BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

It is not at all an idle matter to define what a human being is. Primo Levi.
Sarina Levi Nathan, 1819-1882
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Love and respect woman. Look to her not only for comfort, but for strength and inspiration and the doubling of your intellectual and moral powers. Blot out from your mind any idea of superiority; you have none. Giuseppe Mazzini, Italian revolutionary.

Lord Byron had his Greece—which, it could be said, killed him—but for 19th-century romantics Italy was the cause that moved most and for the longest time. Italy was to “rise again” (the literal translation of risorgimento) to regain its lost cultural eminence, to unify, and (for many) to become a modern, liberal state. This was the cause that took the American Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) to Italy to report on the most romantic stage of the risorgimento, Garibaldi’s abortive 1848 revolution, but it also brought another woman back to Italy and the cause of revolution: with a little ‘time out’ to support the Union during the US Civil War. She was born Sarina Levi on December 7, 1819, at Pesaro on the Adriatic coast and raised in Leghorn, preferring its political and religious climate to that of Rome and the Papal States. Her mother’s family, the Rosselinis, had connections in London, which is where Sarina went after marrying (in 1836) Meyer Moses Nathan. There she birthed and reared a dozen children, and it was there also (in the 1840s) that Sarina Nathan met Giuseppe Mazzini, the other half (to Garibaldi) of the Italian revolution. Sarina and Meyer Nathan helped to finance Mazzini’s stay in London, and through Meyer’s connection with Dr. Henri Conneau (Napoleon III’s physician and counselor) helped Mazzini to negotiate the perilous waters of 19th-century diplomacy. Thus Sarina became known to Italian reactionaries, and when she returned to Italy in 1859 she narrowly escaped arrest. Instead she and her eldest daughter, Janet, fled to Lugano, in Switzerland, where her house, La Tanzino (as an Italian name, ‘Tanzino’ is traditionally associated with loyalty, kindness, and generosity), became a kind of HQ for a republican revolution and where she and Janet reestablished themselves as ‘best friends’ to Mazzini. Unification succeeded but alas there was to be no fully realized republican revolution, and after Mazzini died (at Janet’s house in Pisa, in 1872) Sarina returned to London where she became involved in a social reform causes, notably having to do with women’s rights and often in partnership with Josephine Butler, an actress turned reformer. In London, Sarino Nathan also undertook publication of Mazzini’s letters and papers, and continued her sponsorship of a Roman school for poor girls. Back in Italy, her son Ernesto was to become mayor of a Republican Rome (1907-1912) and a leader of the anti-clerical core of the Liberal Party. Sarina would not live to see that. But she did qualify as a person of courage and persistence in the cause of Italy’s long revolution. ©

[Stanley]

I had no choice but to accept. . . .
Julia Bowman Robinson, b. St. Louis, December 8, 1919.
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After discussion with Raphael, who thought I should decline and save my energy for mathematics, and other members of my family, who differed with him, I decided that as a woman and a mathematician I had no alternative but to accept. Julia Robinson, concerning her election as president of the American Mathematical Association.

