THEY WERE ALREADY IN USE WHEN U. S. GRANT WAS PRESIDENT
In recent months, photo id cards have acquired new importance as part of our nation’s fight against terrorism. Digital imaging and magnetic strips are modern developments, but the basic technology behind photo IDs can be traced to the French photographer Adolphe Disdéri, who in 1854 found an efficient process for making miniature portraits. Three years later, the Duke of Parma began attaching photographs of himself to his calling cards. The fad soon spread to England and, in late 1859, to the United States.
By the end of 1860, it was a full-fledged craze on both sides of the Atlantic, as collectors snapped up photos of famous people the way baseball cards are collected today. In one of the earliest examples of sports licensing, when Tom Sayers, the English bare-knuckle boxing champion, defeated the American champion, John Camel Heenan, in England in 1860, and photographers clamored for him to pose for pictures, he replied, “It’s no good, gentlemen, I’ve been and sold my mug to Mr. Newbold.” Whether Newbold had signed up Heenan as well is unknown—“not that it matters greatly” (in the words of one historian), “for after the battle, Heenan’s face was so battered that there was little human semblance left in it.”
It was the Civil War, however, that established card photographs as an American institution. Soldiers on both sides had their pictures taken in uniform before they went off to war and took along pictures of their families and sweethearts. The technology was still fresh in mind when organizers of the 1876 Centennial Exposition, in Philadelphia, needed a way to protect their season passes against use by unauthorized parties.
The procedure they adopted was simple: The recipient of a pass would pose for a photographer under a skylight, usually for 15 to 3 o seconds, or as little as 3 to 5 on exceptionally sunny days. While the picture was being taken, the subject’s head would be immobilized in a brace to hold it completely still, a process that one news account compared to “the tortures of the thumb-screw.” After developing and printing, the photo was cut out and glued to a form. “When [a] pass is presented at the narrow turnstile, which admits only one person at a time,” the account continued, “the gate-keeper compares the photograph with the original; but what provision is made for future growth of beard, shaving, or otherwise changing one’s appearance we can not say.”
Photo IDs eventually spread around the world, showing up as far away as Japan by the early twentieth century. Most notoriously, they were used by the Nazis to register Jewish ghetto residents during World War II. As the century came to a close, photo IDs were nearly universal in America, with most people carrying several (though as late as the early 19905, tradition-loving New York State still did not have photos on its driver’s licenses). The ultimate technological advance, however, remains to be seen: a camera for ID cards that does not make everybody look like a turtle.
THE BUYABLE PAST
Lunchboxes
Everyone remembers what lunchbox they carried in grade school, according to my cousin, who had a Barbie box. The choice was one of the only truly crucial decisions left up to a child in the 1950s and 1960s. That’s probably why lunchbox salespeople called their store displays “whine racks.”
The first of the decorated lunchboxes was introduced in 1950. It was a red or blue box with a decal depicting Hopalong Cassidy on the side. It cost $2.39, which would have bought a lot of paper bags in those days, but within a year or two, lunch kits were an industry, with commissioned artwork for both the box and the thermos bottle inside. TV and movie stars, cartoon characters, dolls and toys, rock bands and folk heroes: More than 450 subjects ended up on the boxes between 1950 and 1980. The most ephemeral captured the rise of such fads as UFOs, surfing, and Flower Power.
Lunchboxes honored the fleeting interests of schoolchildren year in and year out. Today, they are sorted and categorized just like coins or stamps. Having been produced for a nation of eight-year-olds, they are collected by people who remember living in that nation.
The most popular box of all time was an upright “dometop” decorated to look like a school bus filled with Disney cartoon characters. Nine million were sold from 1961 to 1973. Manufacturers liked such perennial subjects because movie and television tie-ins were far more risky. The Beatles lunchbox was a hit, of course, and so were “Star Trek” and Star Wars boxes, but kits for such short-lived shows as “It’s About Time” made it to the market only after the programs had been canceled. And carrying a remaindered lunchbox has never been cool. In fact, lunchboxes prove that no one is too young to be cool—or at least to want to buy something in that pursuit.
