Peabiddy, Peabody, and Peabodys
Posted: May 31, 2026 Filed under: America Since 1945, TV Leave a comment
In Massachusetts there is a town called Peabody. Locally it is pronounced “PEE-biddy.”
The town was once part of Salem, and then became “South Danvers,” and then, in 1868, changed its name to Peabody, in honor of George Peabody, who was born there.
George Peabody was a financier and pioneer of trans-Atlantic banking. He started out, like every other rich American of the 19th century, in “dry goods,” and then selling cotton in the UK. He expanded into banking. He would sell the bonds of US states in London.
Here’s some of what Ron Chernow says about him in House of Morgan:
Peabody, a good talker, was not prepossessing. Over six feet tall with light blue eyes and dark brown hair, he had a rumpled face, with knobby chin, bulbous nose, side whiskers, and heavy-lidded eyes. That this homely man would found the House of Morgan-later a white-glove affair with high-society partners famous for good looks and stylish dress—is ironic. He carried the scars of early poverty and was quick to feel slights and perceive enemies. Like many who have overcome early hardship by brute force, he was proud but insecure, always at war with the world and counting his injuries.
Born in Danvers, Massachusetts, he had only a few years of schooling. When he was a teenager, his father died, and Peabody worked in his brother’s shop to support his widowed mother and six siblings. When he later prospered in a Baltimore dry-goods business with a rich older partner, Elisha Riggs, he remained haunted by his past. “I have never forgotten and never can forget the great privations of my early years, he later said.3 He hoarded his money, worked incessantly, and retained a lonely air.
In 1837, Peabody moved to London. A year later he opened a merchant house at 31 Moorgate in London, furnishing it with a mahogany counter, a sate, and some desks. He joined a select group of merchant bankers who traded in dry goods and also financed such trade; hence, their businesses became known as merchant banks. They developed a form of wholesale banking remote from the prosaic world of bank books, teller windows, and checking accounts.
Late in life, he looked for a successor:
Ordinarily, Peabody would have chosen a son or nephew to take over the business. Most merchant banks were family partnerships with a few talented outsiders. But as a bachelor, Peabody was in the unusual position of having to shop for an heir and bequeath his empire to a stranger.
He was, however, no stranger to the company of women. While he didn’t smoke or drink, he resorted to the shadowy world of illicit pleasure
(He had a mistress and an illegitimate daughter.)
Peabody took on a young partner, also from Massachusetts, named Junius Spencer Morgan.
Late in life, this Peabody became charitable:
The Civil War years saw the metamorphosis of George Peabody from Scrooge to Santa Claus. He had been a prototypical heartless banker, a one-dimensional hoarder. As a contemporary said, “Uncle George, as Americans… call him—was one of the dullest men in the world: he had positively no gift, except that of making money.”29 Yet this dour man suddenly became prodigal in his gifts; his philanthropy was as immoderate as his earlier greed. He found it hard to break his miserly habits. “It is not easy to part with the wealth we have accumulated after years of hard work and difficulty,” he confessed. 30 Now a lifetime of hoarding was disgorged in one compensatory binge, cleansing his Yankee conscience.
Wikipedia declares him “the father of modern philanthropy.” The list of his causes is many. The Peabody Museum at Harvard is one that made an impression on young Helytimes.
The Peabody Education Fund, for the purpose of promoting “intellectual, moral, and industrial education in the most destitute portion of the Southern States,” post-Civil War, was another big one.
It may have been this effort that Robert Campbell Brinkley had in mind. Brinkley founded the Peabody Hotel in Memphis. The story goes that he was going to name it the Brinkley Hotel, but just then he found out his friend Peabody had died, so he named after the great philanthropist.
In Memphis they pronounce this hotel “Pee-Body.” My Massachusetts pronounciation caused me no end of queer looks when I lived in this hotel for a week in 2022 while my wife was working on Young Rock. What a happy time that was.
There was more than one philanthropic George Peabody. There was also George Foster Peabody:
This George Peabody was connected to Junius Spencer Morgan’s son, J.P. Morgan. When J.P. Morgan put together General Electric, he had this George Peabody on the board of directors. Did J.P. and George ever discuss his father’s friend George? No doubt. If George Foster was closely related to the first George, I can find no evidence of it, but they were probably connected somewhere.
George Foster Peabody was also a benefactor to the South. He was raised in Georgia, and developed Warm Springs, where his friend Franklin Roosevelt came to soak (and eventually died).
The Peabody Awards for Excellence in Broadcasting are administered by the University of Georgia, and are named after this Peabody.
Start researching Peabodys and they are legion. Nathaniel Hawthorne married a Peabody. The first English language kindergarten was started by Elizabeth Peabody:
Imagine having this lady teach you finger painting.
Two different Peabodys, Harlan Berkley Peabody Jr and Francis Peabody Magoun, were important in the study of oral poetry. (Berkley Peabody’s obituary is soothing reading). There was Frank Peabody the paleontologist, and Frances Peabody the doctor and essayist, and James Hamilton Peabody, governor of Colorado, who crushed the Cripple Creek miners’ strike, and Richard Peabody who fought alcoholism. The town of Peabody, Kansas is named after a vice president of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad (boy if you wanted a town named after you, 19th century railroad exec was the way to go).
How about tough old Endicott Peabody, the fighting reverend:
After his first semester of classes, Peabody was invited to take charge of a fledgling Episcopal congregation in Tombstone, Arizona. He arrived in January 1882, three months after the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.
Though Peabody felt unqualified, his stay in Tombstone proved that he could attract donors and manage a congregation, two traits he employed to great effect in his educational career. Within months, he raised $5,000 to build St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. It opened on June 18, 1882, making it the oldest Protestant church building in Arizona.
It is said that he visited saloons to ask gamblers for donations and “would challenge locals to boxing matches on the condition that if he won, they had to come to church on Sunday,” although Peabody dismissed most of these stories as apocryphal.
This Peabody founded the Groton School. Isaacson & Thomas, in The Wise Men:Six Friends and the World They Made, say:
Groton’s driving force was Endicott Peabody, who ruled the school for its first sixty years. Educated in England at Cheltenham and at Trinity College, Cambridge, the Rector was a perfect Victorian. Tall and muscular, regarding his body as a temple, he always dressed in highly polished black shoes, blue suit, and white starched bow tie. As a thirteen-year-old Averell Harriman described him in a letter home:
“You know he would be an awful bully if he wasn’t such a terrible Christian.”
Peabody cared more about sportsmanship than scholarship. “I’m not sure I like boys who think too much,” he once said. “A lot of people think a lot of things we could do without.” He personally taught two subjects: football and sacred studies. “The way of the non-athlete at Groton was not so much hard as inconsequential,” wrote the school historian. “Football was the King of the Games. Theoretically, a boy does not have to play the game, but moral suasion on the part of the faculty and students makes it almost impossible to avoid doing so.”
