January 2011

I‘d long suspected that colleagues in the profession shared my illicit interest in historical movies; their detailed contempt, like mine, betokened intimate familiarity. My recent experiences as editor of Past Imperfect, a collection of essays on Hollywood’s interpretation of history, have confirmed my suspicions. The indictment—and it is a broad one—can now be unsealed: Historians love movies about the past.

Here’s the evidence: The historians I approached to write the essays were busy folk, and even before I could explain the project, many of them recited, mantralike, a litany of crushing professional obligations or publication deadlines. But as the idea began to seep through the protective verbiage, they conceded its appeal. A few did decline at this stage, but always reluctantly; nearly everyone else, with salacious alacrity, agreed to do an essay.

A few years ago, I served as one of the historical advisers for the movie Glory, which told the story of the 54th Massachusetts Colored Infantry and its brave and calamitous attack on Fort Wagner in the summer of 1863. This sort of consultation makes for a very agreeable job: You get paid to show off, while never suffering the faintest pinch of real responsibility.

William Davis, a cabinet-maker, left his home near Great Salt Lake in the Utah Territory in the mid-1870s and headed for Northern California, a fast-growing region where he hoped to earn up to six dollars a day by adapting his expertise to ship carpentry. He made the 800-mile trek with his wife, Isabelle, and three small children, the youngest of whom was just six weeks old.

After working briefly at the Mare Island Navy Yard, north of San Francisco, Davis left his family in nearby Vallejo while he made a brief trip into San Francisco in search of an even better job. Unfortunately he chose to quench his thirst after the journey at a waterfront saloon in the area known as the Barbary Coast. His family didn’t see him again for nearly eight years.

People familiar with the dangers along the wharves speculated on his probable fate, but it wasn’t confirmed until he reappeared several years later. After passing out from either liquor or a drug, he had awakened aboard a ship bound for Europe by way of Cape Horn.

Mark Tansey is a definitively post-modernist painter. His pictures stand at two removes from nature; not art but art history (or art theory) is his subject. Tansey deals in theories and notions, presenting them with the sort of sharp irony found in editorial-page cartoons. At the major Tansey exhibition at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts last year, the most striking and I think best example of the painter’s work on display allegorizes a world historical event in the annals of modern art. The picture, an oil painting dating from 1984, is called Triumph of the New York School. It records a thrilling moment presumed to have taken place in the late 1940s, the moment New York supplanted Paris as the art capital of the world and home of the international avant-garde.

For a sense of the continuity of the of the terrorist tradition in America, consider this actual sequence of events: The FBI smashes a dead-serious plot to overthrow the federal government and reveals that, for more than a year, the right-wing militias involved were undergoing army-style training, fired up by inflammatory talk radio. They planned to use their bombs, rifles, and machine guns to wage guerrilla warfare on American cities, and they claimed friends and allies in government and the military. They aimed, in one reporter’s words, to ”bomb selected buildings, seize public utilities, blast bridges, terrorize Jews, appropriate Federal Reserve gold, assassinate fourteen Congressmen, and set up a dictatorship.” The goal: to remove all liberal and anti-Christian forces from government, not least the liberal President and his activist wife.

This happened in January 1940.

I volunteered to be an air liaison officer, an ALO or forward air controller, with the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) for a number of reasons—high among them the division’s legendary status. With a tradition going back to the Civil War, this Army unit had been in the D-day landing, the airborne assault toward Arnhem, and had ended the Second World War in possession of Berchtesgaden. The 101st had fought well in Vietnam, too, but it was my boyhood memories fueled by movies like The Longest Day , A Bridge Too Far , and Battleground that drew me to it. Battleground probably represented the height of the division’s fame. This was about the outfit that, cut off at Bastogne in the winter of 1944, had stood and held on until relieved, thus helping derail the last German offensive in the West. In fact, all the missions of the 101st seemed to have the same theme: hold until relieved.

What I’m about to record is true, including the parts I’ve forgotten. Seeing the movie Quiz Show disinterred a memory almost half a century old. On the way back there, though, I must pause first at 1958, when Charles Van Doren was holding forth on the tube and piling up all that money on the “Twenty-One” show. Being something of a snob at the time, I hadn’t acquired the habit of watching television. Besides, I was a book editor, and my evenings were spent reading manuscripts.

For general information on Arizona call 800-842-8257. Country Walkers (800-464-9255) schedules several weeks on the Sonoran Desert in spring, to catch the best of the bloom, and in November, when a wide variety of birds make their winter migration. It offers other walks in settings from Cape Breton Island to Costa Rica and Burgundy. To minimize surprises, you should ask lots of questions when planning your trip and know that within reason you can modify hikes to suit your requirements. Other walking-tour groups include Progressive Travels (800-245-2229) and The Earth Is Yours (708-869-5745).

While reading up on Arizona before making a trip there, I came upon the following remark by the English author J. B. Priestley: “There is no history here because history is too recent. This country is geology by day and astronomy at night.” Given the title of this column, I briefly wondered if I’d chosen the right destination, but after it was all over, I could see exactly what Priestley meant. What he took away from a winter’s stay on a ranch near Wickenburg just sixty years ago (and wrote about in Midnight on the Desert) still applies.

In the grim aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, the historian’s antennae quickly picked up signals from the White House and Congress of an intent to use some recent history to justify changes in the government’s rules of engagement with violence-prone organizations. Assorted leaders, starting with the president, promised to seek stronger powers for federal law enforcers, particularly the FBI, to penetrate clandestine antigovernment groups and thwart bombers before they strike. Behind the rhetoric was a claim that the Bureau’s “domestic intelligence” functions had been too sharply cut back by an excess of zeal for civil liberties in the post-Watergate atmosphere of the mid-1970s. Now, the argument runs, clear and present danger demands a restoration of balance.