history » Jason Cochran

The 11 days when young Thomas Jefferson never existed

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Jun 172011

Thomas Jefferson's gravestone: Maybe they toss pennies just to spite him

Thomas Jefferson’s gravestone is weird.

First of all, the well-wishers who throw good-luck coins on it do so haphazardly. You’d think more people would toss nickels on Thomas Jefferson’s grave. After all, Thomas’s head, which is on the face of the nickel, lies just feet below the stone, and the image of his slavemanse Monticello, just down the path, is on the reverse.

But no, visitors heedlessly jumble political parties and eras by hurling pennies (Lincoln’s profile, and on the other side another very teeny tiny Lincoln sitting in his Memorial), dimes (World War II Commander-in-Chief F.D.R. with, um, an olive branch) and quarters (Washington, plus still life with eagle, or “your local tourist attraction design here”). If a man is going to work so hard in life that he earns the nickel in death, the least people could do is chuck his own head at his headstone. Come on, people! He earned it!

But the oddest thing about Jefferson’s grave is the way his birthdate is carved: April 2, 1743 O.S.

Tourists pressed their faces to the metal fence around his marker. “What’s that stand for?” one older lady asked.

Another visitor, a younger man with a baseball cap announced what he thought was the answer: “Our savior,” he said, as if the matter was settled.

“Oh,” said the elderly woman, apparently convinced.

The curators at Monticello, love ‘em, are aware of the confusion. They’ve drawn up a blog post about it. In my mind, such explanations help offset the $22 ticket price.

The story about the O.S. is this: The calendar used to be lopsided. Before 1752, Westerners used the Julian calendar, for which the first day of the year was March 25. But the calendar was imperfect, and its holidays didn’t properly coincide with the seasons year after year. A tidier, more accurate calendar was called for.

So the Gregorian calendar was invented, which started the new year on January 1, as we have it today. To make the switch, though, 11 days had to be chopped out of the year somewhere. Early September, 1752, was selected as the victim.

Jason Cochran and statue of Thomas Jefferson

Me with Tommy, a natural redhead, at Monticello, near Charlottesville, VA

(Something similar happened on November 18, 1883, the so-called “Day of Two Noons,” on which the minute and the hour across America underwent a similar synchronization. Except in that effort, people lost only some time off their lunch hours, and not nearly two weeks of their lives. I wrote about that on my blog last year. Curiously, 1883 was the same year the current Jefferson monument was erected. It’s possible the person who instructed that O.S. was to be carved, and didn’t simply translate the date to N.S. to spare us faulty tourist intellectual bravado, might have had a bee in their bonnet about that Day of Two Noons thing.)

Anyway, people in the American colonies went to bed on September 2, 1752, and they woke up on September 14, 1752. The intervening 11 days never happened.

If you had been born before those omitted 11 days, you were born using the Old Style calendar. Afterward, it was the New Style calendar, or N.S.

Something else from that period challenges historians and genealogists: When dates were written before everyone settled on what the calendar was, sometimes they were written in reference to the first month of the year — then, March. For example, if you were a Quaker, your birthdate might have been recorded as happening on the 19th day of the in the second month of the year, meaning April. So a date of 2/19/1690 would be April 19th, 1690.

Like the Metric system, the switchover happened fitfully and variously, depending on the political whims of the government and the laziness of the scribe in question. That means we’d better not talk even about the year, because you often had to add a year depending on whether the subject was using the Old Style or the New Style calendar. The Ancestry.com entry about all this confusion makes high school algebra look easy.

We could technically still use N.S. on our gravestones today, and maybe I will, since I don’t have a coin made out of my face and I’ll need to leave something buzzy behind. I’d also like to confuse the busloads of future tourists who come to see my resting place. By virtue of them being at all interested in doing that, they’re likely to be easily confused anyway.

That’s what Thomas’s O.S. means. And it also means you have to add 11 days, or April 13, 1743, if you want to translate his birthdate into modern terms. Which will come in handy if you’re the kind of person who adds the birthdays of dead Founding Fathers to your digital calendar. It’d be, like, totally embarrassing to send T.J. that e-card that plays “Yankee Doodle Dandy” a week and a half late.

It also means that for 11 days in 1752, when he was nine years old, Thomas Jefferson didn’t exist.

They're pushing up more than daisies at Monticello

Monticello’s masters also have something else to say about where The Big Jeff is interred. The woman who guided me through the lost slave quarter area told me that even though DNA tests proved that a Jefferson — probably Thos., maybe not — had fathered a child (and maybe six) by his slave Sally Hemings, the living descendants of Jefferson won’t allow that non-white wing of the family to share the family burial plot.

It’s still an active plot, and Jefferson fruit is still planted there after it falls from the family tree, but no non-white Jeffersons will be permitted, per family vote, to join them. DNA tests, after all, are never 100% definitive — more like 99 % — but as my guide told it, the family, sneakily, has decided that no one from the Hemings line shall join them in eternal rest until it’s been 100% proven that TJ was the babydaddy.

Monticello’s keepers, operating under a lawyer’s burden of proof rather than under the shield of logical likelihood that historians prefer, politely hedge about the DNA evidence record. Frustratingly, they seem to placate the stance of the Jefferson clan by admitting that we can’t be “entirely” sure.

The family, drenched in an undying sense of honor, appears obsessed with protecting his virtue even though his wife Martha had died a quarter century before the first alleged child was conceived. Two centuries later, they’re still smarting from the drubbing our old redhead took in the press. The way I see it, though, someone lying behind that metal fence at the Jefferson family plot fathered the Hemings line, because that’s where the DNA points.

That 1% of doubt, like that one drop of black blood in miscegenation days, keeps the Hemings-Jefferson line from claiming its full rights, and from the honor of having its progenitor’s head hurled at them daily on the obverse of legal tender.

