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HISTORY
NOW
Buying Into the Nation’s Attic
A CONTROVERSIAL DONATION RAISES QUESTIONS AT THE SMITHSONIAN
The Smithsonian Institution’s decision to establish a Hall of Fame of American Achievers at its Museum of American History, to be paid for with $38 million from a financial-services entrepreneur, has ignited a furor among the museum’s staff. The donor, Catherine B. Reynolds, has some definite ideas about what shape the permanent exhibit (to be called “The Spirit of America”) should take, and she plans to use her considerable influence to put them into effect. For example, her eclectic list of potential Hall of Famers ranges from Martha Stewart to Michael Jordan.
While the museum will retain final authority, such basic matters as the exhibit’s design and location must be approved by the donor. When it comes to choosing inductees, Reynolds will appoint io of the selection committee’s 15 members (subject to approval by the Smithsonian’s regents), and in keeping with her philosophy of “entrepreneurial” and “hands-on” philanthropy, she intends to include herself among them. If this were the magazine business, we would call the project a special advertising section. Or as a group of staff members asked in a memorandum, “Will the Smithsonian Institution actually allow private funders to rent space in a public museum for the expression of private interests and personal views?”
With such a clear vision of how her money should be spent, the question naturally arises why Reynolds didn’t simply establish her own museum. That’s what Albert Barnes did in 192.2., and to this day curators at the Barnes Collection in Merion, Pennsylvania, continue to observe his directions regarding the paintings that will be displayed and even their exact placement on the walls. The answer, of course, is that Reynolds has given up a measure of control in order to take advantage of the Smithsonian’s reputation, marketing, and expertise.
There is nothing new about such arrangements, at the Smithsonian or elsewhere. After all, the institution was founded by James Smithson, a British chemist who ensured himself of eternal renown with a bequest of a little more than £100,000. Many of the Smithsonian’s member institutions also bear the names and retain the philosophies of their wealthy founders. A more accurate criticism of the Reynolds agreement, for those
who disagree with it, would be not that the Smithsonian sold itself but that it sold itself too cheaply.
Yet public-sector funding, which makes up about 70 percent of the Smithsonian’s budget, creates its own conflicts, as was seen with the Enola Gay controversy of the mid-1990s. Like most workers, the Smithsonian’s professional staff see themselves as the best judges of how their jobs should be done, while the people who control their funding, whether rich or elected, believe history is too important to be left to historians.
The genius of the Smithsonian Institution has always been the way it has blended the contributions and concerns of its curators, private donors, and the general public. If Ms. Reynolds’s Hall of Fame inspires the Smithsonian to sell vanity museums under its imprimatur like McDonald’s franchises, the cause of history will surely be hurt. But if, as seems likely, it leads to an honest assessment of how historians, donors, the government, and the public can work together more effectively, the episode will end up benefiting everyone.
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RAILROAD CHINA
THE BUYABLE PAST
The first railroad passengers boarded an American train in 1830. They’d better not have been hungry. Dinner wasn’t served until 1868, when George Pullman designed a sumptuous dining car for the Chicago & Alton.
Pullman’s “Delmonico” and the dining cars that copied it on hundreds of lines all over the country offered meals cooked to order and table settings equivalent to those in a hotel restaurant. Gentle chimes called passengers to dine, and for a hundred years after the first tones sounded, the best dining cars were on a par with any restaurant in the country. Railroad chefs had a special advantage, gathering local ingredients in farm towns iu fishing ports as they went along. Delicious food was essential to drawing customers, and the railroads willingly subsidized the feast, typically losing 50 cents on every dollar spent in their dining cars.
Amtrak still offers dining-car service on some of its routes, but an era is nonetheless over. You can no longer hear the chimes and order a “Great Big” baked potato on a Great Northern train. You can’t look forward to a steaming casserole of chicken pie on the Santa Fe Chief or linger over one of the Twentieth Century Limited’s renowned custard desserts. For those who consider the dining car of the past the happiest convergence of human beings and train travel, only remnants are left. Custom china is the most evocative.
Most collections are built around favorite railroad lines or specific china patterns. Sadly, though,
the value is so high that no one serves meals on
railroad china anymore. The era really is over.
TYPES OF
COLLECTIBLE CHINA
Logo The name of the railroad was incorporated in about half the designs used in dining cars. Small railroads nearly always used logos; examples from obscure lines generally cost less than $100. Recent collector prices: Twentieth Century Limited plate, $800; Atlantic Coast Line plate, $90. Pattern Some designs have no connection to railroading; the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe’s “Mimbreno” was based on South-western Indian art. But collectible pattern-china always is stamped with both the name of the maker and the railroad on the bottom. Well-known patterns are as expensive as logo china, although more generic pieces can go for less than $50. Recent prices: Mimbreno cup and saucer, $200; Southern Pacific “Prairie Mountain Wild flowers” plate (worn), $10.
—Julie M. Fenster
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FURTHER RESEARCH
Book Douglas Mclntyre, The Official Guide to Railroad Dining Car China (1990: Golden Spike Enterprises, P.O. Box 442, Williamsville, NY 14221). Web site http://www.klnl.org/ for the Key, Lock & Lantern collectors’ club. Club Railroadiana Collectors Association, 550 Veronica Place, Escondido, CA 92027. Dealer Track 16, 2525 Michigan Avenue, Santa Monica, CA 90404; http://www.track16vintage.com. |
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Fall vs. Autumn
A PAIR OF SYNONYMS ENCAPSULATE CENTURIES OF HISTORY
You know what the word Autumn means, but do you ever use it? Not very often, if you’re like most Americans. Saying autumn, like spelling color as colour or talking with an English accent, conveys in this country the tone of mild pretentiousness (or, in advertisements, elegance) that we associate with
things British—a notion that would surprise a resident of the seamier portions of Birmingham or Bradford. Autumn is all but universal in Britain, as fall is in the United States. How did this happen?