…
Although Peabody was thoroughly intimidating, most of the students also revered him. He remained a loyal and powerful force to most of them throughout their lives, marrying them off, christening their children, and even on occasion visiting them in jail. (When one of his old prefects, New York Stock Exchange president Richard Whit-ney, was convicted of embezzlement, Peabody visited him at Sing Sing. He brought Whitney a first baseman’s mitt so he could play on the prison team.) Franklin Roosevelt cited him as “the biggest influence in my life.
… At the school’s twentieth anniversary celebration, the President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, summed up that message for the students by paraphrasing the gospel of Luke: “Much has been given you. Therefore we have a right to expect much from you.”
Groton did produce more than its share of public servants. The school history notes that Groton’s first thousand graduates included a President, two Secretaries of State, two governors, three senators, and nine ambassadors, grandly extrapolating that it the rest of the U.S. population had produced leaders at the same rate, “there would have been 37,000 Presidents, 350,000 ambassadors, 110,000 Senators…” With some exceptions, most notably Franklin Roosevelt, Groton’s graduates avoided politics and tended to prefer the more discreet branches of government, particularly the OSS and the CIA. Few entered the ministry, and virtually none pursued the arts. Service to God and Country was overshadowed by service to Mammon. The largest single category of career choice in the school history is “finances, stocks, bonds, etc.”
The grandson of this Endicott Peabody was Endicott “Chub” Peabody, who served one term as governor of Massachusetts and then ran and lost for a series of offices of diminishing importance in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.
Chub. From his obituary in The Economist:
Young Endicott went to Groton, inheriting the nickname “Chub” from his father, who had also attended the school. They love tradition in Massachusetts.
In fact, as a young man he was more bulky than chubby. He was a football star at Harvard, a “baby-faced assassin” according to a writer in the Boston Globe. He had a brave war against the Japanese as a submarine officer, afterwards practising as a lawyer in Boston and getting political ambitions. He was in love with politics and after his string of failures moved to Washington for a time, just as a hopeful actor will go to Hollywood, without prospects but just to be there among the glamour. He did some lobbying and was given some minor political tasks by sympathetic Democrats.
In the tributes since his death “gentleman” is a word often used. He sometimes seemed to be too gentlemanly to be a successful politician. When he lost his bid for the Senate in 1966 he seemed genuinely pleased that his opponent, Edward Brooke, a black, had won. Ending racism was a family passion. At the age of 72 his mother was arrested in a southern town in 1964 for entertaining a group of whites and blacks in a segregated restaurant. Ending the death penalty was another of his campaigns, and he was always receptive to the latest liberal cause. One of his last tasks was to chair a meeting in Boston calling for the abolition of landmines.
What about the Mr. Peabody mentioned in John Prine’s song “Paradise”? That is Francis Peabody, founder of what’s now Peabody Energy. He was from Illinois, I don’t think he’s closely related to these Peabodys.
Anyway, this is all a roundabout way of bragging that Common Side Effects won a Peabody Award:
The ceremony will be at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, a place that would probably shock Endicott. Then again is it worse than Tombstone?
We would be very remiss if we didn’t mention the greatest Peabody of all:
Simon Bolivar Buckner (and Jr.)
Posted: May 30, 2026 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a commentSimon Bolivar Buckner was born in 1823. He served in the Mexican War, taught at West Point. A son of Kentucky, during the Civil War he became a Confederate general. When he was 62, he married a 28 year old, and had a son, Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr.
At 80 years of age, Buckner memorized five of Shakespeare’s plays because cataracts threatened to blind him, but an operation saved his sight. On a visit to the White House in 1904, Buckner asked President Theodore Roosevelt to appoint his only son as a cadet at West Point, and Roosevelt quickly agreed.
His son Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr. served in the U.S. Army, rising to the rank of lieutenant general. He was in command of the Tenth Army during the Battle of Okinawa when he was killed by hostile artillery fire on June 18, 1945, four days before the conclusion of the battle. He was the highest-ranking American to have been killed by enemy fire during World War II and was posthumously promoted to four-star general in 1954.
Buckner Jr.:
Buckner gave orders in June 1942 for the indigenous Aleut people to be evacuated and for their villages to be burned. The Aleut people were not allowed to return until 1945, after the war was over.[8] Buckner furthermore objected to the deployment of African American troops in Alaska, writing to his superiors of his concern that they would remain after the war, “with the natural result that they would interbreed with the Indians and the Eskimos and produce an astonishingly objectionable race of mongrels which would be a problem”.
(source)
This is the last picture of him alive (at right).
Pretty wild span of history in two lives. Douglas MacArthur’s father was in the Union Army during the Civil War, but he wasn’t a general. Patton’s grandfather was with the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia.
It seems possible that William Claiborne Buckner is still alive, thus there’s a guy out there whose grandfather was a Confederate general.
strange dream
Posted: May 24, 2026 Filed under: America Since 1945, TV Leave a commentwhere I was looking up this phrase I remembered from a 2001 New Yorker article.
John Lahr writing about a Kristin Chenoweth sitcom, Kristin.
Leaning against the bar across the room was John Markus, a goateed forty-four-year-old TV writer, who was about two weeks away from completing the pilot script for a sitcom starring Chenoweth, and who was wondering, as he watched her bask in the affection of her fans, whether he was doing the right thing.
At the time I read that he must’ve seemed impossible aged to me.
Clark Gable
Posted: May 17, 2026 Filed under: actors, America Since 1945, WW2 Leave a commentI saw this posted by someone (apologies to you, poster, I’ve lost track of you) as an example of an outstanding first page of a biography:
I lost the thread and it took me a minute to track it down again. In attempting to find it I read several first pages of biographies of Clark Gable. None of them begin with a punch like that, they start with stuff like “In 1982 a poll of film enthusiasts ranked their favorite stars of all time blahblah.”
This is from Jane Ellen Wayne, Clark Gable: Portrait of a Misfit. (You can read it for free. That casting couch allegation seems questionably documented but who knows. That isn’t the kind of event people keep meticulous records of.)
Wayne on Gable in World War 2:
More:
(In case WordPress won’t let me embed Clark Gable singing “Puttin on the Ritz.”)
great name for a magazine
Posted: May 7, 2026 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a comment
(source)
Ted Turner
Posted: May 7, 2026 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a comment
from a Playboy interview with Ted Turner, which I find here.
PLAYBOY: You go to every home game and sit in the front row. Why don’t you sit in the upper deck in the owner’s air-conditioned box?
TURNER: That’s what’s wrong! I told you, you idiot! All the owners sit up there behind their bulletproof glass and they’re afraid to meet the fans. I sit down front and I have to give about three dozen autographs during every game. Anyway, I figure the best seats are in the front row. The first thing I did was spend $1,000,000 on a giant TV screen over the scoreboard, then I spent $500,000 moving the dugouts and front rows closer. What I really love is catching foul balls and throwing them back in. Caught one the first day after I got back from winning the America’s Cup. Not too shabby!PLAYBOY: We notice that some of the Braves grew mustaches and beards. You have no objection to that?
TURNER: Hell, you’ve got a beard and I’ve got a mustache. I don’t care what a ballplayer does, if it makes him happy, it makes me happy. Just as long as he wears something over his cock, you know.
