December 3, 2007
Dry Manhattan Posted by Ellen Feldman at 03:50 PM EST Michael A. Lerner’s Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City, a well researched and delightfully readable study of Prohibition in New York City, has considerable relevance to today’s culture wars. Lerner begins by explaining that he limited his investigation into the effect of the Eighteen Amendment to New York City, because to the rest of the world, New York was America. It was also seen as a vortex of sin, and the Anti-Saloon League, under the local leadership of the single-minded, politically savvy, bigoted, and psychologically intemperate William Anderson, saw drying out the city as both a coup and a first step in spreading temperance around the globe. Anderson and his allies exploited both the Progressive Movement and World War I to push through Prohibition. The fact that many brewers were of German descent made the effort to outlaw beer seem patriotic, and drys argued that a sober soldier was a better soldier, though returning doughboys were outraged to find that the nation they had fought for had gone dry. Those men and women who did support temperance were often strange bedfellows—Norwegian church-goers and African-American labor leaders, tea merchants and women suffragists. What little support there was for the dry movement, however, dried up as soon as New Yorkers realized how drastically their personal liberty had been curtailed. The book is full of fascinating tidbits about the city under Prohibition. The closing of many cabarets and nightclubs was no surprise, but some hotels also failed, and even the great Ziegfeld had to shut down one of his shows. More unexpected was the effect on movie theaters. Certain that without spirits to raise their spirits people would have to find other means of escape, theater owners had predicted record audiences and revenues, but movie attendance plummeted. Lerner posits that the lack of liquor depressed everyone so completely that they had no taste for any entertainment at all. The book tracks other quirky side effects. In the first few months, both arrests and hospitalizations for inebriation went down, but soon the drunk and the poisoned were crowding emergency rooms, and the cost of law enforcement skyrocketed, while the police turned to criminal activity with unprecedented zeal and imagination. New Yorkers from every walk of life were resourceful in finding ways around the Eighteenth Amendment. Whether city dwellers were more ingenious is open to debate, but there is a priceless scene in Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt in which the eponymous protagonist sets out to get some bootleg hooch for a dinner party that demonstrates that the rest of the nation was not so cavalier about flouting the law. New York differed from the rest of the country in another way. The dry movement tended to be Nativist. New York teamed with immigrants and Catholics and Jews. Lerner points out that for all its deleterious effects, the neighborhood saloon was often a community center for new Americans. An excellent example of this was John McSorley, who nether drank nor smoked and ran his legendary ale house with a strict hand. New Yorkers put up a tough and inventive battle against Prohibition, and two of the individuals who led the struggle to repeal it, Al Smith and the formerly dry socialite Pauline Sabin, were locals. But though Prohibition took on a special flair and force in the city, the experience was national and has relevance for us as a nation today. Lerner points out that never before had an amendment been passed to limit rather than protect personal freedom. No wonder that the Eighteenth was imposed from above by special interests rather than demanded by grass-roots groups. Current proponents of an amendment to restrict personal rights, such as marriage, should take note. Prohibition was not only a dismal failure while it was in force. It unified those who had previously had little interest in the issue, incited lawlessness, and, after a little more than a decade, was repealed with glee.
August 26, 2007
Mad Men Posted by Ellen Feldman at 08:45 PM EST Perhaps it is blasphemy to say this, but I was never a fan of The Sopranos. While I found some of the earlier episodes intriguing and fully realized, the progressive exploitation of America’s love affair with the Mafia—all that violence and endless shots of strippers pole dancing in the background—soon put me off. But now that Tony Soprano has either retired or been whacked, depending on your interpretation of the final scene, the race is on to crown a successor. Last Thursday, August 23, The New York Times ran two articles citing Mad Men, an AMC series about Madison Avenue admen, their secretaries, wives, and mistresses, set in 1960. One piece in the Entertainment section reported that HBO had lost its preeminent position among cable channels and added that it, as well as Showtime, had turned down the new hit series, Mad Men. The second, in the Style section, swooned about the period sets, clothing, and artifacts. If character was plot for Henry James, crystal highball glasses and nifty lighters tell the story here. I would be the last to deny the importance of the accurate prop in fiction, whether on the screen or on the page. John O’Hara said reams about a character merely by describing the click of her Delman pumps as she crossed the concourse of Penn Station. But he said even more by letting those accurately accoutered characters talk and act. While I too am in thrall to the ambiance of Mad Men, the real strength of the series lies in the characterizations. The men and women who prowl the agency offices bear a greater resemblance to the characters in nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels than to their two-dimensional predecessors in television sitcoms. I am not an authority on the genre, but it seems to me from the few I have seen that even the best sitcoms relied on disturbingly single-note characters. One was obsessive about cleanliness, another was pathologically insecure; one man constantly denigrated women, one woman was always on the prowl for a man. The laugh track only intensified this harping on one or two qualities. Each week the situation changed and the actors faced a new challenge, but their responses remained the same. There were no surprises, but there was plenty of familiarity and a high comfort level. In Mad Men the characters’ reactions are less predictable. They make be unlikable—many of them are—but they seem to be doing their best to figure out who they are and how to navigate the world in which they find themselves. The series is not flawless. Much of it is broad and over-the-top. I worked in an advertising agency for a single year approximately a decade later, and while there was a great deal of drinking and smoking, bottles did not usually come out of bottom drawers until after five and not everyone in the office breathed smoke like a dragon every time he or she opened his mouth. And while I suspect the sexism of the men in the show is fairly accurate, the lack of ambition in the women was not nearly so universal. As for the sex, as opposed to sexism, affairs, like alcohol, may have been rampant, but few women were as cavalier about them or as determined not to have them turn into marriage as the playgirls in Mad Men seem to be. And no reputable psychiatrist would have called a patient’s spouse to deliver a diagnosis. Nonetheless, the series has a lot more to recommend it than horsehair crinolines, chrome cocktail shakers, and tailfins. The hungry, striving, confused men and women who inhabit this half-century-ago world have more in common with Anthony Trollope’s creations than with their forebears who dominated the small screen for so many years. And oh, yes, the series has one more attraction, not despite, but because of the rampant sexism and anti-Semitism. (Forget about racism. There is not a person of any color but lily white to be seen.) The other night while I was watching the most recent installment, my husband, who is not a particular fan, looked up from his book and observed, “I guess we have made some progress after all.”
August 9, 2007
FDR’s Polio II Posted by Ellen Feldman at 10:45 PM EST Though I have not seen the series Eleanor and Franklin in many years, I agree with John Steele Gordon that it is a superb portrait of the Roosevelts and their brilliant political and less successful personal relationship. It is also, as Mr. Gordon points out, impressive in its accuracy. While I enjoyed HBO’s more recent Warm Springs and greatly admired Kenneth Branagh’s portrayal of FDR, I found myself occasionally raging at the inaccuracies on the screen. The movie’s depiction of the Roosevelt marriage is murky at best, misleading at worst. The viewer doesn’t quite understand why these two characters who are so obviously and blissfully in love are always apart. Even worse is the scene when FDR makes his agonizing walk to the podium to nominate Al Smith as the Democratic candidate for the Presidency in 1928. Though few in the audience knew how extensive his paralysis was, they sensed he had pulled off a feat of daring and courage, and went wild with admiration. All that is true, but in this movie, FDR, who was ever the consummate politician, nonetheless takes time before beginning his speech to blow ER, who is sitting in the balcony, a kiss. FDR could be affectionate, but not before thousands of delegates packed into Madison Square Garden. What I found most fascinating about Mr. Gordon’s blog, however, is his quibble with the “production values” in the recreation of Teddy Roosevelt’s house, Sagamore Hill. As he wisely points out, the Roosevelts were “old money” and had no need to impress. His comment reminded me of an interview Richard Heffner, the host of The Open Mind, conducted many years ago with Eleanor Roosevelt. Mrs. Roosevelt reminisces about turning the house in Hyde Park over to the government after FDR’s death. The Roosevelts were “old money,” but times were changing, and she could not afford to keep up the main house and all the land. She remained in her own cottage on the property, however, and in the interview she speaks of occasionally dropping in at the big house and listening to the comments of visiting tourists. Many were disappointed in, even disdainful of, the beautiful old house, which FDR had helped design and dearly loved. They found the furniture and decor old-fashioned and musty. If they could have afforded to live there, they would have spruced the place up. ER appears not to have engaged any of the visiting critics on the subject, but she does admit in the interview that like her mother-in-law, Sara, who was the mistress of Hyde Park until her death in 1941, she believes in making things last. She never quite says it, but you can tell from her voice that she finds redecorating merely for the sake of redecoration vaguely vulgar. It was probably one of the few opinions she shared with her famously difficult mother-in-law.
July 19, 2007
Disaster and Technology Posted by Ellen Feldman at 10:50 PM EST Years ago when I was a student beginning to care about history, a teacher’s remark about the Titanic set me thinking about technology. Just as the ship was seen as an emblem of modernity, so the speed with which the news of its sinking traveled was another hallmark of the modern world. Had ocean liner and iceberg met in an earlier era, it would have taken weeks for the news to spread. Other examples of technology coloring the way we perceive and react to events abound. When television brought the violence of the civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam into American living rooms, Americans left the comfort of those living rooms to take to the streets. Yesterday’s steam explosion in midtown Manhattan set me brooding about the connection between technology and disaster again. I was about to leave the New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street when I looked out of one of the tall windows of the main hall and saw a plume of what I thought was smoke rising to the east. A short time earlier I had heard rumblings which I took to be thunder, but when I emerged from the windowless Rare Book Room and saw that the sun was out, I assumed that the storm had been brief or my ears had deceived me. Now the low rumbling that accompanied the geyser shooting skyward indicated that I had in fact heard something, but it had not been thunder. The great hall of the library was filled with readers, researchers, and tourists. Since the library’s glorious restoration, it is common to see gaggles of out-of-towners wandering the halls and reading rooms with necks craned and cameras aimed. But at 6 p.m. on July 18, every eye and lens (I’ll get to the latter later) was focused on the sight outside the building. The plume of what we now know was steam continued to rise, obscuring the skyscrapers beyond. And now hundreds of people were running toward the library, some of them covered with mud and other debris, many crying. No one spoke the words 9/11, but I doubt a soul in that hall was not thinking them. The reaction was not surprising, but what followed was. One after another, people began taking out their cell phones. I am not an admirer of the gadgets. I find them annoying on buses and sidewalks and in shops and restaurants. I find them unconscionable in libraries. (My husband tells me I have turned one reading room I frequent into a fascist state in my zeal to stamp the things out.) But I was grateful for them at that moment. While some people could not get through, others managed to make contact. Within minutes, the word had gone around. We were witnessing not a terrorist attack, but a steam pipe explosion. Even the official information came by way of cell phone. One guard on duty called his wife who turned on the television and reported what was happening back to us who were on the scene. I left the library through the 42nd Street entrance, as directed by the guards, and joined what was now a crowd of thousands moving west. There was no panic. There were no rumors. Everyone was telling everyone else that, despite the morning’s news of a just-released intelligence report predicting another attack on American soil, this was instead an urban accident due to aging infrastructure. And many were talking into their cell phones reporting to friends and families that they were unhurt. The ability to communicate during that nervous time was a boon, but there was another aspect of those cell phones I found more perplexing. Inside the library, people were crowding the windows to take pictures of the disaster. Outside on the street, they were stopping to capture the scene digitally. I assumed they were all fledgling photojournalists, dreaming of breaking into the big time with their pictures. A neighbor whom I ran into on the long trek home interpreted the picture-taking differently. She says we have turned into a nation of individuals who can experience events only vicariously. Perhaps that’s another result of technological innovation.
