April 24, 2006
What Would Earle Combs Do? Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 05:15 PM EST Last week I was reading The Divided Family in Civil War America, by Amy Murrell Taylor, which has recently been published by the University of North Carolina Press. On the subject of mail service between the two sections, she writes: “Union and Confederate postal authorities carefully monitored the mail that came through their offices and employed postal clerks for the sole purpose of reading every letter to look for anything suspicious.” This made me think of our recent discussion regarding President Lincoln’s wartime policies and their applicability to the present day, a subject that Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., one of American Heritage’s contributing editors, takes up in today’s Washington Post. Let’s see, if Lincoln were in charge of the United States during a war, what would he do? If history is any guide, he would suspend habeas corpus, arrest anyone who opposed him, and intercept all communications with the other side. Or maybe he wouldn’t. Times change, and if history teaches us anything, it should be the perils of translating thoughts and acts from one era to another (as I have discussed in a previous post). My own guess is that if Abraham Lincoln were somehow brought back to life in the twenty-first century, his first order of business would be to find out why everyone was walking around talking to themselves with a hand clamped to their face. The same situation occurs in sports when people try to make comparisons between eras. Last week I read yet another baseball writer dragging out the cliché about how “today’s Royals [who were 2-12 at the time], if put in a time machine, would probably thump the 1927 Yankees.” Sportswriters love to make statements like that because they know they can’t be denied, for the simple reason that they don’t mean anything. What would happen if you could actually try this experiment? Playing on the road is tough enough as it is—how would the poor Royals deal with a world without GameBoys or ESPN, in which they had to travel by train and wear flannel uniforms? How long would it take them to adjust to the different strike zone and the lack of lights and 460-foot outfields and smaller roster sizes? Would they be restricted to 1920s training methods? Would the teams have time to watch each other beforehand and gauge their styles of play? In real life you can’t send Babe Ruth to the plate against Zack Greinke, any more than you can put Abraham Lincoln (after a quick course in air power, perhaps) in charge of American military policy. For any such hypothetical exercise to have meaning, in baseball or politics, you need to make all sorts of assumptions about which things would stay the same and which things would change in the transition between eras—and the people who make these arguments always choose assumptions that yield the conclusion they want. If Lincoln were around today, would he adopt modern attitudes about privacy, press relations, dissent, international law, and so forth? Or would he retain the mentality of an age when public executions were common, reporters could casually stroll into Army field headquarters, and the biggest military threat the United States faced was from Indians? Similarly, would today’s baseball players, transported back to 1927, have the benefit of videotape analysis of the opponents they were facing—a staple of modern baseball? And which factors would weigh more heavily—the dilution of talent caused by expansion and baseball’s decreasing importance in American life, or the increase in talent caused by population growth and the greater use of African-American and foreign players? In all these cases, you can rig the conditions in such a way as to support whatever point you’re trying to make. I’m reminded of James Bryce’s remark that “the chief practical use of history is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies.” It makes sense to ask how Lincoln would have handled, say, a defeat in the 1864 election, or how the 1927 Yankees would have fared against a team of Negro League stars. Those are things that could actually have happened. But once you start moving people from one era to another, you might just as well imagine that Grover Cleveland is a teenaged girl living in Ohio today and ask what color dress he would wear to the prom. Cross-era comparisons can be fun, and mildly instructive in a general sort of way, but the terms and conditions that govern them are so amorphous that it makes no sense to base a serious argument on them.
April 24, 2006
South Pacific Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:45 AM EST At a college seminar a couple of decades ago, a naive student asked the author James Michener what the secret of becoming a successful writer was. “Oh, that’s easy,” Michener replied. “Just have Rodgers and Hammerstein make a musical out of your first book.”
The Michener estate, it is safe to assume, is still receiving tidy royalty checks covering his share of South Pacific, which was based on his Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection, Tales of the South Pacific.
The show was the biggest Broadway hit of its day, perhaps ever. It did not run as long as Oklahoma! (1,925 performances to 2,212), but the reason for that is that Oklahoma! was a very inexpensive show and could make money with the house half empty on weeknights, which it did for two years. South Pacific, with a very large cast and a great many stage hands to handle the complicated sets, could not. It sold out virtually every performance for four years but closed fairly quickly when business finally began to slacken.
