Well, after a couple teasers — a miscellany of quotations from the county official who became a Bengals exec; an appreciation of Mike Brown as a “near-brilliant litigator” — my feature on the Bengals and their stadium lease is finally here. The story doesn’t break much news, other than a few hints about a potential solution to this 15-year mess. But I do think it synthesizes that mess into a coherent story.

It’s also a very depressing story. If you follow Cincinnati sports and want something a little more uplifting, check out the previous story I did for the magazine — on the Reds and their efforts to win back their fans.

*  *  *

One more thing: I should elaborate on one part of my stadium-fund story — the end, where I claim the Bengals’ mistreatment of Carson Palmer ”tells you everything you need to know about Brown.” After the issue went to press, the Bengals traded Palmer in one of the most slam-dunk deals of all time. That might seem like a vindication of Brown’s pettiness. After all, the Bengals now have two extra draft picks to go with their promising rookie quarterback. But I think this misses the larger picture. Throughout this saga, Brown treated Palmer, maybe the best (and certainly the nicest) player he’s ever drafted, with zero class. After the trade, Palmer took time to call the Cincinnati media, saying all the right things and handling the whole thing like a professional — like an adult. What did the Bengals do? Well, in the team’s statement — and you could obviously forget any interaction with the media — Brown didn’t even bother to thank Palmer for his years with the team. Marvin Lewis stooped even lower, bashing Palmer to reporters.

So here’s a question: how do you think players around the league perceived this? The Bengals have long struggled to lure free agents to Cincinnati. This offseason, Jonathan Joseph, a free agent and one of their best defensive players, bailed on the team despite its best efforts to resign him. Right now, it seems the Bengals can’t give their money away. Here’s a second question, then: What happens in five or six yeas when those two new draft picks become free agents?

In Sunday’s Boston Globe, in the Ideas section, I’ve got a profile of Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt. In his new book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, Greenblatt writes about the fifteenth century’s rediscovery of Lucretius and his poem On the Nature of Things. Given Greenblatt’s subtitle, it’s no surprise that the book continues his push into the world of popular writing, a push that started with his Will in the World.

Actually, Greenblatt’s been writing reviews for The New Republic and op eds for The New York Times since the 1980s; nothing about his career is easy to summarize or diagnose. Still, writing a Shakespeare biography for Norton seems far different than writing an academic book for the University of Chicago Press. I asked Greenblatt about this (and N.B. that none of the quotations in this post made the profile — Greenblatt’s a compulsively quotable guy). “For me, there isn’t a big gap between the two,” he said about academic and popular writing. “It wasn’t like I was deciding to write detective fiction.”

After doing two interviews with Greenblatt, and reading or re-reading many of his books and essays, I’d say this is one of his defining traits: a weird inability to admit that anything he’s ever done was intentional, programmatic, or calculated. When I asked him about the genesis of New Historicism, for example, he said, “We weren’t a group of people who thought we were going to plot the transformation of the field.” Yet Greenblatt transformed his field — and not enough people point this out — through some very deliberate and unglamorous channels: he edited collections of academic essays; he co-founded a journal and book series; and he conjured up not only broad theoretical concepts, but also specific close-readings (of Marlowe, Spenser, and many, many more) that still occupy specialists in those fields.

So, Greenblatt’s The Swerve highlights his transformation from highly specialized academic to . . . literary journalist? (The Swerve doesn’t have much original scholarship, so far as I [or a scolding Michael Dirda] can tell. Unlike Dirda, though, I think it’s a good book; name me a literary journalist who could pull off as many fun and learned tangents as Greenblatt does in his book.) But The Swerve highlights another transformation for Greenblatt, and it’s the one that drives my profile: How did the scholar who argued that not even Shakespeare could escape the limits of his culture end up writing a book whose subtitle claims that, thanks to one book and one author, The World Became Modern?

It was very, very hard to get Greenblatt to address this. At one point I rather desperately read him the passage from Renaissance Self-Fashioning that comes up in my profile, then asked what his 1980 self would think of his 2011 book. “I think he’d like it,” Greenblatt replied. (He’s also compulsively sly.) Still, after some prodding, he admitted that “I was always slightly less Foucauldian than I sounded. I’m a little more optimistic now.”

Greenblatt remained uneasy about his publisher-provided subtitle. “I’m skeptical about any straight-forward teleology,” he said, like any good scholar. Still, he took literary scholars to task for their retreat from the public sphere. “Our work is important. But something about how that work is presented is self-diminishing, self-defeating.” Greenblatt added: “Why do we spend our lives on this? Why is it exciting? Why is it fun? Is it really just ideological demysticifcation? That’s fine, but there can’t be a full diet of that.”

The New Republic‘s just put out a special 9/11 issue, and I’ve got a feature in it on the long struggle to build the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. I don’t have a lot more to say about Shanksville, but I would like to write a bit about the Johnstown Flood National Memorial. Like the Flight 93 memorial, the Johnstown memorial sits in rural Pennsylvania and is operated by the National Park Service. Unlike the Flight 93 memorial, though, the Johnstown memorial commemorates something that happened more than a century ago. I visited Johnstown on my drive back from Shanksville; it helped me think, however approximately, about the way time inflects national tragedy.

