Biden’s Architecture of Power

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, May 27, 2021

Biden’s Architecture of Power

He topples a nonpartisan arts commission for much the same reason vandals topple old statues.

‘I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble,” Augustus Caesar said of his reign. If only the president consulted his Suetonius. Joe Biden found Washington a city of marble and has set out to throw bricks at its defenders. The latest target is the nonpartisan Commission of Fine Arts. In a break with more than a century of tradition, on Monday the executive branch, writing “on behalf of President Biden,” ordered a majority of the fine-arts commissioners, including the chairman, to resign by the close of business or be terminated that evening. Next, Mr. Biden named four new appointments in their place.

“I respectfully decline your request to resign,” shot back Justin Shubow, the commission’s chairman, who was appointed to a four-year term in October 2018. “No commissioner has ever been removed by a President, let alone the commission’s chairman. Any such removal would set a terrible precedent.”

Mr. Shubow is right to stand firm against executive overreach. Established by Congress in 1910, this independent federal agency has overseen “matters of design and aesthetics, as they affect the federal interest and preserve the dignity of the nation’s capital,” according to the commission’s own description. Composed of seven members with expertise in the arts, the unpaid commission has historically risen above partisan politics—in part by being appointed as terms expire, not at every change of administration. From Taft to Trump, no American president had gone against this tradition.

The four commissioners on the chopping block are seasoned architects, artists and preservationists. Mr. Biden’s move against the peaceful transition of power for these design professionals reveals the high stakes of aesthetics in a newly woke Washington. As Trump appointees, all four are assumed to be defenders of Washington’s classical forms. Coming out of a period of astonishing violence that has sought to destroy symbols of America’s classical inheritance, the four commissioners are for the left but the latest monuments to “white supremacy” to tumble.

One wouldn’t think preserving and extending Washington’s classical order should invite controversy. This is a city where a Senate meets on a Capitol Hill, named after the Capitoline Hill in Rome. The Commission of Fine Arts was established to promote classical unity. Inspired by the City Beautiful movement that began in the 1890s, the agency played a key role in tying together the architecture of the White House and the Capitol with a program of new buildings and monuments, such as the Lincoln Memorial of 1922.

In 2020 an executive order called “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture” brought renewed attention to this mission by again giving classical forms priority in federal design. The order overrode a 1960s mandate that had allowed modernist and often Brutalist architecture to squat around the National Mall. Writing in these pages last year, the journalist and historian Myron Magnet observed that the order “would thrill lifelong amateur architects George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. ” America’s Founders “wanted the new nation’s public buildings to embody its ideals of self-governance, rooted in Greek democracy and Roman republicanism.”

In one of his first acts in office, Mr. Biden overturned Mr. Trump’s executive order. Now, by moving against the commission, Mr. Biden looks to extirpate classical roots. In “Paideia,” a magisterial three-volume study of the ideals of Greek culture, the historian Werner Jaeger noted: “Our history still begins with the Greeks. . . . Without Greek cultural ideals, Greco-Roman civilization would not have been a historical unity, and the culture of the western world would never have existed.” First published in the 1930s, this work by a scholar who fled Nazi Germany for the U.S. well understood how “other nations made gods, kings, spirits: the Greeks alone made men.” It fell to the arsenal of democracy, an arsenal of such men, to restore these ideals of humanistic self-governance.

Those ideals have been embodied in America’s elected institutions as well as the buildings that house them. Recent critics have sought to malign America’s classical forms through facile associations with Nazi Germany and the antebellum South. Yet it is Brutalism and other forms of recent architectural supremacy that most align with authoritarian regimes, reflecting through impenetrable design and inhuman scale the totality of the state. By attacking the nonpartisan commission, Mr. Biden further undermines our democratic classical inheritance in both institutional and physical form. For a president who has already staked out his imperial ambitions, one might say, how could he not?

Mr. Biden’s affront to the Fine Arts Commission foreshadows greater challenges ahead for democratic institutions. Formed in April through his executive order, the Commission on the Supreme Court similarly looks to overturn precedent by threatening new presidential pressure and power over the appointment of Supreme Court justices. “Tell your president,” Justice Louis Brandeis said of an earlier attempt to pack the courts, “he has made a great mistake.” The same should be said of Mr. Biden’s move against the Commission of Fine Arts. When it comes to classical forms and classical norms, we don’t need a little Caesar.

Son of a Gun

THE SPECTATOR, WORLD EDITION

Son of a Gun

On the family gun club

In his late-middle age, my father cultivated more of the interests of the old neighborhood. His kitchen overflowed with pasta makers and deli slicers. His prep table was taken over by a home wine-making operation; we ate our meals beside a glass carboy as it bubbled up fermented gas. And scattered about the living room, tucked in the bookcases and stashed behind the coffee table, he positioned an array of locked cases and bags containing a growing collection of rifles, pistols and shotguns.

