The secrets of America’s wealth

Photographs

Just a handful of events did it.

When you look at the causes of success in the wealthiest nation there has ever been, there are but a handful:

  • The Revolutionary War. Kicking out the British and keeping taxes for ourselves stopped colonial plunder for once and for all.
  • The Louisiana Purchase. President Thomas Jefferson consummated the deal amidst the usual calls for impeachment and rendered America essentially immune from invasion unless you consider Canadians and Mexicans a threat. Nappy proceeded to waste the cash on interminable war with England and an idiotic attempt to capture the misery that was and remains Russia. America gained a vast swath of territory from Louisiana to North Dakota. The cost was less than 9 months of our current criminal spending on perpetual war.
  • Lincoln’s Secretary of State gave his name, albeit unwittingly, to the purchase of Alaska from the Russkies in 1867. The cost of $100 million in today’s money saw ‘Seward’s Folly’ remove the Russian Bear from North America and delivered vast sums of gold and oil soon after.
  • NASA and the Apollo program. The Russkie Bear did America a great favor in beating us to space time and again – the first unmanned space vehicle, the first man in space, the first spacewalk, etc. at goodness knows what cost to life. It lit a fire under us, stoked by JFK, who said we would put a man on the moon within a decade. The US space program was the Cold War at its most hot and, as with all wars, technology proceeded by leaps and bounds. It’s hard to begin to relate the gains to US GDP from Apollo, but the development of just one technology says it all. The microchip.

These thoughts ran through my mind when I snapped the images below for they speak loudly to the most significant of the wealth creators enumerated above, the first. The other three would have been impossible without it.

When a bunch of throughly pi**ed off Americans chucked 342 chests of English tea (from China, of course, stolen by the British in the first place) into Boston Harbor the movement for independence from a tyrannical colonial power was firmly entrenched. There would be no more taxation without representation and the English protection racket was doomed.

“Your taxes pay for protection”, the English King told us. Uh huh. (‘Colonialism’ is little more than a euphemism for theft).

While the original boats are long gone there’s a replica to be seen in the harbor:

Taken from a high floor of the Intercontinental Hotel, Boston.

Panny GX7, 12-35mm pro zoom.

School – early morning

Photographs

New England light.

The nights and mornings in New England are cold by now, frost in evidence as the sun rises.

Having attended breakfast with the Dean at an indecently early hour, I stumbled out of the deanery at my son’s school and this is what I saw:


Early morning.


Alumni Hall serves some of the best meals in New England.


This girls’ dorm dates to 1882.


Seen through the frame of the Admissions Building.


Another view of Alumni Hall.


More like 7am …. The Memorial Chapel is made from local Connecticut River granite.
Like almost every prep school in the area, NMH is now secular.


The Forslund Gym faces the magnificent playing fields. NMH is in the Pioneer Valley.


First autumn colors.

I am a big believer that the spirit of place is a key component of a happy mind and how could you go wrong on this beautiful campus in central Massachusetts?

Panny GX7, 12-35mm pro zoom.

Connecticut College

Colleges

Architectural unity in a fine setting.


Connecticut College is close to Boston and New York.

For an alphabetical index of the New England College series of pieces, click here.

When Wesleyan University decided to ban women (!) from its campus in 1909, the business opportunity was not lost on Connecticut College, some 40 minutes east in Connecticut which opened its doors in 1911, to women only. It’s now co-ed, as is Wesleyan and educates just 1800 undergraduate students, with its strengths being chemistry, biology, medicine and economics. Many graduates go on to NYU to take a masters in business.

As I was at my son’s school in central Massachusetts for Fall Family Days, we made the pilgrimage to Connecticut College some 120 miles and 2 hours south during the long weekend. While Winston is increasingly focused on an urban or city setting for college after four years in remote Northfield Mount Hermon in the Berkshires, CC’s setting near the small, tired working class town of New London does not disqualify it, as excellent rail services see to it that both New York and Boston are some 90 minutes distant.

