RESEARCHERS PREPARE TO LOOK INSIDE THE LONG-BURIED CONFEDERATE SUBMARINE
With a 90-pound explosive charge attached to an iron spar protruding from her bow, the Confederate sub H. L. Hunley looked like a lopsided hypodermic needle. On the night of February 17, 1864, off Charleston, South Carolina, she gave the Union sloop Housatonic a lethal injection. After ramming the barbed spar into the Housatonic’s wooden hull, crewmen furiously hand-cranked their engineless vessel across the surface of the harbor amid small-arms fire from the surprised Yankee sailors. In so doing, they unspooled a line attached to a trigger mechanism. About a minute later, a mighty explosion sank the Housatonic almost instantly, killing five of her crew. According to one account, the Hunley signaled with a gas lantern to lookouts four miles away on Sullivans Island and then disappeared with her crew of nine.
Since then, the Hunley has been awash in mystery and controversy as well as mud. The controversy intensified after she was lifted from the harbor floor on August 8, 2000, by a team led by the novelist and shipwreck expert Clive Cusler. Another salvor says he found the submarine back in 1970 (although he made no attempt to raise her), while a self-styled “degreed archeologist” says he located her in 1973. But Cussler insists his group was the first to pinpoint the Hunley’s location, on May 4, 1995, after a 15-year search. The government agrees with his claim.
The Hunley Commission, a semiprivate organization operated by South Carolina, has taken charge of the submarine’s preservation. At the new Warren Lasch Conservation Center in North Charleston, the Hunley rests submerged in a huge water tank whose pH, oxygen level, and conductivity are regulated by a computer. The vessel turns out to be rounder than was thought. She also has previously unrecorded hydrodynamic fins built into her sides, and there are signs that gunshots from the Housatonic may have penetrated her conning tower. Nothing as yet explains, however, what made her sink.
Robert Neyland, the project director, and his team are using a three-dimensional scanner to record 2.5 billion survey points, which will map the artifact’s external shape. Sonar allows the researchers to probe its interior. “We plan to remove rivets and take off plates shortly,” says Neyland, “and we plan to go inside by March.” What does he expect to find? “You never know for sure, but I think we’ll find human remains.”
—Fred L. Schultz
Old Blue Eyes Slept Here
AGUIDETO HIS ADOPTIVE HOME, FOR FRANKOPHILES
Planning a visit to Palm Springs? Want to make sure you don’t miss such landmarks as the Riviera Resort, “where Sinatra organized several big charity shows featuring such fun-loving pals as wacky comedian Jerry Lewis and fellow swooner-crooner Bing Crosby,” or Riccio’s Restaurant, where he “felt most comfortable in the early '7Os"? Then get a copy of All the Stops Along the Way—The Places Sinatra Loved, the People He Knew, a brochure available for $2.00 from the Palm Springs Desert Resorts Convention and Visitors Authority, 69-930 Highway 111, Department FS, Rancho Mirage, CA 92270. It covers 30 Old Blue Eyes-related locations and is packed with endearing nuggets of inside information (the swimming pool at his second home had to be moved because guests at the bar kept falling in; his best friend, July Rizzo, rests close by him at Desert Memorial Park).
EDITORS’ BOOKSHELF
Reading Lyrics, edited by Robert Kimball and Robert Gottlieb (Pantheon, $39.50), is about the best anthology of great American popular songs you could hope for, with words to more than a thousand of them from the era between 1900 and 1975, arranged by lyricist. It is a must-have for any admirer of the poetry of Hart, Gershwin, Carmichael, et al. And if you want to know more about those songs and their authors and composers, turn to Easy to Remember: Great American Songwriters and Their Songs, by William Zinsser (Godine, $29.95), an elegantly written and handsomely illustrated appreciation in the form of short essays about individual songwriters and some of their most outstanding masterpieces.
The title of G. I. Brown’s Scientist, Soldier, Statesman, Spy (Sutton, $12.95) aptly sums up the diverse careers of its subject, the American-British-FrenchGerman Count Rumford, originally Benjamin Thompson of Woburn, Massachusetts. Besides betraying his fellow colonists in the Revolution, pioneering the mechanical theory of heat, and making important advances in lighting and stove design, he ingratiated himself with virtually every powerful man or rich woman he met (marrying two of the latter) and used scientific studies to greatly improve the health of Bavaria’s soldiers, despite his erroneous conviction that the chief nutrient in soup was water.
In April 1865: The Month That Saved America (HarperCollins, $30.00), Jay Winik’s well-paced narrative follows Robert E. Lee’s attempt to elude Ulysses S. Grant and join up with Joe Johnston’s troops; the fall of Richmond, the Confederate capital; the pins-and-needles negotiations that finally led to Lee’s surrender at Appomattox; Abraham Lincoln’s struggles in his last days to find a shape for Reconstruction; “the choreographed decapitation of the Union government,” as Winik calls Lincoln’s assassination; and on through to the capture of a fugitive Jefferson Davis and the first stirrings of national reconciliation, the troubled dawn of “a new America, reunited, yes, scarred, certainly, but for the first time, largely whole, looking as much to the future as to the past.”
