by Stephen Fry
PA
Nicknames:
The Keystone State, The Quaker State
Capital:
Harrisburg
Flower:
Mountain laurel
Tree:
Eastern hemlock
Bird:
Ruffed grouse
Toy:
Slinky (I’m not making this up)
Motto:
Virtue, Liberty and Independence
Well-known residents and natives: Benjamin Franklin, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, John Updike, August Wilson, James A. Michener, Dean Koontz, John O’Hara, Thomas Eakins, Pearl S. Buck, Man Ray, Andy Warhol, Marilyn Horne, W.C. Fields, the Barrymores, David O. Selznick, Gene Kelly, Jayne Mansfield, Grace Kelly, Henry Mancini, Charles Bronson, Richard Gere, Kevin Bacon, Sharon Stone, Will Smith, M. Night Shyamalan, Perry Como, Bill Haley, Chubby Checker, Keith Jarrett, Hall and Oates, Christina Aguilera.
* * *
This, Jim tells me, is an important part of the background to Abraham Lincoln’s shining moment of oratory.
The Address
In July of 1863 the Union forces had won a great victory over Lee’s Confederate army at Gettysburg, PA, a victory that was believed at the time to be a potentially decisive turning point. The losses were staggering, the largest number of any battle in that war: over 50,000 casualties in two days of dreadful fighting.
It was decided that a great and grand National Cemetery should be created to house the dead of both sides. A dedication ceremony was planned for November and, almost at the last minute, Abraham Lincoln was asked to say a few words, as President. The main oration was to be made by one Edward Everett.
Came the day and Everett spoke for two hours. Lincoln then rose to deliver a ten-sentence address in his ‘high-pitched Kentucky accent’. When he sat down it is unlikely he knew that he had delivered one of the greatest speeches in political history, a speech memorised by generation after generation of American schoolchildren. A speech whose final sentence is so well known it is in danger of landing on one’s ears like an inelegant cliché. I am keen to hear it again. Jim naturally knows it by heart and gives me a private performance.
‘Four score and seven years ago…’ Jim’s voice is sharp and clear. He is speaking the words in exactly the same place where Lincoln first spoke them. The gravestones have heard them before. ‘…our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
‘Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
Shooting the breeze with Abe.
‘But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate–we can not consecrate–we can not hallow–this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us–that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion–that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain–that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom–and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.’
I am in tears by the time Jim finishes. The speech is moving on any occasion, but here amongst the buried dead, on the very ground that ‘we cannot hallow’ it is charged with even greater power. Jim tips his hat and walks slowly off, that unmistakable gait and profile heading towards a group of schoolchildren who, it seems, want his autograph.
The ‘new birth of freedom’ that Lincoln described is what the Civil War somehow, for all its horrors, achieved. It was a necessary war. Heaven knows there was pain and persecution and intolerance after it. But just look at America’s economy in the fifty years before that war and in the fifty years after. As I wrote when looking at the Newport cottages from the Gilded Age, ‘Never in the field of human commerce…had so much money been made so fast and by so few.’ If the Vanderbilts and their ilk were the most prominent beneficiaries of the Civil War, the rest of America waxed fat too. It took the emancipated slaves and their descendants a long time, a shamefully long time, to benefit from the ‘new birth of freedom’ and many might argue they still have not, but without the Civil War, it seems hard to believe that America could ever have risen to her world pre-eminence in power and prosperity.
There is something in the American project, something in simple American oratory, something in the hope and idealism of this frustrating and contradictory nation that still makes my spirits soar and my heart leap with optimism and belief. If only they understood how to make a cup of tea.
Jack the Abe-alike.
MARYLAND (& WASHINGTION D.C.)
‘So neat, so pretty. Even the horse that took me about the streets had nail varnish and an expensive coiffeur. I feel I could live here.’
Maryland (pronounced something like ‘murlan’) is, like Delaware, a Middle State, not quite South and certainly not Yankee.
If ever there was a silly name for a town it is surely that of Maryland’s elegant and graceful capital city Annapolis. I hope Queen Anne, after whom it was named, wasn’t too hacked off about it. What would have been wrong with Anneville? Oh, it sounds like a blacksmith’s iron. Of course. Incidentally, one of the minor but interesting linguistic differences that one meets along the way in America is that they say ‘named for’ where we would say ‘named after’. So they might say Annapolis was named for Queen Anne and Baltimore, Maryland’s biggest town, was named for the English peer Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore, who, as it happened, married one Anne Arundell, after whom, or for whom, Annapolis was originally named Anne’s Town before, in a fit of sycophancy, the city fathers dedicated it to the then young Princess Anne, later of course the last of the Stuart monarchs. One might say all that and then be left both out of breath and holding the loose end of a conversational thread.
Annapolis, ‘Nap Town’ (from the ‘nap’ in the middle of its name), would argue with Newport, RI over which is the sailing capital of America. Indeed Annapolis styles itself the sailing capital of the world. The approach, over the gorgeous Chesapeake Bay, makes for one of the most attractive arrivals imaginable. Water is everywhere, the perfect place to sail and to train naval cadets, really. And there, sure enough, stands the United States Naval Academy, the navy’s equivalent of West Point.
