Wyeth’s Inspiration

Nearly as impressive as the meticulous detail work in Andrew Wyeth’s painting is the balancing act he maintains between opposing schools of art: modern without being modernist, classical without being stuffy, and realistic without being either ironic or pretty. It must be admitted, however, that he shows a marked fondness for grays and beiges. For anyone who has spent time among Wyeth’s austere canvases, then, the farm of his Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, neighbors Karl and Anna Kuerner—where Wyeth has made more than 1,000 paintings, starting in 1932—will be a revelation in its very ordinariness: green grass, bright sunshine, and wide-open spaces.

The Kuerners, immigrants from Germany, rented the farm in 1926 and bought it in 1940. It stayed in the family until 1999, two years after Anna’s death, when it was sold to the Brandy wine Conservancy, the nonprofit group that operates the Brandy wine River Museum. Last year the farm was opened to the public. Now visitors can explore the sites of some of Wyeth’s most memorable works and see how the painter altered details to fit his artistic vision. The farm can be visited only on tours from the museum, which are conducted from late April through mid-November (the farm is closed in winter, when it is at its most Wyethesque). Tours of the nearby N. C. Wyeth House and Stu dio, where Andrew grew up and his father created timeless illustrations, are also available.

Even without the Kuerner farm, the Brandywine River Museum is worth a visit. Its collection of Wyeth family art—from N.C. to Andrew to Andrew’s son Jamie, along with assorted artistic spouses and cousins—is unsurpassed. Elsewhere in the museum are displays of American illustration, landscapes, genre paintings, and still lifes, plus seasonal exhibits such as children’s-book art and a strikingly extensive and detailed model-train layout at Christmas. Not the least of the museum’s charms is the inspiring view it affords of the river whose name it bears. See it in full torrent after a heavy rain, or meandering lazily through late-autumn trees, and you’ll want to get some brushes and start painting yourself. For information, go to www.brandywinemuseum.org or call 610-388-2700.

To Learn More

The Internet provides one-stop shopping for those interested in this particular exposition. Intriguing facts and figures pertaining to it are available in an Earth Station Nine entry (www.earthstation9.com/index.html?1939_new), and eBay offers an unending parade of souvenirs for sale. The World’s Fair Collectors Society (www.members.aol.com/bbqprod/wfcs.html) is open to those interested in any such expo and is likely to include people eager to show, swap, or sell items from the 1939 event.

The War in Iraq is Just Like Vietnam

History teaches, but only those who are open to being taught. For others, history supplies a convenient set of templates into which everything that happens afterward can be fitted. The current Iraq war is a case in point. Supporters say it’s World War II all over again, while opponents say it’s Vietnam. In fact, it has some features in common with both. But why stop there?

THE WAR IN IRAQ IS LIKE:

the Revolutionary War because…

American battle deaths have totaled in the thousands (around 4,400 in the Revolution, though diseases took many more).

intervention by a third party (France, of all places) helped free a nation from tyranny.

one of the main reasons for the war disappeared soon after it started (Great Britain’s Orders in Council, which prevented American ships from trading with Britain’s enemies, were rescinded a few days after Congress declared war. Sir George Prevost, the governor-general of Canada, and Gen. Henry Dearborn signed an armistice in August 1812, expecting the conflict to be settled by diplomacy, but communications were slow and military events elsewhere had already been set in motion).

guerrilla acts (attacks by British-backed Indians) took the lives of many troops and civilians.

many people in the land being liberated bitterly resented it.

there was no declaration of war by Congress.

optimists expected it to be over quickly (“On to Richmond” was the slogan in the summer of 1861, and the first group of Union volunteers was enlisted for just 90 days).

vigilantes nullified some of the war’s gains.

the deposed leader fled and was captured in humiliating circumstances (when the Army finally tracked Jefferson Davis down, he was wearing his wife’s raglan and shawl, which he had hastily donned when fleeing his tent).

more than a century later people are still debating whether the war was justified.

the opponent’s regular troops put up little resistance.

some equipment issued to troops was inadequate (in Cuba, instead of the new smokeless powder, most volunteer regiments—though not Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders—used old-fashioned black powder, which was less powerful, fouled guns much faster, and revealed the shooter’s position).

for America, the trickiest part came after the war ended (eradicating the causes of the world war proved to be impossible, and tensions simmered for two decades before erupting again).

it took a sneak attack to get the United States involved in a war that was already consuming the rest of the world, after which we had to deal with the attackers’ allies as well.

