A MERE NAVY LIEUTENANT (JG) JOINS SOME ACTION-FIGURE GENERALS
Both the Army and Navy rejected him on health grounds in 1940. When he finally won over the Navy, three months before Pearl Harbor, he had to beg to escape routine desk jobs and land a position on an actual boat. He finished the war a lowly lieutenant, junior grade. But John F. Kennedy can now finally take his place among the five-star generals Omar Bradley and Dwight Eisenhower and the four-stars Colin Powell and George Patton—as G.I. Joe’s newest recruit.
The 12-inch action figure, which is part of the adult-targeted G.I. Joe Classic Collection, commemorates Kennedy’s days as commander of PT-109. Text on the back of the box recounts JFK’s heroism after a Japanese destroyer sliced his boat in two in August 1943: He led his crew to a nearby island, towing an injured comrade while he swam, and carved a rescue message into a coconut shard that natives ferried to rescuers. Hasbro, the company that makes G.I. Joe, worked in conjunction with the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum to create faultless accessories for the pint-sized Kennedy, including dog tags, fatigue cap, revolver, and a replica of the coconut. Tom McNaught, the Kennedy Library’s director of communications, guarantees that “the toy coconut is very accurate; the message is identical to the real one.” Whether the figure itself looks like the real Kennedy is another matter. To create the likeness, a sculptor, working from World War II-era photos, carved a walnutsized head in wax. After library officials tweaked the nose a bit, Hasbro cast a mold and grafted the results onto a standard G.I. Joe body. This explains why the sickly Kennedy, a six-footer who came home from the war weighing 127 pounds, in this incarnation has the equivalent of 13.5-inch biceps. In a playroom police lineup, this G.I. Joe could probably be identified as Kennedy (or at least more easily than the Bradley and Eisenhower figures could be named as their counterparts), but his family’s trademark jawline seems too oblique and his eyes lose something in the translation.
Nonetheless, collectors have already proved willing to shell out the figure’s $30 sticker price, a portion of which benefits the library. McNaught, for one, is pleased. “Hasbro approached this with dignity,” he says. “And we knew Kennedy would be in good company with Patton, Powell, and Ike.” Even so, should G.I. Jack get lonely, the Franklin Mint sells a series of Jackie O. dolls, and three versions of Marilyn Monroe Barbie hit the market in 1997.
ON EXHIBIT
“In no single area of the war was the overwhelming advantage possessed by the Federal government so ruinous to Southern hopes,” the historian Bruce Catton wrote of Civil War sea power. You can learn why at the National Civil War Naval Museum, in Columbus, Georgia, which opens on March 9, the 139th anniversary of the pivotal standoff between the ironclads Monitor and Merrimack at Hampton Roads. Visitors to the 40,000-square-foot museum can see a replica of the ironclad CSS Albemarle; stand above the bow of the actual CSS Jackson, recovered from the Chattahoochee River; or clamber onto a replica of the USS Hartford, the flagship of Adm. David Farragut’s fleet during the capture of New Orleans.
Some musical instruments lead a double life, like the violin, which sheds its formal attire to become a fiddle. The banjo, though, is nothing but country, which makes it right at home in the Blue Ridge Institute and Museum (540-365-4416; www.blueridgeinstitute.org) on the campus of Ferrum College in Ferrum, Virginia. “The Banjo in Virginia” covers everything from the slave-built gourd banjos of the 170Os to the steel-stringed, factory-made instruments favored by modern bluegrass musicians. Through March.
THE MAKING OF “LONESOME DOVE”
LARRY McMURTRY TELLS THE STORY BEHIND THE BOOK
This March, Simon & Schuster will publish Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America’s Past (and Each Other), a fascinating anthology edited by Mark C. Carnes in which historians offer essays on historical novels and the authors of these novels reply to them. In it, Elliott West speaks with warmth and appreciation of Lonesome Dove, the definitive Western novel of recent years (although he does wonder how its cowboys drove their charges north without encountering the tracks of the Union Pacific). In his brief response, Larry McMurtry tells of the genesis of his 1985 book.