‘Even the horse had nail varnish and an expensive coiffure…’
With a main street which is the closest to an English country town High Street I have ever seen in America, flower-bedecked shop-fronts, a graceful State House and handsome naval cadets strolling about wherever you look, Annapolis strikes me as one hundred per cent charming. So neat, so pretty. Even the horse that took me about the streets had nail varnish and an expensive coiffure. I feel I could live here. The urban excitements of Baltimore and Washington, DC and are not too far away, should one miss bright city lights. And it is towards Washington, thirty-five miles to the west, that I next turn my attention.
Chicken Maryland
Firstly, however, I have to get to the bottom of Chicken Maryland, or Maryland Chicken. Driving towards Annapolis and feeling faint from hunger, at least an hour having passed since I savaged a blueberry muffin, I stop off at a diner for a late lunch.
‘Do you know?’ I decide, ‘I think I shall have Chicken Maryland.’
‘Say what?’
‘Maryland Chicken? You know, Chicken Maryland.’
‘Ain’t nev
er heard of that, honey.’
‘I am still in Maryland, aren’t I?’
‘You sure are.’
‘Hm. And, forgive me, are you yourself from Maryland?’
‘Born ’n’ raised.’
* * *
MARYLAND
KEY FACTS
Abbreviation:
MD
Nickname:
The Old Line State
Capital:
Annapolis
Flower:
Black-eyed Susan
Tree:
White oak
Bird:
Baltimore oriole
Motto:
Fatti maschii, parole femine (‘Manly deeds, womanly words’–I mean, what?)
Well-known residents and natives: Spiro Agnew, Carl Bernstein, James M. Cain, Tom Clancy, Dashiell Hammett, H.L. Mencken, Ogden Nash, Edgar Allan Poe, Upton Sinclair, Leon Uris, Tori Amos, Toni Braxton, David Byrne, Cab Calloway, Philip Glass, Billie Holiday, Frank Zappa, David Hasselhoff, Goldie Hawn, Jim Henson, Spike Jonze, Edward Norton, John Waters, Johns Hopkins, George Peabody.
* * *
Well! Not wishing to humiliate this fine young waitress by exposing further ignorance of her own home state, nor wanting to rob her of my custom, I order a hot-dog and a root beer.
The next diner was supervised by an elderly waitress. Surely she would know her state dish?
‘Chicken Maryland? Never did hear of such a thing. Whass in it?’
‘Well, er…fried chicken, I think. Banana and pineapple fritters, gammon, that sort of thing.’
‘You say banana?’
Several hours later I had eaten three burgers, two more hot-dogs, a plate of chilli and four ice-creams. The news everywhere was the same. Chicken Maryland: Not Known At This Address.
The last diner I try hasn’t heard of the dish either, but I notice they offer a free wi-fi internet service, so I turn to trusty old Wikipedia:
Chicken Maryland or Maryland Chicken is a dish with various interpretations, depending on the country of origin. It is not necessarily known in the U.S. state of Maryland, and is not considered a native dish thereof.
Well, that explains it. Curse those school-dinner ladies. But thank you, internet. Which reminds me, I am late for an appointment with Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales. We are due to meet in the lobby of the Willard Hotel, Washington DC.
WASHINGTON D.C.
The Willard
The Willard Hotel is a grand Washington institution. Martin Luther King wrote his ‘I have a dream’ speech in one of its bedrooms, in 1963. Abraham Lincoln stayed here before his inauguration and Ulysses S. Grant used to retreat to the hotel lobby for tea and nibbles when he was President. He is said to have grown so annoyed with those hanging around and begging him for favours that he cursed them as ‘those damned lobbyists’. Now I happen to know that this explanation of the origin of the word ‘lobbyist’ is untrue, but I arrive for a meeting with Jimmy Wales hoping to catch out his remarkable creation.
* * *
WASHINGTON D.C.
KEY FACTS
Abbreviation:
DC
Nickname:
The District
Motto:
Justitia omnibus (‘Justice for all’)
Well-known residents and natives: Helen Hayes, Samuel L. Jackson, Chita Rivera, Frank Rich, Duke Ellington, Marvin Gaye, Kate Smith, John Philip Sousa, John Foster Dulles, Al Gore, Edward Albee, Pat Buchanan, J. Edgar Hoover, Robert F. Kennedy Jnr.
* * *
Wales, as is fairly well known, made his first fortune in the options market in Chicago and his second with an ‘adult-oriented’ web portal called Bomis. With his editor-in-chief Larry Sanger he created Nupedia. To feed this gargantuan and ambitious online encyclopaedia idea, they created a wiki-based site whose aim, originally, was to service and feed the Nupedia project. Well, Wikipedia, as the world knows, has grown and grown into the most popular reference source in the history of the planet. It is mocked for mistakes, but in reality, who could possibly deny its value, reach, depth and importance? On top of this it is free, open, wholly funded by volunteer donations and entirely non-profit making.
