Author Archives: Earl B. McElfresh

Civil War Questions with High School Students–Questions 9, 10, 11

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Question 9:  How did the draft work during the Civil War?

The draft was a pretty shabby affair for both sides and it was also manifestly unfair. In the North a drafted man could buy out for $300. That was a lot of money then and only the wealthy could afford that. They would then get a substitute. They were often enough shady characters who would take money, enlist, desert at the first opportunity and enlist again, again for money, using an alias – and on and on. In the South, there were numerous exceptions and the saying was, “It’s a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” In other words, the wealthy men who owned the slaves (and they made up a tiny fraction of the overall population) that the war was really all about were not drafted because they had to stay home and oversee the slaves etc. Initially, in the South, draft age (and there were many occupations, including service in the non-fighting state militias e.g. that were exempt from the draft) was from 18 to 45. By the end of the war, they were taking men from “cradle to grave” 16-65. The draft, for both sides, was pretty much a disaster.

Question 10  Did we have the Medal of Honor during the Civil War?

There was a Medal of Honor during the Civil War. It was awarded much more liberally than the present day Medal of Honor and it was sometimes given to an entire unit for some especially meritorious action. There were several local Medal of Honor winners including a Mr. Oviatt (the street next to Boardmanville school is named for him)  and Stephen Welch. Mr. Welch, your OHS teacher, is a direct descendent. Stephen Welch is buried in Allegany cemetery. Mr. Welch can tell you all about him.

Question 11  What was the most important information a battle map could provide for the armies?  Elevated ground?

The most important information a map could provide a Civil War commander was enough knowledge of the ground that he knew where he could march and maneuver his army (where he could pass through a mountain range, where he could ford a river, where he could feed his men and water his animals, what multiple roads he could spread his army out on and still maintain contact between the separated units and get them to the right place at the same time.) A commander mostly wanted to know from a map where he could go and what he could do and equally important to him, where his enemy could go and what the enemy’s options were. It was while the armies were angling for a battle that maps were most important. Once contact was made and battle was joined, they could scout around for information and to a limited extent see what was going on.

Civil War Q&A With High School Students–Questions 6, 7, 8

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Question 6:  How many people survived the prison camp at Andersonville, Georgia?

There were about 45,000 Union prisoners at Andersonville. Something like 13,000 of them died there, so there was about a 27% casualty rate. The biggest Union POW camp was in Elmira, NY.  There was less excuse for the approximate 25% casualty rate for Confederate prisoners there since the Union, in contrast to the South, was thriving throughout the war.  But those were very hard times and very hard people.

Question 7:  Would you consider Robert E. Lee a traitor?

Robert E. Lee was still in the U.S. Army in early 1861 and he received a promotion. When you receive a new rank, you take a new oath of allegiance.  You swear to defend the United States of America against any enemy, foreign or domestic.  Within weeks of taking that oath, Robert E. Lee was a domestic enemy of the nation he had just sworn an oath to defend.  That pretty much makes him a traitor I’m afraid.

I think the Southern aristocracy—which Lee was part of—had such a high opinion of their personal “honor” that whatever they did had to be honorable because it was their honorable selves doing it. I also think that their absolute power over their black slaves, and the iron handed rule they had over their plantations and their society gave them a bad case of arrested development. Their actions and opinions were so unchallenged that they had been gradually lulled into simple-mindedness.

Question 8:   What was your favorite map to make? Why?

I really can’t say which was my favorite map to make.  Each mapping project is really exciting, first because it’s a new job and it means money and it means you’re going to be profitably and happily employed for months and that’s nice. And it’s also wonderful to have a new subject to delve into, to dig around for resources and information.  So I like that.  It’s also a lot of fun to do the drawing and I really enjoy, for example, doing the lettering of the map titles.  I usually meet some interesting people and get to travel to interesting places when I do the research…And as I got better at doing the maps, the ones done with more expertise were more enjoyable than ones done early on that I look back on and wish I’d done a better job. Long and short, I guess I’d have to say my favorite map is the one I’m working on or the next one I’m about to do. I guess my Pearl Harbor map is right up there though.

