Photo of the Day: Waiting Out the Storm, NYC

I had been hearing all day about a major storm coming our way. A few blocks from my office late this afternoon, the long-predicted downpour arrived. I made it across the street from where the musical Hamilton is playing and, with the handful of people in this photo I took, waited for the precipitation to abate.

I can’t say that when it was all over, the storm was worth it: much of the mugginess lingers in the air even several hours later.

Photo of the Day: Weehawken and NY Skyline

Normally, on the long local bus route from Englewood, NJ to the Port Authority in New York, I occupy myself with all kinds of reading. But invariably, when I get to Weehawken, I become pleasantly distracted by the view—particularly on a sunny (albeit freezing) day such as this morning, when I snapped this shot.

Quote of the Day (Comic Ryan Reiss, on Why NY Is the True ‘City of Romance’)

“People say Paris is the city of romance, but I say it’s New York. You only pay $2,900 a month in rent once before you look at whoever you’re dating and say, ‘I love you—let’s move in together.’”—Stand-up comic Ryan Reiss quoted in “Joke of the Week,” TimeOut New York, Sept. 25-Oct. 1, 2014

Quote of the Day (Gail Collins, on One Outcome of This WeinerSpitzer Summer)

“It could be pretty exciting. The entire city would come to a halt as the two staffs fired rocket launchers at each other. The movie version would be in 3-D and star Channing Tatum as Eliot Spitzer.”—Gail Collins, forecasting what would happen if disgraced pols Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer win in their comeback attempts in New York, in “New York Sizzles,” The New York Times, July 11, 2013

WeinerSpitzer—I get indigestion just imagining the possibility!

Photo of the Day: The Happiest Roman of Them All

Years ago, cigar-store Indians were ubiquitous outside tobacconist shops. But I can’t remember the last time I saw one of these solemn, silent wooden sculptures. You can probably guess why from the 1993 Seinfeld episode called—surprise, surprise!—“The Cigar Store Indian,” in which Jerry is chided as a racist by a Native-American woman who's caught his eye, when he buys such a figure as a peace offering for Elaine.

Political correctness can scare off attempts to enlist representatives of racial or ethnic groups for business purposes. In Wednesday’s New York Daily News, for instance, John Mariani took to task Presidential candidate Herman Cain for his past association with Godfather Pizza, which, the writer observes, perpetuated stereotypes about Italian-Americans and the Mafia.

But, if you have to tread carefully about a symbol involving today’s Italians or Italian-Americans, yesterday’s—well, okay, ancient—ones present no such problems. A couple of weeks ago, on West 49th Street in midtown Manhattan, I came across a nice counterpart to the cigar-store Indian: an ancient Roman standing guard outside the restaurant Da Marino.

I have no idea what this eatery’s food is like, but this fine fellow caught my eye and made my chuckle. To start, there's the cut of his jaw, the most prominent chin this side of Jay Leno.

More than that, there’s a real difference between him and others of his ilk from the age when all roads led to Rome. It wasn’t easy carrying out the whim of power-mad emperors, lording it over oppressed alien groups or protecting a corrupt people from the horrible fate at the hands of barbarians that they so richly deserved.

If you want proof of what I’m talking about, just look at John Wayne’s cameo as the centurion in George Stevens’ reverent Greatest Story Ever Told. Now, if I were making boodles of money in a two-minutes-tops appearance, I’d try to sport a more serene mien. But The Duke looks like he’s really getting into method acting here, rather dissatisfied with his lot, until he makes a hash of his climatic moment. (“Surely this man was the son of God.”)

And what about those two soldier-friends in the late HBO series Rome? Titus Pollo and Lucius Vorinus certainly don’t appear to be pleased with their lives, what with all their discontent about loved ones and the responsibility of saving the republic from itself.

So this soldier outside Da Marino was a revelation. He’s smiling so much, you’d think he’d just been named to command a legion.

On the other hand, since he’s standing outside the restaurant, there could be an alternative explanation. He could be delighted in the meal he’s just had. When you think of it, what could fortify a soldier like this--what could inspire him to take up his manifold, lonely duties--if not the very real prospect of an excellent dinner?

