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January 2011
POOR COUSINS,
by Ande Manners .
Coward, McCann & Geoghegan ,
318 pp. $8.95
INVISIBLE IMMIGRANTS,
by Charlotte Erickson .
University of Miami Press ,
531 pp. $17.50
THE CHILDREN OF COLUMBUS:
An Informal History of the Italians in the New World, by Erik Amfitheatrof. Little, Brown and Co. , 416 pp. $9.95
Even before the Statue of Liberty raised her torch over New York Harbor in 1882, millions of men and women from all over the world had poured through American ports over a time span of two and a half centuries, regarding them all as “golden doors” to opportunity, bread, dreams, and whatever else is meant by the term “a better life.”
His name seems pure invention —Pinckney B. S. Pinchback. It sounds so much like pinchbeck , dictionary-defined as “counterfeit or spurious,” that one suspects a joke by political enemies. But the name was genuine, and so was the man, and so was the record. Louisiana voters elected him to important public office at least five times, and for thirty-five days in December of 1872 and January of 1873 he was the governor of Louisiana. And that was a landmark—the highest official position in a state ever achieved by an American black man.
As our image of Winston Churchill slides back into history—his hundredth birthday comes next November 30—the fine lines of his portrait begin to fade, and he is remembered by a new generation mainly as the wartime leader who intoned of blood, toil, tears, and sweat and prodded his countrymen to their finest hours.
Through some sixty years Churchill had an auxiliary theme to his main purpose of guiding and preserving the British Empire. That was to involve the United States—the American people—in his grand design.
He first visited New York at the age of twenty, and at twenty-six he returned, so famous that his factotum, Major J. B. Pond, proclaimed him as “author of six books, hero of four wars, Member of Parliament, forthcoming Prime Minister of England”; Mark Twain presented him to a lecture audience, and Churchill’s friend and fellow journalist Richard Harding Davis wrote with some reverence: ”… that he is half an American gives all of us an excuse to pretend we share in his successes.”
The last of the major silent films, made shortly before sound engulfed the movie industry in 1928, may not have been golden, but they glittered brightly. Some sixty million Americans were going to the movies more or less regularly, and production budgets were soaring to dizzy heights. Competition among the big film corporations— Paramount, Loew’s, Fox, Universal—was savage. In 1924 Loew’s had merged to become the formidable Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Even without a sound track the voice of the lion was heard in the land, and the M-G-M motto— “More Stars than there Are in Heaven”—became the king of boasts. It seemed not too gross a hyperbole, either, with Lillian Gish, Mae Murray, John Gilbert, Lon Chancy, and Ramon Novarro all acting for M-G-M ; and after The Big Parade , starring John Gilbert, set new box-office records in 1925, the company was ready for the 1926–27 season absolutely swollen with confidence. To its exhibitors it sent a lavishly illustrated book showing off the productions for the coming year.
Stone bridges were strongest, but America, with its scant investment capital and lack of time, was frequently forced to turn to its timber supplies. Flimsy trestles were thrown up in weeks to help the railroads push west. Most of them have long since been replaced, but the one at left, built by the Great Northern Railroad at Hanover, Montana, in 1930, still carries freight. In contrast to its crude complexity, the engaging little shed above enjoys the distinction of being the shortest covered railroad bridge in the world. Built around the turn of the century by the St. Johnsbury & Lamoille County Railroad at Wolcott, Vermont, the ninety-foot span did yeoman service until the line was recently abandoned. The bridge, however, still survives.
Wrought iron is infinitely more durable than wood, and once American foundries became sophisticated enough to handle such work, dozens of iron-bridge companies sprang into existence. The proud speciality of the Berlin Iron Bridge Company was its patented Parabolic Truss. Increasing use of steel in bridges had already rendered the truss obsolete when the patent was granted in 1878, but vigorous salesmen kept flogging it with considerable success well into the nineties. The arresting form can be seen below in an 1893 bridge at Norfolk, New York, and opposite in the splendid five-span vehicular bridge of 1885 that is still in use over the Merrimack River at Lowell, Massachusetts.
By the turn of the century it had become obvious that wrought iron lacked the strength to support the increasing weight of rail traffic, and engineers brought about an era of superlative steel bridges. Regarded as ugly and ponderous by the architectural critics of the time, the bridges have survived their detractors and are today justly seen as works of utilitarian grandeur. The two shown here were designed by the greatest engineers of the era, Gustav Lindenthal and Ralph Modjeski. Linden that’s massive Sciotoville Bridge over the Ohio River, below, was completed in 1917. Modjeski’s 1930 Mid-Hudson Bridge at Poughkeepsie, New York, at right, is considered to be one of the most beautiful suspension bridges in the world.