In 1996. Constance Reid was asked to speak of her older sister Julia Robinson at a memorial dinner for Robinson put on by the society of American Women Mathematicians. Reid decided to speak on “Being Julia Robinson’s Sister”—a prudent choice for Reid had dropped math for Latin in tenth grade and hence, when the sisters met up again in the mid 1970s “knew nothing about” the work for which Julia was already famous. Neither do I, but in borrowed prose Julia Robinson became world renowned for her work on “decidability,” tracing and explaining the borderlines between mathematical problems that can be solved and those which cannot. By 1996, there were plenty of women mathematicians. But as Constance pointed out, mathematical fame was an unlikely outcome for Julia Robinson, who was born in St. Louis on December 8, 1919. Constance came two years later, a perfect gap to encourage sibling rivalry. The distance between them grew when, in San Diego, Julia fell to rheumatic fever, missed almost three years of school, and had to begin her studies all over. But she survived, recovered, more than caught up, and discovered that her best talents lay in thinking about numbers, often in abstract ways. In 1935 she started a math major at San Diego State, aged 16, but transferred to Berkeley in 1939 where she wowed them all and married her number theory professor Raphael Robinson. When an unsuccessful pregnancy cast Julia into depression, Raphael urged her to return to mathematics for graduate study, where she completed her PhD in 1948. After that—barred by her marriage to a faculty member—she couldn’t work at Berkeley but could elsewhere, got involved in Democratic politics, and returned to Berkeley as a professor after Raphael retired. By then (1976) Julia had solved most of the big problems she’d worked on, but not all, and the new institutional connection sped her election to the National Academy of Sciences and, eventually, the presidency of the American Mathematical Society. But at that 1996 memorial dinner (Julia had died in 1986) Constance thought it most meet to talk about Julia as a sister, for there were sister-mathematicians aplenty, and at that dinner, to speak of Julia’s mathematics discoveries and of her success in demonstrating that the higher maths could be women’s work. Constance did have something to say about the latter contribution, for it had been through Julia’s tutelage that Constance shifted her focus to become a writer on mathematics. ©.

[Stanley]

The bread and butter of history.
Reay Tannahill, 'amateur' historian.
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I had enough material . . . to produce a panoramic view so that people who were only ever going to read one book about food could know as much as is reasonable for your average educated reader. Reay Tannahill, interview, 1990.

Considering their published output over the centuries, historians have not been much interested in the details of daily life, especially as lived by ordinary folk. Of course there were some points where that stance could not be maintained (for instance the prices of bread and cake in Marie Antoinette’s France or the general disappearance of tea from the American diet), but in general we set our sights ‘higher,’ on great social movements, dominating ideologies, upheavals in national politics, diplomatic crises and wars. But in my lifetime that has changed, rather emphatically, so that what Perry Miller once called the “washpan and boiler-pot school of history” is now a respectable element in the curriculum. It’s interesting, then, that one of the agents of that change was not, herself, trained as an historian, and in the sense of professional qualifications and status, never became one. She was Reay Tannahill, born in Glasgow on December 9, 1929. Early on, she abandoned artistic ambitions to take a more conventional path, majoring in English at Glasgow University. She then went on the job market (as many female English majors did) as a Jill of all trades in and around the publishing industry. She fetched up in London as press officer for the Folio Society (they reproduce superior cloth-bound editions, often specially illustrated, of the classics and of some modern best-sellers). Recognizing that their press officer was knowledgeable and could write, the Folio Society commissioned Tannahill to produce a couple of presentation books which sold well enough that they asked for another. Tannahill surprised them—and herself—by researching and writing Food in History (1973) and then its ‘taboo’ offshoot Flesh and Blood: A History of the Cannibal Complex (1975). This is basic stuff, and Tannahill continued with Sex in History (1980) which sold even better. Having done food and sex, Tannahill went on to shelter but much later and in a different, novelistic format, about an upper-class widow’s Having the Builders In (2006) and Having the Decorators In (2007) the last and most innovative of a long string of Tannahill’s historical fictions. She died just a day after the ‘decorators’ book came on the market. Reay Tannahill was not the only person to take up historical treatments of such basic—or base—subjects as food, sex. and shelter, but as a non-professional and non-specialist she did demonstrate that it could be done and that, well done, it was of significant interest to the reading public—and it is the educated reading public that is the best market for academic historians. ©

[Tripps]

historians have not been much interested in the details of daily life, especially as lived by ordinary folk.

Pretty bold statement to make on this site. What say thee SCG? Best have a word with him and soon, I'd say.

[Stanley]

David, I think he is referring to earlier years...... Bob himself agrees that the “washpan and boiler-pot school of history” is now a respectable element in the curriculum.".