What better advertising for a ristorante?

This Day in Pop Music History (Paul Dresser, Tunesmith Brother of Theodore Dreiser, Dies Broke)

January 30, 1906--Paul Dresser, once the toast of Broadway with hugely successful songs such as “On the Banks of the Wabash Far Away,” “The Letter That Never Came” and “Just Tell Them That You Saw Me,” died penniless at age 47 in the New York apartment of his sister Emma.

Dresser’s scores of tunes eventually led to his posthumous election to the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and he also played a role in the rise of Tin Pan Alley as part owner of the music publishing company Howley, Havilland & Dresser.

But he also heavily influenced the life and work of the brother 13 years his junior, author Theodore Dreiser.

That concept might seem preposterous to anyone comparing backslapping, wisecracking Paul (who changed the spelling of his surname after leaving home to join a male quartet that traveled with a medicine wagon), whose sentimental songs were composed for a middle-class audience, with Theodore, an increasingly radical, plodding, humorless writer who nevertheless transformed American literature with his grimly naturalist novels.

But none other than the author of Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy claimed, in his affectionate essay “My Brother Paul” (reprinted in his 1919 collection, Twelve Men) that following their revered mother’s death, the only member of his large family “who truly understood me, or, better yet, sympathized with my intellectual and artistic point of view, was, strange as it may seem, this same Paul, my dearest brother.” There is every reason to take the novelist at his word on this point.

Dreiser’s raw depiction of the lower depths has obscured an aspect of his fiction noted by early champion H. L. Mencken, who pointed out in a 1911 review that the title characters of Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt “escape from the physical mysteries of the struggle for existence only to taste the worse mysteries of the struggle for happiness.” The case of Paul Dresser illustrated this as much as anything else in his brother’s life.

Like Carrie and Jennie, Paul rose from Midwest poverty to ever-greater heights. Leaving his native Indiana behind, he lived large in Gotham. (Literally so: as seen in the image accompanying this post, he weighed more than 300 pounds.)

It’s tempting, in fact, despite differences in racial backgrounds, to liken Paul to some contemporary hip-hop moguls who have parlayed careers in one area into wider-ranging endeavors. As Theodore observed, Paul at one time or another had been “a singer and entertainer with a perambulating cure-all or wagon (‘Hamlin’s Wizard Oil’)…both end- and middle-man with one, two or three different minstrel companies of repute; the editor or originator or author of a ‘funny column’ in a Western small city paper; the author of the songs mentioned above and a hundred others; a black-face monologue artist; a white-face ditto, at Tom Pastor’s, Miner’s and Niblo’s of the old days; a comic lead; co-star and star in such melodramas and farces as ‘The Danger Signal,’ ‘the Two Johns,’ ‘A Tin Soldier,’ ‘The Midnight Bell,’ ‘A Green Goods Man’ (which he wrote, by the way) and others.”

And then the bottom fell out. Paul’s easy way with money--spending perhaps even more freely, on down-and-out entertainers who needed a helping hand, as on himself--along with poor business sense and inability to adjust to the changing tastes of an increasingly polyglot New York, led to bankruptcy. But worse was that the friends who had crowded around him once were nowhere to be found now: “Depression and even despair seemed to hang about him like a cloak,” Dreiser wrote. “He could not shake it off. And yet, literally, in his case there was nothing to fear, if he had only known.”

From first to last, Dreiser’s characters are gripped by yearnings for success and sex so insistent as to overwhelm all moral codes and laws. His brother opened up to him the breathtaking urban kingdom that offered these temptations.

Dreiser’s style can be heavy, awkward and sometimes fatuous (e.g., Sister Carrie claims that for a young girl leaving home for the big city, there are only two alternatives: “Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse”). But at times, caught up in the wonder of what he describes, it inextricably takes flight, as in this description of his brother’s routine that captures the fast pulse of a city awakening to its destiny at the center of the 20th century:

“He rose in the morning to the clang of the cars and the honk of the automobiles outside; he retired at night as a gang of rapid men under flaring torches might be repairing a track, or the milk trucks were rumbling to and from the ferries. He was in his way a public restaurant and hotel favorite, a shining light in the theater managers’ offices, hotel bars and lobbies and wherever those flies of the Tenderloin, those passing lords and celebrities of the sporting, theatrical, newspaper and other worlds, are wont to gather.”