More:
PLAYBOY: Considering the fact that you got interested in baseball just two years ago, how can you stand to be around it so much?
TURNER: It’s like anything, my friend; no matter what you’re doing, if your attitude’s right, you’re going to enjoy it. I mean, when I was in the Coast Guard cleaning latrines, I whistled while I was cleaning them. I didn’t even question it. “Mine is not to question why, mine is but to do or die.”
PLAYBOY: Do you think about your past a lot?
TURNER: Yeah, I always wonder why people did things. When you think back, when men look back, the happiest times of their lives were when they got together and did something. We are social animals. The most fun that you ever have as a man is in doing men’s things. Men’s things are primarily getting a bunch of guys together and going out and conquering a country, fighting a war, winning a big fight, putting a baseball team together. For most guys, the happiest times were when they were on the football team, when they won the Ivy League championship or the state championship or the debate team or the bridge team or whatever it was. But first of all, you got to get a good bunch of guys together and do it, whatever it is. And then you have to get them all excited and motivated so they’ll bust their ass. People have the most fun when they’re busting their ass.
More:
PLAYBOY: You still love history?
TURNER: Yeah, mostly military history. As much as I hate war now, I was basically a warrior. I was reading about war all the time as a kid. Fighting and soldiers and all that stuff. What I wanted to be was Horatio, Admiral Nelson, Napoleon, Alexander the Great and Pericles; they were the greatest warriors.
PLAYBOY: Why did you like it so much?
TURNER: In the past, war was a lot of fun. You know, rape and plunder, kill and steal. There weren’t enough women to go around, because they died early, so you grabbed the other guy’s women, sold his children into slavery and killed the soldiers. Used to go home and have a big parade. Glorious, you know. Now war is finished.
PLAYBOY: What do you mean?
TURNER: It’s no longer fun. The weapons are too sophisticated. It’s not men leading the fleet into battle or running up the flags, you know. Back in the old days, when they didn’t have professional sporting events, war was sport, like gladiators killing each other. You know who was the original rookie of the year? David, when he went out against Goliath.
(Similar thought from Bruce Catton). More:
PLAYBOY: How much money do you need to stay happy?
TURNER: Not much. Just give me an old 12-meter sailboat and a couple of movie starlets, a house in the suburbs and a television station and I can get by on one sirloin strip at a time, or a two-and-a-quarter-pound lobster, plus a couple hundred thou in the bank.
PLAYBOY: Sounds like wealth is the way to joy, then.
TURNER: I’ve seen very, very poor people who were happy and very, very wealthy people who were miserable. I mean, you have to realize how lucky you are that you weren’t born a mosquito. Not to mention people–a black guy wonders, Why wasn’t I born white? Or a guy from India says, Why wasn’t I born an American? But you’re still better off than a mosquito, ’cause it lives only one summer and gets swatted at every time it gets a bite to eat.
PLAYBOY: You turn out to be quite a philosopher.
TURNER: Well, at least I know the meaning of life.
PLAYBOY: We’re waiting.
TURNER: Man is put on earth for one reason alone, and that’s to reproduce. As soon as we do, we start dying. Life is one great big endless circle. You know that song, “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here”? Who was the wisest man ever? Socrates, right? He said, “All I know is that I know nothing.” Which is pretty heavy. It’s a shattering thought.
Without Ted Turner there’d be no Cartoon Network, no Adult Swim, no Common Side Effects? An effect Ted Turner had on my life: because the residue of his cable empire is still HQ’d there, we’ve made several visits to Atlanta. It coulda been Dallas or Phoenix or something. The rise of Ted Turner, is it connected to the overall rise of Georgia that came with the Jimmy Carter governorship? The two were friends:
“I was a regular fishing companion with Ted, and he and I were both fishing for bass, and he had told me that he had just heard that Jane Fonda was going to get a divorce from her husband. And he was thinking about asking her for a date,” friend and former President Jimmy Carter told CNN in a previous interview.
(sources, I can’t find the original CNN interview transcribed.)
dairy farming
Posted: May 3, 2026 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a commentThe number of dairy farms in the United States had fallen to fewer than 25,000 from a peak of nearly 700,000 in the 1970s. Milk prices had barely risen in half a century, held down by overproduction and a handful of large corporations that dominated the dairy market. The costs of running a family farm had skyrocketed by as much as 500 percent.
wild stat from this NYT piece.
Nut picking
Posted: May 3, 2026 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a comment“I Love Lucy” wasn’t important content, but it was shared content. And it meant that tomorrow morning you had a whole bunch of topics you could go to with your neighbor or your co-worker that was just shared cultural data.
We don’t have any of that anymore. So, in a world where everybody is incentivized to go narrow but deep, there’s not a lot of need to call out B.S. and crazy on your own end of the continuum.
There’s a ton of incentive for both political addicts on the right to find some nut job on the left who did or said something crazy — “They’re all going to grab our guns” — or there’s some nut job on the left who says everybody on the right wants to do this horrible thing to you because they found some idiot on Twitter or on a podcast who said that thing.
The problem with that kind of nut picking is it doesn’t ever solve a problem.
I found Ben Sasse’s term a useful description of something I see constantly (especially on X).
Embracing Cormac
Posted: April 18, 2026 Filed under: America Since 1945, cormac, writing, writing advice from other people Leave a comment
Interesting that James Merrill may have launched Cormac McCarthy:
This book isn’t for casuals – most of it is intense analysis of the drafting and editing process of Cormac McCarthy’s first three books. An interesting aspect that comes out is how difficult it was to revise a novel in the days before word processors. Copying and retyping were time consuming and expensive. It got me to wondering whether any really great novels have emerged post-word processor. McCarthy was still using a typewriter, and passing revisions with his publisher back and forth was laborious.
Between all this stuff a thin biography emerges. For a McCarthyhead every nugget can be meaningful.
His sister Barbara (Bobbie) McCooe reports that although his first assignment in the Air Force was as a navigator, he preferred his second role as a radio disc jockey for the base in Alaska, not only because it gave him more autonomy, but also because it allowed him to work at night and fish in the daytime (Interview with Bryan Giemza and Dianne Luce).
Family:
McCarthy’s ex-wife Anne De Lisle has remarked that McCarthy’s analytical, pragmatic father “didn’t know what to make of him” (Conversations). And his sister Barbara McCooe recalls that it was the impracticality of his chosen career in the arts to which his parents objected (Interview with Bryan Giemza and Dianne Luce).
McCarthy’s first book, The Orchard Keeper, was discovered through the slush pile. Would this happen today? (could it not happen today because word processors/computers make it too easy and thus the slush pile too full?)