Maybe the O.S. should stand for “Owes Sally.”

"You shall not pass!" (Even if you pass.)

Hidden truth in Rosewood, Florida

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May 072011

Rosewood's marker: Half the story, but whose half?

Today I visited Rosewood, Florida, a town with a past so tangled that its historical marker requires two sides to tell it.

That sign is pretty much all there is to tell the story. That’s because Rosewood was erased.

It was torched by racists in 1923. The tale is as convoluted as it is painful, but the short version is that there were once two towns, one mostly white and one black (Rosewood). One day a white person accused a black man of doing something terrible, which happens a lot when scapegoats are required, at which point hundreds of the whites exploded into a bloodthirsty rage. They didn’t just kill people (mostly black, but some whites who tried to stop the slaughter, too), but they hunted them for a week. Rosewood residents had to hide in the woods like animals, only to be cut down when they finally emerged. To finally rid the area of blacks once and for all, the white savages burned Rosewood down.

For a long time, what happened in Rosewood was mostly whispered because no sign or museum in the place itself dared to summon the story. As recently as the ’90s, plans for a monument were shelved because the locals powers disagreed on how much to spend.

Politicians pat themselves on the back

The historical marker was installed only in 2004, despite the fact Hollywood, our most effective national memorializer, had made a movie version in 1997. Most markers in the American South tell the same story on both sides, but Rosewood’s is a cliffhanger. The first half of the story unfolds on the western face (which is odd considering the only civilization in that direction, near the lip of the Gulf of Mexico, is Cedar Key). In it, the dissenting whites are “courageous” while residents of the “predominantly colored” community of Rosewood, apparently not courageous enough to be described that way, hide in the woods.

The flip side consists mostly of a roundabout explanation of why the sign took so long to get there. You see, the sign apologizes, the victims refused to talk about it. Fortunately, and as a matter worthy of casting onto a metal marker, a Democratic governor got the ball rolling. A decade later, a Republican one (a Bush, no less) finally accomplished the mission, and made sure the final line of the long-neglected plaque memorialized the fact.

The saga of why Rosewood was denied its due is nowhere equal to the sorrow and horror of the tale itself, but politicians seem to think so. Their bipartisan collaboration takes more space to relate than the more complicated reasons for the violence, and the retelling of the violence, too, reads as if it was written from the white perspective.

It’s said that most racial disputes are ultimately about money — who’s perceived as taking jobs, who’s perceived as causing crime. In Rosewood, black residents owned their own businesses and their own land, and one of the first things the whites did that week was to loot their property and steal their land. Survivors were too terrorized to ever return.

Rosewood, near the west coast of Florida where the state begins its westward bend toward Alabama, is one of more than three dozen black communities that were eradicated by frenzied whites, but above the others it remains stained. I drove down its unpaved roads. There are a few noticeably modest modern homes there now, buried deep in thicket and protected by barking dogs that, judging by their sensitivity, are clearly unaccustomed to even casual drive-bys. Two homes had American flags hung by their mailboxes (they also took the local paper, too), and I saw one middle-aged woman cutting her side lawn with a mower that didn’t seem to be smeared with human blood. (For a video of the town today, click here.)

I’m sure they’re very nice, normal American people there now, with no festering furies. But given the fact the town’s reputation was stained by simmering anger that suddenly bubbled over, it’s not hard to imagine an unwelcome malevolence in these normal yards. When I heard an unseen dog bark in agitation and saw a U.S. flag hang limp on a windless May afternoon, it was hard not to smell underlying threat in the air in Rosewood.

UPDATE: A year later, I revisited Rosewood, and I shot a video. Click here to watch it.

Shoot in the woods instead, as per the unwritten tradition

The mass grave for 11,500 in the middle of New York City

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Apr 132011

"America's Greatest Mass Grave": Looking southeast at the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument, Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn

We obsess over the deaths of individuals. When one notable person dies, or when one person dies notably, we imbue that person with our fears, with idealizations of our better nature, or with a rueful but unspoken gratitude of “there but for the grace of God go I.”

But when we die in batches, we gradually forget. “Remember the Maine!” we shouted, taking up guns, and we killed people over it — and then we forgot. Just what the hell is the Maine, most people would ask today. Was it near the Alamo? Once inspiration for violence and war, some of the Maine‘s 274 dead lie forgotten and unvisited in a cemetery in Key West, Florida, and New Yorkers eat lunch daily on the rim of the stone Maine memorial in Columbus Circle as if it was only a fancy park bench, which of course it now essentially is.

You might remember the Maine, or at least a little — I’d advise having a dim awareness that it might have been a simple accident that caused the sinking and not a hidden mine worthy of slaughtering Spanish over. But 122 years before that, some 11,500 people died in one episode, and we barely remember it at all.

Back during the colonial days, the British didn’t bother much with prisons. It tossed petty thieves and undesirables into hulks, which were usually disused ships festering somewhere in a backwater of the local port. Britain used to ship those inmates, after a long torturous stay, to other lands, where they would drop them off — a life sentence, more or less, since few could afford to buy their way back — and forget about them forever.

When the American colonies rebelled, Britain had to find a new dump for its human trash, and Australia was chosen. But during the Revolutionary War, the Crown couldn’t retire its prison ship fun. Any naughty colonist or mercenary who was caught rebelling was usually packed into a irreparably damaged ship somewhere. For a while, the British held New York City as the Revolutionary War raged elsewhere, and that was when it became particularly aggressive at stuffing human beings into their prison ships and subsequently ignore their basic needs. The hulks were a deterrent to crime back home, the Redcoats reasoned, so they’re sure to scare those colonists straight, too.

