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Alan W. Bock is a senior columnist for the Orange County Register.
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One for the Gipper — "Reagan: A Life in Letters" (Free Press, 2003, 934 pages) is the latest volume in an ongoing effort by Martin Anderson, Annelise Anderson, and Kiron Skinner to demonstrate that the former president was simply not, as Clark Clifford once put it, an "amiable dunce," who had a few simple ideas and a certain likableness and happened to have a gift for communication.
As scholars at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where the former president's papers are stored, they have previously mined the original, handwritten drafts of the radio commentaries Reagan delivered in the 1970s. They showed, in the book "Reagan, In His Own Hand," that he had a lively interest in a variety of political-related subjects and a strong grasp of current events. Now they have assembled a collection of the letters he wrote, from the age of 11 until the year 1994, covering an astonishing range of subjects.
Reagan grew up in an era when personal correspondence was far more important, and more carefully composed, than it is in America today. Remarkably candid and warm, these letters enhance our understanding of Ronald Reagan's life and his place in American history, perhaps better than a full-blown biography can. Agree or disagree with him, this man was far from being a dunce, amiable or otherwise. They also demonstrate that unlike our current president, he had a lifelong interest in politics, freedom, and governance. — Alan W. Bock
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Jo Ann Skousen is a writer and critic who lives in New York.
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Darkness and Light at the World's Fair — In 1890, the United States was barely 100 years old, a mere teenager of a nation, ready to flex its muscle and establish its place among the nations of the world. In "The Devil in the White City" (Random House, 2003, 464 pages), historian Erik Larson tells the story of Frank Burnham's determination to create a World's Fair that would not only rival but surpass the Parisian Exposition of 1889.
Timing the Fair to coincide with the 400th anniversary of Columbus' voyage to the New World, the committee would have just two years to plan, design, build, populate, and advertise the Fair. Burnham assembled a committee of the foremost architects of the age, including landscape artist Frederick Olmsted, who designed Central Park. Burnham himself would later design the Flatiron Building in New York City. The Fair would have imposing exhibit halls, whimsical gardens and lagoons, exotic Midway booths, and a symbol to rival the Eiffel Tower.
Juxtaposed against this monumental task, Larson interweaves the equally fascinating tale of another creatively ambitious Chicagoan, Dr. H.H. Holmes, a charmingly evil man who built the World's Fair Hotel just a few blocks from the Fair. Holmes included secret soundproof rooms and ovens in the design of his hotel, and oversaw the construction himself so that no one worker knew what the building housed. To paraphrase an old commercial, young women visiting the Fair checked in, but they didn't check out. Larson's book is as much a detective story as it is a history of the World's Fair, as he recreates the trail of murders associated with this dark man and his hotel.
Larson's meticulous research is evident throughout the book, which includes 30 pages of footnotes and a bibliography that runs five full pages. Yet he writes like a novelist, teasing the reader with dramatic foreshadowing, artfully delayed details, and deadpan name dropping. (For example, he tells the story of a junior architect who was fired for designing houses in his free time and then notes wryly, "The junior man was Frank Lloyd Wright.") He identifies numerous products and cultural icons that we now take for granted that were introduced at the Fair, including shredded wheat, Cracker Jack, the Pledge of Allegiance, and even the tune every school child learns that begins, "There's a place in France . . . "
Interestingly, though not surprisingly to those who understand the free market, the exhibits that saved the Fair from financial ruin were the ones that were initially rejected by the committee. The Ferris wheel that became the Fair's symbol took so long to approve that it wasn't finished until the Fair was half over. Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show was rejected by the committee, so he just set it up in a separate theater outside the Fair and started raking in the dough before the Fair even opened. Young Sol Bloom, a teenaged entrepreneur who was hired to design the Midway, ignored the committee and brought an element of fun to the otherwise staid exhibits, providing a place for visitors to spend their money. One young boy whose father worked as a carpenter building the "magical realm beside the lake" would, more than 50 years later, recreate a more permanent amusement park based on the Fair's design. His name? Walt Disney.
"The Devil in the White City" is a story of vision, ambition, and persistence. Burnham's charismatic ambition drove him to create a visual masterpiece that was designed for obsolescence; within six months of its opening, it was closed and dismantled. Yet its monumental Greek revival style would influence architecture, landscaping, and entertainment for a century to come. Meanwhile, Holmes' charismatic ambition drove him to destroy dozens of families who would never know what happened to their daughters. It is indeed a book of darkness and light, utterly engrossing on many different levels. — Jo Ann Skousen
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Stephen Cox is a professor of literature at UC-San Diego.
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Totalitarian Grandeur — Like many libertarians, I daydream about totalitarian regimes. They are, I suppose, my way of indulging the science fiction instinct. Preposterous, scary, romantic, they offer the perspective of an alternative universe, ripe for speculation. My imagination is especially engaged by their own daydreams.
Facing each other on opposite pages of Igor Golomstock's "Totalitarian Art" (HarperCollins, 1990, 416 pages), a review of twentieth-century totalitarian art, I find two of the greatest such daydreams, or nightmares: Hitler's and Albert Speer's architectural plan for postwar Berlin, centered on the repulsively oversized dome of the great hall of Grossdeutschland, the House of the People; and Stalin's and Boris Iofan's very similar plan for an urban-renewed Moscow, centered on the tallest building in the world, a Palace of Soviets capped by a 300-foot statue of Lenin.
Of this building, Golomstock says, "An entire large institute worked on the project for many years, until the beginning of the fifties. A vast foundation pit was dug . . . and the press never tired of describing the future grandeur of a construction which was to contain 17,500 square metres of oil painting, 12,000 of frescoes, 4,000 of mosaics, 20,000 of bas-reliefs, 12 group sculptures up to 12 metres high, 170 sculptures up to 6 metres high, and so on. . . . Nothing of either the Palace of Soviets or the House of the People was ever constructed." The site of the Palace of Soviets is now a swimming pool.
Golomstock's book is one of those standard works whose publisher stupidly allowed to go out of print. Everyone should know about it and seek it in the used-book market (it's not hard to find).
It has some flaws. Most of its many illustrations are black and white. Many are too small. (Aleksandr Gerasimov's "Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin" is a ravishing work of art, but only when it's big, and only when you can see the colors.) I have a lot of questions about Golomstock's distinction between the totalitarian style and the period styles that prevailed under democratic as well as totalitarian regimes, styles that make the old post office in Jackson, Mich. look exactly like a building of similar function in Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Russia. But Golomstock knows more than I do, and he may be right.
The virtues of his book include his wide erudition, his sense of humor, his exemplification of many styles and genres of art and architecture within the general field, his alertness to the many exact and bizarre similarities of fascist and Bolshevik art, and his inclusion of many examples of totalitarian art that is actually good. Most of it isn't, of course; but all of it is interesting, much of it is clever, and some of it is actually beautiful. — Stephen Cox
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