March 2011

Duke Ellington is a 1940s American urban Image, flickering with motion, set to steady music, expressed in overlapping patterns that combine, dissolve, and recombine. In cities, loud sound and strong light need a sophisticated order to achieve their best effects. Here bright stripes and checks, rippling hair, and sharp lapels merge with the glitter of bright eyes and teeth to make Ellington’s looks into a version of his incomparable music. And the vivid city gets a distinctive style of dress suggesting all its beat and force with no sacrifice of elegance or warmth.

Although almost any stretch of days from mid-December to early January will contain special celebrations, festivities reach their peak on Christmas Eve. Residents compete for the best displays of farolitos and luminarias (bonfires). After midnight mass people stroll around the city, admiring each other’s handiwork and warming themselves at the fires. Anglos are also welcome at several of the local pueblos. For a schedule of events, call the Santa Fe Convention and Visitors Bureau (505-984-6760) or the Eight Northern Indian Pueblos Council (505-852-4265).

A Chicago judge ruled in 1908 that a nightgown was a luxury, not a necessity, and thereupon issued a restraining order forbidding an 18-year-old girl from buying one against her father’s wishes. “The only possible use of a nightgown,” the judge explained, “is to keep off flies and mosquitoes, and the bedclothes will do just as well.” The father testified: “She never wore a nightgown in her life, and neither did her parents. She’s been associating with nifty people; that’s the trouble with her.” Clearly, as recently as this century, all Americans did not enjoy freedom of dress.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt announced on December 10 that he would donate his papers and correspondence and a private collection of books and prints to form the nucleus of the first presidential library open to scholars and the public.

Presidential papers had traditionally remained the private property of the departing Chief Executive. George Washington shipped his to Mount Vernon when he left office in 1797, and John Adams followed suit because he didn’t want his despised successor, Thomas Jefferson, rooting through his papers.

The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library opened to the public in June of 1941 at the Roosevelt family estate in Hyde Park, New York.

American theater owners voted the child actress Shirley Temple the nation’s number-one box-office star for the fourth consecutive year on December 22. The runner-up, for the third year in a row, was Clark Gable.

The rise of the U.S. population in the first half of the nineteenth century resulted in a corresponding rise in the number of representatives in Washington. Wings added to the Capitol building in the 185Os solved the overcrowding but made the building’s original dome look disproportionately small. Congress hired the architect Thomas U. Walter to design a new, larger one.

Made of iron and inspired by the domes of the cathedrals of St. Paul and St. Peter, the Walter dome—at 307 feet—stood almost twice as tall as the old one. During Lincoln’s first inauguration, the skeleton of the half-finished dome had loomed above him like an emblem of the disheveled Union. But by the end of 1863 the structure was complete, and in a ceremony on December 2 the shining new dome was capped with an allegorical statue by the sculptor Thomas Crawford depicting the “Goddess of Freedom.”

An odd thing about looking at photographs from the turn of the century is that, except for the inevitable black and white of the picture itself, and the stray horse or trolley car, the general urban panorama looks very much as it does today. We see familiar streets and shops and buildings in a dozen eclectic styles; it’s all a setting that one could easily imagine walking through. The great exceptions are the people in the pictures. Yes, one recognizes the major range of male, female, young, and old characters. But what in the world are they wearing? Were they all on their way to a costume party? How quaint, how charming, how bizarre, how . . . odd.

If they could see us, their reaction would be the same, of course. And as for the clothes we ourselves are wearing this season, observers of the future undoubtedly will wonder at them, clothes that seem perfectly ordinary to us, our daily rags and gear.

The Gulf Refining Company opened the nation’s first drive-in service station on December 1 at the corner of Baum Boulevard and St. Clair Street in Pittsburgh. The station was open twenty-four hours and offered free crankcase service, but despite these enticements the manager, Frank McLaughlin, pumped only thirty gallons of gas on the first business day.

Mack Sennett needed a comedian. The “Keystone Kops” director had just fired Harold Lloyd (soon to become one of the nation’s most famous screen comics) for not being funny, and his top man, Ford Sterling, had quit because $750 a week was not enough. Sennett remembered an English comedian from a vaudeville act in New York City. He made a few telephone calls and found out the man’s name was Charlie Chaplin.

Reviewing the nation’s financial situation in its December 1 issue, Harper’s Weekly gave voice to a worry that today seems inconceivable. Treasury estimates had projected a surplus of $203 million for 1890: “This prefigures a situation demanding imperatively enormous reduction of revenue or utterly reckless expenditure.”

Here is the upright and honorable public man of mid-nineteenth-century America. Rufus Choate (1799-1859), a prominent lawyer who served terms as a congressman and a senator as well as attorney general of Massachusetts, was a man without a moment to spare or lose. Here we can see his heavy coat trying to calm his necktie’s urgent flight and subdue the surge of his waistcoat; his emphatic, mobile tailoring betrays the wayward force of his thought. Lincoln wore his clothes like this; so did Poe and Emerson. The costume does general honor to propriety but perpetually bursts info small fits of fold and corner that express the volatile man within.

The author recommends Two Centuries of Costume in America, 1620-1820 , volumes 1 and 2, by Alice Morse Earle (Dover Publications, 1976), and Suiting Everyone: The Democratization of Clothing in America , by Claudia B. Kidwell and Margaret C. Christman (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1974). The latter, now out of print, is available at some libraries.