It also helped me think about David McCullough. Before we get to him, though, let’s talk about the building of the Johnstown Flood National Memorial. In 1964, a Pennsylvania congressman pushed through a bill — well, he championed a bill; it was unanimously approved — that allocated $2 million to build two Pennsylvania memorials, one for the Allegheny Portage Railroad, the other for Johnstown Flood.

The Flood had provided the nineteenth century with its second biggest scandal, after Lincoln’s assassination. It all started at the  South Fork Dam, which backed up the Conemaugh River and created the  Conemaugh Lake. Next to the Lake sat the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, where the East Coast’s elite would come to, well, fish and hunt. One thing they didn’t do was worry about the fact that the South Fork Dam kept springing leaks. In 1889, though, it failed completely. Nearly 5 billion gallons of water spilled down through the mountains and into the steel mill city of Johnstown. Early telegram reports suggested that the Johnstown Flood had caused 10,000 casualties. The final count was bad enough: 2,200.

*  *  *

Around the same time Congress was taking an interest in the Johnstown Flood — they put the National Memorial ten miles above Johnstown, next to what was left of the South Fork Dam — David McCullough was taking an interest in it, too. It was an odd choice for both of them since memory of the Flood had largely faded. In fact, the only scholarship on the subject was a 1940 dissertation, which McCullough ended up thanking in the introduction to The Johnstown Flood, his first book.

In a Paris Review interview, McCullough created a typically charming scene of the book’s origins:

When we were little kids, we used to make a lake of gravy in our mashed potatoes; then we’d take a fork, break the potatoes, and say, The Johnstown flood! — with no idea why in the world we did it. That was about all I knew about it until I saw the photographs of the flood, quite by chance at the Library of Congress. . . .  I wrote The Johnstown Flood at night after work. I would come home, we’d have dinner, put the kids to bed, and then at about nine I would go to a little room upstairs, close the door, and start working. I tried to write not four but two pages every night. Our oldest daughter remembers going to sleep to the sound of the typewriter.

Reviewers loved the book when it came out in 1968. They praised McCulloguh’s research and his writing — especially since he’d chosen an event where, as the Wall Street Journal put it, “no neat narrative line, centered on a dominant protagonist and with all ends neatly tucked in, is possible.”

A “neat narrative line”? A “dominant protagonist”? Today, that feels like a pretty fair description of McCullough’s historical method. Or at least of a prominent critique of that method, where Harry Truman or John Adams simultaneously shape and float above history.

*  *  *

It’s no surprise that McCullough’s Johnstown book didn’t sell like his later presidential ones. Still, it helped bring the Flood back to people’s attention. In 1986, as Johnstown was gearing up for the Flood’s centennial, the director of the city’s new Johnstown Flood Museum — not to be confused with the separate Johnstown National Memorial — could tell the A.P. with a relatively straight face that “it’s part of American folklore. Everyone’s heard of it.”

The government poured another $5 million into the memorial for renovations — by now, the key congressman was John Murtha — and a group of locals formed the Johnstown Flood Centennial Committee. The Committee made an ambitious schedule of more than 100 events. Still, everyone wanted to focus on the historical heroism of Johnstown’s everyday citizens. “We don’t want to build an amusement park,” another city booster told National Geographic.

*  *  *

Those sentiments echoed the ones I heard from anyone associated with the Flight 93 National Memorial. After spending three days there, I started the eight-hour drive back to Connecticut. It was a different route than the one I came on, a route that let me see the Johnstown Flood National Memorial. The memorial’s visitors’ center — the center was one of the things added for the Flood’s centennial — still stocked copies of McCullough’s book. When I stopped by, though, it lacked very many visitors. Thanks to strip mining, the Conemaugh River had turned the color of tomato juice.

Still, the combination of the visitors’ center, which had several wonderful displays drawn from McCullough’s research, and the geographical features — all that remained of the South Fork Dam were its two enormous sloping banks — made the memorial quite powerful. It left me wanting to visit the Johnstown Flood Museum, but I didn’t because I had to keep driving. Honestly, I hadn’t planned on being so moved by the experience.

In the July issue of Cincinnati Magazine, I’ve got a long story on the Reds and their fans. It could have been much, much longer, as my (very gracious) editor can attest. Still, I managed to put a lot of that ancillary stuff on this blog. I’ll link to those posts below — and if any Reds fans want to share their stories or some feedback, feel free to email or leave a comment.

I started with a post outlining my personal history with the team; from there, I wrote an analysis of the Reds’ place in pop culture; a description of the Reds’ 1950s business operation; a sketch of Cincinnati’s TV scene, circa 1972; and a link to the local sports radio segment I did (and that crops up in my story).

