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THE GRAND PARIS HOTEL OCCUPIED BY NAZI SPIES I BY MARK SEAL
PLUS: Brave Women Who Won the Vote BY LIZA
MUNDY The Mad Science of Booze BY TONY
PERROTTET

A P R I L 20 1 9 • S M I T H S O N I A N .C O M

Journey to
St. Helena,
the remote
island where
the emperor
was exiled

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 Vol. 50 | No. 01 April 2019

features

24
Dinner With
46
Haunted by
the Emperor History
Journey to St. Helena, On the Left Bank of
the tiny island where Paris, a grand hotel that
Napoleon spent his final once housed Nazi spies
years, to sample the and, later, concentra-
splendid desolation of tion camp survivors,
his exile under a scorn- reopens following an
ful British governor extravagant restoration
by Erica Munkwitz and by Mark Seal
James L. Swanson

38
America’s Second
Revolution
The persistence of wom-
en who fought to secure
the vote is the subject
of a new exhibition at
the National Portrait
Gallery on the 100th
anniversary of suffrage
by Liza Mundy
58
Time in a Bottle
Our thirsty correspon-
dent visits Lost Spirits
Distillery, where booze
detectives wield high-
tech instruments to
replicate the taste of
precious whiskeys and
rums going back to the
A statue of Napoleon in Longwood House, residence of the era of Paul Revere
former emperor until his death on May 5, 1821. by Tony Perrottet

02 Contributors
prologue 04 Discussion
84 Ask Smithsonian
07 American Icon: The white picket fence

10
• Pull up a chair, it’s a lawn story
Art: Portraits along the path to freedom
You’ve got questions,
we’ve got experts
09
13 Technology: The myth of fingerprints
SA M A N T H A R E I N D E R S ; A L A M Y

• Body parts as evidence

• Animals’ natural ID’s
20 National Treasure: The first artificial heart
22 Witness: Three Mile Island

Cover: A photograph of Merrill

Joshua posing as Napoleon by
Samantha Reinders.

April 2019 | SMITHSONIAN.COM   1

 contributors

Pierre-Elie Mimi Swartz

de Pibrac
The French photogra-
pher, who has undertak-
en projects in New York,
Cuba and Myanmar,
didn’t have to go far for
his first Smithsonian
assignment, “Haunted
by History” (p. 46). He
stayed in his native city
James L. Swanson & Erica Munkwitz to lovingly capture the
James L. Swanson (“Dinner With the Emperor,” p. 24) has Hotel Lutetia, the Paris
written books about the last days of Abraham Lincoln, John F. landmark where Nazi
Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Erica Munkwitz is a histo- spies once set up head-
rian specializing in modern British and European history who quarters and Holocaust
lectures at American University. Given those backgrounds, refugees later sought
it’s no wonder they’re both fascinated by Napoleon’s final shelter and recupera-
years. But it’s extraordinary that they would travel thousands tion. “For a Parisian,” de
of miles to experience St. Helena firsthand and, while there, Pibrac says, “the hotel is
become engaged to be married—a proposal and acceptance as much a symbol of the
witnessed by an ancient tortoise named Jonathan. city as the Eiffel Tower.”
The Texas native and
two-time National
Magazine Award winner
sees the race to invent
the first artificial heart,
which played out in
Houston 50 years ago (p.
20), as a tale of outsized
ambition. “It’s a way to
look at the myths that
Texans tell themselves,”
says Swartz, author of
the 2018 book Ticker:
The Quest to Create an
Artificial Heart. “The
spirit of the wildcatter
informed the early years
of heart surgery here.
With time, and regu-
lation, that changed,
mostly for the good.”

Clive Thompson Spencer Lowell Mark Seal

The Smithsonian con- As a teenager in Califor- “Few hotels have even one chapter of
tributor finds parallels nia, Lowell landed an history,” says Seal, an author of celebrated
between the early days after-school job printing true crime books and a Vanity Fair con-
of fingerprinting and photos at a one-hour tributing editor. “The Lutetia has so many
the recent boom in DNA photo lab in his local chapters it’s hard to keep count.” He’d long
analysis (p. 13). “What shopping mall. He wondered about the place (p. 46), but it
is weirder and more has been immersed in was the novelist Pierre Assouline who
ominous is the trend photography ever since, told him about its surprising role in
S O U R C E M AT E R I A L : SA M A N T H A R E I N D E RS ; M A R K S C H A F E R
toward local cops asking and today is renowned World War II. “I was instantly hooked.”
for DNA samples from for his witty, bold
everyone they stop, even depictions of scientific
for a broken taillight, and industrial spaces.
just to add to their data- In “Time in a Bottle” (p. Samantha Reinders
bases,” says Thompson, 58) Lowell zeroed in on A South African photojournalist who
whose work appears in the Lost Spirits Distill- covered the George W. Bush White House
Wired and the New York ery in Los Angeles and in 2005 and now splits her time between
Times Magazine. His its “Disneyland-like” Cape Town and Kathmandu, Nepal, Rein-
new book, Coders: The feel, a heady blend of ders journeyed to one of the most remote
Making of a New Tribe high-tech and steam places on the planet—the island of St. Hel-
and the Remaking of the punk: “It’s a random ena, the site of Napoleon’s final exile (p.
World, explores the psy- warehouse downtown, 24). “It’s amazing the amount of history
chology and influence of but you go inside and that can fit on a little rock in the middle
computer programmers. you feel transported.” of the ocean,” she says.

2  SMITHSONIAN.COM  | April 2019 Illustrations by Caitlin Ng

“The Angel’s Share”
Is Bourbon That
Evaporates From
The Barrel.
When You Visit,
Breathe Deep.

BetterInTheBluegrass.com
 discussion
FROM THE EDITORS
IN HONOR OF the Smithsonian Institution’s new American Women’s
History Initiative, our March issue showcased women’s achieve-
ments. “Written Out of History” showed that education standards
throughout the nation require students to learn about significantly
fewer women than men. “It’s way past time for schools to reinforce
the intelligence, talents and independence of females in this coun-
try,” Lois Ford Coleman said on Facebook. “Until society and our
leaders acknowledge and accept that women are equal in all areas,
we will continue to struggle to prove our value.” Others wished the
magazine had gone even further: “I enjoyed the focus on import-
ant and interesting women in history, as well as the discussions
of gender inequality in research and publishing,” wrote Marlowe
Daly-Galeano of Lewiston, Idaho. “I just wish you had featured one
of these women on the cover!”
Gonzo Archaeology
Wendell Phillips (“Revisiting America’s Lawrence
of Arabia”) seems to have become a lost antiquity of
his own, given more recent methods of exploration.
However, he did bring to light much that might oth-
erwise not have been found. When the explorer out-
shines the exploration, one wonders what is wrong
with the picture. A fascinating article about a fasci-
nating life in a time long gone on its own.
— Jan Truslow | Yonkers, New York
Send letters to LettersEd@si.edu or to Letters, Smithsonian, MRC 513, P.O. Box 37012, Washington, D.C. 20013.
C O N TA C T Include a telephone number and address. Letters may be edited for clarity or space. Because of the high volume of
US mail we receive, we cannot respond to all letters. Send queries about the Smithsonian Institution to info@si.edu or to
OVS, Public Inquiry Mail Service, P.O. Box 37012, Washington, D.C. 20013.
4  SMITHSONIAN.COM  | April 2019
TWITTER: @SmithsonianMag
INSTAGRAM: @smithsonianmagazine
FACEBOOK: smithsonianmagazine
I would urge Wendell’s sister to bequeath the remain-
ing artifacts to the Smithsonian or a university that
would be most appropriate for continued research.
— Lorraine Carribean | Atlanta, Georgia
In Tune With Americana
What great photos of Rhiannon Giddens (“String
Theory”). I was very much enjoying the article when
I turned the page to see Ms. Giddens airborne in the
most joyful tambourine smash! An incredible shot—
congratulations to the photographer Lexey Swall!
— Sam Chamberlin | Montgomery, Ohio
Giddens is a genius. Her knowledge of American Roots
music is astonishing, only to be outdone by her voice.
She brings me to tears every time I hear her sing.
— Janet Michael Drantch | Facebook
Whenever I hear her voice, I have to stop and listen.
Long may she sing, write and teach.
— Ruth Landry | Facebook
Fishing for Answers
Even though I am a scientist, reading “The Mystery
of Lake Malawi” made me feel like a fish out of water!
It makes me wonder how every female cichlid is able
to find a desirable mate, given how many species ex-
ist and how picky the members of each one is.
— Julia Leusner | Pennsburg, Pennsylvania
I was hooked. I read the entire story twice, and if I
were a bit younger I’d be off to Africa to visit the lake
before it is changed by overfishing.
— Richard V. Carr | Williamsburg, Virginia
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 T H E PAST I S

prologue A M E R I CA N I C O N
By
Michael Dolan

Lawn and Order

How did a symbol of suburban perfection
become so creepy?
L AMBERT/HULTON ARCHIVE/GET T Y IMAGES

Beginning in the late 1940s, the white picket fence became synonymous with the American Dream.

April 2019 | SMITHSONIAN.COM   7

prologue
A M E R I CA N I C O N

N LITTLE TAYLOR, MISSISSIPPI, outside Oxford, a

developer named Campbell McCool is building Plein
Air, a 64-acre community that, in time, will include
200 wood-frame residences. Each house is advertised
as traditionally Southern, most featuring wide front
porches you can imagine sipping lemonade on. They
have all the modern amenities a home buyer could
desire, but if a customer wants a fence—and about a
third do—it must be of white wooden pickets 40 inch-
es high. Scratch-built and painted, that fence costs
about $2,500, which buys not only a practical enclo-
sure but a complicated piece of the American Dream.
Plein Air is a familiar vision of suburbia, one we’ve
seen in countless movies, advertisements and tele-
vision shows for more than half a century. But while
the pickets remained a constant, our attitudes toward
them changed. In It’s a Wonderful Life, Frank Capra Going 1871
Joseph Lessler
stages that postwar paean’s most optimistic scene, in
which George Bailey woos Mary Hatch, in front of a
to Seed of Buffalo, New
York, receives
the first U.S.
picket fence. Forty years later, David Lynch opens his The sod story patent for a
lawn sprinkler.
unsettling 1986 Blue Velvet with a pan down sinister of a growing His invention
pickets and overripe blossoms. And partway through American includes a
small figurine
the 2013 premiere of “The Americans” the camera obsession of a man,
cuts to the front yard of spies Elizabeth and Philip which held the
Research by Anna Diamond sprinkler hose.
Jennings, set off by white pickets. “The white pick- and Matthew Browne
et fence is a kind of shorthand for Americana,” says
John Mott, production designer for the show’s first 1800 1900
two seasons. “The point of ‘The Americans’ is what
it’s like to live a fraudulent life. These people are not
Americans—they’re Russian agents—but they have
to blend into the American setting.” 1868
Frederick Law 1918
Before they crossed the Atlantic, pickets meant Olmsted designs Lawns lose
something completely different. In Old Europe, the nation’s first ground to veggies
planned suburb, as an estimated
pickets—from piquet, French for “pointed stick or Riverside, Illinois, 5.2 million homes
with an unusual plant “victory gar-
board”—were military gear, logs sharpened to shield amenity: a lawn in dens” to support
archers from cavalry. Needing to demarcate and per- front of each house. the war effort.

8  SMITHSONIAN.COM  | April 2019

 In Colonial haps defend their land, New World colonists installed
times, a
mixture of fences of rough pickets, bare or painted white. In
lime and water the 19th century, mass production made fence parts
protected the
wood pickets cheaper and fancier, and the picket fence became
and gave the fashionable from New England to Key West.
fences their
traditional But not everyone loved fences. In 1841 landscape
white color. design pioneer Andrew Jackson Downing denounced
them as “an abomination among the fresh fields,
of which no person of taste could be found guilty.”
Downing lost that round; as the nation spread west,
so did fencing. In the late 1800s, developers of new-
fangled “suburbs” briefly made the borderless front
yard trendy, scholar Fred E.H. Schroeder writes in
Front Yard America. But fenceless yards were no
match for the Colonial Revival design movement that
appeared around the time of the 1876 centennial and
championed the picket fence. The modest totem of
middle-class prosperity stood even through the 1930s,
when many American households couldn’t afford to
whitewash a fence, never mind an entire house.
Blame the Cold War for doing in the picket fence.
Whether seeking security, embracing new technology
or dodging a tedious paint job, many ’50s-era subur-
banites chain-linked their lots. But the symbolism of
the white picket fence was inescapable, and it slid into
popular culture as a
visual shorthand
for the good life.
A kind, gentle
America posed
behind the pickets in television fantasies like “Father
Knows Best” and “Leave It to Beaver”—an imaginary
all-white realm in which the worst thing that could
happen was Eddie Haskell teasing the Beaver.
The actual fences surged in popularity again in the
1980s, revived by New Urbanist developers attempt-
ing to recreate the appearance of walkable early sub-
urbs. The look’s persistence amuses suburbia scholar
Jeff Hardwick, who sees the modern picket fence as
an echo of an echo. “Everything winds up looking like
a suburb that hasn’t existed in 70 or 80 years,” he says.
Today picket fences are sometimes mandated by
homeowner associations, a regimentation that ren-
ders a benign historic artifact alienating—the oppo-
site of its nature. “You can see through it; if you need
to, you can hop over it,” says developer McCool of the
fence. “If you’re standing in your yard and someone
on the sidewalk pauses, you can have a conversation.”
As for the oft-invoked “good old days,” remember:
Whether you’re talking about the 1980s or the 1890s,
those times were no less complex than these times,
when the American middle class that made the fence
a hallmark occupies shaky ground.
The white picket fence is so simple—a few slats
affixed to horizontal rails, a gate or two—as to invite
endless interpretation. But maybe we should retire
the pickets as metaphor and let them do what they do
best: keep kids and dogs where they belong and en-
courage neighborly interaction. Enough deconstruc-
tion already. Let a fence be a fence.

2005
Using satellite imagery,
a NASA-led study finds
1928 that lawns cover about
“Know-how is a prime 50,000 square miles of
ingredient of a good lawn,” 1957
Massachusetts-based sculptor the U.S., making turf
declares the first issue of grass the nation’s
Lawn Care magazine, pro- Don Featherstone creates
the world’s first plastic lawn largest irrigated crop.
duced by O.M. Scott & Sons
Company (now Scotts Mir- flamingo, based on a picture 2017
acle-Gro). The publication in National Geographic. He Americans spend a whopping
has more than four million names the pink bird “Diego.” $47.8 billion on lawn and
subscribers by 1961. Over the next 50 years, some garden supplies; nearly 80
20 million will be sold. million people buy weedkiller.

2000

1945 1982
DDT—“the wonder The U.S. issues safety standards for
insecticide” of the lawn mowers following a year in which
war—becomes the machines injure about 70,000
commercially avail- people; the toll is now 6,500 a year.
able. More than
1.3 billion pounds 1966 2014
will be applied to Houston’s baseball stadium, During the drought, California
lawns and crops to the Astrodome, installs newly offers rebates for tearing out
control grubs and invented artificial grass known grass. Los Angeles County re-
other pests before as ChemGrass; it’s quickly moves about six square miles.
it’s banned in 1972. rebranded as AstroTurf.

GET T Y IMAGES; IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER: NATIONAL PARK SERVICE; U.S. PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; THE SCOT TS COMPANY LLC; AL AMY (2); NASA; ISTOCK
prologue
A RT
By
Amy Crawford

C O N J U R I N G H I S TO RY
Layered works testify to
African-American loss and hope

D
URING THE DEPRESSION, the Works Prog- transparencies floating in a river or lake, a reference
Harris etched
ress Administration hired unemployed this image to both baptism and the waters that enslaved people
writers to gather oral histories from people with lines from crossed to find freedom. The photos are then paired
Claude McKay’s
born into slavery more than seven decades “Mulatto”: with found objects and sealed under glass etched with
earlier. Now, those gripping accounts of suf- When falls the text by Harlem Renaissance figures. The series’s title,
DA ES H A D E VÓ N H A R R I S

hour I shall not

fering and survival have inspired Daesha
Devón Harris’ bold series exploring exodus and re-
demption. To create her richly layered works, Harris
gathers antique portraits from flea markets, makes
transparent versions of them, and photographs the
hesitate / To Just Beyond the River, comes from a hymn popular in
gain the utmost black churches, like the one Harris’ family has attend-
freedom that
is life. ed for generations in Saratoga Springs, New York. The
song and her artwork, she says, are “about freedom
being within our reach, but escaping us still.”