Writers, singers, prolific artists of many stamps have sometimes found, to their bafflement, that they have been more or less trapped by the unexpected and unrelenting popularity of a work to which they themselves had initially attached little importance. Henry James was pestered all his life by fans of what was, to his mind, a slight story, Daisy Miller. Bing Crosby grew very, very tired of having to sing, over and over again, a little ditty called “White Christmas.”
In my case the culprit is Lonesome Dove, a book that now seems as remote from me as the Arthuriad, or the Matter of Troy, but which blooms eternally—a living myth-flower—to its readers (or watchers).
Like the corpus of stories about King Arthur and his knights, or those about the fall of Troy, Lonesome Dove long ago burst past single authorship into a ubiquity of forms. A subdivision I pass on my way to Dallas is called Dove Estates. The dog that won best in show at the Westminster Dog Show a few years ago was named Lonesome Dove. A honky-tonk not 30 miles from where I write is now the “Lonesum Dove.” A TV series featuring several characters I myself had killed off was filmed in Canada; it flourished for three seasons on the Fox network. A few of the characters may have even been killed twice, having succumbed not only in my pages but also in a spurious (but legal) sequel called Return to Lonesome Dove. In television, death just doesn’t have much of a sting.
What I suspect this means is that it’s hard to go wrong if one writes at length about the Old West. I thought I had written about a harsh time and some pretty harsh people, but to the public at large, I had produced something nearer to an idealization; instead of a poor man’s inferno, filled with violence, faithlessness, and betrayal, I had actually delivered a kind of Gone With the Wind of the West, a turnabout I’ll be mulling over for a long, long time.
I have the greatest difficulty thinking about my books once I have finished them and a like difficulty reading anything about them, whether good, bad, dumb, smart, friendly, hostile. I thought Professor West’s piece was smart and good-natured, but what else to say?
First, that Lonesome Dove was an unproduced screenplay for 12 years, done for John Wayne, James Stewart, Henry Fonda. Had the film been produced, I’d not have written the book.
Second, that I almost did not finish the book. I stopped and wrote two other books (Cadillac Jack, Desert Rose) and resumed Lonesome Dove only when I saw an old church bus by a Texas road that said LONESOME DOVE BAPTIST CHURCH. Acquiring a good title provoked me to finish the tale.
Third, that a cattleman named Nelson Story drove a herd of cattle from Texas to Montana in 1866—and sold them at a profit. I thought of the drive in Lonesome Dove as occurring in the late 186Os or early 187Os. I made a note to myself in the first draft to put in the Union Pacific Railroad—I wanted them to cross it in a big sandstorm—but then I forgot my own note. A long novel often involves such sloppiness.
Last, that I think of the West as the phantom limb of the American psyche, not there but not forgotten.
THE BUYABLE PAST
Calendar Clocks
Starting around 1865, clocks told not only the time but the day, the date, and even the month. The calendar clock had been a mechanical possibility for centuries, but in America after the Civil War, it took hold, and inventors peppered the Patent Office with improvements. With one dial or two separate ones, it was a gadget suited to the age, equally popular in schools, offices, and front parlors. A Connecticut inventor named Daniel J. Gale patented clocks that kept track of the number of years until the next leap year, the week number (out of 52), the moon phase, and the sunrise/sunset times on a latitude he described only as “New England.”
After 1915 the craze for calendar clocks of all types faded, just as quickly as it had once taken hold. By the end of the 1920s, almost none were being manufactured in the United States.
FOR DAILY USE
SIMPLE CALENDAR CLOCKS: The date and time could be shown on the same dial by means of a fairly simple attachment. Typically, the numbers 1 to 31 were placed in a circle outside the numerals for the hours; an extra hand pointed to the current date. Companies often charged only 50 cents or a dollar to add a calendar to a standard clock. Today, a simple calendar clock is regarded as more of a novelty than a mechanical wonder ($200-$500).