 

Questions About A Beatle Photo

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The figure I have read is 1200 or more.  That’s the number of times it’s estimated that The Beatles had performed together (anyway, John, Paul & George) by the time they appeared, relaxed and confident, on that first Ed Sullivan Show, 49 years ago this Saturday, Feb. 9, 2013.

But their appearance three days later in Washington at the Washington Coliseum stands out from every other Beatle appearance I’ve ever seen.  Used as a venue for boxing matches, the Coliseum was likely the first time The Beatles had ever played in such an enormous venue, completely surrounded by a huge, enraptured but well behaved crowd and it was the first time that they had to rotate so they’d face everybody in every direction.  It provides some perspective on what The Beatles did for the stature of rock & roll to see Ringo himself struggling to tug his drum set around to play to a new sea of faces.

This is the only Beatle performance I’ve seen where The Beatles are in as tumultuous a mood as their audience, the first I’ve ever seen where The Beatles seem on the verge of being washed away by the sea of screams and cheers and contagious (even the performers caught it) excitement. The film shows constant little furtive flicks of light, like meteors, whizzing across the camera lens.  Jelly beans.  The hard shelled American kind, not the soft gummy sort the English kids would throw.  Ringo’s drum sticks visibly split and shatter as he plays.  Ringo was especially worked up for the concert.  He said afterwards he would have played all night for that crowd.  As a final reminder that it wasn’t until The Beatles’ success that rock & roll reached the heights of big time entertainment, the black and white concert footage ends, “bang” like that, abruptly in mid-song.  The movie camera had run out of film.

Last year a gentleman named Mike Mitchell emerged with a series of photographs he’d taken as, I believe, an 18 year old amateur photographer, when he attended the Coliseum concert.  He apparently moved freely around the perimeter of the stage snapping pictures of The Beatles performing without anyone shooing him away… if true, another indication that rock & roll was still in its “this too shall pass” stage.

Jump ahead 48 years. Mike Mitchell discovers the roll of film he’d shot, develops it and plans to auction the resulting pictures off at Christies.  The Wall Street Journal covers this story and runs one of the photos.  It’s this photo. John and Paul, plugged in and fancy free, dapper and spiffy, from the Coliseum concert.

beatles

Having seen the Coliseum concert in it’s entirety—at least everything the Maysles’ brothers captured—many times, and having watched the significant segment that The Beatles included in their Anthology DVD’s many times, something about the showcased photograph didn’t seem right.  Reviewing the filmed footage with this single photograph in mind, several things seem to be amiss.

  1. John Lennon is, in real life, slightly taller than Paul McCartney. He’s noticeably smaller than Paul in this photo, even taking into account the fact that he’s standing slightly back from Paul.
  2. The round stage at the Coliseum was ringed with mikes and mike stands. No mikes in this photo. John would occasionally wander away from a mike and step forward to sing his bit, but not Paul and not both of them.
  3. John Lennon is clearly actually singing in the photo and not merely mouthing a lyric but he’s singing into a void. Again, no mike.
  4. Where is the background in the photo? It’s a black void.

Perhaps someone can clarify or explain the photo and what it all means.

Civil War Q&A with High School Students–Questions 3, 4, 5

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How long does it typically take you to create a map of a famous battle?

 It typically takes six to eight months to do the research, draft the map, and then ink in the data and watercolor the whole concern.  In the midst of that process, I also work out the information and secure the images for the reverse side of the map.  That six or eight months means seven days a week, morning, noon and night.  The maps are great fun but they’re also a lot of work.

 What interests you most about the Civil War?

The most interesting thing about the Civil War is the participants. The panoply of characters, Abraham Lincoln, U.S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, JEB Stuart, and more obscure characters like Richard Ewell (he married a widow and always introduced his wife as “Mrs. Brown”), Confederate general Joe Johnston who hated president Jeff Davis so much that you wouldn’t know from his memoir that he was fighting the Yankees, he’s always fighting Davis.  Then George B. McClellan, Union general whose reputation collapsed because the stupid, vainglorious letters he wrote to his wife revealed him to be a supercilious jerk.  There was General George Custer (of Little Big Horn fame) who was a brilliant cavalry leader who perfumed his flowing locks and designed a uniform that made him look like a circus performer.  It was a wild bunch of characters.  England had Dickens’ characters.  We had these guys.  Some of the most noble people in history, and some of the most ignoble, made up the cast of our Civil War.

