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Crane operator at TVA’s Douglas Dam, Tennessee (LOC)
Photo by Alfred T. Palmer, 1942
Originally uploaded by The Library of Congress

The Library of Congress has put up about 3000 photographs at the online site Flickr.com. About two thousand of them are from the 1930s and 1940s — in color! Many of the pictures were taken for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and/or the Office of War Information (OWI), often by some of the great photographers of the day, including John Vachon, Jack Delano, Alfred T. Palmer, and Marion Post Wolcott. The rest are photos for the Bain News Service taken between 1910 and 1912.

Suffragettes posting bills (LOC) (ca. 1911)
Originally uploaded by The Library of Congress

What’s really nice is that the photos are searchable by tags like “plane,” “suffrage,” or tennessee,” and that the results can be viewed as a slideshow (click the links).

Rural school children, San Augustine County, Texas (LOC)
Photo by John Vachon, 1943.
Originally uploaded by The Library of Congress

To just start at the top, click here; for a slideshow view of all of the photos, click here, then sit back and watch the show. I’ve been looking through them all evening.

It doesn’t surprise me that Jim Henley’s defense of Ron Paul’s assertion (“Lincoln should never have gone to war; there were better ways of getting rid of slavery” — ) is more interesting than Paul’s own — partly, of course, because the latter was abridged by the format of a Sunday news soundbite show, but mainly because I think Henley is a more capable essayist and thinker than Paul.

Henley’s title — “A Fiery Gospel Writ in Burnished Rows of Steel” — is a quote, of course, from Julia Ward Howe’s Battle Hymn of the Republic, and I think Henley has a point if he wishes that our republic didn’t have “battle hymns,” and that our political culture didn’t confuse wars and hegemony with national purpose — rather than simply seeing that purpose as protecting the liberties of all its citizens. There’s not enough “constitutional patriotism” in the United States these days, and too much “military history patriotism” that seems to make blood sacrifice the point of our history.

Nevertheless, I think Henley’s argument in this post is as wrong as Ron Paul’s, and I’ll try to explain why. Others — see particularly Ari Kelman (”The Edge of the West”) — have rehearsed the events preceding the outbreak of the Civil War at some length, so that need not be recapitulated here, other than the fairly important points that (1) Lincoln was duly elected, (2) his platform merely sought to limit the spread of slavery, and (3) that the Confederacy fired the first shot at Fort Sumter.

For his part, Henley begins his argument as a rejoinder to this comment by Matthew Yglesias on the matter:

The South … decided that rather than abide by the results of the election, they would secede from the country and establish a new herrenvolk democracy committed to slavery uber alles. They, not Lincoln, put resolution of the slavery issue through the political process out of reach.

Henley replies this is only partly correct:

Rather, they put the resolution of slavery through a peaceful political process of “The United States of America” out of reach, because they decided not to be in it any more. There are all kinds of bad things that might have attended the North letting the South go - one possibility is decades worth of border wars in the western territories as the USA and CSA tried to expand at each other’s expense. Imagine a “bleeding Kansas” stretching from the Great Plains to the Pacific Ocean. That might have happened. And Saddam Hussein might have decided to underwrite a biological terror strike on Chicago. Or, maybe not! But the bad possible alternatives are distinct from “American slavery lasts forever.”

And with this, the gambit is more or less complete, with both Henley (and Paul) adding the final move of positing the inevitable end of slavery within a few decades, based on Russia’s and Brazil’s emancipations and various stratagems for undermining the CSA (buying slaves in border states, assisting fugitive slaves, homesteading the freedmen in the USA Western territories, etc.) Like Ron Paul, Henley frames his Civil War analysis as one about the wisdom or morality of the Civil War as a method of ending slavery.

But that wasn’t what it began as: a war for preserving a particular democracy in a particular time and place. That is, there was actually an even more fundamental issue than the particular one of slavery at stake: whether deeply divisive issues such as slavery could be settled by unilateral secession. A United States that allowed itself to be dissolved and fired upon — especially if the dissolution and violence were because of the outcome of an election — is one that would have had no convincing legal answer to further secessions later on, as diminishing centripetal forces of scale and allegiance were outweighed by the centrifugal ones of local advantages via location and alliances.

Henley’s arguments about the war also ignore that peaceful, constitutional mechanisms for achieving disunion were readily available — and were proposed by Lincoln himself in his First Inaugural address:

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right* to dismember or overthrow it. I cannot be ignorant of the fact that many worthy and patriotic citizens are desirous of having the national Constitution amended. While I make no recommendation of amendments, I fully recognize the rightful authority of the people over the whole subject to be exercised in either of the modes prescribed in the instrument itself; and I should, under existing circumstances, favor rather than oppose a fair opportunity being afforded the people to act upon it.

I will venture to add that to me the Convention mode seems preferable, in that it allows amendments to originate with the people themselves, instead of only permitting them to take or reject propositions, originated by others, not especially chosen for the purpose, and which might not be precisely such as they would wish to either accept or refuse.

Henley and Paul are right to be horrified at the cost of the Civil War; they may even be right to suggest that if ending slavery — or washing one’s hands of it — was all it was about, the Civil War was not the only or necessarily the best option. (Though I shall argue that’s a somewhat surprising position for them to take.) But any nation “so conceived and so dedicated” as the United States would have had to make the same decision to resist secession, or accept crumbling into its constituent parts. Lincoln, as usual, said it best, both in his First Inaugural address…

If the minority will not acquiesce, the majority must, or the government must cease. There is no other alternative; for continuing the government, is acquiescence on one side or the other. If a minority, in such case, will secede rather than acquiesce, they make a precedent which, in turn, will divide and ruin them; for a minority of their own will secede from them whenever a majority refuses to be controlled by such minority. For instance, why may not any portion of a new confederacy, a year or two hence, arbitrarily secede again, precisely as portions of the present Union now claim to secede from it? All who cherish disunion sentiments, are now being educated to the exact temper of doing this.

…and in the famed heartbreaking words of his Second Inaugural address:

Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.

