BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

"Words and pictures are yin and yang. Married, they produce a progeny more interesting than either parent." Theodore Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss.

My father’s efforts to ensure that my youth would not be entirely misspent included his strong disapproval of Classic Comics (CC). I thought it was because they cost too much (15 cents, as I recall) but learned differently when he caught me reading the CC version of Hugo’s Les Misérables. It was a great novel, “true” he said, and I should read the real thing, not a travesty of it. Little did he know (and nothing did I know) of a comics revolution, European-based, that was then and is still in progress. I’ve already mentioned in these notes Tintin and Asterix (and their creators), and today add André Juillard, born in Paris on June 9, 1948, and still flourishing as the creator of an amazingly large collection of (mainly) historical comics. He was as a youngster inspired by Hergé’s Tintin, and was able to tap into a French tradition in comics creation at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, where he took courses in the subject. He’d drawn comics from childhood, but his first gainful employment came in 1974, making comics for the children’s magazine Formule 1. His first freelance work came soon thereafter, with an American western series and a rendition of Roméo et Juliette, you know, the one by Shakespeare. Both are more art than history, but then came a medieval knight, Bohémond de Saint-Giles, a very modern woman doctor, Isabelle Fantouri, and a medieval tragedy about the Cathars, whose culture and heresy were destroyed by the Albigensian Crusades of the 13th century. There appear to be hundreds, and Juillard has won many awards. Indeed, Juillard is one reason that our very own Robert Crumb, the outrageous American comic artist, has left the USA to settle in France. Juillard and Crumb still create today, part of a comic empire (“Europe Comics”) and prophets of graphics. And their original art sells for thousands. So I guess I owe an apology to Charlie Bright, an honors college grad who came back to teach a seminar in graphic fiction, about which I had a doubt or two. I was wrong, Charlie!! But I have an excuse: my dad didn’t approve. ©

[Stanley]

"Acting's a hard life. Much harder than it looks." Robert Cummings.

In 1950, film actor Robert Cummings received the accolade of an in-depth interview with Hedda Hopper, in which he his success owed, he said, to three principles, the third of which was “trust in God.” Perhaps so, but earlier he’d decided that being from Joplin, Missouri, was part of his problem and so he sailed to England, cultivated an English accent, took on a new name (‘Blade Stanhope Conway’) and had his picture taken below a fake theatre marquee advertising “Blade Stanhope Conway in Candide.” Back in New York, that got him a minor role, and a press notice, in a Galsworthy play. Then, finding the market for Englishmen gone sluggish, he became a slow-drawling, down-home Texan, ‘Bryce Hutchins,’ and secured small parts, first in the Ziegfield Follies and then in a western film, So Red the Rose (1935). But in fact he was irremediably Charles Clarence Robert Orville Cummings, and really was born in Joplin, Missouri, on June 10, 1910. The “Orville” was there because his godfather was Orville Wright, from whom he both learned to fly and took his first inspiration. That was to be an aeronautical engineer, and in pursuit of that goal Cummings enrolled in the Carnegie Institute of Technology. In 1929 the bottom dropped out of his dad’s fortune and Cummings (who’d acted a bit at Carnegie) took to the stage, or tried to, first in his English and then his Texan dramatis personae. When the latter imposture was discovered was, perhaps, when he learned to trust in God and to be ‘Bob Cummings.’ Or it may have been when some worthless mining stock he’d inherited from his dad came good (legend has it, to the tune of $1 million). At any rate Cummings qua Cummings began in the 1940s to enjoy some real successes (e.g. in The Devil and Miss Jones and King’s Row). He also became a real pilot, serving in WWII as a flight instructor and rising to the rank of captain. Further successes followed, in television too, including a memorable performance (and an Emmy) in Twelve Angry Men, which I actually remember. He had a long career, up and down. Latterly, it was pretty much down, including touring as an after-dinner performer, but as far as I know he was always Bob Cummings, from Joplin. ©

[Stanley]

"If I had my life to live over, I would do it all again, but this time I would be nastier." Jeannette Rankin.

Voting behavior is a complicated question, and the social science answers to it lend irony to all politicians’ stump speeches and to most political manifestoes. As suffrage rights extended, new voters (poor white males, for instance, in the early 19th century) didn’t always vote as they “should,” clouding and sometimes confounding the hopes of those who’d supported democratization. When my great-grandfather came round to support female suffrage (in the early 1880s), it was because he hoped that women would support prohibition. For Jeannette Rankin, the issue was peace, and among her highest hopes for female suffrage was that women voters would never vote for war. Rankin was born near Missoula, Montana, on June 11, 1880, to a schoolteacher mother and a father who moved from skilled labor into ranching. She grew up on a small ranch, often doing “man’s work,” and in her elder years often lived alone, by choice, on a quite primitive Georgia smallholding, doing the labor she needed to do to keep body and soul together. But she’s most famed for her support of women’s suffrage, for her election to Congress in 1916 before the 19th amendment, and in her two terms in the House (in 1917 and 1941) voting against American entry into the “world wars” of the 20th century. In 1917 she was one of only 56 nays (taking House and Senate together), and in 1941 she stood alone for peace, refusing all entreaties to make the vote unanimous. There was, in truth, a lot more to Jeannette Pickering Rankin than women’s suffrage and world peace. In a life that spanned 92 years she compiled a remarkable record of citizenship (in the full meaning of that word); one has to say that she sufficed. The Kansas editor William Allen White, who disagreed with her 1941 vote, praised her courage and predicted that one day it would be honored “in monumental bronze.” Today, her bronze statue, in the Capitol, is inscribed “I cannot vote for war.” ©.

[Stanley]

"We have used the Bible as if it were a mere special constable's handbook, an opium dose for keeping beasts of burden patient while they are overloaded." Charles Kingsley.