The acquisitions that came to fill our Upper West Side apartment mainly came from the shops around Little Italy. Home winemaking was once common among Italian Americans. So too was a well-developed sense for gun culture. There was a time when riflery and marksmanship were encouraged across America, after all. Look at any high school yearbook from a century ago and you will likely find a picture of the student gun club. For Americans of Italian descent, an affinity for firearms was a patriotic necessity. The Risorgimento, the fight for Italian reunification, remained a recent memory. In the 1850s, after a first unsuccessful effort, the Italian general Giuseppe Garibaldi had regrouped in Staten Island, bringing with him his partisan supporters, including, so the story goes, my great-great-great-grandfather, a Piedmontese from Cuneo in northern Italy. Loyalty, combat readiness and virtù, have long remained in the blood.

In our family lore, the Papal states and the Napoleonic empire were all variously to blame for giving Italy the boot. Our quarrel with Rome went back to the tale of Ugolino della Gherardesca, the Count of Donoratico and our Pisan progenitor, who became caught up in that unfortunate Guelph-Ghibelline business of the 13th century and was framed by a Popish plot. The denouement found Ugolino deposited in the lowest circle of Dante’s Inferno, where at least he got to nibble on his betrayer, Archbishop Ruggieri.

Such enmities were slight compared to the family loathing for the Austro-Hungarians and their incursions into Italian lands. At the outset of World War One, my great-grandfather and namesake Giacomo Panero, an American banker, voluntarily returned to Italy to join the Alpini, the mountain division of the Italian army. He successfully pushed the Germans out of the southern Dolomites— in the process, we were told, adorning his high-alpine bunker with Hun skulls. His Italian army portraits, in cloak and alpine hat, still adorn my bookshelf.

When I reached the age of 16, it was time for me to join the family ranks. My father brought me downtown to John Jovino Gun Shop to acquire my first firearm. The old gun shop was a small storefront in an alley behind the palatial former police headquarters at 240 Centre Street. An oversized pistol hung from its sign, a famous urban marker that made cameo appearances from Weegee to Serpico. Founded in 1911, the store was the oldest gun shop in New York, if not the country, before it was finally cut down by the Covid closures of 2020. Back in the early 1990s, as city residents turned to self-defense at the height of the last New York crime wave, business was booming.

Gun enthusiasts are some of the nicest people you will meet. The owners were happy to see a first-time family walk through the door. We selected a Marlin 882 SS, a .22 caliber Winchester magnum rimfire rifle. The gun’s bolt action, still to this day a joy to slide, must have reminded my father of Giacomo picking off those Germans high in the Dolomites. We mounted it with a magnifying scope. To this purchase my father added a .22 target pistol and .357 Magnum revolver.

It should be said that New York City’s gun laws are among the most punitive in the country — for law-abiding citizens, at any rate. Acquiring the license to safeguard a firearm in your home and to transport it in a locked bag to a range is an ordeal. Even during the Nineties crime wave, licensing your firearm was nearly as onerous as today, and my father did it by the book. At the time, it required months of paperwork, background checks and precise postal money orders that had to be filed with a clerk in the bowels of One Police Plaza. Unless you are in a business that transports large sums of cash or cash-equivalents, you can forget that concealed-carry license.

Fortunately at our range it was a different story. Since the owners ‘sold the bullets to the police’, the atmosphere in our tidy range, tucked two stories below the streets of Lower Manhattan, was more laissez-faire. I was more than free to practice with my father’s firearms. I could also try out any of the Glocks or other pistols they kept behind the counter. Want to test out a 12-gauge pump action shotgun against the ‘thug’ target? Fire away. The range came stocked with food catered from Chinatown and, understandably, quickly became my high-school hangout.

In his retirement, my father left the city for freer gun states. His collection came to include a vintage Browning Auto 5 and a Remington 581S. When my wife came to meet him, he gifted her a snub-nosed .38 special in the manner of Clemenza handing one to Michael Corleone, just without the tape on the butt.

In 2003, when the Smith and Wesson company debuted its .50 caliber five-shot revolver (the Model 500), my father was first in line to purchase one. He lived and died an avowed atheist, but he believed in stopping power. The gun was designed to stop a bear in its tracks. It could also ‘put a bullet through an engine block’, he liked to say. When we finally tested it together at a sandpit in the free state of Vermont, the pistol felt like a piece of personal artillery. A flaming shockwave emanated from the end of its barrel and expanded in a cone of heat and light. ‘This gun is your inheritance,’ he told me, more on target than I cared to realize. It was the last time we shot together.