10  SMITHSONIAN.COM  | April 2019

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 prologue
T EC H N O LO GY
By Illustration by
Clive Thompson Kotryna Zukauskaite

The Myth of
Fingerprints
Police today increasingly
embrace DNA tests as the
ultimate crime-fighting tool.
They once felt the same
way about fingerprinting
A T 9:00 A . M . last December 14, a
man in Orange County, Califor-
nia, discovered he’d been robbed.
Someone had swiped his Volk-
swagen Golf, his MacBook Air and
some headphones. The police ar-
rived and did something that is
increasingly a part of everyday
crime fighting: They swabbed the crime scene for DNA.
Normally, you might think of DNA as the province solely of
high-profile crimes—like murder investigations, where a sin-
gle hair or drop of blood cracks a devilish case. Nope: These
days, even local cops are wielding it to solve ho-hum burglar-
ies. The police sent the swabs to the county crime lab and
ALAMY

ran them through a beige, photocopier-size “rapid DNA”

April 2019 | SMITHSONIAN.COM   13

prologue
T EC H N O LO GY
machine, a relatively inexpensive piece of equipment
affordable even by smaller police forces. Within min-
utes, it produced a match to a local man who’d been
previously convicted of identity theft and burglary.
They had their suspect.
DNA identification has gone mainstream—from
the elite labs of “CSI” to your living room. When it
first appeared over 30 years ago, it was an arcane tech-
nique. Now it’s woven into the fabric of everyday life:
California sheriffs used it to identify the victims of
I DON’T THINK I’M EVER GOING
TO USE FINGERPRINT TESTIMONY
AGAIN. I’VE HAD MY FAITH SHAKEN.
their recent wildfires, and genetic testing firms offer
to identify your roots if you mail them a sample.
Yet the DNA revolution has unsettling implications
for privacy. After all, you can leave DNA on everything
you touch—which means, sure, crimes can be more
easily busted, but the government can also more easi-
ly track you. And while it’s fun to learn about your ge-
nealogy, your cheek samples can wind up in plac-
es you’d never imagine. FamilyTreeDNA, a personal
genetic service, in January admitted it was sharing
DNA data with federal investigators to help them
solve crimes. Meanwhile consumer DNA testing firm
23andMe announced that it was now sharing samples
sent to them with the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmith-
Kline to make “novel treatments and cures.”
What happens to a society when there’s suddenly
a new way to identify people—to track them as they
move around the world? That’s a question that the
denizens of the Victorian turn of the century pon-
dered, as they learned of a new technology to hunt
criminals: fingerprinting.
FOR CENTURIES, scholars had remarked on the cu-
rious loops and “whorls” that decorated their finger-
tips. In 1788, the scientist J.C.A. Mayers declared that
patterns seemed unique—that “the arrangement of
skin ridges is never duplicated in two persons.”
It was an interesting observation, but one that lay
dormant until 19th-century society began to grapple
with an emerging problem: How do you prove peo-
ple are who they say they are?
Carrying government-issued identification was
not yet routine, as Colin Beavan, author of Finger-
prints, writes. Cities like London were booming,
14  SMITHSONIAN.COM  | April 2019
becoming crammed full of strangers—and packed
full of crime. The sheer sprawl of the population hin-
dered the ability of police to do their work because
unless they recognized criminals by sight, they had
few reliable ways of verifying identities. A first-time
offender would get a light punishment; a habitual
criminal would get a much stiffer jail sentence. But
how could the police verify whether a perpetrator
they hauled in had ever been caught previously?
When recidivists got apprehended, they’d just give
out a fake name and claim it was their first crime.
“A lot of that is the function of the increasing ano-
nymity of modern life,” notes Charles Rzepka, a Bos-
ton University professor who studies crime fiction.
“There’s this problem of what Edgar Allan Poe called
‘The Man of the Crowd.’ ” It even allowed for devious
cons. One man in Europe claimed to be “Roger Tich-
borne,” a long-lost heir to a family baronetcy, and
police had no way to prove he was or wasn’t.
Faced with this problem, police tried various strat-
egies for identification. Photographic mug shots
helped, but they were painstakingly slow to search
through. In the 1880s, a French police official named
Alphonse Bertillon created a system for recording 11
body measurements of a suspect, but it was difficult
“Rapid DNA” to do so accurately.
machines like
this one in The idea of fingerprints gradually dawned on sever-
Orange County, al different thinkers. One was Henry Faulds, a Scottish
California, allow
police to process physician who was working as a missionary in Japan
samples from in the 1870s. One day while sifting through shards of
gum, saliva,
blood or semen 2,000-year-old pottery, he noticed that the ridge pat-
in about two terns of the potter’s ancient fingerprints were still
hours.
visible. He began inking prints of his colleagues at
A L A M Y; M E L I S SA LY T T L E
 prologue
T EC H N O LO GY

the hospital—and noticing they seemed

unique. Faulds even used prints to solve a
Body of Evidence
small crime. An employee was stealing al- NOW SCIENCE CAN IDENTIFY YOU
cohol from the hospital and drinking it in BY YOUR EARS, YOUR WALK
a beaker. Faulds located a print left on the AND EVEN YOUR SCENT
glass, matched it to a print he’d taken from a
colleague, and—presto—identified the culprit.
How reliable were prints, though? Could a per- METHOD USES ACCURACY
son’s fingerprints change? To find out, Faulds and some stu-
dents scraped off their fingertip ridges, and discovered they FACE A camera mea- Airport security;
grew back in precisely the same pattern. When he exam- sures eye socket, ad-targeting by
nose, chin and marketing firms;
ined children’s development over two years, Faulds found other features. smartphone
The newest ver- unlocking and
their prints stayed the same. By 1880 he was convinced, and sions are 3-D. app access.
wrote a letter to the journal Nature arguing that prints could
be a way for police to deduce identity. EAR Scientists use Experimental;
sound waves ears may some-
“When bloody finger-marks or impressions on clay, glass, and light rays day replace the
etc., exist,” Faulds wrote, “they may lead to the scientific to map the employee badge
shape and size or the hospital
identification of criminals.” of the outer ear. bracelet.
Other thinkers were endorsing and exploring the idea—
and began trying to create a way to categorize prints. Sure, VOICE A processor Call centers
analyzes tone, track fraudsters;
fingerprints were great in theory, but they were truly useful rhythm and digital personal
only if you could quickly match them to a suspect. pitch to create a assistants and
“voiceprint” that smartphones
The breakthrough in matching prints came from Bengal, works like a key. take orders.
India. Azizul Haque, the head of identification for the local
police department, developed an elegant system that cate- IRIS Near-infrared Security and
gorized prints into subgroups based on their pattern types light reveals border control
patterns in the at airports; India
such as loops and whorls. It worked so well that a police of- iris, even through is collecting iris
eyeglasses and data on all 1.3
ficer could find a match in only five minutes—much faster contact lenses. billion residents.
than the hour it would take to identify someone using the
Bertillon body-measuring system. Soon, Haque and his su- RETINA Infrared light The FBI and CIA
shows retinal verify agency
perior Edward Henry were using prints to identify repeat blood vessels in insiders with
criminals in Bengal “hand over fist,” as Beavan writes. When signature pat- scans, which
terns that can’t are too costly
Henry demonstrated the system to the British government, be faked. for routine uses.
officials were so impressed they made him assistant com-
missioner of Scotland Yard in 1901. VEINS Near-infrared Banks and
Fingerprinting was now a core tool in crime-busting. light reveals hospitals in Ja-
veins in the hand pan and South
Mere months after Henry set up shop, London officers or face; new tech Korea (where
tracks blood flow fingerprinting is
used it to fingerprint a man they’d arrested for pickpocket- to prevent fakes. unpopular).
ing. The suspect claimed it was his first offense. But when
the police checked his prints, they discovered he was Ben- ODOR Sensors detect Experimental;
jamin Brown, a career criminal from Birmingham, who’d an array of possible uses
volatile body include airport
been convicted ten times and printed while in custody. chemicals while security and
disregarding even health
When they confronted him with their analysis, he admit- other scents. monitoring.
ted his true identity. “Bless the finger-prints,” Brown said,
as Beavan writes. “I knew they’d do me in!” GAIT A person’s In Beijing and
walking motion Shanghai, police
is recorded and cameras can
WITHIN A FEW YEARS, prints spread around the world. Fin- analyzed; a fake identify a person
limp won’t dupe from up to 165
gerprinting promised to inject hard-nosed objectivity into the computer. feet away.
the fuzzy world of policing. Prosecutors historically relied
on witness testimony to place a criminal in a location. And HAND From pinkie Authenticating
testimony is subjective; the jury might not find the witness length to thumb individuals at
curvature, a prisons, nuclear
credible. But fingerprints were an inviolable, immutable scanner cap- plants, Disney
tures some 90 parks and
truth, as prosecutors and professional “fingerprint examin-
ALAMY

measurements. beyond.
ers” began to proclaim.

16  SMITHSONIAN.COM  | April 2019 Illustrations by Dayoung Cho • Research by Sonya Maynard

In Nebraska, we believe that only boring people get bored. So we invent our own fun.
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go to VisitNebraska.comHQTCHTGG6TCXGN)WKFG#PFYGNEQOGCDQCTF
prologue
T EC H N O LO GY

“The fingerprint expert has only facts to consider;
he reports simply what he finds. The lines of identifi-
cation are either there or they are absent,” as one print
examiner argued in 1919.
This sort of talk appealed to the spirit of the age—
one where government authorities were keen to pitch
themselves as rigorous and science-based.
“It’s this turn toward thinking that we have to collect
detailed data from the natural world—that these tini-
est details could be more telling than the big picture,”
says Jennifer Mnookin, dean of the UCLA law school
and an expert in evidence law. Early 20th-century au-
thorities increasingly believed they could solve com-
plex social problems with pure reason and precision.
“It was tied in with these ideas of science and progres-
sivism in government, and having archives and state
systems of tracking people,” says Simon Cole, a law
professor at the UC, Irvine, and the author of Suspect
Identities, a history of fingerprinting.
Prosecutors wrung high drama out of this curious
new technique. When Thomas Jennings in 1910 was
the first U.S. defendant to face a murder trial that re-
lied on fingerprinted evidence, prosecutors handed
out blown-up copies of the prints to the jury. In other
trials, they would stage live courtroom demonstra-
tions of print-lifting and print-matching. It was, in
essence, the birth of the showily forensic policing
that we now see so often on “CSI”-style TV shows:
perps brought low by implacably scientific scrutiny.
Indeed, criminals themselves were so intimidated
by the prospect of being fingerprinted that, in 1907,
a suspect arrested by Scotland Yard desperately tried
to slice off his own prints while in the paddy wagon.
Yet it also became clear, over time, that finger-
printing wasn’t as rock solid as boosters would sug-
gest. Police experts would often proclaim in court
that “no two people have identical prints”—even
though this had never been proven, or even carefully
studied. (It’s still not proven.)
Although that idea was plausible, “people just as-
serted it,” Mnookin notes; they were eager to claim
the infallibility of science. Yet quite apart from these
scientific claims, police fingerprinting was also sim-
ply prone to error and sloppy work.
The real problem, Cole notes, is that fingerprinting
experts have never agreed on “a way of measuring the
rarity of an arrangement of friction ridge features in
the human population.” How many points of similar-
ity should two prints have before the expert analyst
declares they’re the same? C O N T I N U E D O N PAG E 8 2

A L A M Y ( 3 ) ; R ES E A R C H GAT E ; A L A M Y; U N I V E R S I T Y O F N E B R AS K A ; A L A M Y; U S DA ; A L A M Y; B M C ZO O LO GY; A L A M Y (2 )
Creature Features
NEW HIGH-TECH WAYS BIOLOGISTS
KEEP TRACK OF ANIMALS

ZEBRA MOUSE COW

STRIPES EARS NOSES
Think of it Technicians When
as nature’s usually mark they were
barcode: The lab mice introduced
configuration with tattoos, in 1921, cow
of stripes on ear clips or nose prints
each zebra implants. But were created
is unique. A new research with ink and
computer shows that paper. Now
can quickly photograph- noses are dig-
compare two photographs to deter- ing blood vessel patterns in the ear itally photographed. Recent patents
mine if they are of the same zebra. might provide a better way. propose doing the same for dogs.

BAT LEMUR KOALA

WINGS FACES SPOTS
USDA sci- LemurFaceID Koalas and
entists have borrows humans
found that crime-fight- have similar
collagen ing anatom- fingerprints,
fibers, which ical methods but research-
give wings to study the ers don’t track
strength and endangered koalas that
flexibility, mammal in way. They use
occur in a Madagascar. less intrusive
telltale pattern in each bat. That It could also help identify a wild le- approaches, such as patterns of pig-
allows them to track individuals. mur that was kidnapped to be a pet. mentation on the animals’ noses.

18  SMITHSONIAN.COM  | April 2019 Research by Anna White

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prologue
N AT I O N A L T R E AS U R E
The Heart
of a Rivalry
The race to develop the
first implantable cardiac
machine featured two
titans of Texas medicine
I
T DOESN’T LOOK LIKE ANYTHING you’d want in
your chest, or the chest of your nearest and dearest,
for that matter. Two strange half spheres covered
in fabric—Dacron, Silastic and polyurethane—the
top torn like petals of some decaying flower, parts
of it flecked with strange, brownish stains that
could be old blood. Two tubes to nowhere protrude
from its lower half. The thing measures 7.5 by 9 by
6.5 inches, though how you would come up with
that calculus in a device with such a curious shape
is hard to say. If anything, it looks like some ancient, misshap-
en pair of headphones, but in fact it’s one of the most famous
medical devices of all time: the first artificial heart ever im-
planted in a human being, back in April 1969, in Houston.
It was a strange time. The nation was in turmoil after the
assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King
Jr. , the ongoing tragedy of the Vietnam War and President
Lyndon Johnson’s announcement that he would not seek
re-election. But as riven as the country was by political and
racial divisions, there was still a belief in American techno-
logical domination. In July 1969, Neil Armstrong became
the first man to walk on the moon. That he was guided by
a team from NASA, southeast of downtown Houston, is not
incidental to this story.
The city was, then, on its way to fulfilling its dream
as a technological capital. The first domed sports stadi-
um—a.k.a. the Astrodome—had opened in 1965, and, if
Houston wasn’t the energy center of the world yet, it was
the center of the oil business, money from which fueled the
growth of what was becoming the world’s largest medical
20  SMITHSONIAN.COM  | April 2019
center. Then as now, heart disease was the main cause of
death, but unlike now, the causes and treatment of heart dis-
ease and, specifically, heart attacks remained mysterious.
Smoking was still glamorous. Jogging, much less marathon
running, had yet to become a thing, as had the whole notion
of preventive care when it came to the heart.
What was a thing—the hottest, newest thing—was heart
surgery, and two of the most famous doctors in the field
were based in Houston: Michael DeBakey, who had, through
sheer force of will made Baylor College of Medicine and
by extension the Texas Medical Center into a global nexus
of medical advancement, and Denton Cooley, a Houston
native who had trained at Baltimore’s elite Johns Hopkins
and with some of the best surgeons at Brompton Hospital
in London. While DeBakey had made his name as a vascular
surgeon, a brilliant administrator and a national spokesman
for public health, Cooley’s speed and accuracy while operat-
ing on the heart itself was becoming the stuff of legend.
The two men were physical and temperamental oppo-
sites. DeBakey, the child of Lebanese immigrants who had
settled in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was small and imperious
with underlings but charming and erudite among his peers
and patrons. Cooley was from a prominent Houston fami-
ly, so tall and charismatic that successive medical TV shows
would spend decades trying to imitate the real thing. The
differences between the two men often obscured one pro-
found similarity: towering, relentless ambition.
That ambition was sorely tested when a South African
surgeon, Christiaan Barnard, transplanted the first human
heart in December 1967 while the most illustrious American
cardiac surgeons had to stand aside with very red faces. One
of them was Denton Cooley. “Congratulations on your first
transplant, Chris. I will be reporting my first hundred soon,”
he wrote to Barnard.
In fact, Cooley around that time had felt stymied by a lot
of things, including the man who had brought him to Baylor
in 1951, Michael DeBakey. DeBakey had a great nose for tal-
ent, but he wasn’t the kind of leader who nurtured it. (You
can still find doctors who trained under DeBakey and have
the shattered nerves to show for it.) Cooley was soon chaf-
ing under DeBakey’s management, and, in true Texas style,
raised enough money among his oilmen friends to leave
DeBakey’s Methodist Hospital for his own Texas Heart Insti-
tute, which he founded in 1962.
Barnard’s triumph turned up the heat on what was then,
 By Photograph by
Mimi Swartz Max Aguilera-Hellweg

I WAS THE MOST

EXPERIENCED HEART
SURGEON IN THE
WORLD, THE ONE BEST
QUALIFIED TO PERFORM
TRANSPLANTS IN
HOUSTON.

In a feat of
surgical skill,
Denton Cooley
attached the
temporary
artificial heart
device in only
47 minutes.