The answer goes back to the seventeenth century, when the first great wave of emigrants crossed the Atlantic. At that time, both autumn and fall (often as part of the phrase fall of the leaf) were common in England. After the Revolution, British
usage began shifting to the more Latinate term, influenced perhaps by Continental usage (French
automne, Spanish otono, Italian autunno) or upper-class striving for refinement. Americans, much less affected by such influences,
stuck with their Yankee ancestors’ simple and direct term. John Keats, an Englishman, began his “To
Autumn” with the lines, “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness / Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun.” By contrast, James Whitcomb Riley’s peerless American poem about the season climaxes with “Oh, it sets my heart a-clickin’ like the tickin’ of a clock / When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock.” A nation that could produce those lines was bound to opt for the short and bluntly descriptive term over the more cultivated Old World variant. |
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O.K. ANNIVERSARY
SCREENING
The highly fictionalized bestseller Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshall, by Stuart Lake, a former press secretary to Theodore Roosevelt, begun with Wyatt’s cooperation and published in 1931, changed the Hollywood Western forever by centering it on a legendary peace officer, an organized outlaw element, a classic showdown (the so-called gunfight at the O.K. Corral, which happened 12.0 years ago this October z6), and a cycle of subsequent revenge that called the lawman’s ethics into question. From the first Earp film, Law and Order in 1932 with Walter Huston, Earp’s image has dominated the genre, inspiring nearly 40 movies and several TV series. Here are some examples, all available on either video or DVD, that run the spectrum of views on Wyatt Earp’s life and legend.
My Darling Clementine (1946) John Ford knew Earp, who had done advisory work on Westerns during the twenties. And Ford claimed that his version of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral came directly from Wyatt. However, Ford, like the newspapermen in his later film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, always printed the legend. This film is sentimental hokum, but it’s lovely.
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957) Like John Ford, the director John Sturges found it easier to tell Earp’s story as one of revenge. So instead of portraying the myriad personal quarrels and political complexities that resulted in the showdown with rancher-rustlers near (not in) the O.K. Corral, both directors sent the
Earps to the fight to avenge a murdered brother when in fact the brother was murdered in reprisal for the gunfight. Sturges’s gunfight outblasts Ford’s; Burt Lancaster is too straight-arrow as Earp, al- lowing Kirk Douglas’s sassy Doc Holliday to walk off with the film.
Doc (1971) Written and directed by Frank Perry, this bends the Earp/Tombstone saga into a metaphor for Vietnam. Wyatt, played bv Harris
Yulin, is the predatory soul of America, an obvious stand-in for LBJ, and the Clantons and other cattle rustlers are Vietnam. Stacey Keach’s Doc Holliday is the moral force that keeps Earp’s evil from dominating. It is perhaps the most ludicrously entertaining of all Earp films.
Tombstone (1993) Hack direction by George (Rambo) Cosmatos is saved by Kevin (Glory) Jarre’s brilliant though cut-up screenplay and by Kurt Russell as Wyatt and VaI Kilmer as a flamboyant and enigmatic Doc Holliday. This was the first Earp film to make the cowboy-rustlers seem interesting; Powers Boothe’s Curly Bill and Michael Biehn’s Johnny Ringo look as if they stepped right out of a Remington painting.
Wyatt Earp (1994) Gets a B-plus for historical accuracy and has some fine set pieces illuminating Earp’s life, particularly scenes in buffalo camps and a bare-knuckles boxing match. But the director Lawrence Kasdan’s three-hour-plus epic
has no rhythm, and Kevin Costner’s Wyatt Earp has no humor (thank goodness Dennis Quaid’s Doc Holliday does). The Untouchables (1987) The director Brian De Palma and the screenwriter David Mamet must have signed on to do this film and then realized the real-life Elliot Ness had virtually nothing to do with Al Capone’s downfall, so they reworked the story as a Wyatt Earp movie. Tombstone becomes Chicago during Prohibition; stolen Mexican cattle become bootleg Canadian booze; Mexican Federales become Canadian Mounties; Ike Clanton becomes Al Capone (played by Robert De Niro); Virgil Earp, Wyatt’s older brother, becomes the wise Irish cop (Scan Connery); fast-gun sidekick Doc Holliday becomes slick-shooting Andy Garcia; the gunfight at the O.K. Corral becomes the shootout at the train station; and Kevin Costner makes a better Wyatt Earp than he did in his own Wyatt Earp. —Allen Barra |
NEW ON THE CIVIL WAR
EDITORS’ BOOKSHELF
The handful of Civil War enthusiasts among our readers will have much to interest them this fall. David J. Eicher’s The Longest Night: A Military History of the Civil War (Simon & Schuster, $40.00) is full of stately sentences that begin with phrases like “At dawn on the morning of September 17, McClellan had some 75,316 effectives arrayed as follows.—” On Campaign With the Army of the Potomac: The Civil War Journal of Theodore Ayrault
Dodge (Cooper Square Press, $29.95) stands out from other soldiers’ diaries because the author, who had interrupted his European education to enlist, went on to become one of America’s greatest military historians. Images From the Storm (Free Press, $50.00) is the best book for browsers: It contains 300 detailed color drawings of Civil War scenes, most made from life, by Pvt. Robert Knox Sneden, a Union cartographer. |
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