A traditional campaign biography divides the candidate’s life story into thematic sections (“Log Cabin Days,” “Courage,” “Duty”). What the political writer Richard Brookhiser calls his “moral biography” of George Washington is really just such a campaign life done very well, organized around the themes of war, the Constitution, and the Presidency. Brookhiser’s fluent appreciation of Washington is intelligent and inspiring without evoking the stony old caricature. Why does Washington remain more distant than his vivid peers Jefferson, Adams, or Madison? “Washington’s remoteness is partly his doing, partly ours. He wanted to put a gap between himself and his contemporaries. At the end of his second term as president, Mrs. Henrietta Liston, the wife of the British ambassador, told him that she could read the pleasure he expected from retirement in his face. ‘You are wrong,’ Washington insisted, ‘my countenance never yet betrayed my feelings.’”
Washington was looked on as a man apart earlier than we often imagine. Levi Alien called him “our political father” in 1776—before, Brookhiser notes, there was even ,a nation to be father of. That same year, Stoughtonham Township in Massachusetts became the first of hundreds to take the general’s name. Washington’s legacy was the American Presidency itself, and Brookhiser explores the eighteenth-century models available for political fatherhood—patriot king, patriarch, or slave master—and how Washington, childless in life, became for his country “the kind of father . . . who, when his children become adults, lets them go.”
Today, when “the appetite for closeness has become insatiable in the age of People and Oprah, of kinder, gentler presidents who feel our pain,” Brookhiser is quite satisfied with his stoic hero as he finds him, and Washington seems fresh, almost knowable, in his hands. He would throw the general’s tricorn in the ring today, if he could. Who wouldn’t?
The Forty Years’ War
THE COLD WAR ENCYCLOPEDIA
by Thomas Parrish, Henry Holt, 490 pages.
Memories of the Cold War have already begun to dim a little since the Communist regimes toppled one after another in 1989. In alphabetical entries ranging from the Air Force’s A-1E to Soviet foreign minister Andrei Vyshinsky, the historian Thomas Parrish recalls more than forty years of Cold War culture. Here is an encyclopedia of the conflict’s political figures (Richard Nixon alone gets five pages), technological achievements, and its peculiar strategies (the Balance of Terror).
The book offers many lively reminders of the long struggle: Who now remembers 1982’s Operation Golf, in which the KGB planted a story in a British magazine alleging that the U.N. ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick had accepted gifts from South Africa’s apartheid government? Or the 1978 Markov Affair, in which the Bulgarian émigré writer Georgi Markov was fatally shot in the leg with a poisoned pellet from a KGB umbrella while waiting for a London bus? An entire KGB bureau was devoted to the Cold War business of disinformation, according to Parrish, and one of its latter-day feats was popularizing the idea that American biologists had developed and spread the AIDS virus.
Our surroundings reflect less and less of the war that once was everywhere; The Cold War Encyclopedia has preserved much of it and ends with a 110-page chronology of the Soviet state that made the conflict necessary.
Sod House Album
SOLOMON D. BUTCHER Photographing the American Dream
by John E. Carter, University of Nebraska Press, 142 pages, $40.00.CODE: UNB-1
LIKE CHARLES CONLON’S CLASSIC pictures of baseball, the Western photographs of Solomon D. Butcher remain far more familiar than the man who made them. His glass-plate portraits of Nebraskan homesteaders in front of their sod houses—a cow on the hillside roof, card tables and chairs on the lawn, sometimes joined by a recently dead relative—are distinctive portraits of Western settlement. John E. Carter, curator of photographs at the Nebraska State Historical Society, has printed 120 of the thousands in the society’s archive.