April 2019 | SMITHSONIAN.COM   21

prologue

a simmering competition between two sur-

geons who were probably the most famous
in the world, who appeared on the covers of
major magazines like Time and Life, and who
palled around with famous patients like Jer-
ry Lewis and the Duke of Windsor. Not to be
outdone by a foreign doc whose skills were
derided in Houston, DeBakey, who had been
skeptical of transplants and had been work-
ing for years on an artificial replacement for
the heart, did a 180 and began to look into
heart transplants. He did not invite the par-
ticipation of Cooley, who had performed
the first successful heart transplant in the
U.S. in 1968 and had since done more than

BY THE END OF
1968, ONLY THREE OF
COOLEY’S PATIENTS
WERE STILL ALIVE,
AND NO ONE KNEW
WHY. SURGEONS
WERE CALLING FOR
A MORATORIUM.
any other surgeon in the world—17—to join
him. (“Maybe it’s immodest of me,” Cooley
would later say, “but I thought that since I
was the most experienced heart surgeon in
the world, I was the one best qualified to per-
form transplants in Houston.”)
There is some debate—still—about what
happened next, but not the ultimate result.
Transplantation, it turned out, wasn’t the
miracle it had initially appeared to be. By
the end of 1968, only three of Cooley’s pa-
tients were still alive, and no one knew why.
(The introduction of the drug cyclosporine,
which suppressed the immune system and
allowed the body to accept a new heart, was
still about 15 years away.) Prominent sur-
geons around the world who had similarly
lost their transplant patients were calling
for a moratorium on the procedure.
Cooley, who had turned up his nose
at heart-assist devices coming out of De-
Bakey’s lab, suddenly developed an interest.
He teamed up with an Argentine surgeon
Wi t n es s
Meltdown
FORTY YEARS AGO, THE NATION WAS STUNNED BY THE
ACCIDENT AT THE THREE MILE ISLAND NUCLEAR REACTOR
IN MIDDLETOWN, PENNSYLVANIA. MAYOR ROBERT REID
RECALLS THE STORM BEFORE THE CALM
Interview by Anna Diamond
How did you learn about the that everyone had to evacuate. It
partial meltdown in one of the re- was a mess. I recall standing on a
actors? I was teaching at the local street corner. People were hollering
high school and I was on hall duty out of their car windows, “Mayor,
when the emergency prepared- watch the town!” I knew I couldn’t
ness coordinator called. He said, go. I kept thinking, I was born and
“Something’s going on down at the raised here.
island.” They told us there was a
problem, but no release of radia- When did the people who evacu-
tion. But we kept hearing different ated come back?
stories. Then they told me there There was no explosion, but most
was a small release of radiation. I people didn’t return for a week or
thought they had been lying to us, two. It took quite a while for things
but now I think that this was a new to get back to normal. In fact,
type of energy and things were some people never did return.
developing so fast they didn’t know
how to react. That was Wednesday. How do locals feel about Three
Then everything seemed to go back Mile Island today, as it considers
to normal. closing in September? Every once
in a while, if the sirens blow down at
But there was still a problem. the island, people ask what’s going
On Friday there was a hydrogen on. But we’ve learned more about
bubble that they thought was going nuclear energy. Personally, I think
to explode. The governor called for we have the safest nuclear plant
an evacuation of pregnant women in the world because everybody
G E T T Y I M AG ES

and preschool-age children. But is keeping an eye on it. Still, I kept

and inventor, Domingo Liotta, who had
most people left on their own. There a Geiger counter in my office. I
become frustrated by DeBakey’s profound was a run on the banks. Teenagers looked at it every day. It reminded
lack of interest in C O N T I N U E D O N PAG E 8 0 were going around town announcing me to be prepared.

22  SMITHSONIAN.COM  | April 2019

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DINNER WITH
THE EMPEROR
 We crossed the
globe to meet up
with Napoleon
Bonaparte at the
island exile where
he spent his
last days
by ERICA MUNKWITZ & JAMES L. SWANSON
photographs by S A M A N T H A R E I N D E R S

Merrill Joshua,
of St. Helena’s
tourism board,
dressed in full
Napoleonic
regalia to depict
the island’s most
famous resident.
 China from the collection of
Napoleonic memorabilia belonging
to Hazel Wilmot, who bought James-
town’s Consulate Hotel in 2008.

P
L E A SE , TAK E T HE emperor’s
seat,” says Michel Dancoisne-
Martineau. He is tall, hand-
some and illegally charming.
With his glasses and impish
smile, he looks every inch the
roguish professor you wish
you’d had for history class. As
the honorary French consul on
the British island of St. Helena, he oversees Long-
wood House, Napoleon Bonaparte’s home in exile
from 1815 to 1821, the last years of his life.
Dancoisne-Martineau has already guided us
through Longwood’s famous gardens, designed and
cultivated by Napoleon himself and bursting with
agapanthus flowers that match the blue and white
in the French tricolor flying overhead. He leads us
into the house through the billiard room, where the
banished emperor laid out maps of his campaigns
and notes for his memoirs on the table and used
cue sticks to move them about. The consul points
out the peepholes Napoleon carved into the green
shutters with his penknife, so he could peer out at
the world without the world seeing him. The holes
at that height barely reach our shoulders, hinting at
Napoleon’s smaller stature.
And now Dancoisne-Martineau beckons us into
the dining room, which glows with muted light from
candelabra on the walls. At the consul’s invitation,
James takes the emperor’s seat, in front of the mar-
ble fireplace. Erica sits to his right, in the place usu-
ally occupied by the Countess de Montholon, one of
28 people who accompanied Napoleon to the island.
Samantha Reinders, our photographer, takes the

26  SMITHSONIAN.COM  | April 2019

 As Napoleon is reputed to have said
regarding Champagne, “In victory you
deserve it, in defeat you need it.”

The authors, James L. Swanson and Erica Munkwitz, dining with Michel Dancoisne-Martineau, the island’s honorary French consul. 
place of the Comte de Las Cases, the principal scribe
of the emperor’s memoirs. Dancoisne-Martineau
sits opposite James, in the place often taken by Na-
poleon’s comrade-in-arms, Gaspard Gourgaud.
The consul notes, apologetically, that the table is
the one Napoleon used only from 1815 to 1817, because
the one he used later is being restored. We furtively lift
the tablecloth; highly polished wood gleams beneath.
Either way, he says, he has never allowed a dinner to be
served on one of the tables before. “But you have come
so far,” he says, laughing, “so we make the exception!”
We have come a long way: three flights totaling
20 hours and covering nearly 12,000 miles over four
days from our home in Washington, D.C. (Napoleon
sailed only 5,000 miles from Europe, but the voyage
took two months.) In truth, we wouldn’t have been at
the table without the aid of the French ambassador to
the United States, Gérard Araud. When we told him
we were planning to visit St. Helena, he stopped in
his tracks and his face took on a pained, faraway look.
“Do you know that the British governor refused to call
him ‘emperor’ and would only address him as ‘gener-
al’? He had been the head of state of a great nation.”
It was 203 years ago, almost to the day, that Napo-
leon moved into Longwood House. Here it feels as if
the curtain between past and present has been drawn
back. It is easy to imagine the man of the hour strid-
Longwood House ing into the room, dressed in the green cavalry jacket
as seen from the
flower gardens, of the Imperial Horse Guards, and a white waistcoat
which Napoleon adorned with the Legion of Honor—and taking his
designed with
sunken path- usual seat at the head of the table with us. Our dinner
ways to avoid is a conjuring trick, a historical séance in search of
being seen.
The paths, now the man whose voice once echoed in this room with
crumbling, are in tales of war, conquest, glory and defeat, and of van-
need of repair.
ished dreams of empire and what might have been.
When the emperor sat at this table, he insist-
ed on preserving the protocols of his life at court.
Men appeared in military dress, women in evening
gowns and gems. It was an explicit denial of the
circumstances of his captivity. Tonight, waiters in
black suits serve barely seared local tuna, island
vegetables and le rosbif; we sip Moët et Chandon
Champagne (Napoleon had met the grandson of the
brand’s founder, Claude Moët, at military school)
and a Honig Cabernet Sauvignon from vineyards in
The house
boasts a replica St. Helena, California, decorated with a Napoleonic
of Napoleon’s bee, that we have brought along.
famous death
mask, seen As Napoleon is reputed to have said regarding
resting on a low Champagne, “In victory you deserve it, in defeat you
table in the room
where his body need it.” Here on St. Helena, then, drinking must
was viewed after
his death. have been compulsory.
Dancoisne-Martineau tells us, “Some people who
come here do not know that Napoleon was a real man. Some
think that Napoleon is just a brandy!” But the consul, who is
finishing a 12-volume series on the last years of the emperor’s
life, adds: “Napoleon was many things—general, emperor,
lawgiver, imagemaker, administrator, man of science—what
is there for such a man to do on St. Helena?”
ST. HELENA MEASURES just 6 by 10 miles and comprises 47
square miles of rocky coastline, colored desert, rippled pas-
tureland and lush cloud forest. This speck of land attained
prominence in history precisely because it is in the middle of
nowhere: At 1,200 miles west of Angola and 1,800 miles east of
Brazil, it is one of the most remote islands on earth.
A Portuguese captain returning from India happened upon
it in 1502 and christened it “St. Helena,” for Helena, the mother
of Constantine the Great. (To this day, the locals refer to them-
selves as “Saints.”) The island’s first permanent resident was a
mutilated Portuguese soldier named Fernão Lopez, who exiled
himself to St. Helena in 1516 and spent 30 years virtually alone.
The British seized control of the island in the 17th century
and sent settlers; survivors of the 1666 Great Fire of London
received grants of land to farm. The Dutch tried to take St.
Helena in 1673 and failed, prompting the British to fortify the
island with an estimated 230 gun turrets, traces of which still
remain. St. Helena today is a British Overseas Territory, like
Gibraltar or the Falklands, though in 1858, after years of enmi-
ty, the French bought back the two parcels of land containing
Longwood House and Napoleon’s grave.
Long before Napoleon arrived, St. Helena had a series of
notable visitors. Edmond Halley, of comet fame, made obser-
vations in the inky black starlit heavens above the island in
1677. Capt. James Cook stopped by in 1771, as did Capt. Wil-
liam Bligh of Bounty fame in 1792. Arthur Wellesley—better
known as the Duke of Wellington, Napoleon’s nemesis at Wa-
terloo—visited on a return trip from India in 1805. “You may
tell Bony,” the duke famously wrote to a friend after Napo-
leon’s arrival on St. Helena, “that I find his apartments at the
Elisée Bourbon very convenient, and that I hope he likes mine
at Mr. Balcombe’s,” on the island.
Back at the gardens of Longwood House, we skirt ponds
filled with Wedgwood-colored water lilies and a basin curved
into the shape of Napoleon’s famous bicorn hat. “Napoleon
was a man of water,” Dancoisne-Martineau says as we watch
our reflections ripple.
Given that the emperor fought on land (engaging in 60 bat-
tles and losing only eight), that might seem far-fetched. But
water was continuously intertwined with his fate. Napoleon
was born on an island, Corsica, in 1769. Water provided an es-
cape route from his catastrophic Egyptian campaign in 1799.
He was exiled to another island, Elba, just six miles off the
Italian coast, in 1814. After 300 days he escaped, again by wa-
ter. That feat led to the Hundred Days campaign (actually, 111
days), during which he launched a reconstituted French Army
on a European crusade that left nearly 100,000 men killed or
wounded. After his loss at Waterloo, in June 1815, Napoleon
was forced to flee France on the high seas.
April 2019 | SMITHSONIAN.COM   29
 The defeated emperor briefly considered escaping
to America but surrendered to the British, expecting
better treatment from them than from the Prussians
(whose field marshal, Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher,
demanded summary execution). He hoped for asylum
on an English country estate, but after the British ship
holding him put to sea, he was told that his captors had
other plans. The governor of St. Helena was informed
30  SMITHSONIAN.COM  | April 2019
by letter: “His Majesty’s Ministers deeply sensitive of
Napoleon’s leg- the high importance of effectually securing the person
end “depends on
him thousands of a man whose conduct has proved so fatal to the hap-
of miles from
anywhere on piness of the World, [have judged] that the Island of St.
this lonely black Helena is eminently fitted to answer to that purpose.”
rock,” says biog-
rapher Andrew Historian Andrew Roberts, whose Napoleon: A Life
Roberts.  may be the definitive biography, told us, “When you
approach the island by boat, as you get closer and