Also, most wars are futile. For example, the First World War led directly to the Second World War and the Second World War wasn’t even over when the Cold War got underway.  In contrast, the Civil War was fought to end slavery and preserve the United States.  When the Civil War was over, slavery was dead and the United States lived.  Success!

Who do you think was the greatest Confederate General?

I think Stonewall Jackson was the South’s great general but he had the advantage in that regard of dying too early in the war to confront the best Union generals.  But I also think there was something vaguely—for want of a better term—autistic, about him.  He seems kind of blank in terms of personality and he was a bewildering figure to his fellow generals.  And his successes came in the first half of the war when the south fought with the immense advantage of a friendly population and in familiar countryside.  His Valley Campaign, upon which his fame primarily rests, would not have been possible once Union forces knew the roads and topography as well as he did.  But circumstances are what they are and he was, in my mind, the best in the 1861-1863 timeframe.

What is the oldest battle that you mapped?

The oldest battle I’ve mapped is the Revolutionary battlefield of Saratoga in NYS.  It was fought in 1777.  The oldest Civil War battlefield I’ve mapped is Manassas or Bull Run, VA.  Two battles were fought there, 1861 and 1862.

Civil War Q&A With High School Students–Questions 1 & 2

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Time did not allow me to answer all of the questions of the American History Class at Olean High School, but I did respond to them by e-mail.  The first and second question were:

What information do you use to draw the maps?  Do you use photos along with studying the landscape?  What else do you use?  How do you decide if the information is reliable or legitmate?

I had to give a rather long answer to the question:

  1. I use contemporaneous photographs, taken within days of some of the major battles (Antietam, Gettysburg e.g.).  I got a Cornell agronomist (a crop expert) to study the panoramic photos of these fields to determine the crops in the fields. It was easy to figure out what type of fencing there was, where the orchards were, the extent of the woodlands etc. Essential to the use of these photographs was the 1970’s work of William Frassanito, who painstakingly determined the point-of-view and location of each extant wartime photograph of Gettysburg and Antietam.
  2. Then I used regimental histories – each regiment would occupy a small sector of the battlefield and their accounts and maps  would show their particular sector in great detail. The soldiers’ diaries and letters (this was probably the most literate war in history) also contain many references to their immediate surroundings. Many of them were themselves farmers and they would frequently comment on the crops and fields, fences, barns and orchards. The most poignant research items were “burial” maps. Dead men were often buried right where they had fallen by their fellow soldiers, who were usually their townsmen, friends, even relatives. They would then send the family a very detailed map so they could journey to the battlefield, locate the body and bring it home for burial.
  3. On the major battlefields such as Gettysburg, Antietam, Stones River in Tennessee, the National Park Service has tons of data that they gladly make available to a researcher.
  4. As I mentioned in the class, aerial photographs are very revealing if you know what you’re looking for. If I have a reasonably good Civil War era map and it shows a road or a lane that’s vanished, or a barn or a house, if you look very carefully, you can find a footprint or a trace of it. Also, the skeleton features in the landscape – the rivers, streams, hills, principal roads etc. – are obviously extant features on todays extremely accurate USGS maps. So those features are immediately drawn on my map so I immediately have a framework to go by. And the maps drawn and used by the actual Civil War armies, while not terribly accurate in terms of exact distances etc., are full of the sort of information the armies needed. They needed the name of residents along the roads because there were no route markers and there were not normally formal names for a given road or lane so the surest way to get reliable directions was to get pointed toward the Smith’s house or the Jones farm. Documenting the residents also gave the armies a idea of the local population. The more residents there were, the more resources there were for the armies to live off. (Union General Sherman set off across Georgia on November 16,1864 saying, “Where a million Georgians can live, my army will not starve.) The armies also had to know where they could find corn fields, wheat fields, orchards, hay fields, wells, springs etc. because an army on the march needed to feed 30, 40, 50 thousand men  and thousands of horses and mules. A typical mule would drink 10 gallons of water a day. Multiply that by 10,000! A Civil War army (and it didn’t matter whether they were friends or enemies, Union or Confederate) would devastate any countryside they marched through. They would take all the food for themselves and all the forage for their animals, drink the wells dry, destroy the fields they camped on, empty the barns, clear out the larders, tear down all the fences (to make their camp fires to brew their coffee) and raise havoc generally. But the armies need to live off the land is great for mapmakers because their military “route” maps detailed this sort of food and forage information so the armies knew where they could march and fend for themselves.
  5. A great aid in mapping Gettysburg was the work of John Bachelder, who arrived in Gettysburg immediately after the battle. Bachelder marched up and down the field, mapping it, and he had as a resource the thousands of wounded soldiers, Union and Confederate, remaining behind, who he interviewed. His map, a birds-eye view of the field, was very reliable and valuable.
  6. There were also quite accurate published county maps available of some areas, including Gettysburg, published prior to the Civil War that I could make use of. (They were also made use of by the armies and the generals.) Also, soon after the war, the U.S. War Department prepared surveys of many of the major battlefields. These maps were much more detailed and accurate than the maps made under wartime conditions. (The U.S. hired former Confederate mapmakers to work on these surveys. One Rebel named Blackford, who’d sworn he would die rather than live again under the stars and stripes, found himself, within a month of Appomattox, working for the U.S. Army mapping the battlefields.)
  7. Finally, most every Civil War battlefield has people who have devoted their lives to studying “their” battle. They know every nook and cranny of the field and like nothing more than to guide someone around the field, point out sites, recommend books and resources, provide access private lands and to other knowledgeable locals, and in some cases they fix parking tickets.
  8. There are other resources but the above provides a pretty good idea of what’s out there. I decide on the reliability of the information based on the resource I used. Photographs, for example, are irrefutable – at least back then they were, before photoshop – and other data would often be corroborated by some other data. And then you have to wonder why anybody would mislead about the existence of a stone wall or the presence in their front of a rye as opposed to a wheat field.