The “dark Satanic Mills” of the industrial revolution brought forth great prosperity and great suffering, and it was that cruel contrast that brought William Blake to hope for a new “Jerusalem in England’s green & pleasant land.” Blake’s call was heeded by many, notably Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, whose Communist Manifesto came out of a heated meeting in Soho, London, in 1848. But there were other answers to the sufferings of the proletariat, and in the very same year, 1848. Charles Kingsley and others founded the Christian Socialist movement which aimed to establish “the Kingdom of Christ” to rule “over the realms of industry and trade.” Charles Kingsley was born a vicar’s son on June 12, 1819. After graduation from Cambridge, he became a vicar himself, at Eversley, in a church perched spectacularly above the sea at Eversley, Hampshire. He’s buried there, too, but he was bound for higher things, including a history chair at Cambridge, appointment as chaplain to Queen Victoria (and tutor to the Prince of Wales), and the canonry at Westminster Abbey. Clearly Kingsley’s Christianity made his socialism acceptable, but it was (as he put it himself) a very “muscular” Christianity. It had many expressions, including Kingsley’s multifarious reform activities (e.g. in the cooperative movement and workers’ education). Ironically, given Marx’s use of the metaphor, Kingsley referred to the church’s traditional social function as an “opiate” stilling the humane impulses that should come from a true understanding of Christ’s ministry. Kingsley was also a novelist, a notable writer of children’s literature (The Water-Babies, 1863, wherein his Christian socialism is evident), and a defender of Darwin’s evolutionary theories. But Kingsley’s Christian charity was tribal and racial, soured and limited by his virulent prejudices. These brought fort his racist anti-Irish writings and his very public endorsement of the brutal suppression of Jamaica’s Morant Bay Rebellion (1865). For Kingsley, Christian Socialism was fit especially, perhaps only, for Protestant Anglo-Saxons. Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Charles Dickens took a very different view. ©

[Stanley]

"He that is gracious unto the poor lendeth unto the Lord." Proverbs 19:17.

“Were the New England Puritans Hebraic?” is a question that echoes through early American historiography, but Governor John Winthrop’s classic ‘lay sermon,’ “A Model of Christian Charity” (1630) reads a bit like rabbinical text on the Jewish tradition of Tzedakah, which by Winthrop’s time had acquired many meanings: justice, righteousness, fairness, and/or charity. Today scholars argue about whether Winthrop’s version was to be directed to all or just to the Puritan tribe, but it’s quite clear that by the time Baroness Charlotte de Rothschild came along, she took Tzedakah to mean all, Jews or Gentiles, anyone in need of justice, righteousness, charity, or fairness. She was born a Rothschild (in Naples, on June 13, 1819), and, in 1836, in line with family tradition she married a Rothschild, her cousin Lionel Nathan Rothschild. This branch established its base in London, where Lionel’s Austrian peerage was not quite currency. But Charlotte, courtesy title Baroness, made it current. While Lionel watched after the family’s fortunes (and became the UK’s first unconverted Jewish MP), she raised her five children to be acceptably English yet orthodox, an effort matched by her devotion to Tzedakah, traditionally a ‘Tzedakah Box’ but in Charlotte’s case a Tzedakah empire, centered on the Jewish poor of London’s East End but spilling over, deliberately, to take in their poor gentile neighbors directly or through Charlotte’s generosities to Christian charities. Her philanthropies included schooling, medical care, foodstuffs, job training. If it had a theme (other than fairness, etc.), it was to give people what they needed to be able to help themselves. That included a children’s savings bank, where Charlotte paid her little depositors 10% interest (way, way above bank rate) so that their thrift would bring quick dividends. While working out her Tzedakah duties, Charlotte de Rothschild became an important person in her own right, center of a Tory reform salon, intimate of Benjamin Disraeli, society hostess, and author, but to many of London’s poor she was the “never-to-be-forgotten Baroness.” ©

[Stanley]

"Wealth has never yet sacrificed itself on the altar of patriotism." Robert M. La Follette, 1917.

With the Republican party now in thrall to Donald J. Trump, it’s difficult to remember that—once upon a time—the GOP could claim to be the home of American progressivism. The most famous of Republican progressives was Teddy Roosevelt, but by some measures the more effective was Robert M. (“Fighting Bob”) La Follette of Wisconsin, from 1901 to 1925 Wisconsin governor and senator, presidential candidate, and progressive hero. La Follette was born on June 14, 1855 in a small (and still unincorporated) community called “Primrose,” in Dane County, Wisconsin. So he didn’t have to go far to attend the University of Wisconsin. There he imbibed the moralistic, theologically-tinted political philosophy of President John Bascom, and acquired the odd idea that it was good to know something about society before trying to change it. Knowledge was certainly better than bribery, which some Republican politicos unwisely tried on the young La Follette, making him into what was known, at that time, as an “insurgent.” When the “insurgent” became governor (1901-1905), he drafted university professors (over two score of them) to study what the state needed and then draft legislation to address those needs. This “Wisconsin Idea” has not, of late, dominated La Follette’s party, but he made it a force in his home state, and (by dint of clever manipulation of the state legislature) vaulted from the governor’s mansion into the US Senate in 1905. Throughout, he championed legislation protecting labor unions, controlling railroads and banks, expanding the suffrage, establishing progressive taxation, regulating food and drug production, protecting wilderness areas, and advocating the establishment of non-partisan judiciaries. Indeed, when one thinks about it, you could say that Robert La Follette was the non-Trump. Doubtless our current “president” would not wish to be reminded that he and “Fighting Bob” share the same birthing-day. But La Follette was by far the more photogenic. Indeed, in The West Wing, Martin Sheen looks strangely, weirdly akin to Fighting Bob. ©

[Stanley]

"What a pleasure it would be to me . . . to see you at east. Then I could contentedly leave you to the Providence of God, in this life, & resign myself to it in the other." Alexander Pope's last letter to Martha Blount.

