Category Archives: US History

The Ernie Pyle World War II Museum

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I have a sneaking suspicion that the later 21st century is going to be completely indifferent to war correspondent Ernie Pyle. Like almost everyone else, he’ll join the ranks of the obscure. The items now collected at the Ernie Pyle World War II Museum in rural Indiana will scatter to archives or private collections or landfills. Only occasionally will anyone read his writings, as found in libraries or odd corners of the Internet.

The process is already underway. The museum used to be the Ernie Pyle State Historic Site, owned and run by the state of Indiana. When the recession came 10 years ago, state budgets suffered. I doubt that anyone put it down officially in a memo or the like, but I’m sure the decision to close the Ernie Pyle SHS came down to, “Who’s heard of him anyway?”

A nonprofit, the Friends of Ernie Pyle, now owns the site and carries on the struggle against obscurity. The organization renamed the museum nearly a decade ago. Yet Randy McNally, in its 2017 Road Atlas, still calls it a state historic site. So does Google Maps. It isn’t a place that gets a lot of attention.

We arrived in the hamlet of Dana, Indiana, early in the afternoon on Saturday. Rain had dogged us most of the way from Champaign, Illinois, where we’d spent the previous night. The museum includes the house in which Ernie Pyle was born in 1900, relocated from the nearby farm fields.

Next to the birth house are two Quonset huts, World War II vintage but never used for military purposes, that house displays and Ernie Pyle artifacts. It continued to rain while we were in the huts, with drops drumming on the metal in their distinctive way the whole time.

I probably would have heard about Ernie Pyle later anyway, but I like to think that the reason we came was that Bill Swinny, one of my high school English teachers, planted the seed by telling us about him during class one day. Mr. Swinny, who taught us a good deal more than high school-level literature, managed to convey how upset the nation was at the death of Ernie Pyle, coming as it did right after the death of President Roosevelt.

We were the only visitors at the museum. An informative woman in her 60s took our admission. Also on staff was a much quieter young man, perhaps as young as 20 and perhaps a relative of the older woman, who was doing his bit to help out, though that’s just a guess on my part.

The larger displays, including Pyle-like mannequins standing in for him, evoke Ernie Pyle’s wartime circumstances. That is, living with the GIs he wrote about.
A good number of his columns are posted for visitors to read. You can also listen to excerpts from the columns by picking up telephone receivers. There are a few videos. One is devoted to a single early 1944 column, “The Death of Captain Waskow.” As well it should be, since the column is a masterpiece of reportage.

Good to know that Ernie Pyle got a Purple Heart, by act of Congress in 1983. A rare honor for a civilian.
The birth house was interesting, though less compelling. But I did learn that Ernest Taylor Pyle was born poor. At the time of his birth, his parents were tenant farmers.

The museum isn’t quite all there is when it comes to commemorating Ernie Pyle in that part of Indiana. A few miles to the east of Dana, on U.S. 36, is the Ernie Pyle Rest Park, essentially a wayside rest stop. One feature stands out, and got me to stop despite the rain.

Ernie Pyle Memorial IndianaIt’s a replica of Ernie Pyle’s memorial on Ie Shima, the small island on which he was killed by enemy fire.

At This Spot
The
77th Infantry Division
Lost A Buddy
Ernie Pyle
18 April 1945

This is a replica of the original built at Ie Shima by the 111S Engineer Combat Group United States Army.

I can’t speak for Ernie Pyle, but I imagine that the thought of being forgotten by future generations might not have troubled him. I get the sense that he would have preferred that the men he wrote about be remembered instead.

Southern Loop Debris

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When were driving through LaGrange, Texas, on the first day of the trip, I began to wonder. What’s this town known for? I know it’s something. Then I saw a sign calling LaGrange “the best little town in Texas.” Oh, yeah. Famed in song and story.

On the way to Buffalo Bayou Park in Houston, we took a quick detour — because I’d seen it on a map — to see the Beer Can House at 222 Malone St., a quick view from the car. Looks like this. Had we wanted to spend a little more time in Houston, I definitely would have visited the Orange Show. Ah, well.

We enjoyed our walk along Esplanade St. in New Orleans, where you can see some fine houses.
Plus efforts to thwart porch pirates. We saw more than one sign along these lines during our walk down the street.
We spent part of an evening in New Orleans on Frenchman St., which is described as not as rowdy or vomit-prone as Bourbon St., and I suppose that’s true, though it is a lively place. We went for the music.

