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January 2011
No economy in history has produced as many fortunes as the American economy has. Many of them came from the country’s great industries, such as railroads (Cornelius Vanderbilt), automobiles (Henry Ford), and computers (Bill Gates). Others came from real estate (John Jacob Astor) and Hollywood (Steven Spielberg), and still others from banking (J. P. Morgan) and the stock market (Charles Merrill). Surprisingly few have come from passive investments, though Warren Buffett’s altogether impressive $43 billion fortune did.
The editors are full of parental pride just now, as recent weeks have seen the publication of three fine books that found their genesis as articles in this magazine. Race of the Century: The Heroic True Story of the 1908 New York to Paris Auto Race , by Julie Fenster (Crown, 400 pages, $25.00), tells the story of an enterprise that in its day was roughly equivalent to a kayak race across the Atlantic. The project was an automobile run from Times Square west to Paris, through a whole palette of obstacles: American prairie; Russian steppes; China; the Bering Strait (the occasional boat was briefly allowed); and no good roads anywhere outside midtown Manhattan. Fenster tells her story with zest and humor and an absolute command of the formidable mechanical challenges but never loses sight of the real courage that fueled the project.
“When I say that for more than seventy years... American Gothic has represented the nation, I mean that, like the American flag, the bald eagle, and the Statue of Liberty (perhaps the only national symbols that continue to surpass it in circulation), it has not only reflected but helped create American identity.” In American Gothic: A Life of America’s Most Famous Painting (W. W. Norton, 160 pages, $21.95), Stephen Biel traces the fluctuating career of Grant Wood’s stolid farmer and his wife (or daughter? This is a debate of more than 50 years’ standing). The couple was first seen as a satire on small-town narrowness, but the intervening years wore the humor away, and in time they evolved to represent granitic national virtues through the same mysterious process by which the Midwest came to embody all that is wholesome in America. Biel’s account of this Iowa apotheosis is shrewd, lively, and highly entertaining.
In our February/March 2005 issue, Ellen Feldman wrote about the controversial career of The Diary of Anne Frank after its American publication. She had steeped herself in the subject because she was at work on an audacious novel that has just been published: The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank (Norton, 261 pages, $23.95). In 1944 Anne Frank wrote that the 17-year-old Peter, who was waiting out the fraught days with her in the Amsterdam house where they were hiding from the Nazis, told her that if he got out alive, he would reinvent himself. In this historical (or alternate-historical) novel he does, becoming a prosperous American in the 1950s. But of course he is carrying an immense burden of memory, and how he manages to bear this weight through the sunny countryside of Eisenhower’s America is explored in a novel whose sensational theme never tarnishes the passion and delicacy with which Feldman tells her gripping story.
In a curious way, the grandeur of George Washington’s reputation can obscure how great he actually was. A splendid reminder of Washington’s true stature, David McCullough’s 1776 (Simon & Schuster, 400 pages, $32.00) follows him through that momentous year. The book opens with the American army driving the British out of Boston and quickly brings that army down to New York, where calamity upon calamity awaits it. Full of the sound and color of the era and deeply suspenseful even though we know how the story ends, this swift, bracing book reminds Americans that while our founding myth is as full of daring and impossibilities as that of Rome, it isn’t a myth at all.
Of our twentieth-century Presidents, William Howard Taft (1909-13) may be the least remembered, and among First Ladies, his wife, Helen Herron Taft, is also a shadowy figure. Yet she has caught the attention of the historian Carl Sferrazza Anthony, and in Nellie Taft: The Unconventional First Lady of the Ragtime Era (William Morrow, 534 pages, $29.95) he presents an appealingly original woman with a lifelong sense of adventure.
In 1900 Nellie took up surfing in Hawaii en route to the Philippines, where her husband had just been appointed governor. When she invited Filipinos to social events, she deflected criticism with a sentiment remarkable for its time and place: “Neither politics nor race should influence our hospitality in any way.” Her strong political instincts helped propel her husband toward the Presidency, and after his victory she broke with tradition by insisting on sitting beside him in the carriage that took them to the inauguration.
Every would-be Shaker collector should view the order’s work firsthand and invest in a few good illustrated reference books such as Shaker Design , by June Sprigg. John T. Kirk’s The Shaker World: Art, Life, Belief is a particularly ambitious work that’s out of print but, as this is written, still available from the Shaker Museum and Library in Old Chatham, New York (
The Communal Shaker Order included master woodworkers whose classic nineteenth-century designs anticipated modernist attitudes by a hundred years or more. Their furnishings, “plain without superfluity,” perfectly suit the precisionist paintings and photographs in which Charles Sheeler depicted them around 1930, and their reductive spirit suffuses the superb Danish furniture that began to appear after World War II. The Shakers marketed some items to outsiders through catalogues, and their oval storage boxes proved highly popular. Brother Isaac Newton Youngs noted in a journal that his New Lebanon, New York, community, the one that made the largest number, built 3,560 in 1836 alone. Production there, which had begun in the 1790s, continued through the early 1940s, but by then the group had dwindled considerably, and hired hands made boxes that were sold through a gift shop.