The Athenaeum

"THEY HAVE KILLED PAPA DEAD!" A Review by W. Patrick Lang

 

"Anthony Pitch's "THEY HAVE KILLED PAPA DEAD!": The Road to Ford's Theatre, Lincoln's Murder, and the Rage for Vengeance is the only new major work to focus on the assassination and its aftermath."

I am sometimes described as a "student of the Lincoln assasination."  I suppose that is true although I only developed an interest in the subject after reading Bill Tidwell's two fine books on the subject some twenty years ago.   Further reading led me to the question of the Dahlgren Papers, their authenticity, or the lack of it, and the possible chain of opinion changes in Richmond that may have led to a decision to capture or kill Lincoln.  The long defended "Booth as lone rogue in charge of a band of nuts" theory is so discredited that it is hardly worth discussing.  The great irony in that theory of the killing has always been that Southerners are its principal defenders.  Why would they not be?  The possibility that the secet services of the Confederacy killed Lincoln either wittingly or in an unauthorized action by Booth (their agent) is still resisted with fire and brimstone by what I call the "SCV crowd."  Heaven forbid that their ancestors might have tried to "take out" what they saw as the enemy head of state and commander in chief of the armies and navies over-running their homes.  Heaven forbid!  Now we have this interesting book, named for the agonized exclamation of one of His children.  God bless them.  They would need his blessing in years to come. 

Pitch, evidently English by birth and Northern by the grace of residence and taste, went to enormous trouble in researching the book.  Nine years, he says?  Nine years in the bowels of the National Archives and countless libraries.  God bless him too.  The book is a marvelous resource for someone like me.  Pitch has dug up a mass of detailed first person narrative and quoted newspaper stories, columns, proceedings and other primary or nearly primary source material that makes the protagonists in this national "passion play" stand up and walk around.  The author makes you see the sky as it must have looked the week after Lee's surrender of his army.  He makes you smell the horses on Pennsylvania Avenue.  Pitch brings to life all the seedy hotels and bars of 1865 in Washington.  He fills in the details in one's imagination of what it was like to rent a horse for a day, what the stableman said to you in letting you ride off on his horse, what the country people of southern Maryland were like, how they spoke and thought.  It is striking that so many of Booth's team were Catholic Marylanders.  Two had been in the major seminary at Baltimore before the war and left to join the Confederate Army.  They were back in civilian life two years later after taking the "Oath of Allegiance" to please the ever-gullible US Government. 

The book is marred for me by Pitch's inability to see any sort of higher motivation in anyone on the Southern side of the American Iliad.   In his view, they are all wretches and madmen pursuing a hopless dream of disunion in this best of all possible countries.  Powell, the man from Mosby's Rangers sent in to Washington to join Booth's team and give it "spine" is portrayed as a coarse lout, savage in nature and uncomprehending of the gravity of the meaning of his actions.  In fact Payne/Powell left his Florida home at seventeen to soldier.  He was captured wounded in Pickett's Charge at Gettyburg and when sufficiently recovered escaped to Virginis where he joined Mosby's command.  Pitch says that he was a deserter from the Confederate Army.  In fact, he was still on the muster role of Mosby's regiment the day that he was executed in Washington.  He pleaded for Mrs. Surratt's life even on the gallows.

So, on balance, I judge this book to be a marvelous resource, wonderfully documented but a work that would have benefited from a modicum of neutrality toward the events and people of that far off time.  pl

Irish Langs

My father'sfamily came to America from County Meath just before The Famine, Oldcastle actually.  I have been told that the family persists in that part of the country.  In looking in the on-line Irish telecom phone book, I notice that there are a few Langs listed thereabout.  In particular I see that there is a Frederick Lang living in a village outside of Kells.  That was my grandfather's name.  Would anyone care to suggest a method for gtting e-mail addresses for any of these people?

I realize that I am opening the door to mischief in the form of twelve year old boys with a developed sense of gamesmanship.  Conmen and scamsters are everywhere.  I am not easily deceived.  pl

“A Reason For Every Detail”: The Gamble House, Pasadena CA

The whole construction was carefully thought out, and there was a reason for every detail. The idea was to eliminate everything unnecessary to make the whole as direct and simple as possible, but always with the beautiful in mind as the final goal.

-Charles Greene

Touring the Gamble House in Pasadena, I kept mulling over this mission statement from one half of the architectural team that designed the place. The magnetic drawing power of this Greene & Greene building & its surrounding gardens, begun as David Berry Gamble’s winter home & ending as housing for lucky USC graduate design students, can be felt immediately on entering its circular brick driveway.  A magnificent “bungalow,” the zenith of Arts & Crafts design execution, the Gamble House sits on a slight hill framed by the vegetation of SoCal, that odd mixture of palm trees, pine trees, eucalyptus, & scrub oak.

The regular Gamble House tours are enough of a dazzle, but the “Behind the Velvet Ropes” tour I recently experienced was even better.  Wearing cotton gloves, twelve of us explored every inglenook & cranny of the house.  Walking off the beaten path in the Gamble home is magical.  From the top of the house, a huge open room perched on high like a crown that was meant originally to be a billiard room (but for the religious non-billiard playing Gamble family turned into an airy retreat overlooking a deep arroyo), to the basement root cellar/larder beneath the kitchen stairs, to David Gamble’s tiny private study in between with its Stickley furniture and vaulted brick fireplace, the deliberate, organic flow built into each space was mood altering.  Even standing outside on one of the many sleeping porches, busy traffic noises and the sounds of docents & tourists receded far into the background.  So much smooth wood, woods of all kinds used in the construction of each wall, floor, ceiling, staircase, each piece of custom designed furniture.  Teak, bird’s eye maple, cedar, redwood, humble pine blending seamlessly with exquisite detailing- inlays of abalone shell, silver, ebony, semiprecious stone chips, buttons of mahogany covering every nail.  The house seems so modern in its design, it was startling for all of us to open Mrs. Gamble’s walk-in closet & find clothing from 1908- could someone who wore button-hooked high tops and a veiled leghorn hat with cherries on the brim have possibly commissioned such a place?  And in the gilded first decade of the 20th century?

But one can surmise from their choice of architects alone that the Gambles were unique, individualistic. The family also had made a conscious choice NOT to buy property & build their house on the already populated “Millionaires Row” in Pasadena (that area often viewed in the background of the Rose Parade, the traditional mansions at the posh residential end of Orange Grove Blvd.), but preferred instead a tract of land overlooking the rugged arroyo a few miles away.  Many others followed them to that part of Pasadena later, & an outcropping of Greene & Greene designed homes soon surrounded the Gamble House.  The walking tour of those homes was tempting, but would have to wait for another day.  I had spent three hours putting my hands on priceless Arts & Crafts history, & the cotton gloves had to be turned in.

Those readers who can make their way into Pasadena at some point to tour the Gamble House are in for a rare treat, an afternoon of architectural wonderment in the serene surroundings of this National Historic Landmark.  For those who do their touring on the web, the Gamble House has a comprehensive site www.gamblehouse.org that includes history of the house & the extensive conservation/restoration done to it over the years, many stills, & a very good virtual tour.  Below are a few pics my husband & I recently took of the exterior of the house.  The interior photos are from the USC Greene & Greene Virtual Archives, as no camera use is permitted inside.

-Maureen Lang