AN ARIZONA BURGER KING TELLS THE STORY OF A UNIQUE UNIT OF MODERN-DAY NAVAJO WARRIORS
Japanese tourists heading to the Grand Canyon often pass through the Navajo Reservation town of Kayenta, Arizona, but when they stop at the local Burger King, it’s not just for food. A 75-foot message sign advertises the real attraction: NAVAJO CODE TALKER EXHIBIT (alternating with 99-CENT WHOPPER!).
Inside are displays of Japanese guns, grenades, and flags retrieved from Pacific battlefields during World War II. Another wall is covered with photographs of a group of Navajo Indians who played a key role in defeating the Japanese. “The exhibit is even in Japanese tour books,” says the restaurant’s owner, Richard Mike. “They’ve told me they don’t have anything like this in their own country.” And no wonder.
Mike’s father, who died four years ago, was King Mike, one of some 400 Navajo “code talkers,” Marines who used the unwritten Navajo language to transmit sensitive military messages. Since Navajo follows an uncommon combination of linguistic rules and relies on the speaker’s inflection to convey much of its meaning, even the extremely sophisticated Japanese cryptologists could not decode it. Other Indian languages, such as Choctaw, had been used in military codes during World War I, but not on nearly so large a scale. Navajo code talkers participated in virtually every Pacific theater from late 1942 through the end of the war. King Mike brought many of the museum’s artifacts back from the Pacific himself, and World War II veterans who happened upon his son’s Burger King while vacationing have donated their own war souvenirs.
The code talkers were sworn to secrecy when they returned from the war, since the Pentagon thought the Navajo language might be needed in another conflict. Still, Teddy Draper, Jr., whose father was a code talker, credits their success with starting a revival of the language. In the 1940s, Navajo children in federal Indian schools who spoke their native language had gotten their mouths washed out with soap, but now they were a potentially valuable part of the nation’s defense. In 1968 the code was declassified, and recently interest in the story has revived. Two Hollywood studios currently have major motion pictures about the Navajo code talkers in the works.
—Bill Papich
ON EXHIBIT
The highly skilled miniaturist Sarah Goodridge painted Daniel Webster a dozen times during his 40-year political career; that he was considerably more to her than an illustrious subject is suggested by the astonishing little talisman she executed in watercolor on ivory and gave the senator in 1828, a self-portrait whose subject would be manifest only to one who knew that telltale mole. The painting—no bigger than a playing card—descended in Webster’s family and is currently perhaps the most arresting picture in an exhibition of miniatures, “Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures,” that has been organized by the Yale University Art Gallery. The exhibition stays there until December 30 before going on to the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, South Carolina, and the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts. The show is accompanied by a handsome book of the same title by Robin Jaffee Frank, published by Yale University Press.
THE BUYABLE PAST
Telephones
In one strike, Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone made communication the most modern of technologies, wherein electricity chased the speed of sound right up to the speed of light. The phone has remained modern ever since, yet the blindingly fast systems of today can still accommodate the old phones. A cradle phone from the 1930s can connect today to a cell phone on a ship out at sea—via satellite and without a hitch. Most telephones made after 1925 can be used today with their original workings intact. There is a peculiar satisfaction about a technology that moves forward and yet leaves nothing behind.
FOR SERIOUS COLLECTORS:
ANTIQUE TELEPHONE SETS—C. 1877-95. Early phone boxes ($500-$!,000) and threepiece wall models sometimes called “coffin” phones ($2,000-$9,000) attract the most attention, and money, because of their rarity.
EUROPEAN HANDSET—C. 1910-35. Until 1920, American manufacturers rejected the integration of the speaking and listening pieces into a single “handset” device. With no such prejudices, European manufacturers pioneered the design of cradle phones. The results often showed artistry not accorded American phones until the 1930s ($250-$1,000).
FOR DAILY USE:
WALL PHONES—C. 1900-50. Often made of oak, wall phones originally relied upon a crank for initial power. They also relied upon an operator to place telephone numbers; for use today they can be fitted with dialers, though some collectors sidestep that necessity, using them only for incoming calls ($150-$1,000).
CANDLESTICK PHONES—C. 1895-1940. A veritable icon of the first half of the twentieth century, candlestick phones included rotary dialers after direct-dial systems bypassed operators ($100-$3,500).
CRADLE PHONES—C. 1926-70. An early example of progressive industrial design in America, the first generation of the classic tabletop phone was produced in 1927. Collectible models are made of black Bakelite or colored plastic ($25-$500).
Cell phones are not yet collectible, but those who use them will surely benefit from an advertisement placed by Bell Telephone: “When replying to communication from another, do not speak too promptly … much trouble is caused from both parties speaking at the same time. When you are not speaking, you should be listening.” The year of that ad was 1877. The ever-changing world of the telephone really does not leave much behind.