His body stunted and slightly twisted by a spinal disease, his face thin and drawn, often expressive of his pains, Alexander Pope appears an unlikely lover. But he had a romantic streak, and a yearning. Complimented on the wondrous gardens and grotto at his Twickenham villa, he responded “were it to have nymphs as well—it would be complete in everything.” And he used his astonishing gifts of word and wit to pay court to the ladies, often in dedications, sometimes in the poetry itself. Among his romantic but probably platonic relations was one with another outcast, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, she of smallpox vaccine fame. But a more likely candidate lover was Martha Blount, born on June 15, 1690 (and thus just two years younger than Pope), Martha and her possibly even prettier sister Theresa first met Pope when they were all in their late teens, and he was undoubtedly drawn to them. They were all Catholic, and so outcasts in an aggressively Protestant culture, and (the Blounts having fallen on hard times) their status as poor and thus unmarriageable gentlewomen seems to have appealed to the poet. Theresa was the subject or dedicatee of several Pope poems, but his relationship to Martha survived longer and was more intimate. Martha was shy, indeed rather retiring, disliked formality and formal occasion, and he may have shown some of his work to her before publication, perhaps for her approval rather than her criticism, and Pope certainly enjoyed her approval. Rumors flew thickly enough that in 1729 Martha’s godfather offered Pope a dowry if he’d take her to wife. He responded that he had no tie to her but “a good opinion, which has grown into a friendship with the experience that she deserved it.” But he did love Martha somehow (“on unalterable principles,” he wrote to her during one of their spats) and when Pope died (1744) he left the bulk of his estate to Miss Martha Blount, Catholic gentlewoman. Perhaps it was because she needed the money. Or . . . ©

[Stanley]

"If you know you're right, you don't care. You know that sooner or later, it will come out in the wash." Barbara McClintock, 1983.

Corn, “Indian corn” the colonists first called it (to distinguish it from their English corn), zea mays, has been cultivated for thousands of years, and along the way its human harvesters developed several strains, each more or less toothsome and more or less productive. In the 19th century, breeding corn got more serious (a strain called Reid’s yellow dent), which excited Charles Darwin’s curiosity and helped him further develop his ideas about evolution’s mechanisms. In the 20th century, George Shull and Henry Wallace got more scientific about it, but in the Mendelian ways of cross-breeding, trial, and error. One scientist who took corn out of the field and into the lab was Barbara McClintock, born in Hartford, CT, on June 16, 1902. Her decision to pursue a career in science is said to represent a triumph of her physician father over her over-protective mother (not genetically but behaviorally), but however it happened she had an astonishing career. Working with corn’s ‘genetic material’ well before Crick’s & Watson’s discovery of DNA’s molecular structure, McClintock figured out how and why partible inheritances worked in the corn plant. It wasn’t easy. As a woman scientist, McClintock ran up against gender barriers at virtually every stage of her work, or stagings, first at Cornell University, where she ran through the curriculum at speed, from BS to PhD by 1927. Outside of the academy she had better luck with research grants (for example, a Guggenheim in 1933) but neither Cornell University nor Missouri (1936-41, where faculty meetings were by definition all male) believed that women should be full professors or in charge of anything at all except, perhaps, cleaning pipettes. So her pathbreaking work (mainly in the 1940s) was done at the Rockefeller Foundation and at Andrew Carnegie’s Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. But she broke paths that no one was willing to follow, until Crick & Watson came along in 1953 and (basically) proved that Dr. Barbara McClintock had been right all along. Partible inheritance worked because corn genes had parts. Her love for her work was requited, latterly, by a string of prizes, grants, and recognitions, not least her Nobel prize (1983), the first unshared Nobel to be awarded to an American woman. She carried on working at Cold Spring until shortly before her death, aged 90. ©

[Stanley]

"And so it ends,// We who were lovers may be friends. . ." Vita Sackville-West, "And So It Ends," 1931.

Evelyn Irons got her Oxford degree in 1921, only the second year that women could secure that recognition. What she’d do with that degree was anyone’s guess (including probably her own), but he had proven herself a remarkable canoeist and a strong swimmer. She would much later save her partner, Joy McSweeney, from drowning in the Irish Sea (and, better yet, receive a medal for it), but more immediately she took up life as a journalist, and thanks to her drive and talent an important one, a distinguished correspondent in WWII, a successful ‘scoop’ journalist in several fields, including politics, and in her last paid job the New York bureau chief for the London Times. She was born Evelyn Graham Irons in Glasgow on June 17, 1900, possibly descended from the Grahams of Montrose, more immediately from a clan of steam engine builders. She first became a well-educated bookshop assistant, not an unusual fate even in 1921 for women graduates who’d majored in English. This palled, and in 1927 she got a job as a fashion correspondent for the Daily Mail, for despite her complete rejection of cosmetics she was always stylishly attired. It was in this guise that she reported on Vita Sackville-West’s fabulous gardens at Sissinghurst. There intervened a famed and (though they parted on good terms) stormy affair with Sackville-West, from which Irons soon departed to take up her life-long partnership with McSweeney. The best of her journalistic career remained ahead of her, starting in the war when she presented herself as a war correspondent to the Evening Standard and secured an assignment to the Free French under General de Gaulle. Irons was among the first to report from a free Paris, and later, in company with a few soldiers, captured a small Bavarian town and reported it. The French admired her for it and awarded the Croix de Guerre. After she and McSweeney moved to New York Evelyn Irons reported on a whole variety of things, usually first-hand, from her adventurous scoop on the US ‘intervention’ in Guatemala (not much appreciated by John Foster Dulles) to her journalistic presence at the Marilyn Monroe-Arthur Miller wedding. After Joy McSweeney died in 1978, Evelyn Irons lived out the century, dying at her forest retreat in 2000 just weeks before her 100th birthday. ©.

[Stanley]

From geek to aficionado? Fanatic to amateur? The life of William Lassell, brewer and astronomer.

