January 2011

by Donald Dale Jackson Alfred A. Knopf Illustrations and maps 361 pages, $13.95

The California Gold Rush was not only a scramble for riches; it was also a national adventure. It had its anthem—“Oh, Susanna,” in dozens of cheerful and raucous versions—and its own terminology. Those taking the interminable sea routes to San Francisco referred to seasickness as “casting up accounts.” And when a forty-niner had endured great hardship, and learned from it, he had “seen the elephant.” For several hundred thousand young American males, the thought of missing the adventure was intolerable. “A man had to go, to take part somehow, lest he wonder forever what might have been,” Jackson writes.

There was plenty of gold to be had in 1848. In fact, to fail at the mines that year “required an extraordinary combination of ineptitude and bad luck.” But few of those who came in the next two years went home with bulging gold sacks, and many died of cholera before they ever got to the gold fields.

The young ladies below believed, they said, that “a woman’s Crowning Glory is her hair. ” This was not mere narcissism on their part; their livelihood depended on American women sharing their view. They were the Seven Sutherland Sisters, purveyors of hair and scalp tonic “for the production and maintenance of beautiful, soft, lustrous hair.”

They were born to an impoverished upstate New York farmer in an era when having a succession of daughters was not considered unalloyed good luck. But when their harassed father saw how lustily the girls’ hair was coming in, Yankee inspiration spurred him to develop a hair tonic. By the 1880’s, when this picture was made, the girls were a superb advertisement for this product; their hair, taken in aggregate, was thirty-seven feet long. It made them famous, and after their father’s death, they signed up with Barnum and Bailey. Eventually they struck out on their own, touring the country with seven maids standing by to keep all that hair under control between performances.

THE RILED BUNCH THE STUART SOLUTION THOMAS ALVA EDISON AND THE CONCRETE PIANO AND WHO WOULD WANT TO BADGER JOHN L. SULLIVAN? THE CATTON VIEW

Shortly before dawn the five-inch pine spindle of the Faneuil Hall wind vane snapped, dislodging the thirty-pound gilded cricket that spun ten feet above Boston’s marketplace roof. Early risers first heard the baying of dogs, then the roar. Beneath the autumn moon, fifteen hundred chimneys swiveled and spewed bricks; the gable ends of brick houses that had survived the fire of 1747 collapsed onto cobblestone. As the contents of their homes toppled or migrated, families fled into the streets with shrieks attributed by one observer less to their embarrassment at “seeing their neighbors, as it were naked” than to their fears of confronting Judgment Day at last, and in nightclothes.

Sherman’s March On the Road With John James Audubon Gold Dust

by Burke Davis Random House Photographs, maps 320 pages, $12.95

On November 16, 1864, General William Tecumseh Sherman, with sixtytwo thousand men, set off “on a thousand-mile foray through the heart of the reeling Confederacy that would leave a path of destruction eighty miles wide” and for the first and only time, Davis writes, expose Americans to “the terrors of total warfare.”

The basic facts of Sherman’s fearful march are well known—the foraging, the senseless looting, the joyous slaves and brave Southern women, the acts of hideous cruelty and individual kindness, and so much burning that the marchers could follow those ahead of them by watching the billows of smoke in the sky. But the literally hundreds of participants and witnesses on whose previously unused testimony Burke Davis has based his new account give a shocking immediacy to the story.

During the 1912 strike of 25,000 Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile workers—the high-water mark of the Industrial Workers of the World’s turbulent career—a group of female mill hands marched under a banner that read “We Want Bread and Roses, Too.” Moved by the blunt poetry of the demand, the novelist Joel Oppenheim used it in a ballad that became the famous union song that runs, in part, “Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew./ Yes, it is bread we fight for—but we fight for roses, too!” In the years since Lawrence, many labor organizations have worked to improve not only the working conditions of their members but the quality of their lives as well. None, however, has striven more vigorously toward this end than District 1199, National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees in New York City. Currently in the midst of their two-year “Bread and Roses” cultural project, the union has—along with mounting a series of programs that includes drama, music, poetry readings, and symposiums—established Gallery 1199, the only permanent exhibition hall in the labor movement.

At first it was a men’s club of the meanest stripe—a sparsely furnished, stogie-scented parlor on the second story of a red-brick office block, across the alley from an undertaker’s morgue, within the sonic radius of a two-bit music hall. Its founders were half-a-dozen newspapermen who imagined themselves, on no substantial evidence, to be the artistic elite of a provincial city that already rejoiced in men’s clubs of virtually every possible type from Cantonese tongs to Bavarian zonkerbunds. The charter members, after fierce debate, agreed to call themselves “Bohemians,” although a minority fretted about the ugly implications of the name: cheap wine, stringy hair, unpaid rent, contagious diseases.… They voted to keep out rich people, publishers, and other natural enemies of the muse.

Henry Rosenberg arrived in Galveston, Texas, in 1843, a nineteen-year-old Swiss fabric apprentice with an eight-dollar-a-week job waiting for him. When he died fifty years later he was a wealthy banker, and had developed considerable feelings of gratitude to the city that had made him rich. Many would-be benefactors consider donating libraries; Rosenberg gave the city a fine one. But he had another idea as well, one which developed into a civic legacy unusual even in a city known for its elaborate architecture. In his will, Rosenberg put aside a bequest for “the erection of not less than ten drinking fountains for man and beast.” Each was to be a sort of aquatic temple of granite and bronze, and that they were objects of considerable splendor is clear from renderings by the architect, J. Massey Rhind of New York. In the end, seventeen of them got built; twelve in March, 1898 (one for each ward of the city), and five larger ones the following October. Each bore the inscription “Gift of Henry Rosenberg.”