—Julie M. Fenster
BooksTelephones Antique to Modem by Kate E. Dooner (1992).
Museum Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D.C.) exhibit “Information Age.”
Internet-auction search terms With the word telephone, try antique, candlestick, or Bakelite.
The World’s Most Valuable Phone Book
THE CUBANS OF MIAMI LOVINGLY PRESERVE A 40-YEAR-OLD RELIC
The University of Miami’s Cuban Heritage Collection has a surprising star attraction, the Directorio Telefonico de La Habana, Havana’s last published telephone directory before Fidel Castro’s takeover. Out of the collection’s 500,000 documents and artifacts, the 1958 phone book is one of the most frequently asked about. Half a million Cubans fled the country in the decade after Castro took power, but almost none took along a phone book—a key, it turns out, to reconstructing and imagining Havana life in those days. As a result, hundreds of people each year consult the university’s copy, which was long kept under lock and key. Esperanza de Varona, coordinator of the Cuban Heritage Collection, says it lets exiles “remember the feeling of the time that they left, and pass those memories on to their children.”
Frank Angones, now a lawyer and member of the Florida Bar Board of Governors, came to the United States from Cuba in 1961, when he was 10. He says of the phone book, “I found my family’s listing, and my grandmother’s. It reminded me of better times.” The playwright Luis Santeiro, also a Cuban exile, used a prop version of it in his recent play Praying With the Enemy. “Powerful memories come out of that directory,” he says.
The refugees from Cuba settled almost exclusively in southern Florida, and Castro’s revolutionary government required that they leave behind all their household possessions. Never believing Cuban Communism would last, many of them hid their valuables in Cuba for safekeeping. Today those Cuban exiles have had to accept that they’ve left behind more than hidden treasures. The lives they gave up, and expected to return to in due time, are irretrievable. The closest they can come is the yellowed pages of a lone phone directory. For information on seeing the book yourself, visit www.library.miami.edu/umcuban/cuban.html or phone 305-284-4900.
GREAT BOOKS REBORN
NEW TECHNOLOGY ALLOWS THE REISSUE OF CLASSIC HISTORICAL WORKS
A few weeks ago I found myself balanced atop a ladder at die Strand, a vast used-book store in Manhattan, hanging onto a shelf with one hand and reaching greedily for John Lukacs’s The Last European War with the other. I stretched out as far as I could; just a few inches more and it was mine. Then, horror, the ladder began to tilt. So this is how it ends, I thought—with a great, sprawling crash into nineteenth-century Prussia. Perfect. I managed to regain my balance; no swan dive, but definitely a bad bibliographic moment.
When I got home, however, I discovered that the fates had arranged a very good bibliographic moment for me. In the mailbox was a catalogue from Phoenix Press. Treasure! And the best kind: treasure from the crypt. Here, returned to life, were Rebecca West’s The Meaning of Treason, Maria Bellonci’s Lucrezia Borgia, Hugh Trevor-Roper’s Archbishop Laud, Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power, and Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers, all of them newly reissued in trade paperback and all for $14.95 to $24.95.
Phoenix Press was conceived by Anthony Cheetham, chief executive of the U.K.’s Orion Publishing Group, and is overseen by Bing Taylor, the managing director and publisher. Says Cheetham: “I have long been convinced that the history backlist was a significantly underexploited resource. Our decision to do it on such a large scale was prompted by continuing developments in print technology, which make small runs viable, and the spectacular growth of the Internet as a sales channel for books.” Taylor says Phoenix seeks “to become the first port of call for everyone interested in world history.”
They’ve made a hell of a start. The plan is to publish out-of-print titles side by side with newly issued books at a rate of 12 a month. The breadth of focus is extraordinary, with interest categories such as the Age of Disasters, Science and Natural History, Empires, the English Civil Wars, and on and on. The historians Simon Schama and Lady Antonia Fraser will choose, and write about, some of their favorites.
Schama perfectly captures the spirit of the thing: “I like my history disorderly and omnivorous … and I have always loved histories that surprised me with their improbability and with their impolite eccentricity: Braudel’s lyric geography; Michelet’s flooding passion; the sardonic devastation of Tacitus’s irony; E. P. Thompson’s rolling ideological thunder; Francis Yates’s memory palace, crammed with alchemical signs and wonders.”
The books are available from Phoenix Press, telephone 44-1903-828-503, or from their Web site, phoenixpress.com.
—Alan Furst
Where’s Sacagawea?
NOT IN YOUR POCKET, PROBABLY
Have you ever gotten one of the new dollar coins in change? Most people haven’t, and it’s no surprise, because Americans have a long history of shunning dollar coins. Even in the nineteenth century, silver dollars rarely circulated except in Western mining districts. The rest sat in bags at the Treasury Department for decades until they were eventually melted down.
