January 2011

To say merely that he was a photographer is only to brush at the truth. In a career that began in 1867 and was rarely interrupted until his death in 1942 at the age of ninety-nine, William Henry Jackson produced more than forty thousand photographs, most of them of the American West during the last stages of a frontier condition. Throughout most of the last thirty years of the nineteenth century, on both private and government expeditions, Jackson loaded as much as a ton of equipment on the backs of pack animals and struggled across all the rocks and hard places of the West, immortalizing a now almost vanished panorama in crystals of silver nitrate.

Pornography seems to be doing very well these days. Every fair-sized town has its “adult-book store,” and x-rated feature films have advanced from their first big-city beachheads of the midigGo’s to occupy theatres in suburban shopping centers. Naturally, the vigorous state of the industry has not gone unnoticed. A national news magazine, for instance, devoted a cover story to the proliferation of pornographic films, topless bars, and what are universally and euphemistically known as “massage parlors.”

Those who fear that all this is yet another indication of the imminent disintegration of our society might take heart from a study made by one Franklin Fretz in 1912. In a book entitled The Furnished Room Problem in Philadelphia , Fretz discussed patterns of life in the city’s rooming-house district. He was appalled by the licentious diversions available to the people who lived there. Here is what he saw:

That powerful ballad, written in 1925 by the poet Alfred Hays, was heard again and again during the great demonstrations of the 1960’s. Chances are that not one in ten of the people singing it knew who Joe Hill was, and yet there was that oddly potent name reverberating through the streets of America more than a half century after the man who bore it was executed by a Utah firing squad.

The year is 1859. Throughout the region popularly called Pikes Peak, a hoard of gold-hungry miners are swarming around the front range of the Rocky Mountains, spurred by discoveries of the rich mineral at Cherry Creek and Clear Creek and in the foothills that rise above the little supply town of Denver. Even as the hills are being turned from wilderness into mining camps, some settlers are already looking beyond the muddy streets and make-shift laws toward a goal: statehood.

But what to call this new addition to the Union?

The history books usually don’t say much about how Colorado got its name. But the story is intriguing, because the early inhabitants first wanted to call it Jefferson, then almost got it named Idaho, and finally settled for the original Spanish name that the conquistadors had used—Colorado, meaning “reddish” or “colored.”

ARTICLE I.

The United States guarantees and will maintain the independence of the Republic of Panama.

ARTICLE II.

The Republic of Panama grants to the United States in perpetuity the use, occupation and control of a zone of land and land under water for the construction, maintenance, operation, sanitation and protection of said Canal of the width of ten miles extending to the distance of five miles on each side of the center line of the route of the Canal to be constructed. … The Republic of Panama further grants to the United States in perpetuity the use, occupation and control of any other lands and waters outside of the zone above described which may be necessary and convenient for the construction, maintenance, operation, sanitation and protection of the said Canal or of any auxiliary canals or other works necessary and convenient for the construction, maintenance, operation, sanitation and protection of the said enterprise.

PROLOGUE: Washington, November 18, 1903

As John Hay, Secretary of State of the United States of America, prepared for bed in his comfortable home just across Lafayette Park from the White House, it must certainly have struck him that the day just concluded had been altogether one of the most curious in his four-year tenure in office—or, in fact, in a long diplomatic career that had taken him as a representative of his country to London, Paris, Vienna, and Madrid.

When the Norwegian artist Lauritz Larsen Mossige emigrated to America in the early 1880’s, he settled in Deckertown—now Sussex—New Jersey, and changed his name to Louis Larsen. The Americanization process did not stop there, and Larsen seems to have made himself a scholar of all the small-town scandals that enlivened life in Deckertown. Unlike virtually all other such primitive paintings, the two on these pages have come down to us rich with gossip about the people in them. Goings on in the Union House, for instance, apparently fascinated Larsen; he did no fewer than five canvases on this noble theme. In the one shown here Pierce Cole lounges on the porch. Pierce was a bitter man. It seems that a few years before this scene was painted, he took his girl to the circus. There a bounder named Jim Feakes stole her away, and thereafter Pierce forsook women forever. He lived out his days in sour bachelorhood at the Union House, in the last room to the left on the second floor. Larsen himself was something of a town scandal—he drank. This so distressed the townspeople that they discarded many of his paintings. However, thanks largely to the efforts of Carroll O.

James Hubert “Eubie” Blake was born February 7, 1883, in Baltimore. His parents, John Sumner and Emily Johnstone Blake, had grown up “in the slavery” in the state of Virginia. John Sumner Blake was fifty years old to the day when “Little Hubie” or “Mouse” Blake was born, and it is startling to realize that Eubie Blake’s recollections when linked to the sharply remembered stories told by this revered and plainspoken father reach back to 1833, when the Republic was fifty-seven years old.

Certain elements in Eubie Blake’s childhood are common to those of other musical prodigies: the impressive gi/t revealed early in a chance encounter of a toddler’s fingers and a discovered keyboard; the devoted teacher insisting upon rigorous grounding in the classics; early public recognition and a taste of the adulation that comes to those endowed with unique talent.

The great job of the historian is to enable people to understand how things were and why they happened so in a time and at a place that are gone forever. Somehow he has to reach the irrecoverable past. Living in one era, he must work in another, trying his best to lay his hands on something that is forever beyond his grasp, to hear voices that have been stilled for generations and to interpret the aspirations and motivations of minds and hearts that returned to their elements long since in the mists beyond the Jordan. The job can never be done fully, and no one knows this better than the historian himself. He would sell his hope of salvation (provided such hope remains to him after years of the kind of toil and frustration that is apt to warp the soul) if only, just once, he could actually go to the era he has been studying so hard and see just what the men of that day were up against.

In 1935 Mr. Warren Johnson of St. Joseph, Missouri, was caught in a dust storm in western Kansas and beheld the startling scene above. “The dust storms were so bad that year,” recalls Mr. Johnson, “that several times the highways were closed due to zero visibility. The blowing dust was very hard on the engines. In fact, the engine life of a car in a dust storm was about a hundred miles. So, when this one blew up, I drove all night to get out of it.”

He stopped only once, when, passing through a town in the afternoon, he saw the main street swarming with jack rabbits fleeing from the oncoming storm. “I saw them come running on and on, driven by their natural instinct to get out of it all, and I took time out to snap this picture. The rabbits ran ahead of the storm for miles until they were exhausted or found a place to hide.”

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