But those four sold-out years are legendary. There was a New Yorker cartoon showing people on a New York street. Half of them are bent over, merely schlumping along through life; the other half are striding briskly, their shoulders back, smiles on their faces. Connecting the latter group is a balloon with a tropical island. They’ve seen South Pacific and all’s right with the world. A joke made the rounds where a man seeing the show at a matinee finds himself next to an empty seat. Overcome with curiosity, at the intermission he asks the woman on the other side of the seat if she knows why it’s empty. “It was for my husband,” she replies, “but he died.” The man expresses his sorrow but wonders if a friend couldn’t have come with her. “They’re all at the funeral,” she explains. On its last performance, after all the curtain calls were over, the audience began to file up the aisles, and the actors went to their dressing rooms, the house curtain was left up. Symbolically, at least, South Pacific never really closed at all. But South Pacific has not fared as well in recent decades as the other R&H classics. Oklahoma!, Carousel, and The King and I have all had full-scale revivals in New York and London in the last 15 years that have done much to establish them as the enduring masterpieces of musical theater that they are. South Pacific, however, has not been revived in New York in nearly 40 years, and its recent London revival was less than wholly successful. There are, to be sure, technical reasons for this. South Pacific is a “star vehicle,” a play that requires a star—an actor who, in some indefinable but unmistakable way, lights up a stage by his or her mere presence—to really work. Mary Martin, the original Nellie Forbush, was a star. But actually it is a double star vehicle. And the male lead is very, very difficult to cast. He must be (1) middle-aged, (2) very sexy, and (3) able to command “Some Enchanted Evening,” which is not a song for the musically limited. Ezio Pinzas do not grow on trees. A recent and misbegotten television version starred Glenn Close, who, while certainly a star, is 30 years too old for the part of Ensign Nellie Forbush (one critic dismissed her as “Admiral Forbush”). On Wednesday night on PBS (check your local listings), you’ll have a chance to see South Pacific in a concert version (no sets, limited costumes, limited business) staged at Carnegie Hall last year. It stars Reba McEntire, Brian Stokes Mitchell, and, of all people, Alec Baldwin, playing the comic part of Luther Billis. The audience adored it, and so, for the most part, did the critics. Ben Brantley of The New York Times wrote that “those fortunate enough to attend this one-night-only benefit for Carnegie Hall had the privilege of experiencing the emotional force of South Pacific . . . as the members of its opening night audience must have in 1949.” Jay Nordlinger of the New York Sun noted that “there are two groups of people who appreciate South Pacific . . . : the masses, and the musicians—meaning the real musicians. They know the material’s worth. The middlebrow people—those with a little education, who know enough for dilettantism—can scoff at South Pacific, or condescend to it. If they had any sense, they’d give a limb or two to have written the least of the songs.” I know I’ll be watching.