June 28, 2007
Some Further Thoughts on Race, Money, and Justice Posted by Ellen Feldman at 03:00 PM EST I, too, admired John Steele Gordon’s piece in The Wall Street Journal, but I agree with Joshua Zeitz that money was not ultimately an issue in the defense of the Scottsboro boys, as they were called. Though the boys’ poverty did lead to shamefully inadequate representation in the first round of trials in 1931—one attorney was from Tennessee and claimed he knew little Alabama law; both lawyers were reported by contemporaries to be inebriated during the entirety of the speedy trials—once the case became an international cause, funds for the defense began to flow in not only from the North but from around the world. Samuel Leibowitz, the lead attorney in the 1933 trial, which followed the Supreme Court’s overturning of the convictions, was known as the next Clarence Darrow, and, thanks to the money he had made defending Al Capone (twice), Vincent (Mad Dog) Coll, and others of their ilk, he could afford to represent the boys without a fee and even pay his own expenses. Leibowitz was no more successful in the second trial in 1933 than his inebriated, incompetent colleagues had been in 1931, though he did make history when he appealed the verdict to the Supreme Court a second time. The court overturned the verdict on the grounds that Alabama barred blacks, or as the terms was then, Negroes, from sitting on juries. The ruling supposedly changed the way justice was meted out in the South, and, presumably, throughout the country. In a biographical sketch of Sam Leibowitz, Quentin Reynolds tells a story that is so good it’s hard not to suspect it’s apocryphal. Forced by his wife to take a holiday, Leibowitz found himself in Miami, but bored with sand and sea, he headed straight for the local courthouse. The case he stumbled upon was uninteresting, but the jury, made up of eleven white men and one black, captured his attention. When the court recessed for lunch, Leibowitz approached the defense counsel and, without introducing himself, expressed his surprise at finding a Negro on the jury. As Reynolds tells the story, the lawyer answered, “It’s all on account of a son-of-a-bitch named Leibowitz from New York. He came down to Alabama a few years ago to try a case and somehow he got to the Supreme Court in Washington, and damned if we haven’t had to put [them] on our juries ever since.” The Supreme Court’s second overturning of the Scottsboro convictions made history, but history has a way of refusing to stay made. In an article in The New York Times earlier this month, Adam Liptak wrote about Allen Snyder, a black man sentenced to death by an all-white jury in Louisiana. “It took some work to get an all-white jury in a parish that is almost one-quarter black, but the prosecutors . . . used peremptory strikes—ones not requiring a reason—to remove all five eligible potential jurors who were black.” Some years ago Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote of “the racial discrimination that peremptories inject into the jury selection process.” Race still skews American justice, and the fact that it usually skews it against people of color does not make the injustice at Duke less shameful. But what of the less lurid and therefore not headline-making aspects of our legal system that perpetuate this racial rush to judgment?
June 9, 2007
Joy and Serendipity in Archival Research Posted by Ellen Feldman at 03:15 PM EST The June 8 edition of The New York Times reported the discovery in the National Archives of a two-sentence letter written by Abraham Lincoln to Major General Henry W. Halleck, the Union general in chief, in the wake of the Union victory at Gettysburg. The contents of the letter was known, because the two sentences had been forwarded by telegram to General Meade, though without the original document the accuracy of the Halleck’s telegram would always be in question. More to the point, or at least my point, the archivist who found the letter, Trevor Plante, was not searching for it. “I was looking for something else,” Plante said. Archival research, as anyone who has done it knows, can be tedious, frustrating, and fruitless. Few of us will ever experience the thrill of finding a missing Lincoln letter. But spend enough time burrowing into original documents and you are almost sure to experience at least an occasional moment of serendipity and joy. Plante’s discovery stuck me with special force, because I had just returned from the Houghton Library at Harvard. I had gone there to study some Margaret Sanger documents in the papers of the American Birth Control League, and I found what I was looking for. I also stumbled across a letter I had heard about but never read verbatim. This was not a discovery. The letter was catalogued. Others had seen it. But holding in my hand the worn stationery and reading Sanger’s exact words to her husband brought me suddenly closer to the story and revealed the wily woman behind the fearless warrior. Sometimes revisiting even well-known documents provides rewards. A few years ago, when I was researching a book on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, I kept running across references in secondary sources to a letter from ER to her mother-in-law early in her marriage. The quote did not show the future First Lady at her best. She complains of the “Jew party” at Bernard Baruch’s and says she never wishes “to hear money, jewels, or labels mentioned again.” ER’s early anti-Semitism did not surprise me. I took it as a signpost indicating how far she traveled from the point where she began. But the word labels confused me. In all the pictures I studied, I never spotted a small polo player on FDR’s shirts or an LV on ER’s handbags. I did not go back to the original letter to check it. I was too busy stalking the less well-documented Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd. But another historian did, and managed to decipher ER’s difficult handwriting, made more illegible by her habit of writing first horizontally, then vertically over it in an old-fashioned attempt to save paper. What she wishes never to hear mentioned again is not labels but sables, a luxury far more in keeping with the early years of the twentieth century. Lest I sound too much like a Luddite in praise of original documents, I must add that the one infinitesimal historical discovery I ever made came not from archival sources but from the wonders of technology. Most historians date Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd’s first visit to the White House, under her secret service code name of Mrs. Johnson, to August 1941. Thanks to the constant updating of the presidential chronology, I found a meeting on June 5 of the same year. The difference of several weeks would not seem important to anyone other than an obsessed writer, except for the incidents of the previous evening. While Lucy and the President met for the first time in more than two decades, Marguerite “Missy” LeHand, FDR’s personal secretary and constant companion during those same two decades, lay in her small room on the third floor of the White House, incapacitated by the after-effects of a stroke suffered the night before. Thus, as one woman exited FDR’s life, another reentered it. The digitalization of sources is a boon to historians, just as the dusty original documents will always be a seduction. According to Allen Weinstein, the United States archivist, the discovery of the Lincoln letter “reminds us that history is a dynamic thing, new information will always come to light.” I might add to that the idea that subsequent students of history will always experience anew the thrill of connecting with old documents.
May 17, 2007
Cheaper by the Dozen Cheap Shot Posted by Ellen Feldman at 05:10 PM EST I am addicted to the Turner Classic Movies channel, both for the gems it revives and for the lesser movies that nonetheless tell us who we were and what we espoused, or what the people who made the movies thought we ought to espouse. I recently caught a snippet of the original Cheaper by the Dozen, with Clifton Webb. The movie is based on the best-selling book about Frank Gilbreth, a renowned efficiency expert, his wife, and their 12 children. Though Gilbreth died in 1924, the book, written by his son and daughter, was not published until 1948, and the movie didn’t come out until 1950. The dates are important for what they tell us about postwar America. It is no secret that as the country demobilized militarily it mobilized to get women out of the workplace and back into the home. An army of pink slips gave the orders. Long full skirts ensured that their wearers were not going to set foot in a factory, cinched waists constricted breathing, and heaven only knows what purpose pointy bras served, beyond feeding male fantasies. During the war, women’s magazines ran features on how to whip up a nutritious dinner in 15 minutes. After it, they printed recipes for Americanized versions of French cuisine that were designed to keep a woman in the kitchen for hours if not the entire day. Despite my knowledge of this backward march, forced in some cases, voluntary in others, the scene in Cheaper by the Dozen, which also appears in the book, still shocked me. A woman played by Mildred Natwick turns up to ask Mrs. Gilbreth, a ravishing, flat-stomached Myrna Loy, to head the Montclair chapter of Planned Parenthood. Mrs. Gilbreth calls her husband, who pretends to support the cause. (There is a considerable amount of mean-spirited elbowing in the ribs in the scene.) Then Mr. Gilbreth blows his whistle, and 12 children come streaking in from every corner of the house and property. The woman leaves in a huff, and Mr. and Mrs. Gilbreth, and presumably the audience, get a good laugh at outwitting this wrongheaded reformer. Four decades after Margaret Sanger went to jail for trying to give birth-control information to poor women, who did not have the same access to worldly private doctors as their more fortunate sisters, birth control had become not a flaming controversy but a bad joke. After all, what better way to bar women from the work place than by keeping them pregnant? Margaret Sanger knew this, but her crusade sought more than self-realization for women. She was fighting for the lives and health of children and their mothers. On a countrywide speaking tour after her arrest, she quoted statistics showing that the likelihood of infant death increased not only as the father’s income went down but also as the time between births shrank. The relative position in the family also affected mortality rates. Thirty-two percent of second children died annually. The rate progressed with each child born to the family, until for the twelfth child, that mystical number Mr. Gilbreth had set his heart on, sixty out of a hundred died each year. Sanger also spoke of the horror of self-induced and back-alley abortions, not by “girls in trouble” but by poor women who could not afford to feed another mouth. And the toll was not only on poor women. Eleanor Roosevelt wrote that for the first decade of her marriage she was either always having a child or just getting over having had a child. Perhaps I am a curmudgeon. I did not watch the entire movie. Work called. I’m sure much of it is amusing. But more than half a century later, this mindless glorification of large families as somehow intrinsically virtuous still offends. The ridicule and dismissal of the work of generations who struggled to better the lives of women and children and men infuriates. The fact that the movie has been remade twice in the twenty-first century simply puzzles.