Clearly, this turned out to be a pretty complex and multifaceted story. My main takeaway, though, was that the Reds know they need to attract more fans and are working incredibly hard to do so. And not just working hard, but working in a highly specialized and professionalized manner. In the story, I note how much corporate speak flies around the team’s offices. So let’s give the last word to that tradition — here, the concept of “strategic buckets,” a concept which the Reds’ management is quite fond of, and a concept which I had to look up:

In this week’s Boston Globe — and exactly 150 years after the start of the Civil War — I’ve got a feature on the war’s impact on American literature. For pretty much all of those 150 years, people have been wondering why the Civil War didn’t produce any great contemporary works of literature. What gets overlooked in this is the number of great authors who did live and write during the 1860s: Whitman, Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, and more. The history of American war writing stretches back at least to 1638, when Captain John Underhill chronicled the Pequot War in Newes from America. I learned that in Cynthia Wachtell’s excellent War No More: The Antiwar Impulse in American Literature. Still, the focus of my feature is Randall Fuller’s From Battlefields Rising: How the Civil War Transformed American Literature. Taken together, Wachtell and Fuller’s books suggest that, while the Civil War lacked a true literary masterpiece, it did clear the way for the antiwar writing we recognize today.

I want to expand on two things I didn’t have space for in my feature. First, the role of photography in the Civil War. Plenty of scholars have argued that this newish medium — notably through Mathew Brady’s 1862 gallery of Antietam — went a long way toward making the Civil War the grisly, realistic, and transformative experience it so surely was. But Fuller connects this idea to literary authors. While in Washington reporting “Chiefly About War-Matters” (the essay remains a great read and can be found here), Hawthorne sat for two visual portraits. The first (pictured above right) was a painting by none other than Emanuel Leutze, who remains best known for his Washington Crossing the Delaware and Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way. The second (above left) was a photograph by Alexander Gardner, the Brady photographer who supplied many of the Antietam shots.

The contrast between these two portraits gets at how transitional this moment was for visual culture.  But it also gets at the difference between painting and photography — a difference that played out in the war coverage, where, for the first time, people could choose between the sanitized, sentimental drawings in publications like Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper and photographs. When the New York Times wrote up Brady’s gallery, it praised its “terrible reality and earnestness.” “If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets,” the Times continued, “he has done something very like it.” Hawthorne looks a lot better with the help of Leutze. The same was true of the Civil War’s violence.

Second topic: Walt Whitman’s taste in opera. At the start of my feature, I tell the story of Whitman walking out of the opera on the night of April 13, only to learn about the attack on Fort Sumter. Scholars love this anecdote for all the obvious reasons, but they disagree on the show Whitman attended. Most say it was Verdi’s Ballo in Maschera. But a few, like Mark Caldwell, in his cultural history New York Night: The Mystique and Its History, say it was Donizetti’s Linda di Chamounix. Curious, and wanting to get this right, I emailed Professor Caldwell to ask him why he went with Donizetti.  In a gracious and detailed reply, he explained that according to the listings Verdi was a matinée on April 13, while Donizetti was an evening performance on both April 12 and April 13.

Now, the news about Fort Sumter arrived in New York via telegraph on the afternoon of the 12th. This means neither show matches up perfectly with Whitman’s own account of hearing the news — an account he wrote more than a decade after the fact. Professor Caldwell told me he placed more weight on Whitman’s description of reading the news at night than on his specific mention of the 13th of April. That makes perfectly good sense. I did some more reading around — I didn’t see anyone air this debate out fully, though someone surely has — and decided to put more weight on the documented lag between telegraphs and newspapers and on Whitman’s ability to kill a few hours in Brooklyn. I hope that makes sense, too. Either way, Whitman had seen more than 20 opera performances before this one. He would have been happy with Verdi or Donizetti or both.

In this month’s issue of Indianapolis Monthly, I’ve got a long feature on Milan, Indiana — the small town that inspired Hoosiers and that’s struggled ever since. The magazine’s website is in the middle of a redesign, so the story didn’t make it online. I’m posting a slightly longer version of it below the jump.

Another Long Shot

Milan could be any Indiana town — except, of course, for its high school basketball team, which won the state tournament almost 60 years ago. Now, a few locals are trying to convert that tradition into a basketball museum and a shot at reviving their town. But what if Milan’s legacy is what’s holding it back?

So there’s this picture. It’s of the 1954 Milan Indians, and it’s not the reserved, rigorously posed one everyone knows. Somebody — no one remembers who — took this picture right after the team had shocked the state, took it inside their Hinkle Fieldhouse locker room where it’s all sweat and shock and self-pinching, where the players and coaches are tightly woven together, wearing a series of expressions that reveals just how many ways a human being can feel joy.

You might not know the picture, but you know the story: the high school whose enrollment is 161, led by the coach whose favorite phrase is “I’ll try,” watches the player who doesn’t own a telephone hit the game-winning shot. The next day, 40,000 fans lined the road leading into Milan, spilling into fields and onto building tops, waving homemade signs, enduring Manhattan levels of honking. People have been celebrating the team ever since — especially after it was Hollywoodized in Hoosiers. Milan frequently crops up on Top-Whatever lists (Sports Illustrated’s “20 Favorite Teams of the Century”), and Butler’s Final Four run brought with it another wave of invocations.

