According to a 1995 poll, more than 113 million Americans are researching their family histories. Presumably, the others are put off by the hobby’s side effects: nausea induced by hours spent staring at microfilm, and vacation time eaten up traveling to out-of-state libraries for research. Now the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation has a way to save them at least one trip and a couple of packets of Alka-Seltzer. To complement the interactive Family History Center in its immigration museum, the foundation will put online in late April (at www.ellisislandrecords.org) the records of everyone who entered the country through Ellis Island during the peak years between its opening in 1892 and the institution of strict quotas in 1924. Volunteers from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, ever devoted to genealogy, logged more than five million hours transcribing the tiny handwriting on decaying microfilmed copies of the original ships’ manifests. The resulting database of 22 million names represents 60 percent of all U.S. immigration records.
Genealogists can now at no charge type a name into the Web site’s search engine and retrieve a page containing facts from the immigrant’s entrance interview, including last residence, age, marital status, and date of arrival. Seasoned researchers will recognize a catch: Unfamiliar foreign names were often misspelled by overworked stenographers or Americanized on the spot. So if the correct person’s dossier fails to pop up, the program will find ethnic variants or names that begin with the same letters. Conversely, entering a few pre-search details, like ethnicity and year of entry, can whittle down the number of results for a common name like John Smith.
Of course, genealogical research would be even easier if each ancestor and organization had dutifully archived every scrap of information available. But in reality, preservation rarely occurs before it’s almost too late. The National Archives, for example, didn’t start putting the Ellis Island records on microfilm until 1938, two decades after the technology was developed. By that time, the oldest manifests were 46 years old and beginning to tear. Personal records are no less evanescent: Certificates crumble and rip, photographs discolor and fade. To combat that, the site also contains the Living Family Archive. For $45, users can scan in their family trees and pictures and store them in a virtual scrapbook, which can be open to public view or protected with a password. The archives are saved on the Ellis Island server, where they, like the newly digitized ships’ manifests, are finally impervious to sunlight, basement floods, and young descendants with crayons.
Bakelite Jewelry
Costume jewelry was born in the nineteenth century, using mass production to give ordinary people baubles that looked almost exactly like real gold or silver, diamonds or pearls. But Bakelite, the plastic jewelry that emerged in the 1920s, was a triumph for the twentieth century; it didn’t pretend to be anything but what it was.
Bakelite brought something new to jewelry: radiant colors in a material that could be easily molded, carved, and assembled. Companies used it to bring variety, spontaneity, and, most of all, humor to jewelry. Bakelite and other similar plastics created a challenge for designers because they could be anything: a bunch of cherries, a royal guardsman, a nurse.
The rich didn’t take long to make their way to the Bakelite couture; Coco Chanel introduced her own line of Bakelite accessories in Paris in 1925. During the Great Depression, though, people not only wanted the bright, doggedly cheerful plastic jewelry, they needed it, to dress up old outfits and also strike a bit of neon defiance at the gray mood of the business world. Anyway, a piece of Bakelite jewelry was affordable if anything was: Prices ranged from 20 cents to three dollars. For about a half-dollar, a woman could wear a pair of shoes with holes in the soles—in the form of a shiny Bakelite pin. Not even the Depression was allowed to be depressing when it was molded in Bakelite.
FOR EVERYDAY WEAR
Pins, bangles, charms, and necklaces: $10 to $100. Plain Bakelite jewelry is plentiful, but reproductions also abound. There are two simple ways to tell a vintage piece from a later copy. First, Bakelite and most of the other early plastics have a noticeable density and heft. Second, Bakelite in particular will give off the smell of formaldehyde when it is rubbed or is placed in warm water.
FOR SERIOUS COLLECTORS
Pins and necklaces go for $1,000 to $12,000. Factors that increase the price include the integration of other materials, such as wood or straw; hand painting; and the wit of depiction. Bangles range from $250 to $15,000. Unique carving, rare colors, and distinctive “Flash Gordon” designs attract serious collectors.
—Julie M. Fenster
FURTHER RESEARCH
Book: The Bakelite Book, by Corinne Davidov and Ginny Redington Dawes (Abbeville Press, 1988). Web site: http://costumejewels.about.com/hobbies/costumejewels/library/blbake/eqa.htm. Auction search terms: Bakelite; plastic jewelry; Catalin (a colorful commercial plastic). Dealer: Terry Rogers & Melody, 1050 Second Avenue, #30, New York, NY 10022 (212-758-3167).
