Old School

Ninety-nine years and five days ago Theodore Roosevelt was shot in the chest in Milwaukee while on the campaign trail . . . he proceeded to deliver a 90-minute speech before seeking medical attention. His opening statement was, "Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose." A copy of the speech can be found here. As a colleague of mine just remarked, "that is old school."

As we gear up for the next presidential election, I'm not sure what this story may or may not say about today's politicians and presidential candidates, but I know this: I would not want to be following the legacy of TR! I can also imagine that if a candidate were to display those kinds of heroics, he or she would be nearly impossible to beat. Less than a month after the Bull Moose speech, President Roosevelt lost the November 1912 election to Woodrow Wilson.

America Eats…And Discovers

By Adam Nemett

My colleague Scott McMurray recently wrote an excellent post about the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the program’s vital role in Depression-era rebuilding of our nation’s economy and infrastructure. I’d like to piggyback on that and write about the WPA’s vital role in my dinner last week.

Operating out of the same location as Chef José Andres’ famed Café Atlantico restaurant, which took Washington, D.C., by storm about 25 years ago, America Eats Tavern is the namesake of a 1935 WPA program that sent unemployed writers—including plenty of unknowns, but also such luminaries as Eudora Welty, Ralph Ellison and Saul Bellow—to capture the unique stories, ingredients and rituals behind America’s melting pot of culinary culture. Writers traveled the country, seeking out hidden kitchens, family recipes and regional food festivals. The material was collected, but never properly exhibited or published. Most of the content has been collecting dust in the Library of Congress and National Archives for the better part of a century.

A few years ago, Brooklyn author Pat Willard uncovered these archives and followed them on her own trek through contemporary America, searching to see which traditions remained. Willard published her findings in the 2008 book America Eats!: On the Road with the WPA—the Fish Fries, Box Supper Socials, and Chitlin Feasts That Define Real American Food.

Chef Andres took the concept one step further, going back to the National Archives and putting his own unique spin on these traditional dishes. He added short historical blurbs under each listing. It took us longer to read the menu at America Eats Tavern than it did to actually eat the food, but in quick order we sampled:

• Oysters Rockefeller (created in 1899 at New Orleans’ renowned Antoine’s restaurant, the dish is named “for the richest man in the world because it tastes and looks like a million dollars”)
• Buffalo Wings (invented by a bartender’s mom who wanted to impress his late-night clientele)
• Vermicelli Prepared Like Pudding (“the grandfather of today’s mac n’ cheese”)
• Cobb Salad (named after the owner of Hollywood’s Brown Derby restaurant, who accidentally created the salad from a hodgepodge of fridge leftovers)
• Kentucky Burgoo (a stew once traditionally prepared with blackbird and squirrel meat)

To wash it all down, we had Franklin’s Milk Punch (from Benjamin Franklin’s 1763 recipe), Grog (sailor’s rum mixed with lime to prevent scurvy), and Switchel (a field worker’s drink made of rum, molasses, cider vinegar and ginger).

The whole thing may sound gimmicky—and in some ways it was—but the meal was tasty and it’s rare that one gets an opportunity to truly “taste” history. But be warned, a meal with this much research and substance behind it doesn’t come cheap ($78 for a two-person Lewis and Clark-esque Bison Steak).

Behind the restaurant itself, though—newly opened, on Independence Day and only up for six months—is a deeper purpose. A partnership between ThinkFoodGroup and The Foundation for the National Archives, the pop-up restaurant benefits the National Archives Experience—an initiative to “open the stacks” of our preserved documents and artifacts and allow visitors to explore forgotten records like the WPA materials that Willard and Andres found so compelling. These intrepid explorers found buried treasure in the archives that has thus far yielded a book, a restaurant and a “What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam?” exhibit tracing our government’s impact on what we eat. The goal of the project is to open a new museum on the National Mall where visitors can more directly interact with similar gems.

Our founder likes to say that “archives confess truth” and people seek this kind of substance and authenticity, whether they’re hearing a story or sitting down for a meal in D.C. I’m hoping this latest National Archives concept becomes a reality. I’m curious to see what people will pull from the stacks, how they’ll make it their own and which of these elements from our buried past will find their way back to an evolved future.

What Happens Next?

by Matthew Jent

Google started in a garage, with a remote control door, before becoming a billion-dollar company that invented a new verb. Just Google it!

Nike began as Blue Ribbon Sports, with co-founder Bill Bowerman ripping apart running shoes to find out how to make them lighter, faster and better.

The Upton Machine Company began with an order of 100 electric ringer-washers, all of which broke down—and all of which Lou Upton replaced at no cost to the customer. One hundred years later, the Upton Machine Company is called Whirlpool Corporation, the largest manufacturer of home appliances in the world.

Origin stories! Beginnings are built to grab our attention, and whether it’s a corporate history or the adventures of Superman, they tend to include portents of the future, moments of mythological significance and unforgettable characters. But a lot of “About Us” websites will stop there, or jump from the beginning to the present day, whether that founding story was five years ago, five decades ago or at the turn of the last century. And that misses a big opportunity to tell a compelling story, to clients, customers and employees.

DC Comics, the home of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and the Green Lantern, have been in the news lately with a publishing initiative called “The New 52,” which restarts all of their titles at new #1 issues and retells origin stories for their characters, some of whom have histories stretching back more than 70 years. This reboot is proving successful, at least in the short term. Orders for DC’s flagship title, Justice League #1, topped more than 200,000 issues in August, while July pre-reboot issue barely broke 43,000. And while the stated goal of co-publishers Geoff Johns and Jim Lee (who are also the creative team behind Justice League) is to bring in new readers, this isn’t a new approach for DC. Once or twice a decade they restart their characters and go back to the beginning. In 1986, Superman was relaunched with a new #1 in the wake of the everything-is-different Crisis on Infinite Earths series, and in 2004 they gave all of their titles “zero” issues, rebooting their origins. Just five years ago they published a weekly series called 52—this was the old 52, now replaced, I suppose—in which their major characters were given updated origins. It’s tempting to revisit those stories that we know so well—Superman sent from Krypton as a baby, Batman wrestling with the ghosts of his parents—but in doing so, and in doing so over and over again, DC Comics is leaving unanswered the most compelling storytelling question:

What happens next?

Characters like Superman and Batman were successful for decades because their audiences were clamoring for the next adventure, not waiting to relive the last one over and over again. Retelling a story isn’t a bad thing, and it’s not a new fad—the Odyssey is the Aeneid is O Brother, Where Art Thou? after all—but the trick lies in finding new things to illuminate in a story twice told, and after you’ve done that, to make your story’s second act even more exciting than the first. It can be fun to hear a friend tell a well-loved anecdote for the twentieth time, but nothing beats the thrill of learning the answer to

The reason DC Comics restarts their stories every few years is because the sales figures habitually drift back down in the wake of the reboot. In the past, comic books solved this problem by making stories that were All-New, All-Different, moving their stories and characters into unknown territory.

Stories aren’t meant to stand still. Google moved out of that garage and revolutionized keyword advertising. Nike’s logo became an icon, spread by word of foot. And Whirlpool struggled to find its place in the mid-20^th century before teaming up with NASA’s Gemini program—and then becoming a staple in nearly every home in the country. But if all you know about your company is how it got started—if that’s the only story you tell—you’re failing to move forward and failing to answer that most compelling question:

What happens next?

(Photo: Then-U.S. Senator Barack Obama posing next to a statue of Superman in Metropolis, IL, in 2006. From the United States Senate office of Sen. Barack Obama)