Letters to Home and a 100th Birthday

After starting to scan my father’s letters he sent home during WW II – and before sending them to the National WW II Museum along with his War Memorabilia -- I suddenly realized that tomorrow would have been his 100^th birthday. He died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 68.

He refers to me in those letters as “my little guy.”  Could he have imagined a future point in time when I would be organizing his unique WW II scrapbook, his photographs and the few letters of his I have, all sent to his brother, my Uncle Phil, for museum preservation?  He sent many more letters to my mother and sadly they are all gone. 

Or what would he have thought of the technology which has rendered most silver halide photography obsolete? That was his business. Somewhere I read that there are more digital photographs taken throughout the world today in two minutes than all the photographs taken in the 19^th century. Give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of cameras and you could do away with professional photography.  Before digital, one had to think through the “what and when and how” to photograph; it required thought and skill and artistry.  You couldn't afford to snap away.  Photographic materials were just too expensive.  Now the accidental confluence of someone with an iPhone at the right moment results in photographs that the best photographers would envy.  All by accident!  Not skill, not love of photography.  He would be appalled.

The very first letter I came across in the collection (they were not chronologically organized) is dated May 20, 1944, full of anticipation about maybe being able to return home for a few days as Germany had just surrendered and he thought he was about to be shipped to the Pacific theater. I don’t think I am going to publish others but this first one was particularly meaningful.  He was a Signal Corps photographer and this letter to his brother tells a lot about his state of mind at the time and has interesting information about what he was going through.  “Penny” was the nickname for my mother and “Pop” is my grandfather who was running the photography business back home.

This transcription is not exact, but as close as I can make it without doing in depth editing.  I mostly dictated the contents to my iPhone as an email and then pasted it into Word and then did some light editing to make sense of run on sentences, misnaming of things from the transcription from voice to type (e.g. amusingly “Berchtesgaden” was captured as “Birch is God”), and just general but not precise clean up.

It was written on “Der Reichsminister und Chef der Reichskanzlei" stationary (The Reich Minister and Chief of the Chancellery) and presumably this was left behind in the SS facilities the GIs were then occupying

May 20, 1945 from Berchtesgaden

Dear Phil,

Well, Phil, finally the struggle lasting more than five years for the European people has ended and with great relief to us all. Now I'm confronted with the Pacific war and my utmost wish and desire is to come home or at least return for a brief stay before going into the Japanese warfare.  I don't see why that's such a tremendous problem that the Army is making us believe. Money running into billions and time running into years has been already been spent so what's the difference if it costs more and takes more time to finish that phase of the warfare.  Especially so if it is the choice of most of the prospective GIs bound for the South Pacific wishing to return home to their love ones.  I for one haven’t enough points for a discharge but neither does the majority of troops and I like many others feel so fortunate to come through this struggle without bearing any marks. Fighting in the Pacific might last more than a year and who knows if my good fortune will hold out. I do feel though that I have a pretty good chance in obtaining the route through the states before going to the Pacific. If I do I certainly will be thankful and overjoyed. I have my fingers crossed even my toes.

From my heading in the first page of this letter you can see that censorship much has been lifted. No more officers who I knew fairly well will be prying into my mail. Just the base censors as certain restrictions still exist.

I am now living in Berchtesgaden and in fairly comfortable barracks formerly occupied by SS troops. These barracks are very near to Goering’s summer home giving him the protection he very well needed. We have two rooms. One we fixed up into a writing, sitting, and chat room with a sofa and five chairs, a desk and a radio that works when it wants to. The other room we have divided in half, one half are our cots and the other we fixed up into a dark room. We acquired an enlarger, some chemicals, a hand cutter, even a deckled edge cutter, some trays, and a dryer. Here we can process our personal work along with some brown nosing material (brown nose means work which puts us in good with ranking personnel of the division). Between this work and our photography for the Army which hasn't let up we are pretty busy and have very little time for personal needs. Our mess hall has two large dining rooms and we eat from clean tablecloths and plates.  KP's are volunteer German girls who serve the chow and clean up the mess afterwards. The food is really good but our rations aren't up to par as yet but soon they will be.

With all the sudden change in living conditions I had first felt pointless doing it but in a short time I was back in the game so to speak. Everything has changed to regular Garrison life, the way it was back in the States in the Army Corps. But I think it is slightly more chicken to eat.

