BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

From suffragist to suffragette?
Lucy Burns, 1879-1966

It is unthinkable that a national government which represents women should ignore the issue of the right of all women to political freedom. - Lucy Burns, 1913

In Britain, women who agitated for voting rights were suffragettes; in the USA they were suffragists. Or that is what I believed for years, caught as I was in the toils of Shaw’s witty apothegm that the two countries were divided by their common language. But the differences between the two were more tactical than geographical, and both terms were used pejoratively (in both countries) to oppose and ridicule those who supported political feminism. One woman who in her lifetime cut through all confusions to be both a suffragette and a suffragist, and in both Britain and America, was Lucy Burns. She was perhaps an odd candidate for feminist militancy of any sort, born the middle child of a large, Irish Catholic family in Brooklyn, NY, on July 28, 1879. She grew up tall, strong, stately (graceful according to some), and with flaming red hair, and being smart as a whip would have cut an impressive figure in any walk of life, but she first chose education. From a girls’ school that promised to make her into a lady, she moved on to Vassar College, then graduate school at Yale (in linguistics). After a spell of school teaching Lucy Burns moved on to further language studies in Germany (Berlin and Bonn) and then in England (at Oxford). All this suggests ambition and intelligence of a high order, not thought of at the time as ladylike qualities. Lucy Burns became more aware of the limitations imposed on her womanhood through friendships with the Pankhursts, Emmeline and Christabel. She converted to their cause and migrated to its militant side, and with a new American friend, Alice Paul. By the time she and Paul moved to the USA, 1912, Lucy was a veteran of demonstrations, imprisonments, hunger strikes, and force feedings, and unlikely to be patient with the slow progress of American suffragists. Quickly she and Alice Paul broke away from gradualist, state-by-state approaches to form the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage and then the National Woman’s Party. Burns campaigned across the country but especially in Washington (picketing Woodrow Wilson’s White House) and in California where her work threatened Wilson’s party in power—and where women could already vote. Along the way she bravely suffered the usual penalties of a militant suffragette, including force-feeding. The place where she suffered that “Night of Horrors” is now the Lucy Burns Museum, the old Fairfax County workhouse in Virginia. It’s a fitting memorial. After the success of the 19th Amendment, Lucy retired to care for her orphaned niece and to work tirelessly for the Catholic Church in New York. “I have done enough,” she said, perhaps optimistically. ©.

[Stanley]

The Cellar of Pervyze
Elsie Knocker, 1884-1966

It seems funny to think that by this time tomorrow I shall be in Belgium, in the midst of all the terrors of war. Elsie Knocker, September 24, 1914.

In the west, World War I began with the German invasion of Belgium. That caused much outrage, but there remained a “Belgian front,” the Yser Front. It was held by the Belgian army, an organization whose military disorder was symbolized by its lack of uniforms, with occasional help from British, Canadian, and French units. It was an odd battlefield, flat as a pancake and so waterlogged that both sides had to build their “trenches” above ground. It produced its fair share of carnage, and with that a remarkable story of the war, that of the “Angels of Pervyse” (Pervijze), two British nurses (one English, one Scots) who volunteered early and stayed late, and whose work under fire contributed to important advances in frontline medicine. The elder was Elsie Knocker, as English a name as you can get. She was born as Elizabeth Shapter, a doctor’s daughter, on July 29, 1884, orphaned early (at 6), and married a Knocker in 1906 but (after she had birthed a son) divorced him and, from 1908, trained as a nurse and became a motorcycle enthusiast. The motorcycles brought about Elsie’s friendship with the wealthy young Scotswoman, Mairi Chisholm of Chisholm, who knew Elsie as a widow. When the two volunteered for nursing duty in Belgium, in 1914 (at that time the British Army didn’t want female nurses), their familiarity with motors and mobility, their physical strength, and their courage drew them right to the Yser battlefront and to the realization that a crucial element of battlefield nursing was to do it quick, make first-aid decisions on the spot about whom to treat and how (we call it triage today), and only then get the survivors to hospital. They made their reputations quickly, and their determination (or obstinacy) made enemies too, especially among male medics. In the mud and muck of battle they drove motor-ambulances or, often, carried the wounded on their backs, often across flat ground with no cover and under German fire. By December 1914 they had established, in a battle-wrecked house, the ‘Cellar of Pervyse,’ and secured their reputations. Both of them lived long, but they fell out at the peace, Elsie’s true state as a divorcée becoming known. That revelation also ended her battlefield marriage to a Belgian count. The annulment left her as Baroness de T’Serclaes. Under that name, she volunteered in the next war, too, served as a RAF officer, and lost her RAF son, a Knocker, who was shot down over low countries in late 1942. Exhausted by life and by wars, Baroness Elsie died in 1966. After doing much to revive the Clan Fraser, Mairi died in 1981. Today museums celebrate both as pioneer female heroes. ©

[Stanley]

The spy who disappeared
Reginald Teague-Jones, 1889-1988

The Spy Who Disappeared. Title of Reginald Teague-Jones’s published journals, 1990.

A man called Ronald Sinclair died in Plymouth, England, on November 16, 1988, aged 99. His London Times obituary didn’t appear until November 22. There are several explanations for the delay, including the fact that he’d been living in secluded retirement for several decades before publishing a book (weeks before his death) on his exploits as a spy during World War I. Another may have been that he wasn’t ‘really’ Ronald Sinclair at all. When he’d spied along the imperial frontiers (Russian and British) of central Asia, he had been Reginald Teague-Jones. Three days after the first obituary, and after some hurried huggery-muggery between the Times and the British Foreign Office, a revised obituary gave his ‘real’ name and a few tantalizing details about his ‘real’ life. Reginald Teague-Jones was born in Liverpool on July 30, 1889, the youngest child of a schoolmaster. The father taught foreign languages, and Reginald probably picked a couple of them up by the time his dad died. He was then sent to family friends in Tsarist St. Petersburg where he finished his schooling. In 1910, having dropped out of King’s College, London, Reginald joined the imperial police force in India, learned yet more languages, and before the outbreak of WWI was operating as a spy. When war came, he was shifted to the Persian Gulf where he directed British espionage from Basra to the Caucasus. At the time of the Russian Revolution he moved into the Caucasus (in disguise, as a Persian merchant) where he supported anti-Bolsheviks and disrupted Central Powers supply lines. He married a Russian woman, Valya Alekseyeva, and engaged in warfare against the Bolsheviks, was wounded, and in 1918 played some part in the grisly massacre, at Baku, of 26 Bolshevik prisoners. In the eyes of the ascendant Soviet leadership, this made Teague-Jones a war criminal, and in London it was decided to sink HMS Teague-Jones but to re-launch Ronald Sinclair, British spy and double agent. Thereafter “Ronald Sinclair” lived a rather shady life, although it’s known that he spied for the British in the USA and in Spain where (having divorced Valya and married a German) he cultivated useful contacts. Later, after the death of his German wife, Valya and ‘Ronald’ took up gardening in Plymouth. Along the way, Reginald Teague-Jones and then Ronald Sinclair were each honored for their exploits (an MBE in 1919 and a CBE in 1923), and the whole story is still a bit fuzzy. “Teague-Jones’s” Transcaspian journals were published in 1990 with the titleThe Spy Who Disappeared, and it’s as the ‘disappeared’ Reginald Teague-Jones that we know him today, if rather shadily. ©

[Stanley]

Greek theater and feminist history
Margarete Bieber, 1878-1978

The last thing I need is to saddle myself with a Berlin Jewess for the rest of my life. Professor Ludwig Curtius, 1919, explaining his refusal to appoint Margarete Bieber to his faculty at the University of Freiburg.

