CREATING MOSAICS FOR HOME SAVINGS &...

The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens

FALL/WINTER 2011–12

Bruce Catton’s Civil War

CREATING MOSAICS FOR HOME SAVINGS & LOAN

RE-ENVIS IONING THE TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILROAD

THE HUNTINGTON’S PERMANENT EXHIBITIONS ARE HARDLY

that. They shift meanings and rotate, depending on the curators’new acquisitions and updated interpretations. Visitors who arriveat The Huntington to see an iconic book or manuscript often leave

with the thrill of having seen the unexpected—a 16th-century map, a novelist’srevised book manuscript, or a colorful medical treatise.

Temporary exhibitions bring a still more heightened curiosity and engage-ment, as if the visitors are in on the curators’ quests to dig deeper into particularsubjects. The coming months will bring two major Library shows to the MaryLouand George Boone Gallery: “Visions of Empire: The Quest for a Railroad AcrossAmerica, 1840–1880,” opening in the spring of 2012, and “A Strange andFearful Interest: Death, Mourning, and Memory in the American Civil War,”opening Oct. 13, 2012. Together the shows will feature hundreds of photo-graphs, posters, books, letters, and manuscripts, many of which have neverbefore been on public view.

This issue of Huntington Frontiers gives readers a peek at a few items that willbe on display in those exhibitions. A stereograph by A. A. Hart opens up a three-dimensional view of the construction of the Central Pacific Railroad (page 8),and an iconic photograph by Andrew J. Russell (page 14) shows the carnagefrom the Battle of Fredericksburg in 1863. In this context, though, the historicphotos add dimension to the scholarship of historians Richard White (page 6)and David Blight (page 12), who have each spent countless hours at TheHuntington and have produced new books about the transcontinental railroadand the Civil War, respectively. When she isn’t assisting researchers, Jennifer Watts,The Huntington’s curator of photographs and curator of the upcoming CivilWar exhibition, spends much of her time on her own scholarship. In the fall of 2011 she contributed two essays to a new catalogue raisonné of the work of photographer Carleton E. Watkins. Her efforts are highlighted in thesepages as well (page 10).

So while each book or manuscript or photo in a glass case might enticethe visitor who relishes the chance to see history up close, the same objects are instruments of scholarship. And for every item thoroughly scrutinized by a scholar, dozens—thousands, actually—await integration into future stories to be told about the past.

MATT STEVENS

The Huntington Library, Art Collections,and Botanical Gardens

SENIOR STAFF OF THE HUNTINGTON

STEVEN S. KOBLIKPresident

JAMES P. FOLSOMMarge and Sherm Telleen/Marion and Earle Jorgensen

Director of the Botanical Gardens

KATHY HACKERExecutive Assistant to the President

STEVE HINDLEW. M. Keck Foundation Director of Research

SUSAN LAFFERTYNadine and Robert A. Skotheim Director of Education

SUZY MOSERAssociate Vice President for Advancement

JOHN MURDOCHHannah and Russel Kully Director of Art Collections

RANDY SHULMANVice President for Advancement

LAURIE SOWDVice President for Operations

ALISON D. SOWDENVice President for Financial Affairs

SUSAN TURNER-LOWEVice President for Communications

DAVID S. ZEIDBERGAvery Director of the Library

MAGAZINE STAFF

EditorMATT STEVENS

DesignerLORI ANN ACHZET

Online DeveloperSEAN HANRAHAN

Huntington Frontiers is published semiannually by the Office of Communications. It strives to connectreaders more firmly with the rich intellectual life of The Huntington, capturing in news and features thework of researchers, educators, curators, and othersacross a range of disciplines.

INQUIRIES AND COMMENTS:Matt Stevens, EditorHuntington Frontiers1151 Oxford RoadSan Marino, CA [email protected]

The magazine is funded by charitable gifts and advertising revenues. For information about how to support this publication, please contact KristyPeters, director of foundation and corporate relations,626-405-3484, [email protected].

Unless otherwise acknowledged, photography providedby The Huntington’s Department of Photographic Services.

Printed by Pace Lithographers, Inc. City of Industry, Calif.

© 2012 The Huntington Library, Art Collections, andBotanical Gardens. All rights reserved. Reproduction or use of the contents, in whole or in part, withoutpermission of the publisher is prohibited.

huntingtonfrontiers.org

Opposite page, top: Carleton E. Watkins (1829–1916), Weston Engine at Summit Valley, Central PacificRailroad, ca. 1876, image: 14 1/4 × 20 11/16 in., mount: 19 × 26 in., Huntington Library, Art Collections,and Botanical Gardens. Center: Susan Hertel’s gouache study for the mosaic installed on the HomeSavings and Loan building in Temple City, Calif., 1984. Huntington Library, Art Collections, and BotanicalGardens. Bottom, left: The Huntington’s Ranch. Photo by Lisa Blackburn. Bottom, right: Historian DavidBlight, the Rogers Distinguished Fellow in 2010–11. Photo by Lisa Blackburn.

FROM THE EDITOR

SHOW AND TELL

[ VOLUME 7, ISSUE 2 ]

FALL/WINTER 2011–12

FEATURES

A COMING FURY 12

Bruce Catton’s Civil War in the Civil Rights EraBy David W. Blight

PAYING DIVIDENDS 18

How Home Savings & Loan Perfected the Art ofBanking in Southern CaliforniaBy Adam Arenson

DEPARTMENTS

FRESH TAKE: A conversation with railroad historian Richard White 6

A CLOSER LOOK: Carleton E. Watkins at the crossroads 10

By Jennifer A. Watts

IN PRINT: Recommended reading 25

POSTSCRIPT: The Ranch sees its first harvests 28

By Diana W. Thompson

Contents

12

6

NEWS BYTES: There’s more to the story… 4

HUNTINGTON FRONTIERS 3

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18

4 Fall/Winter 2011–12

News Bytes

FALLINGWATER WEST

“Large-scale geological features take time, like millions of years. Natural streams andwaterfalls emerge after tens of thousands of years of weathering, erosion, and plant col-onization. But if you are in a hurry, a waterfall can be had in a month or two—givengood planning, a great crew, and some heavy equipment. One is just now happening inthe Japanese Garden.”

—Jim Folsom, Marge and Sherm Telleen/Marion and Earle Jorgensen Director of the Botanical Gardens

In January, Huntington literary manuscripts curator Sara S. “Sue” Hodson washonored as Woman of the Year by the Jack London Foundation, in recogni-tion of her long service assisting scholars with their research on Jack Londonand of her own lecturing and writing on the author. Hodson is co-author ofthe book Jack London, Photographer (with Jeanne Campbell Reesman andPhilip Adam), published in 2010 by the University of Georgia Press. Anexcerpt appeared in the Fall/Winter 2010 issue of Huntington Frontiers.Jack London, Photographer has inspired a new exhibition at the Maritime

Museum in San Diego. Fifty photos featured in the book are on display in theStar Gallery of the Star of India, described by the museum as “the oldest sea-going vessel in existence today.” The exhibition runs through Dec. 3, 2012,and highlights London’s exploits and observations of life on two vessels—theSnark, the 42-foot ketch-rigged sailboat that went to the South Pacific in 1907–08; and the Dirigo, which sailed around CapeHorn in 1912. Also on view are London’s photos from 1904 during the Russo-Japanese War and images of the aftermath ofthe 1906 San Francisco earthquake. The images on display have been reproduced from prints and negatives from the hold-ings of The Huntington as well as from the extensive Jack London archive of the California State Parks, Jack London StateHistoric Park Collection.

Sue Hodson on board the Star of India at the Maritime Museum in San Diego, celebrating Jack London’s birthday on Jan. 12, 2012, and the opening of theexhibition “Jack London, Photographer.” © 2012 Ted Walton Photography. Center: Jack London (1876–1916) On the Crossbeam of the Dirigo (detail), 1912.Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

Woman of the Year

The construction of a new waterfall is transforming the area south of the Japanese House, con-necting a new tea garden to the Japanese canyon and existing pond system. The garden reopensApril 11, 2012, to celebrate its centennial.


