The Beiderbecke Affair

‘This is glory enough for one day’

I’ve told you before about the first railroad bridge to span the Mississippi River, connecting Davenport, Iowa, with Rock Island, Illinois. (Read about how Robert E. Lee, Jeff Davis, and Abe Lincoln all had their hands in the project.) But you’ve got to read the Chicago Press report of the first crossing, on April 22, 1856, to get a sense of how a big a deal this was. For instance, the paper begins its coverage with, of all people, Julius Caesar (excuse, if you can, the garbled syntax):

When Caesar with his legions crossed the Rubicon, which divides Cissalpine Gaul from Italy, he was well aware of the greatness of the work he was engaged in; and although many attempted to dissuade him from such an undertaking, yet nothing daunted he landed his array on the plains of Italy, astonished the world by his deeds—and left mankind an instance of bravery and enterprise worthy of record.

Et tu, Davenport?

We, too, however, have crossed the “Rubicon”—the great “Father of Waters”—which for centuries has rolled on into the bosom of the mighty ocean without a pier to mar its progress. To-day has the mighty deed been accomplished at which the world has so often smiled in derision. Yes, the Mississippi is practically no more. It is spanned by the mighty artery of commerce and enterprise—the railroad. Science has stretched its arms across the ever-flowing Mississippi—and along its fine-knit muscles has the “iron horse” bounded with a heavy snort as it scent from afar the sluggish waters of the Missouri. The mission of Caesar of old was to conquer; so that of the Caesar of the nineteenth century; but the latter is one of peace and plenty. The “war horse” of civilization may have fiery nostrils, but it has an olive branch, the seeds from which it scatters as it flies.

The New York Daily Times, which ran a story on April 28, was not given to such melodrama. It lopped off those two grafs from the Press’s coverage and began here:

That such an event should have occurred without an assemblage of spectators from all quarters of the globe to witness it, is only another instance of the mighty progress which has been made within the last fifty years in the science of bridge building. As we approached Rock Island there were rumors afloat that we would cross to Iowa on the bridge. “Cross the Mississippi on a bridge!” cried an intelligent looking gentleman. “On a bridge?” simpered a feminine voice from a young lady to her parents, bound for Council Bluffs; “why, Pa, I thought the Mississippi was a great river, larger than the Hudson.”

The Times went on to provide specs of the bridge, blah blah blah, but cut the big moment—when train meets bridge! So back to the Press:

Swiftly we sped along the iron track—Rock Island appeared in sight—the whistle sounded and the conductor cried out, “Passengers for Iowa keep their seats!” There was a pause—a hush, as it were, preparatory to the fierceness of a tornado. Tho cars roared on—the bridge was reached—“We’re on the bridge—see the mighty Mississippi rolling on beneath”—and all eyes were fastened on the mighty parapets of the magnificent bridge, over which we glided in solemn silence. A few minutes and the suspended breath was let loose. “We’re over!” was the cry, “we have crossed the Mississippi in a railroad car.” “This is glory enough for one day,” said a passenger, as he hustled his carpetbag and himself out of the cars.

IMAGE: A rare photograph of the bridge, from Arsenal Island, dated around 1860

That Bridge Again

Another great photo of “That Old Ugly Beauty,” the Government Bridge that connects Davenport, Iowa, and Rock Island, Illinois, across the Mississippi River. February 1940; Arthur Rothstein for the Farm Security Administration. (Via Shorpy)

That Old Ugly Beauty

When I was a kid, I was briefly in love with bridges in much the same way I was briefly in love with dinosaurs and outer space. My bridge of choice—while in elementary school I proclaimed it “the Mona Lisa of bridges”—was the I-74 bridge, a relatively rare identical-twin suspension bridge crossing the Mississippi River. Over the years, however, I’ve come to appreciate that the defining landmark of my hometown is in fact the ugliest of its three bridges: the Government Bridge.

Above, you can see the GB as it was drawn on a gorgeous but not-to-scale map from 1888. Built thirty years earlier, in 1856, the bridge connects Davenport, Iowa, with the government-owned Rock Island Arsenal. Below you can see how it looks today, looking from Rock Island toward Davenport.

