ITS OUT-OF-THE-WAY SETTING IS GLORIOUS IN ITS FASHION
Many important things tend to get overlooked in New York City, including its historic places. The nation’s first President was inaugurated there, and the general who saved the Union is entombed there, yet at the sites of both these events, you will usually find more people outside buying hot dogs than inside experiencing history. Even more neglected than Federal Hall and Grant’s Tomb is the Hall of Fame for Great Americans, a National Historic Landmark that celebrated its one hundredth birthday this spring.
The Hall of Fame for Great Americans was the country’s first hall of fame; its success inspired Cooperstown and all the rest. In its early years, induction was the ultimate accolade for an American. Visitors flocked to the uptown campus of New York University (now Bronx Community College) to find inspiration in the noble bronze busts of Presidents, generals, scientists, and scholars. But on a warm and lovely weekday afternoon this spring, the only people present in the hall (which is actually an outdoor colonnade) were a pair of workers repairing light fixtures and a few students smoking cigarettes.
Today, although the hall is well maintained and scrupulously swept, it remains the very embodiment of the old-fashioned great-man view of history, and there is no escaping the contrast between the faces of the inductees and those of the working-class Bronx students outside. The era when history was an assemblage of names and busts now seems as remote as the time when the Bronx was a rural enclave, staring at statues was a popular form of entertainment, and people knew who Sidney Lanier was. (Lanier, a now-forgotten Southern poet, can be found in the authors’ section of the hall.)
The Hall of Fame can hardly be called a tourist attraction. It stands in a decidedly middle-class neighborhood, far from the theaters and theme restaurants of Manhattan. Yet a walk through the hall makes the surrounding campus’s workaday atmosphere (once you get past the McKim, Mead, & White buildings) seem peculiarly appropriate. Surely everyone who is enshrined there would be pleased to be find himself or herself in the midst of ordinary citizens going about the business of learning. Few institutions do America greater credit than its egalitarian system of public education, particularly in an immigrant-heavy area like the Bronx. For this reason, the Hall of Fame’s 98 enshrinees might find particularly appropriate the motto that is inscribed on Christopher Wren’s tomb in St. Paul’s Cathedral: Si monumentum requiris circumspice (If you seek a monument, look around you).
THE BUYABLE PAST
Miniature Portraits
The word miniature comes from a Latin word, but not the one for “little"; it comes from the word for “red lead ink.” In the Middle Ages, a miniator was a person who drew fine-grained pictures, often with an overflow of scarlet, in the margins of illuminated manuscripts. After the printing press arrived, miniators survived only by switching to something entirely new: painting “miniature” portraits for nobles. The typical size was an oval about three inches high, and from it came the English usage of the word.
Miniatures reflect a particular style, as much as any genre in painting can, in that razor-sharp clarity was the standard from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth. The heyday of the miniature was from 1650 to 1860. After that, people didn’t want to sit still for four or five days letting a miniaturist see behind their eyes, not when they could stand still for a few moments with a photographer.
FOR EVERYDAY ENJOYMENT
The common opinion is that miniatures painted on ivory are intrinsically superior to others. However, miniatures on vellum, which are usually older, and ones on porcelain or made of enamel on copper are likely to be just as valuable and are often in better condition.
HISTORICAL FIGURES:
Miniatures of popular leaders were turned out in quantity, but they weren’t painted from life and don’t offer the sense of a historical moment. Napoleon miniatures are especially common. Prices go from $100 to $300.
UNKNOWNS: Unsigned miniatures of anonymous sitters can be exquisite, depending on the spirit captured and the fineness of the brushwork. High-quality, unattributed portraits range from $500 to $1,500.
JEWELRY: Brooches, rings, and bracelets inset with a coin-sized miniature were rarely the work of a serious artist. They were sometimes produced as mourning jewelry. The price usually depends as much on the surrounding jewelry as on the artwork, but good examples, set in gold, can be found for less than $400.
FOR COLLECTORS
HISTORICAL FIGURES: Miniatures painted from life of anyone known to the history books start at about $10,000. A miniature of Adm. Horatio Nelson sold for $65,000 last year. A 21/8inch portrait of George Washington brought $1.2 million in January, the highest price per square inch ever paid for a piece of art.
