January 2011

WILL ROGERS MAY NEVER HAVE MET A MAN HE DIDN’T like, but Harry Dubin evidently never met one he didn’t like to be. Fifty years ago, his protean inclinations inspired an extraordinary series of color photographs that have only recently surfaced.

The project came about because Dubin, like his subjects, knew about hard work. In the midst of the Depression, he attended New York University’s law school at night while toiling in a grocery store during the day. But graduating law clerks earned only five dollars a week; Dubin had a family to feed, and so his legal career ended before it started. Instead he managed a store in the Busy Bee grocery chain and eventually opened his own grocery on the Upper East Side. The Regent Food Shop was a kind of elegant fullservice market rarely seen today. Most orders came in by phone, and many were delivered to the service entrances of Rockefellers and Astors. William Paley sent his chauffeur to the Regent for his bulgur wheat.

WHAT’S THE POINT OF BEING A BOY IF YOU DON’T GRASP THE FACT that cars are the package that excitement comes in? I certainly did. By the age of eleven, I was the kind of boy who knew every Dodge and Hudson and Packard of every model year by heart, tore the car ads from the magazines, rushed to the dealers’ showrooms every October for the epic unveiling of next year’s longer, lower, wider wonders. Small Ontario towns had no Bugatti dealers. I accepted it as self-evident that mankind inhabited a cozy automotive universe revolving around a single glowing planet called Detroit; and that the sole automotive life form in it, directly evolved from the Big Bang of Henry Ford’s Model T at the dawn of time, was a turret-topped, pontoon-fendered Midwestern American dream of pep and practicality, the bigger the better; and that no matter how big or how much better, it would be bunted into oblivion after twelve months by the irresistible force of innovation—i.e., a styling face-lift. New Fire, New Flair, New Freedom From Care! Wow!

As an Indian person I read this article with dismay. Why is it so outrageous to expect Micki Hutchinson to pay for a liquor license to the governing body of the area in which she resides? She has no doubt exploited the Indian population and made a profit for many years. The author tells us that Ms. Hutchinson was relying on the words of the commissioner of Indian Affairs, who spoke in 1881. But anyone who knows anything about the history of Indian policy knows that it has often made complete reversals in a matter of months, depending on which way the winds were blowing in Washington.

Anita P. Fineday Cambridge, Mass.

Bordewich laments: “Tribal claims on ancestral bones and artifacts were depleting many of the most valuable anthropological collections in the country.” His choice of the word valuable is revealing. Valuable to whom? I have yet to hear reports of native people desecrating the “valuable” graves of their white neighbors under the guise of anthropology.

Kathy Roth Clarks Summit, Pa.

Mr. Bordewich suggests that Native Americans obtained citizenship with the Dawes Severally Act when, in fact, citizenship was not granted to them until 1924—after they had fought and died in the first of two world wars in which they served our country.

Jim Kent Pompton Plains, NJ.

Fergus Bordewich has the Dawes Act being passed in 1881. Severally was proposed in 1879, but the Dawes General Severally Act was not passed until 1887. Another point: If white folks are suffering due to Indian sovereignty issues, such problems are certainly not universal. The Murray study (1995) in Wisconsin showed that the Oneida Nation generated in service fees and taxes well over $37 million and through operations such as gaming added over $284 million to the economy of the local Brown County. Across the country numerous non-Indians might well be unemployed were it not for tribal gaming facilities.

Robert E. Powless
Professor and Department Head
Dept. of American Indian Studies University of Minnesota at Duluth

When she was orphaned in adolescence in the mid-1850s, Indians in northwestern Missouri offered to adopt my great-grandmother, part Cherokee, blood sister to the Kickapoos (or, perhaps, the Sauks and Foxes). As a result, I suspect, of Baptist religious training, Great-grandmother chose instead to live with a family of ex-slaves until she was taken in later by an aunt and uncle. She viewed the Indian life with respect but chose a path that was more compelling to her.

America must have tens and tens of thousands of similar family stories of connections to native blood and culture. My wife’s grandmother’s grandfather was an Apache scout, straddling the lands and cultures of Mexico, and America, as well as those of the Apaches. It was neither a simple nor easy task—the living at times involving serious violence, at other times whispered secrets. And there were all the difficult border crossings—physical, linguistic, and emotional.

THEY SIT LIKE RUINED VILLAS IN THE distant reaches of mall parking lots, in inner-city neighborhoods and backcountry towns, dressed no longer in bright colors but in gray patches and orange primer, the last Chevelles and Biscaynes, GTOs and Sting Rays, the dying echoes of the stylistic opera of Bill Mitchell. Their torsos long and taut, their hips tight but tense like a sprinter’s calves, their fronts raking forward at an angle, their corners bulging with implied power, these cars survive from the distant side of a cultural watershed. They come from a world before the victory of imports and downsizing. For many, they are the last real American cars.

William L. Mitchell, the head of General Motors design from 1958 to 1977, was responsible for the look of some 72,000,000 automobiles, a volume of product that Ralph Lauren or Raymond Loewy would be proud of and a mass of visual impact on the landscape that was inescapable for anyone who lived in the United States during those decades. He can be considered a major cultural figure.

THE CURRENT VOGUE FOR PUSHING TO SELL AMERICAN AUTOMOBILES ABROAD can certainly be called overdue. No one has seriously tried such a thing in generations. To make inroads on the number of Volkswagens in Mexico or of Austin Minis in France or on the sea of Japanese automobiles in Japan might seem unprecedented. But, actually, it’s just an attempt to recapture former markets.