Revising our century “The mother of us all” Attack on “a most abandoned hypocrite” Plus …
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January 2011
General Custer's widow wrote this about the verge of her husband and his men's end at Little Bighorn: "My husband rode to the top of a promontory and turned around, stood up in his stirrups and waved his hat. Then, they all started forward again and, in a few seconds, they had disappeared, horses, flags, men. And we never saw them again."
Mail sent after him by courier was shortly returned unopened. For he had gone beyond reach of letters. “My thoughts, my dreams, my prayers, are all for you. God bless and keep my darling. Ever your own Libbie,” her last one ended.
To our modern eyes, it sometimes seems as if no woman born in the last century was actually pretty. But that’s not true of Elizabeth Bacon, the daughter of a Monroe, Michigan judge. The pictures show it. She had, we are told, the most wonderful smile, her eyes almost squeezing shut as a happy look came over her face.
by Ben Yagoda, Knopf, 409 pages.
He began his career at the turn of the century doing rope tricks in circuses and on the vaudeville stage. When he died in a plane crash in 1935, he was the most popular man in America, a movie star and a humorist, and a political commentator whose syndicated column reached forty million people every day. “He is what Americans think other Americans are like” was how one observer analyzed his appeal. Others, Yagoda writes, noticed that “the older and more worldly he got, the more socially at ease he was with senators and tycoons, the worse the grammar and spelling in his columns became.”
Rogers’s determinedly folksy style can seem quaint to contemporary readers, but in this lively, well-written, and handsomely illustrated biography, Yagoda explores the ways in which he still serves as an American icon. When at the Democratic Convention in New York last year the actor playing Will Rogers in a musical on Broadway stepped up to the microphone and delivered a speech Rogers had given in 1931, it brought down the house.
In 1973 American Heritage, in a decidedly uneditorial foray, offered its readers two silver Christmas-tree ornaments—a dove and a reindeer—and received a warm enough response to strike off and sell an angel the next year. In 1975 the theme became more specifically antiquarian and American: an extremely good-looking miniature of a turn-of-the-century locomotive weather vane. American Heritage itself no longer issues the ornaments, but they still bear our blessing. This year the ornament is an evergreen holiday wreath ( $65.00 , CODE: DBH-1), crafted, like its predecessors, in sterling and, like them, a handsome memento of the season.
by Oliver E. Allen, Addison-Wesley Publishing, 336 pages.
The Society of Saint Tammany, born in the 1780s, became a machine that dominated New York City politics for a century and a half. By 1857 it had such unprincipled control of local government that the state had to move in to take over the police force; Tammany simply kept up its own police, and they met in open battle. Two decades later Tammany’s Boss Tweed had so mastered graft that a single county courthouse ended up costing nearly twice as much as the federal government had just paid for Alaska. And in the scalding summer of 1900 a Tammany ring including the mayor actually cornered the city’s market on an essential commodity—ice—and instantly doubled the price.
For natives and tourists alike, Christmas in New York is Rockefeller Center. It’s the sixty-foot tree, of course, that draws us, set like a tiara over the ice-skating rink and in front of the tall, strict column of 30 Rockefeller Plaza.
Our offices used to be in an adjoining Rockefeller Center building that offered us an inspiring vista of the tree and the surrounding urban night. Since then we’ve been resigned to Everyman’s view, a neck stretch up from the crowded, chilly streets. Until a breakthrough discovery, that is. You heard it here first. The best place to watch the tree, the skaters, and the weather of a Christmas season at twilight is from the front central windows of Saks Fifth Avenue, which has stood directly across the street since 1924. For an excellent vantage try the tall windows on the second floor in the Donna Karan department. Another good spot is on four, near women’s suits. Climb farther, to the sixth-floor men’s department, and the perspective expands.
by Richard Marius, Knopf, 622 pages.
It’s just the same old familiar story: Paul Alexander, a Greek soldier serving with the Belgian army in the opening weeks of World War I, is grievously wounded but survives to make his way to Bourbonville, Tennessee, where he becomes head of the Dixie Railroad’s car-building shops. Marius’s big, engrossing, and wholly unique novel is not only about the fierce early decades of this century that largely created the nation we inhabit today but about the process through which one becomes American—what is gained and what is lost. Funny, violent, and quiet by turns, the book shines throughout with a poetic sensibility that understands and conveys the current of melancholy that flows beneath the surface of all change.
Elizabeth Deane, executive producer, Shanachie Entertainment Corp., 4 hours.
Geoffrey Ward, a contributing editor of this magazine, won a 1993 Emmy as principal writer for this two-part series, which relates the Kennedy-family story with unsentimental sympathy. The saga has seldom been presented so clearly; it all seems inevitable given Joseph Kennedy’s equally furious ambitions for wealth and for his children’s success. Certainly it makes enthralling television, especially when it focuses on the interrelations of the brothers. The Kennedy Presidency is revealed as a triumph of father and son and as a product and source of rivalry among the three brothers. The story ends with Ted Kennedy’s sacrificial 1980 campaign for President and the speech in which he invoked the legacy of his brothers even as he was freed from it: “The work goes on, the cause endures, and the dream shall never die.”
(Barber, String Quartet, op. 11; Ives String Quartets, Nos. 1 and 2, and Scherzo, “Holding Your Own”) Emerson String Quartet, Deutsche Grammophon 435 864-2.