Today’s busy parents are more inclined to hand over lunch money than to pack a lunch, but the golden age of the lunchbox is long since over anyway. Steel lunchboxes, which featured the most striking illustrations, petered out in 1987. According to parents and school administrators, there were children who recognized that any piece of metal with a handle constituted a weapon. Lunchbox fights became so commonplace in the early 1970s that steel kits were banished from schools in one state after another.
RECENT PRICES
Lunchboxes were specifically designed to be banged up, scratched, and scraped; the sandwich and chips inside were what mattered. As with any object meant to withstand abuse, condition is essential to determining today’s value. A lunchbox in mint condition is often worth 10 times more than a bruised one of the same design.
Hopalong Cassidy (1950): Red background with decal, fair condition, $87.
Beatles (1965): The faces of the four lads, mint, complete with manufacturer’s sticker and pamphlet inside thermos, $1,375.
Lost in Space (1967): With a fanciful illustration even for a lunchbox, good, $299.
Speed Buggy (1974): Mod design, very good, $52.
—Julie M. Fenster
FURTHER RESEARCH
Book Carole Bess White and L. M. White, Collector’s Guide to Lunchboxes (Collector Books, 2000). Web sitewww.geocities.com/art_lunchbox, for background and price guide. eBay search Browse to “Collectibles,” click “Pop Culture” to “Lunchboxes, Thermoses.”
THE DOGS OF WAR
OF MASCOTS AND MEN DURING WORLD WAR II
L. Douglas Keeney was at the National Archives researching his book Air War Europe when he stumbled across a photograph of a soldier on the front lines with a puppy. This led him to look for more like it, and he eventually came up with hundreds (plus a few of mascot birds, monkeys, and cats). Many of them are nearly irresistible, including one of a ninepound boxer named Max who jumped from a plane five times to qualify as a full-fledged paratrooper with the 505th Parachute Infantry. Keeney has gathered all the photographs he found in Buddies: Men, Dogs, and World War II (MBI Publishing, 156 pages, $24.95).
EDITORS’BOOKSHELF
In The Penguin Dictionary of American Folklore, edited by Alan Axelrod and Harry Oster (Penguin, 527 pages, $18.00 [paperback]), in keeping with the protean nature of the field, one can read about everything from genuine folk customs (some African-Americans believe “a dream of paring one’s nails portends disappointment”) to justly forgotten popular fads (the “little moron” jokes of the 1930s). There are also a great many entries on folklore writers and scholars, on musicians and artists whose work includes folk elements, and even on such figures as Babe Ruth and Gen. George S. Patton, who seem to have been included because stories are often told about them.
The story of how Francis Scott Key wrote his exultant poem upon seeing Old Glory over Fort McHenry after a night bombardment in 1814, and how the resultant song attained its solemn and official status, is told in The Flag, the Poet, and the Song: The Story of the Star-Spangled Banner, by Irvin Molotsky (Dutton, 240 pages, $24.95; Plume Books [paperback], $12.99). Molotsky does an able job, his only misstep being a bizarrely long and irrelevant digression on the present-day controversy over flag burning.
George Washington had no sons, and Thomas Jefferson none he would admit to. Presidents Madison, Monroe, and Jackson also lacked male offspring. By default, then, the Adams family benefited most from the atavistic attachment to hereditary succession that democracies around the world have always shown. Like a succession of photocopies, the Adamses’ sharpness faded a bit with every generation: John a brilliant revolutionary, diplomat, and statesman; John Quincy a moderately successful diplomat and statesman; Charles Francis a diplomat and writer; Henry a writer. In America’s First Dynasty (Free Press, 234 pages, $25.00), Richard Brookhiser explores the careers of these four men without neglecting the darker aspects of their family’s character. Whatever the personal struggles of later dynasties like the Kennedys and Bushes, it would be an exaggeration to say of them, as Brookhiser writes of the Adamses, that “alcohol laid waste two-thirds of the second and third generations.”
Vintage Virginia
JEFFERSON WAS A WINEMAKER TOO
If Thomas Jefferson were around to— day, he would feel right at home standing in his vineyard on Monticello’s southern slope. He’d be surrounded by an exact recreation of the vines and split-rail trellises he installed there in 1807. The expansive view across the Blue Ridge Mountains from the birthplace of American wine still evokes the landscapes of Bordeaux and Tuscany that inspired him, and although he never quite succeeded in making great wine at Monticello, he would doubtless be pleased to find that a skilled European vintner is now producing the splendid Monticello Sangiovese there.