The Right Angle

THE NEW CRITERION, June 2021

The Right Angle

On Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler

After the Bible and Shakespeare, one of the most reproduced books in the English language is Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler. No surprise there: the seventeenth-century fishing how-to is as alluring today as when it was written. Walton’s understanding of the behavior of freshwater fish remains remarkable for the depth of his acuity and the intimacy of his language. No one else could describe a trout or a pike or a perch in such living terms as Walton. Published amid the turmoil of the Interregnum, the book also offers an escape from the failings of man into a more companionable world of fish and freedom, a particularly English freedom revealed in Walton’s observations and candor. Whether as a “Brother of the Angle” or mere “Pretender,” rare is the reader not hooked by this “Compleat” discourse on, as its subtitle suggests, the “Contemplative Man’s Recreation.”

Walton sets Angler as an extended “Conference betwixt” a fisherman (Piscator), a hunter (Venator), and a falconer (Auceps): “You are well overtaken, Gentlemen!,” Piscator begins. “A good morning to you both! I have stretched my legs up Tottenham-hill to overtake you, hoping your business may occasion you towards Ware, whither I am going this fine fresh May morning.”

The three become confiding friends who soon reveal that complaints about fishing are nothing new. Venator says that he has “heard many merry Huntsmen make sport and scoff at Anglers.” Auceps admits that he too has “heard many grave, serious men pity them, ’tis such a heavy, contemptible, dull recreation.” As each sportsman proceeds in “commending his recreation,” Piscator sets the hook for reeling in his audience to the joys of angling:

O, Sir, doubt not but that Angling is an Art; is it not an Art to deceive a Trout with an artificial Flie? a Trout! that is more sharp-sighted than any Hawk you have nam’d, and more watchful and timorous than your high mettled Marlin is bold?

A Trout! For most, a fish is a fish, but Walton makes a friend of his forage as great fishermen do. He respects the mind and manners of his creel as he would a visitor and guest.

Piscator goes into an extended consideration of the connections between fishiness and Godliness, one that should leave the reader with little doubt that the one true church is waterside and the one mode of veneration is angling. Of the twelve Apostles, Jesus “chose four that were simple fishermen,” as Walton writes. Not only that, but “when our blessed Saviour went up into the mount, when he left the rest of his disciples, and chose only three to bear him company at his Transfiguration, that those three were all Fishermen.” Why fishermen? Because “he found that the hearts of such men, by nature, were fitted for contemplation and quietnesse; men of mild, and sweet, and peaceable spirits, as indeed most Anglers are.”

The hook is clearly set. As if there were any lingering doubt of a fisherman’s divine favor, “I might tell you that Almighty God is said to have spoken to a Fish, but never to a Beast; that he hath made a Whale a Ship, to carry and set his Prophet Jonah safe on the appointed shore.” In this extensive dialogue on the life aquatic, Walton’s discourse suggests that Melville’s latter-day fish tale may have been another product of The Compleat Angler’s influence.

Mixed in with many discussions of flies and worms, of just where to set the hook and when to reel it in, are Walton’s affecting chapters on fish species: The salmon is “accounted the King of freshwater fish”; the tench is the “Physician of Fishes”; the perch is a “very good, and very bold biting fish”; the eel is the “most daintie fish . . . The Queen of palat pleasure”; and the carp is the “Queen of Rivers; a stately, a good, and a very subtil fish.” We learn such details that “in Italy they make great profit of the spawn of Carps, by selling it to the Jews, who make it into red Caviare; the Jews not being by their Law admitted to eat of Caviare made of the Sturgeon, that being a Fish that wants scales, and (as may appear in Levit. 11.) by them reputed to be unclean.” As for the trout, “He may be justly said, as the old poet said of wine, and we English say of venison, to be a generous fish.” Pikes, meanwhile, are “maintained by the death of so many other Fish, even those of their own kind.” This apex predator is the “Tyrant of the rivers, or the Fresh-water wolf, by reason of his bold, greedy, devouring, disposition; which is so keen.” As for just what to do with such a “solitary, melancholy and a bold Fish,” Walton offers up a recipe:

First, open your Pike at the gills, and if need be, cut also a little slit towards the belly; out of these, take his guts, and keep his liver, which you are to shred very small with Time, Sweet-Marjoram, and a little Winter-savoury; to these put some pickled Oysters, and some Anchovies, two or three; both these last whole (for the Anchovies will melt, and the Oysters should not) to these, you must add also a pound of sweet butter, which you are to mix with the herbs that are shred, and let them all be well salted.

The recipe continues on from there. Walton truly set out to make his Angler “Compleat,” resulting in an amiable book that is a tackle box of information.

The title page to the first edition of The Compleat Angler.

