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History Now
“They Were Always in My Attic”
The Smithsonian gets a remarkable new archive
By Thomas Mallon
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| Homosexuals picket the White House, October 1965; a 1963 button sets forth the movement's goal. |
| (KAMENY PAPERS PROJECT) |
Do you want Constitution Avenue or Independence?”asks 81-year-old Frank Kameny, from the passenger seat, as he guides the much younger man who’s driving to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History from Kameny’s modest brick house in northwest Washington. Kameny was already living in the house in 1957 when he got fired from his job as an astronomer with the Army Map Service and began an 18-year campaign, finally successful, to end the U. S. Civil Service Commission’s ban on the employment of homosexuals.
A few weeks ago Kameny’s papers were transferred to the Library of Congress, but today is about artifacts, not documents. The Smithsonian will be acquiring a dozen protest signs that Kameny and others carried outside the White House on several occasions in 1965. “We decided to give no public notice,” he recalls, when they first showed up on April 17 of that year. “We simply appeared at the southwest corner of Lafayette Park, and to our pleasant surprise a policeman ushered us across the street to a spot to picket. A little over a month later we did it again.” Everyone followed the shirt-and-tie, skirts-for-the-ladies dress code that Kameny imposed: “If we’re picketing to be employed, we have to look employable,” he’d argued.
The museum is closed these days for renovations, but Harry Rubenstein, chair of its Division of Politics and Reform, is around to accept the signs. From the underground parking lot Kameny himself carries in the only one of them that’s still attached to its wooden picket: FIRST CLASS CITIZENSHIP FOR HOMOSEXUALS. Rubenstein has explained that the signs can be more easily protected and accessed if they’re put flat inside the sliding drawers of the division’s storage cases. He pulls out a poster, just so preserved, that once advertised the 1963 civil rights March on Washington. “Oh, I was at that,”says Kameny, as if it were a rally from earlier this political season.
The astronomer often tried to locate arguments for his own cause in the writings of the Founding Fathers. THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS AN INALIENABLE RIGHT FOR HOMOSEXUALS ALSO, reads one of the signs being donated, and Rubenstein is able to show Kameny that it will now be stored not far from a metal cabinet currently containing the wooden writing box on which Jefferson handwrote the Declaration of Independence.
As Rubenstein carefully lifts each newly arrived sign from its pile, Kameny offers a running commentary. SEXUAL PREFERENCE IS IRRELEVANT TO EMPLOYMENT: “If that were done 10 years later, it would have said ‘sexual orientation.’ The nuances of semantics got going later.” HOMOSEXUAL CITIZENS WANT TO SERVE THEIR COUNTRY TOO: “Now there’s the one issue of all the ones I fought for that remains unresolved. ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell.’”
Standing close by is Charles Francis, the Washington public relations man who organized the effort to buy Kameny’s papers from him, for $75,000, and then give them to the Library of Congress. (Half the money came from Michael Huffington, the bisexual former Republican congressman.) Francis is a longtime friend of the President’s family. His brother chaired George W. Bush’s first Texas gubernatorial campaign, and in 2000 he himself arranged for Bush to meet with a dozen gay Republicans. The presidential candidate said he was “a better man” for what he heard in the meeting. Francis went on to found the Republican Unity Coalition, a kind of gay-straight alliance within the party; its members included the late President Gerald Ford and the former senator Alan Simpson. “We felt homosexuality should be a non-issue,” says Francis. “To our chagrin it became the issue, and the Republican party stopped wanting to build any bridges to gays.” The organization, he explains, “is now in a sort of frozen state, like Walt Disney’s body. It’ll come back someday. We’re waiting for a better time.” Until such time arrives, he’s made a wistful retreat into the gay movement’s early history.
Rubenstein explains that these days members of the Smithsonian staff make a point of attending large demonstrations in order to collect placards that would otherwise get thrown away. Asked if he saved his signs with an eye on history, Kameny shies away from any grandiosity. “I tend in general not to throw things away,” he says; the signs were saved so that they could be used over and over. But yes, he at last admits, he did have some vague sense of their historical significance when he brought them up to the top of his house. “They were always in my attic, and I kept the roof in good condition.”
Rubenstein invites Kameny to don a pair of cotton gloves so that he can lift the lid of an inkwell that Abraham Lincoln may well have used while drafting the Emancipation Proclamation. The curator also shows him the “Jailed for Freedom” pin that the suffragist Alice Paul wore after her release from prison in 1918. The pin prompts Kameny to ask Rubenstein if the museum would be interested in a collection of gay protest buttons he has. Rubenstein assures him that it would. Kameny says he’ll send them over; they’re still at home, in his closet.
