Lightning Man : The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse

Rating:
Summary: Morse Rediscovered
Review: As he did with Houdini, Poe and Cotton Mather, Silverman peels away the tired skin of his subjects and reveals a person hitherto unknown to history. Never one to catalog facts, Silverman redefines not only the person but the era in which he lived. Morse's Calvinism, his passionate pro-slavery views, and his profound frustrations can be comprehended only in the context of his age, which Silverman portrays through dazzling research and exquisite prose. Harrowing Nineteenth Century sea voyages and the Puritan's love/hate relationship with Rome provide two of the many fascinating vignettes that invigorate this portrait.
Once again, Kenneth Silverman has proven himself the Dean of American biographers.

Rating:
Summary: Morse Rediscovered
Review: As he did with Houdini, Poe and Cotton Mather, Silverman peels away the tired skin of his subjects and reveals a person hitherto unknown to history. Never one to catalog facts, Silverman redefines not only the person but the era in which he lived. Morse's Calvinism, his passionate pro-slavery views, and his profound frustrations can be comprehended only in the context of his age, which Silverman portrays through dazzling research and exquisite prose. Harrowing Nineteenth Century sea voyages and the Puritan's love/hate relationship with Rome provide two of the many fascinating vignettes that invigorate this portrait.
Once again, Kenneth Silverman has proven himself the Dean of American biographers.

Rating:
Summary: Telegraphs and Turmoil
Review: Samuel Finley Breese Morse -- painter, sculptor, pioneering photographer and world-renowned inventor of the American electromagnetic telegraph -- considered himself cursed. When he was busy pursuing his first career as an artist, he was a financial failure, if not a critical one. Then his telegraph (patented 1837) embroiled him in a maze of lawsuits with former colleagues who questioned the originality of his discovery. Meanwhile, his family life proved tragic. According to Kenneth Silverman in his superb "Lightning Man," Morse's descendants were heirs not only to his renown but also to his "neglect and inner turbulence." His children hardly knew him; three of seven died as suicides.

Born just outside Boston in 1791, Morse came from old Puritan stock. He was raised in Charlestown, Mass., where his distracted father -- a stern Congregationalist minister -- moonlighted as the author and publisher of atlases and travel guides. (Jedediah Morse's series of geographical primers, launched when "Finley" was just a toddler, proved as popular as the dictionaries published by family friend Noah Webster.)

A staunch Federalist and strict Calvinist, Jedediah used his sermons to attack the liberal social order taking shape in the wake of the American Revolution. At the same time he raged against the Roman Catholic Church, which he saw as a threat to Christian republicanism. At once distant and demanding, Jedediah packed each of his sons off to boarding schools at early ages. Nevertheless, his fire-and-brimstone religiosity, his staunch nativism and his entrepreneurial spirit rubbed off on all three, most especially the boy who was destined to unleash the "lightning" of the telegraph.

Throughout his life, as Mr. Silverman makes clear, Morse would see himself as a sinner in the hands of an angry God. In fact, the first intercity telegraph message transmitted by Morse in 1844 parroted the famous query from the Fourth Book of Moses: "What hath God wrought?" In true Calvinist spirit, Morse published tracts -- such as "Foreign Conspiracy" (1835) -- and made speeches warning his countrymen to beware of papal ambitions in North America. Eventually he even made failed runs for New York mayor and for Congress under the aegis of the Native American Democratic Association. Such activities always ran a close second to Morse's primary pursuit in life: building a profitable infrastructure of patents, personnel and wires for the transmission of telegraphic messages from town to town.

Morse's father, while profoundly hostile to Catholics, had been a strong abolitionist, and it was here that father and son parted company. During the Civil War, Morse expressed his admiration for "Christian slaveholders" while criticizing abolitionists as "freedom- shriekers, Bible spurners." In an 1861 pamphlet titled "An Argument on the Ethical Position of Slavery in the Social System," Morse made the case that nature as well as Scripture warranted slavery for "weak and degraded" blacks. Following the surrender of the Confederacy, he declined to take part in ceremonies at his alma mater, Yale, honoring graduates who had served in the Union Army. "I should," he wrote, "as soon think of applauding one of my children for his skillful shooting of his brothers in a family brawl."