In 2011, however, Milan finds itself caught up in another — and, unfortunately, much more common — story: a withered downtown, a dearth of good jobs, and kids who head off to college and never come back. The town has become a weird mash-up of old and new, dying and getting-by, hallowed ground and Dairy Queen. Its aging population needs a pharmacy, but since they’re too few to keep one around, they must drive twenty minutes for a prescription. The Milan Plaza, a strip mall decorated in the school’s colors of black and gold, has vacancies in four of its seven storefronts. No realtor has even bothered to put up signs for prospective clients.

But local nonprofit, Milan ‘54, Inc., wants to change all this by building a brand-new, big-money museum to capitalize on the town’s legacy. The nonprofit includes eight men and women — some of them former players, others related to former players, one even related to the ‘54 mascot. They’re some of Milan’s best and brightest, people who seem smart and passionate and more than a little stubborn. At stake, they believe, is more than just a team or a game or a legacy. It’s a small town and its way of life.

Still, when you see what the group is up against, you realize that this might not be the right plan to save the town — or even the right lesson to draw from the original team. In Milan and Indy and everywhere else, the boys of ‘54 have become a parable, something that can dilate to the level of the American Dream or shrink down to the smallest daily struggle. But the real point of the Milan Miracle is in that forgotten picture, and in that picture is why we play (and watch) sports. It’s not about innocence or destiny or David or Goliath, it’s about base stuff like effort and competition — stuff that sometimes pays off and sometimes doesn’t.

* * *

Right now, the Milan ‘54 museum is crammed into an old Main Street barbershop. It looks a lot like the one where Gene Hackman meets the Hickory patriarchs, except this one — “Nichol’s Barber Shop” is still stenciled in the window — is much, much smaller.

Still, the Milan ‘54 group has made the most of their temporary home. The barber shop’s pale green walls are covered with blown-up photographs (Coach Wood cutting down the net, the parade crowd shivering in the cold) and yellowed newspaper clippings. On and around the cracked porcelain sinks and National cash register sits a mismatched collection of display cases. In addition to uniforms, ticket stubs, and other things you’d expect, they display the team’s original first aid kit, a rusted rim taken from a player’s barn, the fur coat worn by Wood’s wife to the parade, and pieces from the old Milan gym floor. The back wall is lined with ten wooden lockers, which contain autographed basketballs, varsity jackets (both Milan and Hickory High), brief where-are-they-now narratives, pennants, sneakers, yearbook pages, a handkerchief one player gave his girl at a school dance. There are several dozen fat three-ring binders containing even more photos and newspaper clippings and — after the high school janitor rediscovered them in 2003 — almost 200 telegrams and letters from the Governor, the Mayor of Indianapolis, and others congratulating the team. (One letter is addressed to simply “THE COACH / THE TEAM, MILAN, INDIANA.”)

It’s an incredible collection — especially if you’ve passed through Milan for most of your life without even knowing it existed. Like my father and grandfather, I grew up about five miles from Milan. Still, none of us had heard of the museum. And so, last January — I’d moved to Connecticut after college, but was home for Christmas — I found myself on my first visit, sitting in an uncomfortably inclined barber’s chair and talking with Tom Kohlmeier and Roselyn McKittrick, two of the museum’s biggest boosters.

“It just happened,” Roselyn says of the museum. “There wasn’t a big plan.” Roselyn, wearing a white turtleneck and even whiter Keds, is now in her 70s, but when Hoosiers came out she was still running Milan’s Railroad Inn, which was widely esteemed for its fried chicken. (Roselyn ended up selling the restaurant, and it has since closed — because, she contends, “the new owner tried to turn it into a 4-star.”) At the request of some local Boy Scouts, Roselyn put out a few 5x7s from Hoosiers at the Railroad Inn. The photos sold out in a week, and the movie — which Roselyn, like everyone else I talked to, loves; “truth, if not accuracy” is the company line — catalyzed everything. It convinced her a museum might work.

So Roselyn began acquiring and displaying Milan memorabilia at the Railroad Inn, then at her next business, an antique store. In 2000, she and a few other locals formed Milan ‘54, Inc. — and bigger plans began to take shape. In 2002, they bought the old State Bank of Milan, a two-story brick building that sits right next to Nichol’s Barber Shop. They also hired Schmidt Associates, an Indianapolis consulting firm, to draw up an ambitious plan that called not only for the restoration of the Bank to its 1954 state, but also for additions like turning the vault into a display room for the championship trophy and players’ rings, a corner office into a 30-seat movie theater, and one outside wall into a simulated barn door and basketball hoop.

It all sounds state-of-the-art. But a quality product costs money — $2.5 million, according to Schmidt Associates. Roselyn insists Milan ‘54 “won’t spend the money if we don’t have it.” To buy the Bank, which cost $60,000, the group received a grant for $50,000 from the philanthropic arm of a local casino. They also got $3,000 from Mitch Daniels’s foundation, and their website — like the museum, it offers Milan ‘54 shirts, hats, and DVDs, all with optional player autographs — has brought in “a few thousand dollars.” But that’s about it. Indiana still loves its most famous underdogs — the State Senate passed a resolution honoring the team in 2004 — but more tangible recognition has been harder to find.