 

 

The Civil War: Some Suggested Reading

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I prepared a reading list of Civil War volumes to hand out to an Olean High School junior year American history class as part of a Civil War presentation on Jan. 15, 2013. The list is short and sweet and my basic premise was that, for the most part, none of the students had read much, if anything, about the Civil War. My intention was to suggest some books that would be scholarly but entertaining and informative at the same time.  Also the list had to fit on one page. This is the list I came up with. My feeling is that if any of the students read even one of these volumes they will probably be drawn to read others as well.

  •  Bruce Catton’s trilogy on the Civil War, which includes The Coming Fury, Terrible Swift Sword, and Never Call Retreat, is a very dramatic and beautifully written set. It’s accurate history but it reads with the verve of a novel.  A pretty long novel though.
  • Bruce Catton also wrote a terrific little book entitled U. S. Grant and the American Military Tradition. It’s one of my absolute favorite Civil War books. And it’s short!
  • There are two excellent one volume biographies of Abraham Lincoln.  Stephen B. Oates’s With Malice Toward None and/or Benjamin P. Thomas’s Abraham Lincoln.  Another really neat little book is this same Benjamin P. Thomas’s Lincoln’s New Salem.
  • The best single volume account of the overall Civil War—it’s pretty long and quite detailed but extremely worthwhile—is James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom.
  • There are all sorts of truly fascinating first person accounts of being a soldier in the Civil War.  These books are America’s Victorian literature.  We don’t have a Dickens, a Trollope, a Thackery, an Eliott…but we do have these.  And they’re not only thrilling and entertaining but they’re also true.  There are dozens of these but two of the best are: War Years with JEB Stuart by W.W. Blackford and I Rode With Stonewall by Henry Kyd Douglas.
  • The Blue and the Gray, edited by Henry Steele Commager, is a chronologically arranged collection of excerpts from contemporary accounts of the Civil War.  The entries are usually short.  They’re like intellectual snacks.  But the selections were chosen because they gave the illuminating sense of “being there.”
  • If you’re feeling really ambitious, there’s a fabulous set of volumes by Carl Sandburg (he’s the poet)—2 volumes entitled The Prairie Years, and 4 volumes entitled The War Years.  Together they constitute a superlative biography of Lincoln and the American cultural and political environment in which he lived and governed. Make yourself a promise to read these volumes some time in your life.
  • Finally there is an ongoing series The Civil War: Told by Those Who Lived It, which will consist of four volumes published by Library of America.  McElfresh Map Company prepared the endpaper maps for each volume.