There are enough synonyms for ‘obsessive’ that we might regard it as a normal human trait. True, some are used pejoratively (like ‘geek’ or ‘fanatic’), but then there are ‘amateur’ and ‘aficionado’ (and even ‘aficionada’) that we use when we wish to admire an obsession (or the obsessed person). Sometimes usage varies with age (the young geek becomes the elderly aficionado). Neither word was available (in English) for William Lassell in his lifetime, but doubtless the Victorians found substitutes for the young apprentice whose odd obsession with astronomy (during his apprenticeship) became an admired avocation when he was one of the richest brewers in England—but still an astronomer, and one of some note. William Lassell was born in Lancashire on June 18, 1799, in comfortable circumstances. But when his father died family fortunes fell and he had to go the apprenticeship route. At school he had become an enthusiastic star gazer, and he remained so all his life, spending way too much time and money on it when he had little of either, and yet much more of both as his brewing fortune waxed. So of course he had his own telescope, but he built it himself. In the process he devised a new technique for grinding the glass and a new mechanism to compensate for the earth’s rotation. This was a 24-inch reflector, no small thing, but he went on to build two (2!!) 48-inch reflectors, one installed in his home observatory (he called his estate “Starfield”). By then he’d moved out of Liverpool in search of clearer skies, and then he took the second 48-incher to Malta. But he left behind him a number of benefactions, including a city observatory for Liverpool, and some discoveries too, including ‘new’ planetary moons for Neptune and Saturn and a clutch of more distant nebulae. Whatever they’d thought of the apprentice geek, Victorians loved the elderly amateur and showered him with honors, including a Cambridge degree honoris causa, fellowship in the Royal Societies of London, Edinburgh, an Uppsala, and a more than nodding acquaintance with Victoria herself. And here’s an odd fact: his two biggest optical telescopes, when he built them (1845 and 1855), were the 4th and 5th largest in the world. ©.

[Stanley]

"Life is what you make it sometimes a livin’ hell// If you want to find that promised land dig a little deeper in the well." Lester Flatt, 'Dig a Little Deeper in the Well.'

In the very political summer of 1964, on a family holiday in the Ozarks, I ran into a bluegrass musician who was washing dishes in a greasy spoon café in Blue Eye, Arkansas. His dad, who owned the restaurant, claimed to be the last socialist in Arkansas, and so we stuck around for a few days, while dad and his new friend shared their detestation of Senator Goldwater and I learned a lot about blue grass, country & western, and politics too (including that Gene Autry, the singing cowboy, began his career performing for the Oklahoma socialist party). But what struck me most was musical range of the dishwasher, who after learning to play and sing at his father’s knee, entered the Juilliard School in New York City to study (of course) classical guitar. To prove it, he played quite a bit of Bach for us, after closing, while we sat around a table sipping White Lightnin’. Another blue grass musician who learned his art ‘down home’ was Lester Flatt, born on a farm near Sparta, TN, on June 19, 1914. Like many hill kids in the southern uplands, Lester left school at 12 and had to eke out a living through mill work, but the boy could play (banjo and guitar), and he could sing (tenor), traditional or made-up stuff; he married a singer (Gladys Stacy) and by the time they were in their mid-20s they were musicians, not millworkers. It was mostly down-home stuff, though he did croon quite a bit with big bands in the style of Sinatra or Crosby. He always returned to his grassroots. Then (in about 1945) he met Earl Scruggs, and from 1948 on “Flatt & Scruggs” (and the Foggy Mountain Boys) were blue grass personified, stars at the Grand Ole’ Opry but also indefatigable tourers, usually across the South, appearing on stage, in clubs, and also in short spots, live, on local radio stations. In the 60s, about when I hit Blue Eye, they had a national TV show of which—I have to admit—I knew nothing. I”ve heard their recordings since, and I think Lester Flatt could have played Bach blindfold, if he’d wanted; but perhaps he didn’t. One of his more famous compositions was a song he wrote right at the end of his life: “Don’t Get Above Your Raising.” ©.

[Tripps]

My kind'a music. Listen here wdvx dart carm I do nearly every day.

[Stanley]

"As no words can express what I feel for you and our children, I shall not attempt it. Complaint of any kind would be beneath your courage and mine." Wolfe Tone's last letter to Matilda Tone, November 1798

At Lancaster University I knew many students from Northern Ireland, some refugees from ‘The Troubles,’ some not; from all I learned something of the complexities of Irish nationalism, not least that nationalism itself had never been a Catholic monopoly. Among its earliest heroes was Theobald Wolfe Tone, born in Dublin on June 20, 1763. Wolfe Tone was a child of the Protestant ascendancy, his grandfather a landowner in Kildare, his father a coach builder in Dublin. As Tone himself later wrote, he could have learned his dislike of the ascendancy from Jonathan Swift, the very Protestant dean of Dublin’s Anglican cathedral, but he seems to have picked it up from observation instead. He was also well educated (Trinity Dublin and the English Inns of Court), and his observations were further sharpened by his wife Matilda, whom he idolized, and his radical friends. He gave up all interest in a legal career and with his 1791 publication of An Argument on behalf of the Catholics of Ireland became publicly associated with the nationalist cause as secretary of the ‘Catholic Committee.’ Early on there were some parliamentary successes, but the French Revolution changed everything, making Tone and his friends ever more insistent on independence and making the British ever more suspicious of any such group. There followed a series of plots, travel first to the USA (which was destined to become a well of sympathy and support for the Irish cause) and then to France, and two botched invasions. On the second, in October 1798, Wolf Tone was captured. He had conducted himself gallantly, and at his court-martial, he appeared in his French uniform. His eloquent speech is still remembered, but his request for the military dignity of a firing squad was disregarded in favor of the humiliation of hanging. That night, Wolf Tone proved his own sovereignty by cutting his carotid artery, a clumsy effort (“I find then I a but a bad anatomist”) which left him to die in agony, eight days later. But he did not hang. Matilda long survived him, remarrying and then relocating to the USA, where she oversaw the publication of his papers. She died in Georgetown, near Washington DC, in 1849. ©

[Stanley]

"If you equate God's judgment with your judgment, you have a wrong religion." Reinhold Niebuhr, 1958.