Paul did not begin his brother’s sexual education, but the entertainment demimonde to which he exposed Theodore inevitably shaped the novelist’s views on women. The novelist was astonished not merely by Paul’s “catholicity of taste” but also by the brazen dress and manners of those who sought the songwriter’s favors: “They were distant and freezing enough to all who did not interest them, but let a personality such as his come into view and they were all wiles, bending and alluring graces.”

Judging from his own compulsive philandering, Dreiser could not have come away from such encounters with much respect for women. In 1909, the same year of his essay about Paul, the novelist became involved with a ruinous relationship with the 17-year-old daughter of an assistant editor at the publishing house where he worked. Over the years, he came to conduct several affairs at once.

Paul Dresser's work has not enjoyed the continuing popularity of a New York music forebear, Stephen Foster, but at least during his lifetime, Dreiser did live to see renewed appreciation for his brother's work. "On the Banks of the Wabash" became the state song of Indiana, and several years before the novelist's death he worked assiduously in Hollywood to bring to the big screen a biopic about his songwriting brother, My Gal Sal.

Audiences of the time would have been horrified by the notion that the song that inspired the 1942 musical starring Victor Mature and Rita Hayworth was based on a madam with whom Paul Dresser lived for a time in Evansville, Ind.--but the tunesmith's brother, having seen so much of the dark side of life, could hardly have been bothered by this at all.

Headline of the Day (The Daily News, on Gerald Ford and NYC)

“FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD”—New York Daily News headline, October 30, 1975

Talking about Halloween scares!

There have been tabloid headlines more infectious (one personal favorite: in the New York Daily News, after Joey Buttafuoco was arrested for paying for a prostitute: SO JOEY, HOW’S TRICKS?).

But none were so powerful—or so politically consequential—as the one created by Daily News managing editor William Brink after President Gerald Ford, in a nationally televised speech, rejected the Big Apple’s request for federal aid to stave off imminent bankruptcy.

Eventually, the city managed to keep the wolves from its doors as Governor Hugh Carey cobbled together, with the clock ticking, a package consisting of debt-packaging corporations, strict financial oversight, and concessions by unions (a tale told by Seymour Lachman and my college friend Rob Polner in their new study of Carey, The Man Who Saved New York).

A few weeks later, even Ford helped out, to a limited degree, by signing a package of short-term emergency loans. But the damage had already been done to his standing by the News’ short, brutal headline.

A year later, city and state voters remembered—and made Ford pay at the polls. In retirement, the President would point to the headline as a contributing factor in his narrow loss to Democratic challenger Jimmy Carter in the Electoral College. New York State’s 41 electoral votes would have given him Ford victory. Instead, he left the Oval Office, wondering what might have been.

The question inevitably arises: What would have happened if the city's emergency had occurred today? Well, the state itself, of course, would not, because of its own precarious finances, be able to come to the rescue. But it's also safe to say that the situation in Washington would not have been congenial to a bailout.

As we are learning in this current election, American taxpayers are not happy when politicians squeeze them to pay for other people's irresponsibility, even if there's quite a bit of difference between Wall Street firms who engage in the most reckless form of casino capitalism and municipal governments with the best intentions of creating a better life for more of its citizens.

This Day in Presidential History (Lincoln Advances in Republican Race With Cooper Union Address)

February 27, 1860—Abraham Lincoln—a railroad lawyer with a couple of terms in the Illinois state legislature, one term in Congress and no executive experience whatsoever—redefined his image over the course of 24 hours with an electrifying speech at the Grand Hall of Cooper Union and a photographic session with Mathew Brady. After the election, the candidate who had once been dismissed as a regional phenomenon would say, “Brady and the Cooper Union made me President.”

The Cooper Union speech was delivered in New York, a city that would resolutely turn its back on him until five years later, when the President’s funeral procession was viewed by thousands of grief-stricken Gothamites (including six-year-old Theodore Roosevelt) who finally understood what he stood for.