SPORTSMANSHIP AND OTHER ANACHRONISMS
TIPS AND ADVICE FROM A VANISHED ERA ARE BOTH DATED AND TIMELESS
It is a sign of how far America’s community ideal has fallen that The Good Citizen’s Handbook, compiled and edited by Jennifer McKnight-Trontz (Chronicle, $12.95), can amuse its audience by simply reproducing, without alteration, excerpts from citizenship handbooks published between the 1920s and the 1960s. Today, when the very word community signifies a special interest (as in “the disabled community”), suggestions like “sweep the sidewalk in front of your house every day” or “Be loyal to your school. Learn its songs and cheers” will inspire derision from many readers. Yet those not inclined to irony will find genuinely useful advice here, and everyone can have fun guessing when each item was originally published: Authoritarian instructions in all-capital letters, using a typeface with serifs, are a 1920s giveaway, while illustrations that include African-Americans must date from the late 1960s.
Real Fakes
CAN’T HIT LIKE TY COBB? YOU CAN STILL DRESS LIKE HIM.
Historic baseball artifacts are fun to collect but not to use. You would no more hit fungoes with a DiMaggio-signed bat than you would toss a first edition of Moby-Dick into your tote bag for beach reading. A happy medium between authenticity and utility is achieved by Seattle’s Ebbets Field Flannels (800-377-9777; www.ebbets.com), which reproduces antique caps, jackets, and uniforms of such teams as the Toledo Mud Hens and Cuba’s Cienfuegos Elefantes, using old-fashioned materials (flannel, wool broadcloth, leather sweatbands) and historically accurate proportions and stitching methods. Another company that makes usable historic sporting goods is the Cooperstown Bat Company (888-547-2415; www.cooperstownbat.com). The bulk of the company’s business is in imprinted modern bats, but it also sells wooden reproductions of bats that were used at the turn of the century and before, as well as old-style baseballs. Each bat comes with a copy of nineteenth-century baseball rules for those who wish to commune even more fully with the spirits of Hoss Radbourne and Candy Cummings.
ON EXHIBIT
The United States Constitution is an ingenious compromise, a bulwark against tyranny, and a model for other nations to emulate. It’s also a piece of paper, and this role is the focus of Preserving Our Charters at the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C. (202-501-5000; www.nara.gov). The exhibit shows how NARA conservators through the years have protected and defended the Constitution against heat, light, humidity, and other enemies. The exhibit will remain until July 4, 2001, after which the rotunda of the National Archives Building will close for renovations until 2003.
A pair of recently opened exhibits, one temporary and one permanent, explore the manifold connections among history, technology, and design. At New York City’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Aluminum by Design: Jewelry to Jets (through July 15) shows how that durable and lightweight metal has inspired makers of precision instruments and modernist furniture alike (212-849-8400; www.si.edu/ndm). At Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, Time displays roughly a third of the museum’s 1,500 clocks and watches, a collection formerly housed in a museum beneath a motel in Rockford, Illinois (773-684-1441 in the Chicago area, 800-468-6674 elsewhere; www.msichicago.org).
For those untroubled by either embroidery’s kitschy reputation or the elaborate scholarly apparatus that has grown up around it in response, Painted With Thread: American Embroidery as Art, at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts (through September 30), includes samplers, thread pictures, and decorated garments and furniture of wondrous beauty and complexity. These range from a wall hanging brought from England in 1628 and works created by sailors during long sea voyages to contemporary pieces by artists who have adapted a centuries-old medium to present-day sensibilities (978-745-9500; www.pem.org).
MASTER GLASS
A TRAVELING EXHIBITION SHEDS LIGHT ON THE WINDOWS OF FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT
Frank Lloyd Wright once said, “I used to gloat over the beautiful buildings I could build if only it were unnecessary to cut holes in them.” Fortunately, he not only consented to cut holes but came up with a new style of leaded glass to fill them. Wright’s invention is the subject of Light Screens: The Leaded Glass of Frank Lloyd Wright, at the American Craft Museum in New York City (212-956-3535) from May 10 to September 2. Early pieces reflect the muted palette and symmetrical geometric patterns of Wright’s Prairie houses, while the whimsical, boldly colored windows of the 1912 Avery Coonley Playhouse signal a shift to more syncopated compositions. The exhibition will make a five-city tour and is accompanied by an exhibit catalogue (Rizzoli International, $39.95) and a catalogue raisonné, Light Screens: The Complete Leaded Glass Windows of Frank Lloyd Wright (Rizzoli International, $150.00).
Yellowstone’s New Waterfalls
UNTIL RECENTLY, THE PARK HAD 50 RECORDED WATERFALLS. NOW IT HAS ALMOST 300.
It is a measure of Yellowstone’s vastness that a survey has found some 230 waterfalls—each at least 15 feet tall and two dozen more than 100 feet—that had never been mapped during the century and a quarter since its establishment as America’s first national park. The survey was conducted over seven years by Lee Whittlesey, a National Park Service archivist and year-round Yellowstone resident, and a pair of longtime Yellowstone explorers, Paul Rubinstein and Mike Stevens. Their work, which is still in progress, has boosted the number of recorded waterfalls in Yellowstone from 50 to almost 300.