Like Filippo Mazzei, Jefferson’s own winemaker, the creator of Monticello Sangiovese, Gabriel Rausse, is Italian. Rausse, who is also Monticello’s assistant director of grounds and gardens, began planting in 1995, using grapes and early winemaking techniques, such as crushing and pressing in wood, that Jefferson would instantly recognize.
Noted for its depth, polish, and rich berry flavors, Monticello Sangiovese is one of America’s most exclusive wines. Rausse’s annual production of about 1,000 bottles is snapped up every January by eager buyers like the Californians who send a courier to Charlottesville by jet for a case (the wine is sold only at Monticello) and the Texas aficionados who drive two days to pick up a few bottles. This year, sales began on January 8.
Bottles are available at Monticello’s two museum shops for $39; call 434-984-9840 for information or e-mail hwilliams@monticello.org. The shops are open seven days a week from nine to five. No deliveries.
—Bill Whitman
DOUBTS ABOUT JEFFERSON AND HEMINGS
THE DEBATE GOES ON
In November 1998, the scientific journal Nature ran a headline that would have seemed more at home in The National Enquirer: JEFFERSON FATHERED SLAVE’S LAST CHILD. The article was based on a study of DNA tests on descendants of Sally Hemings, a slave owned by Thomas Jefferson. It received widespread coverage in newspapers and magazines and on radio and television. Two months later, the geneticist Eugene Foster, who had led the original study, clarified his findings: He had not proved that Thomas Jefferson was the father of Sally’s son Eston Hemings, merely that some undetermined Jefferson male was. The retraction received much less notice.
The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, an organization of the President’s descendants, appointed a committee to examine the matter. The committee found “a high probability that Thomas Jefferson fathered Eston Hemings.” After this conclusion was announced, John Works, a dissident descendant, formed the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society to investigate the Hemings case further. (This controversy was discussed in an article by the Jefferson descendant Lucian K. Truscott IV in our February/March 2001 issue.) The Heritage Society appointed its own committee, and last spring, to virtually no public attention, that committee released its findings: The panel “agrees unanimously that the allegation is by no means proven,” and except for one dissenter, the members’ “individual conclusions range from serious skepticism about the charge to a conviction that it is almost certainly false.”
The panel’s members include such scholars as Lance Banning, author of several erudite and widely praised studies of Jefferson; Robert Farrell, distinguished professor of history emeritus at Indiana University, who has written more than two dozen books about U.S. Presidents (including the definitive studies of Warren Harding’s supposed African-American ancestry and out-of-wedlock child); and Harvey C. Mansfield, the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Government at Harvard University.
Whatever one’s views, it is hard to deny that, in the words of the report, “honorable people can and do disagree” about Jefferson and Hemings. The widespread attention paid to the matter has given Americans a closer understanding of interracial sexual relations under slavery, and that can only be good. At the same time, it’s important for the public to realize that the purported Jefferson-Hemings liaison remains a disputed possibility, not an established fact.
A COMPUTER GAME OFFERS THE CHANCE TO PLAY GOD THROUGHOUT HISTORY
If you’re like most American Heritage readers, you harbor a desire to have witnessed certain events in history—an important discovery, maybe, or a decisive battle. Until time-machine technology comes along, Firaxis Games will do you one better, and for only $39.99. With Civilization III, an update of a popular computer game introduced in 1990, you don’t just relive history, you make your own. A far cry from the frenzied shoot-’em-up bloodbaths that populate most game shelves, Civilization is an involved contest of economic and political strategy that develops over hours or days, like chess as imagined by Adam Smith. You act as the founder of a civilization—half-leader, half-god, similar to an emperor of Rome but with more power. Even Augustus didn’t get to decide what percentage of his planet’s terrain would be covered with water.