Bet Teacher didn’t tell you this: More people died on these moored prison ships than died on the battlefields of the war. That’s right: America was born out of concentration camps.

Roosting again after 45 years in an undisclosed location

(It would not be the last concentration camp to devour so many lives in America, either. But I’ll leave that story for another time soon.)

Every day, British soliders would stand on the shore nearby and holler at the ships, telling the luckless and momentary survivors to toss out the day’s dead. Over the course of the war, some 11,500 corpses were accumulated this way. The British, who are otherwise good about the soil and farming, quickly buried them in shallow graves on the waterside. You can almost see those homesick English soldiers now, drunk and smelly and bored, hanging out on a burned-out island that hadn’t seen nearly enough action in the war. One Redcoat turns to another and says, “Your turn, Nigel.” And Nigel shuffles off to collect the day’s dead, covers them over with a cursory dusting of river sand, and hurries back inside for another flagon of beer with his buddies.

Despite horrific conditions that created a daily orgy of death, not one person recanted their allegiance to the colonies and joined the British. One word would have freed them from the infection and stench that surrounded them. They died instead.

Take care not to forget me this time, eh?

Of course, early Americans knew all about the willful mass slaughter, just as they gave the French their due for ultimately getting us out of our jam with the English. You would have had a hard time forgetting, too: When you least expected it, corpses would resurface with uncivilized regularity. You can’t run a booming port with rotting body parts floating all over the place, so the locals poked around the shoreline for all the human remains they could scrounge up and re-dumped them, with just enough solemnity to make it seem less sacrilegious, in a new mass grave and got on with the business of making money.

I’d like to say that in the mid-1970s, they built a luxurious suburban subdivision on top of that, neglecting to inform buyers that their tract homes were located on sacred burial ground, and that one day the corpses were found bobbing in the swimming pool with Carol Ann. That would be fun, and we’d probably remember them more… but it didn’t end that way.

But by the middle 1800s, without those pesky arms and skulls popping up to inconveniently remind new Americans of their conveniently buried savage past, there was a sense that we were forgetting about what happened. Americans are good at many things, but expeditious forgetting is a forte, especially if the thing not worth retaining has to do with being wrong or defeated.

Walt Whitman, bless him, was one of the ones who refused to forget. In what may have been the last instance of an American political movement inspired by verse (that is, until Clinton’s impeachment stemming from a gift version of Whitman’s own Leaves of Grass), he worked to inspire construction of a proper memorial to the so-called Martyrs by writing wrote an ode to the prison ships. It was to be sung to the tune of the national anthem in a march at the newly created Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn in 1846. Quoted in an old New York Times story:

…How priceless the worth of the sanctified earth

We are standing on now! Lo! The slope of its girth

Where the martyrs were buried; nor prayers, tears or stones

Marked their crumbled-in coffins, their white holy bones.

But he envisioned a proper memorial for those forgotten, rotten dead:

Ah, yes! be the answer. In memory still

We have placed in our hearts and embalmed there forever

The battle, the prison ship martyrs and hill;

Oh, may it be preserved till those hearts death shall sever,

For how priceless the worth, &c.

The “&c”, appears to be Walt’s. I have no idea how you’d sing it to the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and frankly it’s a lazy way to finish a stanza since he clearly had more to say but ran out of space for it. But he was Walt Whitman and it was for charity, so I have to let him have it.

Anyway, Walt died, too, before he got his dream, but it finally came true in 1908. Designed by world-famous philanderer Stanford White (also dead by then) and attended by the considerable aspect of President Taft, a 149 foot tall column fitted with an eternal flame was christened on the hill in Fort Greene Park. At the time, it was the tallest freestanding Doric column in the world. (“Honey! Pack the kids into the carriage! We’re going to the tallest freestanding Doric column!” “Yayyyy!”) Beneath that, a crypt was set in the middle of a flight of imposing stairs 100 feet wide, and inside were placed all the corpse pieces that they could scrounge up at that late date. If you added up all the body parts, you’d almost certainly total less than 11,500 martyrs, but it’s the sentiment that counts.

The Prison Ship Martyrs Crypt: We piece together what we can, but we've lost a lot already

Or at least, should count. By the late century, Fort Greene Park was its own horror show, half-lined with dilapidated and crime-ridden projects. The “eternal flame” atop the column was dead. An elevator was installed in 1937 but removed after just 11 years of inadvisable service. The four bronze eagles on the columnar flanks had been removed to storage units unknown until such a time New Yorkers decided they knew how to have nice things again — “removed for their safety in 1962 by the Parks Department” as my 2002 Blue Guide put it.

And yet a nearby historical plaque, also mostly forgotten, calls it “America’s Greatest Mass Grave.” Can you think of any that are bigger?

Fort Greene Park is next to downtown Brooklyn, though, and so it wasn’t destined to molder for long. In 2008, a refurbishment was completed. It looks terrific, and to my delight, there’s even a staffed information center on weekends. The park ranger told me the eternal flame is now only illuminated at night. She also says that visitors are not permitted to ascend, nor may they enter the tomb unless they come with written proof they’re related to someone who is consecrated there. That seems fair; New Yorkers have only just begun to prove they know how to take care of bronze eagles, so I am not personally prepared to entrust them with access to the earthly remains of the Prison Ship Martyrs.

The projects in New York City, meanwhile, have become desirable real estate, and now instead of junkies, Fort Greene Park is patronized by children and joggers who achieve their cardio goals by stampeding up and down the stairs over the white holy bones of the 11,500.