SCHOLAR, MENTOR, FRIEND

With the death last fall of Patrick Collinson (left), Regius Professor Emeritus ofHistory at the University of Cambridge, scholarship on the social and politicalhistory of early modern England will be much diminished. During his Mellonfellowship at The Huntington in 1984, Pat (as he was known) made some archivaldiscoveries that were to be of fundamental significance to the development ofhis revolutionary historical thinking about the nature of the 16th-century Englishpolity. While here, Pat stumbled across what manuscripts curator Mary Robertsonhas called a “scruffy little manuscript” in the Ellesmere papers—the minutes ofwhat would become known later as a vestry or “town meeting” that assembledduring the harsh winter of 1596 in the Wiltshire village of Swallowfield. The“scruffy little manuscript” from The Huntington became a leitmotif of what he

christened the “new political history,” or “social history withthe politics put back.”

When Pat assumed his new position as Regius Professor inCambridge in 1988, I was among the cohort of new graduatestudents in early modern history who were commencing researchat the same time. It was from Pat that I first heard mention ofthe Huntington Library; it was in his footnotes that I first saw themagical reference to The Huntington’s Ellesmere manuscriptcollection; and it was with his encouragement that I undertookresearch on the local context at Swallowfield and published anedition of the minutes of the 1596 town meeting in the HistoricalJournal in 1999.

—Steve Hindle, W. M. Keck Foundation Director of Research at The Huntington

EXPLORE ONLINE

Discover more about these stories atbytes.huntingtonfrontiers.org. You can alsolink to HuntingtonBlogs, Facebook, Twitter,Flickr, and iTunes U.

[ ]

Between Roy Ritchie and theDeep Blue Sea

Stories of mentoring and discovery abound at TheHuntington. One of Steve Hindle’s first duties asthe new W. M. Keck Foundation Director ofResearch was in presiding over a conference inhonor of his predecessor: “The New MaritimeHistory: A Conference in Honor of Roy Ritchie.”The conference, held in November, paid tribute toRobert C. Ritchie, who not only fostered greatresearch but also conducted a good bit of it him-self. In attendance was Gary Nash, professor ofhistory emeritus from UCLA and Ritchie’s own mentor.You can listen to several talks from the conference on iTunes U,

including the remarks of Margarette Lincoln, the deputy directorof the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England, andMichael Jarvis, associate professor of history at the University ofRochester, who both cited the influence of Ritchie’s well-knownbook, Captain Kidd and the War Against the Pirates (1986,Harvard University Press), on their research.

Q&A


[ FRESH TAKE ]

RAILROADED: THE TRANSCONTINENTALS

and the Making of Modern America, a newbook by historian Richard White, is“smashingly researched, cleverly written,

and shrewdly argued all the way through,” says WilliamDeverell, the director of the Huntington-USC Institute onCalifornia and the West. The book, 12 years in the making,is a “powerful, smart, even angry book about politics, greed,corruption, money, and corporate arrogance, and the Americaformed out of them after the Civil War,” he adds.

White, the Margaret Byrne Professor of AmericanHistory at Stanford University, spoke to us about the wayhe balanced his own unique brand of storytelling with anequally creative use of historical data through somethingcalled the Spatial History Project, a collaborative commu-nity of scholars who use visual analysis and digital tech-nology to identify patterns and anomalies in their research.

How should we read the book—as business history,environmental history, history of technology, or all ofthe above? All of the above. I weave various strands of history together,so anybody who is looking for a sort of clean, direct nar-rative—in which one thing determines all—has probablyfound the wrong book. I attempt to bring in a wholevariety of subjects that influenced railroads and show whythey came to be in the late 19th century.

You intersperse sprawling chapters about big railroadcompanies with small vignettes that almost stand aloneas parables of the railroad age. How did this structurecome about?As I wrote the narrative, I realized it was all taking place ina fairly grand scale—with prominent political leaders andlarge corporations run by larger-than-life characters. Butthe railroads also touched individual lives. So how was Igoing to put those smaller stories in? I decided to do theserailroad lives—which I also call mise en scènes—where in factI would take stories from various archives, stories that wereliterally too good to leave out, and use them to illustratelarger themes on a much smaller scale.

That term—mise en scène—implies a visual kind ofstorytelling, which could be one way of thinking aboutthe way you use data to tell different kinds of stories.How does your Spatial History Lab at StanfordUniversity factor into the book?At the Spatial History Lab, we use GIS technology thatallows us to take various data such as freight costs or pop-ulation growth and show them in a single frame in relationto railroad lines. What you find is that people in the 19thcentury who were used to plotting distance in terms ofmiles or time were now measuring it in terms of cost, andthat cost was under the control of the railroad companieswho could make the near far and the far near.

Writing the RailsSCHOLAR RICHARD WHITE GIVES DIMENSION TO THE HISTORY OF THE RAILROAD

Richard White is the Margaret Byrne Professor of American History at StanfordUniversity, where he is also faculty co-director of the Bill Lane Center for theAmerican West. Photo by Jesse White. Opposite: Rounding Cape Horn, CentralPacific Railroad (detail), ca. 1876, photograph by Carleton E. Watkins (1829–1916), albumen print; image: 14 3/8 × 21 1/4 in., mount: 19 × 26 in. HuntingtonLibrary, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.


You use a great example to describe this phenomenonin your reference to a passage from Frank Norris’ bookThe Octopus, in which a character named HarranDerrick watches a load pass by his fictional SanJoaquin Valley town of Bonneville. The goods go all theway to San Francisco at a low rate before beingdelivered to Bonneville on another train at a higher rate.The world is arranged like tinker toys, with the round partsbeing the railroad stations. So goods move from station tostation. You very often have to ship something to a centrallocation and then send it back to the smaller town it justpassed through. It’s very similar to air travel today—youarrive into a hub before backtracking to your local desti-nation. But this means the hubs get all the economicadvantages and the local places get all the disadvantages,and that affects the way you organize a business, how youorganize farms, and how you organize anything. A whole-saler in San Francisco, for example, usually had lowertransportation costs than a wholesaler in Sacramento forgoods shipped from Chicago even though Sacramentowas closer to Chicago.

And, at the same time you’re mining a variety of datasets to write this history, you’re also dipping into iconicwriters like Norris, Anthony Trollope, and Mark Twain.How much were you reading the fiction of this erawhile you were writing this book?I systematically reread 19th-century fiction, and I found thatthe kinds of things that concern me in my own researchwere, in fact, objects of concern at that time. Nineteenth-century writers very often could put things pithily thatwould take a very long time for me to explain.

You seem to do more than simply quote from thesecolorful writers. Historian Donald Worster reviewedyour book for the web-based magazine Slate.com andcalled you “a Thorsten Veblen for our time” and “a master of invective.” Were you channeling writerslike Ambrose Bierce?The 19th century really was the golden age of vituperation.Like any historian, I’m trying to give the sense of the time.And by pulling back and using a more academic prose, Ithought I would lose too much of that power and authen-ticity. Nineteenth-century novels have a straightforward,frank, vigorous prose that does not hesitate to name namesin these kinds of things. So in that sense, yeah, it’s a quiteconscious decision, but if people say I’m a master of invec-tive, I just always have to say that, compared to these guys,I’m still an apprentice.

You devote a whole chapter to exploring the notionof friendship in this age of contentiousness. What didfriendship mean to the so-called Big Four whohelped build the Central Pacific Railroad?The idea of exploring friendship came from my intensivereading of the correspondence of these business people andpoliticians who called themselves friends. As I say in thebook, it was like being in a Quaker meeting—it was FriendHopkins and Friend Stanford. But I would read the restof the correspondence, and even though they addressed

CREATIVE VISUALIZATION

From 1864 to 1869, photographer Alfred A. Hart trackedthe construction of the Central Pacific Railroad, producingmore than 350 stereographs in the process. When viewedthrough a stereoscope, a small card (like the one atright) with double images would transform into a three-dimensional world.

Today, Richard White and the Spatial History Lab atStanford’s Bill Lane Center for the American West are using21st-century technology to change the way we perceivethe world of 19th-century railroads. For links to the Lab’smany visualizations, including a modern retracing of Hart’spath, go to huntingtonfrontiers.org.