Our woodland cabin in located about 5 miles SSW of Wright City, MO, where on June 21, 1892, Reinhold Niebuhr was born, the second of three gifted children of the town’s German Evangelical pastor. (The church is now a congregation of the United Church of Christ). He was educated at Elmhurst College, Eden Theological Seminary, and Yale Divinity. His first fully-ordained pastorate was in Detroit, where he preached a ‘liberal’ theology, socialist politics, and international pacifism. But Niebuhr’s sunny optimism was blighted by the behavior of the Ford Motor Company, the brutalization of industrial labor, the callous response of American politicians to the severe social and economic problems of industrial America, and then by the rise of Hitler in Germany. His reactions made him into one of the most important American theologians and, into the bargain, an influential commentator on contemporary problems. In the process, Niebuhr abandoned theological liberalism. He did not go quite all the way back to ‘undiluted’ Calvinism (whatever that might have been), and today he’s classed as ‘neo-orthodox.’ He certainly embraced the notion of original sin, imperfection as the fated flaw of our human beingness, but whereas Calvin’s response had been to advocate complete obedience to godly rule, Niebuhr’s response was to advocate humility, not least intellectual humility. Our definitions of ‘godly’ were fated to be our own definitions, derived more from our wealth and power than from any reading of God’s will (or any reading of an indifferent universe). One can define Niebuhr’s original sin in a variety of ways, but ‘pride’ comes close enough: pride, self-confidence, self-centeredness, today an all-too-familiar constellation. Wherever pride and power are closely aligned (whether in the market economy or in national politics or in international affairs), there lies our deepest and most dangerous trouble. And so it was that Reinhold Niebuhr, a theologian of a strikingly conservative character, became one of the most important critics of 20th-century America. He who wrote most persuasively—devastatingly, some would say—of The Irony of American History (1952) was himself something of an irony. ©

[Stanley]

"Know that I am now a Christian and I am ready to do a Christian's duty." Albans to his judge, circa June 22, 303, CE.

The mythical plot wherein a prince becomes a commoner (or vice-versa) was as old as the hills when Mark Twain got hold of it, making it the whole plot of The Prince and the Pauper (1881) and an important sub-plot of Connecticut Yankee (1899). There is a class of traditional folk ballads on the theme (some collected in the 17th century by Samuel Pepys), and one could say that the transposition was the whole point of the carnival tradition. What is it other than fate that makes one person rich and powerful (and haughty) and another poor and miserable (and humble)? Sometimes it provides a moral lesson (“There but for fortune . . .”); sometimes the consequences are fatal, such as in the story of Saint Albans, the first English martyr in the calendar of saints, and still celebrated in the Church of England on June 22, because Albans was said to have been beheaded on June 22, 209, at Verulamium, a Roman city about 20 miles north-west of Londinium. There are several problems with the story, not least that Verulamium didn’t exist in 209, so another possible date is June 22, 303. But whenever it was, and wherever, our Albans was a pagan of rank who sheltered a Christian monk fleeing from persecution. Not only did he provide shelter, but Albans took on the monk’s identity (and his cloak, caracella), was captured, brutally interrogated, and then suddenly ‘confessed’ to being a Christian. Albans was sentenced to be beheaded, which was carried out in a natural amphitheater beyond the city walls, but not until several miracles took place, including the drying up of a river, the opening up of a new spring (where Albans asked for water), and then (at the moment of Alban’s death) the executioner’s eyes fell out. The whole thing seemed so miraculous, and Alban’s self-sacrifice so noble, that the judge ordered the persecution of Christians to stop. The earliest surviving evidence of these events comes from later centuries, and there’s no doubt at all that these later manuscripts improved upon the tale. Albans himself is remembered in several towns’ names (including St. Albans, Hertfordshire, and St. Albans, Missouri) and Albani beer in Odense, Denmark (some of Alban’s bones are said to be in Odense cathedral), and on the feast day calendars of the Orthodox, Roman, and English churches. But the main thing is, it’s a good story. ©

[Stanley]

"If you advertise to tell lies, it will ruin you, but if you advertise to tell the public the truth, and particularly to give information, it will bring you success." Edouard Michelin.

There is a long list of inventors who failed to profit from their genius, and it should include Charles Goodyear (1800-1860), whose ‘vulcanization’ process made profitable the industrial production and use of rubber. Not only did the chemicals he used contribute to his sudden collapse and death, but he lost several important patent cases. He took it pretty well, philosophically indeed; so perhaps his ghost was pleased when, in 1898, a tire company was named after him. The providentially-named Benjamin Franklin Goodrich (1841-1888) did better than Goodyear from Goodyear’s patent, and also left his name to a tire company, but the Goodrich name survives only on tires, for his company was bought by Michelin, the French tire giant, in 1994. And in line with one of the curiosities of French industrial history, its familial nature, a ‘Michelin man’ was then still running the Michelin company, for its CEO was Édouard Michelin (1963-2008), a surprisingly progressive capitalist and the namesake of his great-grandfather, Édouard Michelin, born on June 23, 1859. It was this first Édouard who, after a failed career as an artist, returned to the family hardware business and (circa 1889-1891) figured out how to make a better bicycle tire (not only pneumatic but also detachable and reparable on the spot), and then in partnership with his elder brother André set about making Michelin tires into a marketing miracle. Given that neither of them knew ‘siccum’ about marketing, they did pretty well. Before their deaths (both in 1940) they had not only moved into automotive tires but had purchased Citroën, made a name for themselves in competitive racing (cycling and autos), and—realizing that the more miles we traveled, the more tires we needed—made “Michelin” synonymous with touring. Whether we wished to drive to a fine restaurant, or enjoy a distinctive country hotel, or indeed to know something about the history (cultural and geographical) of where we’d been and where we might go next, Michelin would guide us. It’s interesting, too, that both these Édouard Michelins were born in Clermont-Ferrand, a smallish city in the Auvergne and still the world HQ of the Compagnie Général des Établissements Michelin. Very French, the whole thing. ©.