At Three Muses, we saw Washboard Rodeo. They were fun. Western swing in New Orleans. Played some Bob Wills, they did.

At d.b.a, we saw Brother Tyrone and the Mindbenders. Counts as rock and soul, I’d say. Also good fun, though they were playing for a pretty thin Monday night crowd.

Adjacent to Frenchman St. is an evening outdoor market, the Frenchman Art Market, which we visited between the two performances. The market featured an impressive array of local art for sale, though nothing we couldn’t live without.

Something you see on U.S. 61 just outside of Natchez, Mississippi: Mammy’s Cupboard, a restaurant. More about it here.

In Philadelphia, Mississippi, Stribling St. is still around. I don’t know why it wouldn’t be, but after nearly 30 years, I wanted another look.

So is the local pharmacy run by distant cousins. Glad the chains haven’t spelled its demise.

During our drive from metro Jackson, Mississippi, to Montgomery, Alabama — connected by U.S. 80 and not an Interstate, as you might think — we passed through Selma, Alabama. I made a point of driving across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, though we decided not to get out and look around. Remarkably, the bridge looks exactly as it does in pictures more than 50 years old.

In downtown Montgomery, you can see this statue. I understand the bronze has been around since 1991, but was only recently moved to its current site not far from Riverfront Park, the river of course being the Alabama.
I’d forgotten native son Hank Williams died so young. Some singers die rock ‘n’ roll deaths, some die country deaths like Hank.

Speaking of death, early in the trip, I was activating my phone — whose dim algorithm always suggests news I seldom want to see during the process — and I noticed the name “Doris Day” in the feed. I figured that could mean only one thing. Sure enough, she became the first celebrity death of the trip.

I hadn’t known she was still alive. In fairly rapid order during the trip after Ms. Day, the reaper came for Tim Conway, I.M. Pei and Grumpy Cat. I didn’t know that last one, but Lilly did.

I remember a time that Tim Conway described himself as “the funniest man in the universe” on the Carol Burnett Show. We all took that as a comedian’s hyperbole. But what if he was right? What if some higher intelligence has made a four-dimensional assessment of human humor and come to that exact conclusion?

As for Doris Day, I will try to park as close to my destinations as possible in her honor for the foreseeable future (a term I remember hearing as long ago as the ’80s in Austin).

Also in Montgomery: the Alabama State Capitol. The Alabama legislature had been in the news a lot before we came to town, as the latest state body to try to topple Roe v. Wade. That isn’t why I visited. I see capitols when I can.

From a distance.
Closer.
The capitol was completed in 1851, though additions have been made since then. The interior of the dome is splendid.

Actually, the Alabama House and Senate don’t meet in the capitol any more, but at the nearby Alabama State House, something I found out later. When we visited, the capitol’s House and Senate chambers seemed like museum pieces rather than space for state business, and that’s why.

Seems like hipsters haven’t discovered Decatur, Alabama, yet. But as real estate prices balloon in other places, it isn’t out of the question. The town has a pleasant riverfront on the Tennessee and at least one street, Bank St., that could be home to overpriced boutiques and authentic-experience taprooms.
Of more interest to me was the Old State Bank, dating back to 1833 and restored toward the end of the 20th century. It is where Bank St. ends, or begins, near the banks of the Tennessee River.

Even more interesting is the Lafayette Street Cemetery, active from ca. 1818.

Lafayette Street Cemetery Decatur AlabamaIt’s more of a ruin than a cemetery, but I’m glad it has survived.
Lafayette Street Cemetery Decatur AlabamaLafayette Street Cemetery Decatur AlabamaLafayette Street Cemetery Decatur AlabamaDuring the entirety of the trip, there were plenty of random bits of the South to be seen along the way.
We also listened to a lot of Southern radio on the trip — something Lilly plans to avoid on future trips, Southern or not, with her Bluetooth and so on — and we had a little game whenever we tuned into someone discussing some social problem in earnest on a non-music, non-NPR station. The game: guess how long will it be before the discussion turns to God. It was never very long.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice & The Legacy Museum

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As you enter the National Memorial for Peace and Justice on a hill in downtown Montgomery, Alabama — as we did on May 17 — it’s hard to see what’s ahead.
The path passes “Nkyinkyim Installation” by Ghanaian sculptor Kwame Akoto-Bamfo, erected with the memorial when it opened only last year. The work speaks for itself.