Alfred A. Hart (1816–1908), First Construction Train Passing the Palisades, stere-ograph, ca. 1868. Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.


[ FRESH TAKE ]

one another as friends, it was very clear that many ofthem didn’t like each other and, over the course of longlives, came to despise each other.

Mark Hopkins and Collis P. Huntington were friends,but both strongly disliked Leland Stanford, and yet Stanfordstill remained “a friend.” So my challenge was to determinewhether this was simply hypocrisy, or was it that I didn’t

understand what friendship meant in this context? And Irealized that friendship had very little to do with affection—it wasn’t necessary to 19th-century friendship. Friends werepeople who needed each other; friends were people whohad a common set of interests. Friendship wasn’t bribery;friendship made bribery unnecessary. Friendship was an actof reciprocity, over a long period of time—I do you favors,you do me favors. What made friendship so corrupt, ofcourse, was when private favors were exchanged for publicfavors. Who your friends were pretty much determinedhow politics were going to work for you.

What kinds of stories emerged from the correspondencecollections at The Huntington?I used Collis P. Huntington’s papers a lot, but they’re at

Syracuse, not so much here. But Henry Huntington’s paperspick up and cover a lot of things that his uncle’s don’t.Before Henry was rich in Los Angeles with his variousventures and city railcar system, he was a key figure inthe Southern Pacific, and he was one of the few peoplewhom his uncle trusted, so his papers are a gold mine.And the exchanges with his uncle are incredibly frank. Imean it’s a historian’s dream because you can’t believethey are actually saying this stuff and preserving it. Henry,for example, preserves some of the detective reports sub-mitted by operatives whom Southern Pacific executivesused to spy on each other.

But not everybody preserved it. You said that Stanford’swife destroyed all of his letters and personal papers?The irony of destroying your papers is that all the stuff yousent to others is still in their possession, so there are stillplenty of Leland Stanford letters out there. This allows peo-ple like Hopkins and Huntington to have the last word onStanford. Stanford’s counterargument has been destroyed. �

Interview conducted by Matt Stevens, editor of Huntington Frontiers.

Like any historian, I’m trying

to give the sense of the time.

FOR FURTHER READING

The Fall 2011 issue of CaliforniaHistory, the journal of the CaliforniaHistorical Society, is the perfectcompanion to Railroaded, as it isdevoted entirely to Richard White’sbook. Essays by Daniel Carpenter,Steven W. Usselman, Naomi R.Lamoreaux, and Eric Rauchway cri-tique White’s work from various

perspectives, including business, technological, and polit-ical history. The essays resulted froma symposium that took place at TheHuntington in July 2011, sponsoredby the Huntington–USC Institute onCalifornia and the West. The journalalso features comments from WilliamDeverell, director of the institute, anda response from White himself.


At the CrossroadsHOW PHOTOGRAPHER CARLETON E. WATKINSSET THE SCENE FOR THE SOUTHERN PACIFICRAILROAD

by Jennifer A. Watts

[ A CLOSER LOOK ]

IN 1880, CARLETON E. WATKINS (1829–1916)

boarded a train in Los Angeles and headed easton the Southern Pacific Railroad line. He hadnot packed light. The San Francisco–based

photographer brought more than 1,000 pounds ofequipment and a horse-drawn wagon spread out acrosstwo railcars. He planned to travel as far as Tombstone,Ariz., and the mining districts, stopping at variouspoints along the way to make pictures for clients andon speculation. The largesse of his friend and benefactor,railroad titan Collis P. Huntington (uncle of Henry E.Huntington), allowed him to travel free of charge. Hewould eventually pay his way in pictures, making a suiteof eight sumptuous albums, all bound in moroccoleather and containing the large-format photographsthat gained him a reputation as one of 19th-centuryAmerica’s most important photographers.

Watkins produced at least eight mammoth glass-plate negatives (18 by 22 in.) in Yuma, a desolate waystation bordering California on the banks of theColorado River. While Round House, Yuma (at right)is a rarity—only two prints are known to exist—it istypical in the way it pays homage to the railroad whilerevealing Watkins’ mastery of his art. In letters home tohis new wife, Frankie, he described conditions thereas akin to “Eternal Perdition.” Even so, he managed tobattle the heat, wind, dust, and his own rheumatismto create a series of photographs that remain unrivalledfor their seamless blend of historical documentationand artistic virtuosity. �

Jennifer A. Watts is curator of photographs at The Huntington.She wrote two essays for Carleton Watkins: The CompleteMammoth Photographs. Edited by Weston Naef andChristine Hult-Lewis, the new catalogue raisonné was published in 2011 by Getty Publications. It contains 1,273entries, with more than 350 representing photographs fromThe Huntington’s collection.

The final result of Watkins’ efforts is more than a depictionof a literal and metaphorical crossroads on the outskirtsof the Arizona mining territories. Round House, Yuma isalso a testament to the technological prowess and domi-nance of the railroad that not only enriched Collis P.Huntington but also, by extension, sustained Watkins’legacy as one of America’s greatest photographers.


Watkins chose an elevated vantage point to emphasize the angulargeometries created by trains and tracks. He probably stood atophis darkroom wagon to accomplish this bird’s-eye view, which usesthe thrusting diagonal line created by Locomotive No. 10 to force-fully bisect the picture plane.

The “Round House” of Watkins’ title is this rectangular structure.A forward-facing locomotive would enter one of the four bayswhere a hand-cranked (or “armstrong”) turntable would beused to turn it around.

Watkins directed every aspect of thisphotograph—from staging the threelocomotives at various positions inthe background to instructing thedozen or so locals to stand stillduring the seconds-long exposure.The slightest movement would resultin a ghostly blur on the negative.

Yuma was a cultural as well as aneconomic crossroads, as seen inWatkins’ deliberate posing of someof the town’s residents. Three NativeAmericans—two women and oneman—lean against the locomotivewhile several more stand in thedistance. Railroad engineers andemployees stand or sit proprietarilynear the soure of their livelihood.

Round House, Yuma, Arizona Territory, 1880, albumen print; image:14 1/16 × 21 in., mount: 19 × 26 1/4 in. Huntington Library, ArtCollections, and Botanical Gardens.

A Coming BRUCE CATTON’S CIVIL WAR IN


ruce Catton “soaked up Civil War his-tory” in his youth at the turn of the 20th century.For the man who would become the most prolificand popular historian of the war, that soakingoccurred way up north, in the small town ofBenzonia, Mich., in the “cut-over lumber coun-try,” near beautiful Crystal Lake, almost 300 milesnorthwest of Detroit. “Benzonia,” wrote Cattonin his autobiography, “was a good place to wait forthe morning train.” Surrounded by books, readers,and educators, but especially under the spell of asignificant number of old men who were Unionveterans, Catton cultivated a lasting and romanticimagination for the Civil War. “I know [the vet-erans] made [the war] a living thing,” Catton rec-ollected privately in 1954, “which, in my youthfulimagination had somehow happened… just overthe next hill and just five or 10 years ago. It wasvery real and terribly important, and probably Inever got over it.”

Indeed, he never got over it.And he made surein the Centennial years of the 1950s and 1960s thathis millions of readers never got over it either.Catton almost always wrote about the Civil Warwith a sense of the epic, and a romance and appealto the nostalgic, as well as his own brand of realism.In an autobiographical remembrance in 1972 he

BY DAVID W. BLIGHT

Furyb

THE CIVIL RIGHTS ERA

Historian David Blight spent the 2010–11 academicyear at The Huntington as the Rogers DistinguishedFellow in 19th-Century American History. While onfellowship, he completed the book American Oracle:The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era, recentlypublished by Harvard University Press. In commemora-tion of the 150th anniversary of the war, the book looksback 50 years to its Centennial, specifically through theprism of four prominent writers who wrote about itslegacy: Robert Penn Warren, Bruce Catton, EdmundWilson, and James Baldwin. In this excerpt, we meetthe enigmatic Catton (1899–1978), whose so-calledreconciliationist books, such as A Stillness at Appomattoxand This Hallowed Ground, united Northern andSouthern readers, only to ring false to African Americansat the height of the Civil Rights Era.


acknowledged that he had been raisedin a world of small town innocence,where people actually believed “the bigwrongs were all being righted.” Even“on the eve of the terrible century ofmass slaughter…of concentration campsand bombing raids, of cities gone toruin and race relations grown desperateand poisonous, of the general collapseof all accepted values and the unen-durable tension of the age of nuclearfission … , it was possible, even in-evitable, for many people to be opti-mistic. The world was about to takeoff its mask, and our worst nightmaresdid not warn us what we were goingto see.” No matter what he saw, the boyfrom Benzonia wrote about America’sgreatest historical nightmare withlyricism and optimism.