[Stanley]

"The secret of all great undertakings is hard work and self-reliance." Gustavus Franklin Swift.

Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” rejected the comfortable and the conformable to make a hero of the boy from Vermont or New Hampshire who did not wait for his future but made it, trying any profession that worked for him “and always, like a cat, falls on his feet.” One “sturdy lad” from the New England back country (rural Massachusetts in his case) who took this lesson to heart and made self-reliance his motto was Gustavus Franklin Swift, born on June 24, 1839, just two years before Emerson delivered his address to a workingman’s institute. Swift, however, did not try every profession; rather he explored every nook and cranny of his own, which (from age 14) was that of butcher. In the process, he created an empire of meat (in his case, mainly beef), and exhibited most of the virtues and vices of the ‘industrial statesmen’ or, if you prefer, ‘robber barons’ of his time, a ruthless competitor who became the Lord of the Beef Trust, a penny-pincher who became a noted philanthropist, an exploitative employer whose system of rewards and promotions won him much company loyalty. Swift followed the market, moving his operations from Boston to Albany to Buffalo and finally to Chicago’s Union Stockyards. He assiduously attacked the inutilities of the cow, a beast which at 60% of inedible mass was inefficiency incarnate, and then Swift made the by-product profitable. “Everything but the squeal.” That same characteristic made the cow a shipping nightmare, and much of Swift’s success owed to his innovations in freighting meat, notably overseeing the development of a workable refrigerated car. In that Swift proved an adept adversary of the railroads’ monopoly processes (using Canada’s Grand Trunk RR to get his cold meat to eastern markets). And in the process of building his own ‘vertical’ monopoly, he took charge of how meat was presented to the consumer—as attractively as possible, with plenty of choice and differential pricing to match. Gustavus Swift was not what Emerson had in mind, but by his own lights he was self-reliance on the hoof; therefore he became one of my favorite ironies in American history. ©

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"The straight line belongs to men, the curved one to God." Antoni Gaudi.

Ever since Rayner Banham tried to convince me that Pizza Huts and Mcdonalds were valid representations of it, I’ve not been a fan of ‘postmodernism’ in architecture. In its Pizza Hut expressions, it’s somewhere between vandalism and littering, and I don’t know what to call its tendencies towards ‘quotation’; classical pediments atop skyscrapers, to take a famous example, strike me as the sort of plagiarism that is so awfully easy to spot as to fully deserve the failing grade I give it. On the other hand, there is always the work of Antoni Gaudi to marvel at, almost all of it in his native Catalonia. Gaudi was born in seaside Catalonia on June 25, 1852, the son of a coppersmith, and attended architectural school in Barcelona. He spent a longer than normal time there, eight years, at the end of which one of his professors reflected that they had graduated either a fool or a genius. A better way to say it might be “both”; in any case Gaudi was soon attracting major commissions for work which ‘quotation’ seemed to be a major theme, but quotations that reflected Catalonia’s mixed history (Muslim Moorish and Christian Gothic) and its varied landscapes. And although he was concerned with structure (as, I suppose, all architects should be), structure as function or even as a rectilinear necessity was concealed beneath or behind organic and irregular facades. Sounds a bit like an elaborate if somehow Catalan McDonalds? Well, maybe, until you see it. There are Gaudi houses, Gaudi office buildings, Gaudi apartments, even apparently Gaudi lampposts, but towering above all is the Basilica de la Sagrada Familia. It was begun as a copy of a mainly 15th- and 16th-century Italian church, but Gaudi took over the commission in 1883 and soon made it his own design. After about 1902 it became his sole work, his obsession. For long periods before his death (in 1926) Gaudi lived on site, and never finished it. It is still unfinished today, although in 2010 Pope Benedict XVI proclaimed it finished enough by sanctifying it as a basilica. Whether the work of a fool or genius it is something quite other, and it cannot be called quotational. ©

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"Females and the Competitive Process," 1972. Title of one of Carolyn Wood Sherif's studies in social psychology.

In 1865, the Indiana legislature cashed in on the Morrill Act to establish a ‘land-grant’ university. Spurred by a gift from the Lafayette business tycoon John Purdue, the university (“Purdue,” of course) opened in 1874, at first only to male students. Women entered the next year, but owing to several factors their position at Purdue (an engineering and science institution) was for decades as a ‘minority.’ Rara avis indeed: the first female professor in a science department came in 1935, as did the university’s first dean of women. On the other hand, change was in the air. Amelia Earhart joined the faculty in 1935, as a faculty member (in aeronautics, of course) but also, imaginatively, as a careers advisor for women students. And by the time Carolyn Wood Sherif enrolled (in 1939; she was born Carolyn Wood on June 26, 1922) there was a special science degree offered especially to females. Its plan was paternalistic, even patriarchal, but the idea was to offer women the opportunity to study science from a humanistic perspective, in which, it was believed, women qua women might shine. Sherif shone brightly indeed, graduating summa in 1943. At Purdue, she’d written a play to encourage people to buy war bonds. It was such a hit that it was used for exactly that purpose by the US Treasury, and this spiked Wood Sherif’s curiosity. Exactly how and why did her play affect people (man, woman, rich, poor, professional, laborer)? She started her project at Purdue, at the suggestion of a perceptive teacher, and then expanded it by taking a master’s in psychology at the University of Iowa. She also married, which delayed matters somewhat, but she and her psychologist husband (a Turkish immigrant) made it a “marriage of equals” and their moves (to Princeton, then Texas, then Penn State) were governed partly by her interests. Carolyn Wood Sherif got her PhD at Texas in 1961, and then with her husband proceeded to revolutionize social psychology with their now-famous “Robber’s Cave” experiments in social judgment theory. That’s a whole new story, but it allows us to think how well Purdue University wrought when it created a degree designed to encourage a particular minority group (a human definition) to study science from humanistic perspective. ©.