“Death has suddenly opened the eyes of the people (and I think of the word) to the fact that a hero has been holding high place among them for four years,” observed diarist George Templeton Strong, “closely watched and studied, but despite and rejected by a third of this community, and only tolerated by the other two-thirds."

Strong was referring to the fact that the city and state of New York tended to vote Democratic. At least in early 1860, whatever Republican sympathies New York possessed went to favorite son William Seward, the state’s former governor and current U.S. Senator.

Nonetheless, Lincoln felt correctly that the city, as the growing media capital of the United States, could not be ignored. To make a good impression, he was willing to research his speech for months in the law library in the Illinois state house, take five different trains over three days to get to New York—then fidget while Brady lifted his collar and smoothed his unruly hair as far as possible before taking his picture.

And that was all before the speech.

I have been terribly remiss in not writing before about the terrific exhibit at the New-York Historical Society, "Lincoln and New York". The exhibit has been running since last October, but it will still be around for three more weeks before closing, and it’s eminently worth seeing. It highlights the circumstances behind the speech, as well as the President’s evolving relationship with the city that, then as now, is a) overwhelmingly Democratic, and b) fervently anti-war.

The venue for the event, originally Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, was changed at the last minute to Cooper Union (then known as Cooper Institute).

This was not an address, or a speaker, that would have gone over well in today’s 30-second soundbite, image-conscious rhetorical environment. Brady’s photograph, soon widely reproduced, gave the lanky Midwestern a physical dignity that many did not see upon first beholding him, including many in the audience. And that voice, when first heard, was high and shrill.

Even in the context of Lincoln’s subsequent career as perhaps the greatest of President-writers, this address is not filled with memorable phrases or sentences. But it fit in very well with a technique he had learned as a circuit lawyer in his state: play to the audience.

The Republican audience, in this case, needed convincing and reassuring—convincing of his credibility as a candidate, and reassuring that, contrary to Democratic charges, theirs was not a sectional party, that they were not guilty of instigating John Brown’s attempted slave insurrection, and that they had not engaged in historical fraud by insisting that the federal government had the right to ban slavery from the territories.

For two hours, Lincoln employed several means to make his case:

*set at work at once to go after the presumed Democratic nominee—his former rival for the U.S. Senate, Stephen A. Douglas—who had insisted that "Our fathers, when they framed the Government under which we live, understood this question just as well, and even better, than we do now." Lincoln showed that, Douglas’ notion of “popular sovereignty” to the contrary, the federal government had banned slavery in the Northwest Ordinance.

* employed logic repeatedly to rebut emotional charges by slaveholders. After failing to win re-election to Congress, Lincoln, in an effort to improve his skills as a lawyer, mastered Euclidean geometry. The skill enabled him to reduce an argument to simple propositions that could be tested, proved or discarded. You can see it in the following passage from the Cooper Union speech:

“Meet us, then, on the question of whether our principle [restricting slavery in the territories], put in practice, would wrong your section; and so meet as if it were possible that something may be said on our side. Do you accept the challenge? No! Then you really believe that the principle which ‘our fathers who framed the Government under which we live’ though so clearly right as to adopt it, and indorse it again and again, upon their official oaths, is in fact so clearly wrong as to demand your condemnation without a moment's consideration.”

* used historical precedent to buttress his case. Lincoln cited not only George Washington and Thomas Jefferson—crucially, Southerners (and Southern slaveholders)—in support of his claims, but also alluded to Nat Turner’s insurrection in Southampton and even England’s Gunpowder Plot of the early 1600s.

* poured scorn on the opposition. To Southern Democrats who claimed they were supporting constitutional principles, but were prepared to leave the Union if a Republican were elected President, he noted: “In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, ‘Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!’”

Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech might have been delivered in a different age—one willing to listen for a couple of hours to politicians spouting, yet regard the whole spectacle as entertainment—but he made sure it directly addressed voters’ concerns and respected their intelligence. It did not, however, try to compromise on principle.

In an interesting piece for the Huffington Post, Joseph Margolick argues persuasively that President Obama can use the same rhetorical strategies in rescuing his health-care program. Let’s see how that turns out.