January 2011

July 16, 1812: The United States of America had been at war with Great Britain for twenty-eight days. The American frigate Constitution, 44 guns, was at sea, on a passage from Washington, where she had refitted, to New York. There she was to join the squadron of Commodore John Rodgers, to cruise against British commerce.

America got its first look at Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware in New York City in 1851, the year it was completed. A huge canvas it was—21 feet 4 inches by 12 feet 5 inches—and the most ambitious of Leut/e’s whole career. Its exhibition in late October at the Stuyvesant Institute on Broadway drew, in less than two weeks, five thousand viewers. The Evening Mirror pronounced the picture “the grandest, most majestic, and most effective painting ever exhibited in America.” In less than a month, orders were being solicited for the first of many reproductions; and shortly Washington Crossing the Delaware was a fixture in every schoolroom, a “must” illustration in history texts, and a favorite engraving across the continent.

The incredibly shrunken face of an animate mummy, grotesque behind enormous blackrimmed glasses; the old boy tottering around the golf course, benign and imperturbable, distributing his famous dimes; the huge foundation with its medical triumphs; the lingering memory of the great trust and the awed contemplation of the even greater company; and over all, the smell of oil, endlessly pumping out of the earth, each drop adding its bit to the largest exaction ever levied on any society by a private indiviclual—with such associations it is no wonder that the name has sunk into the American mind to an extraordinary degree. From his earliest days the spendthrih schoolboy is brought to his senses with: “Who do you think you are, John D. Rockefeller?”

The death warrant was signed on Monday, and the business was then pushed with all haste. At ten o’clock on Tuesday morning—it was January 30, 1649 —Captain Hacker brought King Charles out of St. James Palace. The air was still and very cold—ice was piled up under the Thames bridges. Charles walked briskly, urging his guard to be quick: “March apace!” To the solemn muted roll of drums he crossed the park between lines of soldiers and entered Whitehall.

The old man was one of the last direct ties to a past Americans did not want to lose— a throwback to the days of pioneering, of covered wagons and homesteads, of simple moral values and deeply held religious convictions. He had a sense of history himself, an awareness of the continuity of human affairs; as Chief Executive of the nation he once observed that “No man can be President without looking back upon the effort given to the country by the thirty Presidents who in my case have preceded me. No man of imagination can be President without thinking of what shall be the course of his country under the thirty more Presidents who will follow him. He must think of himself as a link in the long chain of his country’s destiny, past and future.”

At the turn of the century. America was witness to the full flowering of a unique art form, the art of the American circus. Created by artisans trained in the European craft traditions, the carvings, banners, and posters of the American circus once constituted an exciting and homogeneous whole. The carvings in particular represented a level of creativity easily the equal of the cigar store Indians and ships’ figureheads so treasured by antique collectors and curators. Perhaps the reason they were never quite accepted as works of art was the contemporary belief among the genteel that the circus was synonymous with vulgarity, and that nothing worth-while could come out of it. Now that we have lost the circus as it was. we have come to appreciate its mute remains.

By the year 1561 the mainland of North America had acquired a bad reputation, at least as far as Spain was, concerned. In the three-score years following Columbus’ electrifying voyage, several Spanish attempts to colonize the Gulf and Atlantic coasts had failed dismally. Ponce de Léon was dead from wounds suffered during an Indian attack in Florida. The ambitious De Soto now lay at rest beneath the wide waters of the Mississippi which he had discovered. Pánfilo de Narváez had disappeared in the Gulf of Mexico, the only survivors among his six hundred men being a handful of gaunt and naked wanderers who miraculously made their way to safety in Mexico (see “The Ordeal of Gabeza de Vaca” in the December, 1960, AMERICAN HERITAGE ). Despite its early promise, this vast new country had produced no Eldorado, no Fountain of Youth, no short cut to the riches of the Orient. It was, in brief, far less attractive in every respect than Mexico and Peru.

The art of window dressing, in our opinion, is in a dreadful state of decline today. Simple, elegant, austere: this is the new ton . We were reminded of this fact recently when we chanced upon a little brown book which recalls the art in its heyday. It has a catchy title: The American Hardware Store: A Manual of Approved Methods of Arranging and Displaying Hardware , and it was written by one R. R. Williams in 1892.