April 21, 2006
The Queen’s Birthday Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:20 PM EST The great-great-great-great granddaughter of the last king of the 13 colonies that threw him out and created the United States turns 80 today, with all the royal hoopla one could wish for—artillery salutes, birthday cards by the tens of thousands, congratulations from countries around the world and on and on. She has reigned for 54 years, longer than all but three of her predecessors, and she is quickly closing in on Henry III’s 56-year reign. If she were to live as long as her mother, who died at 101, she would sit on the throne for 75 years, longer than any monarch in European history. That the birthday of a woman with hardly any political power should cause such a worldwide fuss is a testament to the extraordinary, atavistic hold that royalty has on the imagination of ordinary people. Can you imagine anyone outside of Germany—or within it, for that matter—caring about the birthday of the president of Germany? Come to think of it, I haven’t the faintest idea when George W. Bush’s birthday is, and he’s the most politically powerful person on earth right now, not to mention President of the country of which I am a citizen. But just the fact that Elizabeth II is Queen of England makes her, ex officio, one of the most famous people on the planet, able to command instant attention. As she joked to President Bush when he visited Britain a few years ago, “You are term-limited. I am not.” This irreplaceable royal power to command attention is an enormous asset to Britain and is exactly why the idea of abolishing the monarchy is, to paraphrase George Orwell, an idea so stupid only an intellectual could have conceived it. Perhaps no country is as devoted to its republican form of government as the United States, and yet we are no more immune to the power of royalty, especially British royalty, than anywhere else. The first visit of British royalty to these shores did not come at a good moment in Anglo-American relations. It was in September 1781, five years after independence had been declared and just as the noose was tightening on General Cornwallis, besieged at Yorktown. Prince William, third son of King George III (he was later created Duke of Clarence and much later, to his surprise and delight, became King William IV), was then a midshipman in the Royal Navy, and he came to New York that month. New York had been under British occupation since 1776 and was filled with loyalists who had fled to the city for refuge, so it is not surprising that the prince was greeted with great warmth. Things had much improved by the next royal visit, when the young Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, visited New York in 1860. The place, quite simply, went nuts. The Duke of Newcastle, accompanying the prince, wrote that he had “never ventured to hope for anything approaching the scene which occurred here three days ago—such a scene as probably was never witnessed before—the enthusiasm of much more than half a million people, worked up almost to madness.” For the quality folk, a grand ball was put on at the Academy of Music, the city’s opera house, with a floor laid over the orchestra seats. Three thousand were invited, five thousand showed up; the floor collapsed and had to be hastily repaired. It was, in sort, a shambles. Regardless, the prince, famously sociable—far too sociable to suit his parents, Prince Albert and Queen Victoria—had a grand time. But it would be 1939 before a reigning British monarch came to the United States, when President Roosevelt hosted George VI and Queen Elizabeth, later the Queen Mother, in Washington and Hyde Park—where they were famously served hot dogs, which they managed with the aplomb expected of royalty.
April 21, 2006
What Containerization Did Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:20 AM EST John Steele Gordon’s post about shipping containers brings to mind some of the important implications that this innovation had for New York City—his and my some-time home, and the location of American Heritage’s editorial offices. At its height in 1944, the Brooklyn Navy Yard employed 71,000 workers who were involved in every aspect of transporting, packing and moving millions of tons of cargo each month. By 1965 less than 7,000 workers remained. The introduction of commercial jet carriers after World War II made cargo ships increasingly outmoded, and Brooklyn’s antiquated docks and rail lines were inadequate for new methods of shipping, like containerization. Once a mainstay of New York’s urban economy, the city’s waterfront subculture disappeared almost overnight. Its decline was one chapter in the story of postwar New York’s economic shake-up. In 1946, 41 percent of Gotham’s labor force worked at blue-collar jobs. By 1970 that figure declined to 29 percent, nearly matched by the 27 percent of New York workers who held secretarial and clerical jobs. In effect, the introduction of shipping containers were one important component of a longer string of innovations and changes—including the shift of federal resources from the rust belt to the Sunbelt; the postwar suburban boom and the construction of a national highway system; and the shift from an industrial to a service economy—that transformed places like New York. As with all great changes, much was gained and much was lost. The city’s vibrant waterfront economy, with its intense cosmopolitanism and rich blend of peoples and goods from across the globe, is now a thing of the past. New York remains a polyglot city, of course, but losing the dock culture meant losing a part of what made the city special.