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"I just wanted to be a rabbi." Sally Jane Priesand, 2016, interviewed in The Canadian Jewish News.

It’s only 140 miles from Jamestown to Appomattox, but in so many ways they were worlds apart, so “From Jamestown to Appomattox” seemed a good title for the course on American religious history (1607-1865) that, for many years, I taught as a joint (history and religious studies) major course at Lancaster. One theme of the course was “Americanization,” which had meaning (albeit a negative one) even for the very first settlers, and continued to roil and destabilize the religious and secular lives of successive waves of immigrants. Some rushed to embrace American life; others reacted by cleaving ever closer to their ‘old country’ ways. Each tendency produced fascinating stories (and deep conflicts) in many immigrant communities, including amongst Jews. So I was able to tell my students that it was no surprise that (eventually) it was American Judaism that produced the first woman rabbi, though not until 1972, and not without opposition. She was—and is—Sally Jane Priesand, born in Cleveland on June 27, 1946. As a girl in a family that chose to move from a conservative to a reform congregation (in some ways the most “Americanized” of Jewish communions), she early developed a yen for the rabbinate, and enrolled at the University of Cincinnati in its joint program with Hebrew Union College. Despite an initial cold shoulder from HUC, Priesand persisted, graduating into a class of 35 rabbinical candidates in 1968. She was the sole female, of course, and some thought she was just looking for a rabbi husband in one of the best places to find one. But that wasn’t Sally Priesand’s quest, and she never did marry. But she found ordination, first (1972) as an assistant at a New York City reform congregation, and finally (1981) a full appointment at the Monmouth Reform Temple in Tinton Falls, NJ. She’s had a full and varied career there, in service to her congregation and to the community. She’s been celebrated for her achievements before and after her retirement, usually in company with other pioneer women rabbis (not all of them “Reform”, either!!). And long enough, too, to discover that she wasn’t the first female rabbi in Jewish history. That was Regina Jonas, ordained in Berlin in 1935, a bad year and a bad place (worse, certainly, than Cincinnati). In 2014 Sally Priesand joined other women rabbis in establishing a Regina Jonas memorial at Theresienstadt, Czech, an internment camp where Rabbi Jonas had taught and preached before she was shipped to Auschwitz in late 1944. ©

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"San Diego Mother Wins Nobel Prize." Newspaper headline, San Diego, CA, 1963.

The rise of women in the professions has been reflected in various ways. Take Nobel Prizes, for instance. In the first 62 years of the awards (1901-63) there were just 13 female recipients. Since 2001, there have been 24. Among the pioneers was Maria Goeppert Mayer, who copped the Physics Nobel in 1963. She was born Maria Goeppert in Kattowitz, Germany (now in Poland) on June 28, 1906. As a female, she was not supposed to follow in the family tradition (her father was a 6th-generation university professor), but she was bitten by the liberation bug (she attended a girls’ school run by Prussian suffragettes). At university (Gottingen), she first studied mathematics, but her PhD (1930) was in Physics. Her thesis was vetted by three physics Nobelists, all men of course, and in the same year she married an American physicist, Joseph Mayer, and traveled with him to Johns Hopkins. Her presence there added to her husband’s problems, for his department chair didn’t like women meddling in the physics labs, so the couple moved to Columbia where she at least had an office (but no salary), and where she met Enrico Fermi and Harold Urey. Work done at their suggestion proved very fruitful, and in 1941, before Maria Goeppert Mayer ever had a faculty position, she was elected a Fellow of the American Physics Society. There followed four years’ work with the Manhattan Project, where (although she protested that she didn’t “know anything about nuclear physics”) she became particularly interested in the nuclear structure of atoms. The work for which she would win the Nobel was done shortly thereafter, and published in 1950. I don’t begin to understand it, but she described it—helpfully to folks like me—in terms of concentric circles of dancers, each circle waltzing in opposite orbits. Testifying perhaps to continuing difficulties of a woman in physics, her first full university appointment did not come until 1961, at UC San Diego, but then universities have often been slow to adjust to reform. To date, there have been only three women Nobelists in physics (Marie Curie, 1905, Goeppert Mayer in 1963, and Donna Strickland in 2018), but my advice is to watch this space, for it will be filled. ©

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"For most of history, Anonymous was a woman." Virginia Woolf.

In comparison to some politicians, historians are at a disadvantage. They can’t make things up “out of whole cloth,” nor have they the power to create alternative realities. Evidence is required, and since historians don’t usually do the collecting they do their sifting and winnowing in archives. So when ‘new’ areas of historical inquiry open up, for instance women’s history or black history, there’s a background story of collecting ‘new’ material or of collating archival material previously left unstudied. Enter the archivist, whom we might call the documentary librarian. One such, in the area of women’s history, was Margaret Storrs Grierson, a philosopher who became the founder and first director of the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College, in Northampton, MA, which began modestly enough as an archive of the college’s eponymous founder but has grown to become one of America’s great archives for the history of women, and not only of women who’ve succeeded in art, commerce, science, or politics, but of women as girls, siblings, wives, mothers, spinsters, as ordinary folk like you and me—and one or two eccentrics. Margaret Storrs was born in Denver, CO, on June 29, 1900. In 1918 she went away to college, to Smith in fact, where she studied English. She went on to a doctorate in philosophy at Bryn Mawr, another women’s college, and returned to Smith in 1930 to teach philosophy. There she developed a relationship with professor, Marine Leland, but also a romance with the very popular Scottish literary critic and historian Sir Herbert Grierson, then Rector of Edinburgh University (an elective office), whom she married in 1936. Out of this mélange (or ménage, for such it was) came Grierson’s interest in the Sophia Smith archive. By 1940, the collection had become her profession, and as Smith College archivist, 1940-1965, Grierson created what has become a national treasure, a huge collection which (with others, of course) has made possible and profitable the study of women’s history, qua women, as a new field, still growing, and still productive of some of the best scholarship of our times, imaginative but not imaginary. After retirement, Grierson continued her work, but now as an historian of family, working in Northampton, at her archive, until her death in 1997. ©

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"The arc of the moral universe is long . . ." Martin Luther King, Jr.

