The press has recently shown an unusual interest in historiography. During a long, stern inquiry, it has followed accusations of plagiarism against prominent contemporary historians and often compared fragments of their works with those of their predecessors.
Like most things, the practice is nothing new. A predecessor of ours, Historical Magazine, reported similar goings-on in its January 1860 issue. Here the malefactor was Benjamin Franklin, whose famous aphorisms in Poor Richard’s Almanac helped make the young journalist famous. But as “S.A.G."—probably the Boston physician and historian Samuel Abbott Green— reported, “It is generally supposed that most of the proverbs ... originated with Franklin, although he nowhere lays claim to their originality. I have in my possession a copy of ‘A Collection of English Proverbs,’ by F. Ray [Father John Ray], second edition, Cambridge, 1678, in which many of these maxims are to be found. Below are some from each in parallel columns.”
From Ray’s Proverbs
Early to go to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.
Marry your sons when you will, your daughters when you can.
Full of courtesie, full of craft.
Marry in haste and repent at leisure.
An old physician, a young barber.
Better that the feet slip than the tongue.
God sends meat, and the devil sends cooks.
A mouse in time may bite in two a cable.
God healeth, and the physician hath the thanks.
Forewarn’d, forearm’d.
Hide nothing from thy minister, physician, and lawyer.
A good lawyer and evil neighbour.
Love and lordship like no fellowship.
From Poor Richard’s Almanac
Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.
Marry your son when you will, but your daughter when you can.
Full of courtesie, full of craft.
Grief often treads upon the heels of pleasure;
Marry’d in haste, we oft repent at leisure.
Beware of the young doctor and the old barber.
Better slip with the foot than with the tongue.
Bad commentators spoil the best of books;
So God sends meat (they say) the devil cooks.
By diligence and patience the mouse bit in two the cable.
God heals, and the doctor takes the fee.
Forewarn’d, forearm’d.
Don’t misinform your doctor nor your lawyer.
A good lawyer, a bad neighbor.
Love and lordship hate companions.
THE BUYABLE PAST
Hood Ornaments
For almost half a century now, people have been complaining about the visual homogenization of American automobiles, and it’s true that in the 1920s the various makes of cars were far more distinctive, right down to the hood ornament, that bit of sculpture in metal, plastic, or glass sitting on top of the radiator cap. A flying lady, “The Spirit of Ecstasy,” meant that a Rolls-Royce was coming. A cormorant had a Packard in tow. The Lincoln, a big, heavy car, relied on a greyhound to lead the way. The more humble cars had their mascots too: Pontiac used a chieftain, while Plymouth had a little boat. Hood ornaments weren’t regulated, though, and owners changed them at will, to the consternation of naive car spotters and the delight of collectors today.
For a few dollars a motorist could look out on a chrome-plated pig jumping through a horseshoe, a brass elephant climbing out of an eggshell, or a pewter man thumbing his nose at all who approached. A traffic policeman with his arms spinning wildly in the wind was popular, as were airplanes with moving propellers.
If novelty hood ornaments represented a flowering of folk art, sculpted ornaments were among the only examples of actual fine art associated with the automobile. Until the late 1930s respected artists in Europe created limited-edition hood ornaments, generally with heroic, mythological, or animal themes. The most famous of these artists was René Lalique, whose primary medium was crystal glass.
In the 1960s safety concerns rose up against the hood ornament, propelled by the image of a hapless pedestrian stabbed by a miniature lightning bolt or impaled upon a graceful seabird. Most car companies quietly dispensed with their mascots. Today collectors of antique automobiles tend to be loyal to factory specifications and rarely use anything but the standard mascots. The wider world of hood ornaments stands apart. It has developed its own following, made up in large part of people who wouldn’t know a Dodge from a Duesenberg if it were driving right past them. How could they? They don’t look past the radiator cap.
RECENT PRICES
Sculpted Lalique “Chrysis” woman in frosted crystal, circa 1931: $3,600. Female dancer in nickel-plated bronze, signed by the artist (H. Fugere), circa 1915: $500.
Novelty Charlie Chaplin “Tramp,” nickel-plated, circa 1925: $200. “MotoMeter,” new and still in its box, circa 1920: $160. The MotoMeter took advantage of its placement and displayed the temperature inside the radiator.
Factory Pontiac “Chief Pontiac” head, chrome-plated, circa 1931: $218. Mercury jet airplane, circa 1955: $23.