The Milan ‘54 members also feel like they’ve been neglected at home. “The town,” as Tom Kohlmeier puts it, “is anesthetized to the story.” While Tom was only three years old in 1954, he still feels a connection to the team — perhaps because his parents and grandparents attended every game that season, perhaps because his P.E. teachers showed the ‘54 game film in class every year. Dressed in blue jeans and a bomber jacket, Tom is blunt and intense, quickly confessing, for example, that he left Milan for college and never came back. (This may be the ‘54 team’s most lasting legacy: of its 10 players, nine went to college and eight graduated — all shocking statistics in 1950s Indiana.) But Tom and the rest of the group remain frustrated by the lack of local support. “The tanning shop, which is four blocks down, didn’t know where we were,” says Roselyn. Tom mentions that a local photographer with a whole basement full of images from the game won’t let the museum even see them without first paying a fee. And then there’s the town’s brand new sign, a simple “Welcome to Milan, Est. 1854” number that replaced the old one and its prominent “1954 State Champs” logo.

Such slights aggravate Tom because, to his mind, they trip up not only the museum, but ultimately the town itself. Where Roselyn offers a mix of hope and historical perspective — for the town’s sesquicentennial in 2004, she co-wrote a fascinating history of Milan — Tom brings a strong business sense to the Milan ‘54 group. He now lives and owns a company in Noblesville, but hopes to retire in Milan — and in a Milan closer to the one where he was born and raised. Milan used to be “self-contained” and “vertically integrated,” Tom says, and the Milan Miracle simply confirmed what the natives had known all along: that Milan was a wonderful place to live, work, and play. Few people work or play there today. And while the Milan ‘54 group understands that the museum won’t save the town by itself, they do hope it will inspire an economic renaissance. Tom dreams of “an open-air terrace” downtown (and he ticks off several municipal models). Roselyn suggests a soda fountain and a smattering of specialty shops. But they also admit they’d settle even for corporate clients, with Tom bringing up Subway and CVS by name.

The mention of CVS causes everyone to stop and fret over Milan’s lack of a pharmacy. It’s enough to make even McKittrick pause. “We are under time pressure because of the age of the players,” she says — and, it’s implied, the age of the Milan ‘54 board, the youngest of whom are closing in on retirement. But when I ask about what they’ll do if they don’t get the full $2.5 million, Tom jumps in again.

“I refuse to accept that,” he says. “If I have to take my personal retirement money, I will, and I’m not alone in that.”

* * *

To understand statements like this, you need to understand what the Milan ‘54 group are trying to build — or, more accurately, what they’re trying to revive. In 1954, Milan was a typical small town, meriting barely a mention in the Federal Writers’ Project guide to Indiana. Its 1,150 citizens were happily stranded between Indianapolis and Cincinnati, surrounded by cornfields and the occasional wood-frame farmhouse.

This hasn’t really changed — Milan’s population is up to 1,800, and a few of its fields have been broken up by newer homes — but, for the first half of the twentieth century, Milan’s isolation served as its greatest strength. To accommodate the local farmers and factory workers, Milan’s downtown grew into three business-packed blocks: a bakery, a jewelry store, a shoe store, a dress store, a drug store, a dime store with comic books and hair barrettes, a clinic with five doctors, several department stores and groceries, and more. There were restaurants like Arkenberg’s Ideal Dining Room, whose owner left basketball games early to start on the players’ milkshakes and burgers. Best (and biggest) of all, there was Chris Volz Motors, a dealership with enough selection to draw Cincinnati Reds players to Milan. At the grand opening of his new location in 1950 (and this is all in Roselyn’s book), Volz handed out 4,800 bottles of Coca Cola and 5,500 hot dogs. Several ‘54 players worked for Volz, and he coordinated a fleet of Cadillacs to bring the state champs home from Indianapolis in style.

The final stretch of the Cadillacs’ route — the part lined with 40,000 fans — followed State Road 101. But this would soon change. In 1956, Milan got a bypass that shifted 101 from Main Street to a newer, speedier road. In some places, the route moved only few hundred yards, but it was a big enough change to earn a photo spread in the Indianapolis News. Before too long, those pictures began to feel like the first part of a before-and-after set. In 1959, the first grocery store left Milan’s downtown; by 1968, another had moved out to the bypass and the new Milan Plaza, where it was soon joined by the Milan Drug Store and the local dime store. A new hardware store opened on the bypass in 1961. The old railroad station was torn down in 1964. By 1974, the town was down to one doctor.

As this was happening in Milan, of course, it was happening everywhere else. And the other bypasses, along with the completion of Interstate 74, began to leach away Milan’s remaining stores and traffic. My dad, who was born in 1959, doesn’t remember the vibrant downtown version of Milan. The town’s main employer, the Milan Furniture Manufacturing Company, which employed around 200 people at its peak, burned down in 1980. Most locals see this as the violent coda to a decline that began only a few years earlier. The last movie to play at the Milan Theater was 1958’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. For the Hoosiers premiere in 1986, the town loaded into school buses and went to nearby Batesville, then came back to Milan High School for a big reception.