Not everyone is thrilled with the team’s findings—or, more precisely, with their decision to make their findings public. Yellowstone devotees worry that an influx of hikers and campers will ruin the park’s remaining pristine sections. While Rubinstein is sensitive to these concerns, he and the others hope that the benefits of deepening our knowledge of Yellowstone’s beauty and uniqueness will outweigh the attendant risks.
To learn more, see The Guide to Yellowstone Waterfalls and Their Discovery, by Paul Rubinstein, Lee Whittlesey, and Mike Stevens (Westcliffe Publishers, 2000). Information about the waterfalls and other little-seen wonders of Yellowstone can also be found at www.geocities.com/paulrube/hiddenwaterfalls.html.
GLACIAL PROGRESS?
A NATURAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL WONDER MAY SOON SHUT DOWN FOR RENOVATION
Many experienced travelers call Going-to-the-Sun Road, a 52-mile highway that cuts through Montana’s Glacier National Park, the most beautiful road in the world. It was built between 1919 and 1932 at a cost of just over two million dollars, and in 1997 the combination of its panoramic setting and the heroic engineering needed to carve it out of the Continental Divide led to its designation as a National Historic Landmark. Now Going-to-the-Sun Road is starting to show its age. After a six-year renovation proposal provoked grumbling from local businesses, an advisory committee has been formed to search for a compromise. For now, the road continues to carry traffic, though routine maintenance and repair of its guard walls provides some lucky tourists with delays of 15 to 30 minutes in which to pause and take in the scenery.
Many regional Web sites allow users to send free virtual postcards by e-mail; www.postcards.com has a good selection. These tend to be heavy on novelties and present-day scenes, with perhaps a handful of historic shots thrown in. But clevelandpostcards.com has more than 200 antique Cleveland cards, which can be browsed by era, place, or mood (including “mysterious,” “kitschy,” and “foreboding”). Now you can send your online friends an 1890s illustration of Cy Young, a march-of-progress 1920s view of Municipal Airport, an almost Asher Durand-like moonlit Rocky River Bridge from the 1930s, or any number of strikingly bland 1970s shots of the Ohio Turnpike.
Day-Glo buttons, headbands and bandanas, and swirling posters abound at The Psychedelic ’60s, the University of Virginia’s literary look at the decade people used to make fun of before they discovered the 1970s. In addition to the usual themes—rock music, social protest, illicit drugs—the site chronicles the hippie movement’s precursors, such as the nineteenth-century transcendentalists, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and the Black Mountain College poets.
The Jazz Bible
HOT OR COOL, BOP OR SWING, IT’S ALL HERE
If Ken Burns’s epic Jazz series left you feeling you had just skimmed the surface, the next place to turn is the epic Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, a near-definitive paperback just out in its fifth edition, 1,725 pages long (Penguin, $24.00). Its two British authors are strongly opinionated, yet the solidity of their opinions, the musical and historical understanding behind them, and the eloquence with which they’re expressed have commended them to a broad following of jazz players and fans. Louis Armstrong and Earl Mines recording together in the late twenties are “great men speaking almost quietly among themselves” in “something like a reluctant farewell to jazz’s first golden age.” Miles Davis’s Plugged Nickel sessions are “the Rosetta Stone of modern jazz: a monumental document written in five subtly and sometimes starkly different dialects but within which much of the music of the post-bop period has been defined and demarcated.”
EDITORS’ BOOKSHELF
Col. Robert Morgan flew 25 daylight missions over Nazi Germany and France and led the first B-29 raid on Tokyo, yet his claim to fame lies in a fetching piece of artwork and a snappy nickname painted on the nose of his plane. Morgan was the pilot of the Memphis Belle, and publicity from William Wyler’s 1944 documentary of that name about Morgan’s devotion to Margaret Polk, his Tennessee sweetheart, proved invaluable for the war effort and inescapable for Morgan and Polk. In The Man Who Flew the Memphis Belle (Dutton, $25.95), Morgan recalls how he survived —though his engagement to Polk did not—the multiple stresses of war and a public courtship.
E. M. Halliday was a senior editor at this magazine in 1972, when he was instrumental in publishing Fawn M. Brodie’s inquiry into whether Thomas Jefferson had an affair with his slave Sally Hemings. It was far and away the most controversial article American Heritage had ever run, and the depth of the response it-elicited helped set Halliday to a thoughtful and thorough study of Jefferson’s personality that has now yielded a book that in every way lives up to its title. Understanding Thomas Jefferson (HarperCollins, $25.00) is shrewd, engrossing, respectful but clear-eyed, and deeply knowledgeable, and its author, in the words of Stephen E. Ambrose, “writes almost as well as his subject did.”