Were it not for Prussian conservatism in gender matters, Margarete Bieber might never have become a leading authority on Greek and Roman theater. Indeed Prussian universities did not accept female students until 1908, so Margarete first attended the University of Berlin, in 1901, as an auditor, which meant that she had to ask each professor for permission to attend his lectures. But even getting that far had required her to knuckle under to her parents’ gender prejudices, to drop her adolescent ambition to become a medical doctor, and to study to become a schoolteacher, a profession then opening up to women. Margarete Bieber was born on July 31, 1879, into a wealthy Jewish family whose assimilationist anxieties aimed Margarete at an adult life as a proper Prussian hausfrau. So her education was to end at age 16. However, inspired by her own successes and by a couple of feminist teachers, Margarete wanted to study medicine. This her parents would not countenance, and it was only after she promised to limit herself to a teaching career that she was allowed to continue her education at Helene Lange’s Gymnasialkurse in Berlin, whence she moved on to audit at the University. There she found her language-literature professors reluctant to allow a female auditor, and so moved on to Classics and its more liberal faculty. There she developed an interest in Greek and Roman culture. In terms of artifacts, Berlin’s museums made it the place to be, but in terms of cultural historians Bonn was better, and in 1904 Margarete moved there as a formal student (it was not in Prussia) and achieved her doctorate in 1907, only the second woman to do so. From there she traveled to Greece, to Rome, and to begin her work as an archaeologist. As a woman she was still not welcome, but as a scholar and worker, at ‘digs’ and in museums, she was a wonder. Her publications began to appear in 1910, and she was soon an acknowledged leader in the field. Further challenges remained (for instance to her becoming a faculty member), but—with her father’s financial support—she prospered. Then came Hitler and the Nazis, insuperable obstacles, and she did an end run first to Oxford, then Columbia. There in 1939, she published her first work in English, still a standard in the field of classical theater, and she continued to publish until 1977, just before her death at 99. Margarete Bieber never became a hausfrau, but she left behind her an adopted daughter, Ingeborg, several grandchildren, legions of students, a mountain of work, and an inspiring story. ©

[Stanley]

Survival and altruism.
William Donald Hamilton, 1936-2000

“Altruism” . . . is perhaps better described as self-sacrificial daring. William Hamilton, 1975.

It was inevitable that Darwin’s idea of evolution by natural selection would be translated into ‘social Darwinism.’ As industrial and then financial capitalism transformed the western world, those who profited most from the transformation found it comforting to think of themselves, and their class, as exemplars of the best in humanity. Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” served nicely as nature’s endorsement of their supremacy and as a rationale for the further exploitation of poorer classes and backwards peoples. For them, competitive capitalism at home and imperialism abroad seemed the best ways to ensure the fitness of the race (and the “race” was, of course, their own and not the “human race”). Among the 20th-century scientists who helped to dismantle this self-serving interpretation of Darwinism was William Donald Hamilton, born of New Zealand parents at an outpost of Britain’s empire, Cairo, Egypt, on August 1, 1936. Through his studies of genetics and statistics (at Cambridge and then London), Hamilton became interested in the phenomenon of altruism, not as a leftist delusion but as a fact of life. In this he followed and extended the ideas of the great H. A. L. Fisher, who had argued that populations (species) possessed of a range of fitnesses were those most likely to enjoy evolutionary success. If diversity is a Good Thing for a population, a species, then so must be cooperation, mutual benefit, altruism between individuals in that population. There are plenty of examples in nature that give scientific substance to our mythic tales of commonality, not least that of ‘brotherly love,’ an essentially altruistic phenomenon we see in many species (including our own). Being a Darwinian and a statistician, Hamilton resisted giving these phenomena an ethical content, and argued mathematically that we are most likely to be most altruistic to those who share our genes (parents and children, siblings, even aunties and nieces). Later Hamilton would extend this basic principle of mutuality to the evolution of sex (a productive union of genetic variations) and even of senescence (as aging and death beneficially remove weaknesses from any genetic population). Hamilton’s world, then, was not ruled by flower power or pure selflessness, but nor was it red in tooth and claw. His was, it seems, a world in which dog did not necessarily eat dog. So thanks to scientists like Hamilton, those who would argue that “welfare” saps our strength or that “regulation” strips us of the benefits of ruthless competition have to look elsewhere than Charles Darwin’s survival of the fittest (or some other “law” of nature) for their justification. Perhaps their bank balances would do the trick. ©

[Stanley]

Will the real Shakespeare please stand up?
William Ireland, 1775-1832

Begone, I say, lest that my present wrath
Make me forget the place by blood I hold
And break the tie twixt father and his child.

From ‘Vortigern and Rowena,’ by William Henry Ireland, 1795. Or, maybe, William Shakespeare.

So little is known of Shakespeare’s life that many have thought someone else wrote all those plays and poems. Opinions about who did have varied. To judge by the busts on his bookshelf, my great-grandfather favored Francis Bacon, Viscount St. Alban, but the leading candidate now is Edward de Vere, 17th earl of Oxford. Both theories arise from the view that Shakespeare himself was of too common (and lowly) origin to have acquired the knowledge and artistry that undergird even his weakest works. A brilliant answer to this retrospective snobbery can be found in Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004). But another response to Shakespeare’s historical anonymity has been to forge documents and find ‘lost’ plays that plausibly fill out the life of the ‘real’ Shakespeare, the glover’s son who deserted his humble family to become England’s greatest playwright. Among the most successful of these forger-fraudsters was William Henry Ireland, born in London on August 2, 1775. Being an engraver’s son, Ireland came to forgery ‘naturally’, helped along by his father’s enthusiasm for Shakespeareana and his own experiments in concocting “Elizabethan” ink. As far as we know, Ireland’s first “find” came in 1794, when he was in Stratford gathering materials for his father’s Picturesque Views on the Upper, or Warwickshire Avon. This was a deed of sale signed by Shakespeare himself. It so pleased his dad that William produced more documentation, including even a letter to Shakespeare from Queen Elizabeth. Ireland’s ‘found’ forgeries tended to reveal Shakespeare as a proper hero for George III’s Britain, safely Protestant, rabidly anti-Catholic, a loving husband (to “Anna Hatherrewaye”), and a chaste writer whose tendency towards earthiness had arisen in fact from his actors’ adlibs. So besides a new Shakespeare play, Vortigern and Rowena, there was a “Bowdlerized” manuscript of King Lear. At first Ireland’s forgeries took people in, including none other than James Boswell, but as more discoveries entered the public domain skepticism took root and soon flowered into ridicule. William Ireland withdrew from the Shakespeareana market but continued on as a prolific writer of Regency potboilers and popular histories until he sank into obscurity and then into a grave at St. George the Martyr in Southwark. The possibility remained good, and still does, that William Shakespeare was really William Shakespeare. ©