Born around 1593, in the town of Stafford in the English West Midlands, Walton was a staunch Royalist whose works and deeds looked back to the pastoral age of his Jacobean youth. He published the first edition of The Compleat Angler in 1653, “in the most troubled years of the early Commonwealth,” writes John Buchan, who edited a 1901 edition of the work, in his introduction. Through 1676, Walton revised and updated his treatise in five editions. In addition to Angler, he also wrote several “Lives,” such as the one of his friend John Donne. Buchan describes these biographies as “all with this old-world, Jacobean flavour, churchmen all, members of the church quiescent, devout, learned.”

As a young tradesman, Walton ran a small shop in London’s Fleet Street, but Royalist losses pushed him back out to the countryside—as it happens, to a small plot by a stream. Here, “few long lives have been so free from conspicuous misfortune,” Buchan observed. “He had sorrow in his own family, and to one of his peculiar temperament the Royalist reverses must have come as real afflictions. But in the main he lived his easy life of books and angling undisturbed.”

In one episode, Walton was entrusted with a royal jewel known as the “lesser George,” which he secreted away from Cromwell’s London until the Restoration. Otherwise he was a “man of letters pure and simple,” Buchan notes, “the main incidents in his career are the dates of his book, and any attempt at biography is a monotonous chronicle.” In writing his introduction, as the author of spy thrillers, Buchan might have wanted a little more out of his subject. Instead Walton lived out ninety years surrounded by friends of “quietistic temperament,” for which the “strong rude wind of the outer world rarely disturbed those peaceful dovecotes; gentle meditation, mild and sincere devotion, innocent pleasures—such was the order of their days.” Upon his death in 1683, Walton left his cottage, now a museum, to the benefit of his Stafford neighbors so that it might generate income “to buy coals for some poor people that should have most need thereof in the said town.”

Walton wrote as impeccably as he lived. His Angler was not the first fishing book, but it was the one to breathe that “very spirit of innocence, purity, and simplicity of heart,” commented Charles Lamb: “It would sweeten a man’s temper at any time to read it.” Wordsworth dedicated two sonnets to “Walton, sage benign.” Walter Scott wrote that Walton “had so true an eye for nature,” but only wishes he had “made this northern tour” to Scotland. The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica stated, “There is hardly a name in English literature, even of the first rank, whose immortality is more secure, or whose personality is the subject of a more devoted cult.” Buchan concurred, noting that “The Angler has been so praised for centuries that a modern writer must refrain from eulogy and seek only the bare phrases of justice.”

In the sixteenth century, the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner published his 4,500-page, four-volume encyclopedia of the animal world to which Walton often refers. A 1577 book called The Arte of Angling, which was only rediscovered in partial text in the 1950s, carries more than a few similarities to Walton’s own, signaling likely source material. Yet no other nature writer quite “seems always to speak with the living voice,” as Buchan notes, “and it is the living voice that is wanted in a country book.”

Through its “deftness of phrase, the use of mellifluous words, the pleasant cadence of the sentences,” Buchan writes, The Compleat Angler “remains a model of ease and charm.” The “beginning of true angling literature,” the book was the “first to give the sport a halo of letters which it has never lost.” More than a “quaint medley,” Angler in its own day was the “most valuable treatise on the practice of the art, and that still it is not wholly superseded.” But Walton also offers fishing as philosophy and meditation. For Part II of The Compleat Angler, which appeared with the fifth edition,Walton’s friend Charles Cotton extended the franchise by writing a longer discourse on fly fishing: “Here’s a Trout has taken my Flie,” a newbie fisherman laments at one point. “I had rather have lost a Crown. What luck’s this! He was a lovely Fish, and turn’d up a side like a Salmon.” To which Piscator responds: “O Sir, this is a War where you sometimes win, and must sometimes expect to loose. Never concern your self for the loss of your Flie; for ten to one I teach you to make a better.” After all, as Walton writes,

he that hopes to be a good Angler must not only bring an inquiring, searching, observing wit; but he must bring a large measure of hope and patience, and a love and propensity to the Art it self; but having once got and practis’d it, then doubt not but Angling will prove to be so pleasant, that it will prove to be, like Vertue, a reward to it self.

In our own time of troubles, Walton continues to unfold, as Buchan wrote, the “heart and soul of the angler—not necessarily the sportsman, but the angler—a man who loves books as well as his art, who sees nature through the glass of culture, the townsman and the gentleman.” I have not been alone in taking up a renewed interest in fishing over this pandemic year. My Connecticut bait shop still speaks of the “great minnow shortage” of 2020 as more of us became a “Brother”—and Sister—“of the Angle.” Walton is therefore a writer for our age, a needed addition to the pockets of fishermen and non-fishermen alike. “We may say of angling, as Dr. Boteler said of Strawberries, Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did,” Walton concludes, “and so (if I might be judge) God never did make a more calm, quiet, innocent recreation than Angling”—just as no other writer made such a book about the angle.