Henley also makes a somewhat unexpected argument when he posits the “the near certitude that American chattel slavery as such would end within the generation that saw 1865″ — and then writes: “Would the lives of American blacks by 1890 have been better than the lives of American blacks in the 1890 we actually had? I think it’s very likely.”

Even accepting arguendo that blacks would indeed have been emancipated everywhere in North America by 1890,** that’s still a remarkable bargain to make: the basic freedom of millions for “very likely” a generation (but possibly longer) to prevent the battlefield deaths of hundreds of thousands (but “likely” fewer, to recall the beliefs on both sides at the outset of the conflict). Say what you will about the Civil War, but even as waged it was a far quicker and surer route to emancipation than anything Henley imagines — even if that wasn’t the original intent.

And that’s a benefit I’d have thought worth its weight in gold to libertarians like Ron Paul or Henley. Henley, at least, often and rightly rejects the infringement of a single person’s human rights for the sake of unspecified, unproven national security benefits, as reckoned in American lives purportedly saved or guarded. It seems inconsistent to reverse that calculus for our forebears — even if the argument somehow nibbles at the origins of the modern American nation state.

I think the relationship of ending slavery to the Civil War is much as Lincoln described it in his Second Inaugural:

One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease.

That is, ending slavery was not the first object of Lincoln and the United States in The War of the Rebellion, as it is referred to in United States records. Rather, that object was simply but forcefully to insist that we had a deal: our Constitution foresaw some ways of resolving political conflict, but not others. Nevertheless, slavery was the root cause of that political conflict and that war, and slavery’s demise quickly (and foreseeably) became a corollary of ending the war on terms favorable to the Constitution and its Union.

Thus Henley (and Ron Paul) mislead themselves and others by arguing ending slavery was insufficient grounds for resisting secession. No: slavery’s preemptive defense was insufficient grounds — nay, evil and repugnant grounds — for proceeding with secession from this Constitution and this republic. I think constitutional patriots and defenders of liberty — ones like Henley, and perhaps like Ron Paul — do themselves no favor implying otherwise.

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NOTES: Kelman via Josh Marshall, where video of Ron Paul’s “Meet the Press” statements can be seen. “War of the Rebellion”: Cornell University “Making of America” digital archives.
* This would seem to open a loophole, but Lincoln closes it elsewhere: “If by the mere force of numbers, a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right, it might, in a moral point of view, justify revolution — certainly would, if such right were a vital one. But such is not our case” (because ending slavery was not Lincoln’s aim at that time). While I don’t know Ron Paul’s mind on the subject, I can’t imagine Henley would categorize a potential future threat to a class of property he finds an “abomination” as sufficient grounds for revolution.
** However, I do not actually accept it. A successful Confederacy need not have cared a whit for events in Russia and Brazil, would have been a new alliance partner for European countries, and might have maintained and perpetuated slavery in old forms or new (mining, assembly lines) all but indefinitely even if agricultural slavery waned — also not a given. It’s hard to believe a country that went to war for the right to expand its substantial interest in slavery to new areas would not in fact have done so, and did not rightly anticipate material rewards from that.

The real thanksgiving story is much more interesting than the one we’ve learned. That story about Squanto, the friendly Indian? Even the name is wrong. From Chapter 2 of 1491, by Charles C. Mann:

More than likely, Tisquantum was not the name he was given at birth. In that part of the Northeast, tisquantum referred to rage, especially the rage of manitou, the world-suffusing spiritual power at the heart of the coastal Indians’ religious beliefs. When Tisquantum approached the Pilgrims and identified himself by that sobriquet, it was as if he had stuck out his hand and said, Hello, I’m the Wrath of God.

But he taught the Pilgrims that bit with the fish, right? Well, yes… but there may be a little more to it than that:

So little evidence has emerged of Indians fertilizing with fish that some archaeologists believe that Tisquantum actually picked it up from European farmers. The notion is not as ridiculous as it may seem. Tisquantum had learned English because British sailors had kidnapped him seven years before… In his travels, Tisquantum stayed in places where Europeans used fish as fertilizer, a practice on the Continent since medieval times.

Big deal with helping anyway — it was the smart thing to do, European technology outclassed Indians in every way, right? Not so much:

…the natives soon learned that that most of the British were terrible shots, from lack of practice — their guns were little more than noisemakers. Even for a crack shot, a seventeeth-century gun had fewer advantages over a longbow than may be realized. Colonists in Jamestown taunted the Powhatan in 1607 with a target they believed impervious to an arrow shot. To the colonists’ dismay, an Indian sank an arrow into it a foot deep. [...] When the Powhatan later captured John Smith, [historian] Chaplin notes, Smith broke his pistol rather than reveal to his captors “the awful truth that it could not shoot as far as an arrow could fly.”

At least they all sat down together in peace and harmony for that first Thanksgiving? Well, they weren’t that fond of eachother — what really united them was grousing about the neighbors:

By fall the settlers’ situation was secure enough that they held a feast of thanksgiving. Massasoit showed up with ninety people, most of them young men with weapons. The Pilgrim militia responded by marching around and firing their guns in the air in a manner intended to convey menace. Gratified, both sides sat down, ate a lot of food, and complained about the Narragansett. Ecce Thanksgiving.

However, I insist on believing there were cranberries. Happy Thanksgiving!

While I’m thinking about what and whether to write, here’s some cool stuff I’ve run across on the Internet and elsewhere lately:

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The Civil War in Four Minutes — A video on YouTube showing how the area controlled by the Union and the Confederacy ebbed and flowed during the Civil War. It’s really quite satisfying when Sherman marches to the sea. Yay, Sherman! You go, boy.
UPDATE: Aw shoot, the guy had to pull it. Maybe the Abraham Lincoln Museum will put up a link sometime.

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enoweb lyrics : My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts. — By “cool stuff,” I mean of course “cool for me,” not necessarily “cool for you.” That said, I’m not alone in thinking this Brian Eno/David Byrne album is simply one of the best ever, period, full stop. The “lyrics” are actually snatches of recorded voices of radio talk show hosts, preachers, politicians, folk singers, and oh, yes, an exorcist.In the spirit of Jose Isaza’s annotations: we recently acquired a car with — gasp — a multi-CD player, with this album now ensconced in the #4 slot. So Maddie’s listened to it now to where she likes it even better than “Remain in Light” (#1) — and was observed declaiming “no will whatsoever… no WILL whatsoever… I mean what you gonna do?” to herself the other day.