[plaques]

Just finished reading '1599. A year in the life of William Shakespeare ' By James Shapriro. A very in depth biography but as everyone knows or doesn't know there is nothing to pin Shakespeare down in his personal life other than he was relatively wealthy and was very well read on historical and political events. Part shareholder of the newly built Globe theatre and trader cum loan shark in his home town and not adverse to monopolising the grain/malt shortages to his own advantage. This made him not just a romantic poet and playwright but a bit of a wheeler-dealer. His theatre group the Chamberlain's Men later to become the King's Men after Queen Elizabeth died was well tuned to what the Court demanded and what went down well with the public. What was evident in Shakespeare's time was the invasion of Ireland by the Earl of Essex, England's land grab, and Essex's relationship with the Queen. Well worth the read if only for the history surrounding Shakespeare.

[Stanley]

A shilling for your salvation (Henley's admission charge at The Oratory)
"Orator" John Henley, 1692-1756

Great restorer of the good old Stage
Preacher at once and Zany of thy age. Alexander Pope, 1743

At a glance, the word ‘zany’ would seem to be a modern coinage, but in fact it was a medieval import (originally from the Italian for ‘clown’), and was well burnished by the time Alexander Pope used it (in his The Dunciad) to scorn one John Henley, by then known as “Orator” Henley, a man who thought a day wasted had he not made a spectacle of himself, often in print but usually in his ”Oratory”, a hall above one of London’s markets where Henley charged admission fees to those who would hear him out. And his message? Although Henley is often classed as a religious dissenter, there was little in him of the sober Quaker or stern Presbyterian. He derived his liturgy from an Pope, not Alexander but an early Bishop of Rome; his content may be related to deism and free thought; but his style was the thing, and it might be best to regard him as an entertainer. John Henley had certainly not started out that way. Instead he was born (on August 3, 1692) the son and grandson of blamelessly orthodox Anglican clergymen, and upon leaving Cambridge (in 1712 and with an actual degree) he enjoyed the patronage of powerful men, including even the Lord Chancellor, and obtained good preferments in the established church, generally in or near London. But along the way to an ordinary career, something happened. Much later, Henley claimed he’d already been a rebel at Cambridge (where, he wrote in 1752, he’d shown enough “stupidity to be educated”). He also remembered acquiring a reputation as a disputatious student. But it’s as likely that Henley kicked over his traces when his patronage dried up, and that in turn may have happened because his preaching began to seem eccentric or because he’d become known as a Grub Street plagiarist, sometime poet, Whig party propagandist, and a self-styled expert in language teaching. By 1725 he’d resigned his church posts. But he was careful to retain his license to preach, and at Clare Market he established his first “Oratory.” There his preaching became odder and odder, laced with more editorial comment on affairs of the day, and often downright funny. His “Gentleman’s Own University” proved a profitable (or at least a notorious) sideline, and if the fees (for oratory tickets or ersatz seminars) didn’t exactly pour in they kept Henley in enough prosperity to survive. And to cause outrage. Satirized by Pope and other tory pamphleteers (Grub Street produced all sorts), caricatured by Hogarth, “Orator” Henley enjoyed life until he didn’t. Sunk in drink and deserted by his auditors, he died poor and was cast into an unmarked grave in 1756. ©

[Stanley]

A toast to all friends, present or otherwise.
The invention of the invention of Champagne

Come quickly! I am tasting the stars! Attributed to Dom Pierre Perignon on tasting his first “champagne” (August 4, 1693).

Among the more entertaining of holiday reading books is The Invention of Tradition (1983), edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, which I believe is still in print. It’s a collection of essays, each by an eminent scholar. Most are about how 19th-century Britons and then, in an imitative rush, several African and Asian British colonies, invented what we might think of as a usable past. It was often not pure invention or plain fantasy, but had plausibility enough to charm folk into thinking it ‘really’ antique. It testifies to the ideological power of tradition in much the same way as the Trump slogan of Make America Great Again (emphasis mine) helps us to forget our actual pasts of working-class poverty, child labor, racial slavery, and cholera epidemics. My copy of the book is long gone, so I can’t remember whether its single chapter on continental Europe’s (re)invention of a usable past included the legend of the discovery of champagne by Dom Pierre Perignon, OSB, which is said to have taken place on August 4, 1693. That’s a suspiciously precise date for what must have been a process instead of a “Eureka!” moment, but it had plausibility enough to qualify as “tradition” in France and, indeed, wherever and whenever champagne is enjoyed (for instance, on your next summer holiday). Brother Perignon, born in 1638, was the chief winemaker (‘cellarer’) at his Benedictine abbey, Saint-Pierre d’Hautvillers, in the Marne. And he was good enough at his work to qualify for burial in the abbots’ exclusive cemetery. It also seems to have been true that Dom Perignon was worried about the problem of wine refermenting in the bottle and did make rules, a set of recommendations to the brotherhood, about how to avoid that disaster. For when refermentation happened, the cork blew out, the bottle shattered, and since it was stacked with other bottles of the same vintage it could set off a messy, expensive chain reaction. But even if Dom Perignon did (on August 4, 1693, or any other day) open a bottle at just the right time, and did taste it, and did like it, it wasn’t “fine” champagne, it wasn’t “pale” and it probably wasn’t “brut.” To avoid refermentation, Perignon used only pinot noir grapes (including their red skins). The legend was invented by a later cellarer at the abbey, Dom Broussard, in 1821, and as pale, dry champagne became stylish in the later 19th century, the Dom Perignon myth was picked up by the local Syndicat du Commerce and by 1896 was standard marketing fodder (or nectar?) in advertising campaigns. So when on vacation, read your book, sip your champagne, and toast friends present or absent, but don’t revel in the mysteries of champagne’s (invented) past. Invented pasts are bad for your brain. ©

[If it's in Hobsbawm and Ranger's book I can't find it..... ]

[Stanley]

A poet of the parish.
Wendell Berry, Poet of the Parish

There is an uncanny resemblance between our behavior toward each other and our behavior toward the earth. Wendell Berry, 1977.