On the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire anniversary, a government that dishonors it

Blog

Mar 082011

March 25, 1911: Horrible, but avoidable

It happened on March 25, but there had been warnings for years. Factory owners across America amassed fortunes by exploiting what was, at the time, a seemingly inexhaustible resource: immigrants. Newly arrived Europeans were expendable. They had a weak political voice, so crossing them had little negative impact for politicians and none for businessmen, since few laws existed to protect them.

So children labored alongside mothers. Women labored all a day, sometimes as much as 75 hours a week, with no days off, forbidden to so much as speak. They frequently lugged their own machines to work. Girls of 15 made $3.50 a week. Factory doors were locked so they would not waste time gossiping, or stretching their legs, or breathing fresh air. And when they went home, hunched and raw after spending all the daylight hours doing piecework, they often slept in rooms with seven or eight family members, none of them able to earn enough money to reverse their plight.

Demands for protections surfaced but rarely took hold. Child labor protests were the cause célebre, and momentarily. In 1909, a fifth of Triangle’s workers took to the streets with some 20,000 other degraded women, all of them too desperately poor to take a passenger train let alone lose their jobs, in a strike. These weary, foreign-tongued women in threadbare clothes made a rare appearance in Union Square during the daylight to open eyes. Some people clucked their tongues and said, “Yes, yes. Something really ought to be done” — and did nothing except express momentary dismay. But to many others, these protestors were considered anti-American agitators — unclean ghetto scum whose laziness was an affront to the American Dream. Many were arrested, and some sent to work camps. Even though those as American as Mark Twain were emphatic supporters of labor movements, booming industry (backed by police) retook focus and power, and the girls’ warnings faded from novelty and the public eye.

The building on March 25, 1911

But on March 25, 1911, in a factory on the upper floors of a building on the east side of Washington Square Park in New York City, time ran out. A fire began. With no rules in place to keep the floor clear of loose rags, it spread with breathtaking speed. Women scrambled for the doors, but they were locked. They rushed for the windows, but they were too high to be reached by fire truck ladders. They began flinging themselves out of windows, smashing on the sidewalks below, crashing through the pavement, and, skirts still aflame, impaling themselves on fencing. Some desperate girls found a fire escape, but it hadn’t been inspected, and it came loose, dashing more of them to the ground. Bystanders gathered, unable to assist the trapped women, while the streets piled with bodies. The gore filled the gutters, and the smell of blood caused the horses pulling the fire trucks to rear back in fear. The warnings were made horrifically real.

By dinnertime on March 25, 146 had been murdered by something that could have been avoided: the callousness of commerce. It was more than just an accident. If the image of people leaping to their deaths reminds us of 9/11, that’s apropos, because like the 9/11 of its day, the Triangle fire was a source of paralyzing horror and a bellwether of change. Public opinion turned. How could a prosperous, civilized country have allowed the conditions that killed these women — and, even on March 26, threatened countless more across the country? Hastily, with an acknowledged shame, the system changed. Labor and safety laws, weak at first, were ushered into place.

The same view today, scrubbed of meaning

The real changes were deeper. No longer would most Americans trust industry to police itself, without oversight by law or a government interested in the greater good of society. Unions surged in popularity.

Back to how it was: Demonize the employee

Here we are. It’s a mournful irony indeed that on the 100th anniversary of such a milestone in the humane execution of our national business, the right wing, and heedless windsock politicians such as Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Rep. Tom Niehaus of Ohio, are taking a sledgehammer to unions. Their ire is currently directed at public sector unions. As if high school teachers are fatcats who wickedly milk the system. As if being able to stand up for yourself is something you should only be allowed to do if you don’t work for the state.

It’s shameful ignorance of who we are, a modern crime against our history, that the sacrifice and idealism of our ancestors 100 years ago could be so summarily discarded at the very moment they should be commemorated.

In March 2011, there ought to be parades to honor the centenary of the day our industry civilized. Instead, conservative partisans are attacking unions, seizing a political moment to demonize a largely productive entity and feed their own wealth, and disrespecting the process that made America an industrial power that was admired by the rest of the world.

Throughout the majority of our history, American industry was a free-for-all, with no rules to look after the greater good. Look at slavery, for goodness’ sake! Left to its own devices, American business trampled people. And it would have remained so if people hadn’t taken control of their own conditions and created the industry they wanted to have.

It’s no accident that unions took hold in this country at the very moment our consumer culture added rocket fuel to our national economy and propelled us to the very stars in the 20th century.

Yes, there are corrupt unions — but it’s also true that there are corrupt politicians and CEOs, so any argument of moral superiority over organized labor quickly collapses upon itself. I also believe that all-powerful employers can do a hell of a lot more societal damage than all-powerful employees. And I do not believe that history bears out the oft-repeated saw that unfettered capitalism is naturally for the best. Even Adam Smith did not advocate the abuse of workers or the elimination of government involvement.

We created unions because we needed them. Business was abusing the people because it could get away with it. Unions were designed, at their purest form, to protect the lives of the workers who provide the engine of any business. Opponents lazily call them communist, but it can be argued that if an employer cannot run a business in a humane manner and still make a profit, it has no place in a civilized country. Besides, why shouldn’t workers have as much of a voice as businessmen have?

Collective bargaining is one of the few defenses Americans have against the all-powerful corporation. We can thank the 146 Triangle victims for kicking that off in a real way.

Products of an anti-union shop on March 25, 1911

Unions can also protect industry itself. In Germany, where trade unions are far more powerful than they are here, they have helped prop up flagging businesses at moments when they were weakest. When an American enterprise might have shut up shop, Germany’s indomitable guilds repelled change. That may frustrate entrepreneurs, but it nonetheless it helped create an economy that is just as productive as ours despite the fact the average German takes about four times as much vacation as the average American.