The Government Bridge (or Arsenal Bridge, as Davenporters also call it) was the first to span the Mississippi and, because it served a federal installation, was approved by the Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis. As you might imagine, Davis was a loyal southerner, and he became worried that that the bridge’s construction all but guaranteed that a transcontinental railroad would go through the North. So in a fit of never-mind, he briefly stopped work on the project, but to no avail. It opened anyway. Oh, and another would-be Confederate helped to scout the bridge’s original location: Robert E. Lee, an engineer just out of West Point.

Here’s another image that shows how the bridge manages both rail and auto traffic.

The bridge’s spans swing open for river traffic (regularly and frustratingly backing up auto traffic). But in 1856, the whole process still needed some work. On May 6, the steamer Effie Afton slammed into the spanking new structure, destroying the steamer and with it one of the bridge’s spans. Steamboat companies predictably sued to tear down the bridge. And who was the lawyer the Rock Island Line hired to defend its river-crossing? Abraham Lincoln.

Here’s the bridge in 1940.

What I like about this photograph is the sense that you don’t need to see the whole bridge to understand its presence and importance. It has become iconic.

Finally, here’s an image of the old beauty that you have to squint to see. (In fact, I’d suggest clicking on the photo for a larger image.)

The shot is taken from a riverside parking lot in 1920s-era Davenport. The Indian that Abe Lincoln and his Illinois militia once battled has ingloriously given his name to a candy company, and Fort Armstrong, where Lee was first stationed and where Dred Scott first stepped onto free soil, can be seen jutting squarely up from the bridge’s Arsenal terminus.

I’m a little sentimental, I know, but I can’t get enough of this . . .

CORRECTION: The Government Bridge was the first railroad bridge to span the Mississippi.

‘Another wife used not a whip but a rock’

I found an amazing map of my hometown of Davenport, Iowa, dated 1888. It provides a three-dimensional, overhead view of the city with breathtaking detail. Look, for instance, at the corner of Fourth and Brady. You can see the churches, sense the architecture. Is Building No. 69 a hotel?

Maps have their limits, however—or maybe it’s just my imagination that’s limited. I don’t actually see hookers. For that I need Sharon E. Wood, author of The Freedom of the Streets: Work, Citizenship, and Sexuality in a Gilded Age City (2005). Turns out that Davenport, ca. 1888, was a den of sin:

Downtown, she spotted her husband near Fourth and Brady flirty with two young women who were “not such as she cared to have him associate with.” She caught up with the trio, “pounded” the two women, then grabbed a whip from a nearby buggy and thrashed her husband. Another wife used not a whip but a rock to attack her husband when she unexpectedly spotted him on Second Street “with one of the most degraded creatures of the town.” On another occasion, a young woman chanced to meet her fiancé “in company with a woman whose companionship on the streets he would have avoided in the day time.” After protesting his behavior, she left, then returned with a revolver, firing several shots at him. When another man intervened to take the revolver from her, she ran toward the river and was narrowly averted from suicide. A similar encounter ended more tragically, with the shamed woman returning home to end her life with a dose of morphine.

Maybe Good Ol’ 69 was a brothel . . .

PREVIOUSLY: “No,” he croaks. “No! I won’t come back to Davenport.”

IMAGE: Davenport, Iowa, Henry Wellge, Cartographer, 1888

Who Knew There Was a Downside?

Danielle Trussoni on Midwesterners:

For a quick tutorial in stereotypes about Midwesterners, take a look at the Coen brothers’ film Fargo. In it, you will see that Midwesterners are pleasant and patriotic and plump. You will understand that we are wholesome, hardworking folks with oversized cars and undersized vocabularies who wear white tennis shoes to church. We love all-you-can-eat buffets. Our houses are clean. (I’ll never forget a story that Francine Prose told while visiting the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2001 about her Iowan landlady, who suggested that she clean the bathroom tiles with a toothbrush. Being native to the Midwest, I was mortified. At the same time, I thought: There’s no place like (a clean) home! ) Of course, Fargo also reminds us of the Midwestern tendency toward violence. Ed Gein, whose career inspired the movie Psycho, was born in my hometown of La Crosse, WI. Jeffery Dahmer, murderer of at least seventeen men, was from Milwaukee. The list goes on and on. Everyplace has a downside. Ours happens to be serial murder. And Jello salad.