In 1968, in a PhD seminar in American literature, I had an ill-tempered argument with my professor about “provincialism.” He saw it pejoratively and thought William Faulkner’s fiction weakened by it. Being a provincial myself, I took this badly, and we never again agreed on anything. The professor and I might have done well to think of Wendell Berry’s resolution of the issue by distinguishing between provincialism and “parochialism.” Provincials, Berry said, are forever worried that others will see them as provincial, whereas “the parochial person is always assured of the imaginative sufficiency of the local place.” Bingo! Problem solved! Trouble was, in 1968 Wendell Berry was only getting started, and that quoted ‘solution’ would not be voiced until 2019, in an interview in The New Yorker, ironically a fairly parochial journal itself, albeit one located in the country’s great cultural metropolis. Today Wendell Berry celebrates his 88th birthday on his farm in Henry County, Kentucky, a few miles away from his parents’ graves and his own birthplace (on August 5, 1934). Objectively, it looks like a provincial place, but through almost all of Berry’s writing we see it also (in his terms) as parochial. All human life resides there. People make good marriages and bad ones, they advance or embezzle the commonwealth, they support each other or bite backs, and they all have to work. It’s that last bit, work, that attracts Berry’s attention, and from which he draws most of his moral content. He thinks almost everyone is too busy, too business-like. He reads holy scripture (he’s an odd sort of Christian) and has become a sabbatarian. Berry’s sabbath, though, is not a day of rest but a habit of rest, rest that provides time for reflection and opens the possibility of resurrection. He has become especially concerned with those who work the land, farmers like himself and his wife and children. We all depend on the land, and we have accumulated too much evidence that the land depends on us. Therefore our relationship with the land should be, Wendell Berry thinks, like one of those good marriages that occasionally brighten his fictional village of Port William and more often warm his poetry. On the whole, it hasn’t worked out that way, and we need to take counsel about the needs of the land and learn to work with it in a sustainable way. On his farm, he walks that walk. Wendell Berry’s literary career began in 1960, in a Stanford seminar with Professor Wallace Stegner. Among Berry’s fellow students were Ken Kesey and Larry McMurtry. I would have liked to be a fly on that wall, for their arguments must have been at least as ill-tempered than mine, but maybe more fruitful. ©.

[Stanley]

A bit of a screamer.
Florence, Lady Baker, 1841-1914

If you want to do it, you can do it. Nellie Bly, in her Around the World in Seventy-Two Days.

There were many 19th-century women who traveled, but most did so perforce as wives or daughters. In the Victorian era, in Britain and the USA, some women became famous as travelers or explorers in their own right. Several have appeared in these notes, usually because, like the American journalist Nellie Bly (1864-1922), they gained fame by publicizing their adventures. One who didn’t write much but who was the perhaps most famous of them all, was Florence Barbara Maria, Lady Baker. Or infamous: for she may have been the only one of them refused an audience by Queen Victoria. This royal snub came not because of Florence’s geographical exploits but rather because of the very unusual paths by which she had become Lady Baker. Florence, Lady Baker, was born Florence Maria von Szász in a German-speaking enclave in Hapsburg Hungary on August 6, 1841. Whatever domestic peace she enjoyed as a child was shattered by the 1848 Revolutions, during which her family was massacred and she was taken hostage. Little is then known of her until 1859 when, aged 18, she was put up for sale in a slave market in Vidin, now in Bulgaria but then on the European frontier of the Ottoman Empire. Blonde and beautiful, she went for a high price to the local Pasha, but was spirited away by Sir Samuel Baker, something of an adventurer-traveler himself, and then accompanied him on his quest to find the source of the Nile. Baker later claimed that he’d married her forthwith, and maybe he did, but their formal wedding took place in 1865, in London, after they’d returned there to some fanfare. That was when Victoria refused to receive Florence at court (although the queen did confer upon Baker a knighthood). Florence was Baker’s second wife (the first, a vicar’s daughter, had died of typhus in Ceylon where the Baker family had extensive tea plantations), but was quickly accepted by his surviving daughters. Besides making a home (in Devonshire), Florence accompanied Baker on his further travels, both as a high imperial official and as explorer, and helped him directly in his attempts to stamp out the slave trade and to explore the upper Nile. Intrepid and strong, Florence adopted military clothing and a commanding personality (“a bit of a screamer,” her husband once wrote), and the two did get as far as Lake Albert, not without hazard but in considerably more comfort than that enjoyed by Bogart and Hepburn in The African Queen. Florence, Lady Baker was finally accepted by Victoria, and outlived her too (and her husband). Having written only one book, entitled Morning Star, Florence Maria, Lady Baker, died in 1914 and was buried next to her husband in darkest Devonshire. ©.

[Stanley]

Voluntarism as a communal principle.
Elinor Ostrom, 1933-2012

A core goal of public policy should be to facilitate the development of institutions that bring out the best in humans. Elinor Ostrom, Nobel Prize lecture, 2009.

It was the philosopher Thomas Carlyle who first labeled economics as the “dismal science.” He did so in an 1849 essay recommending for economic reasons the reintroduction of racial slavery in the British West Indies. So one might substitute “cruel” for “dismal,” but his judgment seems vindicated by our current failure to acknowledge, let alone address, the climate crisis. At base ‘global warming’ is caused by our insatiable demands on a world of limited resources. Instead of agreeing to limit demand or, horrors, redistribute resources, we allow nature to impose the solutions of fire, flood, war, and famine. So we echo the dismal Thomas Malthus in his most dismal of predictions (in his “Essay on the Principle of Population,” 1798). But it doesn’t have to be that way, not according to the work of Elinor Ostrom, born Elinor Awan in Los Angeles on August 7, 1933, the only child of a failed marriage. Not exactly “poor” (she lived across the street from Beverly Hills High School), her education was impoverished by her parents’ and her school’s dim view of female talents. After she’d cobbled together a good education, this prevented Elinor from enrolling at UCLA for an economics doctorate, which is what she’d wanted, so she got a PhD in political science instead. This may account for her less dismal approach to the problems presented by limited resources and infinite demands. Her biographers say her first cues came when she took Vincent Ostrom’s PhD seminar on Los Angeles’s seamy struggles over water rights. That is of course possible, and she did marry Ostrom (her married life, she reflected, was one of “love and contestation”), but I like to think she learned much from her years of teaching young kids not to fear water but instead to swim in it. However that may be, she developed a theory of how societies best manage their resource problems. This saw full light in her Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (1990). Hers was as much field work as it was theory, looking at how all sorts of societies managed their common resources in pursuit of their common interests, but in the end it brought her the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Science. She was the first woman to win that prize, and one of the few non-economists, too, and both those facts may also have some bearing on her much less dismal view of the problem and how it might best defined, better approached, and actually solved. So a tip of the birthday hat to Elinor Ostrom, her Vincent, and also (belatedly) to Beverly Hills High School where she was not allowed to study trigonometry but did teach swimming. ©.

[Stanley]

Exploration, adventure, and archaeology.
Eigel Knuth, 1903-1996

Greenland is not for sale. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, 2019.