There is no fraternization for the troops and it is hard for most of the boys. As for myself I don't care about the feminine problem but I would like it better if conversations could be had with the civilians -- that's where it is much better being in France, Belgium, Holland, or England. USO shows are being promised and next week I heard there will be a show. The G.I. movies are being shown twice nightly. So far I haven't been to a movie, not for a long time.  The pictures playing are old ones like Eddie Cantor’s “Show Business” or “Meet me in St. Louis” and numerous others. Other forms of entertainment and classes in subjects of learning are being planned. Berchtesgaden is a beautiful summer resort situated close to the Austrian border and high up the mountains, snow capped at that. I was surprised to learn it's a very ancient town dating back to the 11th century.  Hitler’s former home, I say former for was almost completely destroyed, is standing halfway up one of the highest mountains. When the French Armored division reached here they shelled and set fire to it for what purpose just to get even --there wasn't any resistance at his home. After knocking it to pieces they looted most everything in sight, looting they are very famous for. But I have a book that once was on his bookshelf and I’ll parcel post some of my additional souvenirs home.  In more detail I have explained to Penny what his house looks like so I know you have heard all about it.

Way up the top of the same mountain Hitler had another place called Eagles Nest -- a spacious dwelling of stone where he went to meditate his fanatical ideas and also threw wild parties.  What an awe inspiring sight this place is. You can see for miles and miles around and the scenery of the Bavarian Alps is very picturesque. Again the articles that could be acquired by GIs for souvenirs are now diminished. I have two saucer plates of unique design though.  The living room of this house is a tremendous semicircular affair with heavy beamed ceiling, stonewalls and a huge marble fireplace, a large circular table in the center of the room with 10 chairs around. Scattered around the rest of the room are some other chairs and chaise lounges. There are fine large heavy windows that rolled down in the living area and abundant light which afford a view of the beautiful scenery.  There is a large sunny sun porch off to the left and a dining room of oak panel walls and a large table seating about 30 people.  There are two other rooms, one for drinking, and a toilet in another one.  An elevator that goes down to the furthest point in the roadway can go up to this place but is not working at present -- the main reason is that it is fairly well trafficked.  I had to use the footpath up to it about a half an hour’s climb.  We are making -- Mack and me-- a travel log of what the GIs are sightseeing around here. Someday you might see it in the newsreels or in a special short.  I hope so.  Anyway it is a big job and is taking many days to finish.  We laugh when we think about it.  It reminds me of one of those Fitzpatrick travelogues you remember with those closing sunsets and the line “and now we take leave of Berchtesgaden.”

A few weeks prior to the close of the war I was with the 101st division cleaning out numerous pockets of resistance all around these Bavarian mountains -- a tough job it was. When one of the regiments got their orders to take – rather than half take -- Berchtesgaden from another route I went with them walking a number of miles, for more than five bridges were all blown up recently. But still there were SS troops. This job was exciting but very tiring for the tension was hard for a few days and we couldn't get anything much to eat. When the surrender was finally declared many many SS troops had to be rounded up. This was another job I enjoyed and from Penny’s letters you already know the situation.

Uncle Phil and the "Little Guy"

I received your very lengthy and interesting letter of April 23 along with many from Penny a few days ago and Phil I sure enjoyed its contents. Both you and Penny fear that your letters are boring --  they are anything but.  I sometimes feel that way with my own especially to you and family for most everything I write to you I have already sent to Penny.

You ask if I took any shots of airborne troops leaving for Germany.  I presume you mean the airborne mission over the Rhine.  I certainly did on that mission, more than 5000 feet of film.  I'm sure some of it was used in the newsreels.  I also made a lot of footage of those troops moving up to their frontline positions into the heart of Bavaria --maybe it was what you saw.  I never received those shots you made of Penny and Robert at the zoo.  I only hope that they aren't lost in my anxiousness to get them.  Do you think Pop could make a portrait of Penny and my little guy, Phil?  I'd love to have a recent one, say 5 x 7 of my love ones.

Your description of the ballet “Undertow” sounds very interesting and intriguing.  I surely want to see ballets when I'm home once again.  I've missed real art all these past years.  The Harold Lloyd picture must have been very amusing.  I wish this damned Army would show some pictures like that as I'm sure it would be very entertaining and meet with favor with the troops.