closer and see the rising black rocks, you experience what Na-
poleon did. You see the totality of what it is. What his fate will
be. No wonder Napoleon said, ‘I should have stayed in Egypt.’ ”
M A P : G U I L B E RT GAT ES
For more than 500 years, visitors shared the same seaborne
view of jagged cliffs jutting from the sea like a crown of thorns.
The age of the airplane bypassed St. Helena because it offered
no flat land for a runway and was consistently buffeted by
treacherous winds sweeping off the water. But in the hope of
stoking the tourist trade, the British spent almost $400 mil-
lion to fill in a valley by 2014 with some 800 million pounds
of dirt and rock to solve the runway problem and build an
airport. The expense, however, did nothing to mitigate the
winds. Today, only a special, stripped-down Embraer 190 jet
with the best pilots in the world can stick the landing.
After our six-hour flight from Johannesburg, St. Helena
appears as an Impressionist’s dot in the infinite blue of the
South Atlantic and our spirits begin to rise. Then the pilot
took to the intercom and announced, “Do not be alarmed. We
will be making a violent turn to land and then pushing the en-
gines to max thrust to avoid the head winds for landing. Cabin
crew, take your seats!”
THE SHIP CARRYING NAP OLEON to the island arrived on
October 15, 1815, but he was unable to disembark until the night
of October 17. And what must Napoleon have thought as the is-
land came into sight, as he scanned its craggy shorelines and
the ramshackle houses of Jamestown, St. Helena’s capital (and
only) city, with the telescope through which he had surveyed his
victories on the battlefields of Europe? As
Count de Montholon, who accompa-
nied him into exile, would write,
“The valley of Jamestown re-
sembled an entrance to the
infernal regions . . . nothing
was to be seen but rows of
guns and black cliffs, built as
if by a demon’s hand to bind
together the rocky peaks.”
With only two main streets St. Helena
and 160 dwellings—less than
an avenue’s worth of Paris—he
must have indeed thought he had
arrived in hell.
After his first night in Jamestown, he
never set foot there again. There was no residence fit for an
ex-emperor on the island, so he had to wait seven weeks for a
decrepit summer house used by the East India Company to be
brought up to snuff. Until then, he stayed with the Balcombe
family—who had also hosted Wellington—at their home,
the Briars, and fell under the spell of their French-speaking
daughter, Betsy. Between games of whist and blindman’s bluff,
she may have been the only person ever to box his ears and
threaten him with his own sword. He was 46; she was just 13.
These first two golden months at the Briars were his favorite
time. Once ensconced at Longwood House, he hosted no co-
tillions, no grand parties. While protecting his privacy, he was
no recluse. In those early days, he was in good health, enjoyed
working on his memoirs, received visitors, granted audiences
to every important visitor to the island, savored news from the
outside world, conversed with British officers, dined with se-
lected visitors, visited people, went on walks and rode horses.
Everything changed with the arrival of the new governor,
Hudson Lowe. Lowe sent away Napoleon’s faithful aide Las
Cases and banished the sympathetic Balcombes, accusing
them of suspicious loyalty to the emperor. Lowe then further
restricted the emperor’s freedom of movement, vet-
ted who could visit him, monitored his correspon-
dence, demanded that a British officer chaperone
his horseback rides (provoking him to give up riding
altogether) and enforced rules that the ex-emperor
must be seen in the flesh several times a day by pry-
ing British eyes.
Napoleon made a game of it, antagonizing Lowe
with cat-and-mouse tricks to hide from sight, terrify-
ing Lowe that he had escaped the island. Napoleon
even designed sunken paths in his garden, which
still exist today, to make it more difficult for curiosity
seekers to glimpse him. The two men met in person
only six times, and on one of their last meetings, Na-
poleon told Lowe, “You are a bigger scourge for us
than all the miseries of this frightful rock!”
For a man of movement and momentum, life af-
ter Lowe on St. Helena was terrible. Las Cases called
him “le moderne Prométhée sur son roc”—the mod-
ern Prometheus on his rock. Napoleon suffered on
St. Helena as if a golden eagle, released from one of
his battle standards, came each day to torture him
like the Greek Titan. As Andrew Roberts told us, “St.
Helena is an essential part of the Napoleonic myth—
because of his ill treatment. It is important that he
wrote his autobiography there.”
When he had asked Las Cases what could be done
in such a place, the aide had knowingly replied, “We
shall live upon the past. There is enough of that to
satisfy us.” Thus, for the next 2,027 days, Napoleon
could do only that.
T HE SA I N T S OF TO DAY appreciate this legacy.
“Napoleon is tops,” Hazel Wilmot tells us. Wil-
mot owns the Consulate Hotel in Jamestown, which
Despite Napoleon’s prominence in French
history, “it was apparent that no one
knew where St. Helena was.”
is furnished with a cornucopia of Napoleonica—
framed prints, gilt sculptures, souvenirs locked be-
hind glass doors of curiosity cabinets, even a life-
size wood carving of the emperor himself standing
on the second-floor balcony, surveying Jamestown’s
main street. She polls her guests on what brings
them to St. Helena, and says Napoleon seems to be
the prime attraction. Her hotel, she says, is already
sold out for May 2021, the bicentennial of his death.
Still, others believe that obsessing on the emperor
is a mistake. “The history of St. Helena is so intricate
32  SMITHSONIAN.COM  | April 2019
and interesting, and it’s not fully appreciated,” says
One of three Lisa Honan, the current British governor of St. Helena
trees remaining
at Longwood (and first woman to hold the job). “We don’t want the
House from island to be known only for Napoleon.” She says this
Napoleon’s
time—two from a chair in the blue room of her official residence
cypresses by the at the 18th-century Plantation House, only footsteps
entrance and
an evergreen away from a portrait of Britain’s great enemy.
oak outside the And she is right. The island’s history is so rich and
billiard room.
varied as to be unbelievable—so vivid and engaging
that it seems fictional, if not lifted straight from a
darker fairy tale. It’s been argued that St. Helena was
the inspiration for Shakespeare’s The Tempest (see
the book by David Jeremiah, former attorney gener-
al of St. Helena), but it wouldn’t be out of place for
Perrault or Grimm, either.
That history includes the near total destruction
of Jamestown in the mid-1800s by termites released
by ship breaking. Ahead of his time, in 1818, Gover-
nor Lowe freed children born of slaves on the island.
After Britain abolished the slave trade, in 1833, the
island became a temporary refuge for more than
26,000 Africans liberated by the Royal Navy from
slave ships. Some 8,000 of them, victims of the ap-
palling conditions on the ships, are buried in Ru-
pert’s Valley, a narrow chasm next to Jamestown.
At Plantation House, Governor Honan offered us
tea but kindly indulged our preference for the island’s
legendary coffee. We are not disappointed in the rich,
velvety brew, the beans of which came from Yemeni
plants first brought to the island in 1733. When Star-
bucks can get it, it sells for about $80 for an 8.8-ounce
bag—perhaps not surprising, since Napoleon said the
coffee was the only good thing about St. Helena.
Yet we have come to feel that the real historic
markers of the island might be more than its crum-
bling forts or rusting cannons, but also its living—
The view from and breathing—heritage. For example, in the public
a peephole
Napoleon carved grounds of the Castle Gardens are gnarled banyan
into the shutters
of the billiard trees that Napoleon would have passed under on his
room, so that he way to his first night on land. At Longwood, two an-
could peer out-
side inconspic- cient cypress trees hold court over the entrance, and
uously even an evergreen oak sweeps its branches to shade the
when they were
closed. billiard room veranda. Napoleon knew these trees,
felt their shade as he wiped sweat from his brow and
rested from his garden labors.
Just below Teutonic Hall, a beautiful 18th-cen-
April 2019 | SMITHSONIAN.COM   33
The view from
High Knoll Fort,
which Darwin,
visiting in 1836,
described as
“picturesque . . .
like an old Welsh
castle.”
tury lodge now being restored by Nick Thorpe and
his sons, a great Cape Yew tree spreads its ancient
branches. Its feathering leaves cloud the sky like a
flurry of green ostrich feathers. A keen and encyclo-
pedic preserver of the island’s history, Thorpe tells
us that it was under this tree that Napoleon met Miss
Polly Mason, famous for her spunk and for riding an
ox rather than a horse (nothing but a chance for con-
versation came of the encounter—that we know of).
And then there’s the Everlasting Daisy, another
legacy of Napoleon’s gardening. One of his British
admirers, Lady Holland, sent him some seedlings
from his garden at Malmaison in Paris to cultivate at
Longwood, but the flower quickly spread beyond his
control, carpeting the island in glorious yellow blos-
soms. The sight so outraged a later British governor
that he launched an eradication campaign. It failed.
However, the most famous of these living monu-
ments is Jonathan, a nearly two-century-old giant tor-
toise. He is an international celebrity, having his image
on the St. Helena five-pence coin as well as his own
Facebook page and Twitter account. Queen Elizabeth
II may have seen 13 prime ministers pass through in
her reign, but Jonathan has witnessed the coming and
going of more than 30 British governors. One can’t help
but feel dwarfed in his company, not just by his nearly
quarter-ton weight but by his historical presence.
Main Street St. Helena is also home to over 500 endemic spe-
in Jamestown
(pop. around cies, including the endangered wirebird, or St. Hel-
600). Founded ena plover. David Pryce, St. Helena’s self-professed
in 1659 in the
narrow valley “bug man,” has identified almost 1,400 insects on
between steep the island, of which almost 30 percent are endemic.
cliffs, the city
retains many of On Diana’s Peak, the island’s highest point, at 2,700
its Georgian-era feet above sea level, Lourens Malan, the island’s ter-
buildings. 
restrial conservation officer, shows us a patch of tiny
Tooth-Tongue Ferns rippling out gloriously green
fronds, each one hardly bigger than a finger. This is
only one of two places in the world where it grows,
he tells us. “The other one is over there,” he says,
pointing to the adjacent peak.
The St. Helena ebony—the national flower—was
thought to be extinct until it was found growing on
a cliff face in 1980; some brave soul allowed himself
to be lowered on a rope to take cuttings, which have
been cultivated both on St. Helena and at the Royal
The giant tor-
toise Jonathan, Botanic Gardens, Kew. The gumwood, St. Helena’s
the oldest living national tree, survives only in a few places on the
land animal, was
at least 50 years island, but both species are being nurtured and re-
old when he was planted in the Millennium Forest, a multiyear proj-
brought to St.
Helena from the ect to recreate the “Great Wood” that covered the
Seychelles in
1882. island before settlers cut down the trees for firewood
and ravenous goats ate all the rest.
 The French demanded that the tombstone
be inscribed “Napoleon,” but the British
refused unless “Bonaparte” was added.
It struck us that the island’s remoteness can work both ways.
To Napoleon—and to some 6,000 Boer prisoners of war held
here from 1900 to 1902, and to the 13 Zulus sent here after they
protested British rule in South Africa, as well as the three Bah-
raini nationalists who cooled their heels here from 1957 to 1960,
the last foreigners to be exiled here—it was, of course, a place of
isolation. To us, it seems like Eden.
T O DAY W E A RE R ACI NG to catch the setting sun with Na-
poleon. He’s behind the wheel of a battered 4x4, careening
around St. Helena’s tortuous byways and finally going off-
road to get us to South West Point. In this case, Napoleon is
Merrill Joshua, the island’s tourism projects manager.
For the bicentennial of the emperor’s exile, in 2015, the
Saints splurged for a full-on, movie-studio-quality Napoleon
costume—boots, white breeches, dark hussar jacket, glitter-
ing medallions, sword and, of course, bicorn hat. Joshua has
been wearing it on special occasions ever since. At a travel-in-
dustry trade show in Paris, he was disappointed to learn that,
despite Napoleon’s prominence in French history, “it was ap-
parent that no one knew where St. Helena was.”
Joshua stands at the cliff ’s edge of South West Point look-
ing out at the endless sea. Though he’s a good deal taller and
two decades younger than Napoleon was, he strikes convinc-
ingly imperial poses, eyes glued on the far-off horizon as our
photographer snaps away—and then quickly puts on his dark
sunglasses. He leans back, a Coke in hand, and says that the
island is looking forward to 2021. “It will be a great opportu-
nity to educate the world about St. Helena,” he says. But the
island will have to find another volunteer Napoleon: Joshua
left for England in February.
So from its early illustrious history, where did it all begin to
go wrong for St. Helena? As for Napoleon, it began in Egypt. In
1869, the opening of the Suez Canal helped seal St. Helena’s
fate, as ships no longer needed a stopping point on a longer
journey to Europe. Over a thousand ships a year called at St.
Helena in its heyday, but by the turn of the 19th century, bare-
ly a fifth of that stopped at the island. C O N T I N U E D O N P A G E 70
April 2019 | SMITHSONIAN.COM   37
 America’s
Second R
C O U RT ESY C O R N E L L U N I V E R S I T Y

38  SMITHSONIAN.COM  | April 2019

 The humor maga-
zine Puck–a pre-TV
version of “The Daily
Show”—published
this illustration
in 1915, five long
years before the
19th Amendment
was ratified.

Revolution
A NEW EXHIBITION
TELLS THE SURPRISING
STORY OF THE
LONG BATTLE FOR
WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE

I
F YOU LO OK AT BLACK-AND -WHITE pho-
tographs of suffragists, it’s tempting to see the
women as quaint: spectacles and undyed hair
buns, heavy coats and long dresses, ankle boots
and feathered hats. In fact, they were fierce—braving
ridicule, arrest, imprisonment and treatment that came
close to torture. Persistence was required not only in
the years before the 19th Amendment was ratified, in
1920, but also in the decades that followed. “It’s not
as though women fought for and won the battle, and
went out and had the show of voting participation
that we see today,” says Debbie Walsh, director of
the nonpartisan Center for American Women and
Politics at Rutgers University. “It was a slow, steady
process. That kind of civic engagement is learned.”
This forgotten endurance will be overlooked no
more, thanks to “Votes for Women: A Portrait of Per-
sistence,” a major new exhibit at the National Portrait
Gallery through January 5, 2020, that features more
than 120 artifacts, including the images and objects
on these pages. The exhibit is part of the Smithsonian
American Women’s History Initiative, intended to be
the nation’s most comprehensive effort to compile
and share the story of women in this country.
The suffrage movement began in the 1840s, when
married women still had no right to property or

Images courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery

by LIZA MUNDY
 ownership of their wages; women were shut out
of most professions, and the domestic sphere was
considered their rightful place. The idea of women
casting ballots was so alien that even those who at-
tended the landmark 1848 Seneca Falls Convention
on women’s rights found it hard to get their heads
around it. The delegates unanimously passed reso-
lutions favoring a woman’s right to her own wages,
to divorce an abusive husband and to be represented
in government. A resolution on suffrage passed, but
with dissenters.
Twenty years later, just as the movement was
gaining traction, the end of the Civil War created a
new obstacle: racial division. Though many white
suffragists had gotten their start in the abolition
movement, now they were told that it was what the
white abolitionist Wendell Phillips called the “Ne-
gro’s hour”: Women should stand aside and let black
men proceed first to the polls. (Everyone treated
black women as invisible, and white suffragists mar-
ginalized these allies to a shameful extent.) The 15th
Amendment gave African-American men the right
to vote; differences among suffragists hobbled the
movement for 40 years.
Even after a new generation took up the cause,
one faction favored incrementalism—winning the
vote one state at a time—while another wanted a
big national victory. In 1913, young radicals, led by
Swarthmore graduate Alice Paul, kicked off a drive
for a constitutional amendment with a parade down
Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue featuring more
than 5,000 marchers as well as bands, floats and
mounted brigades. Tens of thousands of spectators
packed the streets, many of them men in town for
Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration the next day.
“No one had ever claimed the street for a protest
march like this one,” Rebecca Boggs Roberts writes
in her book Suffragists in Washington, D.C.: The 1913
Parade and the Fight for the Vote. Spectators started
hurling slurs and more at the marchers—scores
ended up in the hospital—but the headline-making
fracas played into the women’s desire for publicity.
Radical suffragists began picketing the White
T E R R E L L : C O U RT ESY O F T H E O B E R L I N C O L L EG E A R C H I V ES

House by the hundreds, even in the freezing rain that

attended Wilson’s second inauguration four years lat-
er—“a sight to impress even the jaded senses of one
who has seen much,” wrote Scripps correspondent In 1912, the National
Gilson Gardner. As the pickets continued, women
were arrested on charges like “obstructing sidewalk Association of Colored
traffic.” Nearly 100 of them were taken to a workhouse
in Occoquan, Virginia, or to the District of Columbia Women’s Clubs endorsed
jail. When some of them went on a hunger strike, they
were force-fed via a tube jammed into the nose. “Miss the suffrage movement,
Paul vomits much. I do too,” wrote one, Rose Winslow.
“We think of the coming feeding all day. It is horrible.” two years before its
But on January 10, 1918, Jeannette Rankin, a Repub-
lican House member from Montana—the first woman white counterpart.
40  SMITHSONIAN.COM  | April 2019
Founding suffrag-
ists Elizabeth Cady
Stanton (left) and
Susan B. Anthony
met in 1851. In
1902, Anthony
wrote to her friend,
“We little dreamed
. . . that half a cen-
tury later we would
be compelled to
leave the finish
of the battle to
another generation
of women.”

Journalist Ida B. Wells

helped found the
National Association
of Colored Women’s
Clubs and crusaded
against lynching
Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954) and other forms of
championed racial equality and oppression, including
women’s suffrage, saying she be- disenfranchisement.
longed to “the only group in this
country that has two such huge
obstacles to surmount.”
elected to Congress—opened debate on
the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, which
would prohibit states from discriminating
against women when it came to voting. On
August 18, 1920, Tennessee became the 36th
state to ratify it, and the 19th Amendment
was promulgated on August 26.
Many histories of the suffragist move-
ment end there—but so much more was
still to come. Some states disenfranchised
women—particularly black and immigrant
women—by instituting poll taxes, literacy
tests and onerous registration require-
ments. And many women didn’t yet see
themselves as having a role, or a say, in the
public sphere. People “don’t immediately
change their sense of self,” says Christina
Wolbrecht, a political scientist at the Uni-
versity of Notre Dame. “Women who came
of political age before the 19th Amendment
was ratified remained less likely to vote
throughout their entire lives.” The debate
over the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which at
first addressed only racial discrimination,
included a key moment when Represen-
tative Howard Smith, a powerful Virginia
Democrat, inserted “sex” into the bill in a
way that led many to believe he was trying
to tank it. The gesture backfired—and the
bill passed. “Women get equality on paper
because of a political stunt,” says Jennifer
Lawless, Commonwealth professor of pol-
itics at the University of Virginia. In 1964,

A pennant from 1913 proclaimed a

mission that gathered force after
that year’s parade down Pennsyl-
vania Avenue in Washington, D.C.
and the near-riot that followed.
Zitkala-Sa (1876-
1938), a member of
the Lakota nation
and an essayist
and librettist,
founded the Na-
tional Council of
American Indians
in 1926 to advo-
cate for cultural
recognition and
citizenship rights
for Native peoples.

Lucy Burns (1879-

1966) was arrested
and jailed six times
for picketing on
behalf of women’s
suffrage. She was
one of several
women who went
on hunger strikes
at the Occoquan,
Virginia, work-
house and endured
force-feeding.
P E N N A N T: C O U RT ESY R O N N I E L A P I N S K Y SA X ; B U R N S : N AT I O N A L WO M A N ’S PA RT Y, WAS H I N GTO N , D.C.
 The suffrage parade in Washington received little police protection—the chief was no fan of the
movement. Secretary of War Henry Stimson arranged for a Virginia National Guard presence,
which proved foresighted when spectators began attacking marchers.

C O U RT ESY R O B E RT P.J. C O N N E Y, J R. ; BA L LOT BOX : C O U RT ESY R O N N I E L A P I N S K Y SA X

The organizers of the parade

maximized attention on the event by
hosting it one day before the
inauguration of Woodrow Wilson.

Before the 19th

Amendment was
ratified, women
were allowed
to vote in a
limited number
of elections.
Elwood, Indiana,
kept a separate
box for women’s
ballots.

44  SMITHSONIAN.COM  | April 2019

 As a child, Mary
McLeod Bethune
(1875-1955)
picked cotton.
As an adult,
she was an
educator and a
fierce advocate
for racial and
gender equality,
braving attacks
during voter reg-
istration drives.

C O U RT ESY STAT E A R C H I V ES O F F LO R I DA

women outvoted men numerically—37.5 million men
versus 39.2 million women—and the trend continued.
By the 1970s, as a result of feminism and the move-
ment of more women into the workplace, women
finally understood themselves to be autonomous
political actors. And in 1980, the fabled gender gap
emerged: For the first time, women voted in greater
numbers and proportions than men, and began to
form blocs that candidates ignored at their peril.
Women’s representation in office remained tiny,
though; to date, just 56 women have served in the
Senate and 358 in Congress overall. But as of this
writing, a record 131 women are serving in Congress,
a woman wields the House speaker’s gavel, and five
women have announced plans to run for president in
2020. True, the officeholders’ numbers skew strongly
Democratic, and full parity for women will depend
on the election of more female Republicans. And yet,
something has changed, something real, says Walsh:
“We’re in a new era of women’s engagement.”
 by MARK SEAL

THE GHOSTS OF
NAZIS, FRENCH
RESISTANCE
FIGHTERS AND
CONCENTRATION
CAMP SURVIVORS
STILL INHABIT
THE GRANDEST
HOTEL ON
PARIS’ FAMED
LEFT BANK

46  SMITHSONIAN.COM  | April 2019

photographs by PIERRE-ELIE DE PIBRAC

April 2019 | SMITHSONIAN.COM   47

 Many guests
have taken
turns at the
keyboard—
James Joyce
specialized in
Irish ballads
and actor Andy
Garcia has
played late into
the night.

Yes, she was a hotel, but I have always been in love

SAW H E R OV ER TH E YEAR S standing on the
corner, a beautiful old lady with secrets to tell. Al-
though she had fallen on hard times, you could still
see glimpses of her glory: her proud and striking
face, her grand and imposing stature, the way she
commanded attention from the street, like some last
elegant remnant from days gone by.
with hotels—their history, their hospitality, their
heart—and in the case of this hotel, the Lutetia, the
horror. She was the only grand hotel on the Left Bank
of Paris, a Cinderella overlooked and overshadowed
by her fabulous stepsisters on the Right—the Ritz,
the Crillon, the George V, the Plaza Athénée and the
Bristol—which flaunted their dominance while the
Lutetia remained mostly silent.
Owners came and went, and the darker parts of
its history were recalled only in fading memories of
people who didn’t seem eager to revisit the place. Be-
cause they were there when evil ruled the world, and
the old hotel served first as a headquarters for hate
and later as a haven for its victims.
Then, around 2014, events colluded to tell all.
First, there had been a best seller entitled Lutetia
by the acclaimed Moroccan-French novelist Pierre

Inside the en-

trance, an Art
Deco mosaic
invokes the
hotel’s name-
sake—Lutetia,
the Roman site
that became
Paris, its an-
cient symbol
a ship sailing
the seas.