In 1880, when he was twenty-four, Solomon D. Butcher traveled west with his father from Illinois to Custer County, Nebraska. Butcher didn’t take to the new life completely; hapless schemes drove him much of the time, ranging from an electromagnetic oil detector to a patent-medicine he sold called “Butcher’s Wonder of the Age.” But his history project—combining his front-yard family portraits with testimonies of the homesteading families—was closest to his heart. “From the time I thought of the plan, for seven days and seven nights it drove the sleep from my eyes,” he recalled. Through the late 1880s and 1890s Butcher toured Nebraska photographing homesteaders like himself who had taken the government’s offer of land. One of his subjects, Sylvester Rawding, appears sharing fresh-split watermelon in his front yard, the rounded remains of a Confederate musket ball over his eye the only hint of the life he’d left back East. When towns at last formed on the prairie, Butcher recorded the solemn laying of water mains, “Dr. Kirby’s new car” climbing a sandy rise in 1900, and the new century’s railroads, depots, and telephone lines.
Civil War Essays
DRAWN WITH THE SWORD
by James M. McPherson, Oxford University Press, 272 pages, $25.00.CODE: OUP-13
EACH YEAR, WRITES THE HISTORIAN James M. McPherson, about eight hundred books are published on the Civil War. In all “more than fifty thousand separate books or pamphlets” have appeared “since the guns ceased firing.” The fact that Americans will read insatiably about that awful, transforming conflict is well established. Why then do so many academic historians continue to write just for one another? McPherson does not. He teaches at Princeton; his books (including Battle Cry of Freedom and Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution) have found wide popularity outside the academy. In this collection of first-rate essays, on such subjects as “The Enduring Lincoln,” “Antebellum Southern Exceptionalism,” the importance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin versus Gone With the Wind, and “Who Freed the Slaves?,” McPherson takes the latest professional thinking on the war and gives it clear and popular shape, a deceptively hard accomplishment. He continues to walk a path between Civil War amateurs, who know their tactical history, and scholars of the “new history,” who focus on the period’s social and industrial forces. (McPherson is the first to point out, in his final essay, that the attempt to reach a wide, intelligent audience for history had earlier prompted the founding of the Society of American Historians and its popular-history magazine, American Heritage.)
“The war of 1861-1865,” McPherson writes in his preface, “resolved two fundamental questions left unresolved by the war of 1776-1783: whether the United States would endure as one nation, indivisible; and whether slavery would continue to mock the ideals of liberty on which the Republic was founded. Little wonder, then, that popular interest in the Civil War eclipses interest in any other aspect of American history.”
Civil War Women
MOTHERS OF INVENTION
Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War
by Drew Gilpin Faust, University of North Carolina Press, 326 pages, $29.95.CODE: UNC-7
“I HAINT GOT THE MONEY TO TAKE US of[f] so we will hafter stand the test,” wrote a Georgia woman in a letter to her husband in the Confederate Army, explaining her fear of the encroaching Yankees. Drew Gilpin Faust uses journals, letters, essays, poetry, and fiction left behind by the women of the Civil War South to create a collage of female perspectives on the war’s impact on the domestic front. She finds that women tended to become disillusioned with their traditional roles once they found themselves forced to take on responsibilities that Southern convention had previously denied them and began fending for themselves as slaveholders, providers, and mothers. One woman wrote to a friend that “anxiety, responsibility, and independence of thought or action are what are peculiarly abhorrent to my nature, and what has been so often required of me.”
Faust’s masterly portrayal of these women makes vivid the difficulties they faced, which left one describing herself as “nothing but a poor contemptible piece of multiplying human flesh tied to the house by a crying young one, looked upon as belonging to a race of inferior beings.” The growing sense that “men went off to worship at the altar of ambition while women were relegated to the altars of sacrifice,” Faust claims, culminated in a feeling of betrayal and a goad to greater independence. Ultimately, these Southern women’s experiences became one of the causes of the rising women’s movement of the late nineteenth century.