When a Sacagawea dollar does turn up, though, it raises another question: Who was Sacagawea? Vibe magazine, generally a reliable source of historical information, says the doughty Indian woman “led the Lewis and Clark expedition,” while many other publications, such as Science News and the Boston Globe, say she “guided” the explorers. What was her actual role?
“Helped guide” would probably be the best short answer. Among other things, she provided knowledge of local geography along the explorers’ route, acted as a translator in their dealings with Indians, found edible plants such as artichokes and gooseberries, cooked, and on one occasion rescued supplies from an overturned canoe. (The tables were turned when Sacagawea fell ill with a fever and Lewis nursed her back to health with bark and opium.) Most important, though, the presence of a woman toting a child served as tangible evidence of the explorers’ peaceful intentions. So while Sacagawea did not lead or guide the expedition, she was still an important part of its success.
EDITORS’ BOOKSHELF
A The browser who leafs through The Statue of Liberty Encyclopedia, by Barry Moreno (Simon & Schuster, $30.00), will find entries not only on the statue’s nose (three feet eight inches long) and replications (a 44-foot polyester model made for a 1968 film can be found today in Barentin, France), but also on Benjamin Jaurès (“a delegate representing the French Senate at the inauguration of the Statue”), Simon Cameron (author of the 1877 congressional resolution accepting the statue), and France’s Third Republic.
B For the first time, The Complete Jacob Lawrence (edited and with an introduction by Peter T. Nesbett and Michelle DuBois, University of Washington Press, $125.00) catalogues the Harlem-bred artist’s entire lifetime output of more than 900 paintings, drawings, and murals depicting scenes of African-American life from the 1930s through the 1990s. More than half of them were discovered by this project.
C From the title alone, you can close your eyes and envision every picture and word of text in Roadside America: The Automobile and the American Dream, by Lucinda Lewis (Harry N. Abrams, $49.50). But who cares? Like the Chrysler Imperial pictured above, everything in the book is as authentic yet unreal, and as stickily irresistible, as a pound and a half of Gummi Bears.
D Anyone casting about for a seasonal gift would do well to remember what is by far the richest anthology published this year, the massive and handsome One Hundred and Fifty Years of Harper’s Magazine (edited by Lewis H. Lapham and Ellen Rosenbush, Franklin Square Press, $50.00), which enjoys a roster of contributors of almost surreal distinction: Herman Melville on Sherman’s march; Clarence Darrow on crime; Theodore Roosevelt on a disastrous 1791 campaign against the Indians; fiction by Joseph Conrad, Eudora Welty, and John Cheever; Norman Mailer on the 1968 conventions; and Leon Trotsky’s 1933 article “What Hitler Wants” (to exercise “the right of the ‘superior’ races to trample upon and to extirpate the ‘inferior’ races. …”).
E There are no burnt edges, like on those old Declarations of Independence, but The Civil War Collection (text by Bob Zeller, Chronicle Books, $24.95) includes replicas of stereoscopic photographs (with a viewer); Maj. Robert Anderson’s telegram announcing the surrender of Fort t Sumter; an insurance policy on a slave; Confederate currency; an 1864 Virginia newspaper; Robert E. Lee’s amnesty oath; and much more.
The Artwork That Beat the Axis
WHAT’S THE SINGLE BEST THING WE MADE IN THE LAST 100 YEARS?
Among the essays that make up the recently published Life: Our Century of Change (edited by Richard B. Stolley, with Tony Chiu, Bulfinch Press, $60.00)—John Leonard on entertainment, Barbara Ehrenreich on shopping, Richard Rodriguez on race—is one on engineering, in which the computer scientist and critic David Gelernter has the audacity to nominate his choice for the Object of the Century:
“If you line up the very best objects of the 20th Century, the loveliest and most powerful ones, you will have sculpture by Giacometti and Joseph Cornell, Matisse cutouts, abstract paintings by de Kooning and a nude or two by Modigliani; you will also have paintings by Stuart Davis that are full of machine images. And you will have the machines themselves. The P-51 Mustang fighter (first flown in its definitive form—American airframe, British engine—in 1942) might well be the 20th Century’s most beautiful object. It has surging grace, uncanny poise, moral grandeur—embodying the power and heroism that ventures everything to defend home and freedom and truth. Eventually you will find a P-51 at the center of some great American art museum, and then you will know that this country has finally come to terms with the last century and its machines and their greatness.”