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Why 1848?
Kurt Andersen gives a neglected year its due
By Allen Barra
Kurt Andersen, the founder of Spy magazine, is the author of Turn of the Century, a scathingly funny satire of American mores at the end of the last millennium, and now Heyday (Random House, 640 pages, $26.95), an exhilarating cutaway view of America in the pivotal year of 1848. I spoke with Andersen about his new book and the state of the American historical novel.—Allen Barra
1848 was a big year for Western history. But it certainly hasn’t been a subject much touched on by American novelists. What inspired you to write 640 pages about it?
I happened to read in the same week accounts of the revolution in Paris (of which I, like most Americans, had been mostly ignorant) and of the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill—and realized that these two world-changing and essentially accidental events had happened almost simultaneously at the beginning of 1848. That struck me as a fascinating coincidence, so I started wondering about how I might invent characters and a story that would be propelled by both events. As I started researching the period, I became more and more amazed by all that was happening then, by how the world was being turned upside down in so many ways all at once: by the industrial revolution, brand-new technology (telegraph, railroads, photography), feminism, utopianism, mass media, advertising, bohemianism, abolitionism, immigration, booming cities, wacky “new age” fads, Marx, Whitman, Poe, Thoreau, and on and on. And the United States in 1848 had just fought (and won) its first elective and first foreign war, against Mexico—which seemed especially resonant now that we’re engaged in another elective foreign war. As you say, the era is fairly virgin territory in American fiction—in our popular imagination generally—and that got me even more excited. I came to believe that 1848 really was the moment that modern life was born.
The event that seems to haunt your novel is the Mexican War, which must be the least discussed major conflict in American history. From the point of view of establishing United States dominance in North America, it might be the most important war. Why do you think so little is said about it?
You’re so right. It was the most deadly war we fought before the Civil War, and it turned a huge chunk of what is now America into America, including California. Several future Presidents (and many soon-to-be-famous generals) fought in it—and Congressman Abraham Lincoln and Congressman (and former President) John Quincy Adams spoke out against it passionately. I think our collective forgetfulness is due mainly to the fact that it lacked any noble purpose. It was a more old-fashioned, un-American war—not for liberty or justice but for land, period. So we’re inclined not to think about it too much. And the present Mexican immigration mess makes that history all the more … inconvenient.
Did you have any fictional inspirations for Heyday? What were your primary nonfiction sources?
No specific fictional inspirations, although Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale, set in New York City in the late nineteenth century, absolutely dazzled me when it came out nearly 25 years ago. I’m a huge fan of Dickens and Twain. And as research before I started writing Heyday, I read Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, his fictionalization of the Brook Farm utopian community outside Boston.
As for nonfiction sources, I used so many it’s hard to say which were primary. Concerning the Irish Americans who deserted and joined the Mexican side during the war, Peter Stevens’s The Rogue’s March was indispensable, as was Mark Holloway’s Heavens on Earth about the utopian communes. On the gold rush, among the dozen books I read were H. W. Brands’s The Age of Gold, J. S. Holliday’s Rush for Riches, and Susan Lee Johnson’s Roaring Camp. I pored over period newspapers and magazines and other ephemera and referred to 1828 and 1847 editions of Webster’s Dictionary many times a day as I was writing.
That old stuffed shirt Henry James derided the historical novel as second-rate, and American critics have traditionally been reluctant to acknowledge that it should take its place at the grownups’ table. Why do you think the form has always been considered not entirely legitimate?
I think that’s changed a lot in the last 30 years or so—Doctorow and Cormac McCarthy being maybe the most illustrious living examples. Susan Sontag’s two major novels were both set in previous centuries—and for the last, In America, she won the National Book Award. Although Sontag declined to call those books historical novels, and I get her point, that she considered herself a writer of contemporary novels who happened to set them in the past. And how do we define historical for purposes of this discussion? Don DeLillo’s Underworld was set in the 1950s, and Philip Roth’s recent The Plot Against America in the forties. I think that old Jamesian genre snobbery is fading fast.
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Screenings
Robert Altman
By Allen Barra
Robert Altman’s entire career, which ranged from episodes of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” in 1957 to the pleasant and strangely elegiac A Prairie Home Companion last year, was summed up after the 1992 Academy Awards. A television journalist asked the director of The Player, perhaps the best movie ever made about the inner workings of Hollywood, why the industry’s research tanks couldn’t determine what moviegoers wanted to see. “Because,” he replied, “what they want to see is something they haven’t seen before, and they don’t know what that is.”