April 20, 2006
The Shipping Container Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:30 PM EST President Bush this morning welcomed President Hu of China to the White House with all the pomp and circumstance appropriate to a summit meeting of the leaders of two Great Powers. Without a doubt high on the agenda for discussion today will be the trade gap between the two countries, which last year yawned to no less than $202 billion in China’s favor. There are many reasons for that gap, China’s artificially undervalued currency for one, its cheap labor for another, its relative lack of concern for the environment for a third. But there’s a fourth important reason: the cargo container. Some inventions are just, well, sexy, and some aren’t, no matter how important. It didn’t take a genius to see that once the Wright brothers proved it practicable, the airplane would have an immense impact on the twentieth century. But consider the stirrup. It seems about as boring as inventions come. Indeed it is so obvious in retrospect, it’s a wonder it took so long to be invented in the first place. But it appeared in India and, within a few generations, made its way to Europe only about the time of Charlemagne. The stirrup made riding a horse much more secure and safe, to be sure, but it did a lot more than that. It made it possible for the rider to use a lance against an opponent while still holding his seat. Thus the stirrup made mounted knights—the tanks of medieval warfare—possible. The high costs of armor, war horses, etc., powered the development of the feudal system, in which land was granted in return for military obligations. The stirrup was thus one of the prime creators of the Middle Ages. The cargo container is another boring but deeply important invention, and next week will be its fiftieth anniversary. Much of the expense of freight transportation has always lain in “breaking bulk,” when goods are transferred from one form of transportation, such as a ship, to another, such as a truck or a train. Since men first went down to the sea in ships, cargo was loaded on board piecemeal and unloaded the same way. Modern cargo ships required sometimes hundreds of stevedores to be unloaded quickly, and then the cargo had to be loaded piece by piece onto trucks or trains. In the early 1950s an American trucking executive named Malcom (that’s the way he spelled it) McLean had a better idea: put the cargo in aluminum and steel containers that could fit on flatbed railroad cars or trucks. A few crane operators could load or unload a ship and the goods be on their way to their final destination in a matter of hours. On April 26, 1956, a converted oil tanker sailed out of Newark, New Jersey, bound for Houston, with 58 cargo containers on her deck, and the world of global trade changed.
The shipping container lowered the price of overseas freight transportation as much as 94 percent. Creating the infrastructure and negotiating with longshoremen’s unions took a while, of course, although the immense shipping needs of the Vietnam War gave the cargo container a crucial boost. But as the use of containers spread, the cost of goods brought in from overseas began to decline rapidly. As their prices dropped, demand soared, and the global economy developed quickly.
Not bad for a boring box.
For an in-depth look at the history of the cargo container, I’d recommend The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson.
April 19, 2006
The Yellow Pages Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:00 PM EST The Yellow Pages have been around a long time—120 years, in fact. R. H. Donnelly produced the first business phone book categorized by type of business or service in 1886. (In 1883 a printer ran out of white paper on which to print a regular phone book and substituted yellow paper instead, but that doesn’t really count). R. H. Donnelly’s bright idea came just 10 years after Alexander Graham Bell said, “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you,” which gives a good indication of just how fast the telephone spread through the American business community after its invention. It would spread much more slowly in private residences, however. In fact, the first year when more than half of American households had a telephone was 1946. Slowly but surely the phone books, both white and yellow, began to push an older competitor, the city directory, out of existence. City directories had to be purchased, but phone books were handed out free to subscribers. The oldest city directory I know of was for New York printed in 1786. It would fit easily into a shirt pocket. The last New York directory was printed in the early 1930s. It would not fit easily into a backpack. But the yellow pages, and probably the white ones as well, now seem doomed in their turn. This morning I needed a place to get passport photos taken and, being of a certain age, I went instinctively to the yellow pages. I could not find anything near me. Then, like Homer Simpson, I smacked my forehead, said, “Doh!” and went to Google. I had a place and even driving directions within 15 seconds. Google is quite as free as the yellow pages, far more comprehensive (I could probably find a place to have passport photos taken in Bangalore if I wanted one), faster, yields more information, and doesn’t require the sacrifice of heaven knows how many thousands of acres of Canadian trees. About the only downside to Google, it seems, is that it is no good at all for bringing a six-year-old up to the right height for eating at a dining room table. The yellow pages will hang on for a while, just as the city directory did, because people are used to them. But when that six-year-old is 56, they will be as dim a memory as dialing zero to make a long-distance call is to us.