48  SMITHSONIAN.COM  | April 2019


BETWEEN THE WARS
Inhabitants of the moveable
feast that was Paris who were
regulars at the Lutetia included,
clockwise, from top: Charlie
Chaplin, Charles de Gaulle, Ger-
trude Stein, Ernest Hemingway,
Pablo Picasso, Josephine Baker.
Later, Baker would become a
heroine of the Resistance,
honored by the nation of France
after the Allied victory.
Assouline. Next, an exhibition, illustrating the
hotel’s painful past, and then a companion docu-
mentary, Remember Lutetia. Added into the mix
was a buyer, an international real estate firm that
purchased the Lutetia for nearly $190 million, determined to
not only restore the old glory but to give the hotel a rebirth
with a radical $230 million restoration unveiled last summer.
“Welcome to the Hotel Lutetia,” the front desk receptionist, a
young man named Kalilou, who tells me he is from Mali, greets
me when I check in for a four-day stay.
While awaiting my room, I settle into the library, a light-filled,
high-lacquered salon filled with the latest picture books of the
good life. I listen to the bleeding voice of Billie Holiday and recall
something the actor Tom Hanks had written in his collection
of short stories, Uncommon Type: “A good rule of thumb when
traveling in Europe—stay in places with a Nazi past.” Within
the hour, I am in love with the new Lutetia, its bright new light
and whitewashed walls, its perfumed air, its glossy, burnished
teak guest-room hallways, which resemble the passageways of
a grand yacht, its bustling Bar Josephine, which overlooks the
busy Boulevard Raspail, its cradling staff and superb cuisine.
I could have happily stayed forever.
But I wasn’t there on holiday.
I’d come to meet the ghosts.
50  SMITHSONIAN.COM  | April 2019
“ YOU THINK W HEN YO U TAKE the cor-
ridor, you are going to turn and see a phan-
tom,” says general manager Jean-Luc Cous-
ty, who has served the Lutetia in various po-
sitions on and off for 20 years. “Even if you
don’t know the history of the hotel, when
you enter the building something happens.
It is very sensitive and emotional. . . . When
you are entering a house of ghosts, you can
be afraid. But that was not the case at all.
Because this is a building where there is hu-
manity. Since the beginning, this hotel has
been a reflection of what is happening in
Paris and the world.”
Given a hard hat and a reflector vest a few
months before the hotel’s reopening,
I take a tour of the Lutetia. Gone are
the dark guest rooms, replaced with
sleek and modern quarters and Cala-
catta marble bathrooms, reduced in
number from 233 to 184, the extra
space given to 47 suites with grand
views. Gone are ancient layers of
age and seven layers of ceiling paint,
beneath which work crews discov-
ered lush 1910 frescoes by the artist
TO P, C LO C K W I S E : M A R K A / A L A M Y STO C K P H OTO ; H U LTO N A R C H I V E / G E T T Y I M AG ES ; ATO M I C / A L A M Y STO C K P H OTO ; M O N DA D O R I
Adrien Karbowsky, which took re-
storers 17,000 hours to bring back to
life. Even the front stairs and extravagant exterior
P O RT F O L I O V I A G E T T Y I M AG ES ; H U LTO N A R C H I V E / G E T T Y I M AG ES ; GASTO N PA R I S / R O G E R -V I O L L E T / G E T T Y I M AG ES
have been sandblasted to perfection.
Atop the new Lutetia, I look across a pretty little
park, Square Boucicaut, to where it all began: the
monolithic department store Le Bon Marché, started
in the mid-19th century by a former traveling fabric
salesman, Jacques-Aristide Boucicaut, and his wife,
Marguerite, who turned their small sales operation
into “the good market.” In his novel Au Bonheur des
Dames, Émile Zola called a fictional emporium based on Le
Bon Marché a “cathedral of commerce.” The store was such a
success that, after the founders died, the Boucicaut heirs, along
with investors, decided to build a hotel for the store’s suppliers
and clients, especially families from across France who made
regular pilgrimages to Paris to stock their homes.
They planned to call it “the Left Bank Grand Hotel,” and
its aspirations rivaled those of the Right Bank of the Seine. Its
rooms had cutting-edge amenities, including air condition-
ing, and the latest in furnishings—from Le Bon Marché, nat-
urally—all behind a soaring marble-white facade with carved
embellishments representing the harvest, hanging bunches
of grapes and other fruit, as well as frolicking cherubs.
“The hotel was inaugurated 28 December 1910, the turning
point between Art Nouveau and Art Deco,” says the Lutetia’s
historian, Pascaline Balland. (She is also the grandniece of a
prisoner of war, who never returned from Buchenwald to the
Lutetia, where his family sought news of his fate.) The hotel
was christened with the Roman name for Paris—Lutetia—and
took as its emblem a storm-tossed ship above the tradition-
 al Parisian motto Fluctuat Nec Mergitur—beaten by
the waves, but never sinks.
In 1912, twelve salons were built to host special
events. Orchestras performed in the balconies above
the ballroom, their railings decorated with wrought-
iron depictions of trailing grape vines, “deemed to be
longer lasting than anything in nature,” according to
the designer. But the parties came to an abrupt halt
two years later with the onset of World War I.
Overnight, half the employees, including the
general manager, were shipped off “to fight
the Germans,” says Balland. “The main salon
was given to the Red Cross and beds were tak-
en from the rooms for the injured.”
Emerging from the Great War, the Lutetia
began to roar with the ’20s. Stars of the Lost Gener-
ation made the Lutetia their second home. The poet
William Carlos Williams wrote about the hotel in his
memoir. James Joyce fled his freezing Paris apart-
ment for the hotel, where he played the lobby piano
and wrote parts of Ulysses with the assistance of his
TO P, C LO C K W I S E ; J E A N - JAC Q U ES B E R N I E R / GA M M M A- R A P H O V I A G E T T Y I M AG ES ; R OS E H A RT M A N / G E T T Y I M AG ES ; TO N Y F R A N K / SYG M A / SYG M A V I A
G E T T Y I M AG ES ; R O N GA L E L L A , LT D. / W I R E I M AG E ; J E A N - C L AU D E D E U TS C H / PA R I S M ATC H V I A G E T T Y I M AG ES ; TO N Y K E N T / SYG M A V I A G E T T Y I M AG ES
He tells me of being caught up in the howling vortex of
the hotel’s lore, the sleepless nights, the tears he shed
onto his computer keyboard. While what he wrote
was fiction, the novel was based on bloody facts.
Assouline’s protagonist is a detective named
Édouard, who ends up investigating the hotel he
thought he knew so well, having frequented its restau-
rant and bar for many years. “Before the war, the hotel
“WE DIDN’T HEAR THE SOUND OF BOOTS. IT
WAS MORE LIKE A SILENT MOVIE. ”
was like a small town,” Assouline tells me. “You didn’t
have to go out. They had a shop with all the newspa-
pers from France and abroad, a hairdresser, groceries,
restaurants, a patisserie, a swimming pool.”
The nightmare began in June 1940, when Hitler’s
armies burst through the Maginot Line, a fortified wall

private secretary, the future Nobel laureate Samuel military leaders foolishly believed could block the in-
Beckett. Hemingway drank in the American bar with vading German Army. France surrendered, collapsed,
Gertrude Stein. Other guests included Charlie Chap- fell, as Marshal Philippe Pétain advocated making
lin, Henri Matisse and Josephine Baker. François terms with Hitler. On June 22, France signed an
Truffaut, Isadora Duncan, Peggy Guggenheim, Picas-
so—all laid claim to the Lutetia at one time or another.
CELEBRITY MAGNET
Among the distinguished visitors were two portents: With the advent of the 1970s and
Charles de Gaulle, a young officer and assistant profes- ’80s, the Lutetia continued to attract
a star-studded crowd, among them,
sor of military history at the time, and the future presi- clockwise, from top: Gérard Depar-
dent of the republic, who spent his wedding night at the dieu, fashion designer Sonia Rykiel,
singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg,
Lutetia with his wife, Yvonne, April 7, 1921; and German actress Isabella Rossellini, President
novelist Thomas Mann and his brother Heinrich, who François Mitterrand and Catherine
Deneuve. During that period, Rykiel
created the Committee Lutetia, meeting with other Ger- revamped the hotel’s interior, intro-
man émigrés in the hotel during the 1930s to plan a new ducing a modernist black-and-white
color scheme punctuated by the use
government to take power after what they felt would be of mirrors and chrome.
Adolf Hitler’s certain demise.
Instead, of course, Hit-
ler conquered Europe and
soon stormed Paris, where
his armies took over the
city’s best hotels. The Lu-
tetia became headquarters
of the counterintelligence
unit, the Abwehr.
“I don’t know really how
it happened,” says Cousty.
“All the hotels of Paris were
occupied. I don’t know why the
Abwehr chose the Lutetia.”

WH EN P IE R R E A S S OU L I NE
checked into the hotel during the
early 2000s to research his novel,
he learned things that shook him
to his soul. “It was very emotion-
al,” he says as we sit in a Paris café.
 armistice agreement, relinquishing its rights to defend itself and
promising to never take arms against its captors.
On June 15, 1940, the Nazis took over the Lutetia. Guests
fled; most of the staff left in a panic. A swift-thinking somme-
lier secreted the hotel’s enormous collection of fine wine in-
side a freshly dug tunnel, whose entrance he hid behind a wall.
(The Nazis would never discover the stash.)
When Abwehr Commander Oskar Reile, a thin colonel with
closely cropped hair, entered the hotel, he was handed a glass
of Champagne by a German officer who welcomed him. “The
pastry shop and brasserie were closed,” Balland reports in her
history, “the windows at street level blocked with a covering
of pine branches attached to their frames, while wire fencing
covered the facade and the main door.” The mailroom was
turned into a dormitory. Each Abwehr officer was assigned to
one of the hotel’s 233 guest rooms.
The Lutetia was now fully under the command of Berlin
and the Abwehr’s admiral, Wilhelm Canaris, whose orders
included interrogating suspected members of the Resistance
network. (The Resistance was founded by de Gaulle, who had
been so infuriated by Pétain’s cowardly truce with the Ger-
mans that he fled to Britain where he led a French government
in exile.) The interrogation sessions were conducted in a room
at the Lutetia with a view of the Cherche-Midi prison.
“The officers of the Abwehr were aristocrats, so they want-
ed everything to be up to their standards: silverware from
Christofle, crystal from Baccarat, china from Haviland, and
china from the Bon Marché,” wrote Assouline.
“LUXURY IS NOT NOISY BUT SOBER. FOR THEM,
THE GENERAL WANTED THE BEST.”
A maître d’ at the Lutetia named Marcel Weber seemed to
be the only living survivor of the Nazi occupation to speak
with director Hans-Rüdiger Minow, who filmed an interview
in 1980, for his documentary Hotel Lutetia. “Before we even
had time to realize they were there, the hotel had been requi-
sitioned,” Weber says in the film. “We couldn’t believe it. I
came up from the cellar to go to the street, then into the direc-
tor’s office because they were all over the place.”
“We didn’t hear the sound of boots. It was more like a silent
movie. It had happened. They were there. One of them imme-
diately asked what there was to eat.”
Then the maître d’s memory seemed to shut down. “He
was not so open to tell me the real truth about what hap-
pened,” Minow told me. The director believes that some
hotel employees were turning a blind eye, and some col-
laborating with the Nazis. “Life could go on and it was pos-
sible to make money on the black market. I think a hotel like
the Lutetia must have been involved in all of this.”
In the interview Weber spoke of Nazis gorging themselves
in a mess hall set up in the former President’s Room; Nazis
ordering wine and being told the cellar was dry, leaving the
Germans only Champagne and beer; Nazis breaking from
52  SMITHSONIAN.COM  | April 2019
spying to go shopping, “returning with
The hotel owns
armfuls of boxes for their dear wives, more than 230
shouting, ‘Ooh la la,’ shoes and a lot works of art, in-
cluding a bronze
of other things at incredible prices. . . . 1980s bust by
And they also appreciated French food, sculptor Philippe
Hiquily, a piece
of course.” The staff, meanwhile, sub- installed in the
sisted on cabbage soup. Lutetia’s library.
Germany surrendered to the Allies
in May 1945. Paris had been liberated
on August 25, 1944. Four years after occupying the hotel, the
Abwehr, still under the leadership of Oskar Reile, exited just
as they had arrived, with Reile sharing Champagne with his
men. “Then suddenly there was no one left,” said Weber.
The Nazis had deported 166,000 people from France to Ger-
man concentration camps: their numbers included 76,000
Jews, among them 11,000 children, and many of the rest were
members of the Resistance.
Only about 48,000 returned, and in France these dis-
placed souls were given a name—the deportees. By a strange
quirk of history, on their return from hell to humanity, many
of them passed through the Lutetia.
BEFORE THE 70TH ANNIVERSARY of the liberation of the
camps, in 2014, Catherine Breton, president of the Friends
of the Foundation for the Memory of the Deportation, was
“looking for an idea of something to do,” she tells me. “At
a time when France is welcoming so few refugees today, I
wanted to talk about France’s hospitality in the aftermath of
the war. I wanted to pay tribute.”
The group soon hit upon the idea of an ex-
hibition about the Lutetia’s postwar role in
receiving and processing concentration camp
survivors. But the survivors, for their part,
didn’t always want to remember, much less
speak about that painful period. “These are
forgotten stories,” she says. “The former deportees would tell
me, ‘It’s not an interesting subject.’ They didn’t imagine that
talking about Lutetia was a way to talk about everything: mem-
ory, people coming back, resistance, and to finally get the recog-
nition of the status of these people for what they went through.”
The exhibit would be called “Lutetia, 1945: Le Retour des
Déportés” (“The Return of the Deported”). Sponsored by the city
hall of Paris and other organizations, it would honor the thou-
sands of men, women and children who returned to the Lutetia
for four tumultuous months between April and August 1945.
But when Breton and her associates began assembling the
photographs, interviews, archives and memorabilia, they hit
another wall: Most of the documentation was lost. So they un-
leashed the hounds of history: Researchers, many of them
grandsons and granddaughters of the deportees, set out to un-
cover and document the survivors.
Alain Navarro, a journalist and author, began scouring the
Agence France-Presse archives and discovered that a Resis-
tance photo agency had been established to chronicle the lib-
eration. “Someone went to the Lutetia in May 1945,” he says.
“They shot maybe 20, 25 pictures. No indication of who were
in the pictures. Jews. Slavs. Russians. People coming to the
 Lutetia. People inside the Lutetia. People waiting out-
side the Lutetia for the deportees.” Today, those
who passed
In one of those photographs, a dozen concen- through the Lu-
tration camp survivors, many still in their tattered tetia—from Rus-
sians fleeing the
striped uniforms, sit in the hotel’s elegantly chande- 1917 Revolution
to concentration
liered reception room, tended to by smiling women, camp survi-
drinking from silver cups and eating crusts of bread, vors—seem to
leave a ghostly
their haunted eyes peering out from emaciated fac- presence.
es. Another shows a young boy and his older trav-
eling companion wearing concentration camp uni-
forms and sitting in a dark Lutetia guest room.
Who were these people and what were they doing
in the luxury hotel? Navarro wondered.
That question caused a lost world to open, and the
secrets of the old hotel to be told. Researcher and histo-
rian Marie-Josèphe Bonnet found much of the lost doc-
umentation, sifting through archives across France,
unearthing long-forgotten ephemera from a time when
war shortages of everything, including paper for news-
papers, meant that much was never chronicled.
“Why did I work on the Lutetia? Because I am
emotionally overwhelmed by this story,” says Bon-
net. “Our family doctor was deported. When he came
back from the camps, we could not recognize him—
except through his voice.”
The floor of her small Paris apartment is covered
with documents she unearthed. In a yellowed news-
paper article she found a drawing of skeletal deport-
ees in their striped uniforms: “The monthly report:

Emaciated
survivors of the
death camps
gather in the
Lutetia restau-
rant in 1945.
Daily provisions
included meat,
butter, bread,
lime-blossom
tea, coffee,
jam, cheese and
gingerbread.
ST F / A F P P H OTO

