History Now
The first
president’s distillery will make whiskey once again
A replica of
what may have been Washington’s still is fired
up.
(MOUNT VERNON LADIES’
ASSOCIATION) |
On the banks of the Dogue Run Creek in Fairfax
County, Virginia, one chilly October morning last year, two
men in waistcoats turned their attention away from stirring a
pasty sour mash in a hogshead— whose sweet, beery aroma
attracted and then drowned multitudes of yellow jackets—to
fanning flames out of the glowing embers inside a brick
firebox. Anchored to the top of the firebox was a copper pot
still, shaped like a dollop of shaving cream. A modern
distillery can produce four times as much in a day as George
Washington’s could in a year, but the process and technology
of pot-still distillation are little changed, and Washington’s
venture as a distiller reveals an industrial side of him that
is associated with more modern sensibilities.
As a general, George Washington deemed spirits
“essential” for the morale and physical well-being of his
troops. He himself was a lifelong social drinker, and when he
stepped down from the Presidency in 1797, James Anderson,
Mount Vernon’s farm manager, persuaded him to build a
distillery. Six slaves manipulated the huge amounts of grain
(60 percent rye, 35 percent Indian corn, and 5 percent malted
barley) and water needed for the mash. The men tended some 50
mash tubs and fed the furnaces that kept the boiler and stills
converting the mash to whiskey. The distillery flourished. In
1799 alone Washington’s five pot stills, with a combined
capacity of 616 gallons, produced 11,000 gallons of rye
whiskey, which generated an impressive profit of $7,500. That
output, and the fact that the distillery was the largest known
of its kind, offer evidence of Washington’s serious approach.
This was no retiree’s hobby. But after he died in 1799, the
distillery passed to other owners, and by 1808 it had ceased
to operate.
In 1940 federal agents confiscated a dingy copper
pot still, bearing a 1787 date, from a house in rural Fairfax
County. Because of its age and locale, the pot still was
assumed to have been owned by the county’s most famous
distiller, and it went to the Smithsonian. It probably did not
belong to Washington; holding only 30 gallons, it is much too
small. Even so, last year the still was photographed and
measured by Rob Sherman, operations manager of Vendome Copper
and Brass Works, Inc., in Louisville, Kentucky, which has
manufactured distilling equipment for a century. The company
crafted an exact replica. On October 21, 13 master blenders
and distillers converged at Mount Vernon to use this copy to
make a historically accurate version of Washington’s whiskey
recipe.
Chris Morris, master distiller at Brown-Forman
Corporation, said, “The fact that Washington’s recipe was 60
percent rye makes it a powerful counterpoint to the soft
scotch whiskey grain profile. The rye gives the spirit a
fruity, spicy character.” Several years from now Mount Vernon
Whiskey will be bottled under a special label and delivered to
the highest bidders following an auction to benefit Mount
Vernon’s educational programs.
All that remains of George Washington’s distillery
is a low stone rectangle, incompletely enclosing several rocky
trenches and some patches of burned soil. Thanks to support
from discus (Distilled Spirits Council of the United States),
plans are under way to reconstruct the distillery on its
original foundation. The project, expected to cost upward of a
million dollars, is slated for completion sometime in 2006.
—Jill Sim
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The Buyable Past
Zenith
Royal 400, Bulova 290, Philco, and Emerson 888
Vanguard models. | Next year marks the fiftieth
anniversary of the transistor radio, which, like the
diminutive electronic component it’s named for, was
invented in America. Using smaller solid-state devices
in place of vacuum tubes, transistor radios could be
scaled down considerably, yet the earliest versions sold
for sums well out of proportion to their size. Most cost
between $50 and $90 at a time when a new car could be
had for less than $3,000.
Marketers banked on the
portability of the new sets, and the first one from
Japan was billed as a shirt-pocket radio when it arrived
here in 1957. Sony tried to disguise the fact that the
TR-63 was a bit larger than advertised by giving
salesmen shirts with oversized pockets expressly
tailored for the product.