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Hunting around, I’ve discovered there’s now a “Bush of Ghosts” web site about a re-release of the album, with an essay by David Byrne about the making of the album, and even more intriguingly, a site where you can re-mix tracks from two of the… songs, recordings, whatever, “A Secret Life” and “Help me, somebody”:

In keeping with the spirit of the original album, Brian Eno and David Byrne are offering for download all of the multitracks on two of the songs. Through signing up to the user license, and in line with Creative Commons licenses, you are free to edit, remix, sample and mutilate these tracks however you like. Add them to your own song or create a new one. This is the first time complete and total access to original tracks with remix and sampling possibilities have been officially offfered on line. Visitors are welcome to post their mixes or songs that incorporate these audio files on the site for others to hear and rate.

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“Once” — I confess I was reluctant to see this movie, but I found out last night I was wrong. Shot on a shoestring budget in Ireland, it features Glen Hansard (turns out he was also in “The Commitments” a while back) and an equally impressive 19! year old Czech musical prodigy Marketa Irglova. He’s a street performer pining for an old flame, she’s a young mom who wants little more from life than a chance to make music. What’s very cool about this movie is how good and heartfelt and believable the music they make is, and how well it fits the story that goes with it. Justly called a new kind of musical, it’s well worth your time.

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Our favorite bookstore, Politics and Prose, just got better: many of the book readings and the subsequent Q&A sessions there can now be viewed online at “Fora.tv”, among them Robert Dallek (”Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power”), Fritz Stern (”Five Germanies I Have Known”), and Christopher Hitchens (”God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything”).

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1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles Mann. The title might as well have added “Everything You Know Is Wrong.” You get a good sense of the book in an Atlantic Monthly article by Mann; I got interested after a glowing description by Teresa Nielsen Hayden (”Making Light”) last year, which you should read both for its own sake and for the comments by her anthropologist, sociologist, ecologist, and etceterologist readers.Mann says two main things in this book. First, there were many more people living in the Americas before Columbus than had been suspected. Second, they had civilizations that were much, much more advanced than had been suspected (by me, at least) — the largest cities on Earth, some of the healthiest people, civil engineering and scientific feats to rival the Old World’s. Check out particularly the stories about Tisquantum (a.k.a. Squanto of Thanksgiving memory), the stuff about khipu, a three (and, including color, four-)dimensional knot-language “like the coding systems used in modern-day computer language,” the story of maize (a prodigious feat of plant breeding), the possible real significance of the huge passenger pigeon flocks of the 1800s, and the bequest of the Haudenosaunee to the ideals America struggles to live up to.The archaeologists, linguists, and anthropologists Mann writes about — and Mann himself — are resurrecting the memory of a huge swath of mankind that was very nearly forgotten or at best given short shrift. This is quite simply the best book I’ve run across in the last couple of years — it’s that interesting, well written, and horizon expanding.

Good line by Bill Moyers in the 1987 documentary “The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis,” a very useful bit of history about Iran-Contra and the secret government it revealed. Moyers continues, “…no watchman to check the door — no accountant to check the books — no judge to check the law.” The thesis:

The Secret Government is an interlocking network of official functionaries, spies, mercenaries, ex-generals, profiteers and superpatriots, who, for a variety of motives, operate outside the legitimate institutions of government. Presidents have turned to them when they can’t win the support of the Congress or the people, creating that unsupervised power so feared by the framers of our Constitution. …

Via Tiny Revolution, King of Zembla, and the miracle of the internets, you can watch the whole 90 minutes right here, right now, if you like, or at least until whoever the copyright owner is complains.

There’s a thin but strong thread connecting those events with today. Moyers mentions that Congress was due to release a report on Iran-Contra as the documentary was aired. But the minority report was chaired by one Richard Cheney and written by one David Addington, now Cheney’s chief of staff. They asserted that there was nothing wrong about a President failing to follow the law when it came to national security. Rather, it was wrong of Congress to expect that, as Joan Didion summarized Cheney’s views in the 10/5/06 New York Review of Books:

…the “mistakes” in Iran-contra, as construed by the minority report, had followed not from having done the illegal but from having allowed the illegal to become illegal in the first place. As laid out by the minority, a principal “mistake” made by the Reagan administration in Iran-contra was in allowing President Reagan to sign rather than veto the 1984 Boland II Amendment forbidding aid to contra forces: no Boland II, no illegality. A second “mistake,” to the same point, was Reagan’s “less-than-robust defense of his office’s constitutional powers, a mistake he repeated when he acceded too readily and too completely to waive executive privilege for our Committees’ investigation.”

No reason to think he feels any differently now; no reason to think he’s hiding anything less illegal.

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UPDATE/EDIT, 12/4/07: different access to video embedded. In case this one becomes unavailable as well, see key excerpts and a partial transcript here (wanttoknow.info).

Washington threw itself a full dress funeral on Tuesday. I’m not complaining, I got the day off too. I’m also not one to criticize former President Ford unduly. When E.M. Forster once wrote that “I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country,” he could not quite have had Ford’s pardon of Nixon in mind. But maybe it was those very words that tipped the balance for the bluff, loyal, plainspoken University of Michigan center so fervently eulogized in the Washington Cathedral and in the pages of our national newspapers. Perhaps Forster’s thought is a reason not to take issue with a president’s defining choice — but then it’s all the more reason to question his choice of friends.

I was resolved to not pay any attention whatsoever to the proceedings in favor of enjoying an unexpected extra day of vacation. But then, as I was driving a rental car back to National Airport — pardon me, Reagan National Airport — I switched on the radio and heard Henry Kissinger croak that Gerald Ford left the presidency with “no regrets, no second-guessing, and no obsessive pursuit of his place in history.”