In the final analysis, American businesses exist to make money for their owners. Innovation is not necessarily at the top of the list of things that are produced in much quantity by that mandate. Cutting corners, or refusing to modernize, or pressuring workers to give up more and more of themselves (including personal health), are just three destructive things businesses do yet still generate profits. And let’s not forget that there is no economic system that is impervious to greed. Without a force that resists potential abuses, greed wins.

I work three blocks from from the building where the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire happened, in a building that was, at the time, Wanamaker’s. It was a mammoth department store taking up two city blocks where those women’s handiwork, created from despair, was almost certainly offered for sale.

The old Triangle space now belongs to New York University, where I attended graduate school. The streets that once ran with gore are now lined with coffee bars and student hangouts. The fire escapes are now secure and regulated. So is my office, and so is every workplace in the country. I have never been a member of a union in my life, but I can thank unions for forcing men of profit to do the correct thing by their fellow man — a Christian principle, after all.

We all assume a level of safety where we work because of what happened on March 25, 1911. We take the fruit of collective bargaining for granted. Visit a sweatshop in Indonesia or China or Bangladesh and you may begin to grasp how things could be, and how they once were.

Of course it’s easy for a Tea Party reactionary to paint all unions as wasteful when they have no true understanding of what they actually contributed to our quality of life. It’s easy to dismantle America if you don’t understand why it was built the way it was. If you want to know the value of what you own, know your history.

The Republicans have spent the past few years vigorously demonizing unions. Let’s not fool ourselves. They’re desecrating the overwhelmingly positive influence of unions because their members contribute mostly to Democrats. The right wing wants to decimate Democratic funding. So they claim unions are guilty of bleeding the American businessman of his profits, that commerce cannot continue if they exist, and that we cannot afford them.

This March 25, I remind them that those was the same arguments that employers gave on March 24, 1911.

Child labor strikers, 1909: Dishonored this month for the sake of partisanship

Transportation is life

Blog

Jan 142011

The government doesn’t pay much attention to making sure we can get where we need to go. Subway lines are falling apart, buses infrequent, train systems decimated, and high-speed rail has been politicized into a fantasy. The ways in which we suffer extend far beyond mere inconvenience.

In America, getting there is not considered a right, and our leaders don’t perceive it to be in the interest of the greater good to help us move about economically. Detroit carmakers got their claws into the public transportation system through National City Lines and other shell organizations designed to replace our universally helpful public transit systems with pay-through-the-hose, gas-sucking motor vehicles.

Americans have been struggling to catch up with their petroleum expenses ever since. In today’s America, you’re expected to be rich enough to pay for a car. Movement, like health, is something that Americans may access only at signficant expense. The situation isn’t like this everywhere in the world, where governments recognize that if its population can get around cheaply, things get done, people are happier, and they can spend their money on more productive things.

I was thinking about all the bad things that have befallen our society because our transportation system is so pathetic. And I don’t just mean bridges that pancake on commuters:

Poverty. If you can’t get there, you can’t earn. For most Americans, who live in places that were built after the introduction of the car, not being able to cross the county often means not being able to earn a paycheck. Wheels bring food.
War. Not having the sort of streetcar, cable car, and rail service that we used to have until the 1940s and 1950s means we have to rely on gas-guzzling vehicles. Which means we need gas. Which means we have to get it from abroad. Which means we fight wars for access to it. The Pentagon might as well be in the shape of a radial tire.
Prejudice. What you don’t know, you fear. If Americans found it easier and cheaper to get around, they would do it, and they’d meet people who aren’t like them in places that are new to them. Instead, they stay at home, homogeneous home. Peering over their picket fences. Living small.

A country that limits our travels limits our freedom.

You’d expect a travel writer to say this.

How we go is who we are

Guess the little bastard

Blog

Jan 132011

So… have a look at this guy. Do you know who this is?

Who's this cheeky bugger?

I have this picture pinned up by my desk. It’s not hard to see what’s so captivating about it. This 21-year-old kid is smug! There’s something incredibly cocky about the little devil; he just thinks he knows all the answers, doesn’t he? The spread of his legs, the self-assured slattern eyes; he’s as modern as a teen-ager who won’t get off his cell phone.

Here are some facts to lead you to his identity:

He was half American. His mother was born in Brooklyn.
He failed three exams to gain entrance to the calvary. That was around the time this was taken, but he’s looking pretty cool because his mother is rich and he knows it’s gonna be fine.
He was a brilliant writer, and so his first claim to world fame was as a war correspondent.
Although he traveled to India, Sudan, and Cuba, he was most known for being kidnapped as a P.O.W. in South Africa during the Boer War. He escaped on a passing train, traveled 300 miles to safety, and was hidden by a mine manager before coming home. His bold tale made him famous.
On the back of this global fame, he decided to get into politics. He failed at that — repeatedly — until he finally secured a minor office. Pretty much failed at that, too.
His mentor, father figure, and role model, Bourke Cockran (I may be related), was a former lover of his mother, an Irish immigrant to America, and a five-time member of the United States House of Representatives. Cockran taught this boy how to orate.

Can you see any greatness in this kid? Or would he benefit most by being grounded? Would you let him borrow your car, let alone unsheath that saber in mixed company?

Last clues:

This image was taken in 1895, the year of his father’s death. This mouthy punk would live another 70 years, until 1965.
This kid saved England.

The answer?

It proves that you can never tell where greatness lies, and that you can never judge today what will be indispensable tomorrow. This little tough guy is Winston Churchill.

So don’t be impatient about your own life. It takes a lifetime, sometimes, to reach your destiny.

Charlie Chaplin was the immigrant America refused

Blog

Jan 122011

One of the fascinating things about studying American history is that it’s so full of contradictions. In order for a country of our size and variety to cohere at all, we require a group acceptance of some pretty romantic mythology. And often, the real story is a lot uglier than the prettified conventional wisdom we’re brought up to enjoy.

