January 2011

Robert Moses, who m a long municipal career has held, or overwhelmed, many important jobs in New York City, was asked last April to speak before the National Sculpture Society on the subject of public monuments; the following excerpts, used with his kind permission, are from those remarks.

… The sculptor has always been handicapped by the ancient curse on idolatry and the graven image. This inhibition is, however, avoided by the modernist, who simply makes his figures unrecognizable.

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Huge abstract outdoor sculpture is now sponsored by the New York City parks department. One such sculpture, a gigantic, contorted steel spiral worm called “Number Three,” is painted bright orange, is thirteen feet high, weighs a ton, and is termed beautiful by my friend Commissioner August Heckscher. This futile steel caterpillar reminds one of the Laocoon family in Virgil squeezed to death by a huge serpent. But when the Romans sculptured a snake, it was a real, honest-to-God sinuous serpent with muscle and oomph, not an amorphous red crawler with no beginning or end.

Who Is the Fairest of Them All?

Pocket mirrors were distributed at shops and department stores to men and women alike, which perhaps explains the contrast in appeal between those on this page and those opposite. The bevy of idealized ladies whose features grace the backs of the pocket mirrors to the left were silent spokesmen for, among others, a dry-goods store, a bookseller, two shoe companies, two candymakers, and—as always—the Coca-Cola Company. (The last, by the way, is one of a series of much-sought-after mirrors distributed by Coca-Cola for which collectors now pay as much as two hundred dollars each.) All very proper. But images changed abruptly when the male was the advertisers’ target. The sight of the beauties at right doubtless quickened many a pulse. There wasonly a dubious connection between the provocative nymph and the digestive aid, or the reflective siren and the cigar, but advertising men have always known that it doesn’t really matter.

From the opening decades of the nineteenthcentury toourownday, Americans’ persistent efforts to understand the causes and conditions of poverty have fixed upon the word “paradox.” Writing in 1822, the managers of one early reform organization, the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism, puzzled over the existence of poverty in the new Republic. “Our territory is so expansive, its soil so prolific,” they exclaimed, our institutions so “free and equal, “and our citizens so blessed with “ample scope for industry and enterprise,” that surely “pauperism would be foreign to our country.” Instead, to their dismay and wonderment they confronted the “strange paradox that pauperism, as a practical evil, should be known among us. ” A century and a half later a Presidential commission appointed to study essentially the same problem expressed equal wonderment.

Attached to every city in America is at least one illustrious industrial name. In Detroit it is Ford. In Durham it is Duke. In Milwaukee it is Schlitz, who made “the beer that made Milwaukee famous.” In the annals of Poughkeepsie, New York, it is Smith, or rather the brothers Smith, William and Andrew, whose patronymic is recognized wherever people cough. What Gloversville has been to gloves, Meriden to silverware, and Battle Creek to breakfast cereals, Poughkeepsie has been to medicated cough candy. There, on the banks of the Hudson River, two canny Scots made the throat lozenge an American institution, rivalled in popularity only by the town’s next most widely known product, Vassar girls.

James Fenimore Cooper told him; Charles Sumner and Ralph Waldo Emerson told him; even Charles Bulfinch, one of the architects of the Capitol, told him; but Horatio Greenough knew his own mind. The gigantic monument to George Washington taking shape in Greenough’s Florentine studio was to be “the birth of my thought. I have sacrificed to it the flower of my days and the freshness of my strength; its every lineament has been moistened by the sweat of my toil and the tears of my exile.” Nobody could persuade the headstrong young American expatriate that the people back home just might not appreciate his sacrifice. “The loungers in the Rotunda,” warned Senator Sumner, “many never before having seen a statue in marble, will want the necessary knowledge to enable them to appreciate your Washington.”

Fawn M. Brodie’s article on the controversy surrounding Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings (“The Great Jefferson Taboo,” June, 1372) elicited letters from many of our readers. Of special interest were two that took opposing sides m the argument over whether Jefferson had as his mistress the quadroon half sister of his late wife.

The first missive, in the form of an open letter to Mrs. Brodie entitled “Mr. Jefferson and Monticello Sally,” came from William Peden, a teacher of English at the University of Missouri who has written several articles as well as his doctoral dissertation on Jefferson. He writes:

The following entries from a Japanese war diary have come into our hands. We cannot vouch for their authenticity:

8 December 1943

Our battalion commander gladly informed us that in an engagement northeast of Guadalcanal our navy has sunk 4 enemy warships, 7 cruisers, 17 aircraft carriers, and countless transports. The American Pacific fleet commander was also killed. At present the death rate of Australians is so high they cannot afford tosend any reinforcements in the future.

9 December 1943

Again troubled by beriberi.