Lincoln–The Movie and the Man–Both Treasures

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I went to see the new Spielberg movie Lincoln. I’ve been an avid reader of Lincoln biographies–from where I sit right now I can see more than fifty volumes on Lincoln and I can honestly say that if I haven’t read all of them, there are some that I’ve read multiple times and will read again, including  Sandburg’s six volumes–perhaps the most wonderful biography ever written–and Benj. Thomas’s Lincoln’s New Salem which is the most charming Lincoln book of them all. I also have half again as many Lincoln volumes at home. Suffice it to say, I like Lincoln.  And I’ve written about him for publication in Civil War Times. Mine is no casual affair. Lincoln and I are for keeps.

Well…Wonder of wonders. I loved–I revered–the Lincoln movie. It was the first movie my wife and I have gone to since Primary Colors. We were startled at the cost of theater tickets ($19 !) but we were thrilled by the movie. My mental picture of Lincoln, framed for ever and ever by the staged photographs of him, has been supplemented by Daniel Day Lewis’s movie portrayal of the 16th president.

I have two quibbles with the movie. The opening scene was a little much. Lincoln, for some reason unattended to and sitting in the rain, seemed a bit unrealistic and daft (the President was a gigantic celebrity in 1864 too, and his being somehow overlooked was as unlikely then as it is now). Then the post battle-scene at the end of the movie…this is presumably in the trenches around Petersburg after the Confederate line is cracked. The movie depicts corpses stacked like the concentration camp images at the end of WWII. There are actual contemporaneous photos of the most gruesome slaughters of the war, scenes from Antietam’s sunken road, indeed photos from the Petersburg field in the battle aftermath. There is nothing like what the movie shows. Maybe modern audiences have to see a carpet of bodies before they’re impressed.

But apart from those two improbable scenes, the film makers did an impeccable job. Lincoln’s office, as filmed, was exact in every detail. The more prominent members of his cabinet (Gideon Wells, Edwin Stanton e.g.) bore a striking similarity to the real men. Secretary of State William Seward was portrayed as a more presentable figure: they skipped the magpie-like features of the actual Seward but that’s understandable. Modern audiences would probably find his looks laughable.

To sum up, considering how awful the movie could have been–and considering how tempting it must have been to go the saccharine route–makes how realistic the movie was all the more commendable. It’salso a treat to see Republicans portrayed as the good guys. People forget the Democrats obstructing role as the nation was locked in a death struggle. And they also forget that the modern Civil Rights legislation was vehemently opposed by the solid South–the South was solidly Democrat in 1964 as well as in 1864–and it was the Republican party that enabled Lyndon Johnson to push his Civil Rights agenda through. Look it up!

Paul McCartney, Lyricist

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Paul McCartney, in spite of characterizing himself as a composer of “silly love songs,” is in fact a superlative lyricist. In my opinion, McCartney’s best lyrics set very comfortably in the company of John Lennon’s and Bob Dylan’s. And perhaps in some ways they’re even better than his two contemporaries.

The acclaimed lyrics of Dylan and Lennon don’t usually survive contact with an unadorned piece of paper. Dylan’s phrasing of his lyrics on the recordings make them valid but they sure sound nutty when someone like Joan Baez covers his songs respectfully and pronounces the lyrics carefully. Ditto for John Lennon. Strawberry Fields, A Day in the Life, Across the Universe…lovely and meaningful songs but what we’re talking about is lyrics here. Isolate John’s lyrics and all you’ve got is gobbledygook.

