January 2011

Dr. Barnes’s article “How to Raise a Family on $500 a year” in the December issue directed my attention to a book in my library with quite the same subject. Copyrighted 1887 (some six years before the Chicago World’s Fair and the work done on the model home by Katharine Davis), Family Living on $500 a Year by a Juliet Corson and published by Harper and Brothers, Franklin Square. New York, is a Daily Reference-Book for Young and Inexperienced Housewives.”

The preface’reveals that the book is based on a series of articles in Harper’s Bazar and certainly reveals a much less austere diet for the middle-class family of that time. A few figures and comments, liberally taken from this text, show that these families were not quite at the “boiled cabbage, bare existence status revealed in your article. Excerpts follow:

“1. The average income of the prosperous American household of the medium range of intelligence and culture will be from $1,500 to $2,000 a year.

James Thomas Flexner’s article entitled “The Miraculous Care of Providence” in your February/March issue leaves us former Louisvillians little choice.

The article states that “Braddock’s mission was to march from Virginia through the wilderness to the falls of the Ohio (now Pittsburgh). …” The city formerly named “Louisville” was established at the Falls of the Ohio in 1779 by General George Rogers Clark, who arrived by canoe from Pittsburgh, a city established where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers join to form the Ohio.

We will not permit mundane geography to conflict with the accuracy of AMERICAN HERITAGE . The most attractive alternative is to change our name to Pittsburgh. In return we expect AMERICAN HERITAGE to arrange for the immediate transfer of both the Mellon and Carnegie fortunes to help our local economy.

So, at the very moment when the West is blueprinting an economy which must be based on the sustained, permanent use of its natural resources, it is also conducting an assault on those resources with the simple objective of liquidating them. The dissociation of intelligence could go no farther, but there it is—and there is the West yesterday, today, and forever. It is the Western mind stripped to the basic split. The West as its own worst enemy. The West committing suicide.

—Bernard De Voto “The West Against Itself” Harper’s Magazine, January, 1947

A Wyoming rancher named Baskett took a ride across the open range one day in 1920 with a man who was looking for oil. “The oilman showed me all those synclines and domes he’d like to drill through,” the rancher recalled years later. “We’d had plenty of snow that winter and the grass was real good. So I said to the oil man, ‘If I might have the surface of all these lands, you may have all the oil that lies beneath, and we would both be happy.’”

It is early on a June morning in 1934. My father has taken me by trolley car and on foot to the shore of the Hudson River under the new George Washington Bridge. The great armada of the U.S. Navy—eighty warships strong—rides at anchor in mid-river after a month-long passage from the West Coast via the Panama Canal. I am interested only in the biplane I see perched on the f oredeck of the battleship directly opposite us. My father explains that the plane is launched by catapult from the ship and it can return by landing in the water and being craned back up on board. I listen, then turn to watch a man farther down the strand who is repeatedly tossing a stick into the river for his German shepherd to retrieve. So much for my first memory of a historic event.

In 1911 Juliette “Daisy” Low taught her first seven female Girl Guides to raise chickens and to spin wool. Now their 2,500,000 descendants, called Scouts, can learn to change the washer on a faucet, rewire a lamp, style hair, take a photograph, clean and set the gap on a lawn-mower spark plug, or recaulk a window. They learn to “relate to others,” participate in groups in a “personalized way,” and “work through tensions.” Gone is the loyal, honorable, obedient, thrifty, pure, courteous friend to all and to animals. She has been replaced by an honest, fair, helpful when needed, cheerful, friendly, considerate, wise user of resources, protector and improver of the world, and respecter of herself and others. Today she wears green polyester instead of blue cotton. But some things never change, and a Girl Scout is as prepared today as she was seventy years ago.

Roadside America found a sardonic and poetic observer in Vladimir Nabokov. Here, in a passage from his 1955 novel Lolita, the obsessed Humbert Humbert surveys the accommodations offered him and his young charge:
To any other type of tourist accommodation I soon grew to prefer the Functional Motel—clean, neat, safe nooks, ideal places for sleep, argument, reconciliation, insatiable illicit love. … I would take a bed-and-cot or twin-bed cabin, a prison cell of paradise, with yellow window shades pulled down to create a morning illusion of Venice and sunshine when actually it was Pennsylvania and rain.

With all flags flying, Jesse Thornton (opposite page, left) and his friend Frank Ross stand on the rear platform of a train watching the city of Dallas recede into the far distance—of a studio camera. The year was 1920, and although Mr. Thornton’s expression might indicate that he was setting out on a long and arduous journey, he was traveling no farther that day than home to the town of Fruitvale, Texas, about fifty miles due east of Dallas. The first Thorntons in America arrived in Virginia from Yorkshire, England, in the 1630’s and later were among the earliest settlers of Alabama and northern Mississippi. In Fruitvale, Jesse Thornton raised cotton on a farm to which he had moved his family from Mississippi shortly after the birth of his daughter Christine Thornton Rodgers of Memphis, Tennessee, who sent us this picture.

n the last issue we told how the United States in World War II attempted to bring destruction to Japanese cities by peppering them with bomb-carrying bats. Bizarre though that experiment sounds, it was not the first time the Americans tried to enlist the help of bats. Herewith, the strange tale of Dr. Campbell’s lifelong obsession.

The story of the bat towers, large wooden structures designed to garrison colonies of bat “soldiers” in the war on malaria, may sound like a tall Texas tale. But the towers were real. A few even remain standing today.

When Dr. Charles A. R. Campbell graduated from Tulane Medical School in 1899, he returned to his native San Antonio to specialize in the treatment of malaria, then a terrible problem throughout the South. Campbell had been greatly excited by recent proof that the mosquito was the disease’s vector. Now, with the enemy a well-identified foe instead of a vague “miasma,” a new age of combating malaria had begun. As early as 1900 Dr. Campbell began to consider using bats.

SELF-GOVERNMENT

There is one thing that America demonstrates invincibly of which I was hitherto doubtful. This is that the middle classes are capable of governing a state. I don’t know if they would come off honorably from really difficult political situations, but they are adequate for the ordinary conduct of society, despite their petty passions, their incomplete education, their vulgar manners. Clearly they can supply practical intelligence, and that is sufficient.

THE RULERS AND THE RULED

When I arrived in the United States I discovered with astonishment that good qualities were common among the governed but rare among the rulers. In our day it is a constant fact that the most outstanding Americans are seldom summoned to public office, and it must be recognized that this tendency has increased as democracy has gone beyond its previous limits. It is clear that during the last fifty years the race of American statesmen has strangely shrunk.

THOSE PROTESTANTS

There is a stretch of some twenty blocks or so on upper Fifth Avenue known as Museum Mile, where art collections of every description fill former turn-of-the-century mansions that have been converted into galleries open to the public. Now a fashionable twentieth-century hotel has joined Museum Mile: it is the fifteen-story Stanhope that faces the Metropolitan Museum of Art directly across Fifth Avenue. When new owners took it over 1980, they added American both to its name and its decor, fitting out the public and private rooms with fine examples of nineteenth-century American paintings and furniture.

Searching for authentic pieces has led the hotel’s designers, Mimi Russell and Arnold Copper, to scour auction houses and galleries across the country. While the 276 guest rooms are being systematically repainted and papered, booty piles up in the hotel’s second-floor office, which has come to resemble a Victorian attic.