Cabin architecture was striking for its roughness and impermanence. It was a simple style of building, suitable to a migratory people with little wealth, few possessions and small confidence in the future. It was also an inconspicuous structure, highly adapted to a violent world where a handsome building was an invitation to disaster. In that respect, cabin architecture was an expression of the insecurity of life in the northern borders. The cabin was also the product of a world of scarcity. It was a style of vernacular architecture created by deep and grinding poverty through much of north Britain during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In that barren country, cabins made of earth and stone were an adaptation to an environment in which other building materials were rare.
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January 2011
"The two great truths in the world are the Bible and Grecian architecture.” This is what Nicholas Biddle believed and what he published in his magazine, Portfolio, in 1814. Although we remember him today as the director of the Second Bank of the United States who fought with President Andrew Jackson over the role of a central bank, Biddle deserves to be best known as the evangelist for Greek Revival architecture in America. In this endeavor, he was far more successful; the evidence is his impeccable estate, Andalusia on the Delaware River just above Philadelphia, which still survives.
The Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village are open year-round except for Christmas and New Year’s Day. During the holidays there are special events, including a magnificent 185Os Christmas dinner in the Eagle Tavern, one of the first buildings Ford collected. For information, call 313-271-1620. Dearborn is full of good hotels, but you should stay if you can at the Dearborn Inn (313-271-2700). It was built by Ford himself in 1931 and was recently handsomely refurbished by the Marriott Corporation. The staff is universally friendly and helpful, and behind it is a semicircle of reproductions of houses of famous Americans, also built by Ford. If you plan in advance, you can stay in the cottage of Edgar Allan Poe, or the big, formal house that Patrick Henry inhabited after he got liberty instead of death.
The first American tried for war crimes, Henry Wirz, was hanged on November 10 to the sound of four Union companies chanting, “Remember Andersonville!”
Whether or not the prison was viciously run, as charged in Wirz’s trial, Union soldiers at Andersonville, Georgia, certainly suffered there. Under Gen. John H. Winder and, later, under Wirz, crowding, dysentery, scurvy, and malnutrition killed upwards of thirteen thousand men. There was little protection from the weather, and the single stream running through the camp was a foul morass. “The swamp now is fearful,” one inmate told his diary, “water perfectly reeking with prison offal and poison. Still men drink it and die.”
By war’s end the camp crowded 31,678 prisoners onto twenty-six and a half acres. The guards, at one point outnumbered twelve to one and suffering themselves from measles, left the prisoners to police or rob one another.
On November 4 Americans went to the polls to choose between a third term for Franklin Roosevelt and a first one for Wendell Willkie. Willkie, the upset-nominee of the Republicans, who’d changed parties only the year before, faced a President who four years earlier had beaten Alf Landon by the greatest margin in U.S. history. Yet the margin was only 52 to 48 percent in the final Gallup poll. Willkie crossed the country, charging that Roosevelt had signed “secret agreements” and had left the country’s defense ill prepared. Roosevelt began the campaign by not campaigning, appearing at news briefings instead, and rarely mentioning his opponent by name. In the final six weeks, however, he entered the race in earnest, declaring famously, “I will not pretend that I find this an unpleasant duty. I am an old campaigner, and I love a good fight.”
Willkie appealed across parties, as a Republican and former New Dealer and as an internationalist and civil libertarian. He forced a pledge from Roosevelt that the United States would have no part in the war “unless attacked.”
The power in New York City went at 5:28 P.M. on November 9. In the Time and Life Building reporters finished their afternoon’s stories by the light of burning grease pencils. Customers caught in a dark midtown crystal shop were afraid to move for fear of breaking something expensive. Trapped in an elevator high inside the Empire State Building, a group of men sang and joked for more than five hours. Hundreds of New Yorkers took over intersections to direct confused traffic. According to one columnist, the first to produce flashlights in the crisis were the city’s prostitutes. There were only ninety-six arrests citywide during the thirteen-hour blackout, and just two deaths: one heart attack from climbing stairs and one fall down a dark stairwell.
Even in these days of nine-hour airplane journeys and instant telephony, the United States and Eastern Europe are very far apart. When it comes to the places and shapes of nations and states east of Germany and west of Russia, there occurs in the eyes of most Americans an instant blur. There are obvious reasons for this. One of them is the plain reality of perspective. When Americans look across the Atlantic, the shapes of the British Isles, of France, of Scandinavia, of the Iberian and Italian peninsulas are recognizable and familiar, even in these times of a scandalously neglected education in geography.
As one of the most imaginative historians in contemporary America, David Hackett Fischer has produced a work that may put his fellow scholars’ teeth on edge. Historians, rather conservative in temperament, are reluctant converts when their choice ideas are thrown into question. Yet Fischer’s latest book, Albion‘s Seed: Four British Folkways in America will fascinate them, as well as the general reading public. Lucid, dramatic, and always entertaining, the thick, handsomely illustrated volume may safely be called a modern classic, and comparisons to Tocqueville are inevitable. The historian Gordon Wood declared that the Brandeis University professor has delivered a “revisionist blockbuster” that “has uncovered America’s political and cultural roots in the countryside of Britain.” The title suggests as much. Albion was the ancient Greek name for the island.
During the last week in June, I listened on cable television to the great House debate on the proposed constitutional amendment to ban “desecration” of the American flag. (In case you’ve forgotten, it got 254 votes in favor to 177 against, 46 short of the required two-thirds majority.) It sent me back to the books to find out how this particular national symbol had been doing all its long years of being unprotected. And one of the very first things I found was a complaint from a Massachusetts representative that what was “talked about as though … a rag, with certain stripes and stars upon it, tied to a stick and called a flag, was a wizard’s wand.”
This was a Yankee conservative named Josiah Quincy speaking, early in the 1800s. He was choleric at the failure of the national government to provide a strong navy, without which the American flag offered no protection to New England’s merchant ships. “You have a piece of bunting upon a staff, and call it a flag,” Quincy expostulated, “but if you have no maritime power to maintain it, you have a name and no reality; you have the shadow without the substance.”