The Michael Jordan 90s were an exciting time to be growing up a basketball fan - even a Warriors fan - and basketball card collecting swept through my class around the time we hit 10 years old. I had two regular haunts for buying cards in the late 90s, both of them in the Inner Sunset. The first went out of business not long after I started collecting there, and was soon replaced by the original Craigslist office. Prior to shuttering its doors, this shop had sold an up-to-date inventory that supplied me with nearly all the contemporary cards I owned. My other supplier was down the block, an odds and ends purveyor called the Oriental Art Gallery (profiled here). Unlike the competition it left behind, the Oriental Art Gallery was a cluttered, dimly-lit room with a smell characterized only slightly more by incense than by old merchandise. Untouched by time, sports and entertainment cards from the late 80s were sold as though they'd been released the week before. (See photo - as of 2016, they still are!) My favorite set was 1990-91 NBA Hoops: stately in gray arches on the face, with well-selected stats and biographical trivia on the reverse. The rosters, too, were fascinating to look back on even then, with Dream Teamers suiting up alongside the kind of lumbering relics who within a decade would have no place in the NBA.
At some point, I stopped collecting basketball cards, but the gray arches and soon obsolete team logos were never far from my mind. I recently decided to look into rebuying 1990-91 NBA Hoops and found the whole set on eBay for $8. With the help of the internet, I learned about the set's many variants and oddities. The most notable is #223: Sam Vincent, then playing for the Orlando Magic at the tail end of an unremarkable 7 year career. Hoops' first version of the Vincent card featured a photo taken during a home game against the Bulls, which happened to be the Valentine's Day, 1990 game in which Michael Jordan's jersey was stolen prior to tipoff; the first and only time Jordan wore #12 is immortalized on the obverse of the card. For unknown reasons, this first version of the Vincent card was discontinued and replaced with a generic photo of Vincent dribbling. Other formatting errors and variations are less substantial, and the different versions of each vary in rarity.
In addition to the core 440 cards in the set, Hoops produced an unnumbered All-Rookie Team card featuring David Robinson on the face receiving his Rookie of the Year award, along with four other standout rookies on the reverse: legends Vlade Divac and Tim Hardaway, plus Pooh Richardson and Sherman Douglas. The card was available only by a mail-in offer on the back of packs of cards. The offer expired on July 30, 1991. Two card variants exist - one with only pictures of the four additional rookies on the reverse, and one with abbreviated rookie year stats added for each of the five featured players. The latter is less common. Like all other cards in the set, either version of this one registers just a tick above valueless.
Two additional sets of oddities exist, as well. The first includes a variety of uncut strips or sheets of (typically unnumbered) cards given away at games as promotional items. One example was a Taco Bell promotion at the LA Forum, which paired several sets of 3-card strips with a mail-in sweepstakes coupon for Laker tickets or Taco Bell prizes. This contest ran from January 28 to February 28, 1991. The second was a series of 58 Announcer cards, produced in unknown quantities and distributed to the announcers themselves and friends of the company as favors. These are especially uncommon, and uniquely for the set, demand high prices when they do surface.
Acquiring these cards 15+ years after I first collected them has been very enjoyable. On a personal level, it's allowed me to revisit a wonderful facet of my childhood and some of the unusual aspects of San Francisco that are slowly (and sadly) fading away. The observational experience has been similar from the perspective of a lifelong basketball fan: it's a game, and a culture, that for better and for worse has irrevocably changed.
The 1990-91 NBA Hoops set can be seen here. (Images will be added sporadically as I complete the scans.)
The history of the record industry is one of reissues: some artists are plucked from out-of-print limbo, while others have anniversary editions of famous albums released with previous editions still being sold new in the marketplace. Predictably, recording technology has advanced in quantum leaps since the 1925 advent of electrical recording; it is further not surprising that each new incarnation of musical medium has inspired reissues of every label's most profitable material. Even the most forward-thinking executives, though, would have had a hard time even 20 years ago foreseeing the emergence of the remastering process. Advances in technology have made it possible not only digitally to excise noise once assumed totally inextricable from the source material, but even to extract detail from the grooves of weathered shellac 78s that went heretofore largely unnoticed. And perhaps most unthinkably of all to Executives of Labels Past, the process can be carried out without the investment of unworkable expense.
