A New World Ablaze

By KURT ANDERSEN

It was the spring of 1848, a Saturday afternoon. During the previous two months, gold had been discovered in California and America's war with Mexico had finished. An impromptu revolution in Paris had caused the French king to abdicate, the first of 50 revolutionary dominoes to fall in Europe. In New York City, the writer and photographer Timothy Skaggs--35, single, fun loving, with no grand purpose in life--prepared to go among the multitude.

Skaggs had finished his day's work, a double portrait of the magician Signor Antonio Blitz and his favorite wooden dummy. He decided to use the rest of the afternoon to start writing an essay, inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's lecture last month, on the ways that railway travel and photography and the telegraph were warping the perception of time.

And he'd decided that a taste of opium, just five or six grains, would be a propitious way to prime his pan for the task.

And so it was. By the time he stepped out on the sidewalk for a stroll, he had filled two large, double-elephant sheets and started on a third--ten square feet of fresh words. It was five o'clock.

No! Not merely five o'clock, he noticed as he looked in at the clockmaker's, but precisely seven past five--no, seven minutes forty-three, -four, forty-five seconds past. He had been writing all afternoon about "the useful tyranny of clock time," and here it was, displayed two dozen different ways in a shop window on his own block. Today he had scribbled out his theory that because watches in every pocket and clocks in every factory and railroad station had stimulated in people an acute awareness of time passing, that itchy new awareness had in turn stimulated the popular impatience with the status quo, and the new demands for still speedier progress.

"Schveep for half a cent?"

Skaggs blinked. Occupied by his own overheated thoughts, he had hardly registered the presence of the city, let alone its people. He saw now that he was in the crowd huddling along Broadway, waiting for a landau and a city wagon to pass. In the landau were a pair of rich ladies dressed for a party, each smiling and holding a tiny candle out the windows of the carriage. Piled in the wagon were dozens of street carcasses--mostly dogs, some rats and cats, a couple of pigs, the whole heap covered in an inch of lime, which sifted out between the boards as the wagon rolled, leaving a fuzzy trail of white on the pavement.

"Schveep for you, sir, please?" A street arab of nine or ten was tugging at his coat with one hand and with the other held a broom as tall as she. A patina of filth made her chestnut hair black, and she had no right eye.

"Ja, bitte," he said.

The girl smiled.

"Which I'm afraid," he continued, "is practically the entire extent of my German, which I acquired in Buffalo. Haben sie von Buffalo?

The girl giggled now at this funny American and started furiously brushing away the dirty feathers and bits of dried manure from the patch of Broadway in front of him, making the odors and motes rise and swirl as she cleared a place for him to step. When she came for her wage, he noticed that his writing pencil was still gripped tight in his hand, so he ceremoniously placed both it and a penny in the girl's open palm. She glanced up quizzically, registered his smile, winked her good eye and plunged the pencil like a bodkin into one of her braids, shouting "Danken sie!" as she dashed off down ... Worth Street, Skaggs saw on the sign bolted to the lamppost. The single Negro among the city's lamplighters stood on his ladder wiping soot from the street sign with a rag.

Skaggs had walked quite far, he realized now, in this pleasantly addled state. And that was part of the problem with his current life, he reckoned--his familiarity with almost every board and stone and step of Manhattan, his habitat by now so well known that even in a light opium haze he was able to wander for a mile, chatting silently with himself.

As he crossed Worth, he watched the lamplighter gingerly poke his torch, like a wizard's wand, up inside the glass globe toward the jet of gas. The bloom of light enveloped Skaggs.

A moment earlier it had been afternoon, the sky still indigo; now from within the glamorous bubble of white-hot glow, night had fallen over the rest of the city, it seemed. Skaggs' favorite hours in New York had always been the gradual, liminal recession of day into night, the daily autumn, with each of its slow, soft, ambiguous gradations of deepening color and shadow. But twilight had been rendered obsolete by the New York Gas Light Company. Half the city's streetlamps were gas now.

Skaggs did not believe, as many people did, that gaslight harmed one's eyes. But expanding its territory in every direction, the new light allowed New York to remain awake longer, to ignore the earth's rotations. The interminable glow had turned tens of thousands of New Yorkers into night-crawling scamps instead of the select fraternity that stayed out late carousing when Skaggs had first arrived. And Skaggs did wonder if the city's gas-fired wakefulness had begun to overstimulate its inhabitants, make them merrier, louder, funnier, stranger, greedier, crazed.