FOR SERIOUS COLLECTORS
COMPLEX CALENDAR CLOCKS: The movement for the calendar was separate from that for the time of day, and typically the date was displayed on a second dial ($500-$!,500). The majority of complex clocks, though, were even more complex than that. Perpetual calendar clocks automatically adjusted for months of different lengths. Many also kept track of leap years ($500-$15,000). Nearly all grandfather, or tall case, clocks beginning in the late seventeenth century were equipped with date-of-the-month calendars, yet the term calendar clock does not normally refer to them. Instead, a calendar clock is a wall or table model, presented in wood, metal, or porcelain. The “skeleton” models made by one of the leading companies in the field, Ithaca Calendar Clock, were enclosed by glass domes or glass-sided wooden cases ($10,000$13,000). They offered something irresistible, a long look at what made them tick.
—Julie M. Fenster
A Lincoln Face-lift?
BEHIND THE FIVE-DOLLAR MAKEOVER
Analyzing the new, disconcertingly off-kilter five-dollar bill last summer, a New York plastic surgeon somehow convinced Newsweek that the government had merely given Lincoln a face-lift to modernize the old portrait. Not so. The portrait on the new bills is in fact modeled after an entirely different photograph of Lincoln—but one taken at the very same sitting. And behind the two portraits lies a story that illuminates the art of presidential image-making.
The sitting occurred on Tuesday, February 9, 1864, when an artist named Francis B. Carpenter ushered the President into Mathew Brady’s Washington gallery. Carpenter had been working in the White House on a large painting of Lincoln’s first reading of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862. He had difficulty capturing that elusive likeness. He brought in a photographer to take pictures of the President in his White House office, but the lighting proved inadequate, and Lincoln’s impish young son locked the man out of his makeshift darkroom, probably spoiling the pictures. Ultimately, Carpenter persuaded the President to visit Brady’s studios.
Out of this one productive session came the famous profile later used for the copper penny, the beloved photograph of Lincoln “reading” a large book to his son Tad (actually it was a sample photo album), and the handsome portrait first adapted for the five-dollar bill in 1928, which Lincoln’s son Robert called “the most satisfactory likeness of him.”
After Lincoln’s death, the finest photo was copied for innumerable prints; by the time it was engraved for American currency, it was already familiar to millions. But yet another picture was taken that day too. Lincoln sat in the same chair, kept his hands in nearly the same position. The difference was that the cameraman moved his apparatus around the room to his right and exposed his plate from a different angle. The result was also widely reproduced in its time, but later it faded from memory.
Now it—and not a made-over, face-lifted revision—is back on ubiquitous view. Francis B. Carpenter, for one, would have been pleased. For he rejected what we have long called the “five-dollar-bill photo” and modeled the Lincoln in his own painting on the pose that has belatedly found its way onto American currency.
—Harold Holzer
The 10 Greatest Jazz Records
THE CREATOR OF THE NEW DOCUMENTARY MAKES A VERY HARD CHOICE. BY KEN BURNS
Filmmaking is a difficult job of distillation, but nothing has prepared me for winnowing down nearly 19 hours of film—my new PBS documentary, Jazz—to a single CD. Still, I’ve done it, and of the 20 cuts on the album (released by Columbia/Legacy), these are my absolute favorites.
1. Star Dust, Louis Armstrong, 1931.
Armstrong is to music in the twentieth century what Einstein is to physics and the Wright brothers are to travel: the most important person there was. He liberated jazz, taking it from being an ensemble music to a soloist art, with his horn and his voice. I think this masterpiece of virtuoso singing and playing is the best way to start any consideration of jazz.
2. St. Louis Blues, Louis Armstrong, 1929.
Armstrong at the height of his powers transforms W. C. Handy’s familiar standard into a virile, driving, utterly dramatic showcase for his trumpet genius.
3. The Mooche, Duke Ellington, 1928.
Ellington saw as clearly as anyone that African-American history is at the center of our culture, and his compositions reflect that in nearly every note and gesture. Listening to them is like listening to the pronouncements of an Olympian god. This one is from his early days as the bandleader at the Cotton Club in Harlem.
4. Hotter Than ‘Ell, Fletcher Henderson, 1934
Henderson and his arranger, Don Redman, helped create a new way of playing jazz—big band swing. As his incomparable tenor sax player, Coleman Hawkins, said, theirs was “the stompingest, pushingest band I ever heard.”