April 28, 2007
Abortion, in the Nineteenth Century and Today II Posted by Ellen Feldman at 03:25 PM EST John Steele Gordon was quite right in his appreciation of the notorious Madam Restell’s business acumen. She brought modern marketing techniques to the ancient profession of abortionist by opening branch offices, employing a team of traveling salesman, instituting sliding fee scales, and out-advertising the competition to the tune of $60,000 in 1871. But not all practitioners were as innovative or, more to the point, as skilled. At the turn of the twentieth century, the point when abortion should have become medically safer due to knowledge of antiseptics, an increasing emphasis on bacteriology, and other medical advances, laws criminalizing the procedure drove it underground and made it even more hazardous. Statistics on illegal abortion are, for obvious reasons, rare and unreliable, but one study of 111 convicted abortionists revealed that fewer than a third were physicians or former physicians. Other professions, such as clerks, barbers, and salesmen, were better represented. There is, however, a wealth of anecdotal evidence, and it is chilling. Death was not uncommon. Perforation, tearing, and other “mistakes” had lifelong consequences. Kindness or even civility was rare, though one frequently cited case, harrowing in its physical details, tells of a “kind . . . motherly lady . . . who put her arms around me . . . and . . . said, ‘Honey, did you think it was so easy to be a woman?’” Self-induced abortion took the worst toll. Margaret Sanger ascribed her conversion to the birth-control cause to the death of Sadie Sachs, an immigrant Jewish wife and mother, who succumbed to her second case of septicemia from her second self-induced abortion in a single year. Mrs. Sachs may have been a fictitious or at least dramatically enhanced character, but she did exemplify a trend. By 1900, working-class women were having most of the illegal abortions, but these desperate souls were not only single girls “in trouble.” Overburdened immigrant wives and mothers were risking death to avoid giving birth to another child they could not afford to feed or clothe or care for. Middle- and upper-class women who sought abortions, could go abroad, find a physician who would perform the operation quietly, or even persuade a hospital board of the need for a therapeutic procedure, though the last was growing more difficult to obtain. Hospital boards prided themselves on making therapeutic abortions as difficult as possible. One committee ruled to grant one, then reversed itself when it discovered the woman was unmarried. By the 1940s and ’50s, the rate of therapeutic procedures had declined precipitously. Police experts, on the other hand, listed abortion as the third largest criminal activity in the country after narcotics and gambling, though it did occasionally attract a better class of perp. One properly trained physician in a small town in Pennsylvania estimated that he had performed more than 28,000 abortions during his long career, and another in Baltimore said she had received referrals from 350 doctors in two decades. Nonetheless, competent physicians acting on principle were the exception. Most abortionists were untrained at best and venal and menacing at worst. Too many of the people eager to restrict access to abortion forget or never knew the horrors of a world where abortion was illegal. The Supreme Court can hand down paternalistic rulings. Legislatures can outlaw procedures. But government cannot change human nature. It can only return the nation to the realm of back-alley surgery, shady practitioners, and dire consequences.
April 26, 2007
Abortion, in the Nineteenth Century and Today Posted by Ellen Feldman at 05:50 PM EST I followed with fascination last week’s debate in the wake of the Supreme Court ban on intact dilation and extraction abortions, and while I agree with Josh Zeitz’s arguments, I concede that John Steele Gordon was right about advertisements for female remedies. Warnings that women should not take the product if pregnant because it was sure to produce miscarriage, a common disclaimer in nineteenth-century ads, were intended as not-so-subtle guarantees that the product was an abortifacient. By midcentury such products had become big business in America. During a single week in 1845, the Boston Daily Times advertised Madame Restell’s Female Pill, Madame Drunette’s Lunar Pills, Dr. Monroe’s French Periodical Pills, and Dr. Melveau’s Portuguese Female Pills. In addition to disingenuous warnings against taking the cure if pregnant, code words were also common. “Portuguese” pills signified an abortifacient while “French letter” or “French remedy” usually meant a contraceptive device, which was also illegal. Despite the glossy ads, commercial abortifacients were as ineffectual and dangerous as the widespread homemade brews. But the high price—some Portuguese pills sold for five dollars a box—lured many retailers and even reputable pharmaceutical firms into the trade. By midcentury, surgical abortion had also become commercialized and highly visible. The Women of New York, or Social Life in the Great City, a lurid 1870 account by the pseudonymous George Ellington, deplored the many female abortionists in the city, most of the “poorer class” and “of foreign birth or extraction,” as well as the tonier “doctor” abortionists, who ran private hospitals and whose knowledge of family skeletons sometimes gave them entrée into the best society. Given the number and variety of practitioners, it was no wonder that abortions could be procured for as much as five hundred dollars or as little as five. “The luxury of an abortion is now within the reach of the serving girl,” wrote one male moralist with a peculiar conception of the good life. By the 1840s, abortions had become common not only for unwed girls “in trouble” but among married women, and not just any married women but white, Protestant, native-born married women of the middle and upper classes. While many husbands were accomplices, even instigators, other white, Protestant, native-born men were outraged. Immigration was on the rise. Catholics were not only taking up residence, they were producing broods of offspring, while native-born women were committing “racial” suicide. One group of men also had a vested interest, and therein lies the story of the first abortion revolution that criminalized the procedure in America. As late as 1800, not a single jurisdiction in the United States had a statute on abortion. By 1900 every state in the Union had an antiabortion law except Kentucky, where state courts managed to criminalize it in practice. More than any other segment of nineteenth-century America, including the clergy, who remained remarkably silent on the subject, regular physicians were responsible for the change. The term “regular physicians” is difficult to define. In 1846 a group seeking to characterize what they were could list only what they were not, a spectrum of specialties ranging from homeopaths to clairvoyants. The phrase generally referred to practitioners who subscribed to the principles of what later became scientific medicine and had some training in the nation’s better medical schools, as opposed to for-profit diploma mills. In an era when anyone who claimed to heal could hang out a shingle, and doctors were often seen as menaces to society, regular physicians had to find a way to distinguish themselves from the hordes of uneducated quacks and self-promoting snake oil salesmen. And since many of the latter had practices devoted, if not limited, to abortion, one of the first and most lucrative specialties in American medical history, the solution was obvious. By prohibiting abortion, regular physicians would, in a single stroke, promote their professional standing, protect their incomes, and encourage the practice of good medicine. The last was not a mere afterthought. Regular physicians were frequently summoned to try to save women who had been maimed and butchered by incompetent practitioners. The irony is that a century later physicians spearheaded a second and reverse revolution. In the mid-1960s, when several California doctors performed therapeutic abortions on women who had been exposed to rubella, a disease that can cause severe birth defects in babies, a Catholic physician on the State Medical Board committed what had been until then an unthinkable breech of medical etiquette and ethics. He brought charges against them. A few years later, Dr. Jane Hodgson, who terminated the pregnancy of another mother who had contracted German measles, became the first physician in American history to be tried and convicted for performing a therapeutic abortion in a hospital. By demanding clarification of the law and a statute that would protect them, which California passed in 1967, physicians helped set in motion America’s second abortion revolution. In view of last week’s ruling, a third revolution may be in the making. If the courts continue to limit access to abortion, and women are forced to turn to back-alley quacks, will reputable physicians step forward again?
February 10, 2007
The Normandie Posted by Ellen Feldman at 06:00 PM EST I share John Steele Gordon’s affection for the Normandie, to which he paid fine tribute on the AmericanHeritage.com homepage today. She was more than surpassingly beautiful and dizzyingly fast. She was racy. If, as Kipling said, the liner was a lady, then, as Ludwig Bemelmans pointed out, the Normandie was a femme fatale. Her passenger list reflected her character. Stodgy society booked passage on the dowager Queen Mary. Cole Porter, Marlene Dietrich, Ernest Hemingway, and other aristocrats of the arts and darlings of cafe society crossed in the Normandie’s cabins, where the sinuous art deco lines promised smooth sailing, at least aesthetically. The Normandie’s death by fire and capsize was heartbreaking, but an ironic twist makes the story almost tragic. As Harvey Ardman tells the tale in his definitive book, Normandie: Her Life and Times, one of the chief architects of the ship, a Russian naval engineer named Vladimir Yourkevitch, was at his office in lower Manhattan when he got a call from an old friend telling him, in Russian, that his beloved ship was burning. Yourkevitch’s first reaction was not cavalier but confident. He knew the Normandie’s superb firefighting system. The flames, he was sure, would quickly be extinguished. He returned to work but could not concentrate. Finally he left his office, hailed a cab, and told the driver to take him to Pier 88. By this time the crowds in the area of the burning ship had brought traffic to a halt. Realizing that things were more dire than he had imagined, Yourkevitch got out and began to run. As he turned the corner of 48th Street and Twelfth Avenue, he came into view of the smoking, listing ship and the scores of firefighters who were continuing to cascade water on it. The sight broke his heart, but his mind clicked into gear. He was certain that if the seacocks were opened, the ship would settle upright and safe in the shallow water. Three times he tried to get through the police lines, but his heavily Russian-accented English made him unintelligible to New York’s Finest. Finally he found a naval officer and managed to convey who he was and how he could save the ship. “The Navy is in charge,” the officer told him. “Don’t you worry about it. We know what to do.” Yourkevitch finally gave up and returned to his apartment on Riverside Drive. From his windows overlooking the Hudson, he watched his ship die.
February 8, 2007
O. J. Simpson and Helen Jewett Posted by Ellen Feldman at 02:15 PM EST The Judith Regan–O. J. Simpson brouhaha has died down—for the moment—but reading The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder, by Daniel Stashower reminded me of another acquitted alleged murderer who managed to have it both ways, and the publisher who made a bundle in the bargain.
Stashower’s excellent book is about the murder of Mary Rogers in 1841, an unsolved crime that inspired Poe to set his brooding detective, C. Auguste Dupin, who would serve as a model for the modern gumshoe, to a fictional solution of the case in “The Mystery of Marie Roget.” It also put in motion reform leading to a centralized municipal police force. But another crime recounted in the book bears a closer analogy to current events.
Five years earlier, Helen Jewett, a 23-year-old prostitute, who worked at the Palace of Passions on Thomas Street in New York City, a mere stone’s throw from the local police station, was bludgeoned to death with a hatchet, her body subsequently set on fire. Jewett was, according to James Gordon Bennett, “beautiful but erring.” For the press, murdered young women of easy virtue are always beauties. Plain Janes never meet violent ends. In the New York Herald, which Bennett had started only a year earlier, he described his visit to the scene of the crime for voyeuristic (and aren’t we all) readers of the day. “Slowly I began to discover the lineaments of the corpse as one would the beauties of a statue of marble. . . . The perfect figure, the exquisite limbs, the fine face, the full arms, the beautiful bust, all, all surpassed in every respect the Venus de Medici.”
Bennett’s account of the dead girl was not much more lurid than others in the penny press. His true originality and flair emerged when he turned the paper’s attention to Richard Robinson, the 19-year-old clerk and would-be roué arrested for the murder. The police, the newspapers, and the public found it an open-and-shut case. Several witnesses placed Robinson with Jewett in her room the night of the crime. The weapon matched a hatchet that was missing from the shop where Robinson worked. The blue cloak found at the crime scene looked like one Robinson was seen wearing that night, though he denied it. But if Bennett, whom Walt Whitman described as a “reptile marking his path with slime wherever he goes and breathing mildew at everything fresh and fragrant,” was going to outsell his competitors, he had to have a gimmick. The Herald pinned the blame on another culprit. “Is it not more likely the crime of a woman? Are not the whole chain of circumstances within the ingenuity of a female, abandoned and desperate?” All evidence pointed, Bennett insisted, to a jealous Rosina Townsend, an “old miserable hag who has spent her whole life seducing and inveigling the young and old to their destruction.” When an army of young clerks took up the cry and crowded the courtroom, sporting special rakish hats, cheering Robinson, and heckling the prosecution, acquittal was inevitable. According to Stashower’s book, “Robinson, whom a later writer branded ‘the Great Unhung,’ would spend the rest of his days coyly hinting that he had gotten away with murder.”
