“I am certain there is too much certainty in the world.” -- Michael Crichton
(Thanks to Brian for the suggestion)
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Quote of the Day (Hilaire Belloc, on Courtesy)
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(Belloc, an astonishingly prolific man of letters—153 books in his lifetime!—died on this date in 1953 at age 83, of burns suffered after he fell into the fireplace at his home in England. Had he not suffered a stroke eleven years before, he might have written 20 more volumes, at least, given his rate of productivity.
Had he been alive today, I’m sure that Belloc would not only have been a blogger but one of those talking heads you see popping up incessantly on cable TV, forever on some producer’s Blackberry for a last-minute appearance. He might have died as a result of burns, but throughout his public career the French-born journalist-poet-historian-essayist-Catholic apologist was dazzlingly, sometimes frighteningly unconcerned about being singed by controversy. At one point, when a friend asked if a particularly implausible assertion in an attack on the fiercely anti-Catholic historian G.G. Coulton was true, Belloc is said to have replied: “Oh, not at all. But won’t it annoy Coulton?”
Whether in print or on the stump, Belloc was a literary counterpart to Ferrovious, the fearsome Christian convert in George Bernard Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion. He not only spoke out frequently and immediately, but sometimes with an intemperance that has damaged his posthumous reputation a good deal more than that of his contemporary, fellow Catholic man of letters G.K. Chesterton. One charge that has particularly stained that reputation is his alleged anti-Semitism. How much of that accusation is true demands more extensive treatment in another blog posting.
One Belloc work that demands to be read is Characters of the Reformation (1938), a group of 23 portraits of key figures in that momentous era. You will find in it none of the cool scholarship of, I am told, Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars. On the other hand, Duffy’s acclaimed history might have fallen on less fertile ground but for Belloc’s pioneering work.
With relentless vigor, Belloc demonstrated how Elizabethan England was hardly the “golden age” depicted by its partisans—including certain 21st century Hollywood filmmakers! — but a piece of Protestant triumphalism. He made unmistakably plain that the “Virgin Queen,” in combination with her adviser William Cecil, had “accomplished what might have seemed the impossible task of digging up the Catholic Faith by the roots from English soil, stamping out the Mass, and shepherding the younger generation of a reluctant people into a new religious mood.”
One wishes that Belloc had been less foolish at times. But it often happens that the foolish are the brave, and only someone such as Belloc would have taken on the entire critical and historical establishment in an era far less congenial to thinking that diverged from the party line.)
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
This Day in Art History (“Mona Lisa” Model Dies)
July 15, 1542—Nearly 40 years after posing for the portrait that made hers one of the most recognized faces in history, Lisa Gherardini Gioconda—a.k.a. “Mona Lisa”—passed away at age 63. Like so much about the life of Leonardo da Vinci, her identity had been an enigma for nearly five centuries—until recently, that is.
I heard it said that when James Joyce was writing Finnegans Wake, he rubbed his hands together and chuckled, “This’ll keep the professors busy for the next 100 years.” Well, Leonardo had different reasons for baffling posterity than the Irish novelist:
*If you start out life born out of wedlock, you already have one strike against you.
*If you’re a vegetarian in an age of so much binging among the upper classes that gout was practically an epidemic (think of former Yankee pitcher David Wells in every public square—if you dare), you’re a real conversation-stopper.
*If you’re a pacifist in an age convulsed by wars among small city-states, you’re suspect.
*If you dissect bodies because of your interest in medicine and the human form, you’re considered heretical and forced to give up the practice by the pope.
*If you’re brought up on sodomy charges—even if those accusations are suddenly, mysteriously dropped—you’re going to be careful in writing about your associations.
Not surprisingly, Leonardo made sure that it would be difficult in the extreme to read his work, resorting to left-handed mirror writing—and even to code. (Did you know that I write in code, too? It’s much simpler to remember that the Renaissance man’s. I simply use my regular handwriting.)
The “Mona Lisa” is doubly enigmatic because there appears to be no reason why the artist had to hide his involvement in the painting and his patron. Consider this: the portrait is unsigned, undated, and without any indication of the sitter’s name.
And that, incidentally, has fed all kinds of speculation through the years over who it might be.
Not that the best clue wasn’t provided early on. In Lives of the Painters, art historian Giorgio Vasari wrote flat-out that the subject of the painting was Lisa Gherardini.