The novel immediately garnered attention. Bensky recalled: There was a protocol in the place where you read from the slush pile. The manuscripts came in by the cartloads. Really: every day a hand-truck full of manuscripts arrived. Jimmy, the drunken mailboy, would bring them upstairs and dump them in this office … at the reception area…. The office had shelves up to the ceiling. You read them in order of arrival. Usually the readers, Maxine [Groffsky] and Natalie [Robins], would read three or four pages, decide if they wanted to read more, or say: “This is ridiculous.” (Josyph, “Damn Proud” 16–17)… Groffsky alerted Bensky that McCarthy’s novel had potential, jotting “Larry/ This might be good” in a note she affixed to McCarthy’s cover letter (Groffsky, Note to Larry Bensky, [May 1962]).
why did this change in reading habits occur? It feels drastic:
Cerf, who had purchased the Modern Library imprint from Horace Liveright in 1925, recalled, “When I started publishing, fiction outsold nonfiction four-to-one. Now that ratio is … reversed, [and] … the bulk of new fiction doesn’t sell at all. It’s heartbreaking to bring out a good first novel and watch it die virtually at birth” (Cerf, At Random, 203–204).
I put this question to WDM who suggested it’s because people now read nonfiction to gain advantage in making investment decisions. Maybe it all comes back to the collapse of Bretton Woods.
Sales were low but esteem was high:
Between 1965 and 1969, when a second printing was issued, the book sold 3,926 copies (Lane, Letter to J. Howard Woolmer). Since the publishing summary for the book prepared in October 1964 had projected that the publisher would break even if 3,155 copies sold, this was a modest success for the publisher of a first novel. McCarthy was to receive $ 2,105 in royalties or advances, whichever was larger. But the novel was more successful by the measure of critical esteem than it was financially.
for context:
Partly to keep his hopes realistic, Scribner had informed F. Scott Fitzgerald that a good sales performance for a first novel would be 5,000 copies; but This Side of Paradise (1920) proved dramatically more successful, with 35,000 sold in the seven months after publication; and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) had initial sales of 20,000 (Berg, Max Perkins 20, 41, 100). Both had been edited by Scribner’s legendary Maxwell Perkins, who energetically promoted his writers and who had an uncanny instinct both for talent and for what would sell. On the other hand, Boni and Liveright had less confidence in Faulkner’s first novel, Soldiers’ Pay (1926), and had printed only 2,500 copies. By the end of the depression year of 1930, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying together had sold fewer than 4,000 copies (Blotner, Faulkner I 494, 685).
It’s astounding the number of reviews McCarthy’s early books got, especially in our age of declining local newspapers and book sections. He’s getting reviewed in the Tampa Tribune, the Charlotte Observer, the Anniston (Alabama) Star.
Travel:
McCarthy met and fell in love with English dancer Anne De Lisle on his trans-Atlantic voyage on the Sylvania, where she was employed as an entertainer, half of the duo The Healey Sisters. She spotted him on the dance floor, asked him to dance with her, and they quickly bonded, spending their spare time together. Anne recalls that his trip terminated in Ireland, while she sailed on to Southampton, England.
…
Cormac and Anne married in the old Norman St. Andrews Episcopal Church of Hamble (c. 1100) on May 14, 1966. Since none of his family attended, Anne’s younger brother Richard stood as Cormac’s best man. Her performing partner, singer Nicky Banks, was her maid of honor, and some one hundred friends and members of Anne’s family attended the wedding and the reception at her father’s sports club. The couple rented a car and honeymooned for two weeks in Devon and Cornwall on England’s southwestern coast. They stayed in Mousehole Village and toured the thirteenth-century Tintagel Castle (constructed on the birth site of King Arthur, according to the twelfth-century legend that had originated with Geoffrey of Monmouth). On their honeymoon, they attended the Bugatti races in Cornwall, when Anne first discovered Cormac’s love of race cars, and later that summer they took a train from Paris to see Le Mans, sleeping in the open air (De Lisle, Conversations).
…
This letter is composed on stationery from the Hotel Mont-Joli on Rue Fromentin near the Moulin Rouge and Sacré-Coeur Basilica. Anne had introduced him to the hotel, and it became their usual place to stay in Paris (De Lisle, Conversations). In The Passenger, Western stays at the Mont Joli and McCarthy describes it as “favored by traveling entertainers and any morning there would be jugglers and hypnotists and exotic dancers and trained dogs in the lobby coffeeshop” (198)…
the couple took a twelve-day automobile trip in a used gold Jaguar XK-120 convertible that Cormac had bought and repaired. The car had a torn black ragtop, and when he first saw it, chickens were roosting inside it, as in one of the junkyard cars of Child of God (De Lisle, Conversations). Their tour began in Paris and wended through France to Geneva, across Italy and back along the southern coast of France to Barcelona, where they stayed a few days before they took the car ferry to Ibiza in early August 1966. There they settled in a finca on the outskirts of town…
They also socialized with Clifford Irving and his fiancée Edith Sommer, who hosted them several times at their finca. Their electricity was unreliable, so they often baked potatoes in foil in the fireplace…
Late in summer 1967, he and Anne finally left Ibiza and traveled back to her family home in Hamble via Madrid and the mountain hamlet, Burgete, in Navarre, where Hemingway’s Jake Barnes enjoys fishing in The Sun also Rises. McCarthy too did some trout fishing there. Then they drove back to Paris, where McCarthy sold the Jaguar (De Lisle, Interview with Bryan Giemza and Dianne Luce).
As he left his friend Leslie Garrett, who later developed serious addictions, McCarthy advised him to give up the drinking and partying life in Ibiza for fear it would kill his work (Williams, “An Interview with Leslie Garrett” 54), and concerns about drinking and over-socializing may have been one reason for his own return to the United States. “If there is an occupational hazard to writing, it’s drinking,” he later told Woodward (Woodward, “Venomous Fiction” 36). De Lisle recalls that McCarthy drank, but never so much that it could affect his writing ability—only his discipline (Conversations).
Stonework:
In summer 1971, McCarthy and Bill Kidwell collaborated for six weeks on the creation of two marble and river rock mosaics set in mortar in downtown Maryville, funded by an urban renewal grant from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. Kidwell had secured the grant, De Lisle remembers, but he did not have the masonry skills to execute the project, so he asked for McCarthy’s help. Kidwell reminisced that as they were constructing the mosaics in full view of the public on Main Street, passersby would stop and comment on their work. Kidwell wanted to engage them in conversation, but McCarthy asked him to keep still and listen. He was gathering speechways for his fiction.
(You can see it here, I’d argue he was more impressive as a novelist). Lifestyle:
When Mark Owen interviewed McCarthy in 1971, he found him witty, uncynical, and happy with the independent life he had created, a life of reading among his 1,500 books, writing his novels, and building his house. “I’ve always been horrified by the way people live their lives,” McCarthy remarked. “On one hand there is a nine-to-five job you don’t like and a totally artificial life. At the other end is the life of a hermit. But I don’t want to be cut off from society and have to … compromise.”
…
McCarthy would usually write for four or five hours each day (Runsdorf, “Recognition Acceptable” 5). In the late afternoon, he would announce to Anne, “Well, it’s cocktail time” and “take a shower as if washing all that stuff out of his hair,” after which they would enjoy a candle-lit dinner (Williams, “Cormac McCarthy” E2). In the evenings, he would often read her some of what he had written that day.
