January 2011

We have just received word of a vigorous historic preservation society that was hitherto unknown to us. The Society for Industrial Archeology, which operates under the aegis of the National Museum of History and Technology in the Smithsonian Institution, is dedicated to the saving and refurbishing of monuments from our technological past. The society casts a wide net and addresses its attentions to such diverse relics as factories, railroad sheds, ferryboats, and canals. While constantly battling the problems of a “bad image” (factories are big and dirty and frequently viewed as symbols of exploitation), the society seems to be making good headway in its various campaigns.

In nearly all respects the Civil War remains the bloodiest war this nation has fought. The casualty rate was higher, the destruction more extensive, the scars deeper than in any other conflict before or since. But for all of that there was an essential innocence in the way the men of both armies adjusted to the grim, hard tasks they were called upon to perfarm.

Back in the twenties, before, chances are, Jack Valenti and Linda Lovelace were even born, my Aunt Julia developed her own movie-rating system. This was based not on the movies themselves but on the stars who appeared in them. No G’S or R’S or X’S for Aunt Julia. A movie either had the right sort of star, in which case it was given a clean bill of health and we kids were sent off to see it with the dimes for our tickets clutched in our hands, or it didn’t, in which case it was put on Aunt Julia’s index and we kids were forbidden even to look at the theatre displays. Since we passed the Lyric, our local cinema, on our way to and from school, this restriction was difficult to enforce, especially as the Lyric’s management didn’t give a hoot how debauched our young minds became—an unconcern we shared with them.

No chapter in railroad history can rival the popular appeal of the wood-burning era. Its great funnel-shaped smokestack, gallant red paint, and polished brass have endeared the wood burner to generations of Americans. Its appearance during a western film raises an excitement second only to that caused by the nick-of-time arrival of the cavalry. Ah, but those imperial clouds of heavy black smoke pouring from Hollywood’s iron horses are as phony as the wagon master’s peril. No scrap of wood has touched their grates in a half century, and all that glorious plumage is generated by an oil burner. The wood burner’s light, billowing gray smoke and its accompanying shower of sparks have never been shown in a modern film.

Many ambulance drivers, having had hair-raising adventures with their Fords, developed an almost passionate attachment to them. Robert Service, the popular Canadian poet who drove in France for many months, wrote one of his splashy panegyrics about such a driver, Jerry MacMullen:

Two great historic figures, men who have merged into myth, are almost the sole remains of the alliance between France and the revolutionary forces of America—Lafayette and Benjamin Franklin. And like most myths time has changed them, clothing the reality in a web of romance. The young Marquis de Lafayette, plunging ashore on North Island, South Carolina, is seen as the personification of those forces in France that yearned for liberty, for freedom from the oppressive hierarchical regime of an absolutist monarchy. These young French idealists found much justification for their attitudes in the simplicity, the honesty, the ruggedness, and the equality of American life—or so we are told. In contrast Benjamin Franklin at Passy symbolized for the sophisticated Parisian salons the true philosopher—natural, unaffected, wise, free from all artifice. The textbooks tell us that the ease of his presence, the extraordinary sanity of his views, his undeviating patriotism, his strength and gravity, rallied all that was best and generous in French society to the American cause.

Among the thousands of homeless children deposited at the Children’s Aid Society in 1875 by orphan asylums, courts, and other institutions was a four-year-old named Willie, sent by the New York Prison Association. “Almost beyond hope” was the verdict of the society’s agent into whose care the “irrepressible young Irishman” was placed.

Soon the object of this despairing character sketch found himself among a group of forty orphaned and destitute boys and girls travelling by train nearly halfway across the continent, to end up at a little midwestern farm town. There Willie and the other children were taken to the local grange hall, where a group of farmers and their wives waited to look them over and to make some momentous choices.

As the story is told in one of the society’s annual reports, only one couple wanted little Willie. In a heavy German accent the farmer’s wife explained why: “Because he please my old man.” And Willie was carried away, struggling and protesting, in her fat arms.

“Who knows?” Piatt Andrew wrote Isabella Stewart Gardner from shipboard on Christmas night of 1914, “we may spend the winter carting the groceries from Paris to Neuilly.” He had volunteered to drive an ambulance for the American Hospital in France, but beyond that his prospects were utterly uncertain. Yet within months he was to organize and direct an ambulance service that would serve virtually the entire French army until after America’s entry into World War I .

“Who knows?” Piatt Andrew wrote Isabella Stewart Gardner from shipboard on Christmas night of 1914, “we may spend the winter carting the groceries from Paris to Neuilly.” He had volunteered to drive an ambulance for the American Hospital in France, but beyond that his prospects were utterly uncertain. Yet within months he was to organize and direct an ambulance service that would serve virtually the entire French army until after America’s entry into World War I .

A century and a half ago American women faced a very different life prospect than today. Without dependable birth-control techniques they could expect to spend their prime years bearing children. Without modern medicine they frequently could anticipate painful and debilitating disorders arising from the rigors of repeated childbirth. Moreover, they lived in a world where the facts of life and the processes of pro-creation were shrouded in secrecy and not thought fit topics for female conversation.

Contemporary manuals of advice offered little help. They encouraged women to accept their God-given biological destiny and prepare for a life of self-sacrificing service to others. What information they did give was often faulty. Even into the twentieth century some of these manuals adhered, for example, to the widespread but mistaken view that conception was most likely to occur during menstruation and least probable during the time we now know as ovulation.