* * *

Last summer, I visited Milan a second time. I planned to check in with Roselyn and Tom. But first, I wanted to go to the grand opening and dedication of the Milan Public Library, which promised to be the town’s social event of 2010 — and, in comparison to the basketball museum, a very different vision for its future.

The afternoon commenced with a classic Indiana rainstorm, but it didn’t slow the turnout. In fact, by the time the ceremony began, the library’s parking lot was so full that people started parking their cars and trucks in the mud alongside the road. While stragglers continued to join the crowd, a local minister led us in a prayer and the pledge under the new building’s outsized American flag. Next came a ribbon cutting, complete with giant scissors and the local State Rep.

After that, we headed inside. Older people took up all the folding chairs in the library’s community room, a small space separated from the main shelving area by a folding partition. Everyone else squeezed around the opening, and the head librarian kicked things off with a joke about crowd size and a new Twilight book.

But things soon turned serious, and the remaining speakers — each of whom had to brave the new sound system’s squealing feedback — explained how exactly the Milan Public Library went from a hazy dream in 1992 to a reality today. Technically, we were standing in the Milan Branch of the Osgood Public Library because Milan and its surrounding townships did not have enough people to start a library. The Milan Library Project, a group of six volunteers, had struggled with all sorts of legal and bureaucratic hang-ups. They wrote letters, walked beside parade floats, made presentation after presentation. And then there was the money. In 2002, ten years into their quest, they received a huge boost when Mabel Lamb, a local teacher who lived in Milan until her death at the age of 97, left them five acres and $50,000. It became the seed money for earning enough grants to cover the construction costs, which came in at just under a million dollars.

The library that resulted, with its high ceilings and bright colors and the first Wi-Fi hotspot in town history, immediately stood as the newest, nicest building in Milan. But it was clear from the ceremony’s speeches and throat-clearings and hugs and, finally, tears — it was clear that the library was also much more. “Children” and “opportunity” were the day’s refrains, and everyone nodded like they were at a revival.

After the program ended, a woman resumed playing an electric piano brought in for the reception. The Friends of the Milan Library served cookies and punch, though there weren’t nearly enough. There was a raffle for two Reds tickets and for a Build-a-Bear. I ended up, punchless, next to Gary Anderson and Joe Neihardt, who, like everyone else, had dressed up for the occasion. Anderson, a carpenter who also handled Mabel’s power of attorney, had lived in Milan long enough to keep the same phone number for 33 years. When I asked him about the town’s future, he said, “Small towns are dying because of demographics, and Milan’s not going to come back. We haven’t had anything to offer young people for generations.” Neihardt, whose grandfather ran Milan’s original downtown hardware store, agreed. I asked about the Milan ‘54 museum and its goal of reviving the downtown, but Anderson and Neihardt both gave polite non-answers. Still, they didn’t seem to tire of the story behind it. “Tired of the team?” Neihardt said, “Oh, heavens no. Any place you go, they know about Milan. That’s the only thing we have going for us.”

John Ingram, Milan’s town manager (that is, its equivalent to a mayor), seemed to agree. In his messy, windowless office, which included an autographed ball from the ‘54 team, Ingram praised Milan’s quality of life — a few months back, it had its first home burglary in “10 or 12 years” — but remained realistic about its limitations. Milan, like everywhere else, Ingram said, was still hurting from the recession, though he cheerfully added that “technically, there aren’t any businesses to suffer.” He had nothing but nice things to say about town’s basketball legacy, but added that he was far more worried about working toward a new sewer plant.

And this attitude seemed pretty representative. You can understand why the high school and basketball team might get a little tired of the Milan ‘54 talk. (Even with the new class-conscious tournament, the team has been up and down, going 3-17 in 2009.) But most of the townspeople I talked to — and I hit all the important institutions: post office, liquor store, First Baptist Church — seemed ambivalent about the Milan ‘54 group. Just about everyone shared a story about visitors asking for directions to the gym or the museum. But their municipal wish-lists centered on more sidewalks, fewer potholes, launching a town beautification initiative. The thing I heard most — here, in the words of a bank teller whose branch lobby carried copies of Roselyn’s book for sale — was that “I just wish we had more stuff for our kids. They move away as soon as they can.”

* * *

My grandparents first met Roselyn in 1952 at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Washington, D.C., when my grandfather, who’d just enlisted in the Army, bumped into her soon-to-be husband, a Navy man, each with his significant other in tow. Two years later, since she was dating a local boy, Roselyn kept up with the Milan team through the newspaper. In 1956, she moved there, raised three children there.

All this to say that, for Roselyn, or for Tom, whose family owned the furniture factory for a while, or for anyone else affiliated with the museum, Milan’s history is also a personal history. That’s why the town’s ambivalence feels like an insult. It’s also why the Milan ‘54 group seems nostalgic not simply for a team, but also for a way of life — for a time when Milan was a destination and not a departure point.