The most collectible models, from
1963 and earlier, can often be identified by the
triangles at 640 and 1240 kHz on their dials. Based on
the civil-defense emblem, these symbols indicated the
two frequencies that were to be used for emergency
broadcasts in the event of a Soviet attack.
Factories
here and abroad produced millions of transistor radios,
with brand names from Admiral to Zephyr. Many wore
stylish cases emblazoned with modern decorative motifs
that included swept-back wings, stars, and, as if to
remind people of the significance of those little
triangles, atoms.
Prices have fallen in recent
years, so this could be an opportune time to begin
acquiring transistor radios. “I sold a radio on eBay not
long ago for about $40 that would once have gone for
$200 to $300,” reports Darryl Rehr, a Los Angeles
aficionado who has several sets displayed in his office.
These days, Rehr notes, $100 should buy something
genuinely collectible. Rehr also says that the look of a
transistor radio is more important to collectors than
whether it works, so select visually interesting
examples and be sure to examine their cases for cracks
and other imperfections.
One rarity to watch for combines
the world’s first transistor radio, the Regency TR-1,
with a presentation case resembling a leather-bound copy
of Jules Verne’s Around
the World in Eighty Days. The producer Michael Todd
had a few of these made as gifts to celebrate his film
version of the novel, and back when bidding was turned
up to high volume, the package was valued at upward of
$4,000. —David Lander
To Learn
More To find the
radios you like best, consult the works of Marty Bunis,
an expert whose books are available from Internet
vendors.
On
the Web, www.etedeschi.ndirect.co.uk/howto2.htm
has lists of the most collectible radios, organized by
country of origin. Several first models produced by
major manufacturers are on its American to-buy
roster.
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An often overlooked branch of
the Navy plans a big new museum
Seabees
build a road in the Aleutians, 1943.
(BETTMANN/CORBIS) | when the japanese attacked pearl
Harbor, two things became instantly clear to Rear Adm.
Ben Moreell: The Navy was going to have to build bases
and airstrips all over the Pacific, and it couldn’t hire
civilians to do it under enemy fire. Members of
Moreell’s new Naval Construction Battalions became known
as Seabees from their initials, and before the war was
over, 350,000 of them had laid 111 major airstrips in
the Pacific; led the way ashore on D-day; installed the
pontoon ferries that took Patton’s troops across the
Rhine; and much, much more.
They’ve played roles just as
essential in every war since and in peacetime too, from
Africa to Southeast Asia to the South Pole. Yet most
Americans barely know they exist. To remedy that, the
CEC/Seabee Historical Foundation (CEC is the Navy’s
closely related Civil Engineer Corps) has embarked on a
campaign to raise $12 million for a big new Seabee
Museum to replace a cramped and outdated facility in
Port Hueneme, California. The museum will take visitors
through recruitment and training and then through the
theaters of service from World War II to Iraq. Capt. W.
B. Hilderbrand, the foundation’s president, hopes to
have the museum open by 2007. “We want people to have a
better understanding of the breadth and scope of what
the Seabees have contributed to their nation in both war
and peace,” he says. “And we especially want to inspire
younger generations to think about opportunities they
might never otherwise consider.” To find out more about
the Seabees and the plans for the museum, visit the
foundation’s Web site, www.seabeehf.org.
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For blues lovers, an authentic
sharecropper’s shack—with all the modern
conveniences.
Robert Johnson played his blues
guitar so well that it was said he’d sold his soul to
the devil. Maybe he had, but it’s just as likely he
learned his chops listening to other blues greats as
they played on the front porches of their sharecropper
shacks. That’s how a lot of Southern culture was
transmitted for many years. But with the introduction of
the mechanized cotton picker in 1944, plantations gave
way to agribusiness, and farm laborers started streaming
North. The blues became an electrified international
institution, as common in the clubs of London as on the
front porches of the Delta.