Controversial Landmarks
HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVED
A People’s Guide to American Historic Sites
by Philip Bumbam, Faber and Faber, 256 pages, $22.95.CODE: FAB-2
PHILIP BURNHAM PUT IN TWENTY-FIVE thousand miles researching this book, pulling off at every kind of roadside landmark for slaughtered Jesuits or Nebraskan homesteaders, laying bare the old and new pieties that too often govern the versions of events thousands of visitors take home. His chapter “The Indian Battle” looks at why some conflicts are called battles and others massacres. In neither incarnation—as the site of Custer’s martyrdom or of Native American triumph—can the Little Bighorn claim any real strategic significance in the outcome of the Indian wars, he points out.
At Mount Vernon’s handsomely furnished slave quarters Burnham overheard someone declare, “They didn’t have it so bad,” and wondered if sometimes the point of historic preservation is not so much to preserve as to evade. In San Antonio he considers which Alamo to remember: the Spanish mission of the eighteenth century, the Indian-built stronghold where the slaughter took place, or the shrine of Texan legend.
In Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, he was impressed by meticulous Shaker privy restorations but unconvinced by literature blaming outside forces for the community’s collapse: “The authoritarian grip that would not permit a brother to pass a sister on the stairs, or allow one to receive a letter without an elder reading it first, made Pleasant Hill a less friendly residence for many than its name would suggest.” This eloquent road book has a cranky fascination, and what might seem at first an easy pose—quibbling with official histories and good-natured efforts of the Park Service—enriches each story by restoring what was smoothed over or perhaps never known.
IF YOU’RE IN
Newport
THE PRESERVATION SOCIETY OF Newport County, Rhode Island, is sponsoring the first annual Newport Flower Show on July 13 and 14 at Rosecliff, one of the palatial oceanfront cottages built at the turn of the century. Patterned on the Grand Trianon at Versailles, Rosecliff was constructed for Mrs. Hermann Oelrichs in 1902. During the flower show its ballroom will be decorated to suggest some of the celebrated parties she held there, including the 1904 White Ball, when all the flowers and decorations were white, guests wore white, and Mrs. Oelrichs ordered up a fleet of white dummy ships to anchor offshore. Visitors will be able to tour the rose garden, where the American Beauty rose was developed, have refreshments on the terrace, and buy plants and garden ornaments. Proceeds from the flower show will help the society restore the gardens at its eight historic mansions. For more information, call the Preservation Society of Newport County, 401-847-1000, ext. 20.
IN THIS ISSUE
WINDSOR PRISON’S GRIM AND colorful story is dwarfed by the centuries-long history of the modern prison itself. Every facet of incarceration is covered in The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society, edited by Norval Morris and David J. Rothman (Oxford University Press, 489 pages, $39.95, CODE: OUP-14)—from Roman underground prisons to French penal colonies, methods and philosophies of rehabilitation, the silent system, and England’s Surrey House of Correction, which employed a Hollywood Squares-like arrangement of stacked, boxed-in pews to keep adjacent prisoners from communicating. In its chapter “The Literature of Confinement,” the book covers well-known prisoners like the poet Paul Verlaine, who shot his fellow poet Arthur Rimbaud and wrote in confinement, “What have you done, o you there, / Who weep so endlessly, / Say, what have you done, o you there, / With your youth?”
Dan Rather’s condensation of Mark Sullivan’s masterpiece of American social history, Our Times: America at the Birth of the 20th Century, was recently published, with scores of the original period illustrations, by Scribner (731 pages, $40.00, CODE: SAS-17).