The scenario sounds uncannily like a certain television interview that few have seen and fewer still have been able to avoid hearing and reading about. The similarity belongs to the the-more-things-change-the-more-they-remain-the-same school of history. Our fascination with murder, especially if it is committed in passion, remains eternal. Our need to project current concerns onto the details and take away relevant lessons from them is equally constant. Bennett blamed womanhood, weak and immoral, for the murder of Helen Jewett. A large part of America found revenge, or at least redemption, for a greater centuries-old crime in the acquittal of Simpson. The fact that the first was a put-up job and the second a valid grievance does not make the injustice any less perplexing.
December 27, 2006
A Lionel Train in the Courtroom Posted by Ellen Feldman at 01:10 PM EST The current issue of American Heritage magazine has a delightful article by David Lander on Lionel trains, as American as mom and apple pie, as Christmasy as Santa Claus himself. The piece reminded me of my intense envy of my best childhood friend, who had a brother and therefore access, if only grudgingly, to a set of spiffy Lionel rolling stock, tracks, and accessories. The third of three girls, I had no such wonderment running around my basement. I was, however, surprised to learn from the article that in 1959 the founder of the company sold his interest to a great-nephew, Roy Cohn, the notorious legal aide to the heinous Senator Joseph McCarthy. The information reminded me of another unfortunate association in Lionel lore. In 1933, the criminal attorney Samuel Leibowitz, who defended Al Capone twice and was known as the next Clarence Darrow, agreed to represent the Scottsboro boys in the second round of trials in Decatur, Alabama. (The previous November, the U.S. Supreme Court had reversed the convictions of the nine young African-American men, who had been taken off a freight train in 1931 and charged with a rape that never occurred.) Leibowitz, who had wanted to be an actor during his undergraduate days at Cornell, was a flamboyant courtroom presence. He got Vincent (Mad Dog) Coll off from a charge of killing a baby with what became known as the Eskimo Pie defense, when he gave the judge, jury, and prosecutors ice cream popsicles to eat while he unmasked the chief witness, a police stooge, who claimed to be an Eskimo Pie vendor but turned out to know absolutely nothing about his product. He used the Christian Fish defense to get off a cop killer, who said he worked in a fish store but could not identify a single fish the prosecution brought into the courtroom, by pointing out that the fish market in question was in a Jewish neighborhood and the state’s attorney had not shown the defendant a single fish that went into gefilte fish. Leibowitz won acquittals in 77 of 78 first-degree murderer cases, with one hung jury, but he did not owe his success to courtroom high jinks alone. He liked to say he was not a great lawyer, only a thorough one. He crammed ballistics information to undermine the testimony of revolver experts, and read volumes on medicine and surgery to defend a doctor on charges of alleged malpractice. He was equally thorough in his preparation of the Scottsboro defense. In addition to studying the records of the earlier trials exhaustively and exposing mistakes and falsifications in the testimony, Leibowitz, who was paying his own expenses in the case, arranged to have the Lionel company build a miniature replica of the Alabama Great Southern freight train on which the rape was alleged to have taken place. The same cars were arranged in the same order they had been in on the original train, and the details were accurate down to the brass fittings. When Leibowitz brought his miniature train into court, even the hostile Southern jury and spectators were taken with it. Who does not love a model train? Then Leibowitz began his cross-examination of Victoria Price, one of the two young women who had cried rape. He was determined to use the replica to demonstrate that the incident could not have happened as she described it. The cross examination should have been a piece of cake. Leibowitz was a skilled trial lawyer. Price was an uneducated mill worker. But she was also a canny actor who knew how to play to the crowd of Southerners, eager to believe the accusations of a white woman against a group of black men. When Leibowitz asked if the Lionel train was a fair replication of the one she was on, she answered that it was different. “In what way?” he inquired. “That is not the train I was on,” Price answered. “Of course, you were not on this miniature train. I asked you if this is a fair representation.” “Just a little bit.” The sparring continued for some time as Price feigned stupidity and Leibowitz became more frustrated. Finally, Price administered the coup de grâce. “It was bigger, lots bigger. That is a toy.” The spectators loved it. The cards were stacked against the nine young men taken off a freight train on March 25, 1931. Neither the Lionel train nor the holes Leibowitz tore in the prosecution’s case, nor demonstrations across the country and around the world, could save them. The jury brought in a verdict of guilty with a death sentence, and the case dragged on for almost five decades and continues to reverberate today. Meanwhile the Lionel train remains on view at Cornell University Law School, a handsome tribute to America’s playful ingenuity and unconscionable injustice.
December 18, 2006
Dirty Dancing Posted by Ellen Feldman at 03:40 PM EST I was interested to read in this past Sunday’s New York Times that an increasing number of secondary schools across the country are banning “pornographic” dancing. The article quoted the principal of Fayetteville-Manlius High School, near Syracuse, New York, as saying, “If you watch this stuff, you end up seeing girls playing out, or being forced to play out, sexually submissive roles.”
While I do not consider myself a twenty-first-century Miss Grundy and rarely find myself on the same side of an issue as the religious right, which has also banned certain kinds of dancing in their schools, I could not help agreeing with the principal. Our sex-saturated society does not need grinding or freak dancing, as it is apparently called, on the gymnasium floor, or more peer pressure on young girls to behave in ways that make them uncomfortable. But the last line of the article forced me to question my own reaction. “I think it’s kind of ridiculous,” one 15-year-old boy at Fayetteville-Manlius said. “Our administration is refusing to change with the times.”
More than two hundred years ago, the waltz, from the old German walzen (to roll, turn, or glide), shocked European society. In place of polite lines of gentleman and ladies touching gloved hands gingerly while performing intricate steps, which required more memorization and concentration than passion, individual couples whirled around ballrooms in delicious intimacy. Bodies entwined, breath shortened, bosoms heaved, heads giddied. It is no accident that, at the count’s ball, Emma Bovary grows dizzy while waltzing.
According to eighteenth- and even nineteenth-century guardians of morality, the new dance threatened the very foundations of society. Religious leaders crusaded against it; most continental courts, with the exception of the Hapsburg, where it achieved some respectability, banned it; and the Times of London deplored it. In July 1816 the Prince Regent gave a ball at which guests danced the waltz. “The indecent foreign dance” scandalized the editors of that august paper. “So long as this obscene display was confined to prostitutes and adulteresses, we did not think it deserving of notice; but now that it is attempted to be forced on the respectable classes of society by the civil examples of their superiors, we feel it a duty to warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion.” Eighteen years later, the waltz was danced for the first time in America, by, surprisingly, Bostonians, and pronounced “an indecorous exhibition.” See: www.centralhome.com/ballroomcountry/waltz.htm.
Perhaps every new craze shocks the generation that danced its precursor. The women who did the bunny-hug and turkey-trot outraged their waltzing parents, because while their feet took small steps, the rest of their bodies made the most of the music. The next generation raised their hems and kicked their rouged knees and gartered legs to the high heavens. By the time World War II convulsed society, jitterbuggers were performing acrobatic feats of wonder. In Kevin Baker’s brilliantly imagined novel Strivers Row, Malcolm Little, who will soon change his last name and history, goes to the Savoy Ballroom on his first night in Harlem to jump and spin and fly and throw his white dancing partner around in a scene that wows the crowd of onlookers, opens the protagonist’s eyes to a new world, and jumps off the page. I could go on through the twist and the frug and other fads that passed me by, but the story assumes a certain sameness.
Perhaps the 15-year-old high school student who complained about his elders refusing to change with the times was on to something. From primitive times, dancing has had a sexual connotation. I don’t want to get out on the floor and do these new dances. I don’t want young girls to be pressured into doing them. But neither history nor young people care what I think. They’re going to dance their seemingly salacious steps. And in 20 years, they’ll be trying to stop their children from doing the same, to a new beat.
December 4, 2006
The Other Tree Lighting Ceremony Posted by Ellen Feldman at 02:10 PM EST As we move into the holiday season, citizens will sue local governments over crèches and nativity scenes on town squares; right-wing pundits, who coincidentally are flogging their recent books on the subject, will rail against the lack of Christ in Christmas; and everyone, except retailers, will bemoan the commercialization of the holiday. Some of my colleagues debated the issue here a few months ago. I will eschew argument for the moment in the interest of pure celebration. Last evening, as every first Sunday evening in December for the past 62 years, the annual Park Avenue tree lighting ceremony in New York City brought together just about everybody in a small corner of Manhattan for a moment of joy, hope, and tribute to America’s war dead. The Park Avenue tree-lighting ceremony is little known beyond the neighborhood where it takes place. It boasts none of the grandeur of the Rockefeller Center event, which manages to shut down midtown Manhattan for a good part of the afternoon and evening on which it occurs and features a headline-making, statistically-notable, telegenic tree. (I’m not complaining. I happen to be a sucker for Christmas trees and their lighting in any venue.) Nor does the Park Avenue ceremony have the artistic clout of the unveiling of the tree at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with its gorgeous baroque ornaments and endlessly intriguing nativity scene. The Park Avenue lighting is a homier and, because of its origins, more deeply affecting event. It begins shortly after dark, as small children ride on parents’ shoulders and gambol along sidewalks, and teenagers struggle to hide their excitement beneath a veneer of ennui, and families and couples and singles pour out of their apartment houses, and dogs, sensing that something’s up, strain at their leashes, as they all flow toward the Brick Church at Park Avenue and 91st Street. Only a few blocks are closed to traffic, and people mill in the street and swarm over the dividing islands. Amazingly, there are no traffic jams, honking horns, or incidents of road rage. Here and there someone wanders through the crowd in a Santa suit, others hold candles, and a few sip eggnog decorously. Finally, officials appear on the brightly lit portico of the Brick Church to lead the singing of the favorite carols you remember from grammar school. It’s all easy camaraderie and good cheer, until the closing moments. A bugler steps forward on the portico, and a hush falls over the crowd. As the mournful notes of “Taps” float out into the cold night, small children stop chasing one another and dogs prick up their ears. The adults feel a chill down their backs. The last note dies, and the minister utters a short inclusive prayer about hope and peace and light. Then, one after another, like a wave rushing down the broad avenue as far as the eye can see, the trees on the islands flare in the night. The first Park Avenue tree lighting ceremony was held in 1944 to honor the men and women who had died during World War II. This year the minister spoke of those who had fallen in Iraq and Afghanistan. There have been many, too many, between. Certainly, the trappings of the ritual are Christian, but the impetus behind it and the emotions evoked by it transcend denominational differences and go to the essence of suffering, hope, and the human condition. I wish I could invite all the litigious local citizens, and cantankerous right-wing pundits, and tireless shopping junkies to join the celebration next year, but I fear they would not only crowd the area but spoil the homey uncommercial ambiance and turn a peaceful coming together into one more noisy take-no-prisoners holiday battlefield.
October 4, 2006
Congressional Pages II Posted by Ellen Feldman at 12:30 PM EST Two days ago Josh Zeitz posted an entry on this site recounting his rewarding experience as a congressional page and saying that he hoped representatives wouldn’t use the occasion of the Foley scandal to do away with congressional pages entirely. On the same day, Representative Ray LaHood called for an end to the practice of having young people serve as congressional pages. The country does not want to put boys and girls in harm’s way. Or to put it another way, the men and women who govern the country cannot trust themselves to resist temptation.
