stumbling virtue

Americana

 
Henry Ford's American suburb, transplanted into the depths of the Brazilian jungle. 

In the early years of the twentieth century, Henry Ford seemed to know how to do everything better and faster. He built cars that got Americans moving faster than ever before, and he built them in a way that people could afford. Year after year, he was able to increase the number of cars he built while also reducing the number of workers needed to build them. Whatever he tried, worked. Ford was a man who knew he was right, and knew that his way of doing things was the best way, and he saw no reason why those ideas shouldn't apply everywhere to everyone. He was wrong.

In Fordlandia, Greg Grandin tells the story of Ford's misbegotten attempt to build a rubber plantation in Brazil in the late 1920s. This is one of those little pieces of history that can best be described as "rolling disaster," as in people making mistake after mistake at every turn. The choice of site was wrong; the Americans didn't get how to do business in Brazil; Ford didn't hire experts of any sort (botanists, people who knew how to run a plantation, people experienced with working in the Amazon). And of course, the rubber boom in Brazil had ended decades before; the British had realized that they could grow rubber trees on their plantations in Southeast Asia, where a pest that killed the trees in South America didn't exist.

Motion Pictures

 

A study of a horse in motion, by Eadweard Muybridge's.
 

Did you ever find yourself lying in bed, late at night, thinking about some odd topic and wondering how you got there? Then you count back, trying to find the steps that linked one thought to another, strange leaps that don't seem naturally aligned but have some tie to each other, until you find where you started. Sometimes writing about history isn't so much about telling a linear story as it is about making connections.

In River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, Rebecca Solnit tells the story of the life of photographer Eadweard Muybridge (the tortured spelling of his name was his own invention, or re-invention, one might say). For Solnit, though, Muybridge's life and work is really just a jumping off point for  meditations on the West and the inventions that propelled America into the age we think of as modern--a time of telephones, phonographs, electric lights, trains, cars, airplanes, and eventually computers and instant worldwide communication through the Internet.

The story of Eadweard Muybridge isn't a bad place to hang all these ideas. Born Edward James Muggeridge in England in 1830, he decided he was meant to seek his fortune in the New World. He made his way to San Francisco and after trying a few different jobs, and a few different spellings of his name, settled on photography and, eventually, Eadweard Muybridge. It took a number of years to get to that name, and in between, he sold his photographs under the name Helios.

Family Ties

A bunch of Wittgensteins, just hanging out.

Someone once said to me, "Siblings are your proof," meaning that your brothers and sisters are witnesses to what happened in your childhood. You know, the ones who will back up the story as the kids saw it, not the parents' version. The ones who know what really happened on that vacation, or that family party.

I agreed, but that's because I've always gotten along with my sisters. I imagine that there must be many families where siblings aren't proof, but rather those liars who don't really remember what happened, or who are just trying to make me look bad, or are sucking up to mom and dad. No matter which it is, though--love, hate, resentment, jealousy--you're tired to your siblings like you are to no one else, even your parents.

Alexander Waugh's "The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War" tells the story of the Wittgenstein family (hence the title), meaning the philosopher Ludwig and his three sisters and four brothers. One brother definitely committed suicide,while two others died in murky ways that suggest suicide; in fact, there were an inordinate number of suicides in the family. If you ever had any doubt that that turn of mind is hereditary, this book might sway you to the yes side.

Heroes

 

James Agee's screenplay for Chaplin wistfully featured the actor's long-abandoned Tramp character.

I read a book. I don't have much to say about it.

(Update: I was wrong. Consider yourself warned.)

That's not to say that I didn't learn anything from Chaplin and Agee: The Untold Story of the Tramp, the Writer, and the Lost Screenplay by John Wranovics. For starters, I had known nothing about James Agee other than that he was a film critic, wrote "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" (which I haven't read) and that he and Whittaker Chambers had worked together at Time magazine and admired each other's work. Now, though, I know that he was close to a saint, everyone loved him, and he worshipped Charlie Chaplin.

Let's get to that first item, the sainthood thing. I'm not going to write a biography of Agee here--there are many better ones out there than anything I could sketch out here and even after reading this book, I don't feel like I've gotten the whole story .What I do know, though, is that Wranovics is a very diligent researcher who quotes from Agee's correspondence and his friends at great length, with all of the quotes being of an extremely positive nature. My point is that this isn't the place to find a full-out, critical biography of Agee, nor is that the intent. It's just the story of how Agee left film criticism to go to Hollywood and work as a screenwriter, an action that--in Wranovics's version--seems to be almost solely motivated by Agee's desire to get a screenplay he'd written to Charlie Chaplin.

Nightingale's Song

 

Florence Nightingale meeting wounded soldiers at Scutari. No doubt they were awed by her.

When it comes to writing for educational publishers, there are certain topics that are off limits. Most of them are disallowed because they deal with things like sex, drugs, violence, death, magic, witchcraft, etc.--the usual taboos for children as dictated by the most reserved and careful of parents and marketing execs. Then there are topics that are out because they are considered "done to death," as in any kid over grade 4 has probably seen them already a number of times. If you're going to write a little book for a reading program about Abraham Lincoln or George Washington, you better have a new take on the subject. The same goes for people like Ben Franklin (though you can often get by with him because he had such a long, multifaceted life ), Harriet Tubman, Lewis & Clark and Sacagawea, Thomas Edison, Amelia Earheart, and alas, my favorites, the Wright Brothers. In other words, pretty much any of the stalwarts of history in the 18th-19th century. This includes Florence Nightingale.