“No regrets, no second-guessing.” A message all Washington might well prefer these days, and a message almost — no, certainly — calculated to appeal to Kissinger’s latest presidential client, so famously resistant to regrets, admitting mistakes, learning, call it what you will. When I watched the PBS recording of the cathedral service, it seemed to me that Tom Brokaw’s less calculating eulogy line — “When he entered the Oval Office — by fate, not by design — Citizen Ford knew that he was not perfect, just as he knew he was not perfect when he left. But what president ever was?” — got Bush’s pursed-lips-of-disapproval reaction, whether at being reminded of his own controversial elevation to the presidency, his fallibility, or both, I can’t say.

A state funeral is no different from any other in reminding those attending of their mortality. So it’s no surprise it serves as a solemn occasion for the political class of the republic to pluck from the recently deceased’s life those lessons most soothing and flattering to themselves, or distracting to others. And so we were treated to endless paeans to Ford’s “bipartisanship,” to the “healing” he brought about by pardoning Nixon, to the “civility” of the bygone era, and to his supposed lack of political ambition — even if the facts tend to speak otherwise,* or if the eulogists were singularly inappropriate. Thus David Broder’s predictable simpering about Ford’s “standard of civility”; Richard Ben-Veniste’s odd worries about the “specter” of legal action against Nixon “as our country moved into its bicentennial year”; Ron Nessen’s hackneyed, vague contrast of the golden Ford era with “these days of angry, divisive, polarized, downright nasty Washington rhetoric”; and in a particularly rich homage, Richard Cheney’s evocation of Ford’s courtesy — rarely has hypocrisy’s definition as the tribute vice pays to virtue been so perfectly demonstrated.

Above all, that “healing” pardon of Nixon also short-circuited a crucial legal opportunity — no, necessity — to prove that even a president is not above the law. Whatever Ford’s motives may have been, it was a negative lesson learned all too well by Ford staffers like Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld — somewhat less averse to the “obsessive pursuit of their place in history” than their revered leader. Given their role in other Ford decisions like fighting the Freedom of Information Act, it’s hard to believe their advice on the matter was a simple matter of friendship — although they may well have pitched it that way.

So popular headlines like “Healer of Wounds” seem wide of the mark to me. I can’t recall where I read this over the last few days, so the metaphor isn’t mine, but one might fairly say Ford bound up a festering wound of executive lawlessness, leaving an infection that flared up over and over again over the next decades. Following Ford’s installment with Nixon’s pardon was not a model of how a republic and democracy should be run; as Avedon Carol wrote the other day, “The original Ford solution is what brought us to where we are now - we can’t do that again.”

When someone dies, most people will want to follow the old dictum, “if you can’t say something nice about him, say nothing at all.” And I’m certainly not suggesting Betty Ford and her children should have been subjected to anything less than a warm remembrance of someone who was by all accounts a decent human being — perhaps decent to a fault.

But at this point, we as a country can’t afford to draw any more wrong conclusions, we can’t afford to make each and every occasion of state yet another opportunity to confirm our fondest dreams and delusions about ourselves. “No regrets, no second-guessing”? That’s got to be the worst advice this country and its president could possibly get right now. Thirty years after Ford left office, his alleged virtues have become antidemocratic vices: “healing” is overrated, “civility” conceals or invites contempt, and “bipartisanship” thwarts the political will of the people expressed at the ballot box. Maybe that’s a shame, but that’s the way it is, and pretending we’re somewhere else or something else will just make things worse.

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* Ford’s ambition and partisanship were not so small as to fail to wage a bitter primary fight with Ronald Reagan and an equally determined contest with Jimmy Carter. Regarding “bipartisanship,” Ford vetoed 48 bills passed by the Democratic Congress in his short tenure in office, the highest veto rate of any American president since Truman. While there are two sides to any partisan political fight, Ford also picked many he lost: the 12 Ford veto override votes by Congress were the the most per year in the postwar era, and fortunately included the Freedom of Information Act.

NOTES: Richard Cheney’s hypocrisy noted by digby (”hullabaloo”). See also comments by fellow hullabaleer poputonian.

UPDATE, 1/7: Amy Goodman (”Democracy Now” radio host) expresses similar thoughts in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (”Impeaching, Prosecuting Nixon Could Have Elevated the Nation“): “If those emerging power brokers [Rumsfeld and Cheney -- ed.] had witnessed a vigorous prosecution of Nixon and his co-conspirators, it could have elevated the country … and changed history. Perhaps a decade later, the Reagan-Bush administration would have thought twice about the Iran-Contra scandal, in which an unaccountable administration would defy Congress and illegally support the Contras in Nicaragua, who killed thousands of civilians. Perhaps the current Bush administration would not have dared to manipulate intelligence to invade Iraq, leading to the deaths of thousands of U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.” (Hat tip: Dad.)

Writing in Slate, Diane McWhorter discusses the causes and effects of our curious and frankly dangerous reluctance to even consider the worst historical parallel there could be to our own state of affairs:

The taboo is itself a precept of the propaganda state. Usually its enforcers profess a politically correct motive: the exceptionalism of genocidal Jewish victimhood. Thus, poor Sen. Richard Durbin, the Democrat from Illinois, found himself apologizing to the Anti-Defamation League after Republicans jumped all over him for invoking Nazi Germany to describe the conditions at Guantanamo. And so by allowing the issue to be defined by the unique suffering of the Jews, we ignore the Holocaust’s more universal hallmark: the banal ordinariness of the citizens who perpetrated it. The relevance of Third Reich Germany to today’s America is not that Bush equals Hitler or that the United States government is a death machine. It’s that it provides a rather spectacular example of the insidious process by which decent people come to regard the unthinkable as not only thinkable but doable, justifiable. Of the way freethinkers and speakers become compliant and self-censoring. Of the mechanism by which moral or humanistic categories are converted into bureaucratic ones. And finally, of the willingness with which we hand control over to the state and convince ourselves that we are the masters of our destiny.

The analogies between then and now don’t need to be exact to have been and continue to be deeply troubling — see McWhorter for a detailed listing if you need it. As the Israeli historian Avi Schlaim once put it, the question is not whether we’re the same as Nazis; it’s whether we’re different enough.