Robert Johnson is the unchallenged king of the reissue. His records sold well regionally during his own lifetime, and he was a much hoped-for participant in John Hammond's legendary "From Spirituals to Swing" concerts, the first to showcase black artists at Carnegie Hall. Johnson died four months before the first concert, however, and his memory languished, popularly forgotten, until the 1961 release of the Columbia compilation King of the Delta Blues Singers. The album and its 1970 companion volume deified Johnson with the folkie crowd (and by extension with rock stars, as well). Johnson posthumously shared the benefits of the blues revival - including a much-delayed, if incomplete, shedding of the "race records" label that had followed blues recordings since their inception - with many other artists, but he would come to exceed all of them in renown, due in equal parts to his remarkable talent and to the dubious Faustian myth that accompanies him to this day. The commercial success of the first CD reissue of his discography was nonetheless staggering. In 1990's Complete Recordings, Columbia had a set of 40+ songs more than half a century old that peaked at #80 on the Billboard charts and was eventually certified platinum.
Accordingly, the centenary of Johnson's birth in 2011 provided not only an ideal opportunity to show off the advances in remastering since the dawn of the millennium, but also a rare opportunity to provide a cash cow for a record label and a useful album for fans simultaneously. The Centennial Collection doesn't disappoint. The dual efforts of Steven Lasker (digital transfer) and Seth Winner (remastering) yielded results that save for minor background hiss sound ten - sometimes fifteen - years younger than they actually are. Columbia also provided much improved packaging and tracklisting over the previous release, this time placing every alternate take at the end of the CD, instead of immediately following the master. The astounding improvement in sound quality, together with these other considerations, raises hope for better reissues of other worthy contemporary discographies. Of course, few (if any) old-time jazz and blues masters share Johnson's all-consuming pull, and the likelihood of any such reissue making substantial money again seems slim. With any luck, though, as the technology continues to improve commercial risks will be undertaken in reviving Skip James, Jelly Roll Morton, Kid Ory, and others. The standard established by The Centennial Recordings is a worthy one in ensuring that these records continue to be esteemed for what they are: landmarks of American culture and history.
On August 25, the world lost one of its titans, Neil Armstrong - a man singular in his defining accomplishment, as well as his refusal to live his life on anyone else's terms. His stark refusal to be caught in the spotlight for most of the last three decades of his life seems especially striking in an era of internet-driven overexposure of erstwhile celebrities. (It should be noted that refusing to take credit for his feats in space hardly set him apart as an astronaut: one would be hard pressed to find one who doesn't automatically credit his accomplishments primarily to countless engineers, mission control, and the other members of his crew.) Yet to call his list of accomplishments staggering would, if anything, be an understatement. Needless to say, he was the first man to set foot on the moon, and his deeply touching (if erratically delivered) "one small step for (a) man" quotation was heard live by 450 million people - more than 12% of the population of a world that was still widely devoid of radios and television sets. Often forgotten following what he did once on the moon, though, was his manual landing of the module on a site he had deemed safe on the spot while flying with less than 30 seconds' worth of fuel remaining in the tank. His legendary eight days aboard Apollo 11 also overshadowed a career in which he logged nearly 2500 hours in experimental aircraft for the Air Force and flew in both the Gemini 8 and 11 missions to space.