54  SMITHSONIAN.COM  | April 2019


15 April 1945: To the free ones, men
and women start to come back from “WE HITCHHIKED. WE HAD THE ADDRESS OF LUTETIA.
the dead. . . . You need only to go
THEY GAVE US ROOMS, FOOD AND CLOTHING.”
through the corridors of the Lutetia
to see,” the story begins.
“I didn’t choose the subject; the
subject chose me,” says filmmaker Guillaume Diamant-Berg-
er, whom Catherine Breton enlisted to interview survivors
for what would become the second stirring documentary on
the hotel, Remember Lutetia. From the beginning, he was ob-
sessed with learning what happened to his own family there.
“My grandfather was always talking about the Lutetia. He went
there for two months every day trying to find his family, the
family that never came back. My grandfather had an antiques
shop just behind the Lutetia. It was in his family for three gen-
erations. So it was inside my ear and my brain for many years.
Catherine Breton had an idea for this exhibition on the Lutetia.
And she wanted in the exhibition a video interview of survi-
vors, which is how I got involved in the project.
“This story was like a gap or a hole inside the family,” he
continues. “From the third interview, I realized I wanted to
make a documentary about it.”
He filmed inside the ancient hotel before its years-long
closure for renovation, its silent and gaping public rooms, its
well-worn suites, where antiques buyers and souvenir seekers
trudged, many buying the hotel’s remains—furnishings, art,
dishes, everything down to the bedsheets. He enlisted actors
to narrate the writings and recollections of those who passed
through the Lutetia after the war. He interviewed the handful
of survivors who had once arrived there with numbers on their
forearms and their striped uniforms hanging off their bones.
“This was really the first time they were telling their stories,”
he says. “But they always speak about the camps, not what
came after. Here, we ask about the part they hadn’t talked
about: going back, to life.”
“N O O N E HA D AN Y ID EA of what state they would be in,”
wrote Pascaline Balland, describing the deportees’ return to
Paris in her history. The original plan was to process them at
the cavernous public train station, the Gare d’Orsay. Then came
“the return of the skeletons,” as Pierre Assouline called them,
requiring special care that no public train station could provide.
“When we thought of Gare d’Orsay to welcome the deport-
ees we could not imagine the survivors’ conditions,” Olga
Wormser-Migot, an attaché assigned to France’s ministry
of war prisoners, deportees and refugees, later wrote in her
memoir. “We thought that once the reception formalities were
completed, they could go home and resume a normal life right
away. However, we should have known. We should have been
aware of the rumors from the camp. ”
Along with the deportees, Charles de Gaulle returned to Par-
is. Given a hero’s welcome, the former exile became the head
of the Provisional Government of the French Republic. When
the Gare d’Orsay proved unsuitable for the deportees, de Gaulle
took one look at a photograph from Auschwitz and knew the
perfect place to receive them: a hotel. Not the Crillon or the Ritz,
with their over-the-top luxury and walls of gold, but a hotel that
was close to his heart, “his hotel,” wrote Assouline, quoting de
Gaulle, “Vast and comfortable. Luxury is not noisy but sober,”
and then adding, “For them, the general wanted the best.”
De Gaulle appointed three heroic women to head the Lutetia
operation: Denise Mantoux, a Resistance leader; Elizabeth Bid-
ault, sister of the minister of foreign affairs; and the legendary
Sabine Zlatin, who famously hid 44 Jewish children from the
Nazis in the French village of Izieu. The women would work with
the Red Cross, medical professionals and other staff to receive
the deportees, a group of volunteers that soon swelled to 600.
Survivors streamed into Paris from everywhere, traveling
by every means of transport—car, train, foot, thumb—headed
to a place where they would receive food, shelter and 2,000
francs (about $300), and a Red Cross coupon for a new suit of
clothing: the Lutetia. The first ones arrived on April 26, 1945.
April 2019 | SMITHSONIAN.COM   55
 They came from Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Ravens-
brück. Some escaped their bondage on foot, if they
still had muscle and vigor, over the scorched earth
and into Paris, war-torn and just liberated, its Nazi
signage still in the streets.
“I was 15,” Élie Buzyn, now 90, tells me, of when he
began running toward the Lutetia. His parents and
brother killed by the Nazis, he was designated one of
the “Orphans of the Nation,” and given a special visa.
But when he left Buchenwald, he was sent to 40 days of
quarantine in Normandy, where he heard a name that
sounded like paradise: “A lot of people were talking
about Lutetia,” he says. “There were good rooms and
good conditions for the people who were in the camps.”
He didn’t wait for permission to leave quarantine;
he escaped. “We hitchhiked,” he says. “We had the ad-
dress of Lutetia. They gave us rooms, food and cloth-
ing, and we were able to stay there for a few days. It was
a transit place to sleep in a good bed for a few days.”
Even today, secure in his fine Paris home, he
seems uneasy over revisiting those memories, those
nightmares. At Normandy, he recalled, there were
survivors with him who had asked after the fate of
family members, when they learned that he had
been at Buchenwald and Auschwitz. In some cases,
Buzyn says, he knew how some of those prisoners
had died. But he kept silent. “I didn’t want to tell
them the story, because it’s too horrific,” said Buzyn.
“SOME WOULD SAY, ‘IS THIS TRUE? AM I ALIVE?
IS THIS A SHEET? IS THIS A REAL BED?’”
And if he did speak? “People didn’t believe our
story. So I decided not to talk, because if I told my
story, I might have committed suicide.”
“I don’t want to go over my story. I don’t like it,”
the deportee and celebrated artist Walter Spitzer,
now 91, told me in his studio.
“For 60 years, I talked to nobody about my par-
ents,” says Christiane Umido, left alone at 11 when
her Resistance member parents were sent to the con-
centration camps—until she was reunited at the Lu-
tetia with her father, who described a forced march
out of a camp under Nazi guard in the last days of
the war, “his feet bleeding from the ‘Walk of Death.’
“People didn’t want to listen to this,” she says. “I
tried, even with close friends.”
Such was the sentiment of many other survivors—
until they were invited to take part in the exhibition.
Most had arrived in Paris in open-air wagons, rolling
through the war-torn streets and finally reaching the
snow-white facade with its hanging grapes, vines, fruit
and frolicking angels, the name Lutetia blazing high
above in swirling letters and shimmering lights. The
56  SMITHSONIAN.COM  | April 2019
Boulevard Raspail in front of the hotel was crowded
At the Bar Jose-
phine, mixologist with more desperate souls: families holding cards with
Lucas Chow the names of the loved ones they’d lost. Lists of known
creates libations
including a survivors had been broadcast over the radio, pub-
cocktail featur- lished in newspapers and posted around Paris. Hun-
ing strawberry li-
queur, mandarin dreds of photographs of the missing, posted by friends
juice, vodka and and families, occupied an entire wall of the hotel.
Champagne.
“The first camp survivors alight on the platform,
and there is deep silence,” recalled Resistance member
deportee Yves Béon. “The civilians look at these poor
creatures and start crying. Women fall to their knees,
speechless. The deportees proceed somewhat shyly.
They proceed toward a world they had forgotten and
didn’t understand. . . . Men, women rush at them with
pictures in their hands: Where are you coming from?
Have you met my brother, my son, my husband? Look
at this photo, that’s him.”
“It was crowded, swimming with people,” one de-
portee was quoted in Diamant-Berger’s documenta-
ry. “Our camp mates kept arriving from the railway
stations. It would never stop. And everybody would
ask, ‘Did you know Mr. So-and-So? And I would an-
swer, ‘No, I didn’t.’ They would show you pictures
and ask, ‘Were they in camp with you?’ Then, I an-
swer, ‘There were 30,000 people in the camp!’ ”
“There was misery everywhere,” says Walter Spitzer,
who escaped from Buchenwald in 1945. “Crowded. A
lot of people were crying. There were photos, and peo-
ple asking, ‘Did you meet this one somewhere
in the camp?’ It was impossible. People were
coming up and holding the photos.”
Once they waded through the crowd, the
Lutetia opened its marble arms in welcome.
“I arrived in front of this big luxury hotel,”
Maurice Cliny, who survived Auschwitz as a
child, told Diamant-Berger in his documentary. He
spread his hands wide to convey the impossible enor-
mousness of the place. “I never walked into any place
like that, only seen in a few books or movies, never
for real. So I stepped into that, what do you call it?
Revolving door. And turned with it, and as I walked
inside the hall, I got this spray of white powder, al-
most in my face. It was DDT to treat lice, a common
pesticide at the time. Now it has proved to be danger-
ous. But at the time they were trying to be nice.”
I’m swirling through the hotel’s revolving door now,
having walked up the same short flight of stairs from
the street that the 20,000 deportees strode, trying to
conjure up those times, when the hallways weren’t
white but brown, and filled not with the wafting scent
of designer fragrance, emanating from almost every
corner of the new Lutetia, but the stench of what sing-
er and Lutetia regular Juliette Gréco called “that blood
smell that soaked their striped clothes.”
The trucks and buses and people on foot kept
coming, an endless caravan depositing deportees in
front of the grand hotel: 800 C O N T I N U E D O N PAG E 72
 by T O N Y P E R R O T T E T

TIME
in
a

BOTTLE
Madcap chemists are decoding the secrets
of booze to recreate age-old vintages in a flash
58  SMITHSONIAN.COM  | April 2019
photographs by S P E N C E R L O W E L L

Far left: Bottles of

international rums
from E&A Scheer line
a wall. The rums are
used for research
and comparison.
This page: The
distillery’s patented
reactor, or “time
machine for booze.”
 Lost Spirits has used molecular science to “hack” the chemi-
cal codes of fine aged spirits and recreate them in a patented
reactor—cloning 20-year-old rums and malt whiskeys in just
six days. And much to the horror of liquor purists, the self-
taught, oddball group of distillers has recently won a slew of
coveted spirits awards for its whiskeys and rums.
The next two hours passed in a dreamlike state, an effect pos-
sibly heightened by sampling a shelf-full of potent liquors. Af-
ter TESSA gave a welcome address, ornamental portals opened
to reveal a chamber where elegant goblets of British Royal Na-
vy-style rum were perched for us on a Baroque astronomer’s

O U N EVER K NOW what you’ll find behind closed doors in Los

A vat of molas-
Angeles. On a steamy summer evening, I meandered through ses boils away in
the confusing cultural landscape of the downtown Arts Dis- front of two stills
in a corner of the
trict, skirting the sidewalk “tent city” of Skid Row, sleek hipster warehouse. The
bars and empty parking lots, to a desolate row of warehouses area is reached
by a Willy
on Sixth Street. A lonely doorway was framed by a lush crimson Wonka-style
mural of the Queen of Hearts whose embedded eyes seemed boat ride along
a faux canal.
to follow me with curiosity. A tiny bronze plaque was engraved
with the silhouette of a sphinx.
I pressed the door buzzer and a solemn, bespectacled young
woman carrying a clipboard appeared. When my eyes adjust-
ed to the sepulchral darkness inside, I found myself stand-
ing in a cocoon of velvety drapes and glittering chandeliers
evoking the Moulin Rouge. I popped into the bathroom. The
disembodied voice of a computer that called herself TESSA,
a chirpy, comic version of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, said
she would be our guide for the evening, adding that the fu-
turistic wonders we were about to behold were all built from
materials “that can be purchased from Home Depot.”
This is the world’s most surreal distillery tour, at Lost Spir-
its Distillery (motto: Science, Innovation, Art), a blend of
heady chemistry and immersive theater that has become a
cult hit among spirits geeks. It’s like a high-end Willy Wonka
experience for adults, a Disneyland for drinkers; imagine the
Pirates of the Caribbean ride taken over by eccentric MIT pro-
fessors. But it also captures the loopy brilliance of a company
that is tinkering with the laws of nature. Over the last decade,

60  SMITHSONIAN.COM  | April 2019

globe. As we sunk into plush leather chairs, a (human) guide
named Wayne explained that each sip of an aged spirit contains Lost Spirits has used
as many as 500 flavor compounds: “It’s the most complex thing
you will ever taste,” he exulted. Thus primed, we savored the
molecular science to “hack”
61-proof rum transforming its effect every time it rolled along
the tongue. Suddenly, on a word to TESSA, the visit kicked
the CHEMICAL CODES
into operatic high gear with bursts of dramatic music, flashing of fine aged spirits, cloning
lights and billowing smoke. Curtains opened to reveal a wood-
en barge, so we dutifully took a seat and floated in pitch dark- 20-year-old rums and malt
ness along a “river” through a noisy mock-jungle.
Our destination was a leafy wooden dock where vats of mo-
whiskeys in just six days.

April 2019 | SMITHSONIAN.COM   61

lasses were pungently fermenting, getting ready to be boiled in
a still whose copper pipes snaked through what appeared to be
the Ark of the Covenant. (Distilling 101: Alcohol boils at a lower
temperature than water, so the still gathers the condensed va-
pors as raw spirits.) A door then opened on the high-tech “Dr.
Frankenstein” segment of the tour, a lab where a shiny chem-
ical reactor looking like it had been borrowed from NASA was
rapid-aging the raw liquor. We were given a brisk lecture on
organic chemistry, filled with arcane references to polymers,
hemicellulose and short-chained fatty acids. (In brief, Lost
Spirits technicians use high-intensity light to break compo-
nents of wood apart and then use heat to put them back togeth-
er again in a new order; when blended with alcohol molecules,
they match the chemical fingerprint of matured spirits.)
From there, it was a leap from science back to Alice in Won-
derland as we wandered through a garden of Amazonian
plants being used to make exotic fruit brandies (“What hap-
pens if you give them the attention to detail and process that
goes into a high-end Armagnac?” Wayne asked) and then sat
on a floating circus carousel as artificial stars twinkled in the
darkness. The last stop was a safari tent on “Whiskey Island”
to sip malt while admiring a megalodon tooth, African wood
carvings and a very plausible “dragon’s skull.”
Fantastical sets, the sense of irony, irreverent style—it’s all
very L.A., of course. So too is the distillery’s obsession with
controlling the passage of time. But while most Angelenos may
dream of reversing the aging process, Lost Spirits is speeding it
up. Why wait years for booze to mature when you can achieve
At 16, Davis built his first
still with a plastic bucket,
a hollowed-out cork and
a metal coil. He based it
on a design he’d seen on
“THE SIMPSONS.”
the same thing virtually overnight? In a way, Lost Spirits turns
back the clock and enables distillers to stock their cellars with
aged liquors—retroactively.
No wonder that the distillery’s guiding light is H.G. Wells,
he of the 1895 science fiction novella The Time Machine. (On
the cover of the first edition is a sphinx—the company logo.)
Wells’ lesser-known classic, The Island of Dr Moreau, about a
scientist who upends the laws of nature by turning animals
into humanlike creatures, is another key text. There’s a first
edition in the distillery’s “Whiskey Island” room, and Lost
Spirits blends are named after chapter titles, “Sayers of the
Law” and “Crying of the Puma.”
For history-lovers, the most thrilling possibilities lie in the
62  SMITHSONIAN.COM  | April 2019
firm’s forays into what it calls “booze ar-
chaeology,” which involves deciphering
the exact makeup of such venerable tipples
as Old Medford Rum, once America’s most
beloved alcoholic beverage, purportedly
sipped by Paul Revere on his epic ride in
1775. Social historians have long argued that
we can learn a huge amount about a past
culture from its attitude to the hard stuff.
Now it’s becoming possible to taste the past.
VISITING THE DISTILLERY at a quieter time,
I found that even the behind-the-scenes
workings are theatrical. The cavernous
space is an anarchic cabinet of curiosities,
filled with Victorian sideboards, tomes on
forgotten Polynesian conquests and kitschy
decorations salvaged from retro Los Angeles
cocktail lounges. A wall is lined with valu-
able elixirs from E&A Scheer, an obscure but
powerful rum trading company in Amster-
dam. Gleaming Mac screens sit alongside
containers full of fermenting star fruit.
“It’s like a tacky American version of the
British Museum,” says Bryan Davis, who
co-founded Lost Spirits a decade ago with
his long-term partner Joanne Haruta, and
now runs the company with a five-person
team of “serious booze nerds.” He was at-
tending to the lab’s most valuable piece of
technology, the gas chromatograph mass
spectrometer, or GC/MS. “It breaks down
the chemicals in order of volatility, which is
the way you taste things on the tongue,” Da-
vis explained. The gray boxlike machine, the
size of an average dishwasher, was vaguely
menacing; it stabbed a vial with a needle,
withdrew a drop of liquid and proceeded to
analyze it, producing the results a few hours
later in a multipage printout. The high-tech
vibe was nicely offset by two statues of an-
gels sucking on plastic tubes (a joking refer-
ence to “angel’s share,” the notion advanced
by monks that the evaporation of barreled
spirits must be the result of angels taking a sip).
“The booze industry has two distinct personalities,” Da-
vis said as we wove past sheets of copper and jars of bacteria.
“There’s all the big-name companies who fill the grocery shelves
with consumer products. And then there are the small boutique
producers, whose bottles people buy to savor and appreciate
and discuss together for hours, like artworks.” With a shaved
head and dressed in a Hawaiian shirt, Davis is a cross between a
mad scientist and a medieval alchemist, although one who runs
a 1950s tiki bar. Perhaps because he is self-taught, he has a talent
for making organic chemistry comprehensible, and is given to
half-jokey pronouncements. “It’s yeast’s world,” he says at one
stage, stirring a pungent vat. “We just live in it.” Digressions