A Keystone of American identity

Take Charlie Chaplin, whom now we view with the warm glow of reverence. I was in London last week, and on a visit to the British Film Institute, I bought a DVD copy of restored shorts from the Keystone Studios in the late teens, when he was still in his 20s. Here’s a guy who seems to embody the American spirit. Born English, he showed up in America when he was about 21, and for the next thirty years, he helped shape and define the American spirit as no other person has.

Chaplin was a brilliant entrepreneur. He assumed control over his own movies as early as 1918, and like Walt Disney would two decades later, he took the audacious step of expanding film shorts into full-length motion pictures. He was one of four performers who founded United Artists, taking ownership of his work from distributors and money men and pretty much establishing what we know as modern Hollywood.

American spirit, born in Britain

He was, to the letter, the astounding success that all good American immigrants aspire to be, and he was adored for it. Few personalities can captivate international culture for a quarter century, but he did. He built his own studio, which today is the home of Jim Henson Studios on La Brea Boulevard in Los Angeles. Chaplin not only navigated the 1927 transition from silents to talkies, which was career homicide for many worthy performers such as Buster Keaton, but he even managed to successfully buck the dialogue trend for nearly a decade more, culminating with a mostly dialogue-free Modern Times in 1936.

Chaplin had all-American courage. In 1940, while America was still dithering about what to do about World War Two, Chaplin released his long-awaited The Great Dictator, the scathing comic indictment of Adolf Hitler (who was born four days after Chaplin). In the late 1930s, when it was shot, the world didn’t even know what Hitler was truly up to. Chaplin predicted it perfectly, and he got the message out.

Slapstick scamp or class commentary?

His richest character, The Little Tramp, was born after the spiritual devastation of the first World War. The Tramp, a low-class vagrant who struggles to keep up with the machinations the world around him, was like the pioneer American spirit personified: outsider, playful, indefatigable, high-spirited in the face of rejection and failure, and ultimately measuring up through sheer pluck and good humor. Like an immigrant, the Tramp blended into city streets without words. Like so many characters created by immigrants such as Billy Wilder and Frank Capra, the Tramp was both an outsider and an insider who saw society with a jaundiced eye. That persona first appeared at Keystone and 1914 and was an international emblem for nearly a quarter century, appearing in its last film in 1936.

While The Little Tramp appeared for the last time, the indefatigable American spirit was being crushed by the Great Depression. Fear of communism largely eradicated the famous American pioneer spirit that had dominated for at least four generations, and World War Two had solidified the social expectation of a unified front.

It didn't matter how famous he was

A new conformity squashed the true American individualism of the West and of the immigrant waves, and despite the fact he gave America an industry and an identity, Chaplin proudly professed liberal politics that made him a target. It was a turning point in American history, when “liberal” was painted as a dirty word, which conservatives still believe is true today. After the economic slide, any powerful person who saw things with a jaundiced eye became suspect in the eyes of the establishment.

Just as Hitler rose from the ashes of the Great War, the malaise of McCarthyism rose from the ashes of Great Depression disillusionment, and the American government discounted any contribution Charles Chaplin had made. Instantly, he was an outsider once again. One of the cherished myths of American culture is that it welcomes all with open arms, but in fact, even minor transgressions are rewarded with banishment.

In 1952, Chaplin went to London to promote his movie Limelight, and while he was gone, the FBI jockeyed to revoke his entry visa. He was 63. He had helped build Hollywood since the teens. He created an American industry.

Evidence against him crumbled, and no one would testify against him, but the damage was done. America had betrayed him. Outraged, he didn’t return to his home.

Its as if he always knew he'd be ground up in the gears

Enough is not enough anymore, and everything is ‘over’

Blog

Jan 112011

Today, a singer-songwriter I like, Jay Brannan, had an outburst on his Facebook page: “when an item or article of clothing wears out or breaks, i want to replace it with EXACTLY the same thing. the idea of “discontinuing” or “redesigning” ruins life.” Soon after, he tweeted the same thought, refining it: “the idea of “discontinuing” or “redesigning” ruins life,” he wrote.

I feel this way, too. I want what I want, and I want what works. But American commerce usually has other ideas.

Over the years, I have come to suspect that the tendency of American industry to incessantly reboot, reimagine, retool, and recycle is a symptom of more than petulance. It’s not even a sign of creativity, or of homage, although it’s usually sold to us that way. It’s desperation.

Don't be fooled: Grandpa liked pictures just as much as you do

Our parents and grandparents enjoyed many of the same products, more or less unchanged, for generations. My mom grew up with pretty much the same Coca-Cola in the 1960s that her mother grew up with in the 1930s. But our generation just can’t resist mucking everything up.

Coke replaced sugar with high fructose corn syrup. National Geographic went from an exploratory, heady photographic journal to a lightweight photo book that seems to be inspired by the lifestyle section of your local newspaper. The previously enigmatic Mr. Peanut and Tinker Bell spout quips like second-string sitcom characters. The affordable VW Bug that served the budget needs of surfers, hippies, and young adults fresh out of college was superseded by a luxury version more likely to suit moneyed marketing executives. What’s left unchanged? What’s actually better?

Ah... that's better!

Why do companies incessantly monkey around with stuff that was proven to work for generations? Why does Facebook change its interface every 14 months, and why do we discard the latest must-have staple of everyday life (Friendster, then MySpace, now maybe Twitter) as “over” sometimes seemingly because it’s been around for more than two years? If everything is declared “over,” what will last?

People now relish the hasty dismantling of the very things that caused the destruction of the institutions that came before them. We’re tripping over ourselves to trash the things that are most central in our lives, and praising redesigns and retoolings that have no real cause to exist except for the unsettling and hollow feeling that “it’s time.”