After Catton graduated fromBenzonia Academy, he went off toOberlin College in Ohio, the schoolfamous for its deep abolitionist roots.Majoring in English, he left school inhis second year, joined the Navy, andserved during the final year of WorldWar I. Catton never saw combat andbriefly returned to college, only to dropout after his junior year. At 21, hebecame a journalist, and would alwaysdescribe himself professionally as a“newspaperman.”

In 1938, Catton was hired by thefederal government as a public infor-mation officer, initially for the U.S.Maritime Commission. As World WarII unfolded, Catton worked as a pro-fessional public relations man underRoosevelt, especially on the pivotalissue of industrial war production. Bywar’s end, Catton dearly wanted tobecome a full-time writer and escapegovernment service. In his first novel,War Lords of Washington (1948), he tolda story of lasting impact in the eternaldebate in America over what Pres.Dwight D. Eisenhower would latercall the “military-industrial complex.”Catton drew on the overwhelming,

chastening experience of World WarII that he witnessed from Washingtonoffices and threw himself—for therest of his life—back into days of yorewhere he might rekindle old passionsand faiths at the same time as he couldwrite about war as the inevitable, hor-rible, transformative, tragic, but fasci-nating beast he had come to love andhate. With time, he would make hisreaders feel the same impulses.

At the beginning of the 1950sCatton began a very long and suc-cessful publishing relationship withDoubleday. Mr. Lincoln’s Army (1951),Glory Road (1952), and A Stillness atAppomattox (1954) appeared in rapidsuccession and practically overnightmade him the most popular and cele-brated writer about the Civil War.Stillness garnered him the Pulitzer Prize

and the National Book Award in thesame year. By the mid-50s, Catton hadbecome a publishing phenomenon likeno one else in the field of history.

The “Catton touch” was in thestorytelling, and in the author’s uncan-ny ability to plant his flag in the Northwhile writing about the war as a grand,national experience in the ultimatespirit of reconciliation. Catton set outto find everybody’s loss and then every-body’s victory in his reconciliationistnarrative. The South’s story of heroicdefeat in a noble cause, laced withsimultaneous denials and embraces ofwhite supremacy, had cried out for apopular counterpart. This was especial-ly the case in the midst of the Cold Warand as the Civil Rights Movement tookhold in the divided and turbulent South.In the Army of the Potomac, some of

Andrew J. Russell (1829–1902), Behind Stone Wall, Marye’s Heights, Fredericksburg, May 4, 1863,albumen print; image: 9 5/16 × 12 3/16 in., mount: 14 × 17 in. Page 12: U.S. Colored Troops standingat attention at Camp William Penn, near Philadelphia, ca. 1863–64, photographer unknown, albumenprint; image: 10 × 12 7/8 in., mount: 11 7/16 × 13 1/4 in. Huntington Library, Art Collections, andBotanical Gardens.


the old veterans whom he had knownand in whose aging glow he had baskedas a youth, Catton found his story.

Catton’s first three books togetherwere a huge commercial success, andstimulated some remarkable fan mail.Such letters reveal a good deal abouthow and why Catton succeeded inforging such a lasting audience in theCentennial era, as well as about thenature of mainstream, predominantlywhite Civil War memory in the1950s. His connection with his read-ers began with the prose, his sense ofdrama, the storytelling that so many ofhis fans found to be utter “pleasure”or “thrilling” or “sheer joy.” Cattonmade reading history “exciting” as wellas edifying. “Lord God how you canwrite!” was a typical line in a fan letter.

Many traditional, academic histo-rians as well as famous writers admiredand befriended Catton during his yearsof success, especially after, at historianAllan Nevins’ urging, Catton took the

job of editor of the newly reconsti-tuted American Heritage Magazine inNew York. Nine years Catton’s sen-ior, Nevins became a close friend andavid supporter of his nonacademicfellow author; both men were writingmultivolume histories of the Civil Waraimed at posterity as well as the mar-kets of the Centennial. Nevins’ eight-volume classic, Ordeal of the Union,poured forth from 1947 to 1971, andthe two authors read each other’s man-uscripts and scratched backs by review-ing each other’s books. Nevins endedhis career as a resident historian at theHuntington Library, and although hetried to recruit his friend to join him,Catton remained in New York, with anapartment on the Upper East Side andas a regular among the two-to-threemartini lunch crowd at the AlgonquinHotel in lower Manhattan.

Although they admired and evenenvied him, some historians viewedCatton as a talented popularizer.Catton rejected the label, preferringto be accepted as a writer whose beathappened to be history. In his NationalBook Award acceptance speech in1954, Catton tried to pass himself offas a simple journalist applying his tradeon a broader canvas. “A newspaper manis a historian without knowing it,” hedeclared. “He does what the historiandoes…he tries to find out exactly whathappened and… to tell about it so thatpeople who were not there may knowwhat was going on.” With the help ofDoubleday, the old public relations manalso had a keen eye on the marketplace.

The “Catton touch” had become aformula requiring several elements—the American tradition of moderationruined by fanaticism, glory enough togo around on both sides, dramaticturns of events on battlefields sufferedendlessly by the ordinary soldiers ofboth armies, a “tragic” bloodlettingfrom which the nation emerged betterand stronger, its ideals given a “new

beginning.” And always, the beautiful,sometimes transcendent, muscularprose. The distinguished historian atthe University of Pennsylvania, RoyNichols, found Catton’s HallowedGround “reminiscent of…Tolstoi inWar and Peace”; he admired Catton’sability to make an army such a livingthing, as well as his “gift for portrai-ture.” But he simply could not abidethe full thrust of Catton’s “romanti-cism.” Catton had lulled his readersinto a vast club of descendents, relish-ing their grandfather’s “noble taskcompleted after great sacrifice.” As theCentennial arrived, Nichols chal-lenged, “Should we not do more thanvicariously enjoy the war?”

A formula for enjoying the war.Although Catton himself denied thisaccusation in numerous forums, legionsof devotees who came of age readinghis books, or discovered them in theirmature years, experienced a vicarious,if ennobling pleasure—sometimesguilty and often not—in learning aboutthe war.They came to “love” the CivilWar in an age when war, with its un-fathomable destructiveness, was nolonger loveable. Catton offered themyoung heroes fighting for what theyconsidered right and willing to sacri-fice their lives to something larger thanthemselves, a story with particularresonance in the Cold War era of in-humane, push-button weapons of totaldestruction. The distinguished Yalehistorian John Morton Blum recalleda conversation with Alfred Knopf, circa1965, when the famous publisher offer-ed this telling comment on the popularhistorian: “Bruce Catton is the lastsurvivor of both sides.”

For the overwhelming majority ofAmericans at the beginning of theCentennial, if American history con-tained black people, they were stilllargely voiceless and invisible, despitethe roar of contemporary eventsacross the South from Greensboro to

One might say a kind

of fault line lay under-

neath the epic Civil

War portrayed in

Catton’s books and in

popular culture by the

early 1960s, a tremor

waiting to erupt and

scream forth with a

demystifying impact.


Birmingham. One might say a kind offault line lay underneath the epic CivilWar portrayed in Catton’s books andin popular culture by the early 1960s,a tremor waiting to erupt and screamforth with a demystifying impact.

Catton and the Centennial com-memorations he became associatedwith had fierce critics on the left and,especially, among blacks. An editorialin the Baltimore Afro-American in 1958took issue with a speech Cattondelivered in which he paid tribute to“Lee” and the “ragged Confederates”who had never “asked for anyone’sforgiveness” and only sought “under-standing” of their cause. Catton neverseemed to grasp that in the wake ofBrown v. Board of Education and inthe cauldron of the Civil Rights

struggle, most African Americans hadlittle tolerance for the “mystic power”of the Civil War to fashion sectionaland racial peace.

