January 2011

We were what we wore

Clothes have always been about more than staying warm and dry, and their progress in the New World has been as dramatic and unpredictable as the history of the United States itself. Beginning with Puritan efforts to ban fancy dress, ending with the string bikini, and in between showing the impact that mass production of garments had on the whole society, Ink Mendelsohn traces the career of clothing in America —and finds herself examining the fabric of our civilization. The story is accompanied by a portfolio of photographs in which Anne Hollander looks at what American men from Buffalo Bill to Marion Brando were wearing, and tells what they meant by it.

How the U.S. helped industrialize Russia

When my daughter is old enough to ask about Vietnam, my answer to the question “What should we tell our children about Vietnam?” will include many of the points assembled in Bill McCloud’s article. If she asks what I was doing then, I will tell her that I never fought there. Instead, in the early 1970s, I was having the educational time of my life in college, with a comfortably high draft-lottery number in the 300s. None of my friends or acquaintances went off to war.

Rather than asking his students to digest platitudes about Vietnam, Bill McCloud might ask them to imagine, for a moment, their feelings as Americans if, in 1860, England, taking advantage of internal friction in the United States, had recognized an arbitrary political line dividing North and South, and then, for its own reasons, sent its army to fight for the Confederacy, which it intended to influence as a “client state” after the war. The students could then fit in the facts about Vietnam: how the 1954 Geneva accords by which France at last relinquished colonial claims to Indochina established a temporary military demarcation line as a prelude to national elections to be held within two years; how the United States could not endure the realization that its own World War 11 ally, Ho Chi Minh, the most dynamic, popular politician in Indochina, would easily win the election; how the United States then converted the temporary demarcation line into an artificial boundary between North and South; and how everything else followed.

It was heartening to learn of Bill McCloud and his successful efforts to obtain comments from a broad spectrum of leaders and decision makers of the Vietnam era. Personal reminiscences play an important role in our understanding of past events; our Civil War produced an abundance of such writings. But scholars are well aware of how selective and biased memories can be. Although much has been written about Vietnam, it is early yet for serious writers to have advanced much beyond the level of popular history. True scholarly research and writing must await a later generation; perhaps someone from Bill McCloud’s class.

Martin Van Buren had his eye on the presidency for most of his political career, and he managed to pave the way to the White House door first for Andrew Jackson and then for himself. His son John was evidently less ambitious. While at Yale the boy gambled and caroused and made a general nuisance of himself. But John managed to graduate and get admitted to the Albany bar; by 1845, he was the New York State attorney general; and he was known as one of the best orators of his day. None of this was enough to satisfy the dynastic yearnings of his father, however, so, in 1858, the 75-year-old former president sat down to give his son some advice.

This photograph is most interesting for what it doesn’t tell,” writes Mark E. Dixon of Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, about this handsome but seemingly wholly unremarkable middle-class quartet. When it was taken in late 1893, Dixon continues, “the two men had been released from the Illinois State Penitentiary at Joliet; one had originally been sentenced to death.

“They were convicted of the broaddaylight slaying of a carpenter and Civil War veteran, Thomas Edmonson, on the streets of Good Hope, Illinois. In front is Robert E. Gick, a keeper of horses and the man who shot Edmonson with a .32-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. According to newspaper accounts, he killed Edmonson in a rage (and after several glasses of ‘cider’) because the carpenter had publicly criticized him for visiting a prostitute. Gick was sentenced to hang.

Washington Goes to War The American Automobile Hoover Dam Chicago Architecture, 1872–1922 From Front Porch to Back Seat

By David Brinkley; Alfred A. Knopf; 286 pages.

Of the world’s major capitals, Washington, D.C., was long considered an incongruity —a provincial Southern town wrapped in the sleepy embrace of its single client, the U.S. government. In David Brinkley’s Washington Goes to War , we are given the city in World War Il at the moment of its sudden and dramatic transformation into a world center.

Brinkley’s voice and eye inform his book, although the first person is never used. Still, when he describes an event as seen by “a young reporter,” we know who he means. His tone is in turn funny, ironic, and once in a while angry, and his words march in a cadence that has become familiar to television viewers. It is an engaging, not intrusive, sense of the author that we find here.

Your interesting article on Vietnam (“What Should We Tell Our Children about Vietnam?,” May/June) unfortunately contained opinions from some who should never be allowed in the same forum with our heroes. A silent rage still exists within those of us who worked for months on end with the wounded in their agony. Our rage is directed against the press who unfairly manipulated public opinion.

By Yasutoshi Ikuta; Chronicle Books; 120 pages.

“Columbia cars are BUILT in Hartford, Connecticut, a city where close caliper machine work has been a habit for 70 years.” That’s the entire selling copy on a 1910 Columbia Motor Car Company ad, and it doesn’t smack much of the bravado and eroticism that would be used to sell automobiles as the century wore on. But there are no calipers in the picture that accompanies this severe information. Instead a distinguished older couple hurries down the steps of a house a little larger than the Executive Mansion to greet the pretty young woman who has just arrived. Her young man is handing her down; the chauffeur is touching his visor in salute; and the agent of all this joy, the Columbia that brought them, stands in the drive, ablaze with polished brass and crimson paint and casual power. The Columbia ad team knew they weren’t just selling transportation.