Late in the 19th century, Arctic exploration became a fad. Coming at the flood tide of western imperialism, much was speculative and competitive, and continued so into the 20thcentury: even until very recently, witness Donald Trump’s offer to buy Greenland (which so irritated the Danes never mind the island’s Inuit indigenes). It’s best to see these explorers as heroes or would-be heroes rather than agents of empire. Because they risked their lives, there grew among them a kind of camaraderie. Some of their best exploits involved explorers from one nation rescuing explorers from another, as in 1882 when the Danish ship Dijmphna saved the Dutch crew of the Varna, icebound in Greenland’s far northeast in what is still called the Dijmphna Sound. Dijmphna was not an awkward Danish transcription from the Inuit. Rather it was the maiden name of the Danish ship’s owner’s wife. So we might say that when her grandson, Eigel Knuth, was born (August 8, 1903) he was fated to become Denmark’s most famous Arctic explorer. Knuth would often say so himself, but in his case ‘fate’ took a circuitous route. True, his wealthy family had continued its involvement with Arctic adventures, and one of Knuth’ most treasured childhood possessions was Fridtjof Nansen’s pocket compass. However, Knuth searched around for something to do with his life, first trying sculpture and art history, then gymnastics, and finally architecture before volunteering (impulsively, it seems) for a Greenland expedition in 1932. Once he got there, however, Knuth was forever smitten. He never married (indeed was probably a closeted homosexual), but his love for the great island never died. And his seemingly accidental training (in art, architecture, and physical jerks) made him an explorer-adventurer with a difference. Eigel Knuth (or, more properly, Count Eigel Knuth) became one of Greenland’s greatest archaeologists as well as a heroic explorer. He started with a fascination with the island’s early Nordic settlers (e.g. Leif Ericsson) but transferred his attention to the Inuit people. It was Knuth who proved that they had a long history in the island, having migrated there from Canada (in wooden canoes, which he un-iced), and who (from their art and artifacts) identified two successive Inuit cultures. Knuth’s many expeditions meant that he spent almost as much time in Greenland as in Denmark, although during the Nazi occupation he put in a stint with the Danish resistance, and he undertook his final Greenland expedition at age 91!! Returning to Copenhagen and feeling at loose ends, Eigel Knuth suicided at midnight, March 11, 1996. ©

[Stanley]

Everybody did that.
Mary Golda Ross, 1908-2008

I may have developed a few equations no one had thought of before, but that was not unusual. Everyone did that. Mary Golda Ross, responding to an interviewer’s question about her contributions to the space program.

The “Native American $1 Coin Program” began in 2000 with the Sacajawea coin, designed by the western sculptor Glenna Goodacre (1939-2020). The coins are minted as collectibles but are also legal tender. Goodacre’s Sacajawea still appears on the obverse, but since 2009 the reverse has featured other Native American contributions to US history. Some years it’s symbolic (as in the cultivation of maize and potatoes, the 2009 coin), some years it honors a group (the ‘Code Talkers’ of WWI and WWII in the 2016 coin). Four coins have honored individuals. In this group one stands out as a rule-breaking pioneer. Mary Golda Ross, featured on the 2019 $1 coin, was not only the first Native American but also the first woman to play a significant role in the American space program—"the final frontier”, as it’s sometimes called in unconscious irony. Mary Golda Ross was born into the Cherokee Nation, on tribal lands in Oklahoma, on August 9, 1908. Her surname indicates her heritage, for it was Principal Chief John Ross (her great-great grandfather) who had led the Cherokee on their ‘Trail of Tears’ into territory they’d been promised would be their land forever. John Ross knew better than to depend on that, and among other things he had founded the Cherokee Female Seminary. By Mary’s time, that was Oklahoma’s Northeastern State Teachers’ College, from which she graduated, with honors, in mathematics. Ross swam in the discipline like fish swim in water, with a native talent if you’ll excuse the pun, and after a few years teaching in Indian Territory schools and working as a statistician for the Bureau of Indian Affairs she moved on to Colorado where she acquired a Master’s degree. Then WWII came, and Mary took up the opportunities then opened to women by filling a (male) vacancy at Lockheed. There she helped to design the P-38 fighter. After the war Lockheed sponsored her as an engineering student at UCLA, and then in 1952 assigned her to “the Skunk Works,” the firm’s top-secret unit devoted to engineering vehicles for supersonic flight, intercontinental missiles, and space exploration. Much of her work there remains secret, but it was both mathematical and visionary, and before she retired (in 1973) she had been examining the theories and practices of interplanetary travel. When it came to honoring her with a collectible $1 coin in 2019, she joined Sequoyah (2017) and Jim Thorpe (2018) opposite Sacajawea. Ross herself had died in 2008, just short of her 100th birthday. She left behind her $400,000 to help fund the National Museum of the American Indian and many shards of broken glass. ©.

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Libraries are a cornerstone of democracy.
Carla Hayden, Librarian of Congress

Librarians are activists [as] social workers. Now we are fighters for freedom. Carla Hayden, 2003.

Carla Hayden has always seen librarianship as a challenging profession. After all, that is how she began her career, as a graduate student volunteer in the Chicago Public Library. There, in the Whitney Young branch, southside, she began and led a reading group for autistic children, not only reading to them but encouraging the kids to read to each other, aloud and with feeling. It’s hard to imagine a stiffer challenge, or to measure the satisfaction that success might bring. Soon she met a young professional couple, Barack and Michelle Obama, and their growing children, and that connection helps to explain how, in September 2016, Carla Hayden became the first female, and the first African-American, to be appointed Librarian of Congress. President Barack Obama nominated her. But a more compelling explanation of her professional success is her whole life story, including of course those young autistic readers. Carla Hayden was born in Tallahassee, FL, on August 10, 1952, her father a professor of music at FAMU, her mother a social worker. The breakup of that marriage caused her some emotional strain and constantly interrupted her education, but Carla also learned much from her mother’s family tradition, a coherent narrative maintained since slavery days. Parts of that story found their way into print in Ruby Berkeley’s It’s Good to be Black (1953). Another book that inspired Hayden was Bright April (1947), a children’s story about a little black Brownie in southside Chicago, where Hayden lived with her mother. Her book passion helped to channel her into a graduate program in library science (MA and PhD, Chicago), and on up through the ranks of her profession to become Director of Libraries in the city of Baltimore from 1993 to 2016. Along the way, Carla Hayden was elected president of the American Library Association (2003-2004). That was a supreme accolade for a female of color, and she celebrated by making “equity of access” the main theme of her presidency. It was also a tough time for libraries because of a controversial provision in the infamous Patriot Act of 2001 enabling government scrutiny of individuals’ book borrowing records. Thus one might be thought guilty for what one might read. Hayden’s life story read her (so to speak) into leading a national campaign against relevant sections of the Act, and this was among the reasons that in 2016 eighteen Republicans voted against her appointment as Librarian of Congress. By now, most of the Act’s obnoxious provisions have expired. And Dr. Carla Hayden, today celebrating her 70th, is still Librarian of Congress!! ©

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Freedom and fitness
Friedrich Jahn, 1778-1852

Frisch, fromm, frölich, frei!! (“Fresh, pious, cheerful, free”). The ‘4F’ motto of Friedrich Jahn’s Turnverein clubs and schools.