Marlene Dietrich visiting the 101st Airborne

I'm glad the business is keeping up fairly well now that the war is over -- over here -- your shortage in paper and film should be lifted somewhat I hope anyway.  By the way remember me to everyone in the shop.  In a separate envelope Phil I'm enclosing a Photostat on Berchtesgaden written in English for the purpose of tourist trade.  Some of their descriptions will give you a laugh. Also with this you find some pictures of myself and a snapshot of Marlene Dietrich at a reunion of the 101^st.  I thought you might like a snap shot like this -- she doesn't look any too well but that's the way she looked that day; the day before that she had a collapse.  She witnessed a terrible accident where two C47s with paratroopers crashed killing more than 20.

So Phil I say so long for a while, take care of yourself and my love to Jerry and everyone I love.

Love Robert

The letter is such a contrast to one he wrote on October 4 from Wiesbaden, some five months later.  He was still stuck in Germany very upset he hadn’t been shipped back as Japan had already surrendered. He was finally shipped home in the middle of December, just in time for Christmas and the New Year, but he tried to keep his mind off the delay by writing this long letter about his ideas for expanding the family photography business to film for TV, promotional use in architecture and real estate, even children’s’ programming to be used by department store child care centers while their mothers shopped (he suggested Macy’s as such a store).  Nothing came of these ideas.  Nonetheless, he speaks to me across the ages, dreaming big as a 29 year old.  It showed me a side of him I didn’t really see as a teenager when I worked with him. 

In another letter from “somewhere in France” on March 18, 1945 he confided to my Uncle (he didn’t want my mother to know yet because of the danger of the mission) that he was reassigned to 101^st Airborne, the “Screaming Eagles” (the same division he mentions in the past tense in the letter transcribed above). He was being trained to photograph from gliders setting down behind enemy lines (not quite put that way because of censorship of GIs letters), so he expected a lot of action.  He expressed his fears but his admiration of the men he was serving with -- D Day paratroopers and “The Bastards of Bastogne.”  He also managed to film General Eisenhower when he visited the 101^st, those shots apparently making it into newsreels back home.

So I salute him on his 100^th birthday, one of the millions of “accidental warriors” who did their jobs.  May they never be forgotten.

Five Hundred and Still Counting

Only six months ago that I wrote about the eighth “anniversary” of this blog. When I posted my last entry BlogSpot reminded me that that was my 500^th entry.  The reasons I write were fairly well summed up by what I wrote in that anniversary piece, part of which is included below. 

When I started this, who knew I’d keep going.  I certainly didn’t.  It was an experiment which still makes me wonder, why?  Perhaps it’s because I sometimes don’t even know what I think until I put my hands on a keyboard.  Writing requires thought, working things out in a way speaking does not, and certainly thinking is completely unnecessary (in fact thinking is the enemy) when forwarding mindless email chains. 

A consequence of writing in this space is “thought accountability.”  I have to take responsibility for the views expressed here which change over time. If others tap into my stories, photographs, and views, benefit by them, identify with them in some way, or are bored by them and never return, so be it.  I chose not to support a comment section in the blog, but one can reach me at lacunaemusing@gmail.com.

One thing I mentioned below is my intent to lessen the focus on family history, not only because of

Age 9

privacy issues, but I’ve covered the essentials.  At the same time I am purging some of the physical “stuff” associated with that history.  The older one gets, the more things own you. In that regard, the George Eastman Museum in Rochester is enthusiastically accepting much of the memorabilia I have from my family’s photographic studio, the history of which I have detailed in this blog. It will be suitable home for those materials, accessible to future generations.  Once they have received everything, catalogued it all, and digitize much of it, I’ll provide a link in some future entry.

And further along those lines, there have been a number of emails back and forth with the The National WWII Museum in New Orleans regarding my father’s unique scrapbook of his service during the War and ultimately I’ll be donating that to them, once I digitize all his letters and locate the photographs he took during the war which are not in the scrapbook itself.

With the completion of that donation, I will be through with not only writing about those pieces of my family’s history, but putting the physical evidence in strong hands for preservation.  Maybe if I didn’t write this blog I might have been less proactive in this regard, another benefit.

