Arts & Letters

Current Books comprehensible, doubtless rebellious mum- against any portrayal of blacks as “inferior, lazy, blings. Watkins stops short of what I think dumb, and dishonest.” should be said: Stepin Fetchit was in fact a Step settled in Chicago and returned to his brilliant subversive, who, in his moment, de- show biz roots—mainly working noisome clip ployed the only weapons of protest available and strip joints in the Midwest, doing standup to a man of his race. routines containing a certain amount of the overtly transgressive material that younger master of comic timing, Step for a few black comedians were beginning to offer. He Ayears considered himself a star. He got a few small movie roles—not enough to wasn’t really, not in the sense of such leading constitute a comeback—and came to be ad- white comics of his era as Will Rogers, with mired by the likes of Flip Wilson and, of all whom he appeared in two 1934 films, D a v i d people, Muhammad Ali, whose entourage he Harum and Judge Priest. But he was at least a briefly joined as “strategic adviser.” But he lost well-known character actor. He was at first a defamation case against CBS for its very care- widely admired by blacks, who in those days less characterization of him in a TV docu- were desperate to see at least a few representa- mentary, and in 1976 he was felled by a mas- tives of their race on the screen in any sort of sive stroke. He spent his remaining years in prominent role. Later in the 1930s, of course, hospitals and nursing homes—proud, angry, Bill Robinson and Hattie McDaniel achieved but essentially irrational. comparable recognition, in equally subsidiary Shortly after the stroke, the NAACP’s Hol- but more easily lovable parts. They were menials lywood chapter gave him a special award for but not grotesques, often able to talk sense to his “contribution” to the “evolution” of black their white employers; Step, of course, could cinema, but that did little to assuage the spirit speak only nonsense to his. of a permanently misunderstood actor. By Step’s fall was almost as swift as his rise. The then, the studios that had once exploited him movies marginalized him a decade after dis- were excising much of his best work from the covering him, and the black press and the extant prints of films. Whatever his failings as NAACP soon turned decisively against him. an artful biographer, Watkins reminds us that Starting in the 1930s, the NAACP in particu- Stepin Fetchit once lived large and was, at his lar pressured Hollywood to portray blacks, in best, an outrageously funny American citizen. manner and aspiration, as virtually identical to middle-class whites. The organization’s efforts >Richard Schickel, a longtime film critic for T i m e, is the author of many books, including Harold Lloyd culminated in an early-1950s campaign, (1974), D. W. Griffith (1984), Clint Eastwood ( 1 9 9 6 ) , prompted chiefly by TV’s Amos ’n’ Andy, and Elia Kazan ( 2 0 0 5 ) . A r t s & L e t t e r s THE WORLD ON SUNDAY: a small roast beef,” and introduced the worthy Graphic Art in Joseph Pulitzer’s News- bourgeois custom of lounging over the Sunday paper (1898–1911). papers. Baker and Margaret Brentano repro- By Nicholson Baker and Margaret duce material published between 1898, when Brentano. Bulfinch Press. 134 pp. $50 the W o r l d installed a “marvellous” color print- We think that we advance. Instead, we ing press, and 1911, when Pulitzer died. With merely abandon the beauty of the past. Noth- intelligent and insightful captions by Bren- ing illustrates this better than The World on tano, we see excerpts from nearly every section S u n d a y, a magnificent coffee-table volume. of the newspaper, including the classifieds and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World once a department store ads, but most of the selec- week became The Great Sunday World, a tions originate—and rightly so—in the m a g a- supplement-stuffed extravaganza that, as zine and the humor section: one sumptuous, Nicholson Baker puts it, “weighed as much as antic, multicolored spread after another, not 1 1 6 Wilson Quarterly only a slew of very eccentric, very funny editorial cartoons and comic strips, but also breathless features that celebrate robber barons, Arctic explorers, bathing beauties, world’s fairs, subways, skyscrapers, airships, and the most amazing phe- nomenon of the age, Teddy R o o s e v e l t . The World was a paper of record, at least in the United States, with its Sunday edition read by more than half a million Americans, yet its editors never lost their sense of giddy wonder. They sometimes slid into sensation- alism—a spread on “spirit pictures” that purported to show spectral presences; a headline declaring that “Scientists Now Know Positively That There Are Thirsty Peo- A typically elaborate Sunday World ple on Mars”; a lurid, warmongering cartoon illustration skewers both trolley safety and on Spanish atrocities in Cuba. But even in the greed of “ambulance-chasing” lawyers. the era of yellow journalism, the paper’s re- p o r t e r s dedicated a surprising amount of ny model standing alongside. space to explaining the dizzying new world One finishes this book wishing only that around them. The modern reader can still get Brentano’s captions had gone on a bit longer. absorbed by “The Busiest Hour on Earth”— But as Baker makes clear in his introduction, a a Manhattan rush hour—or the “12 New large part of the goal behind The World on Americans Every Minute” passing through S u n d a y is to further the two authors’ crusade to Ellis Island, or the way electricity was making rescue original periodicals and newspapers Broadway “The Street That Knows No from those space-saving fanatics bent on mu- N i g h t . ” tilation and monochromatic microfilming. The most striking element of all, and the Baker laid out the argument in his 2001 book one that most starkly distinguishes this ca. 1900 Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on newspaper from its ca. 2000 counterpart, is the P a p e r. Here, he and Brentano mostly let the heady energy of the World’s graphics. The World speak for itself, and it makes their case works of Pulitzer’s brilliant artists and designers b r i l l i a n t l y . epitomize what has nearly been lost in Ameri- —Kevin Baker can popular culture: an idiosyncratic, nu- anced, subjective vision. Consider a single illustration, and far from the best one: Dan W. BOOKING PASSAGE: Smith’s 1908 magazine cover about an up- We Irish and Americans. coming carnival to celebrate the 10th birthday By Thomas Lynch. Norton. of the automobile. Smith depicts a luminous 296 pp. $24.95 night scene at Columbus Circle, cars fes- “Bits & Pieces” and “Odds & Ends” are the tooned with glowing Japanese lanterns and be- titles of two of the essays in Booking Passage, a sieged by a crowd of eager swells. It’s like a collection by Irish-American poet and under- Toulouse-Lautrec poster, the sort of cultur- taker Thomas Lynch. They also describe the al artifact that gives you a palpable desire to nature of this book, which meanders in many be there. Contrast it with what a Sunday directions as Lynch explores the geography of magazine section might serve up today: a his life, spiritual terrain included. shapeless modern car, set against some vast The organizing principle here is Lynch’s re- and desolate landscape, perhaps with a skin- lationship with Ireland and the Irish. The Autumn 2005 1 1 7.

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