But historians have this thing about evidence—they tend not to credit it until they can see it. In other words, it has to be written down to count. That is why, for instance, that the say-so of privileged groups who record their thoughts with pen and paper, and have the education and leisure to do so (the British in Ireland, white plantation owners in the American South) saw their testimony accorded greater weight than groups beneath their heels (Irish Catholic tenant farmers, African-American slaves).
Because Vasari was known to rely on anecdote, historians for a long time felt free to disregard his claims. That opened the field to all manner of historians and critics who deconstructed the painting to a fare-thee-well. Who did they think Mona Lisa was? Leonardo’s mother. A noblewoman. A courtesan. A prostitute. A pregnant woman. A gnasher of teeth. A facial paralytic. Let a thousand speculations bloom.
Now, it looks as if historians finally have what they want: written proof. Two years ago, it turned up in, of all places, the library at Germany’s Heidelberg University. Manuscript editor Armin Schlechter was leafing through an edition of letters by the Roman orator Cicero when he came across notes written by a Florentine city official, Agostino Vespucci—not only a cousin to the explorer and braggart for whom this country is named, but also the secretary to Niccolo Machiavelli, the writer who taught so many young citizens of our land all about the black arts of politics. Agostino noted that Leonardo was working simultaneously on three different paintings (that sounds just like him), including one of Lisa del Giacondo.
Amazingly, Vespucci’s note was even dated—October 1503—so we not only know who it was, but even when she was being painted. That note sounds pretty odd, especially when you consider it appeared in the margins of a book. (Odd, at any rate, to the likes of me. The annotations in my college textbooks includes such gems of wisdom as, “You’re kidding!”) But I guess in that hyperactive age of commerce and culture, Renaissance officials put down their thoughts when and where the urge struck down, because they might not have another minute to spare.
Another Leonardo scholar, Guiseppi Pallanti, after 25 years of research, had previously unearthed other biographical information about Lisa that bolstered Schlechter’s find. Here’s some of what we know about young Lisa:
* Her family and Leonardo’s lived only 10 feet away from each other in Via Ghibellina.
* Lisa was born into a minor noble family of rural origins.
* At age 16, she married Francesco del Giocondo, a silk merchant 14 years her senior –and a recent widower.
* Lisa’s house as a newlywed, in today’s San Lorenzo market quarter, was a good deal roomier and spiffier than the one where she grew up in Florence’s Via Sguazza. But it had one notable disadvantage: prostitutes roamed freely in the neighborhood.
* Lisa gave birth to five children, at least two of whom she had by the time she sat for Leonardo.
Leonardo worked on his masterpiece for four years, then—typically for him—he laid it aside for a long time. He managed to complete it for King Francis I of France shortly before his own death in 1519.
Twenty-three years later, Lisa followed him to the grave, no doubt unaware that she’d been granted a kind of visual immortality. Maybe if she knew, she might have flashed again that enigmatic smile that made her talked about the world over for more than 500 years.
I heard it said that when James Joyce was writing Finnegans Wake, he rubbed his hands together and chuckled, “This’ll keep the professors busy for the next 100 years.” Well, Leonardo had different reasons for baffling posterity than the Irish novelist:
*If you start out life born out of wedlock, you already have one strike against you.
*If you’re a vegetarian in an age of so much binging among the upper classes that gout was practically an epidemic (think of former Yankee pitcher David Wells in every public square—if you dare), you’re a real conversation-stopper.
*If you’re a pacifist in an age convulsed by wars among small city-states, you’re suspect.
*If you dissect bodies because of your interest in medicine and the human form, you’re considered heretical and forced to give up the practice by the pope.
*If you’re brought up on sodomy charges—even if those accusations are suddenly, mysteriously dropped—you’re going to be careful in writing about your associations.
Not surprisingly, Leonardo made sure that it would be difficult in the extreme to read his work, resorting to left-handed mirror writing—and even to code. (Did you know that I write in code, too? It’s much simpler to remember that the Renaissance man’s. I simply use my regular handwriting.)
The “Mona Lisa” is doubly enigmatic because there appears to be no reason why the artist had to hide his involvement in the painting and his patron. Consider this: the portrait is unsigned, undated, and without any indication of the sitter’s name.
And that, incidentally, has fed all kinds of speculation through the years over who it might be.
Not that the best clue wasn’t provided early on. In Lives of the Painters, art historian Giorgio Vasari wrote flat-out that the subject of the painting was Lisa Gherardini.