After living next to Forest Park for 25 years, I have fulfilled my ambition of walking all the park’s paths, most of them often, and have developed an easy familiarity with its monuments. Among the latter, one of the more curious is the Jahn Memorial, which lies (longer than it is tall) at the bottom of Art Hill. It’s on the site of the German pavilion at the 1904 World’s Fair, which is fitting. Then German nationalism was rising to a fever (which would not break until after WWII) and Friedrich Jahn was a pioneer of German nationalism. If he had been nothing else, his Forest Park memorial might never have been built, or might (like the old Confederate memorial on the Park’s northern edge) have been discredited and then ‘disappeared’ in the dead of night. But Jahn was much else, and the memorial honors him as a pioneer of physical culture. Friedrich Jahn was born in Prussian Saxony on August 11, 1778, when Germany was a mélange of princely states. He was well educated (in theology and philology) and came of age in time to see the birth of romantic nationalism. This didn’t originate in Germany but rather with the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon, and young Jahn did his part, fighting the French and lamenting the lack of a revolutionary spirit amongst his German comrades. Jahn was not rewarded for his battlefield bravery until 1840, because his diagnosis of German weaknesses made him an enemy of Germany’s traditional (dis)order. Jahn would see Germany reborn as a modern state through a melding of fitnesses, moral, mental, and physical. His activities landed him in Spandau prison, which radicalized him, and he spent the rest of his life agitating for fitness. His chosen vehicle was gymnastics, first in separate clubs and then in schools. Jahn invented the parallel bars, the rings, the balance beam, and the horse, and devised exercises for each familiar to any who watch gymnastic competitions. Jahn’s intellectualism brought him an invitation to fill the new German chair at Harvard, but “Vater Jahn” stayed in Germany where he lived long enough to play a role in the Revolutions of 1848. His turnverein disciples migrated to St. Louis to play a crucial role in frustrating Missouri’s pro-slavery secession movement in 1860-61. They’d seen one junker class in action in Germany and wanted no part of an American one. The Jahn memorial is thus a fitting fixture for St. Louis’s “people’s park,” just like that of the Union memorial to General Franz Sigel which still stands guard at the trail entrance to Forest Park’s Deer Lake Savannah. General Sigel, like Jahn a German reformer and revolutionary, also thought of physical culture as an essential element of individual freedom. My daily walks pay homage to them both. ©

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The power of good is shown not by triumphantly conquering evil, but by continuing to resist evil while facing certain defeat. Hamilton, 1942 Edith Hamilton, 1867-1963

It has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about education so little stress is laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life Edith Hamilton.

Although their sole brother (and youngest sibling) Arthur did not do at all badly in his own career, the four Hamilton sisters of Fort Wayne, Indiana, deserve a group biography, and I don’t think they’ve had one as yet. The eldest was Edith Hamilton, born in Dresden, Germany, on August 12, 1867, and she may be partly credited for paving the way for Alice (1869-1970), Margaret (1871-1969), and Norah (1873-l945) . Each achieved distinction in her own field (respectively, education, medicine, and art). But I will concentrate on Edith, for it is the anniversary of her birth and because I have (for many years) made shameless use of her wonderful notion that education should be both pleasurable and liberating. She picked that up partly from her father, who inherited so much money (the family wealth was based on property speculation) that he wasn’t interested in making any more, tried to let his wholesale grocery firm take care of itself, and instead lavished the best home schooling that money could buy on his five children. He taught them himself in Greek and Latin and was assisted by Edith’s mother, a musician fluent in several modern languages. From 1884 to 1886, Edith attended a prestigious finishing school but, when she left, was not ‘finished.’ Nor did she marry, Instead Edith went on to Bryn Mawr College, in classics, graduated with honors (1894), and then became the first female to enroll for graduate study at the University of Munich (sister Alice enrolled at Leipzig in the same year, to study pathology). Edith never did get the doctorate she’d thirsted for, but was recruited back to the US to head the Bryn Mawr School, in Baltimore, an all-girls high school where she labored to prepare her students, in mind and in body, for the enjoyments of further and higher education. Then, after 26 years at the school (where she was succeeded as headmistress by her sister Margaret) Edith ‘retired’ to become a leading author of historical works on classical Greek and Roman civilization. Her first book, The Greek Way (1930) made a national splash, as did several of her subsequent works, notably her accessible retelling of the tangled stories of the Greek gods in Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes (1942). Her book sales made her a comfortable life, but it was rendered yet more comfortable by her lifelong partnership with the pioneer woman stockbroker (and Edith’s former student) Doris Fielding Reid. They shared incomes and divided their time between New York City and New England’s “down east” coast until Edith’s death in 1963. ©.

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The queen of the west meets the king of the yellow press.
Annie Oakley, 1860-1926

I ain’t afraid to love a man. I ain’t afraid to shoot him, either. Annie Oakley.

Before Rupert Murdoch and Fox News there was William Randolph Hearst and his nationwide bevy of scandal sheets. Both damaged the republic and abused the principle of press freedom. Murdoch we know about, for he’s of our time and maybe of our ilk, too, but something of his methods can be divined from studying one of Hearst’s most telling cases, one of libel brought against him and his papers by the heroine of the West, Annie Oakley. It all started with a splashy story in Hearst’s Chicago Examiner, which in 1903 reported that Miss Oakley had been caught stealing her companion’s pants (and his money) to feed her cocaine habit. It might be laid to sloppy reporting or inattentive sub-editing, but remember that Hearst’s minions knew what he wanted (sensation and circulation), so it was easy for the Examiner to overlook the fact that their “Annie Oakley” was Maude Fontanella, a young burlesque performer who marketed herself as “Any Oakley.” Ms. Fontanella’s act may well have included guns, somehow (the mind boggles), and for that matter she may have been an addict, but that didn’t matter. Fake news sold newspapers, and the Examiner (and other Hearst papers) headlined “Famous Woman Crack Shot Steals to Buy Cocaine.” The real Annie Oakley was not amused, and the resulting libel cases brought her $13,500 (~$500,000 in today’s values), a stupendous sum in the days when our civil courts were reluctant to put a price tag on “honor.” Annie Oakley was not an angel, but she was honorable—and more careful in her personal life (she married only once, at 16)—than was William Randolph Hearst. On the other hand she wasn’t “really” Annie Oakley. She was born on August 13, 1860, into log-cabin poverty as Phoebe Ann Mosey, the fifth child of a feckless Quaker family. She learned to shoot when she was very young. Her father’s death, her mother’s inattention, and her natural talent at drawing a bead made her the family’s meat-winner. She also hunted for her foster family, despite their cruelty to her, and she sold game in local markets. Her talents made her famous, locally, before they made her famous, internationally, in Buffalo Bill’s traveling wild west circus. Annie was not a feminist, but she was certainly female and thought self-defense was something every girl should know about. She performed for presidents, kings, and queens, and toured the world, and she was not going to take any nonsense from William Randolph Hearst or feature in his fake news. One of her fellow performers, the Hunkpapa Chief Sitting Bull, called her, in Siouxan, “little sure shot,” and so she was. Just ask Hearst. ©

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Taking pictures of the stars.
Margaret Huggins, 1848-1915

Unravelling Starlight. Title of a 2011 study of the scientific partnership between Margaret and William Huggins, astronomers and spectroscopists.

