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January 2011

In war the final defeat is the one that counts. Yet there are wars and wars, and only rarely do historians conclude that a particular surrender was not only a cessation of fighting but a watershed marking the end of one epoch and the start of another. Otherwise there would be no memorable pairings of the vanquished with the scene of ultimate disaster—Harold and Hastings, Napoleon and Waterloo, Lee and Appomattox.

“1795.—The state of my health rendering a voyage to Europe necessary, I determined to proceed by way of America. Accordingly, towards the end of November, I left Santipore, taking with me a small Bengal cow, in addition to my doombah and other curiosities brought from Delhi. The natives would not have consented to sell me a cow if I had not assured them that it would be an object of particular interest and care in the countries I was taking it to.”

 

The author was Thomas Twining, nineteen, son of a prosperous family of tea and coffee merchants who in 1706 had opened a shop in Devereux Court in the Strand, near Temple Bar, in London (the family is still in business today with the same products and the same name at the same address). Twining did indeed come to America with his Bengal cow, his doombah (an Afghan mountain sheep), and an extraordinary collection of other animals and artifacts.

It is a warm summer evening in 1882, in a small town in New England, and the circus of Messrs. Barnum, Bailey, and Hutchinson has come to town for a one-day stand. The “Greatest Show on Earth ” is suitably canopied : three huge tents in a meadow on the outskirts of town—one tent each for the museum and the freak collections, and the big one, the one with four rings that seats thirty thousand people, towers in the middle. In this big top the smell of sawdust hangs thick in the air, and although as the evening wears on some of the ladies begin to wish the brass band would not play quite so loudly, their men and children lighten the sweltering heat with cheers—cheers for the lion tamers and trapeze artists and clowns in the middle three rings and forthestunningbarebackriders in the outer ring, the Roman hippodrome.

Americans have always loved elephants, perhaps because they embody our national leaning toward the outsized and the grandiose, perhaps simply because they are such unlikely and engaging beasts. James Agee, the brilliant author of A Death in the Family, shared this love, as is evident in the following excerpt from a letter to his close friend, Episcopal priest Father James Harold Flye. In it he sketches the sad and wistful plot of a possible movie about elephants in America. It was the last letter Agee ever wrote. Before he could mail it, the author died, on May 16, 1955, at the age of forty-six.

“My father was one of the early homesteaders in Red Willow County, Nebraska. His homestead was located a few miles north of the Kansas line on high, flat divide land. … If he looked toward Kansas, what did he see? He saw nothing but sod. If he looked to the north, what did he see? He saw the sod. In all directions what did he see? He saw the sod. Consequently he used the sod to build his home.”

Colonel William E. Peters stared at his commanding officer incredulously. Had he heard the order correctly? On whose authority was it given? he asked. Peters, thirty-five years old and a veteran of three years of fighting, had proved his bravery often enough; he had two wounds to show for it. But there were limits beyond which, even in war, he would not—or could not—go.

The general showed Peters the written order signed by his own superior. The colonel read it quickly. His response was unhesitating, calm, and resolute. No, he told the general, he would not obey. He would sooner break his sword and throw it away than make war on defenseless women and children.

She had been brought up to make herself useful. And always it suited her.

As a child she had been known as Hattie. She had been cheerful but shy, prone to fantasies, playful, and quite pretty. After she became famous, she would describe herself this way : “To begin, then, I am a little bit of a woman,—somewhat more than forty, about as thin and dry as a pinch of snuff; never very much to look at in my best days, and looking like a used-up article now.” She wasn’t altogether serious when she wrote that, but the description was the one people would remember.

She was born in Litchfield, Connecticut—in a plain frame house that still stands—in 1811, when Lincoln was two years old and when Dolley Madison was in the White House. She was the seventh of the nine children Roxana Foote bore Lyman Beecher before being gathered to her reward, and she was such a worker, even when very small, that her preacher father liked to say he would gladly have given a hundred dollars if she could have been born a boy.

Among the legacies from the Depression of the 1930’s, along with the fear and hunger of those crippling years, is an impressive national treasure of creative work—an artistic archive paid for by the government. Many projects that employed artists and writers were conceived specifically as a means of providing jobs. Some, however, including the photographic project of the Farm Security Administration, were essentially propagandiste. In financing the FSA pictures the government wanted to provide proof that its farm programs were needed and working. It was incidental to the government’s purpose that the pictures formed a unique archive of those years.

The Stag Hound (left) was an impressive sight whenever she entered New York Harbor; she was so heavily sparred she could carry nearly eleven thousand yards of canvas. Stag Hound was the design of the eminent shipbuilder Donald McKay, his very first “California Clipper,” the precursor of a style of sailing vessel that earned worldwide renown. The year she set out on her maiden voyage to San Francisco —1851—was a spectacular one for American seafarers. A sister clipper, the Flying Cloud , made a record run around Cape Horn to the West Coast, and the yacht America sailed around the Isle of Wight and won for us, permanently it seems, a prize ever after known as the America’s Cup. “Speed,” as one observer remarked, “was the spirit of the hour!”


Albemarle Street in London, just a few steps away from the noise and bustle of Piccadilly, is one of those quiet backwaters of good shops like Gieves, outfitter to the Royal Navy; its main landmark is that respectable and comfortable hostelry, Brown’s Hotel. It is certainly no place to come suddenly upon a maiden in distress, let alone in deshabille. But there she was—and is, above; she was resting in the same position in a window of the Parker Gallery when we came by. The gallery is an emporium of paintings and old prints even more venerable than Goodspeed’s in Boston or the Kennedy or the Old Print Shop in New York. There was no missing her, for the painting is over six feet wide.

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