January 2011

The architecture of the first Industrial Age, which we have labeled “Victorian” for want of a better name, has long been in total disrepute. Respectable professors and accredited historians of U. S. architecture lapse into shocked silence at the end of the Greek Revival. They mumble about “disintegration of taste” and a “reign of horror” in a footnote, briefly recover their breath to laud Richardson Romanesque and resume only with Sullivan and a sigh of relief.

The architecture of the first Industrial Age, which we have labeled “Victorian” for want of a better name, has long been in total disrepute. Respectable professors and accredited historians of U. S. architecture lapse into shocked silence at the end of the Greek Revival. They mumble about “disintegration of taste” and a “reign of horror” in a footnote, briefly recover their breath to laud Richardson Romanesque and resume only with Sullivan and a sigh of relief.

In 1893, an itinerant “Tommer” with John Shea’s troupe wrote to a friend back East: “Since we struck Illinois our business has been big. We now have the long green laid aside, whereas when we were at Cairo the silver was easily counted. Bessie and Lulu are doing splendid work in brass, and Mrs. Shea is becoming a good tuba player. Barney, the donkey, is the big attraction on parade; his bucking, kicking, and chasing Marks make the crowd shout every day. We close at Marshalltown, Iowa, October 15, making just one year, four months and nine days without closing the show, and having travelled eight thousand miles by wagon and boat without accident.”

That same year an enterprising theatrical agent proposed a national exchange for “Tom” actors to be established in Chicago, undoubtedly anticipating a rush to his talent auction block from the diverse promoters who were pouring in for the Columbian Exposition. His public notice listed the following quotations:

Uncle Toms, prime, $60; fair, $50; culls, $40.

I am often tempted to believe that I grew up on a gun-toting frontier. This temptation I trace to a stagecoach ride in the spring of 1914, and a cowpuncher named Buck Murphy.

The stagecoach ran from Gull Lake, Saskatchewan, on the main line of the Canadian Pacific, to Eastend, sixty miles southwest in the valley of the Frenchman. Steel from Swift Current already reached to Eastend, but trains were not yet running when the stage brought in my mother, my brother, and myself, plus a red-faced cowpuncher with a painful deference to ladies and a great affection for little children. I rode the sixty miles on Buck Murphy’s lap, half anaesthetized by his whiskey breath, and during the ride I confounded both my mother and Murphy by fishing from under his coat a six-shooter half as big as I was.

There never were more lovely sailing ships than the wondrous clipper ships. They stormed about the seaways of the world, perfections of sailing grace and beauty, exemplifying man’s ability, when he wished, to develop grace in his service—even the strictly utilitarian service of carrying his goods at sea. Under their clouds of gloriously symmetrical sails, they looked the creations of some master artist and their hulls perfection of the sculptor’s art. In fact they were produced by men anxious only to provide the fastest, safest transport under sail, and they were hewn largely with the adze from New England trees. Their speed and their power astonished the maritime world: but they were gone—doomed—in a brief ten years.

Henry Adams was in London in 1862 when the depredations of the Merrimac in Hampton Roads proved the superiority of ironclad warships. To his brother Charles, an officer in the Union Army, Adams wrote:”

Only a fortnight ago they discovered that their whole wooden navy was useless . . . I don’t think as yet they have dared to look their position in the face. People begin to talk vaguely about the end of the war and eternal peace, just as though human nature was changed by the fact that Great Britain’s sea-power is knocked in the head. But for my private part, I think I see a thing or two. . . . Our good country the United States is left to a career that is positively unlimited except by the powers of the imagination. And for England there is still greatness and safety, if she will draw her colonies around her, and turn her hegemony into a Confederation of British nations.

Those who relished the impish irreverence of Thurman Arnold, whose books, The Symbols of Government and The Folklore of Capitalism , strewed the intellectual landscape with the deflated catch-phrases and shattered shibboleths of politics, will enjoy equally the latest work of another college professor, Fred Rodell of Yale, whose attitude toward the Supreme Court seeks the same level of good-humored if biting iconoclasm. Only a few judges earn his respect—from John Marshall to Earl Warren—and a great many his criticism—from the “fourth-rate” Court of Oliver Ellsworth to the recent “take-it-easy” assemblage presided over by Fred Vinson.

The one great attempt which we have made in our history to turn our backs on the values which all of this uprooting brought us, and to swim upstream against the principal current in American life, was unquestionably the attempt to create an independent nation out of the southern Confederacy. It was an attempt made by high-minded men who were actuated by the best of motives, and it was doomed to fail; and the men who led the Lost Cause remain the tragic characters of American history, men who fought against destiny, lost, and went into star-crossed legend as persons who had stepped outside of the main pattern.

Of these, the most perplexing in some ways has been Jefferson Davis.

Even more than Lee, Davis has become a marble image; an image bedecked with fewer floral tributes, because Davis was a person who did not inspire acute personal loyalty on the part of strangers, but nevertheless an image rather than a man.

In a sense, all of us are immigrants. Our roots go back beyond the water; our fathers, or our ultimate great-grandfathers, once took the long chance, got on a ship, and came to the New World. So what comes of it all? What sort of nation do we have, how has the fact that our roots go beyond the sea affected what has been done in this country?

It is always good to get a fresh point of view, and this is provided by Mr. Frank Thistlethwaite, a certified Cambridge don, in his new book The Great Experiment , which is a concise and neatly written attempt to explain the bewildering United States to English readers. It may also have the useful function of helping to explain us to ourselves.

Perhaps one of the most valuable extra dividends of history is the dawning knowledge that things are never quite as bad as they seem to be. Perhaps there is a toughness of fiber in people that enables them to stand ever so much more than rational judgment would suggest as the maximum. It may even be that our perennial American optimism is sometimes justified in spite of all logic.

For any examination of the byways of American history is bound to lead one, every so often, to the contemplation of ugly facts which seem to prove that the whole Amercan experiment is in a state of collapse so complete that nothing whatever can be done about it. The infinite promise of this brave new world is forever being belied by contemporary reality. There have been times when any thoughtful observer would be bound to conclude that things have got into a mess that can never be made right.

The Lower Depths Debt to the Immigrant Leader of a Lost Cause Men, Not Laws