NAME ARTISTS: The work of known artists is of highest interest to most collectors ($5,000-$15,000). Painters famous for their full-sized work, from Holbein to Goya to Copley, were sometimes attracted by the challenge of the miniature. Prices are commensurate with the rest of their work.
EYE MINIATURES: That the eyes are the windows to the soul was ratified in the early nineteenth-century fad for miniatures of only the sitter’s eyes, or eye in the singular ($1,000-$4,000).
—Julie M. Fenster
FURTHER RESEARCH
Book: Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures by Robin Jaffee Frank (Yale University, 2000, $35.00). Galleries: The Gibbes Museum of Art (135 Meeting Street, Charleston, SC 29401) has a collection of 500 miniatures. The Huntington Library (1151 Oxford Road, San Marino, CA 91108) features two cases of superb miniatures. Internet search terms: Try miniature portraits and miniature paintings. To find the out-of-print books vital to the study of the form, use the plural, miniatures.
REMEMBER D-DAY
IN A VIRGINIA TOWN THAT WILL NEVER FORGET, A MEMORIAL MAKES SURE THE REST OF US WON’T EITHER
There were 35 men from Bedford, Viriginia, in company A of the 116th Infantry Regiment, 29th Division—one of the first two assault regiments on Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944. By the end of the day, 19 of them were dead and 2 more had mortal wounds. Bedford, with a 1944 population of 3,200, suffered the highest per capita death rate of any American community during the Normandy invasion, making it an apt site for a monument to teh Allied Forces on D-Day. The National D-Day Memorial, punctuated by the 44-foot, 6-inch Overlord Arch, ws dedicated on June 6. In the surrounding nine acres, a traditional English garden pays homage to the country where the Allies planned the invasion, and a 20-foot sculpture depicts soldiers struggling up Omaha’ seawall. A 2,000-seat amphitheater and a three-story education center are scheduled for completion in 2004. For more information, call 800-351-DDAY or visit www.dday.org.
The 10 Most Endangered Battlefields
The Civil War Preservation Trust, the country’s largest nonprofit battlefield preservation organization, has issued its first annual list of America’s most endangered Civil War sites, most of which are being chipped away by urban and suburban growth. They are presented in alphabetical order by state.
Allatoona Pass, Georgia
Atlanta’s sprawl threatens to engulf the scene of a fight in October 1864 for one of Gen. William T. Sherman’s supply lines.
Mansfield, Louisiana
The Red River Campaign battleground owes its precarious status to adjacent lignite mining and residential development.
Brice’s Cross Roads, Mississippi
An influx of traffic surrounding the location of a humiliating 1864 Union defeat may squeeze it off the map.
Raymond, Mississippi
Grant’s victory here in May 1863 encouraged him to move on to Jackson. Today, that city’s development is encroaching on the wooded valley.
Fort Fisher, North Carolina
The list’s only site not menaced by human hands, this coastal fortification, which guarded Wilmington until its fall in early 1865, is being eroded by the waters of the Atlantic.
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
Even the war’s most famous battlefield is jeopardized; nearby commercial zoning is the culprit.
Stones River, Tennessee
The expansion of a highway interchange and its imminent strip of restaurants and gas stations endangers the pristine location of a tactical defeat for the Union in 1863.
Loudoun Valley Sites (Aldie, Upperville, and Middleburg), Virginia
Developers are eyeing this trio, the setting for a series of skirmishes in June 1863, for roads and subdivisions.
The Wilderness, Virginia
A building boom along the neighboring Orange turnpike imperils the dense woodland where, in 1864, Lee first clashed with Grant.
Harpers Ferry, West Virginia
A 188-home subdivision has already been platted on the site of the arsenal, with industrial projects looming in the future.
SCREENINGS
CUSTER’S LAST STANDS
This June marks the 125th anniversary of the destruction of George Armstrong Custer’s command, an event well remembered cinematicaliy. Custer’s film debut came in 1912 with Custer’s Last fight, directed by Thomas H. Ince and inspired largely by the famous Anheuser-Busch lithograph that graced thousands of beer halls across the nation. Since then, the general has made his last stand at least three dozen times, and that doesn’t even count such thinly disguised retellings as John Ford’s Fort Apache (1948), with Henry Fonda as the martinet Colonel Thursday, who leads his regiment into the fatal valley.
