January 2011

An essential stop is the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s ArchiCenter, housed in the Monadnock Building at 330 South Dearborn Street (312-922-3431). It offers dozens of guided tours, by foot, by bus, or by bike. There is also a Visitors Information Center in the Pumping Station across from the Water Tower on Michigan Avenue.

The best way to visit the Auditorium, which is in a building now housing Roosevelt University at 430 South Michigan, is to attend a performance there so you can enjoy the perfect acoustics of this meticulously restored and stunning concert hall. At the University of Chicago is the Robie House, at 5757 Woodlawn. This is a classic Frank Lloyd Wright building. The Art Institute is famous for its collection of French impressionist paintings, and the Historical Society has excellent exhibits on the city’s past.

by Eric Larrabee; Harper & Row; 723 pages; $25.00.

After a good deal of wrangling between the British and the Americans at a meeting early in 1942, it was decided that instead of two committees directing the war—one here, one in London—there would be just one. Lord Moran, Churchill’s physician, was there, and he knew instantly what this meant: “The Americans have got their way,” he wrote, “and the war will be run from Washington.” So it was, and how it was is the subject of this big and utterly absorbing book.

As the title suggests, FDR dominates the account. Some historians have asserted that the President pretty much left the running of the war to the military; Larrabee believes he took the title of Commander in Chief with the greatest seriousness, and that he was the moving force behind the long process that brought us to victory.

by William Manns, Peggy Shank, and Marianne Stevens; Zon International Publishing Co.; 256 pages; $39.95.

The carousel is the heart of any amusement park. The roller coaster, with its supple geometry, may be more regal, and virtually every other ride is scarier, but it is the flash and holler of the merry-go-round that breathes life into a park.

The title of the book refers to carousel “art,” and so it is: the carved animals—horses, of course, but also lions, elephants, dogs, and even the occasional ostrich—have come to be perceived as American folk sculpture of the first order, and one recently went at auction for fifty-six thousand dollars. This sumptuous book both displays the animals with the gravity fine art demands and shows them in their gritty, punishing working life in parks and fairgrounds at the century’s turn.

by Paul C. Nagel; Oxford University Press; 310 pages; $19.95.

While writing his best-selling biography Descent from Glory: Four Generations of the John Adams Family , Paul Nagel came to realize that the Adams women—minor characters in that book—“deserve at least as much attention from a biographer as their male counterparts.” And unlike most women of their time, they left abundant testimony about their lives and feelings, as they were prodigious correspondents and writers. The author could read their “perceptive observations about human nature … their recipes for making rouge … or for treating piles.” They judged keenly the strengths and weaknesses of males, compared methods of enduring menopause, and shrewdly argued politics. And ever present was their indignation at the way in which their maledominated society treated women. In this admiring and delightful book, Nagel seeks to right the historical balance between male and female Adamses.

I was, I believe, the last person to leave the newsroom of the New York Herald Tribune on April 23, 1966, the day it folded. I walked through the lobby down to West Forty-first Street and then went back upstairs and took home with me the stereotype mats of the last two front pages. No one would see their like again.

But of course I did, and so did everyone else. In Paris. For me, it was seeing a ghost. The breath went out of me the first time I came upon the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune—the survivor, one hundred years old this month.

Who could have guessed? The thing started only because James Gordon Bennett, Jr., was such a wild man. Not everyone believes the story that he suddenly decided to leave New York for Paris in 1877 because of the uproar after he drunkenly broke up a New Year’s party by relieving himself into the grand piano in his fiancee’s Manhattan home. No, some say he did it in the fireplace.

Woodrow Wilson was elected President on November 2, defeating the Republican William Howard Taft; Theodore Roosevelt, who had founded the Progressive or Bull Moose party; and the Socialist candidate, Eugene V. Debs.

The big leak …

There it was in huge black letters across the front page of the December 4, 1941, Chicago Tribune: FDR’S WAR PLANS . The story went on to detail how the President—who had not long before promised never to send American boys to fight in foreign wars—in fact wanted to send five million of them in an expeditionary force against Hitler’s Germany. The leak was so big it might have caused us to lose World War II—and in fact it played a major part in bringing Germany in against us. Who was responsible? Thomas Fleming draws on recently released FBI documents for a fascinating exercise in historical detection.

Who are the Westerners? …

On November 7 and 8 Anne Hutchinson was tried by the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony for “traducing the ministers and their ministry.” At meetings held in her home, Hutchinson had preached that salvation could be earned not by obeying the laws of church and state but by one’s spiritual condition alone. Furthermore, she said, one could communicate directly with God, without the aid of clergy, whom she described as being for the most part misguided anyway. Such notions couldn’t be stomached in a theocracy like Massachusetts.

Elijah Lovejoy, abolitionist editor of the Alton (III.) Observer , was killed on the night of November 7 while defending his printing press from a mob. Lovejoy had already lost numerous presses to vandals who sought to silence him; he was determined to protect the one that arrived early on November 7. Hidden in a massive stone warehouse and guarded by a small volunteer militia, it seemed safe, but by nightfall an angry crowd had gathered nearby. Shots were exchanged, and the roof was torched. When Lovejoy rushed out to stop the fire, he was riddled with bullets and died soon after. No one was ever convicted for his murder. Lovejoy’s death aroused resentment in the North and greatly strengthened the abolitionist cause.

On November 4 Richard Jordan Gatling received Patent Number 36,836 for a rapid-fire gun. Catling’s previous inventions were mostly agricultural ones, including a rice-sowing machine, a wheat drill, and a steam plow, but the advent of the Civil War turned his thoughts to ordnance. Adopting principies used in earlier rapid-fire guns, Gatling created the first weapon that took advantage of modern machine tooling to guarantee reliable fire.

Catling’s purpose in devising the deadly weapon was avowedly benign. Stunned by the number of soldiers who died not from wounds but from illness, he wrote, “It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine—a gun—that would by its rapidity of fire enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred it would to a great extent, supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently exposure to battle and disease would be greatly diminished.”