The memorial structure includes over 800 corten steel (weathering steel) monuments, one for each county in the United States where a lynching took place. Engraved on the columns are the names of the lynching victims documented for that county.

Here are the victims in Wilcox County, Alabama, to pick one of the first steel monuments you encounter: Riley Gulley, William Lewis, Arthur Stewart and Ephreim Pope.
Visitors enter the memorial at one corner of the square shape. On the first side of the memorial, the steel monuments are flush with the floor, with the names at eye level or lower.

On the second side of the memorial, the floor begins to slope downward in the direction of travel, but the steel monuments continue to be at the same level.
In the third side of the memorial, the floor slopes even more and the effect becomes very noticeable. The steel monuments are hanging.
You need to look up to see the county names.

The fourth side. The effect is practically tunnel-like by now.
The writing on one wall says:

For the hanged and beaten, for the shot, drowned, and burned, for the tortured, tormented, and terrorized. For those abandoned by the rule of law.

We will remember.

With hope because hopelessness is the enemy of justice. With courage because peace requires bravery. With persistence because justice is a constant struggle. With faith because we shall overcome.

Water flows down the other wall.

The text:

Thousands of African American are unknown victims of racial terror lynchings whose deaths cannot be documented, many whose names will never been known. They are all honored here.

Outside the memorial structure are smaller versions of the steel monuments arrayed in long lines, lying with their text face up. I understand that if a county named on one of them wants to use it as part of a local memorial to lynching victims, it will be given for that purpose. So far no county has taken any of them.

The Legacy Museum, developed by the same organization as the memorial — the Equal Justice Initiative — is also in downtown Montgomery, pointedly in a building where enslaved black people were imprisoned, near the site of the city’s 19th-century slave market. By the mid-1800s, Montgomery was the focus of the slave trade in Alabama.
In full, it is The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration. It’s a small museum, 11,000 square feet, but a powerful one.

The EJI web site for the museum says: “Visitors encounter a powerful sense of place when they enter the museum and confront slave pen replicas, where you can see, hear, and get close to what it was like to be imprisoned awaiting sale at the nearby auction block. First-person accounts from enslaved people narrate the sights and sounds of the domestic slave trade. Extensive research and videography helps visitors understand the racial terrorism of lynching, and the humiliation of the Jim Crow South.”

The museum also illustrates that the more recent (and ongoing) war on drugs, a toxic interplay of political calculation and moral panic, has made black Americans “vulnerable to a new era of racial bias and abuse of power wielded by our contemporary criminal justice system.”

A quote from the all together remarkable EJI Director Bryan Stevenson, who lead the effort to build the memorial and create the museum:

“Our nation’s history of racial injustice casts a shadow across the American landscape. This shadow cannot be lifted until we shine the light of truth on the destructive violence that shaped our nation, traumatized people of color, and compromised our commitment to the rule of law and to equal justice.”

Natchez &c.

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When we left New Orleans to drive to Natchez, Mississippi, on May 15, the uninspired route would be have been I-10 to Baton Rouge and then north on US 61. Instead I wanted to drive across Lake Pontchartrain, because I’ve seen that crossing on maps for years. Better yet, it’s no extra charge, since the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway collects no toll northbound.

The morning was bright and traffic light on the causeway. It’s actually two bridges, one each way, so you don’t face miles and miles of unavoidable oncoming traffic mere feet away. An enjoyable stretch of road under those conditions. Uneventful enough driving to ponder the engineering marvel that’s the causeway while still on it.

Before going, I wondered if there would be a few minutes on the causeway when we would be out of sight of land. I’d read claims to that effect. But the answer is no, not that I saw. I spotted the north shore of the lake in the distance before the south shore had completely vanished from my rear-view mirror. Once you get to the other side of the lake, you’re in Mandeville, Louisiana. I-12 from there connects with US 61 in Baton Rouge.

By early afternoon, we were in Natchez, Mississippi. The town has some good views of the Mississippi River from a park on the bluff.
The local gazebo.
It was too hot to wander around in the noonday sun for long. We decided not to tour one of the local antebellum homes, but rather spend the afternoon heading further north on the Natchez Trace Parkway to seek out antebellum ruins instead.

Lilly drove part of the way on the Trace and I played with my camera.

Others might find the driving dull, but I like driving the Trace for its lush greenery, and also its sparse traffic. No trucks at all.