touch on how the desire to brew beer spurred Neolith-
Bryan Davis,
a co-founder ic agriculture, or the unlikely origins of the absinthe
of Lost Spirits craze in the 19th century. (The liqueur took off when
Distillery,
samples one of French soldiers in Algeria and Indochina discovered
his creations, that it warded off malaria.) He is just as happy talking
a peated malt
whiskey from his about chemical formulas as parsing the intricacies of
“Abomination” the Harry Potter ride versus Transformers at Univer-
range.
sal Studios Hollywood. “I have the same interests as a
13-year-old,” he says. On one visit to the distillery, we
went to a restaurant in Little Tokyo, a conveyor-belt
“sushi-train” where the plates can activate a televised
battle between ninjas and monsters trying to destroy
world cities. “Isn’t that the coolest thing ever?”
Even while sitting at Davis’ lab desk, try-
ing to untangle the story of Lost Spirits took
some doing. Like characters in a sitcom,
team members interrupted every few min-
utes to offer a new snippet or show an arti-
fact. One research partner, Wynn Sanders
(nicknamed “Colonel Sanders” because he
once worked for the U.S. military), excitedly
brought over a rare wood used in Gilded Age
barrels. A young scientist named Robyn,
who worked in her gym clothes so she could
exercise in a yard nearby, popped over to
discuss a chemical printout. (“I did my PhD
on the GC/MS and I love whiskey! So I com-
bined my two passions.”) A devotee named
Josh, who was not an employee but just
liked hanging out at the lab, had procured
dozens of tiny bottles of 1960s-era rum on
eBay, which we all savored like fine caber-
net. And there were constant calls from sup-
pliers and regulators. “It’s like being stuck
on a pirate ship,” he laughed. “Some days,
I’m just a simple carpenter. Other days, can-
nonballs are being lobbed at you!”
THE SAGA OF LOST SPIRITS is an unlikely
paean to the creativity in suburbia. One day,
at 16, Davis decided to make booze. “I am a
curious person. My cousins owned a winery
so I knew how to make that. But how do you
make spirits?” With a plastic bucket, a hol-
lowed-out champagne cork and a metal coil,
he built his first still based on a design he’d
seen on “The Simpsons.” Adding yeast, sug-
ar and molasses, he made a floral concoction
that looked and tasted “like red Kool-Aid.”
He was soon able to trade his booze for rides
to Burning Man. Davis had found his calling.
The spontaneous, improvised nature of
his research would remain a theme, even if
Davis talks about his career shifts the way
academics discuss Picasso’s Blue Period and
Cubism Period. His “absinthe period” began
shortly before he was a sculpture student at
San Francisco Art Institute and learned that the long-
banned “green fairy” beloved by the French Impres-
sionist painters had been legalized in much of Europe
after nearly a century. (“I thought: That’s really cool!
I need this in my life.”) Davis and Haruta, who had
met in college, moved to a village outside Barcelona,
Spain, where they used 19th-century recipes found in
old newspapers to “bring back from the grave” an ab-
sinthe made from lemon balm instead of hyssop flow-
ers. “We made something pretty palatable,” he says.
“This was not what van Gogh cut his ear off drinking!”
(Absinthe’s popularity with artists comes from its key
ingredient, wormwood, which gives a slightly differ-
April 2019 | SMITHSONIAN.COM   63
ent effect to alcohol, Davis says, making the nervous system
fire faster. “It plays with your brain chemistry. You can drink
but also play chess!”) It became such a hit in Paris that there
were “green hours,” a forerunner of “happy hour.” But absinthe Two sphinxes
gained an unfair reputation for provoking fits of violence and adorn part of a
still. The sphinx
was banned in the early 1900s, making it the first “controlled is the company
substance.” The U.S. ban of 1912 lasted until 2007. logo, inspired by
the design on
Davis’ “bourbon period” began in 2009. With craft distilleries the cover of the
taking off from Brooklyn to San Francisco, he and Haruta decid- first edition of
H.G. Wells’ The
ed to start Lost Spirits on land in central California near Salinas Time Machine.
owned by her parents. The pair borrowed $80,000 and built a
commercial distillery from scratch using copper sheet metal,
wooden barrels on sale in Napa and a disassembled old boiler A circus
they found on Craigslist. (The standard cost is $600,000.) Poring carousel trans-
ports visitors to
over New York Times articles from the 1890s, they also decided to Whiskey Island,
a safari-style
recreate a forgotten frontier contraption called “the log and cop- tasting room in
per still.” Early American settlers had limited access to copper, a canvas tent
surrounded by
so they used the materials on hand: a tree trunk split in two, each jungle plants.
half hollowed out like a canoe and bound together at the end to
form one long log. The log would be filled
with fermented rye until it swelled and
became watertight, using metal only for
the head and condenser. It would then
be lit on fire, boiling the liquid inside to
separate the alcohol. Davis’ modern re-
make distilled the first so-called “steam
bourbon” anyone had tasted in a century.
“There’s a myth that booze is better now,
that people drank to just get drunk,” Da-
vis says. “It’s totally the opposite. Thanks
to the artisanal process, spirits were
heavier and more flavorful.”
The “whiskey period” took Lost Spir-
its on a more avant-garde track. “We
moved from ancient arts to ultra-con-
temporary,” he says. “We wanted to find
flavors that nobody had ever tasted be-
fore.” Now using a peat-smoked still with
a cupola-shaped chimney (a dotty Scot-
tish tradition), Davis experimented with
adding bacteria during fermentation—
microbes cultivated on bananas, for
example—to provide extra layers of fla-
vor. He dabbled in yeast manipulation.
(“Yeast is the fastest-evolving organism
on the planet,” Davis enthuses. “Its cells
reproduce every few hours. They have
superpowers!”) He even fermented us-
ing Pacific Ocean seawater. (“Thanks to
the seaweed, beach water is very alive.
It’s full of coastal bacteria!”) The result
had the aroma of the beach combined
with a distinctive briny taste. (“It had
a killer sense of place.”) Aficionados
flocked to their quirky tasting room—a
mobile home decorated like an estate in
the English countryside.

64  SMITHSONIAN.COM  | April 2019

 It’s like a Willy Wonka
experience for adults, a
Disneyland for drinkers;
imagine the Pirates of the
Crystal goblets
of British Royal
Navy-style rum
Caribbean ride taken over
are presented
on a Baroque
by MIT PROFESSORS.
antique globe.

April 2019 | SMITHSONIAN.COM   65

AT L A ST, IN 2010, Davis decided to unravel
the science behind how spirits mature. “This is
where things get complicated,” he warns—and
he’s not exaggerating.
In short, the traditional method of aging since
the Middle Ages—placing raw spirits in charred
white oak barrels, then hiding them in a dark
cellar for years—involves a series of complicated
molecular reactions. First, polymers in the wood
break down in a process called “extraction.” This
produces a variety of aromas, appealing ones
such as smoke, vanilla bean or pine menthol,
and less appealing ones, he says, like “barf”
(from a short-chained fatty acid called butyric
acid). But as these compounds leach into the
alcohol, a second reaction, “esterification,” oc-
curs. Alcohol molecules bind to the polymer
fragments and recombine to create 500-odd new
flavor compounds. The “barf aroma” compound,
for example, when tied to an ethanol molecule,
smells like pineapple, then honeysuckle. After a
couple of decades, when the taste and smell bal-
ance is most alluring—with lush honey notes or
rich fruit balance—the distiller bottles it.
For centuries, boozehounds have dreamed of
speeding up the process, which is agonizingly
slow, expensive and wildly inefficient, since a
large percentage of spirits are lost to evapora-
tion. So Davis set out to reproduce it in laborato-
ry conditions. He obtained a bottle of a famous
33-year-old rum from Guyana, the 1975 Port
Mourant beloved by connoisseurs, and had it
chemically analyzed. Armed with the molecu-
lar fingerprint, he entered his “rum period.”
The stumbling block, he found, was break-
ing the wood polymers apart, a reaction that
seemed impossible to speed. The eureka mo-
ment came by accident one weekend, when
he decided to paint his wooden house deck,
The inside of the
which was fraying in the Californian sun. “I reactor, where
was thinking: ‘The sun is doing one hell of a raw spirits and uid goes through controlled heating to bind the com-
oak pieces are
job of breaking up the polymers on the deck.’ blasted with light pounds together, forming the complex long-chained
I got 100 yards away and thought: ‘Hey, wait a three times as esters we recognize from spirits matured in a barrel.
strong as the sun
minute!’” He got every lamp in the house and at the Equator to The sweet spot is six days, Davis found, which matches
blasted a piece of wood in a tube of raw spirits break down the the flavor of around 20 years. “And on the seventh day,
wood polymers.
until blowing the electrical circuits. The result we rested,” Davis deadpanned. “That’s my favorite line.
tasted like nail polish, but it had worked: The I engineered the process for months to get it down to
strong light had shorn aromatic compounds six days, just so I could make that joke.”
from the wood polymers. Lost Spirits’ first technologically aged product, Co-
Davis then built his “rapid-aging spirits reactor”—which at lonial Inspired Rum, came out in 2014. “We were terrified at how cus-
different times was called Model 1 and THEA, after a Greek god- tomers were going to respond,” he says. But the reviews were good, so
dess related to the sun, although Davis prefers “time machine in 2015, Davis published his findings in a white paper. After interest
for booze”—to induce both extraction and esterification. This from biochemists and other investors, he essentially became a Silicon
sleek array of tubes and metal containers is the centerpiece of Valley tech company and secured patents and leased out manufac-
the distillery tour. Inside a large glass cylinder, raw spirits and tured reactors to international spirits companies.
oak pieces are subjected to light three times as strong as the sun Not everyone is enchanted with instant molecular “aging.” Edgar
at the Equator. After the wood polymers break apart, the liq- Harden, a London dealer of antique spirits, argues that only time can

66  SMITHSONIAN.COM  | April 2019


provide the subtlety and character of a truly great liquor. “I lik-
en their process to artificially creating an antiqued finish on an
old piece of furniture or a painting,” he said. “You might kind of
get the antiqued look by using solvents and polishes and dirt,
but nothing replaces real dust and grime building up on an or-
ganic surface over centuries; that’s patina.”
Others embrace it. The turning point was a 94 rating for
Abomination peated malt by Jim Murray’s Whisky Bible 2018,
placing Lost Spirits in the top 5 percent of 4,600 international
whiskeys sampled. Many mixologists share the reaction of Sean
Muldoon, the managing partner of the Dead Rabbit Grocery &
Grog in New York, one of North America’s most awarded Irish
taprooms, when given a blind tasting of the six-day-old whiskey
and rum: “You’re kidding me. It’s bloody good.”
In 2016, Lost Spirits moved to Los Angeles and set up a new
high-tech lab-distillery in the Arts District, along with a tast-
ing room for bartenders, chefs and connoisseurs who lived to
discuss the ins and outs of mold and peat burn-
ing while sitting in a faux jungle. It became so
popular that Davis reinvented it in 2018 for the
public by reservation. The blend of education
and artistry has struck a chord. “I didn’t know
what I had gotten myself into at first,” says
Genevieve Liberté, a Los Angeles-based model
and producer who was on the tour I joined. “I
felt like I had stepped through the magic cup-
board into Narnia. But somehow it managed to
include a crash course in organic chemistry. I’ll
never look at a cocktail the same way again.”
FO R D I E - H A R D N O STA L GI C S, it’s the reac-
tor’s potential for cloning antique spirits that
creates the most feverish dreams. Old Medford
Rum, which was first produced in Medford,
Massachusetts, around 1715, remained the most
popular U.S. spirit throughout the 18th century,
but when the family-run company closed its
doors in 1905, the name was sold and the recipe
was lost. Today only a few bottles exist, selling
at auction for around $10,000 each.
Which is why, on my last visit to Lost Spirits,
Davis and his crew gathered proudly around an
eccentric inventor of medical supplies named
Wayne Upton, who opened a small padded Pel-
ican case and carefully produced two vials, one
labeled “Medford c. 1858,” the other “Medford Oc-
tober 2017.” He opened the rare original 19th-cen-
tury sample. “Have a smell. It was bottled when
Abraham Lincoln was campaigning for senator!”
We passed the vial around, savoring the surpris-
ingly sweet, fruity aroma from a century and a
half ago. “It tastes like cherry cough medicine cut
with cologne,” Davis confided. “But in a good way!
It’s different from anything else in the world.”
To recreate the elixir, Upton had obtained a
sample from a sympathetic and very secretive
collector. (The ginger-haired Upton moonlights
as a top-shelf rum connoisseur, serving bottles from the back
of his car in Los Angeles parking lots to fellow aficionados in
his so-called “Trunk Club.”) At Lost Spirits, the team put drops
The “BARF AROMA”
compound, for example,
when tied to an ethanol
molecule, smells like
PINEAPPLE, then
HONEYSUCKLE.
in the spectrometer and analyzed its chemical fingerprint; the
evidence suggested that the yeast strain found in Medford was
unique, so they dispatched a member of the team to Massachu-
setts to collect samples in situ.
If you happened to be in Medford Square one hot night in
July 2017, you might have witnessed a stocky, middle-aged
researcher creeping around the moonlit Salem Street Bury-
ing Ground laying petri dishes by the gravestones. Each one
contained Grade A molasses and distilled water, designed to
capture wild yeast, which floats in ghostly traces in the air and,
despite mutations over time, remains specific to its location.
He continued to the Mystic River to lay other dishes at the spot
where Caribbean molasses was once unloaded from boats, and
he ventured beneath the stone Cradock Bridge, which Revere
had crossed on his famous ride. (The researcher asked to re-
main anonymous, worried that his nocturnal mission had a
certain grave-robbing air. “Laying petri dishes in a public cem-
etery,” Davis pondered. “Do you need a permit for that?” “A
bottle of Scotch was involved too,” the researcher confessed.)
The next morning, some petri dishes had disappeared, oth-

“Now try this,” Upton

said, proudly passing me
the second vial from his
case. “It’s the first real
Medford rum made in
OVER 105 YEARS.”
ers were spoiled by dog’s paw prints and apparent “canine sa-
liva,” but nine had captured yeast strains that could be isolat-
ed. The researcher incubated them for three days in his hotel
room with the thermostat set at a yeast-friendly 80 degrees.
(“It was an uncomfortable weekend.”) Two strains from the
cemetery turned out to be almost identical pairings with the
1860 version, perhaps because the verdant site has changed
very little over the generations. Back in Los Angeles, the cul-
tures were grown and distilled into the raw, white rum. “I’d
never seen any yeast that potent,” marveled Davis. “It’s as fra-
grant as hell. It’s as flavorful as it gets, right at the beginning. I
just like opening the jar of it and breathing it in.”
“Now try this,” Upton said, passing me the second vial from 19th century, rum barrels were made from American chest-
his case. “It’s the first real Medford rum made in over 105 years.” nut, a tree that once covered the entire Eastern Seaboard but
I reverently sipped the rum clone in its raw form; it had a was wiped out by a blight in the early 1900s. Only a handful of
searing potency, living up to its reputation as being strong isolated, protected groves survive, making it one of the rarest
enough “to make a rabbit bite a bulldog,” but it also had the plants in the world today. But two American chestnut trees had
unmistakable tang of the 1860 version. (“It’s like biting into fallen in a storm in Washington State. Colonel Sanders was dis-
a cherry,” Davis said.) The next step in the cloning process is patched to buy the trunks and bring them back to Los Angeles.
to treat larger quantities of the raw rum with antique wood in I left the group chatting about other legendary tipples that
the chemical reactor. This requires another mad quest: In the might be resurrected. What about the fabled 19th-century

68  SMITHSONIAN.COM  | April 2019

 Spirits are
pumped through
two angel
statues, a joking
reference to the
term “angel’s
share,” in Lost
Spirits’ basement
laboratory.

“Bonaparte” rum, purportedly distilled on the plantation
where Empress Josephine was raised on the island of Marti-
nique, a flask of which Napoleon supposedly carried every
time he went into battle. The true holy grail, Davis insisted,
was an obscure Jamaican rum called J. Wray & Nephew 17. It
has been a tiki bar legend ever since the 1940s, when a Califor-
nia bar owner named Victor J. Bergeron (a.k.a. Trader Vic) used
it to create the mai tai cocktail. Today, there are believed to be
only nine bottles left, and the last one went for $54,000 at auc-
tion—one of the most expensive bottles of spirits in the world.
But what price can you put on such a visceral connection to
the past? Davis reminisced about once bidding over $18,000 on
a J. Wray & Nephew 17 bottle of rum before being forced to drop
out. “We had passed the point of sanity,” he admitted, with a
faraway look in his eye. “But you’re not just buying a bottle of
rum. You’re buying the dagger that stabbed Rasputin!”
If Lost Spirits continues to thrive, one day in the near future
everyone will have access to such rare treasures.

