January 2011

Along with their rusty bedsprings, broken chairs, and other relics, the attics, closets, basements, and barns in this country are stuffed with pictorial surprises. Some of them are, very occasionally, works of real art, but most are the humble efforts of local or itinerant painters of the past who preserved on canvas the faces of families and friends or the simple events of daily life. Usually it is in old houses that these treasures of a younger America are found, and for years they have been neglected by scholars and left to gather dust, their stories hidden as well. Not too long ago, however, the Vermont Council on the Arts decided to gather such works then in the hands of residents of the state. Researchers collected and photographed nearly three hundred paintings, which reflect a wide variety of subjects and artistic skills.

In the first years of the eighteenth century Peter Schuyler, mayor of Albany, was friend and protector of the Mohawk Indians. They camped familiarly in his parlor, dined at his table, and called him “Quider,” the Mohawk pronunciation of Peter. They were also lured into supporting Schuyler’s bold plans for the invasion and subjugation of French Canada. For the desultory War of the Spanish Succession, involving France and England, was being waged in Europe and on the high seas. In America it is remembered as Queen Anne’s War. It was marked by indecisive naval expeditions and by bloody border raids, like that against Deerfield, Massachusetts, in 1704.

In 1709 Peter Schuyler supported an invasion of Canada from a base in Albany. The invaders were stopped short of Lake Champlain by the difficulties of forest transport, the countermeasures of the French, and dysentery, the curse of soldiering. Schuyler subsequently concluded that the London Ministry must be persuaded to send massive aid for a properly equipped expedition aiming at the conquest of Canada.

The American who emerged from the Revolution with a military reputation second only to that of George Washington was a Quaker with a physical affliction that had caused him to be rejected as an officer by the men in his militia company. Nathanael Greene’s career was a curious interplay of such contradictions, with the result that his fortunes seemed always at the flood or the ebb, never fully resolved. Raised a Quaker, he never lost the deep sense of piety he learned at meeting, but could not go along with the doctrine of pacifism, which he regarded as impractical under such circumstances as the “business of necessity” in which the colonies found themselves in 1775. A big, husky man, Greene had a powerful frame that came from years at his father’s forge in Coventry, Rhode Island, but his robust appearance camouflaged chronic ill health. Asthma plagued him, inoculation against smallpox left a spot in his right eye that pained him frequently, and a stiff right knee caused him to limp noticeably. None of these ailments kept him from being something of a lady’s man in his younger days, but the gimpy leg frustrated his first attempt to become an officer.

True classics never die. But sometimes second-rate works also acquire unique longevity. Take Uncle Tom’s Cabin , born in 1852. Its best-selling appeal lay in its stereotypes, such as little Eva’s childish purity, Tom’s stalwart virtue, and Simon Legree’s unalloyed villainy. These oversimplified the issues of race and slavery but gave the novel an emotional power that survived transplantation to the stage, where it remained a smash hit until almost yesterday. [See “Uncle Tom, the Theater and Mrs. Stowe,” A MERICAN H ERITAGE , October, 1955.] Though in grease paint the characters sagged into caricature, generations raptly watched the footlit struggle betwixt good and evil long after the work’s original antislavery theme had been forgotten. And cartoonists, always eager for symbols evoking instant public recognition, seized and frequently distorted the familiar dramatis personae for years after the play’s effective lifetime. Thus does popular culture preserve, but change, what it uses. Herewith we present a portfolio of such cartoons.

For several years after the California gold rush San Francisco was notorious around the world for the frequency and magnificence of its municipal disasters. Time and again, devastating fires swept through the business district. City officials defalcated with the contents of the public treasury. Banks failed, epidemics raged, and gangs of murderers ruled the streets. But there was never anything to equal the calamity that befell the boisterous little town one day in January, 1856, when a federal tribunal, after almost three years of travail, concluded that most of the land within the city limits did not belong to the householders and merchants who lived and worked there but to a wealthy French capitalist living in Mexico—a wily, willful buccaneer named Joseph-Yves Limantour, known to his friends (who were few, indeed, in San Francisco) as José.

In early Hollywood there lived a King. He was married to a Queen. Her name was Mary, and she was a Golden Girl. He was dashing and marvellously graceful and young—above all young. Youth was very American, and besides, it was essential to the King

On the morning of August 4, 1735, a cross section of New York’s ten thousand citizens clustered outside the city hall at the corner of Wall and Nassau streets. English and Dutch, men of all classes and trades, waited and argued tensely. Carts bounced over the paving blocks. The midsummer morning light slanted down on white sails in the harbor and on the spire of Trinity Church a block away. Here and there in the crowd readers scanned the pages of a fourpage paper entitled The New-Tork Weekly Journal, Containing the freshest Advices, Foreign, and Domestick .

President Ulysses S. Grant opened the United States Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia on May 10, 1876. When the closing ceremonies were held on November i o, in a cold drenching rain, 9,910,966 people (paid and free) had passed through the entrance gates. This was more than fourteen times the population of Philadelphia, the second largest city of the United States, and more than had attended any of the great world’s fairs held in the preceding quarter century. World’s fairs—and in fact any kind of mass spectacle—were then a novelty attracting great interest; but the Centennial of 1876 was a phenomenon. For six months crowds filled to capacity every railroad station, ticket office, steamboat, horsecar, hotel, boarding house, and eating place in the city and on all the roads to it. During its six months of existence the Centennial proved to be the most overwhelming, absorbing, entertaining public exhibition that had ever to that time been seen in the United States.

If we may pose a question to our readers, When do you suppose the picture above was taken? Twenty years ago? Fifty? Or seventy? We confess we hope you make the last choice, because that is the effect the scene hopes to convey, even though the photograph was actually made in August, 1971. It shows a train on the Valley Railroad in Connecticut, its ancient but sturdy steam locomotive and cars painstakingly restored, inside and out, to the high gloss of railroading in the very early years of this century, when steam was king, managements were proud, and the presidents of great systems were sometimes more highly regarded in the United States (as the historian James Bryce observed) than mere governors or even the President in the White House. If some of these lordly figures were scoundrels, they were nonetheless Persons of Importance and enjoyed, besides, the right of riding on every other fellow’s railroad on special passes, which were on occasion made of solid gold.