There is a wide, and growing, school of thought — very active on Twitter and other social media — that celebrates the science and design of every new change and new reinvention, but never stops to pragmatically wonder if any of it was really necessary.

Those Bug-buying marketing executives are partly to blame. In corporate offices across the world, people are actively justifying their jobs in order to afford those VW bugs they so unwisely changed. So is Wall Street, whose stockholders demand companies make more and more money instead of just enough money.

These days, if you’re content to merely get by with a decent living, you must be a farmer. A real business, one with investors and cubicles, is one that needs to constantly top last year. Modern business must exceed enough, and to do that, it doesn’t honor tradition so much as strip mine it. It waters down the formula, it chases trends with no hope of social endurance, and five years later, when the public only dimly recalls the revolution, they must either do it again or pull the plug.

Someone earned a bonus for this

The threshold of profit is now so high, thanks to stockholder demand, that a candy bar with a modest following — say, a Nutrageous in America or a Fuse in Britain — has no hope of survival because it’s not a smash. A very good television show, such as My So-Called Life or Arrested Development, cannot live because it isn’t a blockbuster. Your favorite coat, your best pair of socks, the cut of your trousers — so many things that do not need to be changed must be made unavailable to you because in some boardroom somewhere, an upstart junior executive dodges the axe by justifying the eradication of the old. Like having children, destroying old things is a way to leave an imprint forever.

What has become of American tradition? I mean, besides the fact that everything we buy went from local, mom-and-pop origin to global, gotta-please-the-stockholders scale. Our grandparents lived with stuff that played unchanging roles for most of their lives, but our generation shucks off everything once it loses the whiff of trendiness and gains a well-worn groove of familiarity. We even have entire industries that celebrate this utter lack of self-identity: What do you think fashion is all about?

On a recent TCM documentary series, Moguls and Movie Stars, historian David Stein said: “We revere them. And then we destroy them. And then we revive them and make them saints.” He was talking about Clara Bow and Marilyn Monroe, but he might as well have been talking about our beloved products, which are the shadow celebrities of American culture.

I don’t think it’s just about the nature of a consumer society. It’s become systemic, making so many of the props in our lives into something rootless and rudderless, with a new expectation that nothing is allowed to age and cement.

Our society now has a subconscious expectation of a flimsy lifespan. My fear — or realization — is it’s a sign that America is in steep economic decline. We jump so rapidly from product to product, and we abandon without hesitation the few constants that have bound our wide society together. We tell ourselves that we’re improving what needs improving, but in truth, our economy has gotten so bad that businesses can no longer survive on the old, just-good-enough margins. They have to keep racing ahead. Enough is not enough anymore.

It’s been said, and I agree, that Americans have the attention span of hey what’s that–

The Statue of Liberty is an Embarrassment

Articles, Blog

Nov 182010

At least, it was when it began.

It was in the Depression of 1873. A few years before, a bunch of greedy New York bankers artificially jacked up the price of gold, causing a financial panic and sending America into a slump that lasted for years. (Sounding familiar yet?)

Going topless used to be more noble in France

Anyway, at the time, France was best buds with America, or at least it was better at pretending to be. It had helped us win our own Revolution less than 100 years before, and French war heros such as Lafayette were still household names Stateside. Back when getting a statue was the equivalent of landing a Nike endorsement contract today — the highest honor a society could bestow — someone European got the idea that there should be a statue to freedom. Things were looking dicey in France at the time, and America had just come out of its own Civil War, which finally emancipated the slaves at great cost.

Suffice to say that at that time, freedom was looking a lot like something that ought to be preserved as a statue in case we forgot about it once and for all. (Still not familiar yet?)

It was decided that the French and the Americans would go Dutch. The body of the statue would come from France while America would foot the bill, so to speak, for the pedestal. The sculptor, Frédéric Bartholdi, built some of the torch-bearing arm as a sort of teaser for the final thing.

In 1876, the right hand of the Roman Goddess of Liberty, which knew not what the left was doing because it didn’t exist yet, was uncrated in New York City’s Madison Square. It was hoped that the sight of 12-inch fingernails would inspire Americans to donate money to the construction of the colossus.

But there it sat, by the side of the road, a hand eternally begging.

That begging hand of Liberty sat there for longer than anyone could remember. It became a nothing but a big joke, and an embarrassment. A colossal embarrassment, in the literal sense. No one could afford to donate. Worse, they thought it was in poor taste. The newspapermen, who were the Bill O’Reillys and Gawkers of their day, mocked it every chance they got: Americans shouldn’t let the French build their monuments, they said, and everyday Americans shouldn’t have to pay for New York City’s follies, and we can’t afford frivolousness like this in these times. Even the committees assigned to raise funds never met. It became hard to tell if Americans didn’t care about freedom, or if they just had very specific tastes in neoclassical anthropomorphic polythestic art.

New York parks have always been weird places

The depression ground on, and still that stupid hand stood in the park, weird and brown, just feet off the ground, ignored like hallway furniture. Meanwhile in Paris, Bartholdi tried displaying a disembodied head to get crowds excited (well, it worked with the guillotine). But apathy reigned.

It was the age of the railway barons, but no big donor stepped forward to give the goddess of Liberty her perch. Not a big grant from the ranks of the Robber Barons like Cornelius Vanderbilt, from the entrenched political machines like Tammany Hall, or from art collecting titans like J.P. Morgan.

In the end, that creepy hand gathered scorn in Madison Square for six long years, which is a very long time no matter how you look at it, but is a stubbornly long time to endure blistering P.R.