As noted earlier, on Thanksgiving 1964 he had recorded on a draft page of Outer Dark “writing = happy”
Sheddan in The Passenger was a real guy:
Sheddan features as an important character in The Passenger, one of Bobby Western’s friends from East Tennessee with whom he converses in New Orleans bars and restaurants. Sheddan claims that Western thinks of him as a psychopath and that he may be right about that (31). In the novel, Sheddan is a petty criminal, but he is also highly intelligent and well-read. Of their friendship, Sheddan says, “I will tell you Squire that having read even a few dozen books in common is a force more binding than blood” (143). Wesley Morgan has learned from one of their classmates that McCarthy and Sheddan met in an American Literature course at the University of Tennessee, where Sheddan was the more vocal of the two.
I hope Dianne C. Luce continues this series.
Kress collections
Posted: April 12, 2026 Filed under: America Since 1945, art history Leave a commentSamuel Kress was born in Cherryville, Pennsylvania. He worked in stone quarries, and as a school teacher, and eventually started a store.
This eventually grew into a chain of 5-10-25 cent department stores. Kress stores had a distinctive architectural look – there’s one here in Los Angeles:
(source)
There’s a whole world of these stores, still standing across the US, repurposed or vacant. Here’s one in Lubbock, Texas:
(source).
The most distinctive and best remembered Kress stores are a group of more than fifty Art Deco buildings dating from 1929–1944 and designed by Edward F. Sibbert (1899-1982), the company’s longtime chief architect. Sibbert’s buildings streamlined the Kress image by using sleek modern facades, simple yet distinctive ornament, and colors characteristic of the Kress brand. Curved glass display windows led the shopper through heavy bronze doors into an interior of rich marbles, fine woods, and large customized counters set crosswise down a long sales floor. Well-positioned hanging lamps created a bright atmosphere for an endless array of inexpensive items (there were 4,275 different articles on sale in 1934). Everything – from the constantly restocked merchandise to the gracious retiring rooms and popular soda fountains in the basement – encouraged customers to linger. Like the great movie houses of the day, the “dime store” – and ‘Kress’s’ in particular – was a popular destination during hard economic times.
Many Kress stores had segregated lunch counters, and were a target for sit-ins during the civil rights movement. The case of Adickes vs Kress, involving a white teacher who tried to take several black students to lunch in Hattiesburg, MS made it to the Supreme Court (it gets pretty technical at that point).
Samuel Kress never married and never had children. He used his fortune to collect European art. Much of this he gave away:
Beginning in the 1930s Kress decided to give much of his art collection to museums across the country while he was still alive. Many paintings were donated to the same smaller cities that had brought him his fortune with their stores. In several cases, his gifts became the founding basis for museums in those areas which otherwise could never have afforded artworks of such importance and quality.
This continued after Kress’s death in 1955:
In the 1950s and 1960s, a foundation established by Kress would donate 776 works of art from the Kress collection to 18 regional art museums in the United States.[1]
An interesting retirement project would be to travel around viewing the regional museums with Kress collections.
I’d like to see the Crucifixion by Maestro Bartolomé (or workshop) at the University of Arizona Museum in Tuscon:
Or Rotari’s Girl in a Blue Dress, in El Paso:
That might be about it actually. A lot of this stuff looks like religious art that doesn’t burst with inspiration.
JFK and delay
Posted: April 11, 2026 Filed under: America Since 1945, Uncategorized 1 Comment
It was his habit–and a very good habit for a political leader–not
to make very grave decisions until they had to be made. He always left
questions open until they were required to be closed, whether by events or
because an answer had to be given or some other reason.
A quote from Joseph Alsop:
https://static.jfklibrary.org/3704qrut557lbf3gqf73b37qyr43322c.pdf?odc=20231115182908-0500
The photo is from A Very Special President which makes him sound a bit like a charity case.
I searched for a companion book to the show Cheers
Posted: April 1, 2026 Filed under: America Since 1945, books Leave a comment
John Steinbeck on Bob Hope
Posted: March 30, 2026 Filed under: America Since 1945, comedy, Steinbeck Leave a comment
At the Steinbeck Center in Salinas I picked up this edition of Steinbeck’s reporting from World War Two. I was surprised by this piece on Bob Hope, who is not often thought of as a hero these days.
Bob Hope
LONDON, July 26, 1943—When the time for recognition of service to the nation in wartime comes to be considered, Bob Hope should be high on the list. This man drives himself and is driven.
It is impossible to see how he can do so much, can cover so much ground, can work so hard, and can be so effective. He works month after month at a pace that would kill most people.
Moving about the country in camps, airfields, billets, supply depots, and hospitals, you hear one thing consistently. Bob Hope is coming, or Bob Hope has been here. The Secretary of War is on an inspection tour, but it is Bob Hope who is expected and remembered.
In some way he has caught the soldiers’ imagination. He gets laughter wherever he goes from men who need laughter. He has created a character for himself-that of the man who tries too hard and fails, and who boasts and is caught at it. His wit is caustic, but it is never aimed at people, but at conditions and at ideas, and where he goes men roar with laughter and repeat his cracks for days afterward.
Hope does four, sometimes five, shows a day. In some camps the men must come in shifts because they cannot all hear him at the same time. Then he jumps into a car, rushes to the next post, and because he broadcasts and everyone listens to his broadcasts, he cannot use the same show more than a few times. He must, in the midst of his rushing and playing, build new shows constantly. If he did this for a while and then stopped and took a rest it would be remarkable, but he never rests. And he has been doing this ever since the war started. His energy is boundless.
Hope takes his shows all over. It isn’t only to the big camps. In little groups on special duty you hear the same thing. Bob Hope is coming on Thursday. They know weeks in advance that he is coming. It would be rather a terrible thing if he did not show up.
Perhaps that is some of his drive. He has made some kind of contract with himself and with the men that nobody, least of all Hope, could break. It is hard to overestimate the importance of this thing and the responsibility involved.
The battalion of men who are moving half-tracks from one place to another, doing a job that gets no headlines, no public no-tice, and yet which must be done if there is to be a victory, are for-gotten, and they feel forgotten. But Bob Hope is in the country.
Will he come to them, or won’t he? And then one day they get a notice that he is coming. Then they feel remembered. This man in some way has become that kind of bridge. It goes beyond how funny he can be or how well Frances Langford sings. It has been interesting to see how he has become a symbol.
This writer, not knowing Hope, can only conjecture what goes on inside the man. He has seen horrible things and has survived them with good humor and made them more bearable, but that doesn’t happen without putting a wound on a man. He is cut off from rest, and even from admitting weariness. Having become a symbol, he must lead a symbol life.
Probably the most difficult, the most tearing thing of all, is to be funny in a hospital. The long, low buildings are dispersed in case they should be attacked. Working in the gardens, or reading in the lounge rooms are the ambulatory cases in maroon bathrobes. But in the wards, in the long aisles of pain the men lie, with eyes turned inward on themselves, and on their people. Some are convalescing with all the pain and itch of convalescence. Some work their fingers slowly, and some cling to the little trapezes which help them to move in bed.