More recently, two years nearly to the day before his death, Armstrong made a rare decision to broadcast his feelings when he criticized the Obama administration for its decision to surrender the forefront of American space exploration to private firms. Speaking before the Senate, he described the contemporary state of NASA funding as one that "presents no challenges, has no focus, and in fact is a blueprint for a mission to nowhere." It is curious that spaceflight has been so thoroughly neglected over the past (precisely) forty years. For a government so long committed to profligate spending - the best record of any American president over the last 70 years in providing balanced budgets was Dwight Eisenhower, at 3 years out of 8 - what was once perceived as a tenet of national (and indeed, earthly) pride has been reduced to only 0.5% of our larger-than-ever national budget. I hope that Neil Armstrong's greatest legacy may one day be his having taken part in the resumption of American predominance in manned space exploration. For now, as a small tribute to a man I admire as much for his few, well-chosen words as his grace under fire, I have digitized the long out-of-print CBS LP Man on the Moon, which was narrated by Walter Cronkite and documents the history and journey of Apollo 11. It's a beautiful reminder of man's all-too-fleeting capacity for genuine, transcendent accomplishment. You can download it here.
Rostislav Dubinsky (1923-1997) was the first violinist, musical director, and a founding member of the Borodin Quartet. The group was one of the few leading lights of Soviet classical music - named, like all the others, by the government and forcibly whittled down to only one full-blooded Jewish member (Dubinsky) before it became a success, but nonetheless talented enough that it toured abroad, both east and west of the Iron Curtain. Dubinsky defected in 1975, and in 1989 published his lamentably out-of-print memoirs, Stormy Applause. The book is a marvel. Dubinsky's English education only began in 1955, yet in the ensuing 44 years he accrued sufficient mastery of the language to write an entire book in charming prose that rarely, if ever, suggests that the author might be a non-native speaker.
Dubinsky's portrait of life under a totalitarian regime is a harrowing one. Certainly, the preconceptions held in the free world regarding Soviet power structure are shown to be true - and the book is a pointed rejoinder to anyone who would suggest that life in the United States, whatever its shortcomings, is not free. Dubinsky provides numerous accounts of the suffering inflicted upon those designated enemies of the state (no matter how arbitrarily), from a vocal Jewish actor who was run down by a government truck and whose entire family was sent to the Gulag, to a Canadian socialism enthusiast who immigrated to the USSR following the Revolution, only to be arrested with his family and shot as a Western spy during the Great Purge. A daughter of the latter man, Olya, was released following Stalin's death and met Dubinsky in Moscow, soon teaching him English and assuming an overarching importance in his life; years of malnutrition suffered in prison left her frail and underdeveloped, however, and she shortly passed away while he was on tour in Siberia. The threat of governmental brutality hung over every aspect of Soviet life, and those who didn't follow the party line were severely punished. For instance, after violinist David Oistrakh refused to sign a letter denying that Israel was a true homeland for Soviet Jewry, agents ransacked his apartment and stole only the least valuable and most irreplaceable of his personal artifacts. Word of threats like these traveled fast, and was enough to keep the vast majority of public figures in line.
Yet Stormy Applause isn't the story of a political regime that "corrodes people the way rust eats into iron," so much as one of those people who lived under it. Inevitably, the paranoiac pressures enforced from above took their toll on all Soviet citizenry, leading to a world in which in addition to one's affairs being in order, one's neighbors' affairs also had to be bad, for the sake of "complete happiness." Following in a grand Russian tradition, the strains of day-to-day living were magnified for Jews, for whom anti-Semitism was so much a fact of life that its manifestations had an astoundingly casual air about them. In the midst of an internal passport check - an inconvenience by no means restricted to Jews alone - policemen would regularly pause at the "Nationality" line (decided by the government) and offer "curious expressions, as if they were wondering, What are you doing in the Soviet Union?" Even among the more socially progressive friends a Jew could make in the Soviet Union, in all likelihood it would only be a matter of time - or in the case of Dubinsky's musician friend Andrei Gorbatov, one heated game of chess - before "strangle [the king]" became "Strangle the Jews."