So, from my “anniversary” issue….

Can it be?  Eight years writing this blog.  That’s the amount of time I spent in grammar school. Those eight years in PS 90 seem to be light years in the distant past, but at the time they were an eternity.  And four years in high school were equally drawn out, anticipating adulthood, the point at which I could leave the turmoil of my parent’s home.  Time accelerated in college, came on full speed during my career and raising a family, and now it’s a year in a blink.

I think I’ve been true to my “mission statement” in this space -- essentially an eclectic, kaleidoscopic diary. There have been 480 entries thus far, enough to fill at least five printed volumes.  Content has morphed into more about theatre, literature and still some politics and economics, but less about family history.  I’ve pretty much covered that, and the older I get the more I’d like to move on. 

Nonetheless, I still write about things which are fairly personal, always hesitating about what I “put out there.”  As this blog has evolved, so has the digital world, data mining for all sorts of nefarious reasons.  And the digital world has moved way beyond blogs to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumbler, social networks where a momentary impulse can be just thrown out as a developed thought.  Not here.   Traffic building has not been my intent.  According to Google, in eight years there have been 86,021 page views. Some web sites do that in a minute. Most land here via searches (not for me, but topics I write about) and frequently those are image searches as I’ve incorporated countless photographs in this space

The most viewed entry is one in February 2011 about the Maiden Voyage of Oceania’s ship ‘Marina.’ Not far behind in fifth place is the one I wrote on my open heart surgery, only two months later 

Without going into details of the latter, it is truly a twist of fate that I made it through that voyage without ending up in the freezer with the flowers (a favorite repository for those who die on cruises).  Of course I didn’t realize that I was so vulnerable at the time (although we’re all vulnerable all the time). I suppose that is another reason I write this blog:  it is a record and it allows me to reflect on my life and matters of living, to have a documented trail.  I go to it when memory fails.

I add this coda, something I came across in my files while searching materials for the George Eastman Museum.  My father had saved it and obviously so did I.  It is the first letter I ever received -- about a month after I was born, from the War Price and Rationing Board of the Office of Price Administration during WW II.  This presumably contained ration coupons – a bit of history including the address of my parents’ first home, an apartment house which is still standing.

Our Decaying Infrastructure

The following is such an important, well-reasoned article that I am “republishing” it in my blog (by permission), something I’ve never done before.  It encapsulates some of what I’ve written about our infrastructure over the years. How do we, as supposedly a First World country, tolerate a transportation system that is definitely Third World?  It is all part of kicking the can down the road (no pun intended), with no agreement on an overarching plan.  It has become ingrained in our politics, the one of “I got mine, you get yours.” Our transportation “system” has become an expression of individualism and class warfare.  

True, there are vast geographic differences between our country and those in Europe and much of Asia which have vastly superior public transportation.  The automobile is still part of the key in traveling in less densely populated places (nonetheless we are also allowing our bridges and roadways to crumble).  But the woeful transportation options in our cities and their adjacent environs -- and this especially true for virtually the entire Northeastern corridor -- is just inexcusable for a country of our resources.  It is also goes against the environmental grain – the need for carbon emission reduction.

It is not sufficient to merely duct tape our failing infrastructure; we need a plan and a commitment.  This would create jobs as well.  Do we have the right stuff politically?  I commend this article from the blog “The Conversation” and hat tip to Barry Ritholtz for bringing it to his readers’ attention:

Why is the U.S. unwilling to pay for good public transportation?

John Rennie Short, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Officials in Washington, D.C. said this week they may have to shut down portions of the Metro subway system for months because its piecemeal approach to maintenance is no longer sufficient.
The disclosure follows a shutdown of the entire Metro system on March 16 for 24 hours. Three-quarters of a million people use the system each weekday, so the inconvenience and cost were considerable.
The reason: frayed electrical cables discovered in at least 26 locations that posed an immediate danger. Closing the Metro was probably the safest thing to do.
Just two days previously, an electrical fire in a tunnel forced stoppages to busy commuter service. In September 2015 a train was stuck inside a tunnel, and passengers choked for over an hour as smoke from a fire was accidentally pumped into the train. One woman died. In the last six years 15 people have died in seven separate incidents.
A system that opened to such fanfare in 1976 is now crumbling. It is a depressingly familiar story that is not limited to urban public transport. The U.S. has a major and growing infrastructure gap – though chasm is a more appropriate metaphor.
The quality of a country’s infrastructure is directly linked to its competitiveness because it makes businesses more productive and improves the quality of life. Why has the U.S. let its public transit slip so far?