‘Skimming around D.C. like a…’
The neat friendly fellow who meets me in the lobby of the Willard seems to me to symbolise much of what America has given the world in business and entrepreneurialism. On the one hand we have a man who did a master’s degree in finance and copped a bundle in the raw capitalist world of options trading and then repeated the trick with, if not pornography, certainly a trade which no one could regard as idealistic and on the other, we have a philanthropist the third act of whose career involves the creation of something wholly new, idealistic and (allowing for the natural flaws all human creations are likely suffer from) good.
I sit with laptop perched atop lap as tea is brought. ‘Did you know,’ I say, ‘that “laptop machines” is an anagram of “Apple Macintosh”?’
‘Yes,’ says Jimmy Wales.
‘Oh. Anyway. Hope you don’t mind, but I thought we’d test your creation?’
‘Go right ahead.’
Wikipedia leaps the first hurdle straight away. Did the terms ‘lobbyist’ and ‘to lobby’ originate here?
…this is probably false, as the verb to lobby is found decades earlier and did not originally refer to Washington politics.
Good one, Wikipedia.
‘Phew!’ breathes Jimmy.
I show him the entry under ‘Stephen Fry’, not an article I am prone to gaze at fondly, but every now and again I have become used to people asking me how I enjoyed myself at the public school Gresham’s. Whenever I protest that I did not go there, they assure me that I did because it says so in Wikipedia.
‘Okay, let’s change it,’ says Jimmy with the patient ease of one who has had to do this many times at parties. He shows me how to register, log in and edit the article. ‘Wikipedia is organic, self-healing. Mistakes are put right.’
‘But sometimes not before journalists have embarrassed themselves by quoting from an erroneous entry,’ I point out.
‘If Wikipedia can add to its public service role by embarrassing journalists…why then…’ Jimmy downs his tea. ‘Gotta rush. Great talking to you.’
He leaves for the airport and I walk over to the Ronald Reagan Conference Center (there appear to be more institutions, streets and buildings named for that president than almost any other) to catch a performance by the Capitol Steps, a satirical revue troupe who use well-known songs with changed lyrics to poke fun at the political establishment, ‘How do you solve a problem like Korea?’, that sort of thing. All very good fun and excellently performed. Capitol Steps has become almost as much of a Washington institution as Grant’s Tomb and the Lincoln Memorial. I meet Bari, one of the performers, and she promises to show me those and other sights tomorrow.
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia.
Sunset in the nation’s capital, Veterans Day Eve.
Segway
And when the morrow dawns a new potential way for me to make an arse of myself is discovered. I drive Bari in the cab while she points out the sights and tells me where the bodies are buried.
‘I used to come here as a girl,’ she says as we zoom past the Capitol. ‘If people knew what went on–all the sexual scandals.’
‘Oh do tell!’
‘Imagine the worst and double it,’ is all she will say. ‘There must be something in the air. Washington is built on a drained swamp, after all…’
I drop Bari off and pop in to the Segway hire company to be given a lesson in controlling one of their strange electric conveyances, half bicycle, half tennis-court white-line roller. Apparently George W. Bush fell off one and caused great embarrassment to himself and the manufacturers. George W. may have his faults but I suspect he is more coordinated and physically able than me, so I entertain real doubts as to whether the Segway and I are going to be friends.
Extraordinarily we hit it off from the first a
nd I am soon skimming around D.C. like a…well it isn’t easy to know what I skim like. A hippo figure-skating, I suspect.
As I whizz past the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials I see the American flags fluttering against a lilac sunset and I realise that tomorrow is November 11th. Armistice Day. Just five hundred yards further on is the state line and beyond it, Virginia and Arlington Cemetery. Another state beckons.
SOUTH EAST AND FLORIDA
VIRGINIA
‘If I tried to count how many Stars and Stripes I see if I drive a hundred miles along an average highway, I lose count or end up in a ditch.’
It is appropriate that the Commonwealth of Virginia (as with Massachusetts and Pennsylvania the title is not constitutionally significant), named for the Virgin Queen, should claim perhaps the most impressive roll of female achievers of any state so far. American music would be a great deal poorer without Ella Fitzgerald, Patsy Cline and Pearl Bailey. The brother and sister combo of Warren Beatty and Shirley MacLaine is a proud boast for any state, but if we look at the top of the list we see eight presidents, and three of the most important generals in American history. The first three presidents were also Founding Fathers (signatories of the Declaration of Independence), a title also usually conferred upon James ‘Doctrine’ Monroe and Patrick ‘Give me Liberty or give me Death’ Henry, Virginia’s first Governor under independence. So this state, this Old Virginny Home, could regard herself as the Cradle of the Revolution, the Birthplace of the Republic. And she does. The three great heritage sites of Colonial Williamsburg, Jamestown and Yorktown form one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world. Much dressing up in tricorn hats and shouting of ‘Oy-yez’ goes on there daily. It is all very distressing, but things must be, I suppose.