But historians have this thing about evidence—they tend not to credit it until they can see it. In other words, it has to be written down to count. That is why, for instance, that the say-so of privileged groups who record their thoughts with pen and paper, and have the education and leisure to do so (the British in Ireland, white plantation owners in the American South) saw their testimony accorded greater weight than groups beneath their heels (Irish Catholic tenant farmers, African-American slaves).
Because Vasari was known to rely on anecdote, historians for a long time felt free to disregard his claims. That opened the field to all manner of historians and critics who deconstructed the painting to a fare-thee-well. Who did they think Mona Lisa was? Leonardo’s mother. A noblewoman. A courtesan. A prostitute. A pregnant woman. A gnasher of teeth. A facial paralytic. Let a thousand speculations bloom.
Now, it looks as if historians finally have what they want: written proof. Two years ago, it turned up in, of all places, the library at Germany’s Heidelberg University. Manuscript editor Armin Schlechter was leafing through an edition of letters by the Roman orator Cicero when he came across notes written by a Florentine city official, Agostino Vespucci—not only a cousin to the explorer and braggart for whom this country is named, but also the secretary to Niccolo Machiavelli, the writer who taught so many young citizens of our land all about the black arts of politics. Agostino noted that Leonardo was working simultaneously on three different paintings (that sounds just like him), including one of Lisa del Giacondo.
Amazingly, Vespucci’s note was even dated—October 1503—so we not only know who it was, but even when she was being painted. That note sounds pretty odd, especially when you consider it appeared in the margins of a book. (Odd, at any rate, to the likes of me. The annotations in my college textbooks includes such gems of wisdom as, “You’re kidding!”) But I guess in that hyperactive age of commerce and culture, Renaissance officials put down their thoughts when and where the urge struck down, because they might not have another minute to spare.
Another Leonardo scholar, Guiseppi Pallanti, after 25 years of research, had previously unearthed other biographical information about Lisa that bolstered Schlechter’s find. Here’s some of what we know about young Lisa:
* Her family and Leonardo’s lived only 10 feet away from each other in Via Ghibellina.
* Lisa was born into a minor noble family of rural origins.
* At age 16, she married Francesco del Giocondo, a silk merchant 14 years her senior –and a recent widower.
* Lisa’s house as a newlywed, in today’s San Lorenzo market quarter, was a good deal roomier and spiffier than the one where she grew up in Florence’s Via Sguazza. But it had one notable disadvantage: prostitutes roamed freely in the neighborhood.
* Lisa gave birth to five children, at least two of whom she had by the time she sat for Leonardo.
Leonardo worked on his masterpiece for four years, then—typically for him—he laid it aside for a long time. He managed to complete it for King Francis I of France shortly before his own death in 1519.
Twenty-three years later, Lisa followed him to the grave, no doubt unaware that she’d been granted a kind of visual immortality. Maybe if she knew, she might have flashed again that enigmatic smile that made her talked about the world over for more than 500 years.
Movie Exchange of the Day (“Die Hard”)
Hans Gruber, terrorist (played by Alan Rickman): “Attention Mr. Cowboy, or should I call you... Mr. McClane? Mr. Officer John McClane of the New York Police Department?”
John McClane (played by Bruce Willis): “Sister Teresa called me Mr McClane in the Third Grade. My friends call me John... and you're neither, s--thead.”—From Die Hard (1988), screenplay by Jeb Stuart and Steven E. de Souza, based on the novel Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorp
(Just my kind of action hero—an Irish-American wiseguy! Die Hard opened 20 years ago today, turning Bruce Willis from a TV star with an indifferent box-office record in films into an A-list star—sort of like what happened with George Clooney a few years ago. For my money, this first of the “Die Hard” franchise is still the best of the lot, because you don’t know until the final seconds of the movie if John McClane is going to survive.
Fans of the movie might be surprised to learn that McClane is based on Joe Leland, the protagonist of Roderick Thorp’s novel The Detective (1966), which was made into a film starring Frank Sinatra. Thirteen years later, Thorp—who taught creative writing at Ramapo College in the early 1970s—reprised the character in Nothing Lasts Forever, only this time the character was an office building security consultant. Instead of an estranged wife, he has an estranged daughter and grandchild. At this point in his career, Willis is a lot closer to playing that character as originally conceived.)