You begin the game by choosing a geographical configuration from an array of Pangaea-like worlds and then picking a civilization to emulate (if you choose the United States over Rome, China, the Aztecs, or the other selections, the computer refers to you as “Lincoln” for the duration). Your society dawns in 4000 B.C. with a few squares of terrain and the natural resources that come with them. As you allocate time and funds to research, exploration, culture, and other facets of civilization, your empire grows, its technological abilities evolve from masonry through to rocketry, and you progress from your first efforts to fend off barbarians to planning naval blockades and nuclear attacks on rival nations.
Advisers, who look like characters from the movie Shrek dressed in historical garb, pop up to offer suggestions, perhaps hinting that you should institute a trade embargo or start researching steam power. You can win through old-fashioned military might or widespread cultural dominance, by being elected secretary-general of the United Nations, or by being the first to launch a spaceship bound for Alpha Centauri.
The game offers a satisfying timelapse view of the advance of civilization, but it fast-forwards the drawbacks as well: After a few hours of play, you’ll have to deal with the effects of pollution, deforestation, and nuclear waste. Also, as addictive as playing God can be, power brings a tough responsibility, and game’s end might find you thinking, “If only I had researched metalworking back in 1500 B.C., I wouldn’t have been conquered just now!”
SCREENINGS
TERROR ON FILM
Americans may have been caught unawares by events of the last few months, but not because filmmakers hadn’t done their best to prepare them. Most films that feature terrorists are irresponsible action movies, which have needed a new source of villainy ever since the Nazis got old and the Communists stepped down (Black Sunday, for example). But several excellent, easily available films treat the issues and audience—and the subject—with a modicum of respect.
Here are four of the best:
The Battle of Algiers (1966). The director Gillo Pontecorvo’s influential and much-imitated film is stirring and riveting Marxist propaganda that tells us as much about radical filmmaking in the sixties as about the Algerian struggle against French colonialism. The Algerian rebels are portrayed as Marxists, which owes more to the director’s historical view than to real life, and the French, particularly an intellectual colonel played by Jean Martin, are not just symbols of colonialism but articulate spokesmen for it. The film won’t teach you much about Muslim involvement in the Algerian revolt, but it will explain the radical revolutionary’s mentality as clearly as any movie ever. In one famous exchange, the colonel tells a captured Algerian that his comrades are cowards because they use “bombs in baby carriages.” The prisoner responds, “You have planes, tanks, and machine guns. Give them to us and you can have our baby carriages.”
The Little Drummer Girl (1984). For some reason, possibly because it was directed by George Roy Hill (The Sting, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), who was regarded as a good commercial filmmaker but had no critical following, this absorbing version of John le Carré’s bestseller was not a hit and has been seen by few. Now might be a good time for a revival. Diane Keaton gives a seamless performance as a no longer young, struggling American actress in London who is recruited by an Israeli agent (Klaus Kinski) to pose as the lover of a dead Palestinian agent and infiltrate his organization by seducing his brother. As is usual in le Carré, there are no good guys or bad guys, just patriots and professionals.
Michael Collins (1996). Lest we forget, what would become known as terrorism had its birth in the Western world, and the man who taught the twentieth century the rules of undercover street warfare, who shook the British Empire while doing more than anyone else to create modern Ireland, was Michael Collins. The Irish director Neil Jordan’s epic tries to compress too many ideas and too many characters into a single film, and the love-on-the-run romance between Collins (ferociously played by Liam Neeson) and Julia Roberts never finds the right tone. Still, there are some stirring scenes, particularly the opening, with its depiction of the bloody failure of the 1916 uprising, which drove the Irish rebels underground. No film has better conveyed the idea that one man’s terrorist can be another man’s freedom fighter.
The Siege (1998). Most Hollywood movies overstate the potential destructive capacity of terrorism; Edward Zwick (Glory) actually understates it in this sober, multilayered examination of the effects of a major terrorist act in New York as seen by the perpetrators, the intelligence operatives who trained them (including Annette Bening), the FBI (principally Denzel Washington, but also Tony Shalhoub, as an Arab-American whose son is taken prisoner by mistake), and, especially, the military (Bruce Willis plays a career military officer whose solution to terrorism is martial law). The Siege is less about terrorism than about the dangers of excessive response in a democracy, but it’s no less riveting for that.