The architecture, with Connecticut River granite used throughout, is quite splendid here with only two modern design eyesores – the Library and Arts buildings. The stone used, however, is the same. In this regard the campus is very reminiscent of far more remote Middlebury, with CC distinguished by a quite splendid selection of modern sculptures dotted throughout the compact and beautifully ordered grounds, resplendent with not one but two perfect soccer pitches. Further, even the old buildings see their infrastructure modernized and the overall effect is much of a muchness. Lovely.



Our charming guide Shelby, a sophomore, briefs the tour group on a crisp autumn day.
Winston at right, sporting NMH apparel.


The gingerbread admissions building. It matches nothing but is quite charming.


The Arts building. Oh! dear.


A hint of Brutalism in the performing arts building, but not too bad.


The concert hall inside the performing arts building.


Winston in front of Louise Nevelson’s magnificent Untitled piece, 1976-86.


Antoine Poncet’s Sensoraya, 1969.


Sasson Soffer’s Northern Memory & Southern Memory, 1986.


It may only be late October but the leaves are all gone here.


Professional greenhouse.


Following Wesleyan’s lead, CC includes an observatory.


Synergy. Francis G. Pratt, 1994


William McCloy’s whimsically named ‘The Dangers and Pleasures of Co-Education’, 1968


While the Shain Library’s exterior has a face only a mother could love,
the four stories of books, including a lovely oriental quiet
space, are really something.


Putto 4 over 4, v2, by Michael Rees, 2006. A most dynamic piece.


CC alumni include Joan Rivers, Judge Kimba Wood, Susan Saint James, Estelle Parsons and Nan Kempner.

Panny GX7, 12-35mm pro zoom.

First Man

Movies

Compelling.

First Man is a biographical portrait of a special man, Neil Armstrong.

Director Damien Chazelle used a mixture of three film formats in making the movie, hand held 16mm for some of the domestic scenes, 35mm and 65mm IMAX for the HD sections, including the heart-stopping image of the Apollo 11 attached to von Braun’s faultless Saturn V rocket on the Houston launchpad at night. The 16mm work captures the look and feel of 1960s American middle class domesticity well. The 65mm sections harken back to the 70mm film used in the big magazines attached to the Hasselblad 500EL used by the astronauts. (The wonderful moment when Mission Control reminds Armstrong of the correct exposure settings as he prepares to step on the moon is correctly repeated here).

Candidly, if you do not catch this movie in an IMAX theater then the effects of a launch – be it the earlier Gemini or the later Apollo capsules – will be lost. The raw violence as the rockets ignite at blast-off, the sheer physical terror from the unleashing of over 7 million pounds of thrust to release man from the powerful grasp of gravity, these are things which dictate IMAX technology.

Two aspects of this fine movie stand out.

One is Ryan Gosling’s rendering of Armstrong. While the natural tendency of American directors is to opt for sentimental schmalz in biopics, Chazelle largely avoids this temptation, opting for schmalz-lite in securing continuity through the repeated mention of the death of Armstrong’s daughter at a young age. Gosling shows us the man we so little knew. Self-effacing, tightly wound and, above all, very serious. This is a very serious movie in the best possible way. I would hate to think what Spielberg would have delivered, other than better returns for his investors and sales for the makers of Kleenex.

The other is the no-holds-barred renderings of the hardware. There’s nothing glossy or high-tech about the look here. These are machines clearly seen to be bolted together by hand, poorly finished and utterly functional in intent. You wonder, time and again, why parts are not falling off during the brutal first few minutes as von Braun’s fires of hell are unleashed below the occupants, mostly mere passengers with little control over their fate.

Other performances of mention are Corey Stoll’s Buzz Aldrin, ever spiky and opportunistic. Not a man you would have a beer with. And a low key yet courageous Claire Foy as Armstrong’s wife. As the widow of another of the astronauts reminds her, she could have married a dentist and, yes, he would always be home by 6pm. Not an option for this woman.

