Introduction

Introduction

As I began to fine-tune this manuscript, thinking, hoping that I was finally finished, I was reminded of an incident when a very young man, when I presented my latest, most proud achievement as a young artist. It was in my estimation a veritable masterpiece. I brought the fairly large and presumptuous canvas in front of my mother, an artist, and waited quietly for her adoration. She smiled and said little. She knew that she held the pin which could pop my bubble, and to a large degree controlled the wind in the sails of my ego. She studied and her eyes gleamed, but she still withheld her remarks. The suspense was killing me.

Her restraint was herculean. She had a rare ability to be giddy, even when dead serious, so it was impossible to read her reaction. As usual, the perfectionist in her was not going to miss a teaching moment. Then finally she set some grounds for a discussion.

“Tell me what you want... You know that it is good... do you just want praise, or do you want criticism?” In other words, son, do you want to be treated like a man or a little boy?

This hit me like cold water in my face... on a cold day. I wanted, and was expecting praise, but if there was something... I needed to know... some artistic failure... of course I wanted to know.

“What you have done is good. I could not do it. It is good... But I know that you can do better.”

Nearly outraged, I sulked away, and went up to my primitive studio and did what I should have done in the first place, before I got so impressed with myself. When I came down the second time, a couple of days later, it was great. It was the difference between the work of a real artist and a wanna-be. She had dared to hurt me... to push me a little farther... to excellence. And it worked. That is a mother, and that is the essence of this book.

Mothers have a way, a credibility and a method unique to their titles. They birth and teach and refine us. Then they encourage or deflate us as our behavior requires, and they are about the only ones who can do it. They can because everyone knows, no matter how much we love or hate their advice, that it comes from our greatest friend and admirer. Few mothers want anything but the very best for their children. Few others can ever earn the trust and intimacy we have with them. People who are deprived of this foundation in life spend a lifetime trying to establish it. Sadly, the rest of us take it for granted.

My mother, Margaret Cushman instructing a student during a painting class... 

but for me, school was never out.

It is mothers who make the nest we first call home, our mothers who are our personal first responders. Certainly it was men who conceived and led Conservative politics, (the way things are) and it was women, especially mothers who inspired and fought for the Liberal antidote (the way things ought to be). Mothers are the benevolent dictators of the nest, with a focus on the now, the first person we run to, and from whom we hear the last word: “We love you!” “Be careful!” “Call us us when you get there!”

It's unfortunate and ironic that our society has come so far that anyone would still feel compelled to write these stories and explore their morals. They should be part and parcel of our noble American psyche... but like these stories, morals and moralists have fallen by the wayside in our modern culture. Morality became a casualty of Relativism, and anything moralistic has been demoted as an anachronism. Stories which featured morals or moralistic lessons became an offense to our modern concepts of freedom and diversity. Thus in this day it is rare to find any writer or publisher who dares to moralize, unless it is to propose a new set of morals, which up until now is thought to have been neglected or never before considered. Newly identified sins are a popular pastime, as is the neutralizing of the old ones. But some of us are still clinging to the old paradigm, and for good reasons.

Every generation has been plagued by narrow-minded elders who never missed an opportunity to reminisce about the old days, and how things were more respectable then. And every generation has found a way to avoid them and their condemnations. And that was when things changed relatively little. Mankind has been in a race with itself for the past 150 years, with a dizzying rate of change and disorientation. My grandmothers for instance, lived long enough to see mankind evolve from the horse and buggy to cars and airplanes and then rockets to the moon. I have lived to watch mankind be infatuated and informed by the radio, then television, then computers, and now a handheld device that does all of those things and many more. All my great-grandfather ever knew was a scratchy sounding Philco AM radio as big as a U.S. Mail drop box, with ten stations when the weather permitted. We have gained and learned exponentially, and been changed so much. But what might we have lost?

Through some of my old habits, like collecting, and research, and some new technologies, (Photoshop and Google search) I came to appreciate some women from our heroic past who were glad to inform me about what we have lost, and worse, what we are throwing away. And somehow they put that burden on my shoulders. This book is your mother's America.

Ada Menken, American actress. A find which led to... this!

It all started with the purchase of an old tintype image of an American actress I found on an Internet auction. It was so exciting that a bought another. And another. As I assembled what was to become a staggering collection of historical tintype photographs, I was forced to research their possible identities. What followed was several years of binge reading and many hours of digital graphic enhancement. I became a human facial recognition processor.

Many of the faces looked hauntingly familiar to me, and in a wonderful, engrossing delusion, some have suggested, I soon was transported into what I imagined was a rare glimpse of these famous persons, or an uncanny parallel universe, a slot machine of America's Who's Who, where I read intensely, studied minutely, and imagined largely; Mark Twain and his family and friends, the French Impressionists, lawmen of Dodge City, outlaws of Tombstone, presidents and first ladies and their children, Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family. The family, even some of the slaves of General Robert E. Lee. Included were groups of complete families, General's staffs, and famous authors contracted by a single Victorian publisher.

Carl Sagan reasoned that “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” And I agree with him. That is why I make no claims about the avalanche of tintypes illustrated here. But he also conceded that “The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.” Rather than argue that this large, improbable body of related artifacts defies the mathematical odds of being some kind of shocking, parallel universe, and must be the remnants of a once comprehensive photo archive, I merely recognize their uncanny resemblance to hundreds of known persons, and share them as the serendipitous sirens who lured me into this literary odyssey.

Dark, dented, sometimes hazy countenances beckoned me to hear them, know them, and eventually, to tell their stories. The women especially were a fountain of the unheralded. Now their faces, captured on tin, are secondary to me, compared to their stories and the lessons we could learn. In fact, it could be that none of the hundreds of images I acquired in this fantastic encounter were of the persons whom I thought I was discovering. But their stories were for real. The stories and their legacies were real, but like the tintypes, were often gathered and understood too late to impact their own times, but very significant if we wish to understand who Americans were, or who we should be as their heirs. So I submit the photos, many of them now digitally restored as excellent illustrations, as a welcome break from the tired, old, poor quality photos often published of these individuals; a cascade of fresh visual perspective.

Here, as you suspend your disbelief, you see them young, at the apex of their vitality, and more importantly, before their fame. Before they became the stuff of legends. Think of the faces presented here as well-cast actors, playing a part. Think of their dialogue as you would that of a screenplay. Much of this work is an artist's illusion, text and imagery woven to evoke whatever might be salvageable of our mother's America.

So here it is. The last scolding from the Victorian era, complete with famous mothers to, mother-like,  hit this society over the head with a magazine. Here are amazing American women, all mothers, who speak to our generation as if from the grave. They braved wars and the frontier and economic disasters, and still managed to fight for their rights, raise their children, and set remarkable standards of motherhood. They only ask for one more, last word.

(The chapters of the book are listed up on the right, starting with a prologue for Part I. Just click on one to go to it)