The practice of blaming the victim has a long and dispiriting history. As a girl, reading some novel in which religion played a role—it might have been To Kill a Mockingbird or Strange Fruit—I was shocked to come across a sermon warning of the evils into which women will lead good men. I had never thought of myself as an occasion for sin. Most religions buy into this stereotype of women as distracting, dangerous, and therefore responsible for men’s delinquency. The law has followed suit. Though occasionally the men who frequent prostitutes are swept up in raids, it is the women and girls who made the men do it who serve time. And the tradition of the she-was-asking-for-it defense in rape cases has become less common but not extinct. In fact a few years ago I was surprised to learn that as a middle-class woman of a certain age, I would not be welcomed on a jury by a prosecuting attorney in a date rape case, because my assumptions would be that the girl, if not asking for it, should not have put herself in a situation that permitted the rape. I guess those early books got to me after all.
The cry to abolish the congressional page system seems to be building. Since the foxes who were guarding the chicken coup failed to prevent one of their own from making a raid, their solution now is to burn down the chicken coup.
October 2, 2006
The Queen Posted by Ellen Feldman at 12:00 AM EST The superb new movie The Queen, elevated to the level of brilliance by the subtle, multifaceted performance of Helen Mirren, has got me thinking about historical fiction on the screen. (I am always thinking about historical fiction on the page.) While the movie is not about American history—the only moments of Americana in it are a television clip of President Clinton making a statement after the death of Princess Diana and of various American celebrities attending her funeral—the film’s use of fiction to explore recent British events stands in stark contrast to ABC’s miniseries The Path to 9/11.
In The Queen, Stephen Frears views the enormous and, to the British royal family, shocking and unanticipated explosion of public grief after the death of Diana through the prism of Queen Elizabeth’s feelings and interaction with the then-just-elected prime minister, Tony Blair. The conversations between the queen and Blair, and between the queen and members of her family, are, of course, imagined. I am not a royal-follower and have no idea how closely they adhere to fact, nor, I imagine, do even royal-followers. I would be delighted to discover that the queen has such a sharp wit, and that her husband calls her “Cabbage” as he kisses her good night. But the important point is that the characterizations and dialogue are credible as far as what is on record. The portraits of the queen and Blair are sympathetic, but they do not seem wildly off the mark.
Contrast this with The Path to 9/11. Before ABC aired the series, the network made much of the fact that former New Jersey Governor Thomas Keane, the chairman of the 9/11 Commission, had vetted it. Only when members of the Clinton administration began to protest that the movie, in the words of former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, “depicts scenes that never happened, events that never took place, decisions that were never made and conversations that never occurred,” did ABC begin to emphasize the fictional aspect of the program. One fabrication Ms. Albright objected to was a scene that shows her refusing to support a cruise missile strike against bin Laden without first alerting the Pakistani government. But perhaps the most egregious misrepresentation is a scene that shows former national security adviser Samuel R. Berger slamming down the phone on a CIA officer in a fit of pique and thus forfeiting a chance to get bin Laden. The writer and one of the producers of the miniseries admitted the moment had been improvised by an actor and kept in because it seemed to work so well dramatically.
The Queen illustrates and illuminates the place and problem of the monarchy in contemporary Great Britain without grossly misrepresenting the facts as we know them. The Path to 9/11 plays fast and loose with what we do know to sex up a horrific moment in our recent past, or perhaps only to score political points.
August 3, 2006
Another Great Hotelier Posted by Ellen Feldman at 09:20 AM EST Yesterday’s AmericanHeritage.com homepage article about Conrad Hilton reminded me of another American success story in the hotel business. In 1950 Kemmons Wilson, a Tennessee homebuilder who was doing well in the postwar boom, decided to take his wife and five children to the nation’s capital. They would drive from Memphis and enjoy the sights along the way. The trip turned out to be anything but enjoyable. Sleeping accommodations for the large family were hard to find. Rooms were often dirty. Food was frequently inedible. The family was dispirited by the trip. Kemmons Wilson was inspired.
He knew he was anything but unique in postwar America. Before the war, families that took to the road had not done it for pleasure. During they war, gas was rationed, and tires were out of the question. But now many men were making more money than they had ever dreamed of in their Depression-era youth. Families started during the wartime years were growing rapidly. These newly prosperous and confident Americans would want to see their country. And the thriving automobile industry would provide the best way to do it. Cars offered flexibility, intimacy, and fun for the whole family, or so it was thought. But when the shadows grew long on the road and the children got cranky and started fighting in the back seat, these families would need a reliable place to stop for the night.
The answer, Wilson sensed, was a chain of hotels that would not vary from town to town or even state to state. You could stay in a room in Missouri one night, check into another in Ohio a few days later, and know you were going to find the same clean and comfortable accommodations, as well as plenty of space to park the family car. The rooms would even look alike. Wilson’s brainstorm would take fear of the unknown out of adventure.
In 1952 he opened his first hotel in Memphis. By 1958, the chain had grown to 50, by 1964 500. In 1968, the 1,000th hotel opened, in San Antonio Texas.
As inventive as Wilson was, however, he could not seem to come up with a suitable name for his new-style hotel. Then one night he was going over blueprints drawn by his friend and architect Eddie Bluestein. Bluestein had been watching an old Bing Crosby movie on television while he worked, and as a joke, had scribbled the movie’s name on the plans. Holiday Inn.
I have a footnote to the story. A few years ago a friend’s seven-year-old caught Holiday Inn on cable and was enchanted. She had heard of Holiday Inns in her own world, but had never been to one. She pleaded with her parents to take her. When they drove up, she almost cried with disappointment. It looked nothing like the set Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire had sung and danced their way across. When I passed on the information that, yes, Virginia, there really was a connection, she was mollified, but only slightly.
July 31, 2006
Inherit the Wind, Continued Posted by Ellen Feldman at 01:30 PM EST Fred Smoler's excellent piece on Inherit the Wind makes me hang my head in shame. He is quite right that even if Darrow and Scopes were not the flawless heroes portrayed in the movie, they did wear the white hats in this particular battle. He is also correct that Darrow makes clear Bryan's former greatness, and I think that aspect of the script does a good job of showing how complicated this towering figure was.
Perhaps what I was bemoaning was my own naiveté. Inherit the Wind was one of my favorite movies of my youth. I still love it. And I think I felt betrayed when I discovered that the trial was, not a publicity stunt—I think that's too harsh—but a calculated undertaking by organized forces. I say this with admiration, not condemnation. The play and the movie appeared at a time when the American public was still willing to view leaders as heroes. Their private lives were, well, private. The organized efforts of a group of people working for a cause were viewed as less admirable, for some reason, than one man’s, or in this case two men’s, fight against ignorance. Or perhaps the truth is simply less dramatic. An interesting question is, if the movie were made today, with all our supposed cynicism, would it be shot any differently?
Smoler is entirely correct that any play or movie that depicted actual trial testimony would send viewers running to the exits in droves. (Having just finished reading 800 pages of testimony from one of the Scottsboro trials, I can attest to that fact.) And I certainly never meant to suggest that Inherit the Wind was alternate history. I think it’s a stirring portrayal of a critical moment in our past. It has probably reached millions of people who would never have opened a book on the Scopes trial. If it taught the story in primary colors rather than subtle shades of gray, that’s a small price to pay. Thanks to Fred Smoler, I remember that I find much more to love in the play and movie than to censure.
July 19, 2006
History vs. Hollywood? Posted by Ellen Feldman at 01:30 PM EST I read with fascination (if somewhat tardily due to a holiday) Frederic Schwarz’s splendid “20 Questions About the Scopes Trial” on American Heritage’s home page. I am ashamed to say that, like many Americans, I grew up believing the Hollywood version of the story. Spencer Tracy was a witty, rational, generous-spirited Clarence Darrow (or rather, Clarence Darrow was a real-life incarnation of the heroic above-Hollywood character we had come to revere, Spencer Tracy). Fredric March was a bumbling, Bible-thumping, immoral (remember his manipulation of Scopes’s innocent girlfriend), gluttonous William Jennings Bryan. In the 1960 film Inherit the Wind, which like all historical fiction says more, or at least as much, about its own era as the one it is portraying, Tracy/Darrow lost the case, but the forces of reason and the power of free thought seemed to triumph nonetheless, especially when the humane Tracy/Darrow reprimanded the opportunistic Gene Kelly/H. L. Mencken for his unbridled cynicism. The movie is brilliant, but I agree with Schwarz’s point that it has done a certain amount of damage by misrepresenting history. (As a historical novelist, I am especially sensitive to this danger.) Bryan came to his fear and rejection of evolution by way of the savagery of World War I (he resigned from Woodrow Wilson’s cabinet after the President’s protest of the sinking of the Lusitania, which he deemed too bellicose) and what he believed to be the unraveling of the social fabric. The late Stephen Jay Gould, and more recently Garrison Keillor, have suggested that one reason for his opposition to Darwinism was its odious association with its less scientific younger sibling, Social Darwinism. To paraphrase Hemingway, wouldn’t it be pretty to think so? The textbook at issue in the trial, which Bryan quoted from and criticized, A Civic Biology, by George William Hunter, made a strong argument for eugenics. As Michael Kazin describes it in his recent book A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan, the textbook cites two families, the Jokeks and Kallikaks, plagued for generations by “immorality and feeble-mindedness.” Members of both families were “true parasites” who, if they were lower animals, “we would probably kill off to prevent them from spreading.” Reading these words more than three-quarters of a century later, we realize that perhaps Bryan was not such a backward-looking proponent of intolerance after all. Kazin, however, disagrees with Gould’s reinterpretation. He points out that, though Bryan railed against the textbook, he neglected to cite these passages or even mention the espousal of Social Darwinism. So while the movie perhaps goes too far in one direction, our tendency toward revisionism may tilt too far in the other. An interesting sidebar to the case is the subsequent careers of some of the attorneys involved. Bryan, as Schwarz points out, died five days later. Arthur Garfield Hayes, a secular Jewish New York lawyer for the six-year-old American Civil Liberties Union, who, with Darrow, represented Scopes, would spend a good part of the following decade fighting to free the Scottsboro Boys. Clarence Darrow, on the other hand, financially strapped by the stock-market crash, would refuse to represent the nine black youths, though their support by the Communist-backed International Labor Defense probably contributed to his unwillingness as much as his need for money. But the same year that he turned down the defense of the Scottsboro Boys, he defended Mrs. Granville Fortescue, a white society matron, who, when a Hawaiian jury found a dark-skinned youth not guilty of assaulting her daughter in the infamous Massie case, took justice into her own well-manicured hands and shot the man to death. Darrow was no more successful getting her off than he was Scopes. I offer no moral here, except perhaps that Hollywood’s myths are a lot more reassuring than history’s questions. And oh, yes: When I was fifteen, coming around a corner of a hotel corridor at high speed, I slipped on the well-polished floor, and fell right into the arms of a surprised Fredric March. He was strong as the Rock of Ages, to which he refers in the movie, and without a whiff of sanctimoniousness.