In no particular order, here are a few Paul McCartney lyrics–coherent, evocative and quotable–that surpass Bob Dylan’s and John Lennon’s.

From I’m Looking Through You: I’m looking through you/ Where did you go? / I thought I knew you/ What did I know?

From Rocky Raccoon: Her name was Magill/ And she called herself Lil/ But everyone knew her as Nancy.

From Back in the USSR: Show me round your snow peaked mountains way down south/ Take me to your daddy’s farm/ Let me hear your balalaikas ringing out/ Come and keep your comrade warm.

From Get Back: Wearing her high-heeled shoes and a low neck sweater/ Get back home Loretta.

From Maxwell’s Silver Hammer: P.C. Thirty One/ Says we’ve caught a dirty one.

From Helter Skelter: You may be a lover but you ain’t no dancer.

From Her Majesty: I want to tell her that I love her a lot/ But I gotta get a bellyful of wine/ Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl/ Someday I’m gonna make her mine.

From Two of Us: You and I have memories/Longer than the road that stretches out ahead.

From I’ve Got a Feeling: All I was ever looking for/ Was somebody who looks like you.

From She Came in Through the Bathroom Window: And so I quit the Police Department/ And got myself a steady job/ And though she tried her best to help me/ She could steal but she could not rob.

From You Never Give Me Your Money: One sweet dream/ Pick up the bags and get in the limousine.

From Lady Madonna: Friday night arrives without a suitcase/ Sunday morning creeping like a nun/ Monday’s child has learned to tie his bootlace/ See how they run.

From Hello Goodbye: You say yes/ I say no/ You say stop/ And I say go – go – go/ Oh no/ You say goodbye/ And I say hello.

From Let It Be: And when the night is cloudy/ There is still a light that shines on me/ Shine until tomorrow/Let it be/ Let it be.

From The End: Oh yeah !/All right !/ Are you gonna be in my dreams/ tonight?

Do you see what I mean? These are phrases that can punctuate casual conversations. They’re useful hi-lights for everyday use. They have a classic touch. You’d be surprised how handy it can be to drop “You may be a lover but you ain’t no dancer” into some cocktail party chit chat. Or get folk’s attention by an impromptu quoting of “Her name was Magill, and she called herself Lil, but everyone knew her as Nancy.”

Remember, you heard it here first.

Beatle Cover Songs

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The Beatles, among their other numerous qualities, often managed the rare accomplishment of surpassing the original artist(s) when they did a cover version of someone else’s songs. The most obvious example is their version of Twist and Shout. They literally created a new song out of the Isley Brothers’ goof-off rendition. The Isleys did a thin, tinny, high pitched, almost a novelty take on the song. The Beatles instrumental line-up and John Lennon’s vocal transformed the song into one of the all time great rock numbers, a surging instrumental and vocal performance…rock & roll with no holds barred and the floodgates open.

Other bands and singers may have made more noise or screeched higher but I’m still incredulous when I listen to the Please Please Me album version of the song and still more taken with the rendition performed at the 1963 Royal Variety Show after John’s “… the rest of you just rattle your jewelry…” quip. It’s a stunning performance before probably the worst possible rock and roll audience. These weren’t screaming teenagers and shrieking girls out front. These were the Royals and their ilk if you can imagine it.

My fictional rock and roll group The Sparrows in Sidereal Days, The History of Rock & Roll, A Romance, are enthralled by both the song and the performance when they see The Beatles perform it live on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1963. The Sparrows are conditioned to the frantic, gimmicky antics of the stars of the day, the Jerry Lee Lewis’s and the Little Richards, who kicked and screamed and careened around the stage during their wild numbers. The Beatles and John Lennon stood literally stock-still and let loose the massive barrage of controlled shock waves that was Twist and Shout. It was the sedate stage presence of The Beatles while launching into this staggering song that leaves the fictional Sparrows limp with admiration.

(In a hundred years, if it becomes necessary to explain rock and roll to generations as yet unborn and unknowing, I would suggest that the last living fan dust off Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode, Buddy Holly’s Peggy Sue and The Beatles’ Twist and Shout and stand back to see what happens.)