It took nearly 20 years for Liberty to find her place in New York Harbor. She was paid for the hard way: penny by penny out of the savings of a people clawing their way past the nightmare of the Civil War and a chilling economic depression. After one newspaperman, Joseph Pulitzer, pled its case in the press, some 120,000 people contributed, many of them schoolchildren. Most donations were less than a dollar. Mind you, it’s entirely possible they just wanted the ugly thing taken out of their park once and for all, but regardless of why they did it, people got together and bought Liberty a pedestal.

Naturally, when she was completed, the pinstripe-suited crowd jostled each other to be first in line to take the credit. There was a parade, showered by the ticker tapes of the financiers who had mocked the high-minded project from the start. President Grover Cleveland, busily hurrying toward his well-deserved posthumous anonymity, arrived in New York to mark the occasion.

The lesson, of course, is to always be patient. Things will change. Laughingstocks can become icons. Even when things look bleak, or when you can’t envision the path forward, or when your idea appears to be so detested that all hope is gone, you can eventually come through and create something enduring to be proud of. Liberty can take its sweet time.

She couldn't get a hand, not even stereoscopically

The corporation commands you to admit it’s 1:37 pm

Articles, Blog

Nov 102010

Long before you lived here, America was a land of many towns. Our expansive “agrarian society” was barely a society at all, really, save for a loosely connected sense of similar place and purpose. And each place had its own time on the clock.

The view of the 10:22 from the locomotive of a departing 10:19

When it was 9:00 am in your town, it could be 8:42 in the town next door. It had to be that way, because there was not yet a way to unify our communities — no widespread phones, no telegraph to speak of — and the sun itself could only indulge men on the ground with the roughest sense of its place in the sky.

Many cities in the world, such as Edinburgh, Ottawa, and Hong Kong, could induce their citizens to agree on the current minute by means of cannons fired daily at noon on the dot — “noon-day guns,” they were sometimes called, some of which still operate out of the undying human demand for nostalgia and tourism (one scared the crap out of me daily at lunchtime when I lived in Cape Town) — but across the vast unsettled land of America, cohesion was still a dream.

The difference of a few minutes really didn’t matter much when it took an hour to travel two miles, and when the main daily pressure would have been to get you business done by dark. But when the trains began running, the shuffled deck of our various systems became a true mortal threat. A train couldn’t leave one town at 9:00 and arrive in the next one at 8:43. Apart from severely confusing the passengers and creating schedules a foot thick and requiring conductors to use an abacus, there was a real opportunity for collisions.

So in the 1860s people began agitating for everyone in America to adopt a standardized time system. Many of them stood to make a fortune from the new steel highways, as many men did. It started with a joker named Charles F. Dowd, who was the head of the Temple Grove Ladies’ Seminary in Saratoga Springs, New York (back when upstate New York was still a world player thanks to the Erie Canal — but the trains, ironically, would soon fix that). The year the famous Golden Spike was sunk into Utah, Dowd started pressing for the adoption of four American time zones. And to get those accomplished, we’d have to start putting our heads together on what time meant to us. We’d have to pin it down, once and forever, like a butterfly under glass.

Hill Valley never quite adhered to standardization

It took a while. Americans didn’t really object to the hands of the federal government on their pocket watches, largely because the proposed change was at the behest of the newfangled railroad companies instead. As the equivalent of the Internet companies of their time, they had lots of devotées — most of whom conveniently overlooked the drawbacks and consequences and instead fixated on the benefits of the brave new world they could bring.

But by 1883, we had the tools we needed to proceed. The telegraph was established enough so that signals could be sent between towns and clocks could be adequately synchronized. The National Railway Time Convention was held, and it was agreed that November 18 should be the day that time zones were implemented and everyone’s noon would be noon. It was called the “Day of Two Noons,” after the places that would have to live through one noon before correcting themselves to the “right” one, forevermore.

The day passed, and apart from a little Y2K-style fretting that the seams of the natural world would come unsewn, everyone peaceably made their adjustments and forgot about it. It was completely optional, yet we all agreed that, for the sake of a greater good, time itself should be redefined.

How I admire those old Americans for their good sense.

In that case, industry led the advance of the greater good. The train companies put us all on the same track. A recent episode of PBS’s History Detectives uncovered a clock that was used as a timekeeping nerve center, keeping precise time for train stations throughout the Midwest and Mid-South.

The Williamsburgh Savings Bank, at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge, still flaunts its naughty 'H'

Unfortunately, the mania for standardization was contagious, and in 1890, President Benjamin Harrison (who will never be an action figure) convened the Board on Geographic Names. As described in Bill Bryson’s superlative Made in America, the Board’s mandate was to beat the individuality out of the rich tapestry of eccentric names that America had cultivated for itself over the centuries. The Board’s job was to command all government agencies to spell things its way. Fierce Americanization was the order.

Prior to 1890, British spellings in place names was far more common. After all, at that time, many of our grandfathers would have been born British. But the Board beat the Centres in to Centers, suffixes of -borough were dulled to -boro, and sprightly hydra-headed New Castle and La Fayette were tamed into Newcastle and Lafayette. San José was robbed of its aigu, thus excising the Spaniards from the story of what they began.

The Board and the Post Office lost one notable battle. In 1891, the edict came down to start using Pittsburg. The city, no doubt puffed up with steely pride, refused. Not the University, not the Stock Exchange (which existed, and which during the city’s industrial heyday wielded considerable power). For 20 years, the Board and its arbitrary grammar police commanded the loss of the rambunctious H. It never took. On July 19, 1911, Pittsburgh, with that wasteful 10th letter, became the official spelling per official law.

But most places in America complied, perhaps out of a starry-eyed wonderment for the brave, uniform, industrial age they were supposedly enjoying. I wonder how many towns would sooner burn to the ground than comply with a government order like this today.

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