June 13, 2006
The Problem With American Exceptionalism Posted by Ellen Feldman at 09:00 AM EST In the wake of the three suicides at Guantanamo reported this past weekend, Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris, Jr., the commander of the detention camp, was quoted as saying of the prisoners, “They have no regard for life, neither ours nor their own.” He went on to add, “I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.” I would argue that taking one’s own life, especially in protest rather than desperation, demonstrates an extremely high regard for human life. Look what I am willing to sacrifice to make my point, the suicide screams.
There is, however, a greater problem with Harris’s argument. His words took me back to Hearts and Minds, the film about the conflict that we call the Vietnam War and the Vietnamese term the American War. Point of view is exactly the point here. In the film Gen. William Westmoreland is heard saying that the Vietnamese do not share our regard for human life and family relationships. Meanwhile, on the screen, a Vietnamese mother is seen sobbing hysterically and trying to crawl into the grave with her son at his burial. I may be wrong about the exact words and scene. Perhaps General Westmoreland referred to only life or only family relationships. Perhaps it is a wife rather than a mother. But the fact that the scene has stayed with me all these years and sprang immediately to mind attests to its power. Even at the time there were complaints of the inflammatory juxtaposition of words and scene, as there always are with polemic documentaries, but the fact remains that Westmoreland did make the comment.
Certainly we cannot teach fighting men and women to love thy neighbor or turn the other cheek, though studies have shown that most men and women in combat fight not for principles or nation but for their comrades. But the need to demonize the enemy presents problems. In a soon-to-be-published biography of Franklin Roosevelt, Jean Smith writes that one reason many Americans were skeptical of the early reports of the horrors of the concentration camps was the debunking of some of the worst World War I stories about the atrocities of the “Hun.” (My colleague Fred Smoler says that many of the these debunked atrocities turned out to be true. I have no firsthand knowledge of the debunking of the debunking. I defer to Fred Smoler’s expertise in the matter.) But I think Harris’s statement, like Westmoreland’s before him, reveals a larger and more serious problem, that of American exceptionalism, the belief that we are more moral and righteous than other peoples of other nations.
In a recent New York Times Book Review essay on The Good Fight, by Peter Beinart, Joe Klein takes on this problem of America’s conviction of its own goodness. It was not always so, both the author and the reviewer argue, and they return to the glory years of Truman and a host of dedicated public servants who carried the liberal banner, when the L-word, as it is now called, was not a dirty one. “In the liberal vision,” Beinart maintains, “it is precisely our recognition that we are not angels that makes us exceptional.” That is why the Marshall plan required beneficiary nations to draw up their own programs rather than impose an American brand of democracy, as we are now determined to do. Other countries’ ways of doing things, liberal thinking went, may be different from, but is not necessarily inferior to, ours.
I am not suggesting that the world is a warm and fuzzy place; that terrorists do not want to destroy us; that there is not something warped about young men, and the occasional woman, who think they will achieve happiness in heaven, not to mention all those virgins we Westerners laugh at, by blowing up themselves and as many others as possible. But we will never solve the problem by dismissing those who create it as less good, less loving, less essentially human than we are. The only hope is to try to understand, and remedy, the conditions—some of them created by American policy, some by their own repressive societies and governments—that make them behave that way.
May 10, 2006
Beyond Salem: It Happened in New York Posted by Ellen Feldman at 11:30 AM EST Joshua Zeitz’s perceptive comments about the contagious hysteria of displaced fear in both the Salem witch trials and the McCarthy years bring to mind the recently published New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan, by the Bancroft award winner Jill Lepore. Lepore explores a largely forgotten chapter in New York history during which rumors of a slave plot spread as rapidly and treacherously as the fires that gave birth to them. Although Lepore makes a connection between these events and the famous freedom-of-the-press trial of Peter Zenger in 1735, she also likens the episode to the Salem witch trials almost half a century earlier. In fact, an anonymous letter from Boston warned New Yorkers against “making Bonfires of the Negros & perhaps thereby loading yourselves with greater Guilt than theirs.” The city fathers were enraged at this sniping from their New England brothers. In 1741, one in five inhabitants in Manhattan was enslaved, making the city, in the words of the author, “second only to Charleston, South Carolina, in a wretched calculus of urban unfreedom.” In this urban racial tinderbox, after a brutally cold winter, ten fires raged during five weeks in March and April. As New Yorkers grew more fearful of where and when conflagration would break out next, rumors of a slave plot against white inhabitants spread. An account the previous February of a slave revolt in Charleston, South Carolina, that burned 300 houses to the ground and nearly destroyed the city only fanned the embers of suspicion, while the retraction by Peter Zenger shortly after, assuring his readers that “The report of the Negroes rising [in Charleston] was groundless,” did nothing to douse the terror. Presently a 16-year-old white indentured servant, Mary Burton, stepped forward with a vivid account of poisonous plots to murder white men, marry their women, and appropriate their wealth. “The happy instrument of all this discovery,” as Burton was called at the time, named names, including the white tavern keeper who was the brains behind the scheme. Surely, colonial white New Yorkers told one another, Negro slaves were not smart enough to hatch such a conspiracy. Burton was not the only one to implicate others. More than a hundred black men and women were imprisoned in a dungeon beneath City Hall, where, not surprisingly, many traded confessions for leniency. Ironically, as Lepore points out, the Enlightenment was behind this readiness to recognize a slave conspiracy. An earlier age might have blamed the fires on God’s vengeance or fate, but now there had to be a rational reason for events. Our main source of information for this scandalous episode is the journal of the self-serving and unreliable judge in the case, Daniel Horsmanden, which Lepore deconstructs brilliantly without dismissing entirely. She also brings to life the sights and smells and sounds, the manners and customs and culture of the infant city. The casualty count of the alleged New York uprising of 1741 was greater than that of the Salem witch trials. Thirteen black men were burned at the stake, seventeen blacks and four whites hanged, seven citizens banished from the city, and those countless others imprisoned beneath City Hall. New York Burning is a meticulously researched, beautifully written account of a shameful moment in New York’s history. It illuminates the different meanings liberty assumed in the fledgling colonies for whites and for blacks. It also reveals the bloody toll fear, both rational and irrational, can take on a populace.
May 9, 2006
War on Contraception Posted by Ellen Feldman at 10:00 AM EST The May 7 edition of the New York Times Magazine published an excellent, and terrifying, article by Russell Shorto on the religious right’s war on contraception. “I cannot imagine any development in human history, after the Fall, that has had a greater impact on human beings than the pill,” the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary told Shorto. The pill, however, is the least of it. These groups want to outlaw all forms of contraception, including condoms, which have been proven to stop the spread of disease as well as prevent pregnancy. This is not a fringe movement. Shorto goes on to report that last year when a reporter asked if President Bush supported the right to contraception, Press Secretary Scott McClellan said he would “not dignify the question with a response.” The White House has still not replied to a series of letters sent last July by a Congressional group led by Representative Carolyn Maloney asking if the President supports the right to contraception. Once again religious conviction masquerades as public policy. The same groups that are trying to outlaw all methods of birth control are, of course, in the forefront of the war against the right to abortion, despite the fact that studies show that countries where contraceptives and information about how to use them are available have far lower abortion rates. Thus, this is not a campaign for a “culture of life,” as they claim. It is a war against sex, even sex in marriage. Isn’t the law supposed to prevent misdeeds against the community and its members, not legislate personal morality? What these groups, which are opposed to any form of birth control, lack is a sense of history. They lament our sex-obsessed society. (Then why not go after the advertising rather than the contraceptive industry?) But they have no knowledge of what life was like for families, as well as independent-minded single women, before the advent of legal contraceptives. Margaret Sanger, the heroic mother of family planning, liked to tell the story of a woman called Sadie, who lived in a tenement on the Lower East Side of New York. Sanger’s biographers agree that Sadie may well have been apocryphal, but if she was, Sanger, a nurse, had undoubtedly treated scores like Sadie while working among the poor. Sadie, the mother of a large family, fell ill from the aftereffects of a self-induced abortion. When the doctor arrived to treat her, she pleaded with him for contraceptive information. Women in the slums suspected their better-heeled sisters had ways to prevent pregnancy. The doctor told Sadie she could not “have her cake and eat it too.” It is safe to assume there was very little cake in Sadie’s impoverished life. When she continued to beg him for information, he advised her to “tell Jake to sleep on the roof.” A few months later, Sanger returned to treat Sadie after another self-induced abortion, but she was too late. Sadie died from lack of information and the unavailability of a health product. Sadie’s fate was not uncommon in the slums of America before the legalization of birth control, well into the twentieth century. It was, of course, rarer in more upscale neighborhoods. Though some women with access to doctors who would provide contraceptive information were reluctant to avail themselves of the option—Eleanor Roosevelt complained of always being either about to have a child or just getting over having had one, but did nothing about it until she banished FDR from the marriage bed—others were less shy. ER’s outspoken cousin, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, made fun of Eleanor’s naiveté and boasted of her own worldly German physician who was a source of much useful prophylactic information. If the religious right and this administration succeed in turning the clock back on contraception, the poor will once again be the ones to suffer. Those with means can always hop over to Europe or find an idealistic or acquiescent physician at home. Those without will have to choose between another child they cannot afford to feed or clothe or educate and telling Jake to sleep on the roof. Surely we have enough spousal abuse in the country to know where that form of birth control will lead.
May 3, 2006
Why Did Some Immigrants Go Back Home? Posted by Ellen Feldman at 12:10 PM EST John Steele Gordon poses a valid question about whether immigrants gave up and returned home or retired to happy sunset years in their native countries, and I am grateful to Joshua Zeitz for providing some answers to it. I’d like to enlarge upon them just a little. Since, like John Gordon, I admire David Kennedy’s excellent Freedom from Fear, I accepted Kennedy’s implication that the difficulties rather than the rewards of building a new life in a new land drove many to retrace their steps. Kennedy bases his figures on the exhaustive history of American immigration Becoming American, by Thomas J. Archdeacon. The author writes that from the statistics, “it is impossible both to tell how many different people were actually counted as immigrants [as opposed to those arriving as temporary workers, for example] and to judge how many emigrants from America were fulfilling original hopes [to return to their homelands] or escaping unexpected disappointments.” But Archdeacon also points out, as does Joshua Zeitz, that Jews had the lowest frequencies of return of all the late-arriving ethnic groups. He also argues that the large remigration rate of Italians drastically reduced the impact of their original influx. The story of Greek immigration and remigration is similar to the Italian, while the proportion of Germans who returned home was low.
Though, as Archdeacon states, we have no statistics to prove why immigrants returned home, it seems likely that once again the matter of the sheer otherness of the new arrivals comes into play. Germans were less alien to a WASP country than were Italians or Greeks, a fact that probably made adjustment easier and prejudice less virulent. Jews, on the other hand, might be considered the most alien of all the new arrivals—but as both Archdeacon and Joshua Zeitz point out, they had known more terrible conditions in the countries they had fled, and they had no place to which to return.