These notes have occasionally featured pioneer women astronomers. Almost all were American (one was a Scots immigrant to the US), and most began as ill-paid “computers” who recorded the discoveries of male astronomers, notably at Edward Pickering’s Harvard Observatory. I’ve noted only one European, Caroline Herschel, the German-born sister of Britain’s Astronomer Royal, William Herschel. Another ‘pioneer woman’ in this field was Margaret Huggins, born Margaret Lindsay in Dublin, Ireland, on August 14, 1848. Schooled at home and then privately in England, Margaret Lindsay excelled at the traditional studies for girls (in art, literature, and music) but developed two unusual enthusiasms, photography and star gazing. Evidence is that she’d put those two together before she met the astronomer William Huggins (1824-1910). He was already (and also) involved in photography. The coincidence swept both off their feet, and they married, near Dublin, in 1875. The marriage produced no children, but a flooding tide of scholarship in which their photography unlocked several secrets of the universe. At first William appeared as sole author, but Margaret Huggins’s technical skills and inventiveness with photographic equipment soon brought her into the picture (pun intended). From the late 1880s she was co-author and co-researcher with William, in works focused on the chemical composition of distant stars and—as they were then called—nebulae. They formed a working partnership that required astronomical colleagues to recognize Margaret as a scientist in her own right. But the profession was still so hidebound that it could only manage to make her an honorary fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society (in 1903). She did important work in other fields, too, notably the science of musical instrument-making. After William’s death in 1910 she retired to a private life, cataloguing their research notes and recording their technical innovations. When she died, Margaret bequeathed her notes and ‘machines’ to Wellesley College, in Massachusetts. It shouldn’t have surprised anyone, for Wellesley had a sparkling new observatory, the Whitlin, and had made itself into a center of (female) astronomy. Among Wellesley’s first astronomy graduates was Annie Jump Cannon, who’d then labored at Pickering’s observatory and made it her own by becoming expert in spectroscopy. So Wellesley College was a ‘natural’ place for a European astronomer-spectroscopist to leave her mark as a woman. There the Huggins papers reside today, witnesses to the slow progress of gender equality in making sense of the stars. ©

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a pioneer of the deep state.
Peter Young, 1544-1628

Bureaucracy is not an obstacle to democracy but an inevitable complement to it. Joseph A. Schumpeter, in his Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942).

Donald Trump is no original thinker, and his notion of a “deep state” is almost as old as the hills. One continuous thread in its long history is the growth of a ‘civil service,’ servants of the state whose job it was to make things work. That’s important, if you think about it for a minute, and it has a universal history (an expression of political ‘modernity’?), but in Anglo-American politics it began in the royal households of medieval and early modern British kings, where loyalty to the reigning monarch was the cardinal rule. Once that notion was in place, it wasn’t a long jump to add the idea that the job’s obligations extended beyond the ruler of the day to include, simply, “government.” A short jump in theory but a long one in practice: and eventually it brought deep change. One of the early pioneers didn’t so much change rulers as he changed thrones, for he was imported into England when in 1603 James VI of Scotland became James I of England. This early ‘bureaucrat’ was Peter Young, born in Dundee on August 15, 1544. Young was well-born (often a characteristic of modern civil service elites), his father a burgess of Dundee and Edinburgh, his mother a woman of Clan Scrymgeour. (That surname sounds myseriously Old Norse, and J. K. Rowling employed it that way in her Harry Potter saga, but it is more likely of French origin). Peter Young was brought up a strict Calvinist, suffered exile for it, and was tutored in Geneva by Theodore Beza. So when Scotland returned to the Protestant fold, James Young was well suited to be tutor to the infant King James VI who would, eventually, become King James I. He prospered well enough to enjoy other income-producing offices. But instead of making these mere sinecures, James Young made them engines of change, notably standardization of academic curricula and church catechisms. Then his continental connections made him a perfect ambassador, one who may have helped arrange the marriage between James and Anne of Denmark. When the king was translated to London, Peter Young followed him to take up an appointment as tutor and head of house to Prince Charles. From that eminence he furthered the civil service careers of his sons, including Patrick (royal librarian) and John (dean of the Anglican cathedral at Winchester). None of them were ‘modern’ civil servants, but it’s not hard to see them as precursors of the deep state, those bureaucrats who keep the wheels turning in all weathers, even in our own troubled winter of 2020-2021. We often satirize them for their bureaucratic frailties; Trump’s failed coup d'état offers us reason to honor their successes. ©

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Small is beautiful. And appropriate?
Ernst Friedrich Schumacher, 1911-1977

Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology toward the organic, the gentle, the elegant and beautiful. E. F. Schumacher, 1973.

Early in my career, in grad school in the 1960s and then at Lancaster University in the 1970s, there arose a vogue for smallness. It’s since cheapened, chiefly as a mantra-lament (“downsizing”) as middle-class and middle-aged folk face up to the prospect of lengthened lives and limited pensions, but in its origins it was a reaction to the horrors of the 20th century’s past (two World Wars sandwiching a Great Depression) and its likely future of fouling the planet with our waste products and industrial exhalations. In 1973 the vogue found its bible (or manifesto, or style sheet?) in a collection of essays by E. F. Schumacher entitled Small Is Beautiful. Ernst Friedrich Schumacher was born in Bonn, Germany, on August 16, 1911, the son of a professor (of political economy) who grew up in a rarified climate. His sister married the brilliant physicist Werner Heisenberg (whose ‘uncertainty principle’ can stand for us all) while he himself enjoyed great academic success as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and then a graduate fellow at Columbia in New York. A self-exile from Hitler’s Germany, Schumacher settled in Britain where he became a disciple of John Maynard Keynes and embraced deficit spending and government investment as antidotes to the depression. These were big solutions to big problems. They worked pretty well during WWII, and afterwards Schumacher continued his pursuit of bigness as advisor to the rebuilding of the German economy and to the nationalized British coal industry. But along the way he also got involved with the immediate economic problems of newly-liberated colonies, notably India and Burma, and this set him to thinking in a very different mode. We can call his recommended solutions “smaller” ones (after all, he did himself), but Schumacher wanted to build economies which were fitted to the actual circumstances of these ‘new’ nations. So his favored word was not “small” but “appropriate.” Modern science might enable these new societies to invest appropriate sums in appropriate technologies, and thus address their r
eal problems of supply in ways that would complement their traditional cultures. Inspired now by Gandhi as much as by Keynes, Schumacher advocated improvement, not revolution. A beneficial by-product of this evolutionary approach could be a better, more careful stewardship of the natural environment. So small might really be ‘beautiful’, offering not only a way to attain prosperity but also a workable means to preserve it. In our present state, which brings us global warming but local fires and floods, it’s a system of thought that might be worth revisiting. ©.

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Medicine as a public service
Thomas Hodgkin, 1798-1866

Men had better be without education… than be educated by their rulers. Thomas Hodgkin, “Institution for the Instruction of Mechanics,” 1823.