When Fergus M. Bordewich was 14 years old, he badgered his reluctant mother into going riding with him; she fell from her horse and died beneath the hooves of his own. In My Mother’s Ghost (Doubleday, $23.95), he tells of a lifetime spent coming to terms with this calamity, and since his mother, LaVerne Madigan, was the executive director of the Association on American Indian Affairs in a crucial time, his beautifully written memoir is not only a lucid statement of the power and complexity of one’s personal past but an absorbing account of an immensely capable woman working to right historic wrongs.
Who’s That Girl?
GRANT WOOD’S STERN-VISAGED IOWA FARMER LOOKS OLD ENOUGH TO BE HER FATHER. IS HE?
Scores of readers chided us for using Grant Wood’s American Gothic on our November cover to illustrate a story about divorce: Don’t we know that the pair in the painting are father and daughter, not husband and wife? We could hardly have gotten more letters if we’d identified Emanuel Leutze’s best-known painting as Jefferson Crossing the Delaware. But before firing our picture editor, we did a little digging to discover whether we had, in fact, misinterpreted one of America’s most familiar works of art.
In 1930, when Wood spotted the painting’s distinctive house (which is still standing) in Eldon, Iowa, he sketched what would become American Gothic on the back of an envelope. He imagined two people whose long faces would echo the shape of the arched window behind them, eventually choosing his sister, Nan Wood Graham, and his dentist, Byron H. McKeeby, as models. In a 1933 article, Wood wrote that he envisioned the pair as husband and wife: “I finally induced my own maiden sister [in fact, Nan had been married for six years] to pose. … The next job was to find a man to represent the husband.” Wood also used the word wife in his correspondence in reference to the woman.
The painting was unveiled in October 1930 and instantly became famous—or, in Wood’s native state, infamous, for many lowans thought he was making fun of them. The clear age disparity between the two faces—Graham was 31 and McKeeby 62—also ruffled some feathers. So Wood and his associates began to change their story. With a vagueness typical of the literature on this topic, a 1944 biography by Darrell Garwood says that “what had started out to be a farmer and his wife became a small-town businessman and his daughter.”
Ever since, critics have disagreed on the nature of the relationship. The Stanford art historian Wanda Corn, for instance, author of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (1983), firmly believes the figures are father and daughter, but James M. Dennis of the University of Wisconsin-Madison insists in Renegade Regionalists (1998) that they are husband and wife.
So who’s right? If only Wood had given the woman a pitchfork to hold, we might have settled the matter by looking at her ring finger. Since he didn’t, the safest course may be to do what Dennis did in an earlier work, Grant Wood: A Study in American Art and Culture (1975), and simply refer to the figures as “the man” and “the woman.”
ON EXHIBIT
Texas pride has burned white-hot since Davy Crockett’s time, but until now there has never been one central place to contain all that passion. On April 21 the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum, named for a late lieutenant governor who pushed for the project, opens its doors in Austin. The three-story pink granite structure holds relics of the state displayed in a high-tech setting that includes a clutch of theaters. Beyond the 3-D IMAX installation we’ve come to expect in such places, there is the Revolution Theater, built to resemble the Alamo the day after the battle. In the Texas Spirit Theater, where Sam Houston narrates a film called The Star of Destiny, the seats shake when a gusher shoots from an oil derrick and when a Saturn V lifts off, carrying astronauts to the moon. Texas State History Museum: 512-936-8746. Web site: www.TheStoryofTexas.com.
The Smithsonian Institution’s numerous museums are constantly mounting exhibits—more than 20 this spring alone. The complete schedule can be found at newsdesk.si.edu. Most intriguing, perhaps, is an exhibit scheduled to open April 6 at the National Museum of American History, in Washington: “Accounting for Taste: The Paint-by-Number Phenomenon of the 1950s,” which will include canvases by (among others) the season’s most unlikely pair of artists: Andy Warhol and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
The Eames Era
After World War I, things were supposed to go back to normal, but trying to remember “normal” proved harder than anyone thought. In the aftermath of World War II, Americans didn’t make that mistake. Things then were supposed to be different, and it was basic furniture that spoke of a fresh start to all those millions of Americans who were making their own fresh starts by moving into new homes.
In 1945 Ray Eames (rhymes with dreams) and her husband, Charles, started introducing chairs that were clean and unencumbered, with a style so modern that it still smacks the eye today. The Eameses’ chairs were also strangely organic, despite being manufactured with high-tech processes and mass production.
Ray was an abstract painter, and Charles had been trained as an architect. After they were married, in 1941, a doctor friend told them about the Navy’s dire need for a new design for a leg splint. They studied the problem and produced an effective—and beautiful- splint, based on knowledge Charles had of a new way to shape lightweight plywood. The Navy ordered thousands, and the Eameses had the chance to perfect their production methods while establishing a design firm, the Eames Office, in Venice, California, which introduced three of the most influential chairs of the twentieth century:
DINING CHAIR: With a gently curving piece of plywood for the seat and another for the backrest, it came with wooden legs (known as DCW) or metal ones (DCM). Introduced 1945 ($100-$200).