5. Begin the Beguine, Artie Shaw, 1938.
A beautiful, moving, and lyrical composition filled with both technical virtuosity and an intellectual approach to swing. It endures as one of the great anthems of the swing years.
6. Cotton Tail, Duke Ellington, 1940.
Ellington molded his orchestra into his own personal instrument, and no member of the band ever played more beautifully than his great tenor saxophone star, Ben Webster. One of Webster’s best-known performances is in this up-tempo tune, which his boss wrote specially for him.
7. Jumpin’ at the Woodside, Count Basie, 1938.
Basie brought to the nation a new kind of music, pulsing and suffused with the blues. If you had to pick one Basie tune to characterize that driven “Kansas City” sound, this would be it.
8. Solitude, Billie Holiday, 1941.
No female singer has had a greater impact on jazz than Holiday. “Solitude” is her masterpiece, an Ellington melody performed so beautifully and with such humanity that it is hard to imagine anyone else singing it.
9. Groovin’ High, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, 1945.
After World War II, a new, risk-filled music began to dominate: bebop. The two great pioneers of bop combine here to rework completely an old standby, “Whispering,” into something entirely new.
10. So What, Miles Davis, 1959.
Trying to represent the scope and variety and restless experimentation of Davis’s career with one piece may be foolhardy, but few could quibble with, this choice from Kind of Blue, the best-selling jazz album of all time, in it is all that makes Davis so central to the music.
Eating the Past
IT’S AMERICA’S LATEST CULINARY SENSATION: HARDTACK AND GROG
Few things are more evocative of the past than bad food. As proof, consider the London restaurant School Dinners, which for 20 years has drawn hordes of enthusiastic customers (including the noted epicure Prince Andrew) who pay good money ” to eat the exact same dreary fare they were subjected to at boarding school. Nothing that bizarre could ever happen in America, if only because most of us can duplicate our high school lunchroom experience by simply visiting the company cafeteria. On the other hand, we do have Civil War re-enactors who enthusiastically pay eight dollars for a box of 10 hardtack crackers—the same crackers that, according to one genuine Union soldier, “required a very strong blow of the fist to break.” The crackers’ manufacturer, the G. H. Bent Company of Milton, Massachusetts (www.hardtackcracker.com), was the biggest supplier of hardtack to the Union Army during the Civil War. Around the turn of the century, the company stopped making them, only to revive production a few years ago at the request of re-enactors.
To experience hardtack at its best, the crackers should be soaked in water and fried in pork fat. Soldiers called this delicacy “skillygalee.” The crackers also worked well as naval rations because they were, like linoleum flooring, so durable. This made them useful when ships were equipped for long sea voyages. To complete the naval experience, purists can wash them down with grog, or rum diluted with water, which was a part of sailors’ daily allotment on British warships as late as 1970 (though the U.S. Navy abolished its grog ration in 1862). Now an Austin, Texas, company named Great Spirits (www.greatspirits.com) is selling surplus British naval rum in demijohns, each of which contains one imperial gallon (4.54 liters). Since 1970 the rum has been served only on special occasions, most recently at the wedding of the ubiquitous Prince Andrew (who is not known ever to have eaten a hardtack cracker).
The price? A mere $6,000 per demijohn. At that rate, one shot glass—an amount for which the Royal Navy paid less than a dime in the late 1960s—will set you back $60. So you might want to use cheaper stuff if you’re mixing it with Coke. Still, at 108 proof, British Royal Navy Imperial Rum certainly packs a wallop. As one member of our tasting panel (see below) exclaimed, “It makes me want to lead a boarding party onto the quarterdeck of a French three-decker.”
THE TASTE TEST
To evaluate the Imperial Rum, we diluted it with two parts of water, as was done for common seamen in the Royal Navy, and conducted a blind taste test against a leading premium brand of Jamaican rum diluted to the same alcoholic content. Seven of nine staff members preferred the naval rum, which they described as “delicate,” “earthy.” “oaky,” and “dissipates like smoke on the tongue.” The other brand: “mellow, bland, creamy” and “tastes like alcohol and water and the paper cup that holds it.”