As late as 1941 (in Raoul Walsh’s rousing They Died With Their Boots On), it was still possible to view the general (who was a lieutenant colonel at the time of the Little Bighorn fight) as a hero, though Walsh could show Errol Flynn’s Custer as heroic only by constructing an entirely ludicrous scenario: Neither Custer nor Crazy Horse (Anthony Quinn) wanted war; they were driven to it by unscrupulous bureaucrats like Arthur Kennedy, who lured whites onto Indian land and then sold them repeating rifles to resist. (There is some historical validity in that point of view; what is false is the depiction of Custer as the enemy of Arthur Kennedy.)
Custer has always been a handy symbol for novelists and filmmakers with an agenda, but never more so than in Arthur Penn’s 1970 film Little Big Man, made at the height of the Vietnam War. Thomas Berger’s novel didn’t take sides; you could see how the forces of American aggression that Custer represents had run amuck, but you could also see why, in the context of his time and place, he was seen as heroic by whites and perhaps by not a few Indians as well. Penn’s film doesn’t aim at balance; Custer’s “victory” at the Washita is made to look like a reprise of the My Lai Massacre, and the Little Bighorn is a symbol of America’s eventual fate in Southeast Asia (Richard Mulligan’s Custer has a mental breakdown in the middle of the fight and starts babbling from Custer’s own books on life on the plains; by the way, Mulligan played Custer again, briefly, in the 1984 film Teachers, in which he appears as an escaped mental patient who dresses up as historical characters for a high school history class).
For a balanced account of white and Indian attitudes and motives, watch for a replay of Mike Robe’s two-part 1991 made-for-TV film Son of the Morning Star, which is not so much based on Evan S. Connell’s bestseller as it draws its primary information from it. The film stars Gary Cole as Custer and Rodney A. Grant (of Dances With Wolves) as Crazy Horse and offers the only credible account on film of the events leading up to the battle—and, for that matter, the battle itself.
—Allen Barra
EDITORS’ BOOKSHELF
Nostalgic for the untroubled moral righteousness of the good-versus-evil world of 1960s radicalism? Take yourself back with The Best of Broadside, 1962-1988, a lovingly produced book and five-CD boxed set from Smithsonian Folkways Recordings ($69.99). Broadside was a mimeographed newsletter full of protest songs published by a couple in an apartment on New York City’s Upper West Side from 1962 to 1988; Folkways Records started putting out LPs of the songs in 1963. The selection here includes Pete Seeger singing “Mack the Bomb"; Tom Paxton, “Train for Auschwitz”; the Fugs, “Kill for Peace”; Nina Simone, “Mississippi Goddam”; and Phil Ochs, “We Seek No Wider War”—89 songs in all.
Benjamin Franklin stood out in so many worlds—as statesman, diplomat, scientist, inventor, city father, businessman, author, and philosopher, among many other things—and was so crucial to the making of our nation that a good biography of him will also paint a thorough and unceasingly lively portrait of the breadth of eighteenth-century America. H. W. Brands’s The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (Doubleday, $35.00) does all that, making an eloquent case that Franklin’s life, which reached from Cotton Mather’s Boston to the eve of Washington’s inauguration, “is also the story of the birth of America—an America this man discovered in himself, then helped create in the world at large.”
In Kilroy Was Here: The Best American Humor from World War II, edited by Charles Osgood (Hyperion, $22.95), readers can revisit cartoons and dispatches from Bill Mauldin as well as tales of the Brooklynite Gl Artie Greengroin from Harry Brown, the author of A Walk in the Sun. They can also learn how Gen. Anthony McAuliffe’s defiant reply of “Nuts!” to a German ultimatum was translated by French papers (Vous n’êtes que de vielles noix— “You are nothing but old nuts") and why Army men referred to salt pork as “lamb chop”: “They I am it against the wall to get the salt out of it and then they chop it up into the beans.”