John McClane (played by Bruce Willis): “Sister Teresa called me Mr McClane in the Third Grade. My friends call me John... and you're neither, s--thead.”—From Die Hard (1988), screenplay by Jeb Stuart and Steven E. de Souza, based on the novel Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorp
(Just my kind of action hero—an Irish-American wiseguy! Die Hard opened 20 years ago today, turning Bruce Willis from a TV star with an indifferent box-office record in films into an A-list star—sort of like what happened with George Clooney a few years ago. For my money, this first of the “Die Hard” franchise is still the best of the lot, because you don’t know until the final seconds of the movie if John McClane is going to survive.
Fans of the movie might be surprised to learn that McClane is based on Joe Leland, the protagonist of Roderick Thorp’s novel The Detective (1966), which was made into a film starring Frank Sinatra. Thirteen years later, Thorp—who taught creative writing at Ramapo College in the early 1970s—reprised the character in Nothing Lasts Forever, only this time the character was an office building security consultant. Instead of an estranged wife, he has an estranged daughter and grandchild. At this point in his career, Willis is a lot closer to playing that character as originally conceived.)
Monday, July 14, 2008
This Day in Aviation History (Quentin Roosevelt, T.R.’s Son, Killed in Action)
July 14, 1918—Lt. Quentin Roosevelt, an impish boy grown into a daredevil pilot, was killed in action while facing off against a Germany squadron, plunging his father, former President Theodore Roosevelt, into a grief from which he never recovered.
Many visitors to Roosevelt Field Mall, that palace of consumer spending on Long Island, likely know that it is named after Roosevelt Field, the former airport and military airfield from which Charles Lindbergh set forth on his epic nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic. If they think of the field name’s derivation, they’re likely to trace it to Franklin (or even Eleanor) Roosevelt, or maybe that favorite Long Island son and squire of Oyster Bay’s Sagamore Hill, Theodore.
But actually, the name came from none of these famous people. Instead, it came from Quentin, Theodore’s youngest child, and a war hero in his own right.
Few Presidential children have captured the affection of the American public like little Quentin Roosevelt did. Around 35 years ago, in my early teens, I explored the collected works of T.R., but few of his books gave me a better sense of the President as a person than Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters to His Children. If pressed, T.R. would admit that his favorite child—and, with his asthma, his love of reading, his large head, and his astonishing energy, the one most like himself—was Quentin.
Setting a precedent (as he often did), the President sent Quentin to a D.C. public school in an admirable attempt to make the youngster realize that he could not get through life by trading on the name of his powerful father.
Many visitors to Roosevelt Field Mall, that palace of consumer spending on Long Island, likely know that it is named after Roosevelt Field, the former airport and military airfield from which Charles Lindbergh set forth on his epic nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic. If they think of the field name’s derivation, they’re likely to trace it to Franklin (or even Eleanor) Roosevelt, or maybe that favorite Long Island son and squire of Oyster Bay’s Sagamore Hill, Theodore.
But actually, the name came from none of these famous people. Instead, it came from Quentin, Theodore’s youngest child, and a war hero in his own right.
Few Presidential children have captured the affection of the American public like little Quentin Roosevelt did. Around 35 years ago, in my early teens, I explored the collected works of T.R., but few of his books gave me a better sense of the President as a person than Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters to His Children. If pressed, T.R. would admit that his favorite child—and, with his asthma, his love of reading, his large head, and his astonishing energy, the one most like himself—was Quentin.
Setting a precedent (as he often did), the President sent Quentin to a D.C. public school in an admirable attempt to make the youngster realize that he could not get through life by trading on the name of his powerful father.
An unexpected repercussion, however, was that Quentin joined forces with another Terror of Tiny Town, Charles Taft, son of the Secretary of War and hand-picked successor to the President, as leading members of the “White House Gang.” Charlie played Huck Finn to Quentin’s scheme-devising Tom Sawyer. (All the devilry was exorcised out of Charlie early, as he went on to become mayor of Cincinnati and a founder of the World Council of Churches.)
