January 2011

Screening History

“As I now move, graciously I hope, toward the door marked Exit,” writes Gore Vidai, “it occurs to me that the only thing I ever really liked to do was go to the movies.” Now he looks back on a life spent at the movies, with a view to explaining the various ways in which they taught him—and us—the history of the Republic. Along the way he even makes a little screen history himself.

The Booth Obsession

One hundred and twenty-seven years after he fired the shot that drove a ball half an inch wide into Lincoln’s brain, John Wilkes Booth retains nearly as firm a hold on the American imagination as does the man he murdered. When Gene Smith set about writing a book on the Booth family, he found that a regular little industry had grown up around tracing the assassin’s ghostly footsteps from the box at Ford’s Theatre to the Virginia tobacco barn where federal troopers gunned him down. Smith takes us along on that strangely compelling tour.

Plus …

by Barbara MiIo Ohrbach; Clarkson N. Potter, Inc.; 56 pages.

“We all do share a uniquely American spirit that goes back to the very beginning,” writes Barbara MiIo Ohrbach in this jaunty little compendium of Americana. She taps many sources to invoke that spirit: recipes for traditional fare; bright patriotic chromolithographs; the words of famous Americans; lists of state birds, flowers, and trees; and selections from popular songs and poems, among the latter the entire text of the history of America that Winifred Sackville Stoner assembled from clanging couplets, only the first of which is remembered today: “In fourteen hundred ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue…”

by Walter Karp; Franklin Square Press; 279 pages.

Walter Karp died three years ago this July after a brief illness at the age of fifty-five. His passing deprived this magazine’s readers of a fine series called “A Heritage Preserved,” in which he illuminated the nation’s great museums through an examination of the personalities of the men and women who built them. It also deprived this nation of one of the most dedicated defenders of its liberties.

It is in this latter capacity that he wrote most of the essays in this anthology—although, like George Orwell, he felt that everything he wrote was in some sense political, speaking as he did always to the genius of the individual in society, to the interests of the people as opposed to those of the state. He expressed his views with a conviction that could leave one feeling tepid, waffling, and insincere by comparison; yet keeping company with Walter made you proud to be a citizen of this Republic.

Buried Alive The Spirit of America

I read the article about Liederkranz cheese in the May/June issue (“The Business of America”) with dismay, tinged with nostalgia.

I thought I was the only one who missed Liederkranz. I remember when I was a young man, my family would spread newspapers on the dining-room table and we would peel boiled shrimp from a big pot in the middle of the table. Radishes and beer went with the meal, but the essential accompaniments were loaves of crusty bread and Liederkranz.

I’ve tried to substitute other kinds of ripe cheese for Liederkranz, but nothing else works.

I believe, with Proust, that nothing is as evocative as smells, and nothing smells like Liederkranz. It is sad to think that it is lost forever. Could we bring a class action against General Foods?

This splendid sterling goblet, twenty inches across at the top and nearly two feet tall, is the Vanderbitt Cup—a trophy whose name still resonates with the thunder of the powerful, square-snouted machines that pounded over the back roads of Long Island eighty years ago. The first Vanderbitt Cup race was run in 1904, but an American didn’t get his name on the cup until 1908, when George Robertson won it in his Locomobile.

The race became increasingly lethal and petered out around the time of the First World War. Today the cup is in the National Museum of American History, which hopes someday to acquire Robertson’s Locomobile as well. For more on America’s auto-racing past, see the story within.

In the course of this lethal century, death has been rendered increasingly abstract—a choreographed plunge on the television screen, the punch of a red button in a bomber or a computer game, a statistic in a column of print. The constant flicker of electronic sounds and images that surround us constitutes a mental environment as insulating as the buzzing belief systems of animism, Islam, or medieval Christianity.

Miss Beatrice Fairfax:

Dear Madam: I read that you will advise young persons concerning their love affairs. I want your advice. I came from Ireland six months ago. A young man whom I have known since I was a little girl asked me to promise to marry him. … It was breaking my heart to come away, and I loved him dearly when he asked me. So I said yes. He is to come over as soon as he gets enough money. When I reached this country I met another young man at my married sister’s. I have been to some picnics with him, and I see him often, and I think I have fallen in love with him. It will kill my friend in Ireland if I am not true to him, and it will kill me if I have to be. Please advise me.

Nora

In his article about feeding Russia (“In the News,” February/March), Bernard A. Weisberger offers a dramatic account of Herbert Hoover’s brilliant campaign as Secretary of Commerce to combat famine in the newly formed Soviet Union. Although Hoover despised the Russian Revolution, he also understood the danger inherent in resting American security and welfare exclusively on a trial of strength with another nation. He saw food shipments to Russia as a chance to show that “capitalism was on the side of development.” So, he wrote, America could “take the leadership in the reconstruction of Russia when that moment arrives.”

The analogy is important: one doesn’t have to be soft on communism to recognize the importance of doing all we can to ease the Soviet peoples through the current crisis.

But Hoover’s prescience should not be overemphasized. The same Quaker gentleman who fed Russia also deprived a starving Germany of food to coerce unconscionable concessions after World War I. The result was the “turnip winter,” and a level of misery which Hitler freely exploited en route to his eleven million votes.