The immaculate nurses move silently in the aisles at the foot of the beds. The time hangs very long. Letters, even if they came every day, would seem weeks apart. Everything that can be done is done, but medicine cannot get at the lonesomeness and the weakness of men who have been strong. And nursing cannot shorten one single endless day in a hospital bed. And Bob Hope and his company must come into this quiet, inward, lonesome place, and gently pull the minds outward and catch the interest, and finally bring laughter up out of the black water. There is a job. It hurts many of the men to laugh, hurts knitting bones, strains at sutured incisions, and yet the laughter is a great medicine.
This story is told in one of those nameless hospitals which must be kept safe from bombs. Hope and company had worked and gradually they got the leaden eyes to sparkling, had planted and nurtured and coaxed laughter to life. A gunner, who had a stomach wound, was gasping softly with laughter. A railroad casualty slapped the cast on his left hand with his right hand by way of applause. And once the laughter was alive, the men laughed before the punch line and it had to be repeated so they could laugh again.
Finally it came time for Frances Langford to sing. The men asked for “As Time Goes By.” She stood up beside the little GI piano and started to sing. Her voice is a little hoarse and strained.
She has been working too hard and too long. She got through eight bars and was into the bridge, when a boy with a head wound began to cry. She stopped, and then went on, but her voice wouldn’t work anymore, and she finished the song whispering and then she walked out, so no one could see her, and broke down.
The ward was quiet and no one applauded. And then Hope walked into the aisle between the beds and he said seriously, “Fellows, the folks at home are having a terrible time about eggs. They can’t get any powdered eggs at all. They’ve got to use the old-fashioned kind that you break open.”
There’s a man for you— there is really a man.
Tracy Kidder
Posted: March 27, 2026 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a commentI see that Tracy Kidder has died. Several of his books made an impression on me. Here’s a page from his war memoir, My Detachment, which I enjoyed:
How about this:
How does that interview work? “Hey um couple questions in case you die.”
“well he would say that, wouldn’t he”
Posted: February 28, 2026 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a comment
I misremembered the famous phrase of Mandy Rice-Davies.
The UK is so odd:
In 1980, with Shirley Flack, Rice-Davies wrote her autobiography, Mandy…Subsequently, journalist Libby Purves, who had met Rice-Davies when Mandy was published, invited her to join a female re-creation on the River Thames of Jerome K. Jerome’s comic novel Three Men in a Boat.
This expedition was commissioned by Alan Coren for the magazine Punch, the other members of the party being cartoonist Merrily Harpur and a toy Alsatian to represent Montmorency, the dog in the original story. Purves recounted how she “immediately spotted that this Rice-Davies was a woman to go up the Amazon with” and, among other things, that “only Mandy’s foxy charm saved us from being evicted from a lock for being drunk on pink Champagne.”
Nothing new
Posted: February 27, 2026 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a commentThe idea that AI is gonna give us all too much free time doesn’t worry me. From McCullough’s Truman:
Machine Learning Learning
Posted: January 31, 2026 Filed under: America Since 1945 1 CommentA sense that the frontier is moving very very fast on what we crudely call “AI.” (A rare point of agreement with President Trump*. “artificial intelligence” is a bad name, I don’t like using it and look for alternatives.)
It reminds us of the explosive growth of Internet, it moved fast. Many of the fast movers thrived. I started college in 1999. That was the first time I had consistent Internet access that didn’t rely on a school lab or an AOL free trial with a 3.5 disk mailed to us. Some of the first bloggers – Andrew Sullivan, Matt Yglesisas – established themselves and stayed there. A sense of if you’re not keeping up you’re falling behind motivated me.
Maybe we should “run at it” as Bill Gurley advises. This stuff isn’t going away, we can mock it, complain about it, or try to figure out what it can do.
The only coding I’ve ever done was in BASIC, or making a text football game on my TI-83 during Statistics class. That was quite satisfying, but limited. During the pandemic, I asked a friend who’s sharp at coding – we’ll call him CC, Coding Chum – what “learn to code” would look like. He suggested we work on a specific project. I suggested a name generator that would scrape Wikipedia, gather real names, and randomly pair first and last names. CC gave me a series of Zoom tutorials where we worked on this in Python. My takeaway was that “learning to code” for me would take several years and I’d never be professional grade at it. I lacked the aptitude and motivation.
Along comes “vibe coding.” This is where you type, in words, what you want to happen, and a machine intelligence does the coding for you. I decided to try this using Claude Code.
The main points of friction for me were interacting with the Terminal on my Mac. I don’t even know how to enter command lines or anything on my computer. But Claude (regular, I’m paying for the $20 a month level) walked me through that, often with me sending it screenshots of error messages.
Once we got through that, and installed what I needed for Claude Code, we got to work. The Wikipedia project proved too daunting for Claude Code. So, we reduced the scale. What’s a pool of names?
How about everyone who ever played Major League Baseball? Famously one of the most recorded and compiled activities, surely there would be databases. I didn’t even tell Claude Code what databases to use, but it went to work, gathered the names of all the twenty something thousand people who ever played Major League Baseball and create a name generator that would pair random first and last names.
This took some coaching and debugging that took less than an hour. Here’s the result. It favors unique first names: common names like “Mike” are in there only once, so they come up the same number of times as say Kenshin or Alvis. But, it works. All told this took less than an hour.
The result I shared with CC, who within a few minutes created a revised version, you can select for 1920s names, limit by eras, etc. People who are good at coding will still be better at coding.
Yet for me, a person not good at coding, I could now do in minutes what once seemed like it would take a year’s worth of training and then much hacking away to accomplish.
The limits of Machine Learning are still funny. That was me asking Claude to find obscure works of microhistory published by academic presses. Despite me sending it up here, it did a pretty good job.
As Ben Affleck points out, as a writer it will generate at best average material, and average writing is, as writing, worthless. But that’s now. Who knows what’s coming? As information gatherer, as a research assistant, Machine Learning tools are already tremendous.
When I finished my vibe coding an excitement was paired with a small sadness. The only limit to what I could accomplish is my imagination. And… I couldn’t really think of much else.
Someone on X suggested a powerful use is data visualization. I went to work. Here’s an example:
I asked Claude to go through Census data and create a chart of US horse and mule populations. I asked it to cite sources in MLA format:
Here’s another:
This chart doesn’t show us much that’s new, such a chart may have even existed. These just happened to be some personal botherations I looked into. Work that would’ve taken an afternoon is done in seconds.
Extrapolate from here: what happens when we start putting this on archives, untranslated literatures? Historians have made careers on stuff like, for example, showing correlations between Salem land ownership and witchcraft allegations. If you start putting machines on archives, what connections will it find?
The hard part might be getting physical documents into the machines (which was a challenge for the witchcraft guys):
Published in 1978 in three volumes, The Salem Witchcraft Papers: Verbatim Transcripts of the Legal Documents of the Salem Witchcraft Outbreak of 1692 included transcriptions of the legal papers that had been done by a WPA team headed by Archie N. Frost in 1938, which had only been available to scholars in typescript form on deposit with the Essex Institute and with the Essex County Clerk of the Courts.