The White House Gang—and especially ringleader Quentin—gave the D.C. press corps reams of copy, T.R. endless belly laughs, and Quentin’s sensible, beleaguered mother, Edith, considerable heart palpitations with the following exploits:
* nearly toppling a 350-lb. bust of Martin Van Buren (maybe it was the one thing bigger in the city than Charlie’s dad?);
* running a wagon over a full-length portrait of a figure beloved by the temperance movement, former First Lady “Lemonade Lucy” Hayes;
* throwing spitballs at a White House portrait of Andrew Jackson, with three on his forehead (“like an Arabian dancer,” explained Quentin) and one on each earlobe;
* reenacting the battle of San Juan Hill, with Quentin, on one memorable (and frightening) occasion using his father’s actual sword—one he’d been warned to go nowhere near—to take Charlie “prisoner,” accidentally nicking his friend in the cheek;
* walking on stilts in a White House flower garden
* taking a pony into the White House elevator up to the second floor, where older brother Theodore Jr. was sick (the mere sight of the animal would make his sibling better, the boy reasoned); and
* lying with a pair of chairs for the head and feet, with nothing between but books from which peaked long knitting needles (the person who dared to lay on this—Quentin, of course, because nobody else would think to try it—automatically became leader of the gang).
After his White House years, Quentin seemed ready to follow the traditional family path of male Roosevelts—an education at Harvard, where he showed, like his father, an enthusiasm for writing—when World War I intervened. Theodore’s plea to Woodrow Wilson to lead troops in battle was a nonstarter, because of the former President’s age, his physical condition (worsened markedly by his near-fatal expedition down the “River of Doubt” in Brazil in 1914) and the boost it would give the former President if he launched yet another run for the White House in 1920.
But the Roosevelt sons joined. It took the greatest effort for Quentin to enter the armed forces, because another trait he shared with his father—poor eyesight—required that he memorize the eye chart at his physical examination. Unlike his brothers, Quentin joined an entirely new arm of the military—the Army Air Corps—figuring that his mechanical skills (once, he presented a friend with a gift of a motorcycle he had completely rebuilt himself) would come in handy there.
Instead, he was set to work as a flight instructor, a position in which the young man simultaneously demonstrated his skill and his puckish sense of humor. Having dispatched his students into the sky, he would fly up silently behind them, observe their maneuvers, and descend, his critique all ready, before they could land.
As the boy had grown older, the former President feared that his youngest might have been a trifle soft (something having to do with bunching up pillows to ward off blows from his bigger brothers doing pillow fights), and the three senior Roosevelt boys evidently gave a few hints about why he wasn’t with them at the front lines. Before long, he—and they—had gotten their wish—and they were soon sorry that they had.
Even during his baptism by fire on July 5, young Roosevelt narrowly escaped death. When his engine malfunctioned, he came so close to a German fighter that he could see the red stripes around the fuselage. Miraculously, the German plane ignored him. Later the same day, his gun jammed, but his squadron mates shot down a German plane. He merely laughed off pleas from fellow pilots and commanding officers—even from his normally risk-taking father—to be more careful.
On July 10, Quentin’s squadron returned to its base with him nowhere in view—until suddenly, his plane came out of the sky and they saw the young man grinning broadly, having claimed his first German hit. At home, hearing the news, the hero of San Juan Hill crowed that “the last of the lion’s brood had been blooded.”
Four days later—Bastille Day in France—Quentin’s luck ran out. He and his squadron faced off against seven German Fokkers led by Hermann Goering, the future leader of the Luftwaffe in WWII. Suddenly, three more German planes zeroed in on the Americans from behind. Quentin immediately turned around and engaged them alone. The maneuver saved the rest of his squadron, but proved fatal to the President’s son, whose plane spiraled to earth.
It has been claimed that the German pilots identified the body as that of the President’s son through a love letter from his fiancée, Flora Payne Whitney, granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt. They marked the spot of the crash with the wheels and propellers of his plane, along with a sign reading, “Lieutenant Roosevelt, buried by the Germans.”
His father was sitting on his front porch at Sagamore Hill when reporters arrived to break the news. The ex-President begged their pardon as he went in to break the news to his wife.
For weeks thereafter, Theodore Roosevelt would take long woods in the woods, only to emerge puffy-eyed from weeping. Like writer Rudyard Kipling, another figure whose visually challenged son had died in the service of a cause the father had backed strenuously, T.R. was haunted by his child’s death. He wrote a friend that “to feel that one has inspired a boy to conduct that has resulted in his death has a pretty serious side for a father.”