Al Alvarez, a seasoned poker player, reveals the ins and outs of that most American of card games in Poker: Bets, Bluffs, and Bad Beats (Chronicle Books, $29.95), which meanders through poker’s history, rules, language, variations, and big winners. Alvarez invokes his own experiences and those of true card sharks to show that poker’s importance extends beyond its long history and colorful reputation. Poker, he argues, is “the only game fit for a grown man.” Or as a pair of authors quoted by Alvarez put it more bluntly, “Gambling is a child’s vice practiced largely by adults.”
Virtually every page of Richmond’s Monument Avenue (University of North Carolina Press, $39.95) gives evidence of how the Confederate capital’s statue-lined thoroughfare has reflected changes in Richmond, and in the South as a whole, since its conception in the 1880s. The contrast between the 1890 monument to Robert E. Lee, uniform-clad and sternly erect atop Traveller, and the 1996 Arthur Ashe, in casual sweats and surrounded by children, is one example. Almost as jarring, though, is a World War I photograph in which the grassy lawn around Lee has been replanted with a crop deemed essential to the war effort: tobacco.
The best of John Steele Gordon’s “The Business of America” columns, which have graced the pages of American Heritage for the last 10 years, have now been collected in The Business of America (Walker & Company, $26.00).
RHAPSODIES IN BLACK
A FOUR-CD SET SHOWCASES THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE
Quincy Jones reads “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” by the poet Längsten Hughes. The pianist Fats Waller strides his way through “Smashing Thirds.” Ma Rainey belts out a moaning “Chain Gang Blues.” These and the 82 other tracks in the four-CD boxed set Rhapsodies in Black: Music and Words From the Harlem Renaissance (Rhino Records, $64.98) capture the beauty and excitement of the unprecedented gathering of talented writers and musicians between 1918 and 1935 in that Manhattan neighborhood. An audio companion to the art exhibit and the book of the same name, Rhapsodies in Black features 65 original musical recordings of both old favorites and lesser-known lights, plus 20 new readings of Harlem’s finest Renaissance writers by some of today’s prominent African-American artists, including some surprises: Hip-hop names—Ice-T, Coolio, and Chuck D—give modern voices to earlier poets. A 100-page booklet filled with photos, artwork, essays, and liner notes provides a colorful and handy reference to a time when, as Shawn Amos, the compilation’s producer, states, Harlem was “the epicenter of cool.”
SCREENINGS
PEARL HARBOR ON VIDEO
The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor was such a shock to the American system that it took eight years for a film about it to reach the screen. For those not sated with the carnage of the epic Pearl Harbor, to be released this month, such earlier versions are worth looking into.
From Here to Eternity swept the 1953 Academy Awards and changed American filmmaking with its gritty, non-sentimental look at working-class characters and Army life. Frank Sinatra’s Maggio, Burt Lancaster’s Sergeant Warden, and Montgomery Clift’s Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt became American archetypes, as did Donna Reed (who, like Sinatra, won an Oscar) as the tough/vulnerable bar-girl. Nearly half a century after its release, the viewer still becomes so wrapped up in the characters’ lives that the attack on Pearl Harbor, though you have waited the whole movie for it, is entirely unexpected. To watch the film now without interruption is probably the closest one can come to understanding how Americans felt on December 7, 1941.
Unfortunately, to watch Tora! Tora! Tora! again is only to find how ambivalent Americans were about war in the middle of the Vietnam quagmire. The film was originally conceived as a dual vehicle for the action-film director Richard Fleischer and the Japanese master Akira Kurosawa, but the latter collapsed from exhaustion after three weeks with only minutes of unedited film shot. The Japanese segments were completed by two competent but uninspired fill-ins, and the result, according to The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael, is a film “that thinks it’s being fair to the Japanese by having Japanese actors behave like slit-eyed Americans.” The actual attack is not only spectacular but fresh-looking and keeps close to the historical record. The problem is that the producer, Elmo Williams, eager to please the Japanese in 1970, had all references to Japanese aggression (and documented atrocities) in China cut from the script. And the film’s dialogue is wooden and cliché-ridden, particularly after From Here to Eternity. As one critic phrased it, “With lines like these, who needs bombs?”
There are a number of excellent documentaries on Pearl Harbor, but three stand out. Nightline: Town Meeting- Pearl Harbor Plus 50 was taped in 1991 and has Ted Koppel hosting a live discussion of historians, politicians, businessmen, and veterans from both countries. Pearl Harbor: Two Hours That Changed the World, from ABC News, has sensational footage previously seen only on Japanese television. Most intriguing is December 7th: The Pearl Harbor Story, a “docudrama” by John Ford and starring Walter Huston that was made in 1943 and then was sat on by the military, who thought the film suggested, of all things, that the Army and Navy were unprepared. An edited version was later released; it restored some of Ford’s original footage, but alas, the entire film has never been made available.