As he stepped now from the luminous Worth Street blossom back into the ordinary mid-block evening, the whole view down Broadway struck him as unusually bright, saturated with light.

To be modern, he thought, is to be artificially aglow.

Nor was the new luminosity only a matter of gaslight spreading into every dining room and parlor and respectable street. There were also the laughably large new panes of plate glass that amounted to architectural magician's tricks, erasing the old boundary between indoors and out. And the unearthly rays of light beaming from burning lime that transformed any actor on a stage into a shining angelic or demonic figure; the magic-lantern shows of Halley's comet; the new, exceptionally yellow yellow paints and bright red printer's inks, all mixed up by chemists in laboratories; the telegraph wires that sparked and blushed against the night skies like grapevines beset by St. Elmo's fire.

Modernity glows.

Then, however, he recalled the world's other great modern metropolis--murky, sullen, dun-colored London, which he had visited last year. It was a city that seemed to darken a little more every day from the soot belched by smokestacks and chimneys.

All right, then, an amended declaration: modern America glows.

On the sidewalk in front of him, a telescope man had set up for business: five cents for a five-minute look at the moon's craters and Saturn's rings. Tonight there was already a queue of people hoping to see GOD'S OWN ILLUMINATIONS, as the man's wooden sign promised. What a funny puff to peddle astronomy, Skaggs thought as he prepared to cross the street--when five drummers in Army uniforms stepped directly in front of him. He had accidentally bumped the nearest man.

"Oops, pardon me," he said, and only then noticed behind the drummers a whole band. They were silent but for the soft stomping of their boots as they marched in place. And then, they moved forward into Broadway and began playing Yankee Doodle so loudly that Skaggs was blown backward. He thumped his right elbow against a bystander's belly--and as he jerked away and prepared to apologize, accidentally brushed his left hand across the lightly upholstered buttocks of the man's young wife.

Modern America: artificially aglow, preternaturally loud--and unreasonably crowded. Then Skaggs remembered why. Tonight was the peace festival, to celebrate our crushing of Mexico: the bands and General Winfield Scott and some of his New York troops marching up Broadway from the Battery and, by order of the mayor, the illuminations, a patriotic obligation for all New Yorkers to stick candles on windowsills, twist open the valve on every gas lamp, carry candles, wave torches, build bonfires--that is, to come as close as possible to burning down the city without actually setting it afire.

In the short pause after the first verse of Yankee Doodle, Skaggs heard another familiar tune insert itself. He turned and saw that behind him, marching out of Worth, another regimental band had appeared, playing one of the inescapable songs of the moment, Strike for Your Rights, Avenge Your Wrongs.

As the band reached the last bars of its first verse, pedestrians began shouting the words and clapping along in time.

Felt Mexico's foul tyranny,

Upon the Rio Gran-dee!

More voices joined in on the chorus:

Sing to the Rio Gran-dee,

The rolling Rio Gran-dee,

Our foe shall bow the knee!

Almost none of the citizens knew any of the lyrics except the chorus and final lines of each verse. All the words that people had memorized, and now gloried in shouting out, were the angry ones, the ones that smelled of bile and gunpowder and blood.

Skaggs watched a group of girls tossing bouquets at the survivors of New York's decimated Second Regiment. One of the men stopped to pick up a hyacinth and place it in his musket barrel when a large bomb detonated in the sky--followed shortly by a second, smaller explosion. The soldiers and the girls and everyone else in the street stopped and smiled and looked south.

The fireworks were going up from the Battery. Skaggs adored fireworks, and these days the displays were beyond brilliant--not the pale flashes and pops of his childhood, but reds and blues and greens burning in apocalyptic splendor. At one astounding bloom of purple, he cooed along with the rest of the crowd on Broadway.

Artificially glowing, artificially noisy, artificially jolly America ... and in these protean times, it occurred to Skaggs as he stared at the fire in the sky, modern artifices turn from toy to tool to toy and back again: gas lamps had begun as theatrical gewgaws before they became street fixtures, just as weapons of war had been turned by the pyrotechnicians into entertainments.

He hustled back toward West Broadway, against a column of people holding tiny star-spangled banners on foot-long sticks, all eager to join the bloody-minded festival of peace.