But nostalgia can become a distraction. In 2004, for the Milan team’s fiftieth anniversary, the Indianapolis Star ran a relatively inoffensive story on the museum efforts — which were at the same point then as they are now — and noted that a $100-per-plate fundraiser had flopped. (So did plans to sell a Bobby Plump bobblehead.) When I asked about those events, though, Roselyn turned quiet for the first time: “Let’s not talk about that.”

But don’t we have to talk about it? Don’t we have to talk about how the Milan ‘54 group is trying to raise money in an economy that forced even the mighty Indianapolis Museum of Art to lay off 10 percent of its staff? Don’t we have to talk about how Milan sits in the middle of a cultural wasteland, too far from both Cincinnati and Indianapolis to draw consistent, museum-sustaining crowds? And, most importantly, don’t we have to talk about how the Milan ‘54 group’s downtown plan seems rigid and maybe even a little naïve, based more on a desire for the past than a plan for the future? After all, for a lot of people, the State Road 101 bypass looked like progress. And the things Milan does have going for it — the new Dollar General; a paper company and lumber yard and assisted living community, all arriving soon; and, yes, the library — now form a long, thin strip of stores, small businesses, and nicer houses all along the bypass.

The downtown, meanwhile, has become Milan’s worst section. In addition to Nichol’s Barbershop and the town government building, you’ll find a food pantry (“operated by Milan Council of Churches”), Wayne’s Meats, B&L Motorsports, and not much else. The movie theater, which had been resurrected as a gym during my January visit, is empty again. The Milan Computer Repair displays the sun-bleached boxes of a 56k modem and an external CD drive in its windows. The iconic Milan water tower fell into disrepair long ago and is now graffitied and surrounded by scrap metal and rusted-out machinery. More than half of the houses have been turned into rental units, as have many of former retail locations, their storefront windows now boarded up living rooms and kitchens. The other retail locations remain for sale or for rent.

If Milan seems like a fine place to live — a place that’s safe and comfortable and a little shabby — it also seems like a place completely disconnected from Roselyn and Tom’s dream of a postcard downtown. Instead of adapting with the town, though, the Milan ‘54 group sticks to its vision. Roselyn tried to convince the library to build downtown, even after it got Mabel Lamb’s property out on the bypass, and she doesn’t like its modern look anymore than its new location. “It upsets me,” Roselyn says, “but it’s there, and we’re going to support it.” When I ask about Milan’s kids, Tom suggests that the revived downtown could include “a video arcade or something.”

Roselyn also admits the Indiana Hoops Hall of Fame has asked about the museum’s material, if things don’t work out. “But I don’t want an Indianapolis museum.”

* * *

The counterargument — to the pothole-obsessed public, to the local boy turned East Coast cynic — remains the same: believe. Believe in big dreams. Believe in town-sized miracles. Believe in one more upset.

Roselyn can point to her cache of letters, voice mails, and, most of all, stories from people who have made pilgrimages to Milan. The museum attracts visitors from all 50 states and 14 foreign countries, but it draws only 40 people a week. (That number jumped to 74 during the week of Butler’s Final Four appearance.) Souvenir sales and the proceeds from Roselyn’s book keep the doors open a few hours each day, Wednesday through Sunday, but only in an overhead-free location like Nichol’s Barber Shop and only with a volunteer staff.

Even under these conditions, the Milan ‘54 museum remains worth a visit, if you’re passing through. After looking at the memorabilia, you can talk to Roselyn. She might be sitting at the desk in the back, addressing copies of Hoopla, the group’s newsletter, to state officials. She might be working on the Milan ‘54 application to the Indiana Historical Society’s list of endangered sites. (“We know that’s normally for buildings, but we feel the story’s endangered.”) She might even be willing to help you shake the feeling that, this time around, Milan will soon know the taste of defeat.

In today’s Boston Globe, I’ve got an essay on soundbites, the media, and political coverage. Ever since 1992, when Daniel Hallin documented that the length of the average TV soundbite fell from 43 seconds in 1968 to 9 seconds in 1988, people have worried about the shrinking soundbite and what it all means. In the early 1990s, critics blamed this trend on the “Age of MTV.” Today, of course, it’s the Age of the Internet. But as I try to show in my essay, soundbites have dropped in length for a variety of reasons — economic, political, historical, and professional. What’s more, they’ve been dropping for a long time, as new research suggests that newspaper quotations began shrinking in a similar way in the 1890s.

Instead of soundbites, then, we should worry about the tone and focus of our political discourse. And there’s no doubt that this, too, has evolved. In 1968, for example, Spiro Agnew said at a press conference that “Mr. Nixon is trying to cast himself in the role of a Neville Chamberlain.” Agnew meant to say that Hubert Humphrey had done this and quickly corrected himself. As Hallin noted, though, Agnew’s gaffe aired uncorrected and in the middle of a long soundbite on how the Democratic ticket had gone “squishy soft” on Communism and crime. Nobody blanched at his slip because something like it didn’t — and doesn’t — matter.