If you tape over half your rear view mirror, you’re going to be missing a lot of traffic behind you, closing fast.

Via Jim Henley.

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EDIT, 12/4: italics shifted from “whether” to “same.” The precise quote: “The issue isn’t whether or not we are the same as the Nazis, the issue is that we aren’t different enough.”
UPDATE, 12/12: Welcome, Sideshow visitors! Comments are always welcome.

Last weekend, we visited George Washington’s Mount Vernon home again, it’s a favorite for all of us. There was a crafts fair, and it was great fun, in a make-believe kind of way: smoked turkey legs for lunch, a potter turning a pot on a simple foot-powered wheel, a candlemaker dipping candles. The First Virginia Regiment re-enactors showed how American Revolutionary war era soldiers formed a line, loaded, aimed, fired. Later we went out on a free boat ride and saw the historic house from the river, the same way British gunboats may have seen it during the war.

It all made me a little wistful. From an interview with human-rights lawyer Scott Horton by NewsCity’s Tim McGivern:

Now, if you know the tradition of the United States Army, one thing has been consistent and that is that we are aggressive and tough on the field of battle, but when you take prisoners they are treated humanly and with respect.

That’s the rule that was set by George Washington in the battle of Trenton on Dec. 25, 1776. The soldiers of the continental army took the Hessians and said these soldiers are mercenaries and we should take retribution on them. They wanted the Hessians to run the gauntlet and they would beat them with sticks.

No, we would never do that.

General Washington said we will not do this. He said these people will be treated with respect and dignity and they will suffer no abuse or torture, because to do otherwise would bring dishonor upon our sacred cause.

That’s one of the first orders given to the continental army and that antedates the United States. It has been military tradition for 240 years, and it was stopped by Donald Rumsfeld.

Emphasis added.

Those quaint words “sacred” and “honor” come up elsewhere, as it happens. As any loyal watcher of Liberty’s Kids knows, our very Declaration of Independence closes with the words “our sacred Honor,” as in “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”

So I think this whole “honor” thing might be something worth considering by conservatives, concerned as they always are with our nation’s traditions and its original intent. At least, I wish it were.

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UPDATE, 9/21: photos added. NOTE: The reenactor didn’t say what was in the caption, nor was he asked the implied question. But I’ll leave the caption as it is.

Civitella Maritima, south of Siena.

We got off to a later start than we’d hoped the next day, despite warnings that our goal, the town of Siena, pretty much shuts down in the afternoon, especially perhaps during Easter week.

The day was sunny and the drive was beautiful, especially as we turned inland from Grossetto and headed north. For a shot out the open window of a moving car, the one on the right isn’t half bad, I think; if only I knew which town it was …Pari? Leccio? Campagnatico?

We arrived around noon, but lucky for us, things were not as shut down as we feared. Parking in one of the garages on the edge of the old town inside the walls — like Florence, no nonresident traffic is allowed within the old town — we set out to see what we could of the city and its treasures.

Siena rooftops from Opera della Metropolitana,
Duomo di Siena.

Siena has been under development restrictions for some time — for centuries, in fact. At one time it was a wealthy Ghibelline (imperial) rival to Guelph (papal) Florence, and even administered a crushing defeat to that city’s armed forces in 1260. But then came the Black Death, which apparently hit Siena harder than it did Florence. Another battle with the Florentines ended in Sienese defeat — and terms that no further building would occur.

The potted history is intended only to explain why Siena is both a exceptionally well-preserved medieval/Renaissance Italian city, and one that was once powerful enough to command the talents of the greatest master builders and artists and develop a distinctive style of its own.

Duccio’s Maesta
Our first goal was a painting that Cricket has always wanted to see: Duccio’s Maesta (Virgin in Majesty), in the Opera della Metropolitana, a museum housing art works of the Siena Duomo. The museum is actually housed in what would have been the nave of an even vaster Sienese cathedral than the present-day Duomo, which was originally intended to be only the sanctuary and transepts (the “head and hands”) of the larger planned structure.

The “Opera” houses many other great works as well. One I liked was Tondo of the Virgin and Child by Donatello (1457), a kind of large stone medallion (maybe a yard wide). At first the otherwise beautiful Mary seems to have really overly large hands — until you realized the piece was designed to be seen from nearby and below.

But the Maesta was by itself in a specially climate-controlled room, and it really is spectacular — a 7 by 14 foot or so wooden panel, painted in a style that seems to have just begun a breakout from medieval conventions (distinct, recognizable faces, the artist’s signature) with lavish use of golds, scarlet red, and dark blue. The painting was unveiled on what was declared a public holiday in 1311. From a contemporary account:

…and on the day that (it) was carried to the Cathedral, the shops were closed and the Bishop ordered a great and devout company of priests and brothers with a solemn procession, accompanied by the Signori of the Nine and all the officials of the Comune, and all the people, and in order all the most distinguished were close behind the picture with lighted candles in their hands; and the women and children were following with great devotion: and they all accompanied the picture as far as the Cathedral, going round the Campo in procession, and according to custom, the bells rang in glory and in veneration of such a noble picture as this, . . . and all that day was spent in worship and alms-giving to the poor, praying to the Mother of God, our protectress, to defend us by her infinite mercy from all adversity, and to guard us against the hand of traitors and enemies of Siena.

Quite a difference from the hushed room the Maesta is in now! Commissioning the painting was quite expensive for its time — lots of gold, an artist paid a substantial daily wage for 3 years; together with the rapturous reception, I think it illustrates a “conspicuous pious consumption” principle that seemed to inspire and subsidize most art in those days. But whatever pleasure the Mother of God took from the painting, prayers, and alms-giving, Siena’s protection was at best short-lived — the Black Death (1347-1351) lay only a few years ahead.

A reverse panel was visible to the clergy as the image above was to worshipers. It now hangs across the room from the Virgin in Majesty, and shows Stories of the Passion in a series of 12 panels. I tried to identify what was going on for Maddie, who demanded to be told what exactly was going on in every panel. Family of heathens that we are, this was her first detailed exposure to the story. Subsequent reading confirmed my befuddled guess that Duccio was an early blogger — in that the all the earlier Passion stories are in the 6 panels of the bottom row, with later stories left to right along the top row.

