January 2011

Americans used to take their dinners seriously. The preposterous social arbiter Ward McAllister proclaimed in 1890 that “a dinner invitation, once accepted, is a sacred obligation. If you die before the dinner takes place, your executor must attend the dinner.” In that era there were dinners at the Waldorf that cost a hundred and twenty dollars a setting at which guests were served as many as twelve courses. Nor did this sort of gaudy consumption seem to sit ill with the fledgling social consciousness of the day; in fact, after one such bacchanal the Atlantic Monthly congratulated the participants, pointing with pride to the fact that America produced men whose eating capacities were equal to those of Homer’s heroes, men whose “stomachs were as heroic as their hearts, their bowels as magnanimous.” In this sort of atmosphere it is hardly surprising that a minor but elegant art form grew up around the formal banquet. Any such affair, especially one honoring a dignitary or a head of state, had to be accompanied with a carefully designed and scrupulously printed menu.

In the summer of 1885 a young artist from New York by way of Kansas City found himself resting by a campfire with a couple of prospectors out in Arizona Territory at a time when Geronimo was on the prowl, perhaps “even in our neighborhood.” It was about 9 o’clock in the evening, and the three men were drowsily relaxing, puffing on their pipes and looking up at the stars through the branches of the trees overhead. Suddenly, the artist later recalled, “my breath went with the look I gave, for, to my unbounded astonishment and consternation, there sat three Apaches on the opposite side of our fire with their rifles across their laps.” His companions spotted the Indians at about the same time, and “old, hardened frontiersmen as they were, they positively gasped in amazement.” Before the white men could react and get their guns out, the Indians assured them they had come in peace and wanted only flour, not a fight. Yet they stayed by the fire all night, making it sleepless for the artist and the two prospectors.

Africa was part of my childhood. The attic in our Detroit home smelled like a zoo. There were lion, leopard, zebra, antelope, and colobus monkey skins that my sister and I and our friends used to take out of their trunks and forget to put back. There was also an elephant’s foot made into a wastebasket, ten or twelve elephant tusks and several small curved tusks of wart hogs, drums made out of antelope hide, and musical instruments with strings like the vines on which Tarzan swung from tree to tree.

I had quite a compliment on the street. As I was crossing the Avenue near the Capitol a very good looking man who was spinning by on a bicycle suddenly stopped and jumped off, and said ‘Isn’t this Mr. Choate?’ I said ‘Yes.’ ‘Well,’ he went on, Tm a lawyer and I only stopped to pay my respects, recognizing you by your photographs, and I wanted to say that I esteem you just as much as all the rest of the lawyers in the country do,’ and upon that he remounted and was off again before I could even find out who he was.”

Thus Joseph Hodges Choate at sixty-three, writing to his wife in October, 1895. Around that time the New York Press , in commenting on “the attitudes assumed by prominent men riding in the elevated cars from home to business and back again,” reported that “Joe Choate drops into the northeast corner of the first car and curls himself up as if he were to settle there for life and cared for no creature in the world, not thinking of himself or of his appearance. He sees no one in the car. His mind is elsewhere.”

How America got its name is a slightly fantastic tale involving an obscure German scholar who happened to think more highly of Vespucci than he did of Columbus. George R. Stewart tells the story in this excerpt from his new book, Names on the Globe, which will be published by Oxford University Press next month.

The more important a place is, it has been said, the more difficult the explanation of its name.

Though not to be taken more than half seriously, the generalization has some validity. We may note that thousands of names of Italian, Spanish, and English villages are clearly explicable but that Rome, Madrid, and London remain in controversy or obscurity. The reason undoubtedly is that the more important places in general preserve older names.

Although the bicentennial of American independence is just over a year away, it is the unhappy fact that the United States has not yet expressed the slightest appreciation to those who did the most to make that independence possible.

Variety , the show-business paper, recently reported a curious product now being offered by a French tapecassette company. Peerless Services of Paris is selling Richard Nixon’s resignation speech along with typewritten transcripts of it in French and English. And there’s a bonus: “Since the speech was a shortie, they’ve padded the cassette with six poems by John Keats.”

A surprising addition to the National Register of Historic Places was announced late last fall. It is a chicken coop in Georgetown, Delaware, where America’s broiler industry was started in 1923 by the late Mrs. Wilmer Steele. The coop has been restored to its former glory by the Delmarva Poultry Industry Association.

Allan Damon has spotted two errors in his article on the federal bureaucracy, which ran in our August, 1Q74, issue. On page 65, second column, the fourth line should read: “last available total (fiscal 1972) is 10.8 million, more than 5.6 million of whom are in education—3.1 million as teachers, 2.5 million in administrative, auxiliary, and custodial services.”

On page 66, first column, the third paragraph should read: “The proposed budget for fiscal 1975 is $3o4 billion, a figure roughly 70,000 times greater than the two-year budget for 1789-91.”