On a warm evening in late
September, as I sat on the steps of a sharecropper
shack, nursing a Corona and watching the dusk settle
over cotton fields on either side of Highway 49, I could
almost hear “Terraplane Blues” in the Delta breeze. Of
course, I was paying for the experience, and not with
hard labor. I was a guest at the South’s oldest B&B
(bed-and-beer), the Shack
Up Inn, on the former Hopson Plantation in
Clarksdale.
In 1998 Bill Talbot and a group of
friends, one of whom was part owner of Hopson, loaded
two workers’ shacks that were slated to be demolished
onto a flatbed truck and hauled them to Hopson, where
they renovated them. The Shack Up Inn—now six shacks—has
become an international blues destination. My “shack,”
the Robert Clay, named after its former occupant, was
spacious, with a back bedroom, kitchen, and living
room—all air-conditioned—and made even more spacious by
the fact that I wasn’t raising seven sons, as Mr. Clay
did.
The
shacks are crammed with artifacts from all over the
Delta, such as old blues records, ancient postcards, an
upright piano, a guitar. (Each shack contains at least
one musical instrument.) And the guests keep coming.
Talbot says the partners plan to expand by putting 10
rooms in the old cotton gin and adding a main lobby. The
Shack Up was convenient for me and my traveling
companions, who were touring the holy sites of Delta
blues, but it is also a destination in itself. We
gathered on the lawn, tossed sticks to a golden
retriever, and talked about music. Eventually someone
brought out a guitar.
Rooms range from $50 to $75 a
night, and reservations can be made by calling
662-624-8329. —Elizabeth Hoover
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In June of 1831, when William
Chapman died mysteriously at his home near Philadelphia,
suspicion lit on a mysterious stranger who had become
friendly with Chapman’s wife. The case grew into a
scandal and a trial so well documented that it has now
become the basis for an enthralling historical account.
In The
Murder of Dr. Chapman (HarperCollins, 290 pages,
$23.95), Linda Wolfe, whose previous books include Wasted:
The Preppie Murder, makes these long-ago characters
seem as lurid yet as immediate and real as any today.
 | Michael P. Kelley opens Where
We Were in Vietnam (Hellgate Press, 848 pages,
$39.95) with a quotation from Michael Herr’s 1968 book
Dispatches:
“There were installations as big as cities with 30,000
citizens … posh fat air-conditioned camps like
comfortable middle-class scenes … number-named hilltops
in trouble where I didn’t want to stay; trail, paddy,
swamp, deep hairy bush, scrub, swale, village, even
city… .” They’re all here. Kelley has subtitled his book
A Comprehensive Guide to the
Firebases, Military Installations and Naval Vessels of
the Vietnam War, 1945–1975, and it contains
thousands upon thousands of references, glossaries of
acronyms, gridded maps, everything to help the veteran
find out where he was or the student identify a patch of
jungle or bend of river. And throughout the cascades of
information gleam interesting facts, as when we learn of
the 9th Infantry Division, “Beginning in ’67 its 2nd Bde
was assigned to Mobile Riverine Forces ops with the USN,
the 1st time since the Civil War an army unit became
amphibious and completely afloat.”
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“Cowboy”
A New
Mexico cowboy rolls himself a smoke, 1908.
(LIBRARY OF
CONGRESS) | When, a little more than 30 years
ago, the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci asked Henry
Kissinger how he had attained “incredible superstar
status,” becoming “almost more famous and popular” than
President Richard M. Nixon, Dr. Kissinger, then the
national security adviser to the President, immediately
conjured up a vision of the Old West: “I’ve always acted
alone. Americans admire that enormously. Americans
admire the cowboy leading the caravan alone astride his
horse, the cowboy entering a village or city alone on
his horse.”
Lately the cowboy image has been
much in the news, with the term frequently being applied
in a disparaging sense to President George W. Bush. As
Paul Burka, executive editor of Texas
Monthly, put it, “Foreign critics see Mr. Bush as
Billy the Kid—lawless, violent, solitary and prone to
shoot first and ask questions later.”
Mr. Bush may have
opened himself up to this sort of criticism with his
talk of bringing back Osama bin Laden “dead or alive,”
but the characterization predates September 11, 2001.
