January 2011

It is a truth universally acknowledged that parents of American schoolchildren must take them to Colonial Williamsburg. This fact came home forcefully to my husband and me after our friends from Algeria made the pilgrimage with their son. “The secret,” they told us when they returned radiant with historical insights that our native-born family still lacked, “is to get the vacation package that includes Busch Gardens.” So, last April, we set off on the long drive south, promising our two boys, 10 and 12, twin entertainments: costumed interpreters well-informed about eighteenth-century life, and roller coasters.

Over the years, I have tended to steer clear of people in wigs and tricorns, but I returned from this trip ashamed of my narrow-mindedness. There were fewer wigs than I had expected (most men couldn’t afford them, it turns out), and at Colonial Williamsburg, many people wearing period clothing also speak in eighteenth-century voices, with a vocabulary and syntax just different enough from contemporary speech to be mesmerizing.

Kevin Baker, our “In The News” columnist, has just published a historical novel called Paradise Alley. The book has itself been in the news: Among other plaudits, it has appeared on the cover of The New York Times Book Review, where Geoffrey C. Ward called it “a triumph.” We asked Kevin if he would say something about how he came to write it.

∼ The Editors

In 1991 the photographer Peter Woloszynski spent his first night in America in Charleston, South Carolina. He found the town unexpectedly magnificent, and it inspired him to spend two years traveling through the South getting inside of and photographing antebellum houses still lived in by descendants of their original owners. In Under Live Oaks (Clarkson Potter, 304 pages, $40.00) he presents his eloquent pictures with an accompanying text by the writer Caroline Seebohm, who brings to life the slow decline of the homes and their occupants. The houses, she writes, are “monuments to an illusion, and all the stories ever told cannot in the end put back together the ‘stray pieces of the past.’ As in the poignant image of a parlor in Montgomery, Alabama, empty except for an old family portrait hanging in lonely splendor over the fireplace, the lifeblood of these places is gradually draining away.”

Has anyone ever adequately explained how a British secret agent became an American cultural idol? Well, for one thing, Bond wasn’t English; his creator, Ian Fleming, made clear to us at the outset that Bond was the product of a Scots father and a Swiss mother. Brought to life by Scan Connery, Bond seemed both deadlier and more ingratiating than the traditional English Bulldog Drummond type of hero while at the same time more sophisticated than American private eyes.

For another thing, unlike Fleming’s first Bond novels, Bond movies didn’t exploit the fears of the Cold War so much as divert us from them. As early as From Russia With Love (1963), the film plot was rewritten so that the real struggle was not between the free world and the communist bloc but between all the world’s intelligence agencies and technology-crazed pirates capitalizing on the ideological rift between East and West.

A gazetteer of mythical America would be sprinkled with such picturesque placenames as Buzzardsborough, Crow Corners, East Punkinton, Gopherville, Mudville (where mighty Casey struck out), and Weazletown, all of them indicating small towns or boondocks. ( Boondocks , by the way, is a relic of the Philippine Insurrection of 1899-1902, when U.S. troops pursued rebels into the hills and jungles; the word comes from bundok , Tagalog for “mountain.")

Perhaps no name would appear more often in such a gazetteer than Podunk. A byword for more than 150 years for a small and insignificant place, it still crops up regularly. “On the Campaign Trail from Podunk to D.C.” was the title of a forum at the annual convention of the Asian American Journalists Association in Dallas this past August.

The last paragraph of Mr. Zeitz’s article on the victory of Southern culture uses Joan Baez’s cover of Robbie Robertson’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” as a metaphor for his theme. It’s a better metaphor than he lets on. The Band recorded it first because Mr. Robertson was the guitarist for the Band. Furthermore, he’s Canadian. Why would a Canadian write songs about the American Civil War from the perspective of the South? How is it that the Civil War so resonates within the soul of a Canadian that it inspires him to verse? Slavery and the Civil War are events with no obvious counterpart in Canadian history. We can take this to signify that the cultural victory of the South is so complete that the influence of Dixie has moved not only beyond the South but beyond the borders of the nation.

It is ironic that Joshua Zeitz’s article “Dixie’s Victory” (August/September 2002), asserting that Southerners have captured American culture, is preceded on page 12 (“History Now”) by a short report on the need to rename the Confederate Air Force and Wings Over Dixie Air Show to be less inflammatory to sensitive Yankees with money. The politically correct names now are the Commemorative Air Force and the Great Georgia Air Show. Dixie’s victory indeed!

I think John Steele Gordon made a very poor choice in comparing Kenneth Lay and Henry Ford (“The Business of America,” April/May 2002).

First, the Ford Motor Company in Henry’s time was largely owned by the Ford family, not by public stockholders. Second, Enron existed mainly to sell IOUs to the public in order to create a cash cow for its leaders to loot. Third, Henry Ford had the toughest boss of all, the consumer.

To compare Kenneth Lay to Henry Ford is equivalent to comparing Charles Ponzi to Bill Gates.