January 2011

Robert E. Lee is not only one of the most beloved and admired of all Americans but also one of the most elusive, far more idealized than known. One of his ex-generals, Jubal Early, wrote after his death, “Our beloved Chief stands, like some lofty column which rears its head among the highest, in grandeur, simple, pure and sublime.” In Robert E. Lee , a new addition to the Penguin Lives series of short biographies (210 pages), Roy Blount, Jr., approaches Lee from a number of angles, considering his humor and his attitude toward slavery, for instance, and triangulates to a portrait that is tough, fair, and unsentimental. “If in considering his sad life we strive for too consistent a tone,” he writes, “we miss some of its jangly resonance.”

Vintage, base ball, the playing of baseball today using the rules and customs (and spelling) of the nineteenth century, emerged independently in the early 1980s at two living-history sites, Old Bethpage Village Restoration on Long Island, New York, and Ohio Village in Columbus. It has since spread all over the country and been organized in various leagues, most notably the Vintage Base Ball Association (www.vbba.org). Regional differences have evolved, with Western teams more given to theatrics, Eastern clubs favoring competition on the field, and Midwesterners adhering to the concept of a “gentleman’s game,” according to Drew Frady, who pioneered vintage ball in Colorado, barnstormed in the Midwest, and now captains my own team, the Gotham Base Ball Club in New York.

Released in 1990 and now available on DVD, Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves was, incredibly, the first Western ever to win the Academy Award for Best Picture (unless one counts Cimarron , 1931, from the Edna Ferber novel, which is often listed in video guidebooks under “Drama”). Given the dearth of Westerns coming out of Hollywood these days, it may very well, along with Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven , be the last.

Dances With Wolves is one of a handful of odd, self-consciously revisionist Westerns (Arthur Penn’s highly politicized film version of Thomas Berger’s great novel Little Big Man comes to mind) that seem more dated in retrospect than the films they were supposed to supplant. Its story begins during the Civil War, when Kevin Costner’s disconsolate Lt. John Dunbar tries to get himself killed in battle only to be proclaimed a hero and offered his choice of assignments.

Gordon Lillie—a gunfighter, rancher, buffalo hunter, and Indian agent better known as Pawnee Bill—was inspired to go West as a teenager in 1874 after reading the adventures of Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill Hickok in lurid weeklies and dime novels. Lillie soon started a touring Wild West Show of his own, demonstrating that the myth of the Old West is nearly as old as the Old West itself. All this makes it appropriate that the Hopalong Cassidy Museum, scheduled to open in early August, will be located in the Prairie Rose Chuckwagon Supper ( www.prairierosechuckwagon.com ), a “western complex” in Wichita, Kansas, where tourists can eat barbecue served by cowboys and then enjoy “an evening of western music and entertainment in a climate-controlled, family-friendly environment.” Besides holding a 250-seat theater to screen Cassidy’s 66 films and 52 television shows, the museum will exhibit a wide range of memorabilia from the “King of Merchandising Cowboys,” including comic books, lunchboxes, “Hoppy food products,” and children’s bedroom suites. There will also, of course, be a gift shop.

Politically Correct has been one of the most inflammatory catch phrases of our time and also one of the most resilient. Popularized in the 1970s and the 1980s by the left, the phrase was essentially co-opted by conservatives in the 1990s. Liberal activists initially employed politically correct as a positive standard in debates on sexual, racial, ethnic, cultural, and environmental issues. For example, Toni Cade Bambara declared in an essay in The Black Woman , an anthology she edited in 1970, “A man cannot be politically correct and a chauvinist, too.”