MEANWHILE: My hometown’s famous murderer now works at a taco stand.

PREVIOUSLY: The pathetic, puttering creatures known as retired Iowa farmers, or retired Iowa anything

The Corn-Fed Chronicles

Those of you who attend these pages regularly will recall my interest in the strange & fascinating process by which Davenport, Iowa—my hometown and Bix Beiderbecke’s hometown—has somehow transformed into something bigger than itself. It has become, to quote myself, “a shining beacon for all that is right & good with Planet Earth, a potent symbol that a mistress of the op-ed like Sarah Vowell might even wield against a sitting president.”

A new case in point comes from the political blog Brilliant at Breakfast (run by Jill Cozzi, a self-described “Card-carrying factinista and brainiac on the nerd patrol”). In an April 27 post, Cozzi wrote:

That quote from the Administration about creating their own reality? They weren’t kidding. The trigger from Glenn’s blog entry is the insistence by Matt Drudge that Crashing the Gate, the book by Kos and Jerome Armstrong, has only sold some 3600-odd copies, despite the fact that this is a book by bloggers and not only does that number not include online sales, but Great Aunt Mary in Davenport, Iowa is unlikely to be rushing out to get the latest book by any blogger, however alpha-dog he may be in blogistan.

This is Davenport in the role of the über-American town—virtuous but square—but why Davenport? I asked Cozzi that question and she was nice enough to reply:

The reason I chose Davenport, Iowa is really quite pedestrian—here in the Godless liberal northeast, Iowa is really the most corn-fed, middle-America, heartland place we can think of that isn’t full of the Christofascist Zombies (© Marc Maron) you find in the south and in places like Kansas. Iowa has a strong progressive tradition, as I found when I did some research for a novel I’ve been working on intermittently for seven years, which is set partially in Cedar Rapids.

So why Davenport? Because Amazon Dry Goods is there. That’s a mail-order catalog that sells reproduction patterns for vintage-type clothing of the 19th and early 20th century.

Interesting. I’d never heard of Amazon Dry Goods. (Check out the website. Who knew heroin chic was the thing a hundred years ago, too?) Nothing to do with Bix Beiderbecke, admittedly, but nothing much to do with the present day, either. Thanks for the explanation, Jill.

PREVIOUSLY: Would that the world were all Davenport

IMAGE: City of Davenport, Iowa by Rufus Wright (“Scarce important bird’s eye view . . . based upon a renowned painting then in the possession of George L. Davenport, after whom the city was named”)

Davenport, Ye Are the Light of the World

How does one’s hometown, when one isn’t looking, when one is in Maine stirring up trouble or cavorting in Korea and munching on kimchee, turn into a shining beacon for all that is right & good with Planet Earth, a potent symbol that a mistress of the op-ed like Sarah Vowell might even wield against a sitting president?

I have no idea, but when last I asked this question, an alert reader directed me to a book written by Sharon E. Wood. It’s an academic study of Gilded Age women in Davenport that contains this anecdote in its introduction:

Traveling the Mississippi in 1882, Mark Twain recorded a “glimpse of Davenport, which is another beautiful city, crowing a hill.” The phrase, he wrote, “applies to all these towns; for they are all comely, all well-built, clean, orderly, pleasant to the eye, and cheering tot he spirit; and they are all situated on hills.”

“Ye are the light of the world,” or so reads my King James Bible. “A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid.” As it happens, Twain’s party did not stop in Davenport. “If his steamboat had drawn up to the landing,” Wood writes, “he might have seen something different.”

In fact, he would have seen a bustling, diverse, in many respects cosmopolitan city, one that tolerated prostitution and positively encouraged beer-drinking. (Years after the state of Iowa had amended its constitution to ban alcohol, Davenport was busy licensing its own saloons in order to take a cut of the profits.) Why, then, is Davenport not remembered in The New York Times and other venues as the den of sin that it may well have been? Why is it instead remembered as moral & righteous, even uptight?