I have great sympathy for our current iconoclasts, and no problem with tearing down the statues of Confederate generals or ripping the stars ‘n’ bars out of the Mississippi state flag. But attacking “all” racist vestiges of our common, fault-ridden past carries the danger of forgetting that racism is, indeed, an historical stain, that it grew and waned through time and in individuals—some of whom, black and white, struggled to break through our absurd and deadly ‘color’ line. If they didn’t make it to our standards, they moved the markers. The writer Eudora Welty is one example; a southern white woman who began her life in one place (we might call it paternalistic racism) and ended it in quite another. Another was Dorothy Tilly, born Dorothy Rogers in Hampton, GA, on June 30, 1883, just at the time when the US South was moving (“with all deliberate speed”) to create a peculiarly American apartheid, which included putting up statues of murderers like Nathan Bedford Forrest. Dorothy’s father was a Methodist clergyman who took seriously Christ’s charge to minister to all. As a youngster, Dorothy began with a concern for poverty, a curse to the southern rural poor, white and black. She went away to college, married (Milton Tilly, in 1903), settled in Atlanta, and continued her concerns, early concluding that the particular breed of racism enshrined in Jim Crow legislation and ‘lynch law’ was a potent factor in southern poverty. Gradually, her work with poor rural children in north Georgia (1918-31) and as a leader of the Women’s Missionary Society led her to take more radical positions on race, and in 1930 she played a leading role in the creation of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, not only chairing committees and penning petitions but traveling to towns riven by racial tensions and confronting real problems face-to-face—where, always, they are harder to solve. Dorothy’s changing convictions led her to take an “insurgent” stance within the Georgia Democratic party and publicly campaign against KKK candidates and the Klan itself. In the end, Dorothy Tilly’s long change took her to membership in Harry Truman’s landmark Civil Rights Commission of 1946 and to her work in supporting the 1954 school desegregation decision in Georgia and across the south. She kept at it until she died, aged 86, in 1960. In our admirable rush to destroy racist icons, it would be well to remember and honor Dorothy Tilly’s journey, even if it wasn’t fast enough, or far enough. ©

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"We are still a sexophobic society, afraid of the wrong things for the wrong reasons." Mary Steichen Calderone.

Mary Steichen Calderone was one of those reformers who believe that sex was not just something that happened, now and again, but was a dynamic component of every human’s persona. As ‘sexuality’ it needed to be brought out of the bedroom and, in the broad light of day, taught, learned, understood. She was born (in Paris, on July 1, 1904) Mary Steichen, daughter of the very artistic Edward Steichen and the very Quaker Clara Smith Steichen, and though her parents had a stormy marriage (which ended in 1922) they both encouraged Mary to get an education and speak her mind. At Vassar she studied chemistry but was drawn to the theater, in which she worked, married, birthed two children, and then (in 1933) divorced. She then returned to science and graduated MD (Rochester) and MPH (Columbia) in 1939 and 1942, and married Frank Calderone (who would later become CEO of the World Health Organization). Besides having two more children and starting her own career as a GP, Mary served in the New York Public Schools, and her experience strengthened her conviction that sex education was vital to healthy maturation and that it should begin early, and that (in sum but in stages) it should include the fullest possible information about sexuality: sex itself, female pregnancy, sex and gender, birth, contraception. She took these convictions with her when she joined Planned Parenthood in 1953, first as its medical director, then as president. Her views, strongly and often expressed, got her in much trouble with all sorts, and not only with moral and religious conservatives who believed that sex education caused sin and promiscuity. Within the sex education movement itself (and within Planned Parenthood) she was increasingly thought too conservative, and many in the nascent gay liberation movement thought her homophobic. In 1969 she resigned the presidency of Planned Parenthood but kept at what she saw as her appointed task until shortly before her death in 1998. She is now celebrated (or smoothed over, depending on your perspective) as a brave pioneer although not as a visionary. ©

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"The dividing line between the wave or particle nature of matter and radiation is the moment 'Now.' As this moment steadily advances through time it coagulates a wavy future into a particle past." Sir William Bragg.

While I take pride that one of my avocations is to read about science, I admit that I stop at physics. It’s partly the mathematics, but there’s that other face of physics, the dreadful uncertainties (as they seem to me) of quantum mechanics. Ever since Descartes, mathematics (however abstruse) ruled physics, and (despite some anomalies) led to the certainties that inspired William Maxwell to say that if it can’t be expressed in numbers it isn’t science. Even Einstein, who upset that Newtonian applecart, drew back from the wreckage, insisting that “God does not play dice with the universe.” To accept such uncertainties (let alone to explain them) was difficult for Einstein’s generation, but one of his cohort seems to have managed it with some aplomb, William Henry Bragg, born on the edges of the English Lake District on July 2, 1862. He came to physics through mathematics, which may have helped, but Bragg also seems to have been the sort to make the best of everything workable that came along, including the contradictions. So he excelled at sports and at science. He saw and conquered the difficulties arising from his deepest faiths, in religion and in science. “From religion comes a man’s purpose; from science his power to achieve it.” With his brainy, artistic wife Gwendolyn, he established a salon tradition, bringing together men and women of all sorts and fields to see things from differing perspectives. He did practical work in weaponry and in devising laboratory equipment, and it was through his tinkering with x-ray devices that he married theory with practice to make brilliant advances in crystallography, For this last he and his son Lawrence were jointly awarded a Nobel in 1915 (and, we may say, laid the basis for the careers of Kathleen Lonsdale and Max Perutz and, eventually, the DNA discoveries of Crick and Watson). And he accepted quantum theory, too, joking that it worked quite well for him on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, but not on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Personally, I find that solution much easier to than Schrodinger’s cat, resting forever alive and/or dead in its sealed box, depending . . . . ©