Altman’s half-century as a director was fueled by a desire to give viewers something they hadn’t seen before. He was prolific, perhaps too prolific for a filmmaker who was self-consciously innovative; his credits list 35 feature films and a number of mini-series and TV films, not to mention scores of television episodes, which, in addition to “Hitchcock,” include “Hawaiian Eye,” “Sugarfoot,” “Bonanza,” “Maverick,” “Combat,” “Route 66,” and even “The Gale Storm Show.”
It probably wouldn’t be possible to put together a comprehensive Altman festival; there are too many works of too many lengths, and no one could agree on what should be shown. M*A*S*H (1970), the most ferociously funny antiwar film ever made, the movie about the Korean War that exposed the country’s psychic wound over Vietnam, should lead off any Altman tribute. McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), his hallucinatory dream of a Western, with Warren Beatty and Julie Christie, would also be included. Thieves Like Us (1974), a Bonnie-and-Clyde story as Faulkner might have told it, California Split (1974), his exhilarating reflection on his own gambling addiction, and, of course, the apocalyptic Nashville (1975), the film that gave a country-music soundtrack to our post-Vietnam paranoia, would be essential.
But that would still leave 30 years of feature and TV films to sift through, and what panel of critics could possibly reach a consensus on them? I love The Long Goodbye (1973), in which Altman sets Raymond Chandler on his ear by plunking a late-1940s Philip Marlowe in the L.A. of 1973, but I can see why it infuriates Chandler aficionados. The pleasures of Popeye (1980) are right up my alley, but I wouldn’t argue with parents who are afraid to show it to their kids.
How many people have even seen what might be Altman’s best film, the heart-rendingly nonsentimental biography of Van Gogh, Vincent & Theo (1990) with Tim Roth? Or the searing, Beckett-like Secret Honor (1984), with Philip Baker Hall leading us on a trek through the mind of Richard Nixon?
So many films, so little time. Art is long, but it must be admitted that Altman was sometimes longer. No American director in the second half of the twentieth century split his critical support so radically. A friend takes me to see his deconstruction on the origins of American show business, Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976), and I find myself looking at my watch; I take him to see Altman’s satire of Southern gothic, Cookie’s Fortune (1999), and he threatens to walk out. We split down the middle on Short Cuts (1993), his film version of several Raymond Carver stories (liked that one, hated that one, loved that one).
And so on. No great filmmaker had as many duds as Altman. As Pauline Kael wrote in her review of his stillborn comedy A Wedding (1978), “When Altman is on his game, he’s like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat; when he’s not, it’s as if there was no rabbit in the hat.” All in all, there were enough rabbits in his hats to fill several careers of lesser directors. More than anyone else over the last four decades, Robert Altman made us feel we were watching something we had never seen before.—Allen Barra
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The Buyable Past
Russel Wright Aluminum
By David Lander
Aluminum ore, prevalent in the earth’scrust from time immemorial, wasn’t transformed into metal until the 1800s. The initial cost of the process was exorbitant, and by the third quarter of the century it remained high enough to make aluminum as expensive as silver. Both metals were then considered precious, and aluminum was used in the King of Denmark’s crown as well as in the facing of the Washington Monument. After the American chemist Charles Martin Hall developed a less expensive way of producing it, aluminum’s price dropped considerably, and by 1930 its modest cost and a fashionable machine-age aesthetic combined to make it a logical material for household objects. A fledgling industrial designer named Russel Wright was quick to adapt it to the purpose.
Wright’s designs for mass-produced spun aluminum table accessories were among his earliest and, as is pointed out in the introduction to Russel Wright: Creating American Lifestyle, “were perfectly timed to appeal to the more informal taste of the urban upper middle class.” Wright had just veered from a theatrical career path that could have made him a leading set designer, and as he might have done onstage, he contrived complete environments for the home and elsewhere.
By mid-century Wright’s ceramic tableware was ubiquitous in middle-class American households, but his aluminum objects are harder to find. Nevertheless, an Internet search turned up some tumblers ($65 each), a spherical bun warmer with wood trim ($65), a pair of curvaceous salt and pepper shakers ($375), and a punch set with a spherical bowl and eight matching cups, all trimmed with wooden knobs ($1,300). These things by no means exhaust Wright’s aluminum repertory, which included accouterments ranging from flatware to lamps.—David Lander
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Resources
Russel Wright: Creating American Lifestyle was published to accompany an exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. Dealers that showcase his wares include All Wright (www.all-wright.com) and Mood Indigo (www.moodindigonewyork.com). Wright aluminum items are sometimes reproduced to precise specifications, and examples can be found at Highbrow Furniture (www.highbrowfurniture.com). To find out about tours of Manitoga, Wright’s home in Garrison, New York, visit www.russelwrightcenter.org.
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