We took a diversion off the Trace before going to Port Gibson and on to Jackson, along a winding country lane called Rodney Road. Go far enough on that road, and you’ll come to the Windsor Ruins.
I can’t remember where I read about the ruins, but the place has been filed under my Possible Minor Destinations for a good while. That’s such a sprawling, unorganized mental catalog of places that it’s a wonder that I ever remember to take the right detours at the right time.

We were the only ones there once another car left a minute or two after we arrived. Considering that the ruins used to be the heart of an enormous plantation, it’s remarkable how lonely the spot now feels. History has passed it by.

The view from the ruins.
“Windsor, built between 1859 and 1861, was the home of Smith Coffee Daniell II, a wealthy planter who had extensive properties in the Delta and in Arkansas,” the NPS says. “Completed in 1861, the home was the largest house built at that time [in Mississippi], the plantation once covering over 2,600 acres.

Curiously, Daniell died on April 12, 1861. The mansion survived the war, probably because the Union army used it as soon as the area had been captured, but it burned down by accident in 1890.

The fence is fairly new, added by the state, which now owns the site. Guess the state of Mississippi doesn’t want any of the 23 massive Corinthian columns coming down on any hapless visitors. They’re looking a little dodgy.

The National WW II Museum

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World War II was a big war, and it has an impressively big museum in New Orleans, the National WW II Museum, which we visited on May 14. The focus isn’t the whole — that’s too big — but rather the American part in the global conflict. A big enough subject.

All together, the museum includes five buildings of more than one story each, artifacts large and small, a vast number of words to read with the exhibits, and dozens of continuous video presentations.

The building reminded me a bit of the Denver Art Museum’s Hamilton Building, but a different architect did the work, Bart Voorsanger.

The structure isn’t finished yet. Looks like the wing-like-thing (wing of victory?) is being added right now.

A museum of this scope is exhaustive and exhausting, but I’m getting old. It has a lot of ground to cover, of course, but more than that the museum needs heft to amplify the war’s increasingly dim echo as time passes. It’s mostly vanished from living memory.

The Second World War was my parents’ war, so when I was growing up, the echo was pretty loud, largely in the torrent of books and movies and TV shows dealing with the war. Some of my earliest memories of watching TV include Combat! and The Rat Patrol, to use examples of televised WWII fiction more and less serious. The details of the war might have faded some by the time I came along — it was years before I got Bugs Bunny’s joke about A cards at the end of “Falling Hare” — but the big picture was still clear.

Time passes, even the big picture fades. Just look at what has happened to the Great War. It’s all we can do that they shall not grow old.

So the National WWII Museum starts off big, with a Douglas C-47 Skytrain hanging from the ceiling over the entrance and ticketing counter, which is in the Louisiana Memorial Pavilion.
On the floor is a replica LCVP, built from original plans. This kind of boat is pretty much the reason the museum is in New Orleans.
As an acronym, LCVP is about as standard Army as you can get: “landing craft, vehicle, personnel.” Less formally, they’re Higgins boats, designed by Andrew Higgins and built en masse during the war by Higgins Industries of New Orleans.

Wiki describes the usefulness of the boats well: “The Higgins boat was used for many amphibious landings, including Operation Overlord on D-Day in Nazi German-occupied Normandy, and previously Operation Torch in North Africa, the Allied invasion of Sicily, Operation Shingle and Operation Avalanche in Italy, Operation Dragoon, as well as in the Pacific Theatre at the Battle of Guadalcanal, the Battle of Tarawa, the Battle of the Philippines, the Battle of Iwo Jima and the Battle of Okinawa.”

Pretty much a greatest hits of U.S. amphibious landings during the war. In its early days, beginning in 2000, the museum focused on D-Day exclusively, so what better place than the city where the Higgins boats were built?

Upstairs in the Louisiana Memorial Pavilion is a floor devoted to the U.S. industrial production so critical to victory. As the museum notes, “By the time the Japanese surrendered in 1945… American manufacturers had turned out more than 96,000 bombers, 86,000 tanks, 2.4 million trucks, 6.5 million rifles, and billions of dollars’ worth of supplies to equip a truly global fighting force.”

A number of artifacts illustrate the Arsenal of Democracy, such as a jeep chassis.
Along with smaller items, such as the cigarettes, chocolate and gum that made a soldier’s lot slightly more bearable.
A machine to make dog tags.
They actually were an innovation just before WWI, at least as far as Americans were concerned. For millennia, many men went off to war and simply vanished. I remember, for instance, seeing at Gettysburg National Cemetery row upon row of stones marked UNKNOWN.