April 18, 2006
The Income Tax Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:45 PM EST Once again it’s tax time, and so it is also the time when political commentators across the spectrum deplore the American income tax system. “American income tax system,” of course, is an oxymoron, as there is nothing whatsoever systematic about it. Indeed, the modern income tax code is as unspeakable a mess as only democratic politics can make when given a hundred years in which to make it. The code—all 60,000-odd pages of it—is unfair, arbitrary, incomprehensible, expensive, fraud-inducing, wasteful, and deeply injurious to the American economy. To give just one example of how out of control American tax law now is, consider this fact: Since the last major overhaul of the tax code, in 1986, Congress has amended the law no fewer than 15,000 times. That’s an average of more than four changes to the tax law every single day, including Sundays and Congressional recesses. What were those 15,000 amendments about? Basically they fall into two groups. The first group of amendments were intended to undo the unintended consequences of previous changes or to codify those unintended consequences. The second group is favors to special interests and even individuals, quietly tucked away in the vast mass of the tax code in the legislative equivalent of the dark of night. How did we get into this mess? Basically, it’s all the fault of the Founding Fathers and a switcheroo on the Supreme Court in 1895. In writing the first Article of the Constitution, the Founding Fathers gave to Congress, in Section 8, the power to tax, but in Section 9, they directed that “No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census. . . .” In other words, direct taxes had to be apportioned among the several states according to their population. Rufus King, delegate from Massachusetts, asked in debate, what a “direct tax” was. Madison’s notes on the proceedings record that he received no answer. The Supreme Court, in upholding the Civil War income tax, held that a direct tax was any tax that could be apportioned among the states according to population, which an income tax, obviously, could not be. The Civil War income tax expired in 1872, and the federal government in the post-Civil War era relied mostly on the tariff for revenue. But a tariff is a consumption tax, and consumption taxes are inescapably regressive (i.e., they hit the bottom end of the economic ladder harder than the top end), because the poor consume a larger percentage of their incomes than do the rich. Many, not just of the left, wanted to pass an income tax on high incomes (originally above $4,000, an income enjoyed by less than one percent of American families in the 1890s), and one finally passed Congress in 1894 and was signed by President Cleveland. Naturally, those who would have had to pay it objected ,and, just as naturally, they sued. In 1895 the case of Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan and Trust Company reached the Supreme Court (my great great uncle, I regret to report, was one of the principal lawyers in the case on the anti-tax side). The court deadlocked, 4-4, on the crucial issue of whether the income tax was a direct tax and therefore unconstitutional. Justice Howell Jackson, who had not participated in the earlier argument, hauled himself out of a sickbed (he died that summer), and the case was reargued. Justice Jackson voted to uphold the tax, but one of the justices who had previously voted to uphold the tax now switched sides, and the tax was declared unconstitutional by a vote of 5-4. My great great uncle, I have no doubt, was vastly pleased, but the decision, while perhaps correct as a matter of logic, has caused endless mischief. Pressure for an income tax continued to build, and many in Congress wanted just to pass the 1894 tax again and dare the Supreme Court to overturn it a second time. President Taft, who deeply revered the Court (he would serve as Chief Justice from 1921 to 1930—an office he greatly preferred to the Presidency) was horrified. He suggested instead an income tax on corporate profits, which then largely accrued to the benefit of the rich. Technically, this was an excise tax, measured in income, and therefore not a direct tax. He also proposed a constitutional amendment to allow a federal income tax. The corporate tax soon passed. The constitutional amendment was ratified in 1913, and a personal income tax was then enacted. But the two taxes were completely separate and uncoordinated. They still are. The interaction of the two income taxes, along with wealthy citizens attempting to minimize their taxes, powerful corporations intent on doing likewise, clever lawyers and tax accountants, members of Congress only too happy to do their bidding, and no small number of demagogues have, over the last 93 years, produced a monster. There is no reforming the current code. It is an endlessly metastasizing cancer in the body politic that must be excised. What to replace it with is a great political question that most politicians don’t want to deal with. Personally, I favor a flat tax on personal income. Several countries have now implemented flat taxes on incomes, including Hong Kong, so how they actually work in the real world can now be seen. For a more in-depth look at the history of American taxation, please see an article I wrote for American Heritage ten years ago. Things have only gotten worse since.