Catch First Man at your local IMAX soon because box office returns suggest that it will not be there long, the audience’s interest about as long as Americans’ attention span for the very short lived Apollo program which remains – after the Louisiana and Alaska Purchases – one of the most lucrative investments the US taxpayer ever made. Indeed, had Apollo not existed we would have no microchips today and you would not be reading this.

A note on Wernher von Braun, the German engineer who made it possible for Apollo to escape earth’s gravity. His biography is objectively reported by Wikipedia including much detail on his sordid past. The OSS, forerunner of the CIA, did a masterful job of snatching him from a defeated Germany in 1945 along with many of his scientists, beating the (presumably intoxicated) Russians to the punch. We got the A Team and they crafted the Saturn V. The Russians came later, copied our tactics, and got the B Team. (“Here’s the good news, Hans. You are being liberated. Here’s the bad news. Moscow.”) They never successfully fired their copy of the Saturn V. All four exploded on the launch pad. No moonwalk for Ivan.

The Twentieth Century Limited

Photographs

Travel as it should be.

Through the second World War the two powerhouse cities of the United States were New York and Chicago, after you got your education in Boston. Be it finance, marketing, commodities or industrial prowess, all you could ever need was to be found in and around these magnificent cities with Chicago arguably home to the finest high rise architecture on the planet. Thus there was much demand for high end travel between the two cities and, without a doubt, the travel method of choice was the Twentieth Century Limited train which ran between Grand Central in New York and La Salle Station in Chicago.


The route today.

In the last days of steam the New York Central commissioned the premier industrial designer of the time, Henry Dreyfuss, to skin the steam train in Art Deco splendor, which commission Dreyfuss discharged with aplomb, giving us this:


Dreyfuss’s take on the Twentieth Century Limited, 1938.

The trip from New York took 16 hours by 1945 when powerful – if unromantic – diesel-electrics replaced steam. The successful executive would board the Twentieth Century at the world’s most magnificent (to this day!) interior space, Grand Central Station, repairing to the dining car, after cocktails with the boys in the lounge. Women still knew their place was in the kitchen and the nursery, or as decoration for powerful spouses when called for.


Grand Central – the main concourse.

If you were Roger O. Thornhill (“The ‘O’ stands for nothing”), busy Madison Avenue marketing executive in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 thriller ‘North by Northwest’, on the lam from the law, then your dinner companion would be Eva Marie-Saint, the epitome of cool blonde elegance, and your main course would be suggested by her:



“Any suggestions?” “The brook trout. A little trouty, but quite good”.

And there you have the finest train scene, bar none, ever made for the movies.

The fare was $2,500 in today’s money for a sleeper berth with the comforting knowledge that you would arrive on time.



Your tax dollars at work. Amtrak today.

Amtrak wants $566 today for the trip from NYC’s awful Penn Station with the proviso that you may never arrive. The travel time is now 3 hrs more.

With the introduction of Boeing’s 707 jet aircraft in the late 1950s the Twentieth Century Limited was doomed, Americans forever confusing motion with action. Now they opted to be treated like sardines and the misery of air travel continues to grow to the present day. So instead of arriving at 8am, well rested in your sleeping berth and well fed and entertained, ready for a day’s work, you now arrive frazzled many times faster as you search out yet another miserable hotel in your struggle to make that breakfast meeting. And, of course, it’s all far cheaper, which means that crowd sizes are ever greater and airline legroom ever shorter.

Those who have no need to travel now do so all the time and the results is nothing short of misery and premature death from stress. And airlines reward these traveling salesmen with …. frequent flier miles, which sounds like adding insult to injury.

For more stunning images from what may be Hitchcock’s greatest movie, click here. Interestingly, as this was made in 1959, the movie foretells the demise of train travel, the culprit being the ‘Northwest’ in the title.