Have DiCaprio play Colonel Unger and it'll be a perfect bookend to his career: "Privilege" by Jim Shepard (Best American Short Stories 2024)

I love to read a good trade history book. A talented historian tells stories as well as most fiction writers, but the stories are true. Reading it feels, to use the Christian word, edifying somehow. I know that when I'm reading a trade history book (meaning a history book that gets sold to the general public instead of for other serious historians), I'm not really doing history. A good historian writing a trade book will summarize the conclusions of real historians who did archive crawls. They're the real historians. Still, some of favorite history books, like Theodore Rex or Battle Cry of Freedom or Team of Rivals, feel satisfying somehow, in a way that even a good novel isn't. Like a novel, they layer anecdote with larger-scale narratives to make the big story and lots of little stories intersect, but unlike with a novel, there isn't some lingering doubt about whether the catharsis reached by the protagonist could survive contact with the real world.  

Layering close narratives about real people with large narratives about society is also how Jim Shepard approached "Privilege," which retells the story of the 1889 Johnstown flood. It follows three different groups of "characters," one of which is made up of people whose role in the flood is well known to history and a few who are less so. For the less prominent ones, Shepard had to imagine more of what happened, but throughout, he mixes in known history with his own imagined one, and in the end, lots of people drown or are crushed by the flood when the dam breaks, just like every reader knew it would. 

It's basically Titanic but on land. 

I really liked Shepard's "Our Day of Grace," an epistolary story of the Confederacy in the waning days of the Civil War. It had a looser frame to it, because the letters were free to make up a lot more, and it only had to conform to some very broad historical facts. "Privilege," however, often felt like reading a history book, one that interweaves personal and broader narratives. It would have been good as a history, but as fiction, I kind of couldn't help just wishing it would just be history. There are already large sections of the story that break away from character-driven story telling and just give the facts from history about what happened, so I didn't feel like the other passages were really fiction. It felt like a reenactment, which sometimes strikes me as being not as satisfying as either history or fiction. 

The title pretty much gives away the drift of the story. It's taken from an editorial at the time aimed at the members of the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club, which included some of the wildly rich robber barons of history whose names we still remember, names like Carnegie and Frick and Mellon. And privilege makes sense as a framing concept, because it was the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club's alterations to the lake and the dam, done to make it a sportsman's paradise for the wealthy, that caused the flood. Afterwards, the club was not forced to pay damages, which led to changes in U.S. tort law. The privilege of the ultra-privileged members of the club is the most obvious privilege in the story, but there are others.

John Parke, Jr., the engineer of the club, got his job because of his connected family, even though he struggled to complete only three of four years of engineering school. He's the classic rich white guy who succeeds in spite of being mediocre. He is self-reprimanding, though, and perhaps this redeems him a bit for the reader. He's privileged, but he knows it, and he knows he doesn't deserve his own good fortune. He and his boss, Colonel Unger, are the privileged people in the story who aren't complete jerks, because at least they put effort into trying to avert the disaster. 

There is Jenny Bergstrom and her friend Alma. Jenny is privileged to have good health, and Alma is privileged to have a father who can give her enough money to buy what she wants on a trip. Alma ends up dead. Jenny, whose mother thought she was impervious to sickness, also ends up being privileged enough to survive the flood. 

Then there's James Singleton, who lives with his wife, Lucinda, and his sister Flora. He is a black man who came out of the south after a hard-luck childhood made worse by racism. He still considers himself privileged, though, because he has a Bible and other books at home to improve himself with, and his children will attend school with white children. Everyone in his family dies but him. He just misses out on hearing how, which means he never gets to tell his wife he'll never let go. 

It's a study in varying meanings of privilege, which, again, is kind of what Titanic did with its story of a bunch of people drowning when the boat the rich people who built it said would never sink did just that. It's evocative of the time, bringing the images to life with its shirred waists on dresses, and yet I really didn't feel like I'd been anywhere by the end I wouldn't have found more interesting by reading David McCullough's book about the whole thing.