THE NATIONAL TRUST OFFERS A GUIDE TO HISTORIC HOTELS
In 1989 the National Trust for Historic Preservation launched a program that identified 31 lodgings across the country as Historic Hotels of America. It selected hotels that were at least 50 years old and listed in or eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. Today there are more than 170 members, and the rules are flexible enough to include places “recognized locally as having historic significance.” Four of the newest entries reflect that broad scope: a pair of neighboring Hudson River mansions that were once the official residence of Mali’s United Nations envoy; a 1926 hotel in Lawrence, Kansas; a railroad hotel in Roanoke, Virginia, built in 1882; and a 1924 Cincinnati landmark modeled after a seventeenth-century English manor house. The organization offers a wonderfully readable and beautifully illustrated directory for the bargain price of $3.50 (202-588-6295). And if you call 800678-8946 to reserve a room at one of these treasures, a percentage of the rate will go to the nonprofit trust.
BEATBALL
JACK KEROUAC’S MAKE-BELIEVE BASEBALL GAME HAS BEEN ARCHIVED FOR POSTERITY
The New York Public Library recently acquired a copious archive left by the novelist Jack Kerouac, including, according to an announcement, “two sets of more than one hundred handwritten cards that allowed Kerouac to play a fantasy baseball game of his own invention.” The mass of Kerouaciana, ranging from manuscripts and diaries to his harmonica and railroad lamp to “seventy-two publishing contracts,” will be added to the NYPL’s Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature. There the author will find himself in distinguished company alongside “Kerouac’s literary and spiritual forebears: Emerson, Thoreau, and, above all, Whitman.” While it’s hard to imagine Thoreau playing baseball with marbles, toothpicks, and an eraser no matter how much time he had on his hands, Whitman would no doubt have joined in with gusto.
Imaginary baseball was one of Kerouac’s favorite pastimes from the age of six or seven, and he kept meticulous statistics the whole time. In the early 1960s the sportswriter Stan Isaacs spent an afternoon with Kerouac sipping wine and playing the baseball game. The novelist improvised a running commentary: Pic Jackson, the league’s best-hitting pitcher, Kerouac said, “likes to read the Sunday supplements; his name, ‘Pic,’ is short for Pictorial Review.”
Not long afterward Isaacs mentioned Kerouac to Lou Little, the novelist’s old football coach at Columbia. “Kerouac... oh, yes, a good boy,” Little recalled. “He would have been a fine football player if he hadn’t gotten hurt. Say, what is he doing now?” Unfortunately, what Kerouac was mostly doing by then was drinking, perhaps the only more efficient way to waste time than playing fantasy baseball. He died of an alcohol-induced hemorrhage at the age of 47, on October 21, 1969, just five days after the Mets won the World Series, in the biggest baseball fantasy of them all.
Kerouac’s papers and artifacts will be included in “Victorians, Moderns, and Beats: New in the Berg Collection, 1994-2001,” on display at the NYPL from April 26 through July 27. For details, see nypl.org or call 212-869-8089.
Gettysburg’s New Look
PLANS ARE SHOWN FOR AN IMPROVED VISITOR CENTER
While many Civil War battlefields have been losing out to encroaching development, Gettysburg has lately been turning the tide in that war. The victory scored in 2000, when the privately owned Gettysburg National Tower came down, was followed this January by the unveiling of plans for a much improved and less intrusive new visitor center and museum. The present one occupies Zeigler’s Grove, which was on the Union line on July 2 and 3, 1863, and was part of the site of Pickett’s charge; it will be demolished and that crucial battlefield area restored to its historic appearance. The new center, which will be able to handle several times as many visitors, will sit in a relatively insignificant hollow well behind the Union positions two-thirds of a mile away, on Hunt Avenue between Baltimore Pike and Taneytown Road. It has been designed to look like a farm from the turn of the twentieth century and will contain two theaters, interpretive exhibits, a bookstore, a 250-seat cafeteria, and facilities for properly storing Civil War artifacts now elsewhere. A round barnlike structure will hold the panoramic Cyclorama painting currently in a building next to the visitor center, and winding paths through the woods will lead off to various battlefield sites.