Is Royal Navy rum worth $6,000 a gallon? Not on a publishing salary, to be sure. Still, all were impressed with the momentousness of the tasting experience—not just the link with long tradition, but also the fact that each tiny cup held $8 worth of liquor.
At the One Stop Warhol Shop you can see Clark Gable’s shoes, given to the footwear-loving Andy Warhol by Gable’s widow; get the answers to questions like “Was Warhol gay?,” “Was he rich?,” “Did he wear a wig?,” and “Did he do drugs?” (yes in all cases) that may seem an insult to the memory of a dead man untii you remember that the dead man is Andy Warhol; and even, should you be interested, look at his art. It’s a cinch that Warhoi, who died in 1987, would have been pleased to see his life and work made accessible by the latest technology, though he might not have liked the fact that he wasn’t making any money from it.
Want a firsthand account of the faminelike conditions at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777 or a report from the Constitutional Convention? Want to know what the temperature was at Mount Vernon on December 7, 1785? Then visit the George Washington Papers at the Library of Congress, 1741 to 1799. The library has digitized all of the 65,000 Washington documents in its manuscript coilection—the single largest assemblage of Washington’s papers—including correspondence, diaries, military records, and financial accounts.
Women on Wheels
A LONG-TIME MINORITY AMONG BIKERS GETS ITS DUE
Women who ride motorcycees may seem inherently tough, rebellious, and sexy, but “Women & Motorcycling,” a traveling exhibit assembled by the American Motorcyclist Association and the Motorcycle Hall of Fame Museum, in Pickerington, Ohio, is out to change all that. Women have been riding motorcycles since the early 190Os, and in those days they didn’t need to dress up like men or even like sirens. Included in the exhibit are photographs of pre-1920 groups of large numbers of women, stylishly dressed and out to enjoy a ride on the status vehicle of the era. Not until after World War II did the “bad boy” image of motorcycle gangs arise. The exhibit provides context for these changes by combining a general chronology of the past century, a timeline of women’s history, and a timeline of women’s motorcycling. It also features profiles of such pioneers as Bessie Stringfield, an African-American woman who began riding in 1927, when she was 16. Stringfield completed eight solo cross-country tours during her 66-year career, jumped on and off a moving motorcycle with ease when challenged by a police captain who doubted her riding ability, and served as a dispatch rider in the U.S. Army.
If you think you’d be afraid to run into the Leather and Lace gang in a dark alley, this traveling exhibit wants to change your mind. The exhibit will visit Minneapolis; Cleveland; Rosemont, Illinois; Atlanta; New York City; Daytona Beach, Florida; and St. Louis between late January and March. For a complete schedule, see www.amadirectlink.com.
EDITORS’ BOOKSHELF
A. Lifelong bird watchers and those who are baffled at the bird feeder will marvel equally at the new Sibley Guide to Birds (Knopf, $35.00). David Alien Sibley has been drawing and painting America’s birds—and preparing to create this volume—since he was seven. In it he shows every species found in the United States and Canada in all its varieties, including juvenile and nonbreeding plumages and in flight. The presentation, as beautiful as it is detailed and informative, sets a dazzling new standard for bird guides and thus for the appreciation of the avian wonders of our continent.
B. In an age of e-mail invitations and mass-produced “Come to Our Party” cards, it’s refreshing to recall the era between the Civil War and the Depression, when the elaborate flamboyance that has always surrounded Mardi Gras in New Orleans extended even to the cards that invited revelers to holiday balls. Henri I Schindler, a long-time collector, has recently published Mardi Gras Treasures: Invitations of the Golden Age (Pelican, $35.00), from which the picture at left is taken. Future volumes will P cover float designs, costume designs, and jewelry and krewe favors; postcard and notecard versions of the float designs are already available.
C. “No televisions, no radios, no cars, no dancing,” writes Laura Wilson in Hutterites of Montana (Yale University Press, $39.95) of the Protestant sect that has lived and farmed in communal settlements since emigrating to the Dakota Territory in the 187Os. The Hutterites even forbid photography, though they relented this time, allowing Wilson to take the black-and-white pictures that form the bulk of this book. The usual shots of bonneted women sewing and cooking are here, but jarring modern notes also creep in: a baby wearing a head kerchief, a long dress, and tiny sneakers; desserts made with Oreos and Jell-0; and children frolicking in front of vinyl-sided buildings that look for all the world like suburban tract housing.