Given his popularity as a kind ofreconciler-in-chief during the Cen-tennial, it is remarkable how warmlyCatton embraced the Lost Cause andwhat he approvingly referred to as the“Confederate Legend.” To the end,Catton would give with one hand andtake with the other, often dependingon his audience. In a speech in Berea,Ky., in March 1965, as the Centennialmercifully waned away, Catton deliv-ered a full-throated (for him) expres-sion of how issues of race were throwninto bold relief by the poignancy ofCivil War anniversaries in the midst ofthe Civil Rights Movement. He linked

Sherman’s U.S. Army of 1865 marchingthrough Georgia and South Carolinawith the current deployment of U.S.troops to protect the participants on thefamous Selma-to-Montgomery marchof 1965. The Civil War wrought a“revolution,” declared Catton; “itdestroyed slavery and made the Negroa free person,” and the nation was “stillgrappling with the change.” Then, forhis eastern Kentucky audience, Cattonnarrated in gripping detail the surren-der at Appomattox, providing the rightmixture of elegiac drama, martial hero-ism, and honor for the defeated to keepthe Confederate Legend flourishing.

That same year, in an essay, “TheEnd of the Centennial,” Catton threwhis arms around the Lost Cause. Hecalled the deep threads of the Lost

Mathew B. Brady (1823–1896), McPherson’s Woods—Wheat Field in Which General Reynolds Was Shot, July 1863, albumen print; image: 6 x 8 1/2 in.,mount: 9 5/8 x 13 in. Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. The famous photographer Mathew Brady is the man standing at the fence; oneof his assistants took the photo.


Cause “a mighty omnipresent force inthe land”—rooted in Lee as Christianhero in defeat and in the “incrediblygallant, heroic long-suffering mortal”Confederate soldier, “who triumphedover…everything except the force ofsuperior numbers.” Could Civil Warmemory drip with more pathos thanthis? “In all seriousness,” concludedCatton, “this legend of the Lost Causehas been an asset to the entire country”;and in the end, it “saved us.”

One might be aghast that Cattoncould reach such a conclusion in 1965,the year after the murders during the“Freedom Summer” in Mississippi, andthe turbulent but historic passage ofthe 1964 Civil Rights Act.These werestartling sentiments from a writer whorepeatedly declared his sympathy withthe aims of the Civil Rights Movement.Catton’s understanding of the LostCause was rooted in a rather barren,but fully mainstream understandingof African American history and thehistory of race relations. His Lost Causewas the one Southern partisans had sooften peddled publicly—a benigncluster of myths about a noble crusade,defending tradition against rapaciousmodernity, the defense of womanhoodand home, and the ideal of soldiers’undying valor in holy defeat. WhatCatton did not grasp is just how muchthe Lost Cause “legends” had becomean aggressive racial ideology in the late19th and early 20th centuries, fuelingthe virulent white supremacy at thebase of the legal and social structureof Jim Crow America.

When Catton wrote the dark end-ings of his memoir in 1972, and reflect-ed on the troubled and violent fate ofmankind, perhaps he was entirely awareafter all of the full character of the storyhe had told and sold so well. Remem-bering his innocent youth one lasttime, the 73-year-old accused himselfof “regarding the past so fondly we areunable to get it in proper focus, and

we see virtues that were not there.”And then he gave his own brand ofAmericanized tragedy a devastatingblow. “It is easy to take the tragicview,” wrote Catton, “(which I proud-ly supposed that I was doing) as longas you do not know what tragedyreally means. Pessimism has a fine tartflavor when you know that every-

thing is going to come out all right.”After such success, was the poet andthe old PR man admitting he hadenjoyed the war too much?

In the wake of the violence of the1960s, the riots and assassinations, andthe American tragedy unfolding inVietnam as well as back home, per-haps Catton recalled with ambivalencesome of the writing he had done in thepassion and optimism of the Centennialera. He might have remembered hisbrief epilogue in the American HeritagePicture History, “A Sound of DistantDrums,” captured on one two-columnpage next to a painting of a Unionveterans parade from 1890. With nos-talgia in high tide, and at the end ofthe most evocative visual re-creationof the Civil War ever produced, Cattonsummed up the war’s “haunting mem-ory.” It was understandably about thevalor and loss of so many young sol-diers and the societies and worlds fromwhich they came that could never beretrieved again. Here was Catton infull flower. In the war the country hadlost the “dreams that had brought fireand a great wind down on a land thatmeant to be happy and easygoing…thewhole network of habits and hopesand attitudes of mind it [the war] hadground into fragments—these wereremembered with proud devotion.”

But what dreams and what habits? Ina 325-word epilogue that did not utterthe words slavery or emancipation,nor even imply their presence in CivilWar remembrance, Catton referred to“decaying plantation buildings” as“shrines simply because they somehowspoke for the dream that had died, thevitality of the dream gaining in strengthas the physical embodiment of it drift-ed off into ruin.” What the country,above all, must “never forget,” Cattonurged in his ending, “was the simplememory of personal valor.” Catton hadnot always kept it so simple, and hiswork should still be read today. Butafter so often leaving his readers chokedon mystic emotion about the fallen,and with little sense of the war’smeaning and consequences, perhapsthe Catton in the memoir of 1972felt a strange kind of survivor’s guilt.The Yankee who became the “lastsurvivor of both sides” went home toBenzonia, and spent his last years inthe north woods of Michigan. �

David Blight is Class of 1954 Professorof History at Yale University and author ofthe award-winning Race and Reunion:The Civil War in American Memory.This article has been excerpted fromAmerican Oracle: The Civil War in theCivil Rights Era by David W. Blight,published in September 2011 by HarvardUniversity Press. Copyright 2011 byDavid W. Blight. Used by Permission. Allrights reserved.

Catton cultivated a lasting

and romantic imagination

for the Civil War.

[ ]Go to huntingtonfrontiers.orgto read passages from Catton’s

writing. Also, you can downloadDavid Blight’s talk “Bruce Catton’sTerrible Swift Pen” from the con-ference “Civil War Lives,” held atThe Huntington in October 2010.


How Home Savings & Loan

Perfected the Art of

Banking in Southern

California

By Adam Arenson

dividen

paying

Once upon a time there was a bank. But it did not lookthe way a bank does today: It had no drive-throughATMs, no bulletproof shields, and no plate-glass windowswith posters touting the latest way to save. Instead, this

bank was adorned with mosaics, festooned with brightly colored tilesand intricate patterns. It also had sculptures of towering figures, childrencelebrating with their communities, and men and women with solemnfaces, deeply engaged in their rituals. And it had painted murals, somemore than 50 feet long, showing figures more than life-size, engaged inwork and play, worship and wonder. And the bank was a gathering place, a local landmark. Its distinctive

architecture could be seen up and down the avenue; its entrance plaza waswide, and the lobbies grand, sometimes with fountains and nicely mani-cured foliage. When asked why the extravagance, the bank’s leaders said itwas to “show our gratitude to a wonderful community.”

ds

These were the Home Savings andLoan buildings, constructed throughthe partnership of financier HowardAhmanson Sr. and the artist-impresarioMillard Sheets beginning in 1954 andcontinuing into the 1990s with morethan 120 banks throughout SouthernCalifornia, into the midwest, and asfar away as Florida. When Sheets started this work, he

immediately hired talented artists asassistants—architects, ceramic and fiberartists, and painters, including his for-mer student at Scripps College, SusanLautmann Hertel. After struggling tocomplete the first tile mosaics fromItaly, Sheets began looking for some-one with the patience and skill to mas-ter the art as the commission fromHome Savings went from one bankto two to dozens. For a while, Sheetsasked local Pomona Valley artists,including Martha Menke Underwood,to learn how to work with the unfor-giving materials of glass-tile mosaics.But in 1960, Sheets found what heneeded in Denis O’Connor.The tile mosaics, painted murals,

stained glass, and other artworks werebeautiful—but also expensive. Sheetsemployed architects to design the build-ings and asked both bank employees andhis studio artists to conduct extensiveresearch for the initial sketches of theartwork. Sheets advised Hertel as shecreated full-color gouaches, made full-size projections of the approved design,and selected the correct tile colors.O’Connor and his assistants wouldspend weeks or months with the small,textured glass tiles, cutting them intothe perfect shapes, mixing shades togive the illusion of depth, movement,or shadows, pasting them onto num-bered sections of paper, and then cartingthem to the site. When the mosaic was ready, the

entire studio would gather around as itwas laid on the floor, and Sheets and theother artists would ascend a ladder to