The emotional release of Stormy Applause comes in the form of music. Dubinsky spent twenty-nine years in the Borodin Quartet, encompassing 3000 concerts, dozens of hours rehearsing for each one spent performing, and very nearly as much time grappling with Soviet bureaucracy over which music he would be allowed to play in public. For composers were subject to the same governmental whims as ordinary citizens, and could, at any time and for any reason, find themselves classified among the Untouchables. Certainly, foreign composers (and especially modern ones) were perennially on thin ice, and such names as "Schönberg, Bern, and Webern were unmentionable words." The stakes were much higher, however, for Soviet composers, for whom official condemnation engendered devastating personal consequences. Dubinsky renders the terror of this kind of life particularly vividly in recounting the life of legendary composer Dmitri Shostakovich, whom he knew personally. Though Shostakovich twice survived ideologically-oriented "civil executions," Dubinsky noted that the "expectation of violent death... became the main theme in [his] music and was stamped forever on his face." Viewed in context, Shostakovich's music was not merely a scathing criticism of totalitarianism, but a very specific outcry against the effects of the Soviet Union on the minds of its citizens - "the destruction of Russian thought and culture, their gradual ruin, which Stalin began and Hitler only wanted to complete." For Dubinsky, to perform Shostakovich was to "[unmask] evil and hypocrisy," to "risk your life for the truth." In writing about his performances, Dubinsky manages to voice these eternal truths as movingly as the composer whose work he so admired. One performance of Shostakovich's Fourth Quartet (a Borodin studio recording of which can be heard below) proved to be one of the most meaningful experiences of his life:
When we sat down, we began playing at once, as if it were the most natural act in the world. We performed the Borodin Quartet No. 2 in D-major, with the unrestrained music-making it required. In Shostakovich's fourth quartet we didn't hold back our emotions. It was surprising that our conversation [with a chauffeur, Helmut, about what took place in concentration camps] had taken place today, because Shostakovich's music was about that very subject - the so-called right of some people to destroy others. With Helmut we had spoken about Hitler's Germany, but now we were playing a piece about Stalin's Russia. By allowing Shostakovich's music to be played, the Soviet authorities had significantly complicated their lives, because the truth about the Soviet regime, concealed so carefully, began to reach the hearts of people all over the world. Judging by the silent hall, it was clear that his tale about twentieth-century tyranny was heard and understood. We ended the concert with Schubert, who, after the Shostakovich, acquired a special philosophical depth: as if regimes and rulers may come and go but another life, pure and elevated, remains undamaged.
In 1893, Grover Cleveland - the US President commonly remembered as little more than the only Commander in Chief to serve two terms that weren't consecutive - disappeared for five days, having boarded a friend's yacht and not returned to shore. Though his term coincided with a burgeoning era of American journalism (in volume, if not universally in accuracy), standards being as they were at the time, his prolonged absence wasn't considered terribly unusual, and the official excuse of a leisurely fishing expedition marked by the extraction of a bad tooth was taken at face value. In fact, Cleveland was aboard that yacht for a then-pioneering surgery to remove a cancerous growth from the roof of his mouth. It had been decided that the surgery had to take place in secret to preserve national faith in the recently-reelected Cleveland - and by extension, the economy, which was faltering under the weight of railroad bankruptcies and a crisis over the question of a Silver Standard. (Oral cancer was a particularly touchy subject for the contemporary American public as it had recently killed Ulysses S. Grant, following an extended battle that had been covered with morbid curiosity in all the country's newspapers.) The story was broken by a single reporter, E.J. Edwards, who would face lasting repercussions for his journalistic daring.