Also in the Louisiana Memorial Pavilion is the D-Day exhibit. As the original crux of the museum, it’s very detailed, with artifacts, images, reading material and more. The rooms reminded me of the Musée du Débarquement Arromanches in Normandy, though that facility had the advantage of looking out on the remains of one of the artificial harbors used during the landing.

A copy of the Order of the Day, June 6, 1944, along with French currency presumably carried by soldiers. Notes, not coins.

Another building, Campaigns of Courage, highlights the course of the war in the European and Pacific theaters with artifacts, photos, movies, text and some elaborate diorama-like sections that visitors walk through.

In Europe, for example, the Seige of Bastogne, done to look like snowy woods, though without the freezing temps. In the Pacific, the Guadalcanal Campaign, done to look like a tropical rain forest, though without the venomous bugs. There’s only so much verisimilitude a museum can do.

It took quite a while to work our way through these exhibits and, as usual, I knew we were absorbing only a small fraction of what they had to offer. So it is with large museums.

About 20 minutes before the museum closed, we arrived at the U.S. Freedom Pavilion: The Boeing Center. On display are airplanes, as you’d expect. Hanging from the high ceiling.
The centerpiece of the display is My Gal Sal, a B-17E Flying Fortress, one of only three or four such warplanes still in existence.

You can ride up to the fourth floor and look down on the plane.
Heights don’t usually bother me from behind a secure railing, but looking down from above the plane, with it filling the void below me, made me a little unsettled.

My Gal Sal probably survived because bad weather forced it to land in the wilds of Greenland in 1942, and it couldn’t fly again. The crew survived, but the plane stayed on the ice, not to be salvaged until the 1990s and restored in the early 21st century.

A Few New Orleans Statues, With Some Opinions

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As of May 2019, Gen. Andrew Jackson still rides his steed at Jackson Square in New Orleans, the dramatic centerpiece of a handsome public space.
The equestrian bronze, by notable 19th-century sculptor Clark Mills, has been there since 1856, when the Battle of New Orleans was still in living memory, at least among the old timers. I understand the monument is a target of removalists, so there might come a day when Jackson Square loses its man on horseback and becomes Something Else Square.

That’s New Orleans’ decision. Yet I’m not persuaded Jackson should go, for all his retroactively understood flaws. It’s one thing to remove monuments to those who actively sought disunion because they feared to lose their human property. Jackson and his men defeated an invading army on American soil near New Orleans. As president, he had no use for disunion, either. Just ask John C. Calhoun.

During our last day in New Orleans, Lilly and I visited the National WW II Museum, and to do so we got off the St. Charles streetcar at Lee Circle (as Google Maps calls it). Looking back at the circle, we saw an empty pedestal.

That’s odd, I said to Lilly. But I must have known at some time — I’d ridden on the St. Charles line decades earlier — that a statue of Robert E. Lee used to stand atop the pedestal. I’d forgotten. I don’t ever remember taking a close look at the Lee statue, since I haven’t always watched for monuments as much as I do now.

Just yesterday, it occurred to me to look up Lee Circle, and was reminded that removal activists were able to persuade New Orleans to take down Lee and three other monuments in 2017. Sic transit gloria mundi, Gen. Lee.

Of course, there are many ideas about a new statue to put on Lee’s former spot. Among this selection, the one I like best on prima facie examination is the relatively unknown J. Lawton Collins, a New Orleans native and important commander during WWII. He’s also appropriate because the museum devoted to that war is mere blocks away. Or if a strictly military option is out, Andrew Higgins, of Higgins boat fame, seems reasonable.

Here’s another statue that has gained the ire of removalists: Chief Justice of the United States Edward Douglass White Jr., who had a long and varied career but sided with the majority on the notorious Plessy v. Ferguson decision. (Most sources double that s in his middle name, but the statue does not.)

The chief justice stands on Royal St. in front of the major edifice housing the Louisiana Supreme Court, a building whose reputation has varied across the decades. We just happened to walk by.

Later I wondered, what’s the state supreme court doing in New Orleans and not Baton Rouge? Guess as far as the court is concerned, Baton Rouge is a johnny-come-lately capital, having that title only since 1846.

Chief Justice White would be a harder nut to crack for the removalists than Lee, simply because among the generally ahistoric American people, whipping up righteous outrage about someone as obscure as White would be a tall order. But it might happen.