America’s opponents were bent on genocide and world domination.

Korea has required the presence of American troops for decades to come, and the same could be true in Iraq.

the terrain made it easy for foreign-backed outside forces to infiltrate.

the opposition’s strategy was to outlast the Americans instead of defeating them.

Numerous Hollywood celebrities protested the war.

—F.S.

Screenings

When DVD’s were introduced, a number of critics hailed them as an opportunity for filmgoers to stop and reflect on films that hadn’t been given a fair shot the first time around. It hasn’t turned out that way. The constant flood of new product on the market has instead practically guaranteed that a film ignored on release has almost no chance of emerging into prominence on re release.

Such is the case with John Lee Hancock’s The Alamo (2004), which is remembered now, if at all, as a film that cost in excess of $130 million to produce and generated little more than $30 million in ticket sales. The film sank out of sight before anyone could analyze why it had failed, and since it was not a hit, no one wanted to defend it.

Watching The Alamo on DVD, it’s quite easy to see what went wrong. It has no male action stars, no parts for hot young actresses, and a story line that demands that the audience pay some attention. One has only to look at the five biggest-grossing films in the week when The Alamo was released to see what audiences wanted: Kill Bill: Vol. 2, Man on Fire, Hellboy, The Punisher, and Walking Tall.

When you haven’t got anything to lure the kids, you need strong critical support. The Alamo was doomed on this count before a scene was filmed. When the project was announced, more than a year and a half before its release, Disney’s CEO, Michael Eisner, proclaimed that this telling of the near-mythical siege and fall of the Texas fort would “capture the post-September 11 surge in patriotism.” You don’t have to be of a liberal bent—although many film critics are—to find that statement a little crass. Eisner’s comment predisposed many in the press to treat this version as a mere update of John Wayne’s 1960 version of the Alamo story, which was widely seen as a Cold War metaphor.

Then there was the dreaded “troubled production history” syndrome. Ron Howard was supposed to direct but bolted when Disney would not approve the R-rated version he wanted to film (presumably this would have meant more explicit violence). Howard ended up producing, with Hancock, who had only one previous feature, The Rookie, directing.

All of this helps explain why The Alamo couldn’t find an audience, but the solitary viewer probably won’t care about any of that and likely will be surprised to find how good the film actually is. Several critics remarked on the script’s “confusion,” but in fact the screenplay is a model of clarity. It presents us with the characters’ personal and political motivations without telling us how to feel about them. The film details the mingled destinies of Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, and the Alamo’s commander, William B. Travis. And for the first time in any Alamo movie, it makes the Mexican general Antonio López de Santa Anna a major character. Played by the flamboyant Mexican actor Emilio Echevarría, Santa Anna is a fascinating monster, an egomaniacal tyrant but still a patriot who comprehends the historic sweep of what is happening in Texas as the tide of Anglo-Americans threatens to swamp the native Mexicans. (“Our grandchildren will end up eating the crumbs thrown to them by these bastards,” he tells his officers.)

His opposite number, the Tejano Juan Seguin, played by Jordi Mollà in a sad, sweet, shaded performance, loves his country but loathes Santa Anna and chooses, reluctantly, to fight with the Anglos. Jim Bowie, the slave-trading pirate fighting to defend his home, is played with bravura by Jason Patric; Travis, the soldier of fortune who came to Texas hoping to turn his life around, is portrayed by Patrick Wilson with a sense of calm desperation. (When Patric tells him the night before the final assault that if he lives five more years, he “just might become a great man,” Wilson replies, “I fear that I will have to settle for what I am now.”)

The real revelation of The Alamo, though, is Billy Bob Thornton’s Davy Crockett, a man bewildered by his own fame who, before the end, manages to grow into the hero everyone sees him as. The battle itself is a breathtaking piece of action filmmaking, shot at night—true to history —and, unlike previous Alamo movies, switching back and forth to convey the terror on both sides of the walls.