This story is covered in The President is a Sick Man, an outstanding book by Matthew Algeo. The narrative is written in a compulsively entertaining fashion, making for presumably the most entertaining history yet written of an otherwise forgotten President. The book also does an excellent job of providing a succinct, detailed explanation of factors that contributed to the cover-up - Grant's death, and especially the Free Silver movement - and the evolution of modern medicine. The latter is particularly appropriate, given not only the stature of the patient, but the extremely complicated nature of the surgery itself. Despite being only a handful of years removed from the advent of antiseptic surgery, the skilled medical team managed to leave a wound that healed quickly even by modern standards, and to craft an adequate prosthesis to leave Cleveland's speech and appearance (relatively) unchanged by the radical alteration in the shape of his mouth. Cleveland's cancer was also never known to recur: certainly, it never reappeared in his mouth, and though he was too fat to check for certain using the diagnostic tools of the age, his eventual death (15 years later!) was not suspected to be related to cancer metastasized from his mouth. Of course, this alone led interested doctors to question for years the nature of his tumor. The questions were finally answered in March 1980, when studies on the preserved remains of the tumor were published in Transactions and Studies of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Cleveland was found to have had verrucous carcinoma, a comparatively benign cancer that rarely metastasizes, but one that would have restricted his eating and breathing if left untended. The doctors were thus posthumously found to have been precisely right in their choice of treatment - a fitting cap to an already remarkable feat. The study itself, published by John Brooks, Horatio Enterline, and Gonzalo Aponte, is incredibly difficult to track down, online or otherwise. When I wrote to ask him if he knew where I could find a copy, Mr. Algeo was kind enough to scan all 26 pages and email them to me. On the off-chance that anyone else on the internet was looking, and with any luck to save him the trouble of sending them again, the article can be downloaded here.
In 1936, 20-year-old Orson Welles staged a production of Macbeth in Harlem starring an all-black cast, composed largely of non-professional actors. Carried out under the auspices of the Federal Theater Project (one of the many bureaus of the WPA established by FDR to jumpstart the American economy during the Great Depression), the play kept the basic plot and dialogue of the original intact, but transposed the action to a fictitious Caribbean island modeled on Haiti and changed the witches to voodoo practitioners. The resulting "Voodoo Macbeth" was something of a historical milestone: against all odds, it was an enormous commercial success, and it marked one of the first instances in American theater of a serious production starring black actors that was respected and sustained by white audiences. The play would go on tour, and the publicity would be a major factor in Welles' rise to fame. (He would go on to direct and star in a more traditional - if typically idiosyncratic - film adaptation in 1948.)
Unfortunately, not much of Voodoo Macbeth remains. The bulk of the production is detailed only in Welles' annotated promptbook, which gives an outline of the structure of the play; contemporary reviews also preserve something of the character of the show. Luckily, the last 4 minutes of the play were preserved in a WPA film called We Work Again, which documented the bureau's efforts to provide black Americans with work during the 30s. It's a priceless glimpse into a small but sadly overlooked event in the history of American entertainment. You can see those four minutes below, or download We Work Again for free courtesy of the Internet Archive.
Over the course of the past week, the first (and probably only) color photos have hit the internet of San Francisco in the wake of the 1906 earthquake. They were taken by Frederic Eugene Ives, an early proponent of color and 3D photography and an inventor whose halftone process is still used for newspaper and magazine photographs today. The images were intended for use with his own Krömgram system, a cumbersome and expensive system of producing color 3D images that could be viewed through the device seen above. The color imagery was created with a process that used mirrors and filters to create separate slides for each primary color of light, which were bound together in a special order with cloth tapes. The Krömgram was a commercial failure: the viewing device cost $50 when it came out in 1907 (equivalent to $1000 today), was complex to operate, and according to Smithsonian photography curator Shannon Perich, suffered from "poor product placement and advertising." These photos, then, largely represent the last legacy of the failed format, but they're a remarkably contemporary-feeling look into a bygone era (or for that matter, century/millenium).
Most of the reproductions of these images floating around the internet are extremely low quality. You can find the full resolution files from the Smithsonian archives here; below, you can see smaller resolution versions of those images as well as a few details that I found particularly amazing. The first was taken from the roof of the hotel where Ives was staying at the time of the quake, the Majestic (still extant, at 1500 Sutter St.):
Magnification of the rubble skyline...
...and a house either already being reassembled or having picked a tragic time to begin construction.