Almost unbelievably, Duccio’s masterpiece was sawn apart in the late 1700s; two of the resulting fragments are now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. One, The Calling of the Apostles Peter and Andrew, is Cricket’s favorite NGA piece. That connection was what prompted our visit to the Maesta — and a palpable step back in time.

Duomo, Piazza del Campo
We climbed to a gangway atop the Opera, above what would have been the entrance to the larger Duomo, and looked across to the Duomo in one direction, towards the Palazzo Publico and its tower, the immense Torre del Mangia in another. After exploring the museum a little more, we headed over to the Duomo for a look inside. In the war of all against all that was also the Renaissance, I’m guessing that impressing rubes and visiting dignitaries was cheap compared to fighting them — so up and coming cities like Siena spent a lot on impressive buildings.

Like Florence, the Sienese Duomo seems designed to show city pride nearly as much as veneration for the Holy Trinity and its church. Siena’s colors are black and white, and the cathedral walls and columns are built with evenly alternating black and white marble layers. The effect is both attractive and showy, and clearly says “spare no expense.” Something I also don’t recall seeing before, at least to the level of the Duomo di Siena, was very advanced marble-inlay flooring; artisans were able to use to compose quite intricate and naturalistic “marble jigsaw” (more accurately intarsia) pictures. The technique was apparently first developed by Sienese woodcarvers.

Torre del Mangia.

Leaving the Duomo, we headed for the centerpiece of Siena, the Piazza del Campo and its huge bell and watch tower, the Torre del Mangia. As you walk through Siena, you notice that different neighborhoods have their own insignia underneath the street signs. The symbols of each neighborhood, or contrada, are often whimsical or exotic; there were Rhinoceros, Unicorn, Caterpillar, and Snail contrade, among the 17 comprising Siena.

Coming up on the Piazza and seeing up close how big the ancient Torre is (330 feet, finished in 1348 just as the bubonic plague hit) was unforgettable. The Piazza del Campo is justly renowned as well. The plaza is a huge semicircle, that slope down towards the Palazzo Publico and the Torre in 9 distinct “pizza slices”brepresenting the nine elders (signori, see above) who ruled the city. Off limits to traffic, it has the feel of a kind of medieval urban beach, surrounded by cafes, storefronts, and of course the imposing Palazzo and Torre.

In addition to its layout, the Piazza is famous for being the site of biannual horse race, the Palio di Siena, a three-circuit race around the edge of the Piazza, pitting horses and riders sponsored by each of the Sienese contrade against eachother. My brother-in-law once actually saw one of these races, and achieved a measure of newspaper photograph fame for trying to help pull a fallen rider out of the way of an equally terrified horse careening towards them.

Leaving Siena
Leaving Siena, we drove north and then west to San Gimignano, famous for its medieval skyline of family towers, ranging around 150 feet high. We walked towards the center of town and back, just taking in the sights and not really even checking our guide book for information; we were all a little tired. After a quick supper, we headed back to the car parking lot outside the city wall.

It was getting dark, and our not-so-early start now took its revenge in an occasionally hair-raising drive back “home” to Baratti. The road west from San Gimignano towards Volterra is long, winding, and mountainous, most other drivers wanted to go faster than we did, and turnouts were generally on the “precipice” side of the road rather than the hill side. This resulted in our car leading several long processions through the nighttime hills of Italy, more than a few exasperated Italian drivers, but nothing worse.

Easter weekend and leaving Italy, April 15-17
On Saturday and Sunday we undertook no major excursions, preferring to relax in Baratti with our relatives and new friends. We helped a bit with a sweet Easter egg hunt (no colored eggs, just the good stuff: candy and chocolate), which some of the host’s Italian friends’ children participated in.

On Sunday, we attended a Easter service at the house of one of our host’s sisters. It was nontraditional for not being in a church, and featuring folk songs, but a Catholic priest who was a friend of the family presided over the event, preaching in Italian. (I wasn’t sure whether Catholic services in Italy are held in Italian or Latin, and I suppose I still don’t know what happens generally.)

Our trip drew to a close on Monday, with a morning dash down the Italian coast back to Rome and the Fiumicino Airport. Stopping at a small gas station along the autostrada to top off the tank and get a bite to eat, we found a full service cafe, with espresso, freshly made prosciutto and mozzarella and artichoke sandwiches, and all the other paraphernalia and offerings of a good Italian sidewalk cafe. I can’t say I was really surprised by then — I’d say one part of the Italian lifestyle is “life’s too short to eat bad food,” and we were just seeing the same principle at work along an Italian highway.

I’ll add a few miscellaneous notes separately, but that’s pretty much it for this travelogue. It’s mainly for my own use and that of my family, but I hope it proves interesting and useful to others as well.

Yours truly, Piazza del Campo, Siena.

[Italy travelogue: home] [posted on 5/4]

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FURTHER READING (headings link to Wikipedia entries)
Duomo di Siena: Official museum site Opera della Metropolitana.
Palazzo Publico, Torre del Mangia: official Palazzo Publico e Museo Civico site.
Piazza del Campo, Palio di Siena: The Piazza is listed on the Great Buildings site. There are both official and unofficial English language sites devoted to recording the history and organization of the Palio di Siena races and explaining them to outsiders. The unofficial one – La Voce della Piazza — is clearly by fans, for fans. From “75 seconds to victory“: “…Finally a silence filled with anxiousness comes over the Piazza. Sunto has stopped ringing; the Sienese hold their collective breaths and the last formalities seem an eternity. And suddenly horses and jockeys in the stupendous colors of their Contrade exit from the Cortile of the Podestà. The Campo is a palette, a caleidoscope; everyone looks in the same direction while the race horses go slowly to the ropes…”

Duccio: A profusely illustrated book — Duccio: The Maesta — by Sienese art historian Luciano Bellosi looks to be a painstaking effort. The Web Gallery of Art offers a “guided tour” of Duccio’s work, as well as of Sienese painters in general. See also this SUNY Oneonta student web site. As mentioned above, The National Gallery has two fragments of the original Maesta. A 2005 New Yorker article, “The missing Madonna,” tells the story behind the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s most expensive acquisition, Duccio’s “Madonna and Child” — “Finally, the Met has its ‘Mona Lisa.”
Donatello: This Opera della Metropolitana document confirmed that Donatello intended a “foreshortening” effect for the Tondo.