My maternal grandfather died 8 years before my birth, so I came to know him through stories and anecdotes. Thus I learned that grandma called him “Mr. Simms” (at least in public and maybe because he was 22 years older than she), that his son admired him enormously, and that my mother had dropped out of college to care for him in his final illness, “Hodgkin’s Disease.” This cancer was named to honor the man who’d first discovered it, Thomas Hodgkin, born in London on August 17, 1798. Thomas’s industrious Quaker parents schooled him effectively enough to gain him a good position with the Quaker apothecary William Allen. Allen’s scientific approach to pharmacy inspired young Thomas to take up a career in medicine. Partly because in England Quakers were disabled from many professional paths, Thomas Hodgkin went to Edinburgh where he graduated MD in 1823 (two years before Charles Darwin turned up to drop out). He then traveled the continent, studying medicine and acting as medic and companion to Abraham Montefiore, a London stockbroker. Then Thomas returned to London as a practicing physician. He approached the task Quaker-like, methodically and charitably. Quickly Hodgkin became known to the medical community for his scientific achievements in anatomy and pathology. Some colleagues were discomfited by Hodgkin’s plain style, his mode of dress and his Quaker speech. His ’thee’ and ‘thou’ were at once uncomfortably intimate and oddly old-fashioned. This would later (1836) deny Hodgkin a fellowship at Guy’s Hospital, despite his remarkable scientific accomplishments (for instance his description and diagnosis of lymphoma). But there were other reasons for that, including his charitable activities. Hodgkin saw medicine as a public service. In his private practice he served poor and rich alike; the very poor were not charged. Publicly, his insistence that British advances in medicine should benefit the whole empire including its indigenous peoples, brought him into conflict with the Hudson’s Bay Company, one of whose officers was also deputy chairman at Guy’s Hospital. On another fringe of empire, in Palestine, Hodgkin’s friendships with the Montefiores made him into a medical missionary (to Jew and Muslim). Hodgkin died while on a medical mission there (1866, with Sir Moses Montefiore). He was buried in the Protestant cemetery at Jaffa, which apparently admitted Quaker cadavers. There Sir Moses erected a pillar to honor Hodgkin for his “scientific attainments, medical skill, and self-sacrificing philanthropy.” And when Grandpa Simms fell ill in 1933, old Doc Thielen had a name for his ailment. ©

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A remarkable career in home economics.
Amelia Isadora Boynton, 1911-2015

People ask me what race I am . . . I just answer, “I’m a member of the human race.” Amanda Boynton.

In the very “Old” American south, German settlers proved to their own satisfaction that cash crops could be profitably grown, in a hot climate, without recourse to enslaved labor. Meanwhile, along the southeastern frontier, the Cherokee enslaved Africans in an attempted accommodation to the British invaders. This ‘mixed’ (African, Cherokee, and German) heritage perhaps helped Amelia Isadora Boynton to navigate her world, but it was a world that regarded her as inferior—because of the African element in her past. She was born Amelia Isadora Platte, in Savannah, on August 18, 1911, at the height (or depths) of the Jim Crow period, as white southerners tried to find in segregation and disenfranchisement ‘solutions’ for the end of racial slavery. But her parents (George and Anna) weren’t having it, and made as sure as they could that Amelia got a good education and had a proper sense of herself and her rights. She finished up with a degree in Home Economics from Tuskegee, and took her first job as a county extension agent in Selma, Alabama. Dallas County was then (and still is) overwhelmingly black, and its extension service was (like everything else, from toilets to cemeteries) segregated, so she worked with African-American women, teaching them how to make most of what they had in nutrition, clothing, and shelter. She wrote a play about it and about the origin of the black spiritual. She also married her boss, Samuel Boynton, the head of the county’s “black” extension service. And despite the difficulties in her way, she registered to vote. And she had a political mind. One of her uncles, Robert Smalls, had rebelled against slavery, joined the Union navy, and had been a pioneer black legislator in South Carolina and Washington before apartheid sent him home. Amelia raised her son that way, too, and sent him off to Howard (where, across the Potomac in Virginia, he got arrested for buying while black). Prominent in Selma, in the 1950s Amanda got Martin Luther King, Jr., to help her in fundraising for a liberation project, and of course she took part in the Selma march, where Alabama state troopers beat her unconscious and left her lying senseless in the dirt. She proved durable, though, and in 2015, aged 104, she attended Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address, and then in March (with the president and John Lewis) she crossed Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge—in a wheelchair. She died soon afterwards, forgiven by most for her brief involvement (in the 1990s) with a mail fraud scheme that she thought was part of the liberation movement. Where she lived in Selma is now Boynton Street, a modest reward for an honorable woman (and for her first husband). ©.

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Does 'Free Speech' bring a "Free Press"?
Donna Allen, 1920-1999

So You Think You Have a Free Press? Title of a 1970 pamphlet Donna Allen published about the press coverage of her daughter’s sentencing (for leading a rally against racial segregation in schools.)

Among the collections at the State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia, are the Donna Allen Papers. The location seems odd, for Allen hadn’t any special connection with Missouri. She spoke here, but then she spoke just about everywhere, from many platforms, and on many topics. She studied the USA, past and present. She loved our democratic game and became one of its most indefatigable defenders. If the game had been baseball, she would have been somewhere way out in left field, but her game was politics. She played it well, and she deserves way more than the paltry paragraph she’s accorded in Wikipedia. Donna Allen was born on August 19, 1920, as Donna Rehkopf, in Petoskey, at the upper end of Michigan’s lower peninsula. She was of immigrant stock, Petoskey a lake port that sent timber and limestone to Chicago and Milwaukee. This may explain her native sympathy for working-class folk. If so, she became better-informed as she worked through community college, then Duke (BA), then Chicago (MA), and finally Howard (PhD), in history and the social sciences. She joined up with the Progressive Party and married a fellow worker at Tennessee’s Highlander Folk School. The marriage (which ended in divorce) produced four children and a spell at Cornell University teaching labor economics. Even before then Allen had developed a national reputation on one of Harry Truman’s advisory boards. Her public pronouncements on labor unions and other issues made her fair game for the right, who went after her via the House Un-American Activities Committee. They got her jailed for contempt but they did not silence her. Quite the contrary. Along the way, Donna became obsessed with free speech issues and angered by the fact that those who most enjoyed freedom of the press were the white men who owned and ran it and who ignored or suppressed the voices of women and of the poor. For the rest of her life, she crusaded (almost everywhere, including Moscow and Nairobi as well as Missouri) for press freedom and, more especially, to make it a freedom open to all, notably women. In 1972 she founded the Women’s Institute for a Free Press (WIFP) and for the rest of her life worked to create a public platform where the unheard could speak, and be heeded. Donna Allen died in 1999. I think she left her papers in Columbia because it’s the home of one of America’s best journalism schools. It's a good place, and one can only hope that Mizzou’s journalism majors have learned from her papers. Her four children have followed in her path, Martha as a staffer and sometimes director at the WIFP. ©

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I haven't had yesterday's note from Bob. Most unusual. I have mailed him. I shall report when I have news.