Photo 2, taken from the neighborhood of City Hall:
Photo 3, taken at Van Ness Blvd.:
Three close-ups of remarkably clear ads:
The last two photos, stills of Market St. produced from a slightly different angle from the same spot. The still-standing Flood Building is prominent in the foreground, and the Ferry Building can be made out just out by the horizon:
And in this particularly touching set of contrasts, the enlargement on top is of a man wandering Market St. and a cable car off in the distance, while the bottom shows both of them, perhaps by some Krömgram fluke, vanished into a yellow haze - rather like the former skyscrapers that lay in ruins around them.
The world of professional sports was once a bastion of facial hair. In fact, that era didn't end as long ago as it might seem. Except for Joe Montana, literally everyone - Bengal or 49er - whose player card appeared on TV during Super Bowl XVI was sporting a mustache, and it was only 35 years ago that the East German Women's Swim Team shocked the world with their roid-enhanced, visibly hairy upper lips. For decades, though, the system was on life support, scratching by on an abundance of personality-free goatees and the rare thin, Michael Jordan-style mustache - that is, until recently.
The true revival of facial hair in sports began in 1995, when hockey's New Jersey Devils usurped the trademark of the powerhouse New York Islander teams of the early 1980s: the playoff beard. Since then, the playoff beard has become one of the NHL's proudest traditions - a symbol of unity and sacrifice for players and fans alike, as teams battle through the long, arduous journey to earn Lord Stanley's Cup. Slowly, the allure of playoff pogonotrophy reached its way out through the rest of American sport, and devotees patiently awaited the day when a patron saint (athlete) would arrive and spread the gospel.
Sure enough, 2010 brought not one set of saviors, but two. The San Francisco Giants used "Fear the Beard" as their battle cry throughout their championship run, with players including NLCS MVP Cody Ross and virtually the entire bullpen sprouting beards to match. The most iconic of all belonged to the ever-eccentric closer Brian Wilson, whose laser-printer-toner black chin mask captured the attention of fans and the media as much for his refusal to admit it wasn't dyed ("We play a lot of day games... It's tanned.") as for its undeniable grandeur. Not to be outdone, the Pittsburgh Steelers independently adopted the same ethos. And just like the Giants, the Steelers feature plenty of facial hair (including the beard of star quarterback Ben Roethlisberger), but have one mug that stands out above the rest: the imperial majesty of the beard that belongs to defensive end Brett Keisel, who justifiably has referred to it in interviews as "the greatest beard of all time."
One can only hope that this is part of a growing trend (pun) - a return to the halcyon days of yore, when facial hair belonged to heroes of the court, diamond, and gridion, instead of perverts, hobos, and Scot Pollard. Until then, here's a few of the all-time great athelete beards, to show what we're missing out on.
Calgary Flames legend Lanny McDonald
Helmet abstainer "Cowboy" Bill Flett
Human hurricane Mike Ditka
Chicago Colt Cap Anson
Giants legend Rod Beck
A's legend Rollie Fingers
New York Knick Hall of Famer John Shaft Walt Frazier
...and finally, modern-day beard advocate Baron Davis in the midst of the greatest dunk of all time.
In 1908, the United States was at a managerial crossroads. Teddy Roosevelt, who had ascended to the presidency following the 1901 assassination of William McKinley and won reelection in his own right in 1904, was legally eligable for another term but chose not to run. He retained his massive popularity, and in 1912 would run for office again, this time as a member of the progressive "Bull Moose" Party; he would split his old support base with his former colleagues in the Republican Party, opening the door for Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who would enter the country into World War I and be instrumental in the postwar restructuring of the western world. In the meantime, the 1908 election pitted Roosevelt's protege William Howard Taft against the most important also-ran in American history, the thrice-defeated William Jennings Bryan.
In a quiet way, the 1908 election also heralded the arrival of a newcomer that would prove by far a more important political player as the century progressed than either of the two men running for president, namely, the sound byte. The advent of the Edison phonograph - as owned by many Americans and experienced by countless more at entertainment parlors across the country - had by then progressed sufficiently that the two candidates were convinced to record speeches that would be sold at Edison outlets nationwide. Though the speeches sold well, it would be a stretch to claim they had an enormous (or even significant) outcome on Taft's eventual landslide victory. Still, they humbly symbolized the dawn of a new era in the extension of the American election down to the common man, and even served to create the first-ever presidential "debates" when the aforementioned parlors would set up "dialogues" between opposing phonographs for public consumption. In all, 22 two-minute canisters were recorded in 1908 - 12 by Taft, 10 by Bryan - and have now been digitized and compiled on CD by Archephone Records.
