January 2011

There is something almost atavistic in the appeal of an archeological dig. For most people, to hold in the hands a pottery sherd, a flint arrowhead, a piece of bone, or any other artifact of known prehistoric origin is to feel for one quick moment both the excitement and the melancholy suggested by Alfred Lord Tennyson’s phrase, “So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.” Such remnants are all we have and all we will ever know of those shadowy people who came before us; yet, knowing that, we also know that they are as much a part of us as the genes which determine the color of our skin.

However appealing, the experience of digging in and finding such splinters of the past is not, for most of us, easily come by, a fact which makes all the more intriguing a program instituted in the state of Arkansas thirteen years ago. It is called the Arkansas Archeological Survey, and its goal is not merely to locate and examine as many of the state’s archeological sites as possible, but to do so with the cooperation and, whenever feasible, the participation of the citizenry.

Hold Fort Fisher or I cannot subsist my army.” So wrote General Robert E. Lee in the waning days of 1864 as he watched one Confederate seaport after another fall to the Union armies. Fort Fisher, the strongest fortification yet built in North America, guarded the approach to Wilmington, Norht Carolina, the last haven of blockade-running supply ships and Lee’s major supply depot. As the noose closed around Lee’s army in Virginia, General Ulysses S. Grant decided to launch the largest amphibious attack of the Civil War against the fort.

“He had the short, heavy-set neck of the lower order of animals. His skin was coal black, his lips so thick they curled both ways up and down with crooked blood-marks across them. His nose was flat, and its enormous nostrils seemed in perpetual dilation. The sinister bead eyes, with brown splotches in their whites, were set wide apart and gleamed ape-like under his scant brows.”

This rabid description of a black trooper on duty in the state that had until recently held him in slavery is a typical vignette from the 1905 best seller The Clansman . Its author, Thomas Dixon, said, “I had a message and I wrote it as vividly and simply as I knew how. ” And people listened. The novel sold well over a million copies and went on to become D. W. Griffith’s film epic The Birth of a Nation . The message was simple enough: it was, as Booker T. Washington angrily summed it up, “that to educate the Negro is to increase his powers for mischief.”

Mother was off again, this time to New England to paint the Harvard philosophy department—all five of its members, and on a single canvas. Mother had known the Harvard philosophers before, but only slightly, when my father had studied under them during his graduate years. The thought that five such different men as William James, George Herbert Palmer, Josiah Royce, Hugo Münsterberg, and George Santayana—who, in the first decade of the century, had created the golden age of philosophy at Harvard—might not sit serenely within one frame never occurred to her.

Born in the raw mining town of Carson City, Nevada, in 1872, the daughter of an itinerant photographer, my mother, Winifred Smith Rieber, had had a long climb to become a well-known portraitist, one whose subjects included John Dewey, Franz Boaz, Albert Einstein, and Thomas Mann. Painting the Harvard philosophy department held no terrors for her.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” George Santayana wrote that in 1905, minting an aphorism now grown shopworn in the service of beleaguered history teachers and editors of history magazines. History never repeats itself exactly, of course, as the builders of the Maginot Line learned. But what it does do is show us how men and women not so different from ourselves faced their own trials and managed to endure. With this issue we begin a new column, “Now and Then,” in which, from time to time, guest writers will examine the links between present and past. In the first of these occasional essays, Charles L. Mee, Jr., the diplomatic historian, points up some alarming similarities—and what he sees as one enormous difference—between today and the eve of the First World War.

In 1925 a woman named Ruth Snyder too up with a salesman—a corset and brassiere salesman to be exact—and together on March 20, 1927, they murdered her husband in his bed. Months later, they were both electrocuted. To the public Judd Gray was just another murderer, but the crime of Ruth Snyder was as subversive to American domesticity as the anarchism of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti was to the American political and economic order. Like Sacco and Vanzetti, Ruth Snyder died in the electric chair while the whole country watched the clock. The limits of acceptable American behavior in the twenties were drawn by these highly publicized punishments: the electrocution of two “bolsheviks” and a “flapper”—two immigrant workingmen and a suburban Long Island housewife. But while the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti prompted outraged demonstrations, the execution of Snyder seemed to gratify the public. Almost everyone agreed that Ruth Snyder had to die.

The stretch of sand that runs along for miles at the margin of Cape Canaveral was irresistibly reminiscent, I thought, of Cape Cod. But then one sandspit is very like another, except for the temperature surrounding it. That day the sea was remarkably peaceful though not very blue: it reflected a gunmetal sky. Here and there a family party sat on the sand and ate, but the place was by no means crowded, if you didn’t count the seagulls, and nobody seemed eager to go into the water. It was not easy to believe that this dull, peaceful surface covered, possibly, any number of decaying broken spars, old bones, and silver and gold coins. But it does—perhaps. On a shallow sea bottom like that one never knows, and nothing stays the same under the water, though I always thought it did until I read Kip Wagner’s book, Pieces of Eight.

Between 1847 and 1855 George Caleb Bingham completed a half dozen or so canvases that are among the most unusual and interesting documents in the history of American painting. They are well known to students, critics, and art historians but they are only occasionally reproduced in books that celebrate the “finest” American paintings. Others of Bingham’s works are duly included in such selective compilations, for at his best he was a highly competent artist.

The fact remains, however, that his most creditable pictures have attracted attention as much, if not more, for their subject matter than for the creative talents that gave them a special quality. And so it is with this group, known as his “election series.“ He once wrote a friend that his purpose in painting it was to record “our social and political characteristics as daily and annually exhibited,” and this is precisely what he accomplished.

In our August/September, 1980, issue, Joseph Kastner gave us the story of a great American native—corn. Now, Laurent E. Beaucage of Lewiston, Maine, reminds us of a charming by-product—the corncob pipe, another American native:

“The corncob pipe is a product which has spread throughout the world. Durable, inexpensive, sweet-smoking, the pipe typifies American homespun utility. In the marketplace, it competes successfully with the most lavish pipes carved from the most ancient burlwoods. It was smoked in peace by President Herbert Hoover (who always insisted on paying for any pipes sent to him as gifts), and in war by General Douglas MacArthur, whose ever-present pipe boosted the corncob’s status a hundredfold.

Two recent color portfolios we presented deserve some amplification. The first, “Art of the People” (February/March, 1980), included a painting entitled View of the Schuylkill County Almshouse Property, at the Year 1881 and brought us a letter from Elwood M. Young of Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania, which serves to underscore the fact that most folk art has to endure years of mild ridicule before coming into its own:

“This picture ‘shook me up,’ you might say, when I saw it for the first time. You see, my great-grandfather, John Morgan, was one of the three Schuylkill County Poor Directors in 1881. My mother’s family laughed about it over the years and often joked about it being a ‘masterpiece.’ Were they alive today, they would realize their error.”