In Louis Armstrong Park, where we had a pleasant stroll despite the increasing heat, there are plenty of statues that will probably last a good long time. Satchmo himself certainly deserves to.
Elizabeth Catlett did the bronze, which was dedicated in 1980.

Other metal jazzmen grace the park, such as a marching brass band by sculptor and New Orleans native Sheleen Jones-Adenle, erected in 2010.
Here’s a tripartite statue of foundational jazzman Charles ‘Buddy’ Bolden created by sculptor Kimberly Dummons, also from 2010. Such triple figures aren’t common, but not unknown.

In Congo Square, there’s a vivid sculptural relief by Nigerian-born artist Adéwálé Adénlé fittingly called “Congo Square,” another of the 2010 class of works in the park.

That hardly covers everything in Louis Armstrong Park. Whoever Mike is, he made good images of these and other sculptures there.

Next to the French Market, at St. Philip and Decatur Sts., is Maid of Orleans, a gift from France to New Orleans and erected in 1972.
A replica of the 1880 Emmanuel Frémiet equestrian statue of Joan of Arc in Place des Pyramids in Paris, the Maid used to be at the foot of Canal St., but when a casino was developed there, she moved to her present location in the Quarter.

One more: A seated statue of Francis Xavier Seelos.
Francis Xavier Seelos statueHow we came see that statue, during our walkabout in the Garden District, is slightly convoluted. But that’s never stopped me from pursuing a destination.

While relaxing at the Chateau Hotel during the second evening, I queued up “Pearl of the Quarter,” a dulcet song about a New Orleans long gone and which never quite was. One of its lines: “I met my baby by the shrine of the martyr.”

A flight of Steely Dan fancy, I’m sure, but if you Google around using that term and “New Orleans,” pretty soon you come across the National Shrine of Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos at St. Mary’s Assumption Church in New Orleans. Which just happened to be not too far from where we were going to go the next day.

So we visited the shrine and its reliquary, which are separated from the nave of the church by a wall and a door — locked. We didn’t get to see the interior of the church as a result, which I understand is well worth seeing.

The seated statue is in the hallway outside the shrine itself, which includes a number of exhibits about Fr. Seelos, a Redemptorist from Bavaria, along with many relics and a more conventional standing statue of him at the end of the hall.

Fr. Seelos, for his part, was beatified by the church in 2000. He came to New Orleans as a missionary in the 1866.

“As pastor of the Church of St. Mary of the Assumption, he was… joyously available to his faithful and singularly concerned for the poorest and the most abandoned,” Seelos.org says.

“In God’s plan, however, his ministry in New Orleans was destined to be brief. In the month of September, exhausted from visiting and caring for the victims of yellow fever, he contracted the dreaded disease. After several weeks of patiently enduring his illness, he passed on to eternal life on October 4, 1867.”

Wolf Point & The Merchandise Mart Hall of Fame

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On Friday I went to downtown Chicago for business. Since it was a warm, clear spring day, I wanted to do a more extensive walkabout, especially in the River North area, where I attended to business. But I didn’t have much time.

Instead I was able to take a quick walk near the Chicago River, mostly on the way to my appointment and heading back to Union Station afterward. I was near the place where the river divides into its North and South Branches, which is known as Wolf Point and is the origin of the Chicago Municipal Device.

For quite a while, Wolf Point was oddly underdeveloped, at least compared with the rest of the riverfront. For instance, until recently the point was occupied mostly by a parking lot.

No more. The latest project there, Wolf Point East, is still under construction.

So Wolf Point looks a little different than at the beginning of this decade, and a lot different than it did in 1833.

Hines, Joseph P. Kennedy Enterprises, the AFL-CIO Building Investment Trust and PNC Realty Investors are the developers of Wolf Point East; Pelli Clarke Pelli did the design. The 60-story tower will have 698 residential units — upper-end rentals — that will be available late this year.

Just to the east, of course, is the 4 million-square-foot Merchandise Mart, seen here catching a shadow in the mid-afternoon.

A street runs between the Merchandise Mart and the river — the unimaginatively named W. Merchandise Mart Plaza — and from there, you can see the Merchandise Mart Hall of Fame. That is, eight bronze busts honoring one-time U.S. merchant princes, each facing the building. Joseph P. Kennedy himself commissioned the busts in the early 1950s, which was possible because the Kennedy family owned the Merchandise Mart for many decades.