From First to Third World

The American Society of Civil Engineers gives the nation’s infrastructure a D+. Its report from 2013 depicts a woeful tale of deferred maintenance. More than 70,000 bridges are in need of repair. We need around US$1.7 trillion for our surface transportation alone.
The week that the D.C. metro was closed, I was in Zurich, Switzerland. The contrast could not have been starker. There, a ticket is good for rail, bus and tram. It is clean and efficient, a widely shared experience and a deep source of pride. Most people in the country use public transport in the cities to get around. It is a vital part of urban public life.
In international comparisons, the U.S. is falling further behind. To fly from either Seoul or Shanghai into Los Angeles airport is to make the journey from a First World to a Third World airport. To fly into New York’s JFK from Zurich or most European capitals is to fly from the future into the past.

For people coming and going to Dulles – the main arrival point for international travel – there is no Metro rail station, which would shield travelers from road traffic. Sean_Marshall/flickr, CC BY-NC

And when you arrive in Los Angeles or New York City airports, the public transport connections are often nonexistent or inadequate. If you fly into Dulles, the main international airport for D.C., you will wait in vain for a train to the city (although buses are available). The Metro has yet to link the city to the airport, 40 years after the system opened.
Now Switzerland, which ranks at the top globally for overall infrastructure, may be a reach for the U.S. But when the U.S. ranks 16th for infrastructure quality, easily outranked by countries such as France and Spain, then we should start worrying.
There are substantial costs to the decline of our public transportation system. Closures, accidents and inefficiencies cost individuals and companies and reduce the efficiency of our national economy. Poor infrastructure means Americans spend $120 billion each year in extra fuel and lost time.
To some extent, this state of affairs should be no surprise.
Our competitors are out-investing us in the vital infrastructure necessary to make our economy efficient and internationally competitive. Even when our public infrastructure spending is higher than our competitors, it is less well-targeted because decisions are more politically motivated than based on economic rationality.
We seem unwilling to pay for public services. Our declining road system, for example, is funded by the Highway Trust Fund, which is derived from a gas tax of 18.4 cents per gallon. It has not been raised since 1993, and more fuel-efficient vehicles means less revenue. Raising the gas tax is not considered politically feasible, even in a time of declining gas prices.

What went wrong?

At least four reasons can be cited for the decline in the quality of urban public transportation.
The first is the early and continuing embrace of the private car as a form of urban transport. In Europe, expensive gas and restrictive land use measures kept people in dense cities, and urban growth followed along the lines of mass transit, reinforcing and consolidating their use.
In the U.S. growth spread across a landscape of freeways and motorway exits, encouraged by federal investment in the national highway system in the 1950s. As low-density suburban sprawl spread, public transport became less viable. New suburbs and Sunbelt cities constructed in the last half of the 20th century were built around the private automobile.

Encouraged by the construction of the highway infrastructure, Americans moved out to the suburbs and started to rely more on cars, rather than public transit, to get into cities. www.shutterstock.com

Over time, Republican-dominated suburbs came to see mass transit as a special Democratic interest and voted accordingly. For example, the mayor of Nashville’s plans for public transport last year were blocked by state politicians and right-wing national interest groups.
Second, as cities were designed to meet the needs of the motorist, mass transit systems that had been owned by private companies were abandoned or effectively dismantled in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s because they were losing money.
As a result, many mass transit systems were taken over by municipalities. This led to a high-cost, low-revenue system dependent on the vagaries of federal, state and city funding. Meanwhile, car drivers were economic free riders, not charged for the social costs of their accidents, pollution and congestion.
The third reason is that all infrastructure ages and needs costly maintenance and continual improvement, yet funding is often constrained.
Even when new transit systems were built, such as in D.C., or existing ones were upgraded, as in New York City and Boston, they still had to be maintained, which takes up large chunks of public money without the benefit of a ribbon-cutting ceremony.
Building something new gives politicians a photo opportunity, replacing a frayed electrical cable does not. And there are many other claims on government such as pensions, schools, Social Security and a large military. Our infrastructure chasm is a quiet, slow-moving but relentless crisis only brought into focus when wires fray to the point of immediate danger.
Across the country, transit systems have a backlog of deferred maintenance. Chicago Transit Authority, for instance, spent $5 billion on infrastructure upgrades in the past five years, but needs another $13 billion. Cities in the U.S. have a repair backlog that amounts to $86 billion.