Top: A young Denis O’Connor was profiled in the Detroit News in 1962. Bottom: His mosaic for the HomeSavings and Loan building in Temple City, Calif., from 1984, still graces the building now operated byJPMorgan Chase. Photos (above and on page 18) by M. O. Quinn. Opposite: O’Connor at work on theTemple City mosaic, looking closely at the gouache study by Susan Hertel (also shown on page 3) beforecutting tiles.



look down on the completed work,checking for any needed adjustments.Only then could the mosaic be installedonto the travertine facing of the bank’sexterior wall: a base layer of cement,the careful inlay of the mosaic tiles,painted touch-ups, and, finally, a groutsealer. The tedious, painstaking workcould come quickly to a halt if a tilecame loose and broke, and a replacementhad to be found among the bins of col-ors, cut and re-fashioned for the spot.Today, Home Savings is gone. The

sale of Home Savings to Washington

Mutual in 1998 marked the end ofthese commissions, but efforts are underway to educate the public about theselandmarks and to preserve the uniqueartworks that arose from a partnershipbetween an art studio and a bank. Oneway of telling that story can be found inthe Denis O’Connor papers—accounts,gouaches, process photos, tile samples,and installation slides—that came toThe Huntington in the fall of 2010 as a gift from O’Connor’s son, Kevin,three years after O’Connor’s death.

In the early 20th century, thePomona Valley was alive withart exhibits and studio instruc-tion; women and men were

expanding the commercial role for artby combining traditional craftsmanshipand new subject matter. Jean Amestaught design and enameling at ScrippsCollege and Claremont GraduateUniversity while her husband, Arthur,taught design at Otis; Hertel andUnderwood studied at Scripps; andBetty Davenport Ford, John EdwardSvenson, and Albert Stewart wereaccomplished local sculptors. All hadindependent artistic careers, but all alsoworked with Millard Sheets as he gath-ered artists to help him complete themassive commissions for Home Savings.(Sam Maloof, the subject of theHuntington show “The House thatSam Built,” recently on view in TheHuntington’s MaryLou and George

the intricate cut of

mosaic tiles, espe-

cially in hands and

faces, are what set

the Home Savings

mosaics apart, and

this was O’Connor’s

masterful work.


Boone Gallery, had worked briefly forSheets in the 1940s, doing framing andprintmaking.) O’Connor had settled inClaremont, near his first wife’s family,and was invigorated by the artisticcommunity—and he found his life’swork after he met Millard Sheets.

Sheets told the storyof the Home Savingscommission so oftenthat he perfected it.

The letter from Howard Ahmansonalways came first: “Have traveledWilshire Boulevard for 25 years. Knowname of architect and year every build-ing was built. Bored,” Ahmanson wrote.“Have two valuable pieces of prop-erty on Wilshire Boulevard. Needbuildings designed….If interested callthis number.” Sheets was a Pomona Valley native

and an art wunderkind who startedteaching at art school even before hegraduated. He had won art contests inthe 1920s and exhibited in New Yorkas well as Los Angeles; in 1932, he was

hired to teach art at Scripps College,after a stint at the Chouinard ArtInstitute. Appointed chair of the artdepartment at Scripps in 1936, hebegan to build one of the finest artdepartments in the western UnitedStates. Sheets was a visual artist, not anarchitect, though he had taken onsome large projects before, includingoverseeing the construction of theThunderbird air-training schools justbefore World War II. He was ready foranother challenge and learned aboutthe financier’s goal: “I want buildingsthat will be exciting 75 years from

now,” Ahmanson said, offering Sheetscomplete control—design, subject,decoration, and construction.In the very first sketch, Sheets re-

called, “I included a lot of sculpture anda big mosaic over the main entrance.”When the first site was almost ready,Ahmanson visited, walked aroundsilently, and then pronounced hisapproval. Sheets then proceeded to thefirst Home Savings and Loan banklocation, at 9245 Wilshire, decoratingit with a four-panel, colorfully abstractmosaic portrait facing the street. Itshowed an ornate history of banking,from the Sumerians to the Renaissance,in stained glass, and the gold “HS&L”tiles, for Home Savings and Loan, incolumns under the windows. The public reaction astounded

Sheets and Ahmanson. “They stood inline on Wilshire Boulevard a block anda half long waiting to put money in, inthe savings and loan,” Sheets recalled.

“It paid for itself in the first 10 days.It paid for the land, it paid for thebuilding, it paid for the furnishings,landscaping. Everything.” The banksent out questionnaires to confirm whatwas happening, asking, “Why did youchoose Home Savings?” Customersanswered, “We like to be associatedwith something beautiful.”While Jackson Pollock was pouring

paint on his canvases, while AlexanderCalder was creating abstract mobiles,while art critics were declaring figu-rative art dead, the Sheets Studio pro-duced artwork more closely alignedwith the masters of the Middle Ages,creating stained glass, mosaics, andpainted works with reassuring themes,seeking to build a place of affectionfor Home Savings in the hearts—andwallets—of local residents. The Sheets Studio artwork depicted

the local history or community heav-ily gauzed with a sense of nostalgia,

The Home Savings

artwork made the

banks instantly

recognizable.

Detail from mosaic at the Northridge location, work signed by Denis O’Connor and Susan Hertel,1986. Photo by Adam Arenson.


building on older models of bank art-work in the Los Angeles region.Ahmanson and his Home Savings teamembraced the style wholeheartedly,seeing within it what they called “apride and a symbolism.” The HomeSavings artwork made the banksinstantly recognizable—before seeinga logo or the Home Savings shield, thepresence of this artwork announcedthe bank’s identity and affirmed theaspirations of its clientele. RichardDeihl, the chief executive of the bankafter Ahmanson, confirmed that aneffort was always made to choose aprominent corner and have the bankbe memorable, the artwork serving, attimes, as a very expensive billboard.

already 40 years old, and some locationsneeded restoration. In the O’Connorpapers at The Huntington are discus-sions with the city of Pomona aboutthe need to restore the fountains in thedowntown mall designed by Sheets,with artwork completed by the studioin 1962, and an initial plan for restoringthe mosaic horses on the front of theRancho Palos Verdes location, a proj-ect completed later by other artists. In the 21st century, bank design has

become about uniformity, a placelesskind of branding. The art and archi-tecture of the Home Savings banksprovided the exact opposite: an effortto distinguish the bank, its methods,and its service to the community. Withthe sale of the buildings, Franciscan

Denis O’Connor: A Legacy in MosaicDenis O’Connor was born on the coast of the North Sea, in England,in 1933. Yet his greatest artistic contribution came in telling the historyof his adopted home, California. O’Connor earned a degree in sculptureand drawing from the Royal College of Art in London. He was nottrained as a mosaicist; he had earned a degree in sculpture and drawingfrom the Royal College of Art in London. O’Connor’s specialty was the hands and faces, truly sculptural ele-

ments that demonstrated his academic training. Anyone could provide abackground color—and, indeed, many of the studio artists’ children remem-ber being given this task—but the intricate cut of mosaic tiles, especiallyin hands and faces, are what set the Home Savings mosaics apart, and thiswas O’Connor’s masterful work. In the first few decades, O’Connor worked completely within the

designs as Sheets had approved them, but in the final decade of commissions,Hertel and O’Connor subtly changed the designs of the mosaics, makingthem less angular, softening the images and often letting a breath of humorenter the composition. The historical themes could be even more literalthan before—for example, the research files show how the 1986 Northridgemosaic held symbolic elements carefully calibrated to the site: A hawkrepresents the early Hawk Ranch, and a progression of deer, the PonyExpress, and rodeo horses provides a subtle historical narrative for thetriptych, showing first a local Tongva hunter, then a Victorian-era farming

family (pictured at left), and finally Montie Montana, a local trick rider, actor, and Tournament of Roses paraderegular, smiling in front of the skyline of Cal State Northridge and the local historic hospital. But the vibrancy andenergy of the works remained the same as Millard Sheets had once quickly sketched out.

