January 2011

To inquire about the house tours mentioned in this article, call the following: Historic Charleston Foundation (803-723-1623), Natchez Pilgrimage Tours (1-800-647-6742), and Historic Garden Week in Virginia (804-644-7776).

They all are timed to coincide with the South’s best spring bloom and run from sometime in March until late in April. Each organization has brochures showing what’s on view as well as suggesting hotels and restaurants that for the most part also share long histories.

It is wise to start making plans for a trip as soon as the brochures are out (usually in January), since tours and hotels fill up quickly, especially on weekends. From the relaxed pace and tempo of the weekday tours, I noticed a distinct quickening as Friday arrived. Suddenly people were bunched up in lines outside the houses, and restaurants were jammed. So try to include a few weekdays on a Charleston visit.

I had visited Charleston, South Carolina twice over the years, touring the great house museums that summed up the glory of the eighteenth-century city, ferrying out to Fort Sumter, and dining superbly on she-crab soup and platters of shrimp. Much of the time I would simply walk the uneven slate and cobblestone streets in the heart of the historic district, glancing into gauzily curtained windows and willing my feet not to lead me where they had no right to go, past some particularly enticing wrought iron gate into a stranger’s lush and shady garden. It seemed that however vigorously I toured the town, it always stayed hazily out of focus, remaining, like the hostess of some rarefied party, beautiful, gracious, and remote.

In 1929's You Can’t Go Home Again, Thomas Wolfe wrote that “few buildings are vast enough to hold the sound of time, and…there was a superb fitness in the fact that the one which held it better than all others should be a railroad station. For here, as nowhere else on earth, men were brought together for a moment at the beginning or end of their innumerable journeys…. Men came and went, they passed and vanished, and all were moving through the moments of their lives to death, all made small tickings in the sound of time—but the voice of time remained aloof and unperturbed, a drowsy and eternal murmur below the immense and distant roof.”

When I came upon a news item not long ago to the effect that the Florida representative Bill McCollum had called for changes in federal law that would allow for the trial (in certain circumstances) of 13- and 14-year-old juveniles as adults and that other “get-tough” members of Congress advocated confining some convicted juveniles with adult prisoners, my reaction was immediate and automatic: What, oh what, would Judge Lindsey say?

Judge Lindsey, you see, was Ben Lindsey, a progressive advocate with a fly-weight physique (98 pounds, 5'5" at age 32, in 1901) and the soul of a gladiator. Among his several reform causes was precisely the separate treatment for young criminal offenders that is now under attack, and, whether you agree with his reasoning or not, his story is worth telling. He is one more spirited exemplar of a special kind of optimistic American spirit that flamed especially high at the start of this century.

John Steele Gordon replies: I do indeed remember some pretty ghastly meals consumed on long automobile trips when I young, and they must have been really ghastly, as I’m sure I was a good deal less particular then. But I also remember a clam chowder at some restaurant on the shore outside Boston that was so delicious that my mother—no gastronomic pushover—told me to sit still and marched into the kitchen for a heart-to-heart with the cook.

And most of all I remember a peach pie and homemade ice cream served in a diner somewhere around Brattleboro, Vermont, in the early 1950s. But it was as yesterday that extraordinarily intense taste of peach, surrounded by a crust that would have brought Julia Child to her knees in homage.

I’d risk a lot of ptomaine for one more slice of that pie.

I agree with John Steele Gordon about how far the car has brought us, but I think he strays into false nostalgia when he writes: “Unfortunately the spread of franchising in the 1960s and 1970s much diminished the regional diversity of American highway cuisine.” I remember all too well the diversity of roadside cooking in the pre-McDonald’s years: the fried chicken with its carapace of petrified lard; the dreadful regional variations that could be played even on so seemingly incorruptible a thing as the cheeseburger; the vegetables simmered in Vaseline early that morning (or that week)…

Methinks the New York to Paris racers (“The Longest Race”) got mighty wet crossing the “five thousand miles [of Siberia] east from Vladivostok.”

On March 22, by a vote of 84 to 8, the Senate passed the Equal Rights Amendment, a goal of feminists for half a century. Since the House had given equally lopsided approval the previous fall, the amendment went to the states for ratification. Thirty-two minutes after the Senate vote, Hawaii became the first to ratify; New Hampshire and Nebraska followed the next day. Support for the idea of equality quickly swept the country, with both major parties endorsing the amendment. Within a year of the Senate vote, 30 of the required 38 states had passed the E.R.A. Boosters confidently predicted a quick completion of the process.

Over the remainder of 1973, though, no more states added their names to the list. In 1974, even as polls showed three-quarters of Americans in favor, just three states gave their consent. One state ratified in 1975 and one in 1977, raising the total to 35, but that was all.The E.R.A.’s time limit expired in 1982, and since then, there has been no serious attempt to get it through Congress again. What happened?

On February 17 the Voice of America (VOA) began broadcasting in Russian from a shortwave transmitter in Munich. A newspaper cartoon had predicted that the Soviet public would be baffled by such American radio hits as “Open the Door, Richard” and “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah,” but the VOA’s hour-long inaugural broadcast came closer to the opposite extreme. It began with a summary of world news. Next came an exposition of the relationship between America’s state and federal governments, meant to answer such supposedly common questions as, “Why must the motorist in one State of the United States observe traffic rules different from those in another?” There followed a selection of folk and cowboy tunes and a rundown of scientific developments (“The study of the infrared spectrum of the stars was until recently complicated by the absence of sufficiently sensitive detectors …”). Rounding out the hour were Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” and a recap of the news from the top of the program.

The November issue, like most, was superb, but I would like to clarify a point in your biography of Bill Mitchell (“Designer of the American Dream”).

The ’55 Chryslers were fantastic, but it was Virgil Exner’s ’57s—with their slender rooflines and bold tail fins integrated into a low, wedge profile—that literally sent GM’s stylists back to the drawing board. Because of those ’57 Chryslers, GM quickly developed all-new styling for 1959, not 1958 as the article stated. This is why all U.S.-built GM cars for 1959, from Chevrolet to Cadillac, share a common body shell. There wasn’t enough time to do it any other way.