This Alamo isn’t merely the most historically accurate film account of the story to date, it is the only reasonably historically accurate one. For all their talk of historical accuracy though, Alamo buffs would, if you press them, prefer the sugarcoated myths of Walt Disney and John Wayne. I understand the appeal of those myths; I cherished them in my youth and still do. But it’s sad that we can’t forge new myths out of historical realities, that we can’t see our old heroes as the flawed men they were and still accept them as heroes.

—Allen Barra

I Hear America Singing on the Internet

One summer day in 1939 a young man stopped another man under an elevated train in New York City and asked him, “Do rich people and poor people have anything in common?” The man replied, “God made all this, and he made it for everybody. And he made it equal. This breeze and these green leaves out here is for everybody.…This breeze comes from God and mancain’t do nothing about it.” The younger man would have many more conversations like that one, and with all the voices ringing in his head, he eventually sat down and wrote a sprawling love song to America’s complexity and paradox that he called Invisible Man.

Ralph Ellison was one of hundreds of young, government-funded writers, editors, researchers, and photographers who fanned out across the nation during the 1930s. TheFederal Writers’ Project (FWP) produced 275 books, 700 pamphlets, and 340“issuances” (articles, leaflets, and radio scripts). The manuscripts, containing thousands of raw interviews, photographs, and notes, were put in storage at the Library of Congress after the project ended in 1943. And the writers—among them Studs Terkel, Zora Neale Hurston, and Saul Bellow—moved on.

In the mid-1970s the library began reorganizing the FWP materials and transferring them back to the library, where nearly 300,000 items are now available to the public. But you don’t have to travel to Washington to use them. The National Digital Library has culled 2,900 interviews for a Web site called American Life Histories (www.memory.loc.gov/ammem/wpaintro/wpahome.html). With pictures by photographers like Gordon Parks and Marion Post Wolcott, you can read the interviews and listen to the subjects’ voices.

So, if you want to know why Clyde (“Kingfish”) Smith started singing while he worked, visit “Hard Times in the City: Testifying.” To learn how Mr. Garavelli’s lungs survived stone cutting, see “All in a Day’s Work: Industrial Lore.” Soon you will see why that young man under the elevated train fell in love with language—the American language.

Freedom’s Lifeline

“Josiah Henson’s earliest memory was of the day that his father came home with his ear cut off.” So begins the first chapter of Fergus M. Bordewich’s outstanding history Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America (HarperCollins, 528 pages, $27.95). Henson, born a Maryland slave in the eighteenth century and later an abolitionist, writer, preacher, and founder of a Canadian colony for former slaves, is believed to have been the model for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s hero in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. His is just one of many riveting biographies in Bound for Canaan, which illuminates the lives of the many giants, forgotten and famous, black and white, enslaved and free, of the Underground Railroad, that loose network of safe houses and surreptitious routes northward, which began about 1770 and lasted until 1865.

Bordewich’s impressive success with Bound for Canaan rests on formidable research, artful organization of sprawling material, and tight, clear, brawny storytelling. He vividly recounts some of the better-known tales of escape. Henry (“Box”) Brown mailed himself to freedom in a crate, and Bordewich takes the reader into the box with Brown, tucked in a fetal position and turned upside down for so long that his eyes bulged out of their sockets. In another well-known episode, a light-skinned Georgia woman named Ellen Craft passed herself off as an invalid white man and traveled north in style on an actual railroad, attended by a “manservant”—her darker-skinned husband, William. One tale about a runaway woman who, seconds from capture, tries to murder her children rather than see them return to slavery, gave this modern and moderately cynical reader nightmares.

Bound for Canaan is an epic that takes the reader from the very beginning of the Underground Railroad to the end of the line. Bordewich describes how former slaves coped with newfound liberty and how abolitionists handled retirement or found new causes. It seems no exaggeration to suggest that the hundred thousand men, women, and children who escaped on the Underground Railroad, and the efforts of those who helped deliver them to freedom, form one of the marvels in the history of human survival.

—Jillian Sim