FIBERGLASS ARMCHAIR: Also known as a “bucket” or “shell” chair, it was made from a composite of fiberglass and plastic. Introduced 1950 ($50-$2,500).
LOUNGE CHAIR AND OTTOMAN: Rosewood plywood and black leather made for a richer look than most Eames pieces convey. Introduced 1956 ($l,500-$5,000).
The Eames Office accepted commissions from corporations seeking to project an up-to-date image. In 1972 Charles was asked if he had ever been forced to accept compromises during a career spent working with big business. “I have never been forced to accept compromises,” he replied, “but I have willingly accepted constraints.” The response was spare and practical, like the furniture.
—J. M. Fenster
FLIP YOUR WIG
A LIVING MUSEUM OF COLONIAL TIMES ACQUIRES A SURPRISINGLY RARE EXAMPLE OF A COMMONPLACE OBJECT
Colonial Williamsburg has announced its borrowing of an eighteenth-century wig from the East Hampton Historical Society, of New York. The museum already owned two wigs it thought were from colonial times, but they turned out to date from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The newly borrowed wig, though—a curly white horsehair model—is fully authenticated and promises to give Williamsburg staffers who portray an eighteenth-century barber and wigmaker a much firmer understanding of how the craft was practiced. The European fashion of wearing wigs originated in the seventeenth century at the court of Louis XIII, known as Louis the Bald. By about 1790, it had disappeared except among bishops, judges, and lawyers (although, as the Encyclopedia Americana points out, “a modern form, the toupee, designed to simulate the natural hair, is widely used in the United States and elsewhere"). Colonial Williamsburg, “conveniently located just 150 miles south of Washington, D.C.” (in the words of a press release), can be reached at www.colonialwilliamsburg.org or by telephone at 757-220-7286.
On ‘Wisconsin’
A BATTLESHIP COMES HOME
Well before dawn on December 7, 2000, hundreds of Navy veterans of three wars assembled at Norfolk Naval Station to board the USS Wisconsin for its final journey. Launched on Pearl Harbor Day in 1943, the nation’s last and largest battleship (nearly 888 feet long) was heading a few miles down the Elizabeth River to become a tourist attraction on Norfolk’s waterfront.
Only three other Iowa-dass battleships survive. The Missouri is a museum in Pearl Harbor, while the Iowa and New Jersey, located in San Francisco and Camden, New Jersey, are slated to become museums. The Iowa and Wisconsin are on ready reserve, so tours will be restricted to the main deck; the rest is off-limits. But nearby in the harbor, the National Maritime Center will provide exhibits on life aboard a battleship.
The Wisconsin earned five battle stars in the Pacific, saw action in Korea, and last fired her 16-inch guns during the Gulf War. “There’s a lot of history in that sucker,” murmured one Korean War veteran as he stared up at the freshly painted gray behemoth. “I brought the only part of my uniform that still fits,” another said. “My watch cap.” Around sunrise, as the Wisconsin got under way, pulled by four sturdy Moran tugs, her aged former crew members suddenly became as nimble as mountain goats, climbing ever-higher decks.
For the city of Norfolk, home to America’s largest naval base, the Wisconsin’s arrival is full of promise. “I’m happy. Fm very happy,” rejoiced Rev. Nathaniel Obey, a local man who had spent 1952 to 1956 in the tailor shop on the Wisconsin. “I never thought I’d be on the ship to see it move again. And this is the greatest thing that ever happened to this town.”
The USS Wisconsin opens to visitors on April 16. For more information, call Nauticus, the National Maritime Center (800-664-1080), or the Norfolk Convention and Visitors Bureau (757-664-6620).
SCREENINGS
NEW ON DVD
Loosely based on James Fenimore Cooper’s 1826 novel, Michael Mann’s factually ludicrous and atmospherically compelling 1992 movie The Last of the Mohicans is and will probably forever remain the only hugely popular film ever set in the French and Indian War. To criticize The Last of the Mohicans on a historical basis, as many did upon its release, is like punching a balloon. One historian sniffed, “What could have been a great, fact-based film is instead a reasonably entertaining fantasy.” Nonsense. One could not make a fact-based film from Cooper’s book without scrapping the book and starting from scratch. Mann has pursued the opposite course: He’s plumped up the story into a full-fledged romance (in both the large and small meanings of the word) in which viewers can swoon at their first sight of a near-naked savage and learn to share the savage’s sorrow over the passing of a way of life. If the word history can’t be enlarged to include such things, perhaps moviegoers are right to prefer romance. The DVD release highlights the gorgeous, throbbing soundtrack of Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman and the spectacular set built for the siege of Fort William Henry. In no way does the movie actually depict the last of the Mohicans, who are currently running a casino in Wisconsin.