VIDEO
Chicago, 1964
AND THIS IS FREE The Legendary Slice-of-Life Film from the Streets of Chicago
directed by Mike Shea, Shanachie Entertainment, SO minutes, $19.95.CODE: SHA-4
THE FILMMAKER MIKE SHEA BROUGHT his hand-held movie camera to Chicago’s Maxwell Street Market for six months of Sundays in 1964. The street was famous as a weekend gathering place for gospel and blues singers and for people hawking gyroscopes, car treatments, old furniture, and easy credit. Shea’s camera weaved through the vendors, street players, and Beatles-era college kids as in a childhood fantasy about city life. The musicians in his film are all very good, and the whole place seems appealingly seedy but good-natured and endlessly surprising. On one corner a gospel duo sings “Need More Power”; on another a man has somehow gathered a crowd around to see his medicine for corns. The voices of old merchants, some lamenting how great it once was, provide the only narration over the camera’s tour through the market. “These colored pitchmen,” says an older vendor of the new era’s hucksters, “they’re a pleasure to watch.”
All over the market Shea’s camera finds evidence of the cultural collision—rural South meets urban North—that produced the Chicago blues in the forties and fifties. At the end of this short, beautifully understated film, the street market comes down as if for the last time. Stuff is borne away on dollies and in baby carriages throughout the long dismantling as the blind guitarist Jim Brewer plays his spiritual standard, “I’ll Fly Away.” The market’s real end on Maxwell Street didn’t come until twenty years after Shea made his inspired, black-and-white tribute. But one of Shea’s old merchants says, “This street served its purpose years ago, when everyone was a greenhorn. But no more greenhorns.”
Build Your Own Log Cabin
THE FRANKLIN CABIN
Rustic Replicas, Inc.(7606 West Vine Street, River Forest, IL 60305), log cabin kit, $45.00.CODE: RUS-1
THE FOLK ARTIST GEORGE DE MILLE wanted to re-create on a smaller scale the craft and difficulty of pioneer cabin building, so he devised a roughhewn assembly kit for the serious child or adult who might otherwise be piecing together model battleships. It requires the same meticulousness as gluing tiny plastic pieces and the same tools you might use to make a Pinewood Derby racer. The thirteen-by-thirteen-inch cabin’s materials arrive in a thirty-pound box. Its miniature pine logs need to be whittled, sawed, and fitted at the ends. There are planks and timbers for a modest porch, a bag of plaster of Paris to seal the walls, and a bag of stones for the chimney. Cedar shingles finish it off.
De Mille hopes the project will give children “an appreciation for the courage, hard work, ingenuity and craftsmanship” of early pioneers. While you won’t have the satisfaction of chopping down the trees yourself, the rest of the experience is convincingly authentic. Our dexterous colleague Jon took the heavy box home with him, where, with patience and his own set of blades, he and his wife built an eerily persuasive wilderness cabin in their living room.
MAGAZINE
Boats of the Road
LOST HIGHWAYS QUARTERLY
Subscription rate and membership to the Classic Trailer and Motorhome Club (P.O. Box 43737, 615 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106), $21.00 per year.CODE: LTH-1
TEARDROPS! EXCLAIMS THE COVER OF issue number two of Lost Highways Quarterly, a magazine devoted to the history of trailers. The teardrop trailer, just eight to twelve feet long and made of wood and Masonite, is but one of the many vintage vehicles that the co-editors Todd and Kristin Kimmell are eager to preserve—and to show off. The Kimmells were already antique-car enthusiasts when they became interested in old trailers, and as their letters column attests, they are not alone. Correspondence pours in from people who have collected trailers for years or are just beginning, and many are anxious for tips on how to locate the trailer of their dreams.
Lost Highways mixes the new with the old: period ads for Elcar Sun Coaches and Kar-A-Van Kamp trailers with advice on how to take good trailer photos, where to find rallies, and a piece on the Kimmells’ road trip through Florida, where they toured trailer parks in search of undiscovered treasures. The clunky 1951 Nashuas and sleek aluminum Silver Kings that fill these pages invite you to climb inside, settle in, and drive away. Be careful, though. LHQ reprinted part of a 1940 article, “Camps of Crime,” by J. Edgar Hoover, who marked trailers and trailer parks as ideal havens for convicts on the run. A heated response from K. H. Dixon of the trailer industry began: “To the evil-minded, all things are evil.”