The busts are in two groups of four. These are the busts to the west. They don’t look so large from across the street, but the heads are four times the size of a regular human head.
From left to right: John Wanamaker, founder of the stores by that name; George Hartford, founder of A&P; Edward Filene, founder of those stores; and Montgomery Ward.

These are the busts to the east.
Construction and taxis whizzing by made it a little harder to make an image, but in any case they are Robert Wood, a chairman of Sears; F.W. Woolworth; Julius Rosenwald, another chairman of Sears and founder of the Museum of Science and Industry; and Marshall Field.

More about each of the busts is here. Twelve years ago, at least, they looked like they needed some restoration. I didn’t get quite close enough to them this time to know whether that has happened.

Sign of the Times: The Great American Political Poster 1844-2012

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Visiting the Elmhurst History Museum for its local history collection was fine, but what I really wanted to see on Saturday — before it ends next weekend — was an exhibit called Sign of the Times: The Great American Political Poster 1844-2012. I’d picked up a leaflet about the exhibit when visiting the Elmhurst Art Museum, so that kind of marketing works sometimes.

The exhibit includes 50 items and occupies the first floor of the museum. I could have spent an hour looking at everything, but not everyone in the family is as enthusiastic about presidential ephemera as I am. Even so, I got a good look and had the chance to explain some things to the girls, such as who this fellow McGovern was. He had a fair number of posters, for all the good it did him.

As promised, the exhibit begins with the election of 1844. As we all know, Henry Clay headed the Whig ticket.

Less well known is the Whig for vice president that year, Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey. Vice presidents are often obscure, but men who ran for VP and lost tend to be even more obscure. Too bad he was never veep. Vice President Frelinghuysen has a ring to it.

The Kellogg Brothers of Hartford, Conn., did the poster. They were rivals of Currier & Ives but about as well remembered as Mr. Frelinghuysen these days. Google Kellogg and you tend to get cereal, and they aren’t mentioned in any Christmas songs that I know of.

“An Illustrative Map of Human Life Deduced from passages in Sacred Writ” (1847), which is Wiki’s example of one of their works, makes for some interesting reading.

These were the days of hand-colored prints. This one’s exceptional.
John C. Fremont and William L. Dayton, the first Republican candidates for the presidency and vice presidency, in 1856. A wonderfully named artist, Dominique O. Fabronius, did the poster, which was issued by C.E. Lewis of Buffalo. Look at Fabronius’ portrait of “Spoons” Butler here.

On to the golden age of the color lithograph: two posters from the 1900 presidential contest. First, William Jennings Bryan. A busy poster, promising no cross of gold, attacks on the Standard Oil octopus (I assume) and other things.
William McKinley and TR: an even busier poster.
The artists are unknown in both cases. I enjoyed this detail on the McKinley-Roosevelt poster.
I’ve posted about Phrygian caps before, but not in a North American context. Maybe it’s just as well that the caps are generally forgotten in this country as a symbol of liberty. Such symbols are sometimes co-opted by wankers.

The last of the two-man campaign posters: TR and his mostly forgotten VP, Charles Fairbanks. The city in Alaska is named for him, at least.
Note the fasces. Talk about being co-opted by wankers.

Fast forward a few decades. This poster offers a more folksy style for voters in the 1940 election. Note that a happy worker smokes a pipe, besides supporting Willkie.

Offset lithography was the most common means of poster-making by that time. Artist unknown in the case of the Willkie poster.

In 1964, Goldwater got a fairly standard treatment (unknown artist again) in a pro poster.
Along with a stinging anti poster drawn by Ben Shahn.
The ’72 election was represented by previously mentioned McGovern posters, but Nixon made an appearance as well.
By R. Crumb. Am I right in finding it strange that the Nixon campaign would enlist Crumb to do a poster? Well, strange bedfellows and all. Nixon and the Do-Dah man. The ’72 election was a long strange trip, after all.

Hercules Mulligan, Patriot

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I had ramen at home for lunch on Friday. Unremarkable, except I ate my ramen sitting out on the deck. No coat necessary to keep warm. The setting made the tasty noodles, vegetables and broth that much better.

The warmth didn’t last. It couldn’t. By the evening, drizzle. By Saturday, a late winter chill that hasn’t gone away even yet. Today came the bonus of wind gusts blowing the only way wind blows in cold weather: in your face.