Undoubtedly, many immigrants worked hard in this country to get back home to their native lands, but given the high rate of remigration of those who seemed most foreign to American citizens, I think David Kennedy’s implication stands. Faced with enormous obstacles and grinding hardship, many gave up and retreated back to the old country.
May 1, 2006
About Immigration Posted by Ellen Feldman at 07:20 PM EST On the issue of immigration, America is in a bind. We need the energy, vision, and willingness to work of immigrants, but we fear their otherness. The situation is not new. In the nineteenth century, we permitted Chinese laborers to build the railroads but believed they were so alien they were not capable of citizenship in the growing country. As more immigrants came to stay, the fear of unknown cultures and people escalated. Between 1890 and the 1920s, the nation’s population almost doubled, and nearly a third of this growth was the result of immigration from southern and eastern Europe. The influx of these mysterious strangers led to a revival of the Ku Klux Klan, who turned their hatred on Catholics and Jews as well as African-Americans. By the 1920s, the Klan claimed five million members, but so many others shared their fears that in 1924 Congress practically cut off immigration. By the 1950s many of these earlier arrivals had assimilated so successfully that they were in a position to pull up the gangplank after them. Catholic Sen. Pat McCarran pushed through a restrictive immigration bill that his fellow Democrat, Sen. Estes Kefauver, warned was “motivated by bias, discrimination against certain racial stocks or religions and which violates our Democratic tradition.” The law also exposed the United States to ridicule, he said, because one section excluded professors from the class of aliens admissible regardless of quotas. McCarran feared Communists, but it is not farfetched to suggest that the intellectual elite has always scared Americans. There is, however, another aspect of the immigrant debate. We have all heard tales of those from other countries who came to these shores and went on to great success. Less is said of those who failed. In the early part of the
last century, life in America was so harsh for immigrants that, according to David Kennedy in Freedom From Fear, more than half the Greeks, Russian, Rumanians, and Bulgarians; almost half the Italians; and nearly a third of the Poles, Slovaks, and Croatians gave up and returned home. Life is no easier for current newcomers to the country. That
America is a land of immigrants is a truism. That we need to start paying attention to how we treat our newest arrivals is the real issue of the day.
April 1, 2006
Political Correctness: The Way It Was Posted by Ellen Feldman at 11:20 AM EST In the current discussion here of political correctness, I agree with Joshua Zeitz on two points. The issue in question is often nothing more than simple good manners. And the term has become a cudgel with which to beat soft-hearted liberals who think an inclusive society is preferable to one that brands and jeers at all but certain established and powerful groups. But perhaps another way to look at the matter is to examine what the world and the language were like before the concept of political correctness took root. (And I admit the term is less attractive than the practice.) The Scottsboro case, recently recounted on AmericanHeritage.com, and a subject I am currently researching for a book, provides an excellent example not only of racial injustice and legal chicanery, but of pre-political-correctness loutishness and cruelty. On July 27, 1937, the New York Times ran an article about the arrival in New York of four of the Scottsboro boys who had been freed. According to the paper, when a reporter inquired of Roy Wright what he intended to do in New York, “He drawled, ’Ah haven’t made up mah mind yet.’” Asked if he was afraid when he saw the mob that had gathered to welcome him at the station, he was quoted as saying, “’Ah ain’t nevah been afraid. Ah wasn’ afraid in 1931.’” When the same paper quoted various white Southerners associated with the case, no attempt was made to convey the rich flavor of their accents. The Times was not alone. When Time magazine, given to its own brand of vivid writing, carried an article about foreign demonstrations to protest the railroading of the defendants, it referred to them as “blackamoors.” There were other objects of official scorn. Ruby Bates, one of the white girls involved in the case, made an appearance to help raise money for the defendants. The New York World Telegram ran the headline “Ruby Bates, ‘Poor White Trash,’ to Speak Here in Effort to Help Scottsboro Boys.” Nor were the slurs limited to press coverage. In one of the many trials in the case, the prosecution charged that Ruby Bates “couldn’t tell you all the things that happened in New York because part of it was in the Jew language.” Attempting to discredit another witness for the defense, the prosecuting attorney cautioned the jury to “watch his hands . . . if he had been with Brodsky [one of the lawyers for the defense] another two weeks he would have been down here with a pack on his back trying to sell you goods.” Needless to say, the word “nigger,” appears frequently in the transcripts. The Scottsboro case was a shameful chapter in our recent past. The words used to describe it were not just a reflection of the mindset that permitted it. They were a contributing cause to a terrible miscarriage of justice that dragged on for almost half a century. Neither our society nor our language is less rich for the loss of ugly epithets and facile stereotypes.
February 21, 2006
What Did the Vets Really Want? Posted by Ellen Feldman at 10:00 AM EST Recent articles about men and women returning from service in Iraq have reminded me of other veterans returning from other wars. In Being Geniuses Together, Kay Boyle’s joint memoir with Robert McAlmon, she records Hemingway’s observation that it would be difficult for their generation “to adjust to the prosaic and dull routines of peace, war-shocked and disillusioned as we were.” The prediction turned out to be prescient, and not only for the artistically inclined expatriates who fled Prohibition-era America for Paris. The twenties were a riotous, raucous, and unbridled decade on the home front as well. Prohibition was a joke, though according to Sinclair Lewis’s gimlet-eyed depiction of George Babbitt’s attempt to purchase alcohol for a dinner party, not as comfortably circumvented by law-abiding citizens as we have come to believe. The country was drunk on business, boosterism, advertising, and, of course, the stock market. Everyone was getting rich quick, including the celebrity evangelists who thundered against the temper of the times. Then came the bone-aching, nausea-inducing, suicide-inciting hangover of the Depression. What I find most curious about Hemingway’s prediction, however, is that it should have proven true for the aftermath of the first war and not the second. With the notable exception of the Beats and various visual artists, most returning GIs seemed to want nothing more than “to adjust to the prosaic and dull routines of peace,” though I doubt they were any less “war-shocked and disillusioned” than the generation who had fought before them. My first instinct was to ascribe the difference to America’s shorter and less devastating participation in World War I. But Europe, which had endured four years of unimaginable slaughter, had its own version of the roaring twenties, including expatriates. In her book February House, Sherill Tippins recounts that young British writers like W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood flocked to Weimar Berlin for artistic and sexual freedom, just as their American counterparts did to Paris. And the twenties roared almost as noisily abroad, fueled by legal alcohol, as it did at home, fueled by illegal. Perhaps the explanation for the difference between the postwar attitudes of the lost generation and the greatest generation (though let’s hope that particular label is on the way out) lies in what came before they marched off to battle. The earlier generation was not only reacting against the horrors of war, it was also rebelling against the decades of suffocating Victorian and Edwardian peace. In 1920, America voted for a return to normalcy, but what it really wanted was not to go back to security but to throw off restraints. In 1946, returning vets and the women they had left behind wanted nothing so much as that dull normalcy under which their elders had chafed and which most of them were too young to have known, thanks to the Depression, but not too disillusioned to still dream of.
January 6, 2006
Teaching—Past, Present, and Future Posted by Ellen Feldman at 10:55 AM EST I think Frederick Allen and Frederic Schwarz are onto something in their observations about the explosion of knowledge and the democratization of the knowledgeable. Both phenomena, however, have corollaries. The first concerns the differences among various disciplines; the second the inequities of instruction and learning between geographical and socioeconomic groups. My limited knowledge of the state of teaching today extends only to history and literature. I am a dunce in math and science, a fact that perhaps demonstrates that teaching was not superior a generation or two ago. Another recent survey on education, this one about the state of mathematics expertise among American students, revealed that the United States placed eighth worldwide. (At least, I think that was the rating. I really must start clipping these articles.) Almost as distressing as the ranking was the fact that American students believed that they rated first. But there is another side of the coin, and that has to do with the democratization of knowledge, or perhaps the lack thereof. Yesterday I eavesdropped on a conversation between two men who appeared to be in their eighties or nineties. They began by discussing the scandal in Washington, went on to bemoan the state of the world ethically and intellectually—though wondering whether they merely believed this because they were getting old, which, I thought, showed a wonderful openness of mind—and then one began to talk about the his granddaughter’s courses in science. He, apparently, was a research scientist himself. I could not hear the details—after all, I was eavesdropping—and probably would not have understood them if I had, but he was gleeful as he recounted the work his granddaughter was doing in a high school laboratory. Perhaps American education isn’t in the fix we think, at least not in all disciplines in all places. I suspect the best schools are teaching better than ever. I suspect the best students are making strides their predecessors only dreamed of. I suspect that is especially true in the sciences. But if the good news is that the current state of scientific teaching is not as bad as we feared, the bad news, according to a 2005 letter of protest to the White House by a group of leading scientists, is that this administration’s politicization of scientific research bodes ill for America’s future. And we haven’t even begun to talk about Intelligent Design.
January 2, 2006
Shampoo and Conditioner Posted by Ellen Feldman at 07:40 AM EST According to a recent study, America is not currently living through a golden age of historical teaching, or at least historical knowledge among young people. When asked to choose who on a list of famous generals was at the Battle of Yorktown, an alarming number of students at leading universities picked either Eisenhower or MacArthur. (Unfortunately, I did not clip the news article and cannot recall the actual numbers, but fewer than half chose Washington.) A few days after reading about the study, I gave a talk to undergraduates at a major urban university. Only two in the class knew what McCarthyism was. Thanks to that study, the sea of fresh but blank faces when I mentioned McCarthyism, and three days spent in San Diego working with middle and high school students, I have been thinking a great deal about the difficulties of teaching the past in a world of accelerating history, technological blitz, and the mania for new-and-improved. I went to San Diego to speak about Anne Frank and the life her diary took on in this country after her death. The experience was less daunting than I, a non-teacher, had feared. The kids were, for the most part, well-behaved, interested, and sympathetic. Several of the girls shed tears during a video prepared for the occasion. I'm fairly certain most of the students learned something. But despite the occasional tear, I did not have the feeling the newfound knowledge meant much to them. After the video and a brief talk, I took groups of students through a beautifully wrought model of two of the rooms in the secret annex. The intention was to force the kids into an essential historical experience, to make them feel what it was like to live in another time and place under other conditions. I cannot say I was particularly successful. I spoke of the constant hunger. It was no match for the latest fad diet sweeping the school or the obesity headlines in the day's paper. I told them about being locked up with their parents for 25 months. I could see them mentally closing the doors to their well-equipped rooms or merely turning up their iPods. I reminded them they would have had no contact with their friends. It was a meaningless threat to a generation brought up on instant messaging. Then, on the afternoon of the third day, as I was taking the last group of students through the rooms and talking about the grueling shortages under the Occupation, I inadvertently hit on something
that got their attention. They yawned when I spoke of living on rotten potatoes and beans. They looked bored when I told them about outgrowing clothes and shoes and not being able to replace them. Doing without soap left them cold. “And don't even think about shampoo or conditioner,” I added. I will never forget the look of horror that went from face to face, and not only among the girls. I am not sure what the moral of this story is. I doubt we can stimulate historical curiosity or improve historical awareness by product placement. But I keep thinking there must be a way to make our past more relevant to those who will fashion our future.