The White House Gang—and especially ringleader Quentin—gave the D.C. press corps reams of copy, T.R. endless belly laughs, and Quentin’s sensible, beleaguered mother, Edith, considerable heart palpitations with the following exploits:
* nearly toppling a 350-lb. bust of Martin Van Buren (maybe it was the one thing bigger in the city than Charlie’s dad?);
* running a wagon over a full-length portrait of a figure beloved by the temperance movement, former First Lady “Lemonade Lucy” Hayes;
* throwing spitballs at a White House portrait of Andrew Jackson, with three on his forehead (“like an Arabian dancer,” explained Quentin) and one on each earlobe;
* reenacting the battle of San Juan Hill, with Quentin, on one memorable (and frightening) occasion using his father’s actual sword—one he’d been warned to go nowhere near—to take Charlie “prisoner,” accidentally nicking his friend in the cheek;
* walking on stilts in a White House flower garden
* taking a pony into the White House elevator up to the second floor, where older brother Theodore Jr. was sick (the mere sight of the animal would make his sibling better, the boy reasoned); and
* lying with a pair of chairs for the head and feet, with nothing between but books from which peaked long knitting needles (the person who dared to lay on this—Quentin, of course, because nobody else would think to try it—automatically became leader of the gang).
After his White House years, Quentin seemed ready to follow the traditional family path of male Roosevelts—an education at Harvard, where he showed, like his father, an enthusiasm for writing—when World War I intervened. Theodore’s plea to Woodrow Wilson to lead troops in battle was a nonstarter, because of the former President’s age, his physical condition (worsened markedly by his near-fatal expedition down the “River of Doubt” in Brazil in 1914) and the boost it would give the former President if he launched yet another run for the White House in 1920.
But the Roosevelt sons joined. It took the greatest effort for Quentin to enter the armed forces, because another trait he shared with his father—poor eyesight—required that he memorize the eye chart at his physical examination. Unlike his brothers, Quentin joined an entirely new arm of the military—the Army Air Corps—figuring that his mechanical skills (once, he presented a friend with a gift of a motorcycle he had completely rebuilt himself) would come in handy there.
Instead, he was set to work as a flight instructor, a position in which the young man simultaneously demonstrated his skill and his puckish sense of humor. Having dispatched his students into the sky, he would fly up silently behind them, observe their maneuvers, and descend, his critique all ready, before they could land.
As the boy had grown older, the former President feared that his youngest might have been a trifle soft (something having to do with bunching up pillows to ward off blows from his bigger brothers doing pillow fights), and the three senior Roosevelt boys evidently gave a few hints about why he wasn’t with them at the front lines. Before long, he—and they—had gotten their wish—and they were soon sorry that they had.
Even during his baptism by fire on July 5, young Roosevelt narrowly escaped death. When his engine malfunctioned, he came so close to a German fighter that he could see the red stripes around the fuselage. Miraculously, the German plane ignored him. Later the same day, his gun jammed, but his squadron mates shot down a German plane. He merely laughed off pleas from fellow pilots and commanding officers—even from his normally risk-taking father—to be more careful.
On July 10, Quentin’s squadron returned to its base with him nowhere in view—until suddenly, his plane came out of the sky and they saw the young man grinning broadly, having claimed his first German hit. At home, hearing the news, the hero of San Juan Hill crowed that “the last of the lion’s brood had been blooded.”
Four days later—Bastille Day in France—Quentin’s luck ran out. He and his squadron faced off against seven German Fokkers led by Hermann Goering, the future leader of the Luftwaffe in WWII. Suddenly, three more German planes zeroed in on the Americans from behind. Quentin immediately turned around and engaged them alone. The maneuver saved the rest of his squadron, but proved fatal to the President’s son, whose plane spiraled to earth.
It has been claimed that the German pilots identified the body as that of the President’s son through a love letter from his fiancée, Flora Payne Whitney, granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt. They marked the spot of the crash with the wheels and propellers of his plane, along with a sign reading, “Lieutenant Roosevelt, buried by the Germans.”
His father was sitting on his front porch at Sagamore Hill when reporters arrived to break the news. The ex-President begged their pardon as he went in to break the news to his wife.
For weeks thereafter, Theodore Roosevelt would take long woods in the woods, only to emerge puffy-eyed from weeping. Like writer Rudyard Kipling, another figure whose visually challenged son had died in the service of a cause the father had backed strenuously, T.R. was haunted by his child’s death. He wrote a friend that “to feel that one has inspired a boy to conduct that has resulted in his death has a pretty serious side for a father.”
"You must always remember that the President is about six," British ambassador Cecil Spring-Rice said about T.R. Keep that in mind when you re-read the President’s comment to his friend and observe, in particular, the somber tone. Most people agree that some spark went out of the old political and military warrior after his youngest son’s death. His own passing came no more than six months later.
