January 2011

Five years before the 1876 Centennial Exposition celebrated the nation’s confidence in its technological prowess with towering displays of manufactured goods, a group of Philadelphia photographers, lithographers, and printers produced an elegant, leather-bound album paying tribute to local industry. They called it Gallery of Arts and Manufacturers of Philadelphia , and they pasted in fifty-eight black-and-white photographs, each mounted in a lithographed frame on its own gilt-edged page. Merchants no doubt paid handsomely to be included in the album, and they probably displayed it in their stores and in hotel lobbies, a proud exemplar of the business directory—a form that began in the eighteenth century with simple printed lists of tradesmen. By the 1820s these lists had evolved into pocket-sized, sparsely illustrated books, replaced, twenty years later, by individual lithographed sheets enlivened with pictures of fashionable shoppers and horse-drawn carriages. By 1856 this form of advertising was well enough established for J. H.

Forty years ago, on August 6 and 9, 1945, American B-29s dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, killing at least 110,000 and possibly 250,000 Japanese, and speeding that nation’s surrender. During four years of bitter fighting, World War II had become for the United States virtually total war, in which morality had slowly been redefined to allow the intentional bombing of civilians.

Ever since, however, use of these atomic weapons has raised troubling questions about American ethics during the war. Yet lost in the concern is a related question: Why didn’t the United States also initiate gas warfare? Did an older sense of morality, rooted in the decades before Pearl Harbor, bar this form of war even as other moral constraints eroded?

It’s been a long time since anyone put in a good word, or in fact any kind of word at all, for Franklin Pierce. I am a New Hampshire man who lives not far from the house where the 14th president was born and who therefore grew up, so to speak, beneath his paling shadow. From such a position I would like to take this opportunity to rearrange the perspectives now distorting or, indeed, obscuring the nature of his career. Words from Samuel Butler will serve as a text for my remarks. On observing a pipe organ built by the local carpenter, he said to his skeptical companion, “My boy, you must not judge by the work, but by the work in connection with the surroundings.”

Technology’s history…

“If you scratch an American you will find, somewhere beneath the surface, a person shaped by technology, a person who is living in a mainly technological society. … In dealing with technology’s history, we are dealing with an American characteristic.” So says Thomas P. Hughes, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who is among the most respected and most eloquent of the growing band of historians that is focusing on the role of technological change in human affairs. In a lively interview, Hughes reveals what he has learned in the course of exploring an aspect of our past whose importance is only lately being fully realized.

The man who got it all right …

I found “The Golden Age of Advertising” (April/May) fascinating, but you omitted what to me was the most fascinating part of the advertisements—the coupon.

I have the year pinpointed: 1929. My parents had moved from Somerville, Massachusetts, to Frostproof, Florida, in 1925, just in time to lose almost everything when the land boom collapsed. We lived in five different houses during the next four years, finally settling in a frame house across from the school where Mother taught. The house had a two-room apartment and a front bedroom that could be rented out.

In our town, the oldest pioneer settlement on the West Coast, the article “Ten Books That Shaped the American Character” by Jonathan Yardley (April/May issue) was enjoyed by many more people than just local subscribers to American Heritage. To celebrate National Library Week in April, we used the article as a theme for a display in the main reading room and pulled the books chosen by Yardley. Among the forty-two works cited, we had all but Mason Locke Weems’s The Life and Memorable Actions of George Washington . For a library in the Far West, our collection is quite old; it has been expanding since the library was founded in 1892. Many patrons browsed through and borrowed from the display, and some took the time to read Yardley’s article. Many thanks for a good idea.

When Horatio Alger had one of his characters say, “I was lucky enough to invent a machine, which has brought me in a great deal of money” (“Ten Books That Shaped the American Character”), he certainly struck a responsive chord in many a youngster at the turn of the century.

New inventions were indeed creating fortunes, and it was the ambition of all of us to “get a patent” and make ourselves rich, rich, rich. It mattered little what the patent was for, and nobody had any idea that it was not the product but the process that was patented, nor did we have the slightest idea how anything was manufactured or distributed. All that mattered was to invent something and get that almighty patent. Even “Patent Applied For,” which appeared on many articles, would have been acceptable.

Whenever two or three of us got together to make our own telegraph set from a spool of wire wound around a nail and activated by a bent key cut from a tin can, we would discuss how, someday, we would make a machine that could transmit without wires. Or send pictures, or “somp’n like that, you know.”

I was surprised that you printed a letter in the correspondence column in the February/March 1985 issue with the story about Booz bottles dating from the “log cabin” campaign of 1840.1 thought that the McKearins [Helen and George S., American Glass , 1941] had laid that story to rest many years ago.

There were log-cabin flasks made for that campaign with the slogans “North Bend” and “Tippecanoe” on them, but the Booz bottles, which are in the shape of a small house but not a log cabin, date from the 1860s.

Congratulations upon your beautiful April/May issue, with special commendation for the George Inness reproductions and the nostalgic retrospectives on early advertising and cable cars.

Greatly as I enjoyed Mr. Yardley’s speculations on literary influences upon the daily life of Americans, I fear he was born too late to have experienced the bouleversement that shook us in the teens and early twenties, when the staid Victorian era came to its rather abrupt end, a change in which both Sherwood Anderson and H. L. Mencken played a large part. I am sorry that the recollection of that sweeping wind, which altered the American atmosphere, seems to have faded to such a degree.

Delicious, too, was another glimpse of Gluyas Williams with Robert Benchley’s very perceptive piece on times of trouble and the derby-hatted bystander. Too bad that you did not top it off with the famous and deeply moving lines of W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” on the same theme:

If Gene Smith could have gone back to the New York City of 1932—as he wanted to do in “I Wish I’d Been There,” December 1984—he might have included in his tour a trip by subway (for a nickel) to the South Bronx. Instead of the burned-out ruins that exist today, he would have found solid lower-middle-class apartments that would have been serviceable for another hundred years or so with proper upkeep. On his subway trip he need not have had any fears for his personal safety, either from fellow passengers or from neglected maintenance of the track and equipment.

I am curious about where Mr. Smith got the idea that the food in most restaurants was awful. As I remember, it was generally pretty good, and we know that it was prepared by a cook or chef in the kitchen—not prepackaged. In addition, I’m sure the service was better then, and that there were likely to be linen tablecloths and napkins and substantial cutlery on the tables.