The architect Jacquelin Robertson, whose firm created the design, said on the day of the unveiling that he wanted visitors “to put the highway world behind them. We want them to calm their minds for the profound experience that awaits them.” He explained the design’s pastoral appearance (local stone is used, plus wood and brick and metal roofing) by saying, “You want a structure that looks like it belongs there and not like a big set of boxes Federal Express left there the night before.” Construction will begin in 2004 and end in 2006, assuming that the Gettysburg National Battlefield Museum Foundation, the organization behind it, can raise the $95 million needed.
EDITORS’BOOKSHELF
One sign of spring that’s at least as welcome as a blooming crocus is the annual flowering of baseball books. This year’s crop includes Breaking the Slump: Baseball in the Depression Era, by Charles C. Alexander, perhaps the most distinguished living baseball historian (Columbia University Press, 353 pages, $29.95); Perfect: The Inside Story of Baseball’s Sixteen Perfect Games, by James Buckley, Jr. (Triumph, 256 pages, $24.95), with a foreword by Sen. Jim Bunning of Kentucky, who pitched one of the 16; and The Baseball Almanac: Big Bodacious Book of Baseball, by Dan Schlossberg (Triumph, 384 pages [softcover], $14.95), which is not nearly as cutesy as the title would suggest.
Consider the form of transportation that is most emblematic of each American region’s early days. For the East it’s the sailing ship: hardy, adventurous, and self-reliant. For the South it’s the riverboat: stately, impressive, and leisurely. For the Midwest it’s the railroad: practical-minded and efficient. But for the West it’s the stagecoach, preferably racing across an empty landscape with armed men riding shotgun. In Gold Rush days one company dominated that business, and its protean history from the 1850s to the present—which is in many ways the history of the whole region—is told ably in Stagecoach: Wells Fargo and the American West, by Philip L. Fradkin (Simon & Schuster, 250 pages, $27.50).
How many speeches since the Sermon on the Mount have been important enough to inspire whole books? Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” oration comes to mind, as does Washington’s Farewell Address, though that was never read to an audience. The all-time champion in books-to-words ratio, however, must be Abraham Lincoln. The 273 words of his Gettysburg Address have inspired at least two dozen books, and now his 703-word Second Inaugural Address has gotten its own extended treatment in Lincoln’s Greatest Speech, by Ronald C. White, Jr. (Simon & Schuster, 254 pages, $24.00). White details Lincoln’s lifelong struggle to reconcile his political and social beliefs with the will of God and shows how the speech’s biblical cadences and wording, as well as its message, were shaped by the President’s religious fervor.
SHOOT ALORS!
A PAIR OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PISTOLS WITH A PRESIDENTIAL LINEAGE SELLS FOR A HUGE SUM
The Marquis de Lafayette’s father died when he was only a year old, his mother when he was 13, and his grandfather a few weeks later. Perhaps that is why, when he arrived in the colonies to fight for the Continental Army and George Washington took him under his wing, the 19-year-old French nobleman treated the general in a manner that one biographer called “appreciative and almost embarrassingly affectionate.” Last January a token of that affection sold for $1,986,000 at Christie’s: a pair of inlaid, carved, steel-mounted saddle pistols that Lafayette presented to Washington in 1778. Lafayette had bought the pistols while serving with the Royal Army in France in 1775; he wore them into battle with Washington at Brandywine and Monmouth and bestowed them on the general before returning to France. In 1824 one of Washington’s heirs decided to award them to a recently elected senator in recognition of his heroism in the War of 1812. The senator was Andrew Jackson. Jackson showed them to Lafayette when he returned to America that year and, remembering Lafayette’s joy at revisiting the old weapons, bequeathed them to Lafayette’s son, George Washington Lafayette, upon his death in 1845. The pistols remained in the Lafayette family until a French antique-arms dealer bought them in 1958, and they were auctioned for the first time in Paris in 1983. The auction at Christie’s, the first public sale of the pistols in the United States, set a world auction record for firearms.
ON EXHIBIT
Readers who enjoyed this issue's article on Hawaii but are unable to make it to the Big Island can get a taste of the experience by visiting the Stamford Museum & Nature Center in Stamford, Connecticut, for Ukulele Fever: The Crazy That Swept America (through May 26; www.stamfordmuseum.org; 203-322-1646). The exhibit includes more than a hundred examples of the diminutive instrument, which has been an ancient Hawaiian tradition ever since its introduction there by Portuguese immigrants in 1879, as well as sheet music and other ephemera and film clips and stills. A separate exhibition for children, Hands-On Hawaii, lets budding couturiers “make their own magnetic version of a Hawaiian shirt,” among other things.