In a 1967 book called Babbitts and Bohemians, Elizabeth Stevenson described 1925 as “The Year Nothing Happened” and then devoted a whole chapter to it. Now, two nearly as nondescript years have just had entire books published about them: 1831, by Louis P. Masur (Hill and Wane. $25.00). and 1927 by Gerald Leinwand (Four Walls Eight Windows, $32.00). Masur delves deeply into a few broad topics: race and slavery, religion and politics, states’ rights, technology. Though he falls short of demonstrating that 1831 was the year when the conflicts that would lead to the Civil War became intractable, his treatment is sure-handed, entertaining, and informative. Leinwand, by contrast, often obscures his point under a blizzard of hard-todigest statistics ("Nationally, estimates for amounts in Christmas Club accounts varied from $250 million to $500 million"), and while he presents many fascinating facts along the way, all too often his account reads like Frederick Lewis Allen’s research notes for his classic book about the 1920s, Only Yesterday (1931).
JOINTS OUT OF TIME
YOU’LL FIND NO FRIED MOZZARELLA STICKS IN THESE ESTABLISHMENTS
Roger E. Kislingbury has spent a good deal of his adult life hanging out in bars—vanished ones. And now you can join him, through the 170-odd photographs in his very handsome book, Saloons, Bars, and Cigar Stores: Historical Interior Photographs (Waldo and VanWinkle Publishers, $65.00). For the author, a saloon is a “rustic wooden-floor barroom, usually in the West or a mining district, with oil lamps, primitive fixtures, and a back bar with a ‘diamond dust mirror,'” while a bar has “a more finished or refined appearance,” often with an ornate backbar gleaming under the owner’s pride, electric lights. There are plenty of both to be found here. These places were meant to offer comfort, and thanks to the big, crisply reproduced photographs in Kislingbury’s book, even 80 years after Prohibition worked its havoc on them, they still do. To order a copy, e-mail the publisher at waldovan@earthlink.net.
JACKIE’S FAVORITE THINGS
A TROMPE-L’OEIL WHITE HOUSE TREASURE TROVE
This is what America’s most glamorous First Lady saw every time she went to the closet in her White House dressing room after she had the place redecorated in 1962. The artist Pierre-Marie Rudelle covered a pair of ordinary white closet doors with two trompe-l’oeil paintings of treasured belongings of hers, including, at left, two flowers her sister, Lee, gave her as a child and, above them, a watercolor she herself did of the White House, and at right, a spread in Life magazine that opened with her getting thrown by her horse. The doors are showing through July 29 in the exhibit “Jacqueline Kennedy: The White House Years,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. From September 12 through February 28, the exhibit will be at the Kennedy Library and Museum in Boston, where the doors will remain on display thereafter. Replicas are for sale at the Metropolitan Museum’s store.
ON EXHIBIT
“The sun never sets on a Disney theme park,” wrote the Disney chairman and CEO Michael Eisner in 1996. That empire, from the first Disneyland, in California, to Tokyo Disney, is the subject of The Architecture of Reassurance: Designing the Disney Theme Parks, which runs until August 5 at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. (202-2722448; www.nbm.org). The exhibition uses 350 objects from the archives of lmagineering—the group Walt Disney assembled in 1952 to plan the parks—including preliminary models, advertisements, and film clips. The museum’s galleries are laid out to follow the scheme of the original park, though thankfully without the four-hour lines or endless broadcasts of “It’s a Small World.”
THE NEWSEUM, IN Arlington, Virginia, is, as its meant-to-be-snappy name may not make clear, a museum whose subject is news and its gathering and dissemination. On exhibit into July is War Stories, which shows how war correspondents have struggled to balance the conflicting requirements of secrecy and disclosure as well as of drama and mundane reality. For information, see www.newseum.org or call 703-284-3544.
In his essay on Esther Bubley in the May issue, Nicholas Lemann wrote that you can “pare and pare” her “large body of work down to its revealed graceful heart, and you still have the grandeur of the whole American enterprise during and after the Second World War.” That grandeur, intimately reflected in her portraits of people going about their lives, will be on display this summer at the DBS PaineWebber Art Gallery in New York City. The exhibition of Bubley’s work opens on July 5 and runs through September 7. For information, call 212-713-2885.