Private affluence and public squalor

Fourth, there is a deeper tension in the U.S., first noted by economist Kenneth Galbraith, between private affluence and public squalor.
Many of us, it seems, have lost faith in the public realm. The private car is the embodiment of U.S. individualism. The decline of our cities' infrastructure is one expression of loss of faith in the public realm as a place of beauty and efficiency and an embodiment of what one journalist refers to as “our anger and our pessimism.”
This thinking has made our cities less about shared experiences and more a place of different lives and separated spaces.
There is some room for optimism. A series of reports highlight the advantage of investing more in public transport. And as more people want to live in cities in dense walkable neighborhoods, the demand for public transport is increasing.
Ridership rates vary by city and with the price of gas, but the overall usage trend is upwards. The top 10 transit systems carry 12.6 million people each workday.
And millennials lack their parents' and grandparents' love affair with the automobile. We may be at the cusp of a generational shift in attitudes to the car and mass transit. Cities and cars were never a good fit, something more people appear to be realizing.
Urban public transport may come to be seen as a more desirable, more sustainable, more equitable way of getting around the city. If only we can remember to ensure we have enough money to replace those electric cables before they pose a serious danger.

John Rennie Short, Professor, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The Son – There IS Blood

When I wrote about a similarly entitled novel & Sons by David Gilbert, I asked the rhetorical question of who might replace our great contemporary writers, such as John Updike, John Cheever, and Philip Roth among others.  I had suggested we might look at the work of Jonathan Franzan, Jonathan Tropper, Brady Udall, Eric Puchner, Jonathan Lethem, Chad Harbach, Dave King, Jess Walker, as well as David Gilbert, all mentioned in this blog. 

Based on his second novel, The Son, here is another name for this list, Philipp Meyer.  I recently read his first novel, American Rust, to see whether I wanted to invest the time in the nearly 600 page The Son.  It was a sound investment!

As in the case of American Rust, it is a story told by different characters, but unlike American Rust, this is a multigenerational novel, skipping back and forth in time, and on a much, much larger scale.  If American Rust is a microcosm of the contemporary economy, this is a macrocosm of the dark side of the American soul, with overtones of Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos and Herman Melville.  It is also historical fiction, well researched, particularly in the ways of the Comanche. 

Expansive in scale, it takes place mostly in Texas over more than a century.  I kept thinking of the movie Giant which I remember seeing as a kid, a sprawling film about a Texas family and oil, James Dean’s last film.  At some point in the novel the movie is actually mentioned so Meyer too was acutely aware of the same in envisioning location.  One could also think of the recent movie There Will Be Blood, based on Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil.

At the heart of The Son are violence and racism, man’s plundering nature, and the Darwinian reality of the weak being devoured by the strong and them, in turn, becoming victims themselves, if not with their very lives, their souls.

The “story” is begun by the patriarch of the McCullough family, Eli, who as a thirteen year old is abducted by the Comanche, having to witness the brutal murder of his mother and sister.  This is only the beginning of scores of brutalities in the novel; one needs a thick skin to wade into the evil of man portrayed in these pages. Be prepared to metaphorically drink turtle and buffalo blood.  

Eli tells his story in chapters spread throughout the novel, in the first person, sometimes in retrospect, sometimes in real time.  He and his brother are taken by the Comanche as slaves and Eli is given the name “Tiehteti” which he explains “meant pathetic little white man.”  This is the one thing he vows not to be as he grows up in the tribe, finally rising through his own barbarism to a position of respect, at which point he is “traded” back to white society as there was a premium paid for the return for white captives.  Eli becomes a mercenary with the Texas Rangers and ultimately sets out on his own to build an empire, first in cattle and horses and finally in oil.  Along the way, the skills and savagery learned as a Comanche serve “Colonel McCullough” (as he is known from his Texas Ranger days) well as an empire builder.