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Napoleon
C O N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E 37
By the 1970s, a majority of Saints were working
abroad and sending money home; it became a rite
of passage. Even today, the average annual salary
is only about 8,000 St. Helena pounds, or $10,000.
Hence the British investment in the airport. Weekly
flights began in October 2017 with hopes of boosting
tourism. But while authorities estimated that the
island needed 30,000 tourists per year to become
financially sustainable, that hasn’t happened. In its
first year, the airport welcomed only 894 visitors.
None of them was an emperor, but they all could
do something Napoleon never could: leave the is-
land. After he died, in 1821, apparently of stomach
cancer (though conspiracy theories abound), he was
buried in a grave dug ten feet deep, lined with bricks
and sealed with concrete. For a man who had es-
caped once in life, the British were taking no chanc-
es in death.
After 19 more years, and with a new young Queen
Victoria on the throne, unencumbered by memories
of the past, the British finally yielded to appeals for
his remains to be brought home to France. Today he
lies in a grand, colossal tomb in the heart of Paris,
and near the Seine, where he longed to rest.
On the day we visit his resting place in Geranium
Valley on St. Helena, the site is deserted. A well-main-
70  SMITHSONIAN.COM  | April 2019
Napoleon
tained walk leads from the road down to a grassy hol-
figurines low. Black lances of wrought-iron fencing surround
and memorabilia the now-empty grave. The French demanded that the
at Jamestown’s
Consulate Hotel, tombstone be inscribed “Napoleon,” but the British
housed in an refused unless “Bonaparte” was added. Thus, the
18th-century
building that stone remained blank, history unwritten.
promises an ex-
perience from “a
bygone era.” S O W H AT WO U L D N A P O L E O N think of our visit
today? Where does a fallen emperor fit in a world of
international air travel and social media? Napoleon
lived for communication (he would have loved Face-
book and Instagram). Yet here there is only the wind,
the sea and the birds above. To us, paradise; to Na-
poleon, purgatory.
Still the emperor may have the last laugh. As he
said of the British, “In 500 years’ time, Napoleon’s
name will shine over Europe, whereas yours . . . will
be known only for [the] shame and injustice of [your]
conduct to me.” Truly, “Napoleon”—as cognac or
conqueror—is common parlance today. And even
though his island of exile has not achieved world-
wide fame and tourism dollars, that may be more
blessing than curse. After all, what is the price of air-
plane access and swarms of tourists? Is it better that
St. Helena stay as it is, in its state of not-then and
not-tomorrow, an island enchanted?
On our last morning on the island, we visited Jon-
athan again. We asked for answers, but in his wis-
dom of nearly two centuries, he said nothing.
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Hotel Lutetia arrived on April 29 and “They had lost memory of dates, the names of the comman-
C O N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E 56 30, 1945, followed by 300 dos, their torturers were called nicknames or mispronounced
per day in May, and 500 names,” wrote Olga Wormser-Migot. “We have to tell them they
a day from the end of May until early June, until between can help us find the others, find the mass graves along the exodus
18,000 to 20,000 had passed through its revolving doors. roads; and possibly identify their executioners.”
“There were so many from the beginning,” Resistance mem- “And then Paris and the Hotel Lutetia,” wrote survivor Gisèle
ber Sabine Zlatin wrote in her memoirs. “They had to be Guillemot, the words from her memoir read by an actress in Dia-
washed, shaved, deloused. . . . Everything had to be done for mant-Berger’s documentary, recalling an “elegant woman who
those found in such awful condition. . . . They would spend welcomed us with care, but wore gloves. . . . The Hotel Lutetia
three or four days at the Lutetia, or a week.” had tons of DDT to fight lice, all over the hair, in the mouth, in
“The repatriated will be undressed, put all their personal the nose, in the eyes, in the ears. Enough! I’m choking!”
effects in a bag, which will be disinfected,” Assouline wrote in The doctor looked at her, “the repulsive little animal I had
his novel. “He will keep his personal valuable objects in a wa- become,” Guillemot added, and then “questions, questions
terproof envelope around the neck. Coming out of the dressing endlessly.”
room they’ll walk into the shower room. And the nurse will ask Among them were children, “adults too soon.” One of them
if they need to be deloused. . . . They will be measured, weighed, was quoted in the exhibition, “Bitter, suspicious of adults and
vaccinated, screened for infectious diseases, es- full of hatred against the Germans . . . we had to
pecially STD, and then checked for cases of TB or learn how to become children again.” And hiding
Staff, including
other respiratory problems. The estimated medium doorman David among them all were impostors: Nazi collaborators
weight would be around 48 kilos (95 pounds).” Huguenot, are masquerading as deportees in hopes of escape.
proud of the
There were questions and processes to give hotel’s legacy. They “could not get used to comfort, with hot
them papers for their new lives. “Political deport- In 2007, its and cold water,” Sabine Zlatin said in a 1988 ra-
Art Nouveau
ees, no matter their physical condition, should be features were dio interview. “Some would say, ‘Is this true? Am
protected under
treated like ill persons,” read a directive from the the Historic I alive? Is this a sheet? Is this a real bed?’ So we
French government. Monuments Act. hired social workers to help cheer them up and to

72  SMITHSONIAN.COM  | April 2019

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 tell them it is all true. You are free. You are in a requisitioned
hotel. And you will soon go back to a normal life.”
Many slept on the floor, and, failing that, walked the hallways.
“They are coming back from hell,” says Assouline. “Can you
imagine?”
I tried to imagine. I stood in those same halls, now pristine
and white and filled with gaiety, and struggled to envision
when 20,000 souls passed through this strange membrane
between two worlds. As Gisèle Guillemot wrote, “When we en-
tered the Lutetia we were just numbers; when we left we had
become citizens again.”
I tried to get the old hotel that’s new again to speak to me.
All I had as a window into its past were the interviews I’d done,
the documentaries I’d seen and the exhibition, comprising 50
boxes of placards, featuring the unearthed documents and pho-
tographs. The exhibit was inaugurated in Paris in 2015, when it
went on display for 15 days before going on tour across France,
garnering an estimated 20,000 visitors at 48 sites. But it was not
shown inside the Lutetia. Because, once again, the old hotel was
being reborn, and was closed for its 2010 to 2018 renovations.
EACH SPIN OF THE DOOR WOULD REVEAL
ANOTHER EPOCH OF THE LUTETIA.
A few years before the closing in 2010, it had seemed as if
the hotel was trying to forget its past. A group of deportees
had been meeting for dinner at the hotel on the last Thursday
of each month since the mid-1960s. There were speakers and
remembrances and a meal overseen by management at a two-
thirds discount. The dinners began occurring less frequently.
At this point, the Lutetia was a “property,” as hotels are called
today, no longer even owned by Parisians, but by an American
hospitality conglomerate, Starwood Capital.
THE LU TETIA WA S OFFICIALLY closed as a repatriation cen-
ter on September 1, 1945. In 1955, Pierre Taittinger, the 68-year-old
founder of the Champagne Taittinger house and a Bon Marché
board member, purchased the Lutetia from the Boucicaut family.
Champagne, jazz and good times returned along with the
Champagne magnate. “The hotel was once again a place to be
seen,” wrote Balland. “French President François Mitterrand held
summits at the hotel and addressed the nation from its ballroom.”
The fashion designer Sonia Rykiel redecorated the hotel,
beginning in 1979 and into the early 1980s, replacing every-
thing dark and foreboding with the avant-garde. And for a
time, Americans and other affluent guests did gravitate there.
Actors and entertainers, including the French icons Gérard
Depardieu, Catherine Deneuve, French singer-songwriter
Serge Gainsbourg and Isabella Rossellini, made the Lutetia
their second home. Pierre Bergé, co-founder of Yves Saint
Laurent, checked in for an extended stay.
By 2005, when Starwood acquired the Lutetia, the invest-
ment firm planned to transform it into a reimagined Element
by Westin hotel. “The first of a new brand,” recalled gener-
74  SMITHSONIAN.COM  | April 2019
al manager Cousty. Shortly after, a group called the French
Friends of the Lutetia was formed, made up of powerful Pari-
sians and Lutetia guests from abroad. “They were able to list
the building [for architectural preservation],” says Cousty.
In August 2010, a new buyer for the Lutetia was announced:
the Alrov company. Alfred Akirov and his son Georgy—the
firm’s holdings include the Set Hotels—had plans for a trans-
formative restoration. The hotel that once housed Nazis was
now in the hands of Jewish owners from Tel Aviv.
The Akirovs fell in love with “the Lutetia’s unique location,
history and powerful position in the imagination of all Pari-
sians,” says Georgy Akirov. They jumped at the opportunity to
return the Lutetia “to its rightful position as the ‘living room
of Paris’ in St. Germain,” he says.
And, says Cousty, “The association of deportees has been
in contact to relaunch their monthly dinners at the Brasserie
Lutetia.”
For the hotel’s new owners, Pierre Assouline has his own ad-
vice on Lutetia’s enduring legacy. “Never forget you bought a part
of the history of Paris,” he says. “Part of this history is brilliant,
pleasant, glamorous, the Lutetia of the begin-
ning. But there is the Lutetia of the war and the
Lutetia of the liberation. Never forget it.
“I would be very glad if in the main corridor,
there is a vitrine,” he adds, referring to the dis-
play cases that line the lobbies of Paris’ palace
hotels, filled with brightly illuminated goods
from luxury retailers and jewelers. “And it would not be a place
for handbags or jewelry, but for the history with the pictures.”
I looked for such an exhibition in the dozen vitrines in the
new Lutetia’s lobby, but found them filled with only the typi-
cal luxury wares. So I searched for commemoration elsewhere:
swimming in the white marble pool, soaking in the solid white
marble bathtub, sitting in the spa’s white marble steam room.
Finding nothing of the past there, I joined the present in the Bar
Josephine, packed on this Saturday night with a line at the door,
a band belting jazz and an army of hip bartenders dispensing ar-
tisan cocktails with names like Tokyo Blues and Le Rive Gauche.
“This is the hot spot in Par-ee, baby!” I overhead an Ameri-
can telling his wife.
I fled the bar for the boulevard, exiting through the revolving
doors, which a producer had told Assouline could be a central
character if a movie were ever made of his novel: each spin of
the door revealing another epoch of the Lutetia. But tonight the
door only delivered me to the street. I stared up at the hotel’s
undulating facade. I could make out a faded white stone plaque,
with a bouquet of dead flowers hanging from a ring beneath it:
“From April to August 1945, this hotel, which had become a
reception center, received the greater part of the survivors of the
Nazi concentration camps, glad to have regained their liberty
and their loved ones from whom they had been snatched. Their
joy cannot erase the anguish and pain of the families of the
thousands who disappeared who waited here in vain for their
own in this place.”
Finally, it hit me. I hadn’t seen a ghost, but I had stayed
in one: defiant, resilient and, true to the slogan that was be-
stowed at its birth, unsinkable.
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Artificial Heart
C O N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E 22
the artificial heart he had been hired to
develop. (Experiments on calves had not
been promising. The animals looked, ac-
cording to DeBakey, like “a cadaver from
time of implantation” and did not sur-
vive for any reasonable length of time.)
So it happened that in 1969, Haskell
Karp, a 47-year-old print shop employee
from Skokie, Illinois, arrived in Houston
under the same coronary death sen-
tence as so many others, only to be told
by Cooley, Oz-like, that, why, what he
needed was a new heart! But in case one
wasn’t immediately available, Cooley
also had a new gizmo that could—prob-
ably—keep Karp alive until they got one.
That was how, on April 4, what is now
known as the Cooley-Liotta heart came
to beat in Karp’s chest for a total of three
days, until he received a transplanted
human heart; he died of an infection less
than two days later. (Ethical objections
were raised because the procedure had
been done without formal review.) The
device itself now resides in the collec-
tions of the Smithsonian National Muse-
um of American History.
But in the meantime, history was
made: Cooley and Liotta had proven that
a human being could be kept alive with
an artificial heart, launching a quest
that lasts to this day. The operation also
ignited one of the most famous medical
feuds of all time: Once DeBakey found
out about the heart purloined from his
lab, he fired everyone who worked there
and turned Denton Cooley into surgical
public enemy No. 1, using his influence
to launch local and national investiga-
tions of what he termed a theft. Though
little came of those, Cooley would later
say that the continuing competition
that lasted until DeBakey’s death in
2008—Cooley died in 2016—helped to
make the Texas Medical Center a global
leader in the war on heart disease.
Yet for all the advances made since
1969, there is still no mechanical device
that fully can replace the real thing. The
human heart remains stubbornly resis-
tant to total replacement, its physical
mysteries nearly as challenging as the
metaphorical ones that have plagued us
since the beginning of time.
80  SMITHSONIAN.COM  | April 2019
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SMITHSONIAN; April 2019; Volume 50, Number 1.
Smithsonian (ISSN 0037-7333) is published monthly (ex-
cept for a January/February issue and a July/August issue)
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Fingerprints
C O N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E 18
Eight? Ten? Twenty? Depending on what
city you were tried in, the standards could
vary dramatically. And to make matters
more complex, when police lift prints
from a crime scene, they are often in-
complete and unclear, giving authorities
scant material to make a match.
So even as fingerprints were viewed
as unmistakable, plenty of people were
mistakenly sent to jail. Simon Cole notes
that at least 23 people in the United
States have been imprisoned after be-
ing wrongly connected to crime-scene
prints. In North Carolina in 1985, Bruce
Basden was arrested for murder and
spent 13 months in jail before the print
analyst realized he’d made a blunder.
Nonetheless, the reliability of finger-
printing today is rarely questioned in
modern courts. One exception was J.
Spencer Letts, a federal judge in Cali-
fornia who in 1991 became suspicious of
fingerprint analysts who’d testified in a
bank robbery trial. Letts was astounded
to hear that the standard for declaring
that two prints matched varied widely
from county to county. Letts threw out
the fingerprint evidence from that trial.
“I don’t think I’m ever going to use
fingerprint testimony again,” he said
in court, sounding astonished, as Cole
writes. “I’ve had my faith shaken.” But
for other judges, the faith still holds.
THE WORLD OF DNA identification, in
comparison, has received a slightly high-
er level of skepticism. When it was first
discovered in 1984, it seemed like a blast
of sci-fi precision. Alec Jeffreys, a re-
searcher at the University of Leicester in
England, had developed a way to analyze
pieces of DNA and produce an image
of being unique. In a splashy demonstra-
tion of his concept, he found that the se-
men on two murder victims wasn’t from
the suspect police had in custody.
DNA quickly gained a reputation for
helping free the wrongly accused: Indeed,
the nonprofit Innocence Project has used
it to free over 360 prisoners by casting
doubt on their convictions. By 2005, Sci-
ence magazine said DNA analysis was the
“gold standard” for forensic evidence.
82  SMITHSONIAN.COM  | April 2019
 Yet DNA identification, like finger-
printing, can be prone to error when
used sloppily in the field. One problem,
notes Erin Murphy, professor of crim-
inal law at New York University School
of Law, is “mixtures”: If police scoop up
genetic material from a crime scene, Darwin Panama
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may not have the training to avoid con-
taminating their samples. Yet they’re
also building up massive databases of lo-
cal citizens: Some police forces now rou-
tinely request a DNA sample from every-
one they stop, so they can rule them in or
out of future crime investigations.
The courts have already recognized
the dangers of badly managed DNA iden-
tification. In 1989—only five years after
Jeffreys invented the technique—U.S.
lawyers successfully contested DNA iden-
tification in court, arguing that the lab
processing the evidence had irreparably
contaminated it. Even the prosecution
agreed it had been done poorly. Interest-
ingly, as Mnookin notes, DNA evidence
received pushback “much more quickly
than fingerprints ever did.”
It even seems the public has grasped
the dangers of its being abused and mis-
used. Last November, a jury in Queens,
New York, deadlocked in a murder trial—
after several of them reportedly began
to suspect the accused’s DNA had found
its way onto the victim’s body through
police contamination. “There is a sophis-
tication now among a lot of jurors that
we haven’t seen before,” Lauren-Brooke
Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brennan Cen-
ter for Justice, told the New York Times.
To keep DNA from being abused,
we’ll have to behave like good detec-
tives—asking the hard questions, and
demanding evidence.
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ask smithsonian
YOU’VE GOT QUESTIONS, WE’VE GOT EXPERTS
Q: Dragons are ubiquitous in Chinese
art. What do they symbolize?
— Stacee Hawkins | Sugar Land, Texas
INCE ANCIEN T TIMES, dragons
S have represented the emperor, who
is the son of heaven in Chinese tra-
dition, says Stephen Allee, associate
curator for Chinese painting and
calligraphy at the Freer | Sackler. A symbol of mas-
culine power and positive energy, the dragons are
benevolent beings associated with water, from seas
to waterfalls. Their control over rain and ability to
influence the harvest reinforced their power in Chi-
na’s agrarian society. Often, they’re shown clutching
a flaming pearl, meant to symbolize wisdom they’ve
captured and will use to help humankind.
Q: The painter Lee Krasner became known
for destroying or cannibalizing some of her
works. Why did she do that?
— Earl Alan | Philadelphia
84  SMITHSONIAN.COM  | April 2019
KR ASN E R WA S B O TH keenly self-critical and very
intentional about developing new modes of painting
as she matured as an artist. Her mentor, the German
artist Hans Hofmann, especially encouraged her
move into abstraction. In the late 1940s and ear-
ly ’50s, she began occasionally cutting up her own
paintings—and sometimes ones discarded by her
husband, Jackson Pollock—and incorporating parts
into collages of new work. Evelyn Hankins, senior
curator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture
Garden, says this process of renewal was integral to
Krasner’s practice. In 1981, three years before she
died, an art student wrote to ask how she felt about
her completed works. Krasner replied, “Do I consid-
er my work ‘precious’? The answer is no.”
Q: If the world’s insects ceased to exist, what
would be the effect on the earth?
— Thomas Sweda | Lombard, Illinois
EN TOMOPHOBES MIGHT BE HAPPY, but be care-
ful what you wish for. Insects—1.2 million described
species, and about ten quintillion individual bugs—
make up the vast majority of the planet’s land-animal
biomass. If they disappeared, the results would be cat-
astrophic, says Floyd W. Shockley, collections manager
at the department of entomology at the National Muse-
um of Natural History. They are foundational members
of the food chain, so animals higher up on the chain—
reptiles, fishes, birds and mammals—would also go
extinct. Going vegetarian wouldn’t help much: An esti-
mated three-fourths of the earth’s flowering plants and
a third of crop plants depend on animal pollinators,
most of which are insects. And organic waste would
build up without any insects to help it decompose.
Q: Who was the woman nicknamed “7½” by
the original Mercury 7 astronauts?
— Martha Kudlitz | New York City
B ET T Y SK ELTON, a champion aerobatic pilot and
car racer who was known as “the first lady of firsts,”
was given her fractional moniker in 1959, while per-
forming the same training exercises as the Mercury
7, all of whom were male. She did so at the behest of
Look magazine, for a story that was published in Feb-
ruary 1960 with the cover line, “Should a Girl Be First
in Space?” Although it was something of a publicity
stunt—Skelton was not considered for the space pro-
gram—the question was taken seriously in U.S. news
media, says Margaret Weitekamp, curator at the Na-
tional Air and Space Museum’s space history depart-
ment. Still, it would be 23 years before NASA sent a
Submit your female astronaut, Sally Ride, into space.
queries at
Smithsonian.
com/ask Text by Anna Diamond
Illustration by Shreya Gupta
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