October 21, 2005
A Soldier’s Story Posted by Ellen Feldman at 01:40 PM EST A few months ago, on a flight from Atlanta to New York, I found myself in a seat behind a man of about 19 or 20. He was wearing fatigues, the functional, not the fashionable, kind. Even before we took off, I knew something was up. While the rest of us struggled on our own to squeeze oversized bags into undersized overhead compartments, the flight attendant came over and asked if there was anything he needed. He said there was not. At least, I thought that was what he said. I could hear the stewardess’s words, but the young man spoke quietly. He did, however, shake his head no. A moment later the flight attendant was back clutching something in her hand. I didn’t see what it was—as a novelist, I’m nosy by trade, but as I flier, I know the rules—but she told him not to lose it and to enjoy it. Do they give cameras away in the upper classes of domestic travel? A moment later, she returned a third time with a pencil and paper. She asked the young man his name, rank, and serial number, and wrote them all down. Shortly after takeoff, she returned a fourth time and asked if he would like anything to drink, though this was economy class, and nothing was offered to quench the thirst of any of the rest of us squeezed in cheek-by-jowl. The young man demurred again. Soon the captain came over the speaker system, welcomed us aboard, and said he wanted to extend a particular greeting to Specialist First Class and gave the young man’s name. The entire plane erupted in applause. If the seatbelt sign were not turned on, the passengers probably would have risen to make it a standing ovation. As the flight wore on, other attendants stopped by to ask if the young man needed anything. Various passengers came over to chat and to thank him. The incident indicates, I think, how much has changed and how much has not. Forty years ago, few soldiers returning from Vietnam would have been so fussed over and feted by the public. Many would have been reluctant even to go out among their fellow citizens in uniform or fatigues, though apparently the story of a glass of urine being thrown in the face of a returning GI by an irate protester in a bar, which I heard from at least one Vietnam vet, has turned out to be urban legend. I cannot account for this change of heart toward the military. Though campuses are not erupting in antiwar protests, support for the war in Iraq continues to diminish. Perhaps, thanks to round-the-clock and on-the-scene news coverage, the public finally believes that war really is hell. Perhaps we’re merely guilty that young men and women are dying while we make no sacrifice at all. The altered attitude is even more ironic in view of the fact that the young men fighting in Vietnam were drafted. The men and women in Iraq are volunteers, though certainly some of their extensions of service can be seen as a backdoor draft. But if public opinion, or at least behavior, has changed, the searing effect of battle on the human psyche remains eternal. The young man on my flight said little in response to all the fuss being made over him. He was polite but obviously uncomfortable. He seemed to want only to be left alone. His behavior took me back to a fictional account of another veteran returning from an earlier American war. In The Best Years of Our Lives, a 1946 gem of a movie about reentry into civilian life, all three GIs find it hard to speak, or to remain silent, about the things they have done and witnessed, but one homecoming scene is almost unbearable to watch. The sailor Homer Parrish, who has lost both his hands, and who was played by Harold Russell, a veteran who really had lost both his hands in the war, sits in the living room of his childhood home with his parents, his girlfriend, and her parents. The group watches him nervously as he struggles with a glass of lemonade, which the movie makes clear he would have had no trouble handling under less scrutiny. Their seemingly solicitous comments range from fatuous to offensive. Unable to bear the pressure of their attention, Homer bursts from the room and flees to his uncle’s bar with a heartfelt cry. “Why can’t they just leave a guy alone?”
October 13, 2005
Second Terms Posted by Ellen Feldman at 10:30 AM EST I think John Steele Gordon is onto something in his remarks about our genetic need to tell stories. Though second-term blues have been common throughout our history, the reasons for them, as both he and Fredric Schwarz point out, are wildly disparate. A glance at three recent presidents reveals just how varied the problems can be and how diametrically opposed the underlying causes often are. Frederic Schwarz speaks of post-election fatigue and depression. In the case of Clinton, I think we can add boredom to the list, plus a flair for shooting himself in the foot to relieve the boredom. After achieving a first term and reelection, what was this superachiever to do but raise the stakes for what he could do, or get away with? One can argue that FDR’s second term presents a different set of conditions, because he was the cause, not the victim or beneficiary, of the 22nd amendment. But a convincing case can and has been made that early in his second term FDR had no intention of running for a third, and that only the threat of war persuaded him to stand again in 1940. In other words, in his own mind he might have been in his final term. Perhaps that was why, buoyed by his 1936 landslide, he set out to make permanent in his second term the achievements of his first. He not only attempted to pack the court, he also sought to streamline the administration, which he had helped make so unwieldy, and purge his own party of conservatives in the 1938 election. The current President Bush’s case has certain similarities to those of both these predecessors. Though not reelected by anything close to a landslide, he chose to perceive his return to office as a mandate and set out to solidify the achievements or failures (depending on your point of view) of his first term, not the least of which would be the undoing of FDR’s Social Security plan. But whether suffering from post-election fatigue (which seems unlikely in view of the amount of time he spent vacationing at his ranch before Katrina), depression, boredom, or, more likely, hubris, Katrina and the downward spiraling war in Iraq seem to have caught him, and his appointed cronies, napping. Perhaps the real question is not whether second-term misfortunes are unavoidable, or why they occur, but how serious they are in the long run. An impeached Clinton still remains wildly popular at home and even more so abroad. FDR did not succeed in packing the court, streamlining the administration, or purging his party, but he did go on to a third and even fourth term. Stay tuned for President Bush’s final chapters.
September 26, 2005
A Thought About Dissent Posted by Ellen Feldman at 11:00 AM EST My recent comments about Eleanor Roosevelt and the Bonus March seem to have incited two of my fellow bloggers to entries of their own. They were not in agreement with my views. I will not address the political issues, but I do apologize for my historical mistake. As Frederic Schwarz observed, the Bonus Marchers were not still there when FDR took office. Some of them had returned. The dissents, however, did set me thinking. I am a runner. I usually jog around the Reservoir in Central Park, and while I still thrill to the sight of the New York skyline to the south, even four years later I cannot help noticing the gap where the Twin Towers used to be. There is an irony to this hole in the cityscape, and in the entire nation. Like most New Yorkers, I never regarded the towers as icons of the city. That role was reserved for the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings. 9/11, of course, changed all that. On weekends, however, I run along a country lane, quiet but not deserted, another view of America. As I round a bend in the road, there is usually a car parked in a driveway. The car wears a bumper sticker. The message on the sticker is only three words, but each time I see them, I have the same reaction. My knees pump harder, my lungs expand, and I feel a surge of energy. Even my Cairn terrier, who, like most Americans, came here from somewhere else—Scotland in her case—picks up the pace. The bumper sticker reads, “Dissent Is Patriotic.”
September 19, 2005
A Lesson from the Bonus March Posted by Ellen Feldman at 10:00 AM EST On September 15, still trying to get it right, President Bush made his fourth visit to the area devastated by Katrina. Each trip has been, it seems to me, more carefully scripted. Gone are the off-the-cuff jokes about youthful hell-raising and the accolades to incompetent officials. The most recent game plan left no room for gaffes. The President, dressed uncharacteristically for a prime-time speech in an open-necked shirt, presumably to show he too was getting his hands dirty in the cleanup effort, spoke in a fenced-off area of Jackson Square with the iconic cathedral, lit by trucked-in generators, looming behind him. (When the President failed to visit the worst-hit sections of the city on his first visit, the White House explained that he did not want to disrupt rescue efforts. Didn’t efforts to fence off, camouflage, light, and sound one of the city’s central squares interfere with essential rebuilding tasks?) Before the speech the President was driven through some of the blacked-out sections of the city, a far cry from Lincoln’s walk through Richmond, as described here by Frederick Allen on August 31, or New York Mayor Lindsay’s stroll through Harlem at the height of the riots, or another reckless foray among supposedly dangerous elements. In June 1932, when the Bonus Expeditionary Force, more than 90 percent of whom were Army and Navy veterans, marched on Washington, D.C., wanting no more than the military “bonus” they had been promised, President Hoover called out the troops; General Douglas MacArthur, caught out of uniform, sent his orderly for the necessary items and announced, “MacArthur has decided to go into active command in the field,” and Major Patton led his 3rd Cavalry against the crowd of hungry, unarmed men, women, and children. The marchers fled, the troops pursued, and the results were tragic. When New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt saw the newspaper accounts, he observed that he might feel sorry for the President if he were not so deeply moved by the plight of the men and their families. The Bonus Marchers were still there when FDR moved into the White House the following year. His adviser Louis Howe, no slouch in the tricks-of-political-publicity trade, took the First Lady on a surprise—to both her and the marchers—visit to their encampment. Eleanor Roosevelt rose to the occasion quickly and magnificently, as usual. She served coffee and sandwiches, sang campfire songs, and listened. Her gesture changed nothing, except perhaps the feelings of the marchers. Hoover sent the troops, they said; Roosevelt sent his wife. In Jackson Square, Bush spoke to a gathering of officials and to the television cameras. He remained as far from Americans desperately in need of morale as well as help as he had been on his first tone-deaf visit.
September 12, 2005
Trompe L'Oeil in New Orleans? Posted by Ellen Feldman at 08:55 AM EST When you take a train north from Grand Central Terminal in New York, the tracks of what I still think of as the old New York Central emerge from a tunnel running under Park Avenue into the daylight at 97th Street. If you look up from your reading a little north of that and gaze eastward you will see a good number of abandoned buildings. The sight is not unusual for an inner city, but something about these buildings is. The windows are painted with bright curtains and blooming flowerpots and other trompe l'oeil scenes of a flourishing community. At least they were a year and a half ago, when I last took the train north.
I have been thinking about those windows a great deal as I have watched the tragedy unfolding in New Orleans and listened to the reactions from the rest of the country. This cannot be America, Americans say over and over again, with shame and heartbreak and disbelief. I share their shame and heartbreak. I wonder at their disbelief. Have they not sat in front of their televisions repeatedly in the past few decades watching American cities erupt in violence? A hundred years ago this summer, New York City suffered a record heat wave. In that pre-air-conditioning era, many died. The heat was democratic, but man-made conditions skewed the odds. The death toll was much higher in the crowded tenements of the Lower East Side, where a single bathroom might serve an entire building, a breath of air never entered, and entire families slept in one bed. Those tenements no longer exist, partly because reformers like Jacob Riis forced Americans to see them. The tragedy in New Orleans has forced Americans to see misery and inequality not in some safely distant third-world country but in our midst. As just about everyone has pointed out by now, the preponderance of citizens trapped in the rising waters and locked in the Superdome were black. Without money or a car they could not get out. Like the heat wave a hundred years ago, Katrina was democratic. Our society is less so. The stories and pictures coming out of New Orleans have shown us that. The question now is whether as the flood waters recede we will continue to see, or merely go back to looking at the pretty trompe l'oeil paintings that celebrate the richest country in the world without noticing its poorest citizens.
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