I talked to a Davenporter this weekend who blamed Eustace Tilley and the New Yorker’s claim that it was “not edited for the old lady in Dubuque.” How many D-towns in Iowa can a nation keep straight? this Davenporter asked. And he might be right.

Personally, I blame Bix Beiderbecke. His untimely death demanded a villain, someone or some thing to blame, and Davenport happened to be convenient. Only a town as cornfed & conservative as D-town could have denied his genius and driven him into the arms of jazz. (Or so the story goes.)

But that’s just a guess. What say you, Davenporters? What say you, Sarah Vowell, ye of the gimlet eye?

Would That the World Were All Davenport

Speaking of Ed, he called my attention to a New Republic essay on The New York Times’ on-again off-again op-ed columnist Sarah Vowell. Keelin McDonell’s piece “would be completely worthless,” pounds Ed’s critical gavel, “had he not raised the perfectly valid point that Vowell is unable to convey political events with any sophistication.” I would argue that this is not just a point that McDonell makes, or even just a valid point, but the point, the main point. That aside, I want to throw my hat in with Ed & McDonell here. Vowell is, to borrow from the latter’s arsenal of adjectives, “juvenile” and “self-congratulatory”—two qualities I despise if only because I am so regularly both. “A column,” McDonell helpfully reminds her, “is not a 750 word transcription of your id.” No, that’s a blog.

Here, though, is what really made me double-take when reading the piece. It was this quotation from a Vowell column on Bush’s recent State of the Union speech:

For there are American citizens who used to think that there could be no greater blow for representative democracy than a president worming his way into the White House thanks to one Supreme Court vote. That is, until the day said president was actually elected to a second term by an electorate that overlooked the previous four years of galling, irrevocable policies with upbeat, intelligence-insulting slogans—“Clear Skies,” anyone?—to say nothing of entering into an ugly war based on lies that has made the world a more dangerous place when it wasn’t exactly all Davenport, Iowa, to begin with.

Where, I want to know, does Sarah Vowell come up with Davenport, Iowa? Here & here I have bemoaned the state of historical self-awareness in my hometown of, yes, Davenport, Iowa. Part of my interest in this subject is that it’s ironic; Davenport, after all, is an important place: It is iconic. It is archetypal. In the mind of Sarah Vowell, at least, it stands for all that is Normal & Peaceful & Not Ugly. By which she means: Bourgeois.

But this is not only true vis-à-vis Vowell. Seriously.

One of Davenport’s claims to fame is as the birthplace of the early jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke. And in the various evocations of Bix’s brief, gin-soaked life, Davenport has conveniently stood in for Everything Normal & Peaceful & Bourgeois; i.e., if Bix is a genius, Davenport is the world that can’t recognize or understand such genius. A typical rendering can be found in Frederick Turner’s 2004 potboiler 1929, a novel based on Bix’s bio. In this scene, Bix’s mom tries to convince her dying, booze-addled son to return home.

“No,” he croaks. “No! I won’t come back to Davenport.” But with the utterance of the town’s name it floods back over him: the high, stolid hilltop homes, the riverward flow of the streets, the long industrial brick façade of the high school—clock on the wall in the history classroom and the admonitory minute hand that never moved, time hanging. The river slopping at the levee. Stacks of raw, sap-seeping lumber, lumps of coal in the yard of his father’s company where he could find steady work, forever. The family dinner table, grain of its polished surface, his father ponderously presiding. The limitless reach and stretch of the undulant cornfields behind town. “No! I tell you,” his voice cracks with the weight of his determination, his terror. “I won’t come back there—not now, not ever. I don’t want to die in Davenport!”

This is Bix’s Kurtz moment, at least to the extent that he contemplates something really awful when he contemplates the darkest heart of Davenport. (The irony is appreciated: It’s just as much an anti-Kurtz moment in that the darkest heart of Davenport is also the darkest heart of Home—the whitest place on earth, Civilization with a capital C.) The rest of the world is, you know, all Iraq, all booze and danger and cross-eyed sophistication. Davenport, on the other hand, is polished & ponderous (or, in the words of Edith Hamilton—see two posts below—solid & sensible), bourgeois, a place where history (which is to say time, which is to say music) has halted but work in the lumber yard goes on forever.