Less successful – in fact I would have to say, unsuccessful compared to the original – was The Beatles’ take on the American girl group The Cookies’ song Chains. The original is a perfect acoustic rhythm guitar arrangement with classic hand claps (credited in Sidereal Days to the fictional Sparrows grateful for any excuse to be in a recording studio) and the great vocals by the Cookies. It’s a nice easy swaying song with its spare instrumentation accompanied by the innocent but helplessly sensuous vocals of the Cookies.

The Beatles offer up the weakest track in what I still consider just about my favorite of all their albums, Please Please Me. They forgo the steady strum that paces the Cookie’s version and they replace the Cookies’ sultry voices with their bright British vocals. On this cover, Chains, The Beatles prove once again the old adage that nobody but nobody is perfect. Even The Beatles.


The Greatest Beatle Article Ever

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The best, and I mean the absolute best article I know of on The Beatles, appears in the August 27, 1966 Saturday Evening Post. It’s entitled “The Monarchs of the Beatle Empire.” The author, James Morris, clearly gives the impression that he is an older, slightly sniffy Brit, distinctly posh and old school, who has been reluctantly and gradually charmed by The Beatles. (The Beatles after all had been household names in Britain since early 1963.)  His article is a vaguely aloof, slightly snobby effort to explain how and why this happened to him and what he thinks of them. This generational and class distance that he maintains from his subjects, this sort of ironic affection combined with a wry and witty writing style fit perfectly with his subjects. The Beatles are perfect subjects for James Morris’s approach, being, themselves, rather ironic characters who never took themselves too seriously.

A photo of The Beatles standing together holding up their MBE’s for photographers is given a perfectly appropriate caption, “Standing in a Beatle version of attention, Ringo, John, Paul and George…” It’s the Fab Four casually holding out their awards, unabashedly bored.

Another accompanying photograph is of The Beatles onstage but it’s a shot of them as seen from above. We see them from directly overhead, the amplifiers, a piano, the drums, the pre-amps, chairs, microphones, spare guitars set on the stage floor behind the amps. What catches the attention of the author, and startling to the reader, is the profusion of electrical cords and cables that are strewn about the stage as The Beatles perform. The cords and The Beatles throng to the microphones, to the amplifiers, to pre-amps, to the guitars. The Beatles perform amid a swirl of electrical spaghetti. The photo caption cheerily observes, “Plugged in and fancy free, The Beatles cut loose during a concert inParis.”

A third photo is of John Lennon and Harold Wilson. The caption, “Standing beside Prime Minister Harold Wilson, John Lennon, somewhat a head of state himself, gives an enigmatic ‘V’ sign.”

The clever impishness of the captions rather successfully matches the knock about, off-the-cuff humor of The Beatles themselves. The author manages a literary tightrope of being both erudite and hip.

Morris writes, “No history of the 1960’s will be complete without a Beatle footnote, and, above all, no future history of England will be true to itself unless it has a paragraph, fond or scathing, frivolous or profound, about these irrepressible scions of what Winston Churchill loved to call “The Island Race.”

This is good stuff. Not the pap of the fanzines, not the au courant pop-dash of the Rolling Stone type magazines.

Morris writes knowledgeably of the place of Liverpoolin post-war Briton and notes that The Beatles released the humor, the brash and bouncy irreverent interior monologue that characterized the denizens of what the rest of Briton considered a dreary cultural backwater. The Beatles “…Mersey accent, which not long ago would have seemed to most Englishmen barbaric, now falls with an attractive bite upon the ear.”

Though sick and tired of the “disrespect” so prevalent in post-war Briton, in plays, in novels, in protests, “…The Beatles’ disrespect has been of a different kind. It is eminently genial. Somehow or other it does not often give offense.” Morris goes on to say that The Beatles “…have expressed something that most of us inEnglandhave instinctively felt – that the old values did need a cheerful dust-down. Why should we all be manly? Why should life be quite so real, quite so earnest?”

James Morris brings back the marvelous fun of those early Beatle days and makes it perfectly clear once again what cheerful avatars they were before their immense fame began to encrust them and the cultural vultures broke through their delightful and astonishing nonchalance.