Siena: Official web site for tourists.
San Gimignano: Official web site. In an economics- and mathematics-laden analysis titled Household Saving, Competitive Conspicuous Consumption and Income Inequality, Herbert Walther calls the San Gimignano towers a “nice example of wasteful competition between various families of the upper class in a medieval society” but asks whether they made a certain kind of sense after all: “Or was it rather a conscious signal of prosperity and wealth (like many other monuments), offering prospective coalition partners a clear hint, whom they should trust and associate with in the future? Such signals may have been particularly important at a time, when property rights were insecure and coalition partners were needed for support…”

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* From the Web Gallery of Art history of the painting.

EDIT, 2007: Gloria of Casina di Rosa has identified the town in the picture as her town of Civitella Maritima; thanks very much! We seem to have been heading south for some reason, I’d forgotten that part — maybe it was to take this picture.

Lion, Loggia dei Lanzi, Piazza della Signoria.

We arranged what turned out to be a pleasant, comfortable 2d-class train trip from Rome to Florence the previous evening, and arrived around noon. With what seemed like roughly two tons of luggage, we decided to take a taxi to Hotel Belletini, one of the more reasonably priced places to stay in town, and located pretty centrally; in truth, we could have just about walked there, although schlepping that suitcase full of books would not have been much fun. We were very happy with the friendly reception and good service we got at the hotel (just as we were in Rome).

We left our luggage and commenced exploring Florence. Our first goal was to get a first look at the “Duomo”, the magnificent central cathedral Santa Maria del Fiore. Traffic has been routed away from it (and only city residents can drive inside the city anyway), but that means some of the nearby streets are correspondingly congested; together with every other tourist in Florence wanting to see the Duomo as well, it’s a somewhat crowded experience to get where you want to go. Still, once you’re between the baptistry — a beautiful second building, with magnificent doors by Ghiberti — and the Duomo, things open up a little, and you’re glad to be in one of the great places of all Europe and the world.

Copy of Michelangelo’s ‘David,’
Piazza della Signoria.

After taking care of renting a car for the next leg of our journey, we returned to the hotel to take our room and rest up a bit. Then it was off for more exploration. This time we headed for the the spectacular Piazza della Signoria, flanked by the Palazzo Vecchio (”the old palace”) and the Loggia dei Lanzi, a kind of Renaissance era open-air museum featuring great sculptures by Cellini, Giambologna, and others. (The “Lanzi” turn out to refer to “lanzicenecchi” — the Italian version of “Landsknechte”, or German mercenaries, who were originally housed in the building by Grand Duke Cosimo I.) Walking on, we crossed the jewelry store-encrusted Ponte Vecchio, a bridge-plus-stores structure crossing the Arno River. Beautiful stuff, gold, silver, coral.

Based on a glowing review in a Saveur magazine, we went to the Trattoria Sostanza for dinner that evening. By showing up at opening time (7:30pm, if I recall correctly) we wangled some seats on condition that we were prepared to leave at 9:00. Whatever, fair enough. The restaurant is actually pretty small, seating maybe 30 people in a single narrow room. It turns out to be the oldest trattoria in Florence, and is a favorite of locals and “foodie” tourists alike. (The Saveur article is for subscribers only, but it’s also reviewed in this Guardian article.) I had a wonderful minestrone soup (pureed, I hadn’t seen that before) and a great bistecca alla Fiorentina — steak Florentine style — and some good house red wine; we struck up a nice conversation with our Italian table partners, and generally had a great time.

April 12

Duomo, Santa Maria del Fiore.
A.k.a. “the stripey church” by Maddie.

The first thing we did the next day — after a nice breakfast in the hotel, something Maddie really appreciated and tucked into — was to revisit the Duomo in order to go up to the top and see the ceiling frescoes by Vasari along the way.

The ascent to the base of the dome goes along two or three narrow spiral staircases. Once you’re there, you can walk around a vertiginous gangway (it’s over 55 meters down to the bottom, but there’s a pretty solid marble balustrade and plexiglass barrier) allowing a view of Vasari’s “Last Judgment.” I was briefly sorry for bringing Maddie; parts of the painting are pretty horrific (that’s the point, of course), with one prominent demon’s flaming pike aimed squarely at the rear end of a victim. I could only hope these things weren’t ever actually done to anyone, but I have a bad feeling about that, too.

Resuming the ascent, we got a first hand look at one of the remarkable features of the dome. It’s double-shelled, with the brickwork involved slanted inward and apparently cleverly interlocked, although that’s hard to see from the side. As I understand it, this was all part of the builder Brunelleschi’s strategy for making the overall structure lighter, avoiding expensive wood scaffolding, and allowing an octagonal-based dome rather than the usual circular kind. The (fairly huge) wooden model he built to illustrate how he would do it was once on display here in Washington, D.C.

View of Palazzo Vecchio from Duomo.

The view from the top is spectacular, of course. Maddie was very proud to have made the climb, and can still tell you it took 463 steps to do it. And of course 463 steps back down as well.

After a gelato break, we decided to visit the Basilica di Santa Croce. Like many churches in Florence and in Italy, this one leads a dual existence as church and art museum. An audio guide we rented and its accompanying brochure identified about fifty or sixty distinct things to see — tombs of Michelangelo and Macchiavelli among them — but Giotto frescoes in the Bardi and Peruzzi chapels were our main destination in the main cathedral.

Giotto was a shepherd’s son, and so talented an artist that a lost lamb was said to have been attracted to an image of its mother the boy painted on a rock. I happen to know that story from often reading a rather nice children’s book — A Boy Named Giotto — to my little girl when she was younger; the connection was why we were so interested in the artist. In the children’s book, the drawings seem more medieval and two-dimensional (although also quite nice); Giotto’s own work was a great deal more expressive and modern in appearance, especially the Death of St. Francis,* in which the various monks at the saint’s deathbed are distinctive individuals. The relatively flat coloring and clean line drawing reminded me of good quality cartoons (which I don’t at all mean negatively).

