“Lightness and Force”

Richard Brookhiser has written biographies of Washington, Hamilton, and the Adamses, but none of them, he says, were as good company as Gouverneur Morris, the subject of his latest book, Gentleman Revolutionary. “Morris, alone among the founding fathers, thought that his private life was as important as his public life. … When public life was not going well, he could go home—not to bide his time before his next opportunity, or to enjoy the retirement on a pedestal of a Cincinnatus, but because he enjoyed farming, reading, eating, fishing, making money, and making love as much as founding a state.” But the infant nation was fortunate that Morris could bring himself to leave the comforts of the bed and the dinner table. Here is Brookhiser speaking of what made a fellow writer so good:

“When he was still a young one, age thirty-five, Mr. Morris drafted the Constitution of the United States. The proceedings of the Constitutional Convention were secret, to allow the delegates maximum freedom to speak their minds, so Mr. Morris’s role on the Committee of Style was not generally known. But in later years he admitted to a correspondent that ‘that instrument was written by the fingers which write this letter.’ Years after Morris’s death, an elderly James Madison told an inquiring historian that ‘the finish given to the style and arrangement of the Constitution fairly belongs to the pen of Mr. Morris.’ James Madison, the careful and learned theorist, is commonly called the Father of the Constitution, because he kept the most complete set of notes of the debates and made cogent arguments for ratification after the debates were done (he wrote one third of the Federalist Papers). But Gouverneur Morris, who put the document into its final form and who wrote the Preamble from scratch, also deserves a share of the paternity. The founders were voluminous writers, and much of their writing is very good, but few of them had the combination of lightness and force that generates a great style. Jefferson had it; Franklin had it; Thomas Paine, the passionate and ungainly English immigrant, had it. The only other one of their number who hit that note consistently was Morris. ‘A better choice’ for a draftsman ‘could not have been made,’ Madison concluded.”

Gentleman Revolutionary: Gouverneur Morris, The Rake Who Wrote the Constitution has just been published by the Free Press.

Screening

The Story of the San Patricios— released under the somewhat baffling title One Man’s Hero—is a compendium of everything that’s wrong with the movie business. The original script, based on the history of the U.S. Army’s Irish brigade in the Mexican War of 1846–48—the St. Patricks, or San Patricios as they came to be called by the Mexicans—sat around for years waiting for John Wayne to make up his mind about whether he would play the unit’s star-crossed leader, John Riley. Apparently he was finally dissuaded by his friends, who convinced him that playing a man convicted of disloyalty to the United States wouldn’t fit his screen image.

The film was finally made by Orion Pictures and scheduled for release in the fall of 1998. Then Orion was bought by MGM, which shelved it for more than a year. On August 2, 1999, it premiered at the West Belfast Film Festival and was received enthusiastically. The company had no plans for it until a letter-writing campaign rallied enough support to persuade MGM to release it in the United States. Unfortunately, the studio’s idea of release was to dump it on the market (under its new title) without support or even an American premiere. Fortunately, it has recently been issued on DVD.

The San Patricios is the only major motion picture ever made about the U.S. war with Mexico. The film doesn’t hedge. This war was nothing less than naked aggression fueled by greed and an unwavering sense of racial superiority. For the Mexicans’ part, the government and ruling class are exposed as corrupt, arrogant, and hypocritical. Caught in the middle are struggling Mexican peasants and the mostly Irish-Americans of the St. Patrick’s Brigade, who were subjected to shameful anti-Catholic bigotry by Army officers.

The film has two heroes, both fighting for lost causes. Joaquim de Almeida plays a Mexican rebel leader whose political stance anticipates the coming Juárez revolution, and Tom Berenger is Riley, one of the truly tragic figures in American history. The Irish actor Patrick Bergin is properly imperious as Gen. Winfield Scott, while James Gammon steals his portion of the film, playing Gen. Zachary Taylor as a shrewd crackerbarrel philosopher. The director, Lance Hool, is hardly a distinguished name among filmmakers, but having grown up in Mexico City, he brings an empathy and insight to the complexity of Mexican society.

The San Patricios’ courage was undeniable; they knew they were allying themselves with what would almost certainly be the losing side. Many were captured when Mexico surrendered and were hanged near Chapultepec in Mexico City, saluting the U.S. flag before they died. Riley’s fate, though the subject of a lively historical debate, is still unknown.

The San Patricios has some serious flaws. It is poorly paced and sometimes incoherently staged; it’s difficult at times to tell which crowd is headed in which direction or why. But it’s unfair to judge historical films by purely aesthetic standards; The San Patricios has a devastating dramatic punch, derived largely from its devotion to historical accuracy. For those interested in finding out more about Riley and his men, an excellent documentary, The San Patricios, by Mark R. Day, is available on video. (You can e-mail your request to mday2@cts.com or phone 760-630-7398.)

—Allen Barra

Sleepaway

For thousands upon thousands of American children, summer has long begun with the sewing on of nametags and the boarding of the train—now superseded by the bus—to camp. Deep in the mountains that once were home to some 270 summer camps, and still support 70, the magnificent Adirondack Museum has just opened a show called A Paradise for Boys and Girls: Children’s Camps in the Adirondacks. Among the displays are that mess-hall staple, the mural. The group effort shown below, whose flat, sharply delineated swimmers anticipate the work of the painter Alex Katz, brightened up Camp Severance for Girls on Paradox Lake from 1949 until the camp closed in 1972. “A Paradise for Boys and Girls” is on view until October 13 and will reopen next year; a Web-based exhibit on children’s camps accompanies it: www.adkmuseum.org.

Over in the White Mountains, meanwhile, the advertising executive Laurie S. Kahn so loved Camp Kear-Sarge—“I will always be a sleepaway camper at heart”—that she has written a book charting the course of all-girl camps since the first one opened in Maine in 1902. Sleepaway: The Girls of Summer and the Camps They Loved (Workman Press, 265 pages, $15.95) offers fellow loyalists scores of photographs along with instruction in the arts of braiding lanyards, folding knife-edge hospital corners, and making that dire potion universally known as bug juice. At bottom, a girl from Camp Aloha, near Buffalo, New York, takes a respite from the buddy system, sing-alongs, and poison oak.

The Quilts of Gee’s Bend

Gee’s Bend, Alabama, was so isolated for so long that its only road out of town wasn’t paved until 1967. But the women of the little African-American hamlet have a tradition of creating such extraordinary quilts from whatever materials were available that a show of their work, from the 1930s to 1970s, was recently a runaway hit at the Museum of Fine Arts, in Houston, and then at the Whitney Museum, in New York City. Gee’s Bend: The Women and Their Quilts (Tinwood Books, 432 pages, $75) is a big, heavy, sumptuous presentation of more than 300 of the dazzling abstractions, with profiles of the women who created them.