April 17, 2006
Mathew Brady and Mass Media Posted by John Steele Gordon at 07:00 PM EST Richard Snow writes that “it’s important to remember the terrific emotional impact photographs of the Civil War era had upon those who saw them at the time.” I couldn’t agree more. But I wonder how many people actually saw the photographs in anything like real time. The half-tone process wouldn’t be developed until the 1890s, so newspapers and magazines had no photographs in the 1860s. Hastily made engravings based on photographs appeared in magazines such as Harper’s Weekly, but they are a pale rendition of the original photographs. People living in New York and other major cities with the leisure to do so could visit exhibitions or Brady’s studio, but they would have been a small percentage of the population as a whole. The chattering classes saw them—or heard about them from their friends—the editorialist of The New York Times that Richard quotes being a case in point. But the chattering classes and the masses are two different groups even now, and the distinction was far deeper in the 1860s. So I wonder what percentage of the American population in the war years actually saw an example of Brady’s war photography. I have no idea. Ten percent? I bet not. One percent? That would have been 300,000 people. Maybe. Compare that with the number of people who today see some dramatic footage within 24 hours of its being shot. What percentage of the American population saw video of the second plane hitting the World Trade Center before they went to bed that night? Eighty percent? Ninety? Ninety-five? The fact that Brady is today probably the only nineteenth-century photographer that the average educated American could name testifies to just how powerful his images are. But I wonder how much impact they had on the average man in the street in his day whose ability to actually see them was so very limited by technology.
April 17, 2006
I Smell a Gimmick Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 04:00 PM EST According to the Associated Press, Japanese film exhibitors plan to accompany showings of The New World, last year’s Colin Farrell turkey about colonization in Virginia, with scents that will be released into the theater from specially designed machines. These scents will not try to reproduce what the people and places in the movie actually smelled like, and if you know anything about the seventeenth century, you’ll understand why that’s a good thing. Instead, they are supposed to fit the mood: “A floral scent accompanies a love scene, while a mix of peppermint and rosemary is emitted during a tear-jerking scene. Joy is a citrus mix of orange and grapefruit, while anger is enhanced by a herb-like concoction with a hint of eucalyptus and tea tree.” It all sounds very Japanese, and who knows? In time the technique could become as popular around the world as sushi, though it would help to find a better movie than The New World to use it with. Yet the idea of marrying scents and film goes back almost a century, as one of our sturdy hacks wrote in a sidebar to Tom Huntington’s excellent article on 3-D films in our sister publication Invention & Technology (scroll all the way to the end). As the sidebar explains, when Theodore Roosevelt was President, “S. L. ‘Roxy’) Rothafel, the famous theater owner who later founded Radio City Music Hall, spread rose perfume with a fan while showing film of the Tournament of Roses at a theater in Forest City, Pennsylvania.” The idea was revived occasionally in later decades, most notably in 1959 and 1960, when two competing systems with major-studio backing made brief appearances. (In 1981 John Waters tried a different approach by handing out scratch-and-sniff cards with his film Polyester.) Any scheme for adding scents to film runs into two main problems: (a) it’s hard to do it effectively and (b) there’s no point. From a technical perspective, synchronizing the scent with the action on screen is tricky because the scent takes time to diffuse throughout the theater, and then once it does, it tends to linger. One of the 1959-60 systems, Mike Todd, Jr.’s Smell-O-Vision, tried to solve the first problem by putting a nozzle on the back of every seat, while the other one, Walter Reade, Jr.’s AromaRama, used ordinary ventilation equipment but released a neutralizing agent between scents. Neither method worked very well, but even if they had (and even if realistic-smelling scents could have been produced cheaply enough), they would still have been solutions to a non-existent problem, because no one needs to be reminded during a movie what an orange or a bonfire smells like. Scented-film systems were simply a distraction, and once the novelty wore off (which happened quite fast), they disappeared, to be revived every now and then when some filmmaker needs a gimmick. Will the Japanese approach, which amounts to olfactory mood music rather than a literal rendering of smells from the movie, be more effective? Perhaps. But even so, if the long history of movie-theater innovations is any guide, the costs of installing and maintaining the system will be a strong deterrent to its spread beyond a handful of theaters.