Croci and a few weeds and a purple flower or two now poke out of the ground to tease us about spring. Maybe that counts as cruel. But April is also the month when, suddenly, the grass will be green again.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided it was time to read Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton, which has been on my shelf for quite a while. I don’t regret it. It’s a weighty book, as befits a weighty subject, but also a lively read that illuminates Hamilton’s character and ideas.

There are also plenty of interesting and sometimes entertaining supporting characters. My favorite so far: Hercules Mulligan, only partly for the name. Hamilton met him not long after coming to New York, just before the Revolution.

“[Hamilton] had all the magnetic power of a mysterious foreigner and soon made his first friend: a fashionable tailor with the splendid name of Hercules Mulligan….” Chernow writes. “Born in Ireland in 1740, the colorful, garrulous Mulligan was one of the few tradesmen Hamilton ever befriended. He had a shop and home on Water Street, and Hamilton may have boarded with him briefly…

“Later, during the British occupation of wartime New York, Mulligan was to dabble in freelance espionage for George Washington, discretely pumping his foppish clients, mostly Tories and British officers, for strategic information as he taped their measurements.”

Later, regarding the events associated with Evacuation Day in New York — November 25, 1783 — Chernow relates the following: “The morning after he entered New York, Washington breakfasted with the loquacious tailor, Hercules Mulligan… To wipe away any doubts about Mulligan’s true loyalties, Washington pronounced him ‘a true friend of liberty.’ ”

Mulligan ought to have a plaque somewhere on Water Street. He’s buried in Trinity churchyard in Lower Manhattan. If I’d known that last year, I might have looked for him.

As for Evacuation Day, New York holidays aren’t any of my business, but that’s one that ought to be brought back, even if it’s more-or-less at the same time as Thanksgiving.

Once the Rockets Go Up…

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I’m much of the way through Von Braun by Michael Neufeld (2008), aptly subtitled “Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War.” Overall, a solid biography, though the chapters I’ve just finished bog down a bit in all the mid-50s interservice rivalry and the fog of uncertainty about who would get to launch the first U.S. satellite. It’s hard to keep track of all the bureaucrats, official acronyms and other long-forgotten missile minutiae.

In the end, the answer of who would get to launch for the Americans came after Sputnik was up and beeping. Namely, whatever’s ready, launch it now! Which of course led to flopnik, since the Navy’s Vanguard rocket wasn’t quite up to snuff.

Rather, it was the Army’s Redstone, a design overseen by von Braun, that put Explorer 1 into orbit (to be fair, the Navy launched a Vanguard satellite successfully on March 17, 1958, the second U.S. satellite, and it’s still in orbit). I didn’t realize it until now, but the Explorer Program is ongoing after six decades, with over 90 missions to its credit.

Granted, we’ve been sluggish about getting around to the big-deal missions like sending astronauts to Mars, but by no stretch of the imagination has humanity turned its back on space exploration during any of the last 60-odd years.

As for von Braun, the bio doesn’t shy away from his early employment history and the various Nazi bureaucracies that facilitated development of the V-2, often using slave labor. He was a rocket engineer to his core, and happy to work for whomever would facilitate rocket development — hideously expensive when you get beyond fireworks — up to and including membership in the SS.

One of these days, I’ll have to return to Huntsville, Ala., to see what NASA has done with its rocket displays at the Marshall Space Flight Center (the haus that Wernher built). I remember seeing some of them in 1984, but I suspect the museum’s been expanded since then.

Also, I was only vaguely aware of how well known von Braun was to the American public, even in his pre-Saturn V days, what with his collaborations with Collier’s and especially Disney in the 1950s. Von Braun was famed as a space-flight evangelist at a time when a lot of people probably considered it a not-in-my-lifetime sort of proposition. Lehrer was making fun of a celebrity.

Remarkably, PDFs of “Man Will Conquer Space Soon!” and the other Collier’s articles are available here, complete with the magnificent Chesley Bonestell illustrations.

Digression: there’s a Bonestell Crater on Mars (42.37° North, 30.57° West). An image is downloadable, in this case from NASA. Which I did.

One more thing about von Braun. I don’t have to go very far to find a small tribute to him.

That’s Von Braun Trail in Elk Grove Village, here in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. The neighborhood dates from ca. 1970, and some of the nearby streets honor other space pioneers: Aldrin Trail, Armstrong Ln., Cernan Ct., Conrad Ct., W. Glenn Trail, Haise Ln., Lovell Ct., Roosa Ln. and Worden Way, and probably others I haven’t spotted.