January 2011

There is an old saying about the transitory nature of American fortunes: shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations. As Donald Trump has discovered, they can vanish a lot faster than that. But Trump is not the record holder for financial plummeting (at least not yet). That dubious honor almost certainly belongs to Charles M. Schwab.

Schwab had all the attributes needed for success and then some. Unfortunately he also had a fondness for the good life that drained even his formidable resources, a love of gambling in both casinos and stock markets, and an unshakable belief that the best was yet to come. It was the glory and the tragedy of Charlie Schwab that he was equally a Horatio Alger hero and WiIkins Micawber.

One of my favorite quotations from Finley Peter Dunne’s inimitable bartender “Mr. Dooley” occurs when his friend Mr. Hennessy walks into the saloon just after the 1898 liberation of Cuba from Spain. “I see where th’ war is over,” says Hennessy, beaming. “The part y’see in the picture-papers is over,” says Dooley. “The tax collector will continue his part with relentless fury.”

Ah, that shrewd Mr. Dooley! I think about him in the aftermath of victory in the Persian Gulf when I read that the House of Representatives has just authorized spending $42.6 billion for the war—which is only an initial estimate of its cost. So, the Internal Revenue Service will indeed carry on with its part of the affair for a long time.

The pill is sweetened by the pledges of various allies, since the start of the war, to contribute $43.9 billion in cash. That only means, however, that German, Japanese, Saudi Arabian, and other tax collectors will be furiously playing their roles too.

by Woody Guthrie, edited by Dave Marsh and Harold Leventhal; HarperCollins; 259 pages; $29.95.

“I hope you never do call me another Walt Whitman or another Will Rogers. I ain’t neither one,” Woody Guthrie wrote in his 1946 datebook. This collection of his unpublished writings shows how true Guthrie’s statement was. The folk singer was sui generis , an unmistakable voice that was equally passionate and irreverent.

by David W. Dunlap; Rizzoli; 327 pages; $65.00.

This big, handsome book walks the reader along New York City’s famous boulevard, past and present, slighting
almost no building from Bowling Green to 230th Street. It is an elegant cataloguing of Broadway—and, by extension, American urban architecture- since the time of the Dutch. The six hundred photographs in On Broadway are arranged sequentially as the avenue winds its way uptown. The only way to squeeze in so many facades is to fill the margins with small likenesses of the buildings, as in a good travel guide, but lush pages are set aside for picture profiles of the Woolworth or Flatiron or City Hall buildings. Dunlap, a New York Times writer on real estate, has been chronicling Broadway’s changes with his camera for more than a dozen years. Out of respect for the older pictures, he has shot his newer photographs in matching black-and-white.

The tyranny of the lawn Have our manners gone to hell? Eakins Plus …

Each summer finds millions of Americans locked in a costly and frustrating battle to remake their personal patch of the environment. They want soft, close-cropped grass, uniformly green, unsullied by dandelions, shaded by trees. But where did this ideal come from? Did anybody ever say this was how a lawn had to look? It turns out somebody did, and not that long ago.

Not really, says John Kasson, who has studied the career of what we know as “good manners” and finds they are a very recent thing, a commodity manufactured to meet the needs of an industrial age. But now that the Industrial Revolution is over, we may need them more than ever—but for different reasons. Accompanying the story, a selection of excerpts from etiquette books over the years will teach the reader how to greet a lady on the street, how to use a calling card properly, and (in one very early, rudimentary example) how to walk.

The two nicknames that you listed for Rochester, New York ("City Built by Hands” and “Snapshot City"), never really caught on. But the town does have an official nickname with an interesting history. After the Erie Canal was completed in 1825, Rochester, with water power from the falls of the Genesee River, became one of the largest grainmilling centers in the world and called itself “Flour City.” After that industry declined, Rochester became better known for its parks and horticulture businesses. Not wanting to throw away a perfectly good nickname, city fathers simply changed the spelling to the current “Flower City.”

What a delight to see the Cadillac V-16 on your April cover! I once owned two of these noble automobiles, and to this day I regret having parted with them! From this perspective I trust you’ll indulge my picking a couple of nits.

First, there were no 1929 V-IGs, contrary to your caption. The ’29s were all 341 (denoting cubic inches of engine displacement) Series V-Ss. The V-16 452 Series was introduced in January 1930.

Second, your index page describes the car as a “roadster.” Tsk, tsk! Roadsters were open models— sans roll-up windows or landau irons, which this car obviously has—and their folddown tops were of completely different shape and construction from that in your photo. Your cover car is a “convertible coupe.”

These lapses notwithstanding, it’s a very attractive cover for which your art director should be complimented. Perhaps in a future issue he’ll show us the entire car.

I was present at the auction of the Gifford Oborne estate in Morristown, New Jersey, on June 10, 1989, when the Cadillac was sold. Even a Packard man such as myself would testify to the fact that as good as it looks on your magazine cover, it looks even better when viewed in person. I’d like to see more articles in your magazine relating to the automotive industry in American history. In particular, the decade of the 1930s is of interest, since we were building the best cars we would ever make at a time when people were least able to afford them.