SCREENINGS
NEW ON DVD
Of all the reasons offered, when The Patriot was released last year, for the dearth of films on the American Revolution, the most convincing was the simplest, that there is no satisfying way to present period attitudes toward slavery to a modern audience. Glory, the finest film ever made about the American Civil War, succeeds precisely because it confronts the issue head-on. Whether or not all the men who fought it could articulate it, or even understand it, the war from beginning to end was about slavery. The director Edward Zwick’s 1989 film received some criticism from historians for implying that the 54th Massachusetts Regiment was the first black fighting unit in the Union Army (although the movie does not say this) and for depicting most of the soldiers as former slaves when most in fact were freemen who had grown up in the North. But in this case the rewriting of history was justified. How else to represent fairly not just that regiment but all the 168,000 black soldiers and 30,000 black sailors who fought in Lincoln’s army and navy?
The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael called Glory “spirit-stirring material that has never before been tapped for movies.” Much of the spirit moving must be credited to the composer James Horner (Braveheart, Titanic), whose rousing score, enhanced in the new DVD version, includes choral work from the Boys Choir of Harlem. As CoI. Robert Gould Shaw, the Boston-raised officer who led the regiment, Matthew Broderick has a reticent, slightly dazed look that befits a reluctant and unlikely hero. Denzel Washington, as a rebellious former slave; Morgan Freeman, as a middle-aged gravedigger turned sergeant; and Andre Braugher, as an educated freeman, portray a broad spectrum of black antebellum types without once resorting to stereotype. The screenwriter, Kevin Jarre, whose main sources were Colonel Shaw’s letters and Peter Burchard’s 1965 book One Gallant Rush, has a small part as a white Union soldier who brawls with Washington’s Private Tripp but then later cheers on the 54th to its heroic, calamitous assault on Fort Wagner, in South Carolina. The new DVD wide-screen version appends commentary from the director and a featurette, Voices of Glory, offering production notes and historical background.
—Allen Barra
W vs. Q
THE LAST TIME A PRESIDENT’S SON WENT INTO HIS FATHER’S BUSINESS, THE RESULTS WERE LESSTHANINSPIRING
The parallels are obvious. Both men are the same-named sons of single-term Presidents who had served eight years as Vice President, and both won controversial elections against candidates from Tennessee. Is George W. Bush the next John Quincy Adams? If so, it’s good news for Al Gore, since the losing candidate in the 1824 election, Gen. Andrew Jackson, got his revenge the next time around. A closer look, however, suggests that Bush is much closer in spirit to Jackson, and Gore to Adams.
A popular anti-Adams slogan in both the 1824 and 1828 campaigns was, “John Quincy Adams, he can write / Andrew Jackson, he can fight.” George W. Bush has shown no great talent for either of these things, while Al Gore, as an Army journalist in Vietnam, arguably did both. Still, the slogan highlights something that has remained true of presidential elections since our modern two-party system coalesced around Jackson: A regular guy, real or fake, will beat an egghead every time.
In his first annual address as President, John Quincy Adams lived up to his image by advocating the establishment of a national university, an astronomical observatory, and a uniform system of weights and measures. All these proposals were mocked into oblivion and gave Adams a reputation as an ivory-tower intellectual. Even Adams’s grandson called him an “idealistic philosopher,” which would not be the best way to describe George W. Bush.
By contrast, Jackson’s Inauguration Day festivities in 1829 became a near-riot, as jubilant farmers, backwoodsmen, and laborers overran the open White House. Some observers shuddered at the prospect of four years of government by a man who was little more polished than the mob that had stolen his furniture for souvenirs. Yet Jackson was easily returned to office in 1832.
George W. Bush won election with a similar rope-a-dope strategy: He let the jokes and slurs pile up, and when he held his own in debates and avoided any major gaffes, the Gore campaign had nowhere to turn. Can he achieve the same trick in office? Time will tell. He has made a good start by not being John Quincy Adams, but he now faces the much harder task of being Andrew Jackson.