Quote of the Day (Wordsworth)
“FIVE years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.” – William Wordsworth, “Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”
(I did not have a chance to use this as an additional post yesterday, which would have marked 210 years after its original inspiration, when the poet took a walk around the Wye. In any case, it would be a shame to waste these beautiful lines from one of the cornerstones of Romantic literature—one that evokes the major characteristics of that movement: the stress on the sublime, sweet nostalgia, and the communion between the self and nature.)
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.” – William Wordsworth, “Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”
(I did not have a chance to use this as an additional post yesterday, which would have marked 210 years after its original inspiration, when the poet took a walk around the Wye. In any case, it would be a shame to waste these beautiful lines from one of the cornerstones of Romantic literature—one that evokes the major characteristics of that movement: the stress on the sublime, sweet nostalgia, and the communion between the self and nature.)
Sunday, July 13, 2008
This Day in Civil War History (New York City Draft Riots)
July 13, 1863—Two days after the start of a new draft lottery and 10 days after massive bloodshed at the Battle of Gettysburg, a large mob of New York City's working class expressed their frustration over the Civil War and their economic misery by launching four days of what remains the bloodiest race riot in American history.
Throughout a dozen years of parochial school, I learned nothing about the New York City Draft Riots—nor about one of its necessary antecedents, Ireland's Potato Famine of the 1840s. It took the late, great Columbia University history professor, James Patrick Shenton, to spell out the facts behind these agonizing episodes in Irish-American history, with an actor’s sense of timing and a progressive’s identification with society’s dispossessed.
Millions were not as lucky as I was to sit in on those classes. Despite one or two terrific set pieces in Martin Scorsese's depiction of the period, Gangs of New York, film fans would have encountered a production that was a) sometimes historically inaccurate, b) at times woefully miscast (please raise your hand if you really, truly found Cameron Diaz believable as a pickpocket—then buy yourself a duncecap); and c) without well-motivated characters one could care about. (A mistake most emphatically not made about the South's side of the War Between the States in Gone With the Wind —a novel and film, incidentally, that featured an Irish-American protagonist named O'Hara!)
A magnificent corrective for my readers, for any who may not have done so, is to go out and buy Peter Quinn's historical novel, Banished Children of Eve. In a culture that has yielded to the demands of “dumbed-down” textbooks on every educational level and the distractions of the Internet by catering to shortened attention spans, some readers may feel beleaguered by a novel that not only dares to exceed 500 pages but that even follows multiple major characters. But the best writers demand as much from their readers as from themselves.
(Readers have taken to administering a drubbing to Wikipedia over the last few years for its assorted sins. Here’s one of my problems with it—its entry on the Draft Riots mentions John Jakes’ fictional portrayal of the disturbances, even Newt Gingrich’s, for Pete’s sake, but not Quinn’s. Let’s run that back again, shall we? Two potboilers get mentioned, but not a 1995 American Book Award winner. Go figure.)
Quinn exhibits the same quality as the George Orwell praised in Charles Dickens—a “generous anger”—but also an abiding sense of one of the ironies of American history: how one of the most marginalized groups in the 19th century (Irish immigrants) could turn their collective fury on another despised group (African-Americans) in an urban uprising that cost more than $1 million and the lives of at least 120 civilians and an additional 2,000 injured. (An additional irony: the tumultuous multicultural atmosphere of the early 1860s sounded more contemporary to many readers—including myself—than the relatively more quiescent early 1960s.) The riots’ suppression required Abraham Lincoln to dispatch a part of the Army of the Potomac, many of whom had just finished fighting at Gettysburg.
I could go on and on about how Quinn mastered subjects as disparate as Tammany Hall, the Roman Catholic Church, freedmen in New York, minstrel shows, Stephen Foster, the “orphan trains,” the Know-Nothing Party, the New York underworld, and even the beginnings of baseball—but this would sound as if I think you should read it because it’s Good For You. Heaven forbid! Just glory in the sharp, often comic period dialogue, the deep insight into principal characters, and an expert control of the plot strands until he gathers them up and uncoils them in the swiftly moving, shattering final chapters.