SCREENINGS
DAVY CROCKETT RETURNS (ON DVD)
It has been said that of all the screen interpretations of the complex events leading up to the siege and fall of the Alamo, the most influential have been John Wayne’s (in his 1960 film The Alamo) and Walt Disney’s. Of the two, Disney’s is the more widely seen and remembered. After all, Walt Disney inspired a Davy Crockett craze; John Wayne’s clunker brought it to a close.
It is not true that Davy Crockett was forgotten until Disney Studio’s Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter aired on ABC (which coproduced the episodes with Disney) late in 1954. But the old bear hunter turned congressman turned cracker-barrel philosopher had slid into something of a down period. He had been the subject of perhaps two dozen feature films before Disney, but most of them had been made in the silent era. The closest thing to a recent major movie had been Davy Crockett, Indian Scout, with George Montgomery, in 1950.
In his 1954 book, The Forgotten Pioneer: The Life of Davy Crockett, Marion Michael Null touched a nerve by sounding a lament for the supposed loss of innocence represented by the passing of Crockett’s frontier. Almost as if in response to Null, Disney’s first three installments, ending with “Davy Crockett at the Alamo” early in 1955, didn’t merely rejuvenate Crockett but turned him into television’s first major merchandising fad, with coonskin hats
appearing virtually overnight on the heads of millions of American boys. Had Disney known how successful the series was going to be, he would never have killed off his hero after three episodes. That didn’t stop him from bringing back the stars Fess Parker and Buddy Ebsen for two prequels, “Davy Crockett’s Keelboat Race” and “Davy Crockett and the River Pirates.” And that was just the beginning. In 1955 some marketing genius at the studio realized that most Americans were unaware that all five episodes had been shot in beautiful Technicolor. The studio refitted the five into two feature films, Davy Crockett, King of the ‘Wild Frontier and, later, Davy Crockett and the River Pirates. The productions stand as the only hugely successful TV movies ever to become major hits on the big screen.
The new two-disc DVD release Walt Disney Treasures—Davy Crockett, the Complete Television Series tells you why. You can park historical accuracy at the door (though it’s nice to know that some of the nobler sentiments of Fess Parker’s Davy, such as his opposition to President Andrew Jackson’s treatment of the Cherokees, are based on fact). This is the American frontier as an idealistic 11-year-old would have it. Noble white and red men end bloody wars over peace pipes and work together to foil the schemes of evil white traders trying to exploit Indians. The grateful red men even send one of their own—Nick Cravet, a former Burt Lancaster stunt partner—to fight at Davy’s side at the Alamo. The Alamo sequence is a model of restraint and efficiency that often manages to hide the fact that there are more Texans defending the walls than Mexicans climbing them. The chapel and surrounding barricades are gorgeous, and overall, this one part of one Disney episode manages to suggest more of the desperation and heroism of the defenders than the ponderous John Wayne film does at five times the length and 20 times the budget.
All in all, it isn’t wrong to say of Disney’s Davy Crockett, the Complete Television Series what the historian Frank Thompson wrote of the Alamo segment: “There is little that is ‘historical,’ but there is much that is true."
FOLLOWING THE CORPS OF DISCOVERY
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, America’s original practitioners of extreme travel, are the subjects of Lewis & Clark: Great Journey West, produced by National Geographic Television and Film and narrated by Jeff Bridges. Shown on a huge Imax-like screen, the 40-minute documentary, which retraces the two men’s epic 1804-6 journey across the Northwest with the U.S. Army Corps of Discovery, opens on April 20, in Omaha, Nebraska. Stephen E. Ambrose, a frequent American Heritage contributor and the author of Undaunted Courage, about the expedition, acted as a consultant to the production.
THROUGH ANSEL ADAMS’S EYES
Ansel Adams first saw the Yosemite Valley in 1916, when he was 14, and “from that day,” he later wrote, “my life has been colored and modulated by the great earth-gesture of the Sierra.” A 90-minute documentary by the award-winning filmmaker Ric Burns, to air on April 21, traces Adams’s life and photography from his birth in San Francisco through that teenage awakening and his productive decades to his last years, when he was more legend than active artist. The show will afford a rich appreciation of the life and work of a man who altered the way we see the West.
