Warner Home Video, 90 mins.
The special character of this portrait of the bebop piano genius Thelonious Monk is clear from its opening seconds. As the rest of his jazz quartet performs a slow blues, Monk performs an odd, slow spin onstage before sitting down to play something disjointedly melodic. He is slack-jawed at the sound he makes, and so will you be, for the music in this documentary is truly haunting. The filmmakers lucked into a substantial amount of unseen black-and-white footage of Monk shot in the sixties, and they have arranged their documentary around these candid moments.
Monk is the most enigmatic of the revolutionaries who changed jazz in the forties and fifties; we see him muttering during a recording session, joking at the Village Vanguard, dozing on a plane, and playing the piano with off-kilter certainty in baggy suits, raincoats, dark glasses, phony spectacles, and a wide array of cool hats. “Do your caps influence your music?” a Danish reporter asks him. “I don’t know,” says Monk. “Maybe.”
Born in 1917, Monk grew up largely on New York’s East Side and early on became house piano player for Minton’s. He struggled with bouts of depression that his son describes in the film; he would pace in silence for days. For the last dozen years of his life Monk refused to play. That he stopped was both mysterious and tragic, as this valuable film shows.
BOOKS
River Views
Cities of the Mississippi Nineteenth-Century Images of Urban Development
by John W. Reps, with modern photographs from the air by Alex MacLean, University of Missouri Press, 342 pages.
This book tours Mississippi river cities of the nineteenth century from New Orleans to St. Cloud, Minnesota, as captured in bird’s-eye views by traveling artists beginning in the 183Os. All of Hannibal, Missouri, lies packed onto its square plain in one early lithograph; in others the white stone riverfronts of Memphis and Vicksburg look perfectly Venetian. In this beautiful collection, prints, perspective maps, panoramas, town plans, and written observations accompany the aerial views to create a memorable impression of early life on the river. The text chapters work chronologically, even as the scores of pictures follow the river from town to town.
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine said in 1858 that “these towns come up in a night, and grow, like the prophet’s gourd, so fast that one can hardly keep pace with them.” Alex MacLean’s recent aerial photography, which appears beside bird’s-eye views of the same locations a century and more earlier, shows that the pace has considerably slowed and that most towns have kept remarkably faithful to their original plans. “Even such a disaster as the Mississippi River flood of 1993 will probably not change the basic patterns of land division in the many cities affected,” the author writes in his introduction. “It is likely, therefore, that most rebuilding and reconstruction will leave largely intact the preflood boundaries of lots, blocks, and streets.”
Born to Run
American Politicians Photographs from 1843 to 1993
The Museum of Modern Art/Abrams, 208 pages.
The curators who assembled this hook and the exhibition it complements gathered strong, classic photographs of politicos at work—making speeches, getting heckled, holding generations of babies, enjoying moments of relative quiet. The black-and-white plates begin with John Quincy Adams in 1843 and proceed through to the ascendance of Bill Clinton, with intervening views of everyone from Fiorello La Guardia in firefighting gear to President Calvin Coolidge, Gov. Al Smith, and New York City’s Mayor Jimmy Walker all in Native American headdresses. The Socialist leader Norman Thomas stands under a hail of hecklers’ eggs and vegetables; Thomas Dewey, in his suit and tie, handles a cow’s underbelly.
The chronological presentation provides insight into the changing nature of press coverage; awkward shots of Presidents and candidates either weren’t taken in the past or just weren’t used. The pictures of a young Richard Nixon leaping and President Johnson showing his stomach scars seem almost shockingly unguarded after the decades of podium thumpers and election parades. A picture of a New York political club’s Christmas party, with rows of derbyed men eating at long white tables, gives us as much of turn-of-the-century American political culture as any stump photo of William Jennings Bryan. A portrait of a communists’ meeting in 1930 shows a frozen cross section of the American left, interracial and with placards urging a five-day week and an end to lynchings. The authors have made a study of American politicians that moves in an easy political rhythm from the absurd to the heroic and the ordinary.
Tiny Treasures
Art Deco
by Richard Striner, Abbeville Press, 96 pages.
Gothic Revival
by James Massey and Shirley Maxwell, Abbeville Press, 96 pages.