So how does that happen to a town? How does that happen to my town?

Hamilton insisted, in Mythology, that the gods hailed from just such “familiar local habitation,” and Bix was certainly a god, a mythical hero of sorts, a legendary and mysterious genius. It’s important, then, that Bix hailed from Davenport, but it’s equally important that he rejected it; a god could never stay there, else by definition he would not be a god.

So no, Sarah, the world isn’t all Davenport, Iowa. But if it were, I dare say we wouldn’t have heroes. Isn’t that sad?

IMAGE: Downtown Davenport, 1940

Bugles for Buttheads, Or Learning to Be Historically Self-Aware

I recently wrote about the sad state of historical self-awareness in my hometown of Davenport, Iowa (pictured). Which is fine. I'm entitled. But I don't need to hear it from a couple of uptight Englishmen. I refer of course to Charles Wareing & George Garlick, two Brits who never actually visited Davenport—God forbid—but who undertook the first full-length biography of its most famous son, the jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke. Bix died in 1931. Wareing & Garlick's book, Bugles for Beiderbecke, was published in 1958. Here are the book's excruciatingly condescending opening paragraphs:

In the State of Iowa, on the banks of the Mississippi, lies the township of Davenport.

The faint interest with which this information is likely to be received is, perhaps, a direct result of the resistance jazz has encountered in its efforts to gain acceptance as a small, albeit genuine, art form. Jazz being granted recognition, initially and without reservation, the name of Davenport might conceivably have borne greater significance in musical circles. But jazz was born in squalor and its early history bound up with an environment hardly to be mentioned in polite society. Even today the attainment of comparative respectability is periodically assailed by both religious and secular bodies, who profess to fear its influence on the minds of the young. Given, then, a form of music the best examples of which are popularly assumed to fall below the level of artistry, it would appear pointless to seek genius within the ranks of its practitioners; and upon this hypothesis it is presuming too much to expect reverberations at the mere mention of Davenport.

Yet the information is not entirely gratuitous. Although the majority of its citizens might falter if taxed for the reason, Davenport does, in fact, claim a modest degree of fame.

It was there, on the 10th March, 1903, that Leon Bix Beiderbecke first saw the light of day.

Step Away from the History Book, Ma'am. Nothing to See Here

Iowa has no history. Honestly. That’s what I was told. So I did not spend even one hour of one day during my entire secondary-school education in Davenport, Iowa, studying local history. Kind of amazing, really. Especially since, if you look into it at all, you find some seriously hair-raising tales: about how English-born trader and not-really-a-colonel Col. George Davenport hooked up with his wife in order to get her daughter; about Davenport’s equally brilliant business negotiations with the area’s whites & Indians, including the not-really-a-chief Chief Blackhawk (pictured); about how the Black Hawk War caused all kinds of problems with that relationship; how Abe Lincoln showed up as a young militia captain; how a fresh-from-West Point Robert E. Lee showed up to scout the river for a new bridge; how Davenport was murdered in his home on the Fourth of July while his wife and her daughter were out picnicking; and how Davenport wasn’t even founded by Davenport but by his buddy, an obese Frenchman named Antoine LeClaire. It’s all right there at the bend in the river in an area now generically called the Quad-Cities—and that was before Bix Beiderbecke & Louis Armstrong showed up or John Deere was founded. James Michener would have had a field day.

Anyway, so it’s nice to see Bookforum reviewing a book about Black Hawk (the person, not the helicopter or my high school newspaper), since I never learned anything about him in school. But it’s disappointing to hear that it’s disappointing.

In his concluding chapter, Trask is very hard on Black Hawk. It is true that the old man and several other chiefs abandoned the Sauks in the moments before the massacre. How often do generals die with their troops? But he survived only to surrender and be placed in chains. The Americans sent him east in an attempt to awe him with the power of urban America. Instead Black Hawk became a symbol of resistance to those Americans who opposed the violent removal of Indians. He returned to the Sauk village and dictated his autobiography, which in its day was something of a best seller and has since become an enduring classic for its narration of the native side of an important moment. Held back by his contempt for Black Hawk's limitations, Trask misses the opportunity to write more expansively about one of the great figures in American history.