Certainly, as historical curiosities their appeal is almost unrivalled, offering as they do a chance to hear the voices of the fattest president in American history and the prosecuting attorney of the Scopes Monkey Trial. Yet the recordings are revalatory far beyond their old-timey charm, not only as a source of insight into the minds and personalities of two manifestly intelligent men, but also - more sadly - as evidence of the denigration of American popular politics into something profoundly bland and noticably dumbed down.
Appropriately, the centennial of the Taft-Bryan recordings marked the appearance of the most widely distributed presidential debates in American history, simulcast online for the very first time. The speakers themselves offered no surprises. Republican candidate John McCain - an intelligent man and devoted politician, but not a dynamic public speaker - retreated too often to "my fellow Americans" for dramatic effect and was predictably forgettable in the midst of a presidential race he could never have won. Future president Barack Obama also stayed true to form, offering a well-scripted if platitudinous series of remarks in the confident tone that understandably won him multitudes of admirers.
The contents of the debates were as color-by-numbers as the men who delivered them. Each candidate danced around taking any concrete stances even as the two discussed what purportedly were the hot button topics on whose basis American voters were supposed to choose their candidate. The vapidness of the arguments was compounded as both camps attempted to reach out to the nation's lowest common denominator (see: dumb kids). As reported so lustily by media outlets and dried-up late night tv (see: SNL), the GOP was boldfaced in its stilted folksiness, canonizing Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber in a desperate attempt to reach the everyman. However, the Dems were just as bad, urging American youth and audiences of The View to "BaRock the Vote" and ruining the words "hope" and "change" for decades to come. Neither Obama nor McCain made any concerted appeal to their intelligence in their pursuit of votes, neglecting what ultimately should be the job's primary qualification out of fear of alienating any sector of the voting populace.
The Taft-Bryan recordings, by contrast, showcase both candidates making rational appeals to their audiences and trying to win votes by explicitly outlining the policies they intended to implement in the Oval Office. Though the issues they discuss - trusts, railroads, and American activity in the Philippines, among others - are in many cases no longer at the forefront of the national consciousness, it's nonetheless remarkable to hear American politicans laying their cards on the table. Nor is this only evident in speeches on the future of Roosevelt Progressivism: Taft's talk on the "Rights and Progress of the Negro," for instance, addresses the sticky issue of racial politics with a directness that is both touching and possessed of a brave honesty whose modern-day absence is in many ways responsible for the continued existence of America's racial demons. The most stunning of all the recordings are one apiece from each candidate recorded not as political statements, but as reflections of their characters. Taft displays the same sensitivity he showed in his discussion of black Americans' status in a speech called "Irish Humor," where he suggests that humor had helped sustain Irish immigrants through their enormously difficult transition to American life. Bryan, meanwhile, uses a 3000-year-old grain of wheat as the basis of a staggering meditation on immortality:
It is inconceivable to imagine any Presidential candidate issuing a similar statement today - any such revelation of depth of character could only be seen as too elitist, religious, or strange, and in any case would be tantamount to political suicide. Yet listening to recordings like these could remind modern politicians of the benefits America enjoyed as a consequence of having had the most educated founding fathers in world history. If we're lucky, one day we'll see the transposition of politicians unafraid to openly lead with their minds to a modern political context; until then, we can enjoy listening to one of the terribly few aspects of life that was better in 1908 than it is today. (You can buy Debate '08 from Amazon or directly from Archeophone.)
I was born in San Francisco and am currently a resident at the University of Maryland. This blog's title refers to my right eye, which lost function on April 19, 2004. Thanks for taking a look -- I hope you find something you like.