My belief is that the humanities will be slow to realize the effects these tools could have on their disciplines. By tomorrow you could have a silicon-based assistant who’s read everything extant in Latin and Greek. Or the entirety of the California Digital Newspaper Collection, or the Texas Slavery Project, or the Congressional Record. Here on my desk is a copy of Heart Of Europe: A History Of The Holy Roman Empire. Every paragraph seems to have something like “The Prussian King held only 4.5 percent of the agricultural land, with nobles owning and directly managing 11 per cent, and cities and foundations a further 4.5 percent.” Crunching that data might’ve been some historian’s summer. What kind of analysis will your computer assistant be able to do?
This assistant can read every language and find any pattern, and be trained to look for anything.
The job may scale up from doing the work to managing and steering the incredible power of the automated work-doers. We’ll all become managers. We’ll still have to figure out what to ask, of course.
It’s funny, I’m reminded of Shelby Foote:
I’ve never had anything resembling a secretary or a research assistant. I don’t want those. Each time I type, it gives me another shot at it, another look at it. As for research, I can’t begin to tell you the things I discovered while I was looking for something else. A research assistant couldn’t have done that. Not being a trained historian, I had botherations that led to good things. For instance, I didn’t take careful notes while reading. Then I’d get to something and I’d say, By golly, there’s something John Rawlins said at that time that’s real important. Where did I see it? Then I would remember that it was in a book with a red cover, close to the middle of the book, on the right-hand side and one third from the top of the page. So I’d spend an hour combing through all my red-bound books. I’d find it eventually, but I’d also find a great many other things in the course of the search.
There’s a lot to that. On the other hand, I remembered something like that quote, but I couldn’t remember where I found it. I thought maybe Shelby Foote? I told my troubles to two machine learned machines. Perplexity AI was stumped but Claude found it in seconds.
The future is hard to predict but we’re sitting on a volcano.
* still feels insane to type those words
Best food in the world?
Posted: January 3, 2026 Filed under: America Since 1945, food Leave a commentSometimes it’s half a leftover burrito you forgot you had in the fridge.
2025 in Helytimes
Posted: December 31, 2025 Filed under: America Since 1945, railroads and restaurants, southern california lunch, the California Condition, writerlore 1 Comment
Writers should stagger end of year posts, some people should do theirs in July so January isn’t a flood of the same content. Maybe next year!
How did Jimmy Carter, Dick Cheney, John Thune and Ronald Reagan get and administer power?
What was it like to be around Abe Lincoln?
What was the experience of a Civil War battle actually like?
What was Hemingway thinking with Across the River and Into the Trees?
If Kansas City isn’t cool, why are there a bunch of songs about it?
Which is better, the song “Islands in the Stream” or the posthumous novel of that title?
How did the house of Savoy go from Charlamagne-era minor dukes to kings of Italy, and how did they lose it?
What can Matthew McConaughey, Paul Cezanne, Bruce Springsteen, Henry Adams and Raising Cane’s founder Todd Graves teach us?
Why is the NFL so dominant?
Questions that were on our mind this year, we went diving and whatever shells we found and brought to surface we present here.
Some selections from 2025:
He was on our mind going through 2024-25.
On the LA fires.
An important Reagan advisor and California political figure.
- Living Room on the tracks
- Lincoln in New Orleans (featuring final answer on was Abraham Lincoln gay?)
a review of Richard Campanella’s incredible book on the topic
Texas wines are fun and good!
On Carter’s, the kids clothing brand, their history as a window into economic history.
a catchy song.
some amazing lore from Charles Goodnight.
A deep dive on a Civil War mystery
why is Chili’s crushing it? Railroads and Restaurants is a newsletter I mean to start, it’ll cost $500 a year.
the secret of power
If my goal were to generate the most views, I’d split this site into two: one would be advice adjacent stuff about writing, Writerlore, the other would be Warren Buffett/Charlie Munger Deep Cuts. That’s what gets eyeballs.
sad death of a beloved general. The War of the Rebellion was on my mind, especially real “you are there” moments
Two Louisianans
gratifying reception to Common Side Effects
The most vivid book I can remember reading
looking into the origin of a phrase
Savoy in history and myth was a theme this year
Did some deep cut Hemingway reading this year
This piece probably took me the longest, but seemed to generate zero interest
research with LLMs into a mythical beer
a memorable Southern California lunch, November 1826. Southern California Lunch would be another good spinoff.
how deep can we go into one painting
Homage to a Yankee
which is better, book or song?
been meaning to follow up
Review of some biographies of Ernest Hemingway
some Juneetenth trivia
dispatch from Greenpoint, NY
genuine
a journey in etymology
strangely popular, not sure why
advice from the movie star-philosopher
what was Columbus’s goal, really?
Hollywood forever.
glimpses from New England
origin of Woody Allen’s famous 80% of life is showing up quote
a musical transmission through time
a Midwest character and a northeasterner
another Midwest character and a northeasterner
scraps from a master and fellow scatterbrain.
used Perplexity to teach me to write a Python script to index every post. It worked?
Truman loved a drink
The death of the most powerful Vice President in US history prompts a look at his rise.
on the invasive cow of early California
views of growth
Charlie Parker and California’s mental asylums
some samples of the kind of columnist who doesn’t really exist anymore.
one investigation leads to another
a mysterious power broker from the Dakotas.
More on Starkweather
Kansas City in story, song, and reality
dive into a rising fast food chain
literary anecdote is catnip for readers
a minor Anglo-Irish family through the generations
how jokes enter history as facts.
football: why is it so great? This one generated a lot of positive feedback
a spooky Christmas song
how to learn about the Jefferson era
are we spoilt brats?
a Christmas miracle from Whitney Houston, Jimmy Iovine, Rick Rubin
were all the revolutionaries criminals? was the American Revolution just like The Town or The Departed? An alliance of Boston and Virginia mobs?
Steinbeck on the two Christmases
Posted: December 22, 2025 Filed under: America Since 1945, Steinbeck, the California Condition Leave a commentWriting about the quiz show scandal in The Fifties, David Halberstam says:
It was a traumatic moment for the country as well. Charles Van Doren had become the symbol of the best America had to offer. Some commentators wrote of the quiz shows as the end of American innocence. Starting with World War Two, they said, America had been on the right side: Its politicians and generals did not lie, and the Americans had trusted what was written in their newspapers and, later, broadcast over the airwaves. That it all ended abruptly because one unusually attractive young man was caught up in something seedy and outside his control was dubious. But some saw the beginning of the disintegration of the moral tissue of America, in all of this. Certainly, many Americans who would have rejected a role in being part of a rigged quiz show if the price was $64 would have had to think a long time if the price was $125,000. John Steinbeck was so outraged that he wrote an angry letter to Adlai Stevenson that was reprinted in The New Republic and caused a considerable stir at the time. Under the title “Have We Gone Soft?” he raged, “If I wanted to destroy a nation I would give it too much and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy, and sick … on all levels, American society is rigged…. I am troubled by the cynical immorality of my country. It cannot survive on this basis.”