Giotto was an apprentice to Cimabue, who created the Crucifix of Santa Croce, a huge crucifix that was notable in its time for a slightly surprising reason — it depicted Jesus after his death, still on the cross, having suffered obvious pain. The style had been to either depict Jesus risen and triumphant, or at least still alive; Cimabue’s more forthright crucifix was a harbinger of breaking other artistic conventions and restraints — and may also reflect credit on his patrons, the Franciscan order, who seemed to push the ecclesiastic envelope in other ways, such as burying Galileo on church grounds against papal wishes.

Sadly, the River Arno flooded in 1966, and Santa Croce lies close to its banks. The flood rose 7 meters high in the Franciscan “refectory” room in which Cimabue’s masterpiece was hung, damaging it badly. Having seen it in its present state, however painstakingly restored, it’s a little sad to see how beautiful it once was.

The Santa Croce church and piazza occupy a special place in Florentine and indeed apparently Italian affairs, as the basilica’s Westminster Abbey-like function as the burial site of so many of Italy’s greats attests. The piazza is one of four venues for an annual half-soccer-, half-rugby-like Calcio Storico tournament pitting teams from different parts of the city against eachother in historical costumes; the neighborhood appeared to be one middle class people actually lived in, some of the others were more completely given over to pricy stores and whatnot.

We grabbed a bite to eat at an enoteca — wine and lunch bar — and then headed back across the river to the Palazzo Pitti and its Boboli Gardens. By now we were a little beat, to tell the truth, and after climbing up to the first level of the garden, now well above most of the city, we all just sat down near an ornate, rococo-looking pool. Maddie commenced writing in her journal, while my wife and I just chilled out.

A visit this brief to Florence almost makes you as aware of what you didn’t see as what you did. I knew about the Uffizi, the Accademia, and the Brancacci chapel, and actually visited them over 25 years ago. If I ever make it back for a week I’ll make sure to visit them again. Looking around inside places like the Palazzo Vecchio and the Palazzo Pitti would have been nice, too. But I learned about another site worth seeing once I got back from this trip — the Institute for the History of Science. The Renaissance is apparently considered by some to be a bit of a dry spell for science, but this institute (and some of my subsequent reading) makes plain that something was afoot all the same: one might say advances in metallurgy, optics, and engineering during the Renaissance laid the groundwork for the scientific revolution just ahead, as did simply the spirit of inquiry and pride that seemed so evident in the best of Renaissance work.

It was time for us go. We headed back across the river and picked up our car. I fetched our luggage by taxi, and we then fought our way out of town as rush hour began. Soon we were on the open road towards Livorno, and then points south: San Vincenzo and Baratti.

[Italy travelogue: home] [posted on 4/28]

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FURTHER READING (headings link to Wikipedia entries)

Santa Maria del Fiore (”Duomo”): In Long-Span Structures, Angus MacDonald, ArchitectureWeek) discusses engineering innovations Brunelleschi used to span the dome, such as special brickwork and the double dome plan, calling the result “an example of genuine ‘high tech.’ The overall form was determined from structural considerations and not compromised for visual effect.” Scientific American Frontiers’ Science, Italian Style: Renaissance Machine discusses other Brunelleschi innovations during work on the Duomo, like the first reversible hoist (animation by Institute for the History of Science)– speeding work by no longer unharnessing horses between loads headed up and those headed down. A lecture by McGill University’s Maria Farfan (”Dome Structures: Santa Maria Del Fiore (Florence)“) provides more details about the Duomo’s construction. Here is one photo of Vasari’s Last Judgment painting on the inner surface of the Duomo. See also Great Buildings, mega.it.
Palazzo Vecchio: official site. See also mega.it.
Ponte Vecchio: Great Buildings, mega.it.
Basilica di Santa Croce di Firenze: The Franciscan order has an interesting history of its own, of course. The Santa Croce neighborhood is described by the proprietor of Le Stanze di Santa Croce, which looks to be a nice bed and breakfast. The “About Florence” tourist information site has a good description of the “Calcio Storico” tournament; see also this everything2 account which notes, “the referee carries a sword and needs it.” See also mega.it.
Palazzo Pitti: official site. See also mega.it.
Boboli Gardens: official site. See also mega.it.
Uffizi: the official site is partly in English, and lists basic information, and updates on exhibits, and events. See also the Virtual Uffizi, which offers advance tickets and a comprehensive image catalog. The images are all around 600*400 pixels, so you get a sense of the art or sculpture, but not a detailed one. See also meta.it.

Brunelleschi: the Institute for the History of Science has several exhibits about Brunelleschi including a biography and a discussion of his work on the Dome.
Giotto: The extremely cool Web Gallery of Art (developed by Emil Kren and Daniel Marx) provides the online tour The Art of Giotto, which includes Frescoes in the Bardi Chapel and Frescoes in the Peruzzi Chapel.
Cimabue: Giotto’s teacher seems to have been a similarly driven child artist, according to Vasari: “Instead of studying his letters, Cimabue spent all his time covering his paper and his books with pictures showing people, horses, houses, and various other things he dreamt up.” The Web Gallery of Art biography notes that Cimabue is mentioned as one of the foremost painters of the day in Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Renaissance: The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Timeline of Art History: Florence and Central Italy is a well-constructed overview linking to images and discussions of items in its own collection. It’s the tip of an online iceberg’s worth of art historical information, images and data, a real treat. Books: I’ve already mentioned Paul Johnson’s sensible, compact The Renaissance: A Short History. J.H. Plumb’s The Italian Renaissance is another accessible classic, with chapters by people like Jacob Brownowski and Garrett Mattingly. I’ve now picked up a copy of Christopher Hibbert’s The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall as well.
Florence: ItalyGuide Virtual Travel in the City of Florence lets you pan and zoom 360 degree views of the Duomo and other sites throughout the city. They also offer iPod-downloadable audio guides to many of the same sites.

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* Web Gallery of Art.