April 17, 2006
Mathew Brady vs. TV News Posted by Richard F. Snow at 11:30 AM EST In his recent exchange with Josh Zeitz about the greater power of current battlefield images as opposed to those of the Civil War, my colleague John Steele Gordon writes, “Mathew Brady photographs, haunting and gut-wrenching as they were, are not 24/7 color footage in your living room, any more than a wind-up gramophone playing 78s is an iPod.” This is, of course, perfectly true in a technical sense; and yet it’s important to remember the terrific emotional impact photographs of the Civil War era had upon those who saw them at the time. Mathew Brady’s photographers Alexander Gardner and James Gibson reached the scene of the awful fighting at Antietam almost while the battle was still in progress. They took 70 pictures of the field, and close to a third of them show corpses. Brady exhibited the photographs in his New York City gallery, and the effect of the shattered caissons and rows of dead—on an audience most of whose members were alive when the camera had been invented—can scarcely be exaggerated. A New York Times reporter wrote, “Of all objects of horror one would think the battle-field should stand preeminent, that it should bear the palm of repulsiveness. But on the contrary, there is a terrible fascination about it that draws one near these pictures, and makes him loth to leave them. You will see hushed, reverend [sic] groups standing around these weird copies of carnage, bending down to look in the pale faces of the dead, chained by the strange spell that dwells in dead men’s eyes. It seems somewhat singular that the same sun that looked down on the face of the slain, blistering them, blotting out from the bodies all semblances to humanity, and hastening corruption, should have thus caught their features upon canvas and given them perpetuity for ever.” The tone of this account suggests the writer barely distinguished between images of the battlefield and the field itself. So it was with Oliver Wendell Holmes, who had actually visited Antietam after the fighting, seeking his son who had been wounded there. After seeing the photographs, he wrote, “Let him who wishes to know what war is look at this series of illustrations. These wrecks of manhood thrown together in careless heaps or ranged in ghastly rows for burial were alive but yesterday. . . . Many people would not look through the series. Many, having seen it and dreamed of its horrors, would lock it up in some secret drawer, that it might not thrill or revolt those whose soul sickens at such sights. It is so nearly like visiting the battlefield to look over these views, that all the emotions excited by the actual sight of the stained and sordid scene, strewed with rags and wrecks, came back to us, and we buried them in the recesses of our cabinets as we would have buried the mutilated remains of the dead they too vividly represented.” Brady’s series of Antietam photographs sold well for the next three years, the thousands and thousands of viewers almost certainly experiencing feelings similar to those that vexed Holmes when he wrote, “It was so nearly like visiting the battlefield . . . that all the emotions excited by the actual sight . . . came back to us. [It] gives us . . . some conception of what a brutal, sickening, hideous thing it is, this dashing together of two frantic mobs to which we give the name of armies . . .”
April 17, 2006
Daffodils Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:45 AM EST The daffodils are at their height in my part of the country right now, dancing in the spring breezes and lighting up dark corners of gardens, woods, and roadsides. Central Park is awash with drifts of thousands of them. Native to the lands of the Mediterranean, the Romans brought them to Britain, perhaps to remind them of home. Because they have a long dormant period, the bulbs are easily moved. So, like the Romans 1,500 years earlier, the English settlers soon brought them to this country, both north and south. Pioneers heading westward then tucked the bulbs into odd corners of their wagons and planted them when they arrived in their new homes, both to greet the spring and to remind them of other springs in other places that were now far away. I confess that daffodils are my favorite flower. If you would like to know why, William Wordsworth can tell you far better than I. But there is another reason as well: they are the Johann Sebastian Bach of flowers, an exercise in theme and variations that puts the Goldberg ones to shame. My dining room table right now sports an arrangement of—I just counted them—52 daffodils, picked from the garden and fields around my house. No two of them are alike. And yet they are all alike. They each have six petals surrounding a “trumpet,” and they range in color only from white to yellow to orange. But some are short, some tall, some large, some small, some early, some late, some fragrant, some not, some showy, some demure. There are over 26,000 commercial varieties of daffodils today, and heaven alone knows how many more that simply made themselves one year with the help of an early bee or two on some long neglected patch of ground. Another poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay, once famously asked, “To what purpose, April, do you return again?” She didn’t give her answer to the question, but I know mine: so that we might have daffodils.
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