Seeing is Believing

 

Real Vermeer: "Christ at the House of Martha and Mary"

 

Fake Vermeer: Han Van Meegeren's Vermeer forgery "Christ at Emmaus"

I don't know much about art, but I like to think that I could tell the difference between a painting by a great master, and an awkward piece by an amateur. However, the art of the forger depends not so much on skill or a copyist's talent, but on viewers' willingness to see only what they want to see. Edward Dolnick's The Forger's Spell is about one of the most successful art forgery scams of all time--at least that we know about. The most successful art forgeries are, of course, the ones no one knows about except for the artist who collected the money.

I am not going to be able to do justice to this book. I finished it about two weeks ago, didn't have time to write about it, and then had to return it to the library. Sadly (and perhaps scarily) my grasp of the details have faded during that time, and rather than say something wrong, I'm afraid I may have to be rather vague.

So Long At The Fair

 

Everything starts somewhere.

I have a tattoo of the Eiffel Tower on my left ankle. When people ask what made me choose that, I explain that I wanted something very vertical, and I like Paris. This often disappoints the questioner, who is usually expecting some dramatic story about an important event that happened to me in Paris, or perhaps at the Eiffel Tower. Unfortunately, it's just that simple: practical aesthetics. But I do quite like the Eiffel Tower.
 
If I had been around in 1886, when it was announced that Gustav Eiffel's design had won a competition to be built as the centerpiece of the 1889 World's Fair, my admiration for the Tower would not have been universally shared. Architechts scorned it. Neighbors in the area where it was set to be built sued to stop the construction. A letter of protest against the "dizzily ridiculous tower...a black, gigantic chimney factory" signed by forty-seven luminaries of the Paris cultural scene--including Meissonier, de Maupassant, Dumas fils, Gounod, Garnier--was sent to the fair's organizers. But construction proceeded, and, as Jill Jonnes writes in Eiffel's Tower: And the World's Fair Where Buffalo Bill Beguiled Paris, The Artists Quarreled, and Thomas Edison Became a Count, despite the presence of so many other exciting events, the Tower won over most of its fiercest critics and became the biggest success of the fair.

Gold Rush

 

The Golden Spike Ceremony, where the western railroad met the eastern line. No Chinese workers were allowed in the commemorative photo.

It's impossible to underestimate the way railroads changed the world. For thousands of years people had traveled the same way--by foot, on an animal, in a cart pulled by an animal and on the water. Transportation in 1800 A.D. was little different than transportation in 800 B.C. But when railroads and trains began to cross the lands of the world, everything changed--people and goods could be transported more quickly and in larger quantities than they had before. Routes that had been considered too long or impractical were now viable. People could get to each other more quickly, communication sped up with mail trains, and new material became available. Countries where cities were separated by vast swaths of empty land were now connected. As trains became more common, prices dropped, and people who had never been able to afford to travel before, even for day long holidays, suddenly could. Trains changed time; before them, if you were traveling to visit someone you would only be able to estimate how long it would take you to get there, with your speed depending on your horses, the weather, the condition of the roads during that season. Trains, though, ran on schedules. They left at specific times and arrived at exact times. Just as factories were getting people used to working by the clock rather than the sun, trains were speeding up lives and businesses. It was now possible to plan in a way like never before.

All of the above has been written many times before, and written much better than I have. But I never stop marvelling when I think about it. Imagine what it would have been like to have been born in the early 1800s and live into the 1880s or '90s. The world at the end of your life would have been barely recognizable from the one of your childhood. I like to think about these kinds of things.

This is a lengthy introduction to a very short book (and this will be an extremely short write up. Really. I swear this time). Richard Rayner's The Associates is not about the inventors of the locomotive, or the people who built the transcontinental railroad, or the people who rode it. It is about the group of four California businessmen who made the deals to have it built, making themselves millionaires in the process. With the exception of Leland Stanford (as in founder of the university), these men--Mark Hopkins, Charlie Crocker, and Collis Huntington--are rarely spoken of today, but you could make an argument for their being amongst the most important figures in 19th century American history (and surely some clever person would be able to argue that they are not). At the very least, you can say that Huntington has been sadly underrated as one of the supreme Robber Barons of the Gilded Age.

Bomb Scare

 

The LA Times building was bombed on October 2, 1910.

Today's news always claims to be the most important news ever. Witness how many events claim to be the trial of the century or the crime of the century (usually both). But it only takes the passing of a decade or a generation for something new to claim the title, leaving people to compare the latest horror to a past one: which is worse, a brutal cold-blooded killing of one prostitute or the brutal cold-blooded murder of a wife? A homegrown bomber that kills 1000 or a foreign invader that kills 2000? People who kill for fun or people who kill for money?

In 1910, with the century barely underway, the bombing of the Los Angeles Times building, which killed 21 employees of the newspaper, was called the crime of the century. It's not remembered that way, though, if it is remembered at all. Why it has fallen into the forgotten corners of history is made clear in Howard Blum's book American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, Movie-Making, and the Crime of the Century.

Honor

 

Okay, gentlemen, let's settle this.

If you feel that you've been insulted, how would you react? I'm guessing that you would not issue a formal challenge for one-on-one combat with the intention of fighting to the death.

Yes, I mean a good old-fashioned duel. The kind that used to be fought over the tiniest slighting insult to a man (or his wife, daughter, or lover). Seconds, walking ten paces and turning and firing. Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton. That kind of thing.

For most of us, that's all we know about duels, what we've seen in movies, or briefly in a history book. It's been a long time since duels were considered a part of a gentlemen's personal code of honor (and you have to dig pretty deep in general to find gentlemen these days anyway), so we feel no connection to them.

James Landale, however, has a very personal connection to a duel, the last duel fought in Scotland in which a man was killed. After long hearing bits and pieces of the story from his family, he decided to find out what really happened. The result is his book, The Last Duel, which not only explains what happened on that long ago day between David Landale and George Morgan, but also gives a fascinating history of duelling.