–A.A.

This remarkable experi-ment in the power of artto advertise a bank—andof family and local-

history scenes to endear banks to theircommunities—extended past the deathof Howard Ahmanson in 1968 and theretirement of Millard Sheets from thiswork in 1980, as Hertel and O’Connorcontinued to complete the commis-sions until the sale of Home Savingsto Washington Mutual. By then, thehundred or so bank locations installedwith art in California were joined byclose to 50 decorated branches of thenational Savings of America in Texas,Missouri, Ohio, Illinois, and Florida.When Home Savings was sold,

some of the Sheets Studio artwork was

and tile mosaics left to us provide aremarkable monument to what thepartnership of Howard Ahmansonand the Millard Sheets Studio meantfor local communities. �


friars might now adorn barbeque out-lets, and beach scenes have highlightedcell-phone stores. The effort to educatebank managers about the value of whatthey have—and the protections of the1979 California Arts Preservation Actand the 1990 Visual Artists RightsAct—continues, in a race to understandand preserve these works. But thesculpture, stained glass, painted murals,

Adam Arenson is assistant professor of his-tory at the University of Texas at El Pasoand a Haynes Foundation Fellow at theHuntington Library for spring 2012. Heis the author of The Great Heart of theRepublic: St. Louis and the CulturalCivil War, and he is finishing a bookabout the art and architecture of HomeSavings banks. More about both projectscan be found at adamarenson.com.

From Childhood Memory to History BookI grew up with these mosaics. My local branch was in La Mesa, Calif., near my home in San Diego, but I alsohave distinct memories of arriving into the San Fernando Valley past the marvelous Studio City branch. And Ialways wanted to learn more about their history. When I moved back to California in 2010, I sought out theartists’ children, the studio workers, and maps of the existing branches. I built a blog (now at adamarenson.com/homesavingsbankart) to chronicle what I found, and to welcome memories from the public. The outpouring ofinterest has been tremendous, from front-page newspaper stories to personal e-mails from Ahmanson, Sheets,O’Connor, and Hertel family members, just to name a few. But, as a historian, I also knew the project would be incomplete without access to an archive. The Home Savings

and Loan archives seem inaccessible within the nested records of Washington Mutual and Chase. I knew therewere Sheets papers at the Smithsonian, but I knew they only covered his activities until 1980, when O’Connorand Hertel took on the local stories of five more states as the bank expanded out beyond California. And so Iwas overjoyed to learn that O’Conner’s son, Kevin, donated his father’s papers to The Huntington in 2010. This spring, I will be finishing my research in the O’Connor archive and the Sheets papers—the latter, con-

veniently, held on microfilm by the Huntington Library. And I look forward to sharing more about the historyand ongoing significance of these artworks to their communities, and speaking to those who worked on the artcommissions, banked in these branches, or simply have vivid memories of Home Savings. These collections allowan exploration of what these corporately sponsored pieces of public fine art can tell us about the intersection ofbusiness goals and artists’ visions in the second half of the 20th century.

–A.A.

While the mosaics Denis O'Connor completed for the Sheets Studio still grace the building in La Mesa, Calif. (above), the bank has been replaced by aprivate school. Photo by Kim Jones.


In PrintA SAMPLING OF BOOKS BASED ON RESEARCHIN THE COLLECTIONS

OUT ON ASSIGNMENT: NEWSPAPER WOMEN

AND THE MAKING OF MODERN PUBLIC SPACE

Alice FahsUniversity of North Carolina Press, 2011

Out on Assignment illuminates the livesand writings of a lost world of women whowrote for major metropolitan newspapers

at the start of the 20th century. Fahs reveals how theirwork—including celebrity interviews, witty sketches ofurban life, celebrations of being “bachelor girls,” advicecolumns, and a campaign in support of suffrage—had far-reaching implications for American women at the turn ofthe century.

EMPIRES, NATIONS, AND FAMILIES: A

HISTORY OF THE NORTH AMERICAN WEST,

1800–1860

Anne F. HydeUniversity of Nebraska Press, 2011

This is the second in the ambitious six-volume history of the American West from

the University of Nebraska Press. In Hyde’s contribution,the West is not virgin wilderness discovered by virtuousAnglo entrepreneurs. Rather, the United States is a new-comer in a place already complicated by vying empires.Hyde documents the broad family associations that crossednational and ethnic lines and that, along with the riversystems of the trans-Mississippi West, formed the basis fora global trade in furs that had operated for hundreds ofyears before the land became part of the United States.

CULTURAL HIERARCHY IN 16TH-CENTURY

EUROPE: THE OTTOMANS AND MEXICANS

Carina L. JohnsonCambridge University Press, 2011

Johnson argues that 16th-century Europeanencounters with the newly discoveredMexicans (in the Aztec Empire) and the

newly dominant Ottoman Empire can only be understoodin relation to the cultural and intellectual changes wroughtby the Reformation. Starting at the beginning of the 16thcentury, when ideas of European superiority were not fixed,Johnson traces the formation of those ideas through newspamphlets, Habsburg court culture, gifts of treasure, and theorganization of collections.

UNBECOMING BRITISH: HOW

REVOLUTIONARY AMERICA BECAME A

POSTCOLONIAL NATION

Kariann Akemi YokotaOxford University Press, 2011

In this wide-ranging interpretation ofAmerican history and its Founding Fathers,

Yokota shows that political independence from Britainfueled anxieties among Americans about their culturalinferiority and continuing dependence on the mothercountry. Yokota examines a wealth of evidence fromgeography, the decorative arts, intellectual history, science,and technology to underscore the fact that the process of“unbecoming British” was not an easy one.

THE PLACES OF WIT IN EARLY MODERN

ENGLISH COMEDY

Adam ZuckerCambridge University Press, 2011

What is wit made out of in the comediesof Shakespeare, Jonson, Shirley, and theircontemporaries? Zucker addresses this

question by turning to the relationship between comicform and local history, exploring familiar sites such asWindsor Forest, Smithfield, Covent Garden, and HydePark. Along with Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsorand Ben Jonson’s Epicoene and Bartholomew Fair, Zuckerexplores the neglected town comedies of the 1630s—theforerunners of the Restoration comedy of manners andsatirical realism of our own day.

IN PRAISE OF CHICKENS: A

COMPENDIUM OF WISDOM FAIR

AND FOWL

Jane S. SmithLyons Press, 2011

In her compact miscellany ofchicken wisdom, Smith hasproduced a lively and amusing

collection of quotations from past authorities onall things chicken, interspersed with brief editorialcomments and complemented by colorful illus-trations. Whether a single sentence or severalparagraphs, selections are all little-known andlong on charm. In Praise of Chickens can besavored in small bites or enjoyably devoured all at once. It includes a demonstration of how tohypnotize a chicken, an account of a chicken rodeo,and Mark Twain’s sly tips on raising chickens.


The Uncertainty PrinciplesWHAT MODERN SCIENCE OWES TO PURITAN NEW ENGLAND

[ IN PRINT ]

THE YEAR 1662 WAS A BUSY ONE FOR

Robert Boyle, a pioneer of the modernexperimental scientific method. He was anactive member of the new Royal Society of

London and published his findings on Boyle’s law, whichdescribed the relationship between the absolute pressureand volume of a gas. And yet he still had time that year tofound the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel inNew England, which was a missionary company in thecolonies at the time.

“Today we tend to think of science and religion asmutually exclusive practices,” says Sarah Rivett, an assistantprofessor of English at Princeton University, “but during thescientific revolution there was a natural overlap betweenthe two.” In the 17th century, the term “science” didn’t evenexist.The ultimate goal of natural philosophy, as it was called,was not simply to study nature through astronomy or physicsor chemistry but to prove the very existence of God.