For example, a headline in the Toronto Star of April 5,
2001, announced: Canadian Prime
Minister Lets Loose On “cowboy” Bush.
The first cowboys
were simply that—boys (or men, regarded as boys) who
looked after cows; the word is dated in this sense in The
Oxford English Dictionary to 1725. The term was
given a new twist in the New World, however. During the
American Revolution, Westchester County, immediately to
the northeast of New York City, was the scene of much
guerrilla strife, with gangs of rebels and Loyalists
conducting raids on one another. Rebels called Loyalist
marauders “cowboys” or “skinners.” A century later Noah
Brooks offered this explanation of the old meaning of
cowboy in one of his popular books for boys, The Boys of Fairport (1898): “The
cowboys were the worst kind of Tories; they went around
in the bushes armed with guns and tinkling a cow-bell so
as to beguile the patriots into the brush hunting for
cows.”
Urban
cowboys appeared not long after the Revolution. From the
Middlebury, Vermont, National
Standard of February 27, 1821: “At the same time
the streets appeared thronged with another younger set,
hooting and howling, savage like, and in imitation of
the licentious cow-boys and sooty chimney sweeps in the
suburbs of an ill-regulated city.”
Cowboy
in the modern sense, meaning a man who works on a cattle
ranch, has been dated to 1849. The earliest known
example comes from a history of the Mexican War: “The
Mexican rancheros … ventured across the Rio Grande … but
they were immediately attacked by the Texan ‘cow-boys.’”
The quote marks around the word suggest that the usage
was new at the time.
By the start of the twentieth
century, the wild, woolly ways of Western cowboys had
given the term its modern, negative connotations. Thus,
following the assassination of William McKinley, a
longtime backer of the President—the Ohio senator Mark
Hanna, who had been against Theodore Roosevelt’s
nomination for Vice President—memorably tagged TR with
the term, combining both its Western and disparaging
senses: “Now look, that damned cowboy is President of
the United States.”
Backers of the current President
prefer to interpret the term in a complimentary way, of
course. As Vice President Dick Cheney told Tim Russert
on “Meet the Press” last March, “The notion that the
President is a cowboy —I don’t know, is a Westerner—I
think that’s not necessarily a bad idea. I think the
fact of the matter is he cuts to the chase.”
The meaning
of this particular icon, it seems, is in the eye of the
beholder.
—Hugh Rawson
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A New Look at Joseph Cornell¹s
Enclosed Masterpieces
Joseph
Cornell’s Untitled (Medici Prince), c.
1952.
(ROBERT
LEHRMAN ART TRUST) | The eerily moving universes framed
inside boxes that Joseph Cornell spent four decades
creating are brought together in a truly sumptuous
volume published to mark the centennial of his birth in
December 2003. Joseph
Cornell: Shadowplay Eterniday (Thames & Hudson,
256 pages, $60) has more than 200 color plates, many of
them full page. They lead irresistibly into his compact
realms of paper birds, star maps, Medici princesses, and
so-called ballets, but to get you even closer, the
volume includes, in a sleeve in the back, a DVD-ROM with
which you can explore many of Cornell’s boxes on your
computer, viewing them from multiple angles, from close
and far, and navigating inside them. The DVD also
contains nine short, epigrammatic films he made,
bringing his unique artistic vision to another
medium.
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The vitality of American culture
rests on its blending of influences, and nowhere is this
more true than in the hybrid field of design, as is
shown by a group of current museum exhibits. From March
12 to August 8 the St. Louis Art Museum (www.slam.org)
will present Art of the Osage, showing how these Indian
artists assimilated into their traditional forms the
work of white artists, new motifs, like the American
flag, and new materials, including rayon, brass, and
silk. Meanwhile, at New York City’s Cooper-Hewitt
National Design Museum, Shock of the Old: Christopher
Dresser will be on view from March 5 to July 29.
Industrial design has achieved its greatest flowering in
the United States, yet its founder was British. Dresser
was an industrial designer before that profession
existed, creating strikingly modern-looking teapots,
bowls, toast racks, and furniture as early as the 1870s.