SCREENINGS
DUCK AND COVER
Readers who enjoyed our Cold War coverage in the September issue and wish to return to those stirring days can do so through the offices of Something Weird Video, a Seattle outfit that preserves immense amounts of motion-picture ephemera, from 1940s B movies to feature films made in pornography’s 1970s “golden age.” The company is offering three cassettes of Cold War-era instructional films, among them: Survival Under Atomic Attack, Duck and Cover (which begins with an animated turtle using its shell to protect itself from a dynamite-wielding monkey), Radiological Decontamination of Ships, and You Can Beat the A-bomb (if you should get radiation poisoning, “lie down and rest”). Something Weird Video, P.O. Box 33664, Seattle, WA 98133; www.somethingweird.com.
THE MEN WHO INVENTED AMERICA
Examining the personal lives behind the legends who fashioned our country, the four-part series Founding Fathers (History Channel, premiering November 27-30, 9:00 P.M. EST) includes such sensational details as the purported manic depression of John Adams, James Madison’s anxiety attacks, and the sex scandal that almost ruined Alexander Hamilton. A cast of historians weighs in on why American independence mattered to each of the 10 men profiled.
New Girl on the Rock
AMERICA’S OLDEST SOFT-DRINK COMPANY PREPARES TO UNVEIL A NEW LOGO
In the disposable gallery of commercial art, whose canvases are cake-mix boxes and soda cans, masterpieces are fleeting, constantly redesigned in a quest to keep up with modernity. In a reversal of what happens in real life, the passage of time has made the Old Dutch Cleanser woman grow svelter, Betty Crocker less dowdy, and Aunt Jemima less mammyish. Unlike all these, Psyche, the White Rock girl, has never had the slightest reason to be embarrassed by her old yearbook pictures. That’s why she has had only one major overhaul, in 1947, since her 1894 debut.
Yet Psyche is now showing her age. “Psyche is a great logo, but she’s definitely dated,” says Larry Bodkin, White Rock’s vice president of marketing. “Our challenge is to take June Cleaver and turn her into Cindy Crawford.” To give Psyche a makeover, the company recently invited art students to submit designs for a new logo. The judges included the ageless caricaturist Al Hirschfeld and the 1960s poster king Peter Max, no doubt chosen for his experience with pop art. The panel selected four finalists, including an abstract line drawing and a detailed hyper-realistic rendering. Soda-drinking Psychologists can vote for their favorite at www.whiterockbeverages.com/contest.html, with the new logo to appear on drink labels starting early next year.
LOOKING BACKWARD
AT CENTURY’S END, RETROSPECTIVE THOUGHTS TO ILLUMINATE THE WAY AHEAD
As the last day of 2000 approaches, Americans will be reminded increasingly often that not just a year but also a century and a millennium are coming to an end. If history is any guide, we can expect a torrent of parties, lists, discussions, and reflections on the eve and ensuing dawn of a new era. To put it all in perspective, “History Now” takes a look back at the last time America celebrated the end of a century—in 1999:
Doomsayers predicted widespread computer failures, transportation tie-ups, power outages, and network crashes (although this last prediction, in 1999, was about as risky as forecasting rain in Seattle).
Deceptively large holiday sales by socalled dot-corns unloading merchandise at huge discounts gave rise to false hopes that a bunch of 23-year-olds would reorder American society by selling mail-order goods via computer.
Readers of the New York Post chose Bill Clinton as the second-most evil person of the millennium (Hitler was first). Salon called the Sex Pistols “one of the 20th century’s best bands.” American Heritage included Bill Gates among the top 20 innovators of the century.
Referring to the expected heavy load on the nation’s telecommunications systems, a federal official described the approaching century turnover, with a quintessentially 1990s mixed metaphor, as “Mother’s Day on Viagra.”
And finally, all millennium-related thoughts and activities instantly vanished by around 6:00 A.M. on January 2. Within a couple of days, even the most tiresome office humorists had stopped making jokes about “first cup of coffee of the new millennium.”
The Congress of Websites, run by the Independence Hall Association, focuses, despite its grand name, only on colonial-era Philadelphia, but its lively graphics, impeccable research, and games pages will appeal to anyone interested in history. Viewers can embark on a virtual marching tour of the Revolution, learn Liberty Bell trivia, read the Mayflower Compact and the Articles of Confederation, and visit “The Electric Franklin,” a section with biographies, quotes, video, and photos related to America’s premier Renaissance man. Kids can learn how to re-create some of his safer experiments.
The Rutgers Oral History Archives of World War Il presents 133 interviews, throwing in the occasional Red Cross woman or OSS member among the soldiers.
Who better than the Washington Post to create a site on Watergate? Its Watergate 25 offers such Post-specific features as a timeline with links to archived Post articles and transcripts of interviews with the newspapermen Bob Woodward and Ben Bradlee. Other sections include a “where are they now” of key players and the inevitable speculation about who Deep Throat was.