The conscience in the novel is his son, Peter, who is overwhelmed by the Texans’ treatment of the Mexican natives of Texas, Mexicans who predated the whites before the Civil War. Once the Civil War ended, there was a steady influx of whites and finally when oil was discovered there, their arrival was as fast as they could dispatch Indians and Mexicans to their graves.  Peter is horrified and seeks redemption by falling in love with the sole survivor of a Mexican family destroyed by his father and his henchmen.  Peter’s story is detailed from the pages of his diary which has survived due to a development that only a spoiler could explain, so enough said.

The other main character is Jeanne Anne, grandchild of Peter and great-grandchild of Eli, into whose veins all this bloodletting and empire building ultimately flows.  She must make her way in the world of men, ruthless ones at times.  J. A. McCullough’s chapters are also intermingled, out of chronological order, Meyer writing her tale in the third person.

She grows into this world of men who perhaps thought that she was a slut or a dyke or a whore. A man trapped in a woman's body; look up her skirt and you'll see a cock. A liar, a schemer, a cold heart with a cunt to match, ridden hard and put up wet. Though she shouldn't take it personally. No one meant anything by it. To be a man meant not living by any rules at all. You could say one thing in church and another at the bar and somehow both were true. You could be a good husband and father and Christian and bed every secretary, waitress, and prostitute that caught your eye. They all had their winks and nods, code for “I fucked that cheerleader or nanny or Pan Am stewardess, that maid or riding instructor.” Meanwhile, the slightest hint she was anything but a virgin (excepting [her] three children), would get her banned for life, a scarlet letter.

She’s the one who has to manage the empire during the time of burgeoning oil prices and shady land grabs.  Behind every great wealth is a great sin and behind it all is the sense of a Godless universe of natural selection.

Peter watches his father burn down the hacienda of his long-time Mexican neighbors, an old established family, the Garcia’s: …he is not of our time; he is like some fossil come out of a stream bank or a trench in the ocean, from a point in history when you took what you wanted and did not see any reason to justify.  I realize he is not any worse than our neighbors: they are simply more modern in their thinking. They require some racial explanation to justify their theft and murder. My brother Phineas is truly the most advanced among them, has nothing against the Mexican or any other race, he sees it simply as a matter of economics. Science rather than emotion. The strong must be encouraged, the weak allowed to perish. Though what none of them see, or want to see, is that we have a choice.

Jeanne has her own view on the topic: Even if God existed, to say he loved the human race was preposterous. It was just as likely the opposite; it was just as likely he was systematically deceiving us. To think that an all-powerful being would make a world for anyone but himself, that he might spend all his time looking out for the interests of lesser creatures, it went against all common sense. The strong took from the weak, only the weak believed otherwise, and if God was out there, he was just as the Greeks and Romans had suspected; a trickster, an older brother who spent all his time inventing ways to punish you.

The overarching philosophical view of Meyer is expressed by Jeanne as well (helpful to be doing Google lookups to get the full scope of Meyer’s research): As for JFK, it had not surprised her. The year he died, there were still living Texans who had seen their parents scalped by Indians. The land was thirsty. Something primitive still in it. On the ranch they had found points from both the Clovis and the Folsom, and while Jesus was walking to Calvary the Mogollon people were bashing each other with stone axes. When the Spanish came there were the Suma, Jumano, Manso, La Junta, Concho and Chisos and Toboso, Ocana and Cacaxtle, the Coahuiltecans, Comecrudos ... but whether they had wiped out the Mogollons or were descended from them, no one knew. They were all wiped out by the Apaches. Who were in turn wiped out, in Texas anyway, by the Comanches. Who were finally wiped out by the Americans.

A man, a life - it was barely worth mentioning. The Visigoths had destroyed the Romans, and had themselves been destroyed by the Muslims. Who were destroyed by the Spanish and Portuguese. You did not need Hitler to see that it was not a pleasant story. And yet here she was. Breathing, having these thoughts. The blood that ran through history would fill every river and ocean, but despite all the butchery, here you were.

The writing is prodigiously powerful, the research exhaustive.  One could say this is a Western novel, but it is so much more: it is the promise of great things to come from Philipp Meyer.