To top it all off, our great nation now has three
separate Pez-dispenser museums with the opening of the
newest one in Easton, Pennsylvania (“Just paces away
from the Crayola factory!”; www.eastonmuseumofpez.com).
Like its fellow Pez institutions in Myrtle Beach, South
Carolina (“Inside Alma & Annie’s; next to ‘Adventure
Falls’ mini golf”), and Burlingame, California (“ten
minutes south from the San Francisco International
Airport”; www.burlingamepezmuseum.com),
the Easton museum packs more than half a century’s worth
of design, engineering, and culture into a space about
the size of a studio apartment.
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Gods and
Generals
The very
words historical and film taken together suggest some
kind of mildly patronizing qualification, like “military
music” or “detective fiction.” There aren’t many
definitions of a good film that one could apply to Gods
and Generals; it is poorly paced, utterly lacking in
dramatic structure (aside from the historical facts it
is based on), and largely devoid of most of the artistic
pleasures that we seek in movies (except, in this case,
acting).
Why,
then, would I recommend Gods
and Generals, and to whom? First, I’d recommend it
simply because historical films can sometimes give us
something that other films can’t—namely, history.
Second, I’d recommend it to anyone who, for a few hours,
can forgo purely aesthetic considerations to see history
come alive. And that is what, at its best, the director
Ronald F. Maxwell’s 220-minute (not counting DVD extras)
film does: It makes history come alive. Forget the
contemptuous or dismissive reviews that greeted it on
its release, and ask yourself if you’ve ever had a
desire to see Stonewall Jackson and his world
re-created. If not, go no further.
If so, you’ll have to come here,
because no other film since the silent era has even
attempted a portrait of Jackson. Stephen Lang, one of
America’s best actors, will leave you with a vivid image
of the man and the convictions that drove him. You may
not like what you see, but to dismiss the movie’s
reverence for Jackson as homage to a bully—and at least
two major papers used precisely that word in attacking
the film—is to miss the point entirely.
The novel
by Jeff Shaara on which the film is based (a prequel
to his late father Michael’s The
Killer Angels, about the Battle of Gettysburg),
focuses on the great Confederate victories at
Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, as seen through the
eyes of four officers—two Confederate, Jackson and
Robert E. Lee (Robert Duvall), and two Union, Winfield
Scott Hancock (Brian Mallon) and Joshua Lawrence
Chamberlain (Jeff Daniels). Regrettably, Hancock’s role
has been downsized, either in the original script or on
the cutting-room floor. For that matter, Duvall’s
angst-ridden Lee, who seems to carry the burden of
history with him in every word and gesture, is pushed
largely into the background by Lang’s fiery Jackson.
This at least has the merit of highlighting the two
officers, Jackson and Chamberlain, who best reflect the
opposing points of view and the cultures that nurtured
them.
Gods
and Generals works best when considered as a series
of set pieces, many of which (such as a sequence in
which a musical troupe entertains Lee and his staff with
“The Bonnie Blue Flag”) are unlike anything that any
other movie on the Civil War has ever attempted. The
most spectacular sequences, of course, are the battles
themselves. The attack of the Federals against the
Stonewalls at Fredericksburg is, with the possible
exception of the assault on Fort Wagner in Glory,
the most harrowing depiction of Civil War combat ever
put on film. The Battle of Chancellorsville, in which
the camera sweeps out of the woods with Jackson’s “foot
cavalry” upon bivouacked Union troops, might be the
single most sensational battle scene ever in a Civil War
movie.
Gods
and Generals has been accused of being sympathetic
to the Confederate point of view. I don’t know that this
is true; I think perhaps the story lacked a proper Union
general to pair with Jackson. (For all his sterling
qualities, Daniels’s Chamberlain is only a colonel and
thus lacks Jackson’s stature in the film.) Grant or
Sherman would have been appropriate, but we won’t get
them until the final installment of this three-movie
series, based on Jeff Shaara’s The
Last Full Measure.—Allen Barra
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