Amid the carnage of the Civil War, Morse's 7,500 shares in Western Union -- just one of the telegraph firms in which he held a substantial interest -- soared in value, transforming his sizable fortune into a massive one. It was now that Morse cashed out some of his equity and diversified his holdings, investing in petroleum, insurance and Western copper mines. In this way he hoped to solidify his wealth and prepare a legacy for his seven fractured, ne'er-do-well offspring, whose childhoods he'd bungled.

"You must remember you are a Morse," he lectured one of the younger boys, a product of his second marriage, "and that your grandfather was the Father of American Geography." He said it saddened him to think that he would not live to know the lad as an adult, but there would be time enough in the afterlife: "Then we shall meet, where we shall know each other forever." The boy in question developed a taste for guns and liquor and spent his adult years touring as a cowboy with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show.

Morse died on April 2, 1872, at age 80. Three days later, the U.S. observed a national day of mourning. "Flags flew at half-mast," writes Mr. Silverman. "Telegraph operators draped their instruments in black. The New York Stock Exchange adjourned." Newspapers nationwide ran obituaries, only a few of which mentioned Morse's influential if unprofitable career in art. (His paintings -- mostly portraits and historical scenes -- may be seen today at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery and other major museums.) Fewer still bothered to bring up his bigotries.

But for the modern reader, Morse's most profound obituary lies within the pages of Mr. Silverman's book. Its thorough research, measured scholarship and wonderful prose serve to illuminate, brilliantly, the Lightning Man's eight decades of struggle, inner turmoil and genius. It is not easy to depict -- sympathetically yet realistically -- so flawed and complex a character. And yet Mr. Silverman has.

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating Eye on the Early 19th C. & an American Original
Review: SFB Morse is hardly a forgotten figure in history, but neither does he have the stature of an Edison in terms of the industrial development. As Lightning Man ably describes, the telegraph itself was more an invention of an amalgamation of a variety of predecessor developments in science and technology. Morse deserves ample credit for putting the pieces together and, more importantly, having the drive and acumen to evolve the invention into a successful business model, which was the key for its transformative effect on world technology. Yet his life, before the appearance of this excellent biography, seems shrouded in the myth of the lone inventor.

What's truly fascinating about his story and this book is the tale of the transition from the idea of the lone individual genius to the research lab, the difference between a great idea and a useful product, the move from progress being measured by the fevered work of a single man to the joint efforts of the company and the corporation. The story is one of a transformation of a culture, but which stays firmly focussed on its subject, Mr. Morse, in telling the tale.

Morse's "early" years as a painter are covered extremely well, and while the transition between his career as a painter to one as an inventor may seem bizarre and abrupt to the modern conception, Silverman illuminates this strange career change in the light of the times. Morse himself was a bridge between early American puritanism and a more modern philosophy that was to come. His philosophy of human nature and of himself had all the prejudice, bravado, arrogance, hypocrisy, idealism, greed, and Calvinist self-loathing that made the first half of the 19th century such a dynamic period. That Morse had to travel abroad to study fine art painting, a field considered by many Americans of the time to be vile and barely a craft, and sought the approval of the Academy of the day in Europe also neatly encapsulates the love-hate relationship of the period with European culture and learning. (Morse's own tortured schizophrenia on European political institutions is a subtheme: he is quick to criticize the European political systems of the day in his younger years, and all too eager to accept the emoluments and honors of royalty in his later ones.) The treatment of Morse's early years and his relationship with his then-even-more famous geographer father is done very deftly, without resorting to facile Freudian psychobabble, as we see Morse attempting to simultaneously win parental approval, find his own way in the world, make a name for himself, and try to see his own importance.

There's an American tragedy within Morse's life story as well, in the way he bitterly fought -- perhaps too hard in some ways -- to get the sole credit for inventing the telegraph that he is popularly (and inaccurately) given in the one-line biographical entries of modern histories. This fight was done partly for ego and celebrity, and partly to protect his patents and late fortune. It's a sad and cautionary tale how Morse was never able to settle into any kind of self-satisfaction as he became obsessed with his own legacy.

Morse was an American original, and there's a fascinating pull to the story of a man never happy with himself despite having reached conventional success in two quite different professions.