Earlier in this post, I implicitly contrasted Scorsese’s treatment of the period with Quinn’s, with the advantage decidedly in Quinn’s favor. A moment’s further reflection makes me wonder how well any film, no matter how well-intentioned, can depict the draft riots and the forces that gave rise to it. It’s not just that, following a half-year of discontent, I’ve begun to think of American cinema as hopelessly imitative and juvenile when it’s not veering toward the transgression-for-its-own-sake indie film style. No, I’ve come to think of the mini-series as a more accommodating genre for Quinn’s careful treatment of men and their motives.
True, like the long, Dickensian urban novel, the mini-series has seen better days. But, as HBO has proven with John Adams, viewers are prepared to support an entertainment medium that demands their attention and intelligence. Surely they’d be interested in a similar venture on a book that tells us many an uncomfortable truth about the American Experience?
Throughout a dozen years of parochial school, I learned nothing about the New York City Draft Riots—nor about one of its necessary antecedents, Ireland's Potato Famine of the 1840s. It took the late, great Columbia University history professor, James Patrick Shenton, to spell out the facts behind these agonizing episodes in Irish-American history, with an actor’s sense of timing and a progressive’s identification with society’s dispossessed.
Millions were not as lucky as I was to sit in on those classes. Despite one or two terrific set pieces in Martin Scorsese's depiction of the period, Gangs of New York, film fans would have encountered a production that was a) sometimes historically inaccurate, b) at times woefully miscast (please raise your hand if you really, truly found Cameron Diaz believable as a pickpocket—then buy yourself a duncecap); and c) without well-motivated characters one could care about. (A mistake most emphatically not made about the South's side of the War Between the States in Gone With the Wind —a novel and film, incidentally, that featured an Irish-American protagonist named O'Hara!)
A magnificent corrective for my readers, for any who may not have done so, is to go out and buy Peter Quinn's historical novel, Banished Children of Eve. In a culture that has yielded to the demands of “dumbed-down” textbooks on every educational level and the distractions of the Internet by catering to shortened attention spans, some readers may feel beleaguered by a novel that not only dares to exceed 500 pages but that even follows multiple major characters. But the best writers demand as much from their readers as from themselves.
(Readers have taken to administering a drubbing to Wikipedia over the last few years for its assorted sins. Here’s one of my problems with it—its entry on the Draft Riots mentions John Jakes’ fictional portrayal of the disturbances, even Newt Gingrich’s, for Pete’s sake, but not Quinn’s. Let’s run that back again, shall we? Two potboilers get mentioned, but not a 1995 American Book Award winner. Go figure.)
Quinn exhibits the same quality as the George Orwell praised in Charles Dickens—a “generous anger”—but also an abiding sense of one of the ironies of American history: how one of the most marginalized groups in the 19th century (Irish immigrants) could turn their collective fury on another despised group (African-Americans) in an urban uprising that cost more than $1 million and the lives of at least 120 civilians and an additional 2,000 injured. (An additional irony: the tumultuous multicultural atmosphere of the early 1860s sounded more contemporary to many readers—including myself—than the relatively more quiescent early 1960s.) The riots’ suppression required Abraham Lincoln to dispatch a part of the Army of the Potomac, many of whom had just finished fighting at Gettysburg.
I could go on and on about how Quinn mastered subjects as disparate as Tammany Hall, the Roman Catholic Church, freedmen in New York, minstrel shows, Stephen Foster, the “orphan trains,” the Know-Nothing Party, the New York underworld, and even the beginnings of baseball—but this would sound as if I think you should read it because it’s Good For You. Heaven forbid! Just glory in the sharp, often comic period dialogue, the deep insight into principal characters, and an expert control of the plot strands until he gathers them up and uncoils them in the swiftly moving, shattering final chapters.
Earlier in this post, I implicitly contrasted Scorsese’s treatment of the period with Quinn’s, with the advantage decidedly in Quinn’s favor. A moment’s further reflection makes me wonder how well any film, no matter how well-intentioned, can depict the draft riots and the forces that gave rise to it. It’s not just that, following a half-year of discontent, I’ve begun to think of American cinema as hopelessly imitative and juvenile when it’s not veering toward the transgression-for-its-own-sake indie film style. No, I’ve come to think of the mini-series as a more accommodating genre for Quinn’s careful treatment of men and their motives.
True, like the long, Dickensian urban novel, the mini-series has seen better days. But, as HBO has proven with John Adams, viewers are prepared to support an entertainment medium that demands their attention and intelligence. Surely they’d be interested in a similar venture on a book that tells us many an uncomfortable truth about the American Experience?
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