March 2011

Buffalo Bill is the source for all our ideas of what to wear in our own wilderness. His clothes show how to encompass what the Indians and the Mexicans knew and to exercise our Yankee style in harmony with theirs. The leather fringes blend with the quasi-military boots and big belt, the firearms with the silver embroidery; the cowboy hat crowns the assemblage. Chaps or a bandanna might be added, or the boots modified; but in all its versions, the American Western image was stamped on the national consciousness by William Cody, seen at left in 1909 with two colleagues from his Wild West show.

President Lyndon B. Johnson presented the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer with the Atomic Energy Commission’s Enrico Fermi Medal on December 2. As the brilliant leader of the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer had headed the team of scientists that developed the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but after the war he opposed the development of the far more destructive hydrogen bomb, warning that the United States could find itself trapped in a suicidal arms race.

His controversial positions and a youthful flirtation with the Communist party made him the target of an investigation by federal agents. In 1954, despite a complete lack of evidence of wrongdoing, he was stripped of his top-level security clearance. The waning of McCarthy-era anti-Communist fervor eventually brought the disillusioned Oppenheimer into better standing with the government, but he never got his security clearance back.

Until recent years the United States wasn’t known as a capital of fashion for men. If anything, our historical male image has been rough and artless compared with suave British counterparts and elegant Continental models. Nevertheless, we have had true masculine fashion figures, men whose dress has harmonized so well with their free American souls that the whole world has been moved by the combination. American sartorial heroes have leaped past fashion, sidestepping the understated masculine icon invented in England by Beau Brummell early in the nineteenth century. In this country a different standard arose for male looks, based on an ideal of strong individual personality devoid of eccentricity, free but sane. It allowed a way to dress that might incorporate—but was never a slave to—the restrained look of success in an ordered middle-class society. Instead, an American man’s clothes could reveal some unique style or personal goal and be a mirror of those cherished ambitions America hopes to foster in each citizen.

Candor is the keynote in Mark Twain’s famous style of dress, but it is an ironic, sagacious, very American brand of simplicity. The three-piece white suit, so notably taken up in later days by John Huston and Tom Wolfe, so movingly worn by Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird , here becomes the epiphany of an American theme. All the shifting, insistent wrinkles in the loose outfit echo the play of wit over the underlying substance of plain thought. These clothes promote the notion of the clearsighted, good-humored American hero moving unsoiled through the swamps of Old World decadence, casting a fresh eye on objects of outmoded reverence and raising a comic voice to mock them.

 Letters to the Editor

400 Years Ago

Your special New York section, “Encounters 400 Years Ago,” in the Spring 2009 issue contains a terrific set of articles! It is so good to hear the details of other explorers besides Captain John Smith. I have lived in Vermont and in Maine, and it made me happy to see Samuel de Champlain and Captain George Popham given some credit too.

—Helen Lent

Frederick, MD

Hazardous Duty

Ask any WASP what was the most important event that changed her life, and she will proudly say—“I was a WASP.”

We entered the training in 1942–44 as Civil Service employees at our own expense, with no benefits. My life insurance was cancelled because I was entering hazardous duty.

There’s a new twist on the old party game of asking what questions a person might ask should they have the opportunity to dine with Abraham Lincoln or other historical figures. The “synthetic interview,” a technology that comes from the computer labs at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, has made it possible to chat with such luminaries as Charles Darwin, George Westinghouse, and Ben Franklin. And Abe is in the works.

This new experiment in living history represents a cross between Disney’s animatronics and CNN’s holographic imagery. At the Carnegie Science Center, an actor portraying the evolutionary scientist Darwin appears on a large screen that stands within his re-created study. Visitors can quiz Darwin via a touch screen. The exhibit’s designers crafted 199 questions after querying more than 1,000 people.

Animation has come to historical documentaries. Perhaps inspired by the success of animated fictional films such as Waking Life (2001), nonfiction filmmakers are choosing to illustrate the past rather than rely on archival images or reenacted scenes.

Such use of animated images introduces some thorny issues. Is it right to call these “documentaries”? Don’t documentary films—by definition—depict real events with authentic photographic images and genuine artifacts? Can a film that uses an artist’s illustrations of history really purport to be telling the truth about the past?

Artists’ renderings can be every bit as reliable or unreliable as dramatic reenactments, or even interviews with experts. The content is only as good as the evidence that supports it; the accuracy of a documentary doesn’t depend on how its imagery is produced but rather on the intentions of its creators.

 My favorite photo in this boldly styled book is a sweeping panorama of  the Moon’s Taurus-Littrow Valley, taken by Apollo 17 commander Gene Cernan. Jagged, starkly lit boulders litter the foreground, while surrounding massifs shoulder their way into a black sky. Mid frame right, the tiny figure of astronaut and geologist Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, sampling scoop in hand, lopes purposefully into the unknown. Man is at work on the Moon; the alien scene captures the wonder of the Apollo landings and tantalizes us with the potential discoveries yet to be made on the Moon, the asteroids, and Mars. Apollo: Through the Eyes of the Astronauts is especially welcome now, because this summer marks the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11, which landed the first humans on the Moon. The editors of this slim but photopacked volume asked 21 men, the survivors of the 29 who flew on Apollo’s 11 missions, to pick a favorite image from their expeditions and share their impressions. Each of the 11 chapters begins with a brief mission summary, then presents a series of images that pull us into the lunar journey.

This book offers a rare treat for American history devotees. Richard Beeman, who has devoted much of his career to studying the Constitution, played a leading role in the creation of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia and is currently vice chair of its Distinguished Scholars Panel. Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution caps decades of thought and research on the document that so critically shaped the nation.

A long, richly detailed book, as befits its large topic, it opens in the final days of the Revolution with a bankrupt Congress, a mutinous unpaid army, and 13 quarrelsome, suspicious states. In 1786 a disgruntled former army captain named Daniel Shays fomented a good imitation of another revolution in western Massachusetts. Thoughtful northerners and southerners alike began to consider making major changes to the makeshift Articles of Confederation, which the Continental Congress had patched together in the midst of fighting a war. Retired General George Washington agreed, and the Continental Congress issued a call for a convention to gather in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787.

On Saturday, April 13, 1861, the day after Confederate artillery had fired upon the Federal garrison at Fort Sumter in South Carolina, President Abraham Lincoln sprang into action, calling up volunteer state armies and strategizing with his cabinet. If Lincoln reached into his waistcoat pocket that day to check his pocket watch, he would not have felt it. Nine blocks away, at Washington’s premier M. W. Galt & Brother jewelry shop on Pennsylvania Avenue and Seventh Street NW, Lincoln’s favorite timepiece—comparable to a Cartier watch today—was undergoing maintenance by an Irish immigrant watchmaker, Jonathan Dillon. The routine cleaning, reoiling, and retiming would have taken four to six hours of Dillon’s Saturday. Before he had completed the work, one of the shop owners burst into the room, announcing the engagement in Charleston Harbor.

War breaking out would have come as no surprise to Dillon, but the news did unleash strong emotions. Once his boss left, he pulled out a pointed scribe and scratched a message into the brass movement of the watch, then refastened the dial.