Rivett has spent a fair amount of time trying to figureout how such a bold pursuit unfolded in an era not longseparated from John Calvin (1509–1564), whose Institutesof the Christian Religion (1536) stated in no uncertain termsthat man could never dare to know God.

She arrived at The Huntington for a one-year fellowshipfrom the National Endowment for the Humanities in thefall of 2007, a couple of years removed from her doctorateat the University of Chicago. After a year of mining religiousand scientific treatises, she secured a second fellowship for2008–09, this one from the Omohundro Institute of EarlyAmerican History and Culture at the College of Williamand Mary. In addition to giving her another year at TheHuntington, the new fellowship guaranteed a book contractwith the institute’s publishing partner, the University ofNorth Carolina Press. Rivett’s book, The Science of the Soulin Colonial New England, came out in November 2011.

“It’s about how the scientific revolution transformed theway people understood the human soul as a kind of repos-itory for collecting evidence of God,” explains Rivett. “Sojust when the Royal Society was implementing techniquesof observation and experimentation that became thefoundation of modern science, ministers and theologians

were absorbing those methods andideas and applying them to expandwhat they could know about God.”

The best evidence of God, Rivettdiscovered, was found in public testi-monies of faith. Before converting toChristianity in a Puritan congregation,aspirants had to stand up and give anaccount of their faith—to explain thefeeling of God transforming the soul.AsRivett read published and manuscriptaccounts of these testimonies, she wasstruck by the fact that the Puritans’ prac-tice of experimental testimony was bor-rowing from empiricism, the scientificmethod of inquiry associated with FrancisBacon (1561–1626).

In a first edition of Bacon’sAdvancement of Learning (1605),housed in the HuntingtonLibrary, Rivett found that some-one had made a brief notationnext to Bacon’s passage aboutthe consequences of the fallof man: “Calvin in scientia” (orCalvin in science). The ownerof that edition, a FrenchHuguenot named IsaacCasaubon, was noting thelimits of the knowledge ofGod and scientific inquiry.Rivett also came acrossan edition of Bacon’sConfession of Faith (1641)that was bound as anappendix to RichardBaxter’s Call to the

Unconverted, a quintessential mid-17th-century text onProtestant conversion.

“Here you had this fascinating juxtaposition of a con-version text paired with a work by one of the fathers ofthe Scientific Revolution,” said Rivett. This copy, she said,had been owned by a laywoman named Jane Knight, whowas reading the two works side by side as part of her ownpractice of daily piety.

Rivett suggests in her book’s conclusion that, just asreligion absorbed some of science’s empiricism, so too didscience learn uncertainty from religion.

“In Calvinism, knowledge is always contestable,” shesays, “and that’s also the condition of human understand-ing and scientific experience by the mid-18th century,when scientists realized they would never arrive at absoluteconclusions.” Hypotheses and experimentation, accordingto Rivett, are residues of the early modern intersection ofreligion and natural philosophy.

–M.S.

The title page of Francis Bacon’s Confessionof Faith, 1641. Huntington Library, ArtCollections, and Botanical Gardens. Lowerleft: Sarah Rivett in The Huntington’s DibnerHall of the History of Science, 2009. Photoby Dino Parenti.

THE HUNTINGTON EPIPHANY

Oxford University Press has just published a new edition of The New England Soul:Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England, Harry S. Stout’s 1986 bookon the history of sermons in Puritan New England.Stout is professor of American religious history at Yale University and the Rogers

Distinguished Fellow in 19th-Century American History at The Huntington this year. Hesays he has used the Huntington collection for every book he has written, including thoseresearch trips more than 30 years ago when he was working on New England Soul.In the new edition, Stout has added a preface in which he describes what he calls his

“Huntington epiphany.” Until a Huntington curator showed him manuscripts of ser-mons from the 17th and 18th centuries, Stout had limited his attention to what hehad been finding in published books. He found out that manuscripts contained therough notes and revisions that were more accurate records of what was said fromthe pulpit each week. “After my Huntington epiphany, I then scoured all the librariesand historic societies for manuscripts of sermons,” Stout recalls. “So The Huntingtonand archival research are indelibly associated with one another in my mind.”


Harvesting LocalKnowledgeTHE RANCH ENJOYS THE FIRST FRUITS OF ITS LABOR

by Diana W. Thompson

[ POSTSCRIPT ]

had gone to seed. “Now I’ll know to plant that variety laterin the year,” remarked Kleinrock. Meanwhile, the othertwo types survived the high temperatures, remaining sweetand tender.

This is the kind of local knowledge urban farmers needto rediscover, says Kleinrock. “Local seed companies usedto sell varieties best suited to their region’s climate, andoffer instructions on how to grow them,” he explains, “butwe no longer have that structure.” Instead, many urbanfarmers exchange ideas virtually, discussing everythingfrom seed varieties to food preservation through socialmedia and websites, or by regular old-fashioned net-working. With the opening of the Ranch, the burgeoningcommunity of small, local food producers has gained aphysical space where they can rediscover, apply, and testthis local knowledge.

A symposium in November 2011 capped the Ranch’sfirst year and explored a range of techniques, from boostingsoil health to directing bathwater to backyard fruit orchards.For Pasadena-area homesteader Steve Friedman, the sym-posium was his first chance to visit the Ranch. He wassurprised to see how much it had matured in so short atime and was glad to see a space where local growers couldget hands-on experience. “There’s only so much you canlearn from viewing slides on a screen,” says Friedman.“Thenyou need to visit a real garden and watch how it changesthrough the seasons.” For urban farmers looking forinspiration, the Ranch might be just the ticket.

Diana W. Thompson is a freelance writer based in SouthPasadena, Calif.

L IKE A CHILD WHOSE INFANCY IS MARKED

by astonishing growth and learning, TheHuntington’s urban agriculture research station,the Ranch, enjoyed an impressive first year

following its opening in November 2010. (We introducedit to readers in the Spring/Summer 2009 issue of HuntingtonFrontiers.) Thousands of local enthusiasts have now exploredthe best ways to grow food in Southern California throughworkshops, lectures, open houses, training sessions, a blog,and two symposia. At the same time, members of the Ranchstaff were putting ideas to the test in successive cropplantings on 15 acres northwest of the Botanical Centerat The Huntington.

Results are already beginning to emerge. Growingnative plants near fruit trees appears to improve plant healthby attracting a variety of beneficial insects. Gardeners whoresist the urge to pull tomatoes, arugula, or other vegeta-bles at season’s end are being rewarded with improved soilfertility and “volunteer” plants growing back from lastseason’s seed. A plastic tub drilled with holes makes anefficient and inexpensive way to produce abundant greensin a small space.

Some adaptations areunique to Southern California.While gardeners in other cli-mates rush to plant wintercrops before the cold sets in,Ranch project coordinatorScott Kleinrock faces theopposite constraint: excessiveheat. Following a string of 80-plus degree days in November,he realized one of the threebok choy varieties he sowed

Ranch coordinator Scott Kleinrock (withshovel) leads a discussion with participants in the first ranch symposium, held shortlyafter the opening of the Ranch in November2010. A second symposium took place inNovember 2011. Photo by Lisa Blackburn.

][ Go to huntingtonfrontiers.org for a complete archiveof the magazine.

On the CoverThere is a certain inscrutability in the faces of Civil War soldiers—captured in thousands of photos at The Huntington—from the surprisinglycasual expressions of white Union troops resting after battle in Tennessee (on the cover) to the stoic faces of black Union soldiersstanding at attention at Camp William Penn, near Philadelphia (above and on page 12). In his new book, American Oracle: TheCivil War in the Civil Rights Era, historian David Blight marks the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War by looking back 50 years to itsCentennial. In an excerpt about the great writer Bruce Catton, Blight ponders how an author could know so much about the worldof soldiers in the 1860s and yet fall short of mastering any ultimate truth about what the war meant in the 1960s.

The cover features a photograph by Isaac Bonsall (1833–1909), ca. 1863–64, of 12 Union military and civilian men near Chattanooga, Tenn. Purchased by theLibrary Collectors’ Council in 2009. Above is a detail from an image reproduced in full on page 12. It shows black troops at attention at Camp William Penn, nearPhiladelphia, ca. 1863–64. Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

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