Abbeville Press has come up with a pair of diminutive books (6¼ by 4¾ inches) that successfully encapsulate the architecture, music, film, and literature of the Art Deco and Gothic Revival movements both here and abroad. For any traveler wanting a concise and entertaining reference, these books chart each era’s milestones with easy-to-follow time lines. Sprightly texts allied with beautifully selected and reproduced photographs create a montage that will equip the reader to recognize the best of these genres.
As the author of the Deco volume, Richard Striner, writes in his introduction, “Walk up New York’s Lexington Avenue and gaze at the silvery spire of the Chrysler Building; one can feel the rhythms of the Jazz Age. One can feel the messages of power, technology, exotica, and elegance shimmering down from the ziggurat atop the skyline.” The mid-nineteenth-century Gothic Revival seems demure by comparison—and far less familiar to the modern eye. Nevertheless, the pointed roofs and lacy spires that offered the promise of medieval order to the first children of the Industrial Revolution still abound—sprouting not only on country cottages and college campuses but from the lofty heights of great early skyscrapers like New York’s Woolworth Building.
Remarkably, neither of these tiny volumes seems cramped; there is room enough in each for a solid listing of organizations devoted to the style, sites to visit, and recommended reading. Other volumes are in the works—on the Arts and Crafts movement, the Prairie style, Art Nouveau, and more.
Graven Words
Inscriptions of a Nation Collected Quotations from Washington Monuments
by Clint W. Ensign, Congressional Quarterly Books, 120 pages.
When the author of this pocket-size volume moved to Washington to work for a congressman, he became fascinated with the inscriptions he found on the city’s public buildings and monuments. What began as a hobby (copying them down) is now a book and, in its very miscellany, its shadings from prosaic to brilliant, a charming one. The philosophizing of Founding Fathers and the poetry of the Bible are here in abundance, but it is the unexpected that gives the most value. Surprisingly awful are some inscriptions at the former Post Office (now the National Postal Museum) written by Charles W. Eliot, a Harvard president, and edited by President Woodrow Wilson: “Carrier of News and Knowledge / Instrument of Trade and Industry / Promoter of Mutual Acquaintance / Of Peace and Good Will /Among Men and Nations.” Nearby, at the former Post Office Department Building, a splendid antidote resides, taken, remarkably, from an 1859 Postmaster General’s annual report: “It is the delicate ear trump through which alike nations and families and isolated individuals whisper their joys and their sorrows, their convictions and their sympathies, to all who listen for their coming.”
IF YOU’RE IN
Boston
Boston Garden, the last of the pre-Depression sports boxes and the oldest working arena in the country, is slated to come down soon after its replacement, the Shawmut Center, opens next fall. The plain but resilient building was built in 1928 by the promoter Tex Rickard after he took over the Garden in New York; its full name, Boston Madison Square Garden, understandably never went over with local fans. Boston Garden went on to host Prohibition meetings, FDR’s 1937 birthday fete, John Kennedy’s presidential-election-eve rally, and Bruins and Celtics games beyond number.
The building, which seats about fourteen thousand, is uncomfortable by early summer, but its lack of air conditioning has become a homecourt advantage, wearing down visiting clubs from air-cooled coliseums. And hockey has not been spared from the heat: One recent spring a Stanley Cup game was called when the ice began to melt.
During the Larry Bird era there was a ten-year wait for Celtics season tickets, and that demand is helping build the slightly larger Shawmut Center. But the Garden is not coming down before farewell engagements by every regular visitor from the Beanpot college hockey tournament to the Grateful Dead. Buy a ticket to see anything under its roof—basketball, a rock concert, the dog show—and look up at the forty-three championship banners that hang from its rafters.
Bald and Plentiful
Return of the Eagle How America Saved Its National Symbol
by Greg Breitling, Falcon Press, 126 pages.
Bald eagles numbered more than a half-million when European settlers first arrived in America; subsequently our shameful persecution of the birds rendered them nearly extinct. This handsome book celebrates their recent comeback, the result of persistent work by professional conservationists and devoted volunteers alike. The book’s main photographer, Frank Oberle, is one of the latter: He not only has photographed the birds for nearly twenty years but recently donated a twenty-acre bald eagle roosting and feeding site on the banks of the Mississippi. Today there are tens of thousands of bald eagles in the United States and Canada, and they are no longer classified as endangered. In case you want to take a firsthand look, the book contains a valuable directory of the best viewing spots in every state but Hawaii, with directions, local contacts, and brief descriptions. The volume’s striking color photographs suggest why the birds have had such a hold on the national imagination.