(One other note: the same year Hallin published his research, a Harvard sociologist named Kiku Addato published a research paper that corroborated Hallin’s findings. I didn’t mention her because it seems Hallin got there first — he told me he noticed the shrinking soundbite while researching his book on the media and Vietnam — and because her analysis lacked his complexity. You can read a .pdf of Addato’s paper here.)

In this week’s New Haven Advocate, I’ve got an essay on Glenn Beck-as-author, disguised as a dispatch from his latest simulcast book event. Through his radio and television shows, Beck can deliver huge sales boosts to obscure political treatises and to mass-market thrillers — and this gets at what the publishing industry calls his “platform.” It’s why he sells books. But why does he write them? I come to a pretty cynical conclusion in my essay, but other explanations do exist. Still, Beck’s books don’t fit with his off-the-cuff nature. At the book event, he turned a Primanti Brothers sandwich, a Pittsburgh delicacy made up of beef, french fries, and cole slaw, into a metaphor for America’s budget crisis. This metaphor allowed Beck one of his few Obama attacks — he introduced the sandwich as “Michelle Obama’s worst nightmare” — but it also reveals how, um, adaptable he can be. It seems Beck didn’t call Primanti Brothers until six hours before the show. He ordered 300 sandwiches.

In this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review — and just in time for the release of George W. Bush’s memoirs — I’ve got an essay on the crazy (but long forgotten) protests surrounding the release of Richard Nixon’s memoirs. My cast of characters includes Tom Flanigan and Bill Boleyn (pictured above), the co-founders of the Committee to Boycott Nixon’s Memoirs, and Sid and Esther Kramer, the co-owners of Westport, CT”s Remarkable Book Shop (pictured below). Really, though, it includes just about everyone living in 1978 — because RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon came with a degree of media hype achieved by no presidential memoir before or (so far) since.

For further proof of this, check out this contemporary news broadcast (YouTube) and, below, some great caricatures of Nixon as author. I also wrote a blog post for the Times about the two “deluxe” editions of Nixon’s memoirs — this phenomenon of presidential publishing also occurred with Carter’s, Reagan’s, Clinton’s, and, now, Bush’s books — and there are some images of those editions. After that, as promised, a few old newspaper photos of the Remarkable Book Shop. Sid told me that, when the RBS closed in 1993, Paul Newman called him and said, “Don’t close — you can’t close.”

The New Republic (1974)

The New Republic (1978)

Boston Globe (1978)

*  *  *

RN‘s $50 “deluxe” edition, with slip case

RN‘s $250 “numbered presentation” (and
leather-bound and gold-detailed) edition

The “numbered presentation”
edition’s certificate of authenticity

The first volume of Warner’s paperback edition ($2.95)

*  *  *

The RBS in the 1960s (Dan Woog)

New York Times (1994)

New York Times (1987)

New York Times (1994)

In this week’s “Ideas” section of the Boston Globe, I’ve a profile of Jill Lepore and her new book The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History. Lepore was a great interview. (A couple of favorite [and context-free] lines: “I drink my cup of coffee and I think about the history of coffee. In my brain, everything unfolds on a time line”; “Arthur Schlesinger didn’t have to deal with email.”)

Lepore’s also written an interesting, if uneven, book. One thing I couldn’t get to in my profile was her critics within the academy. Lepore’s smartest move in The Whites of Their Eyes may be accusing the Tea Party of presentism — the Bicentennial was also, in Lepore’s phrase, “a carnival of presentism” — because this makes it harder to level one of history’s dirtier words at her. (The president of the American Historical Association defines presentism as “the tendency to interpret the past in presentist terms.”) Still, that’s exactly what people have done to her previous work. Consider the end of Brendan McConville’s blistering review-essay of Lepore’s New York Burning:

The unintended lesson within New York Burning is for those of us who study early America, and it goes something like this: colonial Americans aren’t like us, and that is what is truly disturbing and fascinating about them. Efforts to make their lives a long prologue to the emergence of our own world don’t work, even though some things they did clearly affect us.

I will say that, when it comes to writing about complex historical ideas for popular audiences, I’ve developed a lot of sympathy for Lepore. In the profile, for example, I wanted to explain why Sharron Angle was crazy to call Jefferson and Franklin “social conservatives.” Jefferson was easy enough — as was Franklin, if I’d talked about his views on gender inequality. But I figured I had to broach the issue of slavery at some point in a story on colonial America, so I went with Franklin’s abolitionism. Problem is, I’ve read David Waldstreicher’s excellent Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution, a book that shows this matter is much more complicated than simply referencing Franklin’s run as president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. I had to finesse the point, and quickly. I’m embarrassed to say one draft had “Franklin’s semi-abolitionism,” which my editor smartly shot down. “Franklin’s public abolitionism” might not be much better, but I hope it at least registers the skepticism conveyed in Waldstreicher’s book. It’s a small example, but one that nicely illustrates the difficulties in practicing responsible public history.

One more thing: it’s worth rewatching Santelli’s original “rant heard round the world,” if only for the studio’s confused reactions. “It’s like mob rule there” and “he’s a rabble-rouser” —  no surprises there, but how about this line: “Rick, I congratulate you on your new incarnation as a Revolutionary leader.”