This isn’t quite accurate, as far as I can tell – “Have We Gone Soft?” was an article by the Jesuit Thurston N. Davis, included as part of a larger symposium, in the February 15, 1960 New Republic, you can read it here. No matter.
Steinbeck’s phrase or the rough idea of it stuck with me since I read The Fifties back in high school (in Frank Guerra’s class, American Since ’45, the best class in my high school (we used to call it “Guerra Since ’45” since a lot of it was Coach Guerra’s personal memories of era, which were terrific and much appreciated, as Frank Guerra was one of the most charismatic teachers at the school and the head football coach. We’re straying)).
The other day I realized I had a copy of Steinbeck’s letters on my shelf. It might have the quoted letter in it.
On the cover Steinbeck looks kind of like a stodgy old GK Chesterton sort of guy:
but inside there’s a photo of him where he looks more like the louche California artist:
He looks kind of like the late Brian Reich. Those two poles of Steinbeck are there in the book.
Here’s a bit more of that quoted letter:
New York
[November 5] 1959
Guy Fawkes Day
Dear Adlai:
Back from Camelot, [I think Steinbeck is referring to literal Camelot here, like King Arthur country in the UK, Steinbeck was obsessed with King Arthur and he’d just gone there to research] and, reading the papers not at all sure it was wise. Two first impressions. First a creeping, all-per-vading, nerve-gas of immorality which starts in the nursery and does not stop before it reaches the highest offices, both corporate and governmental. Two, a nervous restlessness, a hunger, a thirst, a yearning for something unknown-per-haps morality. Then there’s the violence, cruelty and hypocrisy symptomatic of a people which has too much, and last the surly, ill-temper which only shows up in humans when they are frightened.
Adlai, do you remember two kinds of Christmases? There is one kind in a house where there is little and a present represents not only love but sacrifice. The one single package is opened with a kind of slow wonder, almost reverence.
Once I gave my youngest boy, who loves all living things, a dwarf, peach-faced parrot for Christmas. He removed the paper and then retreated a little shyly and looked at the little bird for a long time. And finally he said in a whisper, “Now who would have ever thought that I would have a peach-faced parrot?”
Then there is the other kind of Christmas with presents piled high, the gifts of guilty parents as bribes because they have nothing else to give. The wrappings are ripped off and the presents thrown down and at the end the child says-“Is that all?”
Well, it seems to me that America now is like that second kind of Christmas. Having too many THINGS they spend their hours and money on the couch searching for a soul. A strange species we are. We can stand anything God and Nature can throw at us save only plenty. If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy and sick. And then I think of our “Daily” in Somerset, who served your lunch. She made a teddy bear with her own hands for our grandchild. Made it out of an old bath towel dyed brown and it is beautiful. She said, “Sometimes when I have a bit of rabbit fur, they come out lovelier.” Now there is a present. And that obviously male Teddy Bear is going to be called for all time MIZ Hicks.
Kind of a conservative idea in a way. Yet Steinbeck is writing to Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic candidate for president. Steinbeck did some speechwriting for Adlai. When Adlai lost to Eisenhower in 1952, Steinbeck wrote him this one:
It seems a bit drastic in retrospect, Eisenhower is mostly regarded as a pretty good president, certainly by comparison, although he did overthrow a few foreign governments (see discussion of Guatemala in Hely’s The Wonder Trail.) But I guess they really felt this at the time.
Yet, only a few hundred pages later in the book, in 1966, Steinbeck is writing to LBJ telling him not to get discouraged by anti-Vietnam War protestors:
I know that you must be disturbed by the demonstrations against policy in Vietnam. But please remember that there have always been people who insisted on their right to choose the war in which they would fight to defend their country. There were many who would have no part of Mr.
Adams’ and George Washington’s war. We call them Tories.
There were many also who called General Jackson a butcher. Some of these showed their disapproval by selling beef to the British. Then there were the very many who de nounced and even impeded Mr. Lincoln’s war. We call them Copperheads. I remind you of these things, Mr. President, because sometimes, the shrill squeaking of people who simply do not wish to be disturbed must be saddening to you. I assure you that only mediocrity escapes criticism.
The context there was that Steinbeck’s son was headed to Vietnam.
After his service John IV apparently became an anti-war advocate and Buddhist practioner:
He wrote about his experiences with the Vietnamese and GIs. Steinbeck took the vows of a Buddhist monk while living on Phoenix Island in the Mekong Delta, under the tutelage of the Coconut Monk, a silent tree-dwelling mystic yogi who adopted Steinbeck as a spiritual son. Amid the raging war, Steinbeck stayed in the monk’s “peace zone”, where the 400 monks who lived on the island hammered howitzer shell casings into bells.
Steinbeck’s politics are a whole academic mini-field: type “Steinbeck’s politics” into Jstor and 1,339 results come up.
The shifting meanings of conservative and liberal and associated ideas are interesting. If Hemingway and Fitzgerald had lived long enough, I’m sure their political transitions would’ve been quite interesting as well. I’m interested in the idea of America as a spoiled child on Christmas morning.
From an interview with William Souder, author of Mad At The World: A Life of John Steinbeck:
Library of America: Let’s start with your very evocative title. What was Steinbeck so mad about?
William Souder: It’s tempting to say “everything,” and let it go at that. Steinbeck was, in so many ways, America’s most pissed-off writer. In grade school, he befriended a classmate who was shy and got picked on. When he was asked why he wasted time with a boy nobody else liked, Steinbeck answered simply, “Because somebody has to take care of him.” Steinbeck could never abide a bully. Later, as a writer, Steinbeck filled his stories with people who were marginalized in a world he perceived in stark black-and-white.
Steinbeck believed in good and evil, and he was convinced that morality was inversely proportional to your lot in life. Being good too often meant having little to show for it, he thought. This was especially true during the Great Depression, when millions of honest, hard-working citizens were dispossessed and displaced—many of them Dust Bowl refugees who ended up toiling for appallingly low wages in California’s farm fields. Steinbeck investigated the plight of the “Okies” and saw firsthand their squalid roadside camps, haunted by disease and starvation. The migrants were brutalized by the landowners who needed them and also despised them.
In 1938, Steinbeck, who thought the confrontations between the migrants and the landowners’ squads of vigilante enforcers could escalate into civil war, began work on a novel about the situation, focusing it on the oppressive tactics of the big farm interests. After a few months he tore up the manuscript and started over, telling the story this time from the point of view of the oppressed—a family named Joad from Oklahoma. Steinbeck, seething and telling himself again and again to work slowly and carefully, wrote The Grapes of Wrath, long since acclaimed as one of the greatest books in the American canon, in a rage and in a rush. He didn’t have to push himself. He was fueled by anger.
Elmore Leonard on what Steinbeck taught him.
Our previous coverage of John Steinbeck.
Helytimes 
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