January 2011

The record of competition for the America’s Cup is a patriot’s dream. After twenty-four challenges for the trophy, first awarded to the schooner America in 1851 after she defeated a fleet of British rivals, America has never lost. In this hopelessly one-sided history, 1903 stands out as a classic confrontation. In that year the Irish millionaire Sir Thomas Lipton, by now almost as famous for his yachting as for his tea empire, was making his third try for the Cup. He hired a Scot, William Fife, to design a yacht, and on the third day of the third month of the third year of the new century, he launched Shamrock III. Accepting the challenge, a syndicate of Americans headed by Cornelius Vanderbilt hired America’s leading designer, Nathanael Herreshoff, who built Reliance. And the race was on.

When Charles Dickens first came to the United States in 1842, he did not like our clothes, our speech, or our manners. But he reserved perhaps his deepest scorn for our dining habits. First, there was the custom in public places of summoning diners to the table by thwacking an “awful gong which shakes the very window frames as it reverberates through the house and horribly disturbs nervous Foreigners.” Then there was American food itself, which Dickens dismissed as “piles of indigestible matter.” It did not seem to make any difference where a foreigner dined in America. Be it in an inexpensive boardinghouse where, as one observer pointed out, “the Venetian blinds are kept scrupulously closed, for the double purpose of excluding flies and preventing too close a scrutiny of the upholstery” or in more well-appointed hostelries where men sat about “smoking seegars, their feet up on the white marble balustrade and spitting,” the social graces of the New World were not highly esteemed by visitors from the Old.

“Mr. Taylor’s entire career has been fraught with vicissitudes and picturesque adventures” —James E. Taylor

One of the strange legacies of the Civil War, if you reflect on it a little, is the professional television correspondent, that devil-may-care type in the trench coat standing in front of some frontier or scene of carnage while he—or she—concludes his report, makes sure again that you heard his name, and returns you to Walter or John in New York. Technology whirls along. Trench Coat travels by plane and helicopter, with a camera crew; his brief message bounces home off an earth satellite, to be broadcast in seconds to millions. He is such a power in the land, people say, that the biggest power of them all, good, calm, sensible Walter Cronkite, could—if he wished—be elected President.

Just a few decades more, or so we are told, and the process of the homogenization of America will have been completed. All regional personalities will have been sanitized out of existence, and the national culture will be a bland, predictable, and packaged product. Probably this is not a prospect we need immediately contemplate. This is a hell of a big country, as the poet Charles Olson said, and it will take considerably more time and enterprise before it can be so reduced. Here and there, you can still find places that have remained faithful to themselves, places where the past has been preserved so that it seems to well up around you. In such places, admittedly fewer by the year, there is a sense, strong as a voice and conveyed even to the visitor, that something has happened here.

Spreading south from New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico, the Barataria region is, as the author describes it, a “bewildering tatter” of cypress swamps, marshes, saw-grass meadows, palmetto groves, bayous, creeks, bays, and islands, all of it cut through by the Mississippi River meandering down the last stretch of its journey from land to sea. And it boils with wildlife peculiar to southern coastal wetlands: muskrats, otters, alligators, and scores of varieties of fish; swamp rabbits, fox squirrels, feral hogs, raccoons, and swamp deer; bald eagles circle in search of prey, ducks and geese winter here, and white clouds of egrets burst into the air like feathers from a hundred ruptured pillows.

On September 7, three hundred and fifty years ago, a ragged group of Puritans under John Winthrop chose a site on the New England shore and declared it suitable for a new town—one more pinprick of settlement for a land in which they hoped to find the spiritual regeneration that had eluded them in their native England.

They did not find regeneration, but they did establish what would become one of the premier cities of the world, and this year Boston is marking its three hundred and fiftieth birthday with seemly pomp, including tall ships sailing into Boston Harbor and a host of other events and exhibits sponsored by such private and civic organizations as the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the New England Society for the Preservation of Antiquities, and Boston University.

As the lights of London’s Covent Garden dimmed that early August evening in 1919, few people, including the young narrator waiting nervously in the wings, sensed the historic nature of the occasion. A full house of formally dressed English gentry listened expectantly through the overture by the Royal Welsh Guards Band as the rising curtain unveiled the Moonlight on the Nile. An exotic dancer glided onstage, while a tenor voice in the background spread a lyric Mohammedan call to prayer through the vast theater.

The man who then stepped into the spotlight was a young American war correspondent with a unique invitation. He offered to take them “to lands of history, mystery and romance” through the magical combination of music, motion picture, and narration. Thus, “through the nose of a Yankee,” as he put it, his audiences relived the triumphant conquest of Jerusalem and the hitherto unreported exploits of the legendary T. E. Lawrence.

In 1765 John Adams wrote that “A native of America who cannot read or write is as rare an appearance as a Jacobite or a Roman Catholic, that is, as rare as a comet or an earthquake.” He went on to say that “all candid foreigners who have passed through this country and conversed freely with all sorts of people here will allow that they have never seen so much knowledge and civility among the common people in any part of the world.” It is a broad claim. The question is, was it true? Were the colonists as literate as Adams said they were, or was this merely a piece of pre-Revolutionary propaganda?

Corn being so important to Americans, it is hardly surprising that it turns up so often in our art. Indeed, the Tulsa artist, Alfred Montgomery, whose painting opens this story, seems to have painted little else but corn—in baskets, in sacks, on a floor, arranged on a barn door. An admirer claimed that Montgomery painted corn so perfectly that “horses try to devour it, hens even peck at his canvasses.”

Although Montgomery was unique in his zealotry, many other artists also found corn—from spring planting through summer ripening to autumn harvest—an attractive subject, as the following portfolio of paintings suggests.