[Stanley]

I'm Nobody! Who are you? // Are you--Nobody--too? Dickinson.
Emily Dickinson, 1830-1886*

Wild nights – wild nights!
Were I with thee
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile—the winds—
To a Heart in Port –
Done with the Compass –
Done with the Chart!

Rowing in Eden –
Ah – the Sea!
Might I but moor—tonight—
In thee!
Emily Dickinson, poem # 269 in the Variorum edition, 1988.

In her one authenticated “grown-up” portrait, a daguerreotype taken during her brief stay at Mount Holyoke College, Emily Dickinson (born on December 10, 1830) looks out pleasantly if pensively, hair drawn back and parted at the middle, a ribbon at her throat and a book at her elbow. While all daguerreotypes appear gloomy, there is nothing in this picture to suggest that Emily would become legendary in her own town as a recluse, far less to suggest her poetic genius. Back at home, in Amherst, she dressed only in white and lived behind closed doors. She kept a lush garden and greenhouse, and baked beautifully. She used biscuits and blossoms to communicate (silently) with friends, and left the rest of Amherst to its own devices. Other than family, and not all of those, Emily was well known only to children, her nieces, her nephews, and her small neighbors. Kindly, too; one of those children remembered her as synonymous with ‘indulgence.’ Emily feared death and knew it too well. After a string of them in the mid 1880s she wrote that “the Dyings have been too deep for me. Before I can raise my Heart from one, another has come.” With all this, one concludes that Emily must have been a melancholic, the loneliest of the lonely. True, she did write poetry, a fair amount of it, and for most of her adult life. Not surprisingly, much of it is bound together by sadness and its loneliness. And yet this Emily person wrote wildly innovative, oddly melodic, poetry. Her verses, generally short. are almost always surprising in what they say and how they say it. Emily the writer is always in control, maintaining the voice of an outsider even when observing herself. She is (to say the very least) unusual in how she speaks, in the associations she makes (and then naturalizes in one or two lines), and creative in her rhythms and rhymes. And this Emily Dickinson almost no one knew. Those who did (notably the critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson and then her brother’s lover Mabel Loomis Todd) know her poetry saw something of her genius but instead of publishing it as Emily left it they tried to tame it, to bring her poetry indoors and then to keep it there, tamed, corrected, and conforming to grammar, vocabulary, and form as they knew it (and, perhaps, too, conforming the poetry to Emily’s lifestory as a reclusive). Luckily, Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts survived to be republished as she left them, verses through which she could open her doors—and her garden gate—to welcome her readers with her warmth, her wealth, and her company. These poems, in this form, were first published by Thomas H. Johnson in a three-volume set in 1955 and then, even more faithfully, in the 1980s by Ralph Franklin. As Dickinson herself may have intended, they set the world on its ear. If you haven’t yet, today would be a good time to give her a try. ©

[Stanley]

Our first bacteriologist.
Robert Koch, 1843-1910
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If my efforts have led to greater success than usual, this is due, I believe, to the fact that during my wanderings in the field of medicine, I have strayed onto paths where the gold was still lying by the wayside. Robert Koch, 1905.

Our ‘folk memory’ of medicine tends to give greatest credit to those who have discovered the cure of this or that malady (or, failing that, an effective immunization). But the dramas associated with our current pandemic plague—“covid-19”—have reminded us of the importance of defining a disease’s agent or cause. That can be quite a different thing. Deeper understanding of infectious and epidemic diseases has required a more scientific approach, and the greatest innovator in this field was the German Robert Heinrich Herman Koch, born in Hannover, Germany, on December 11, 1843. Today we’d call him a bacteriologist, but in his education (at Göttingen) and during his early work no such field existed. So he became a medical doctor, GP or PCP we might say, in a series of small provincial towns and then a field surgeon in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71). But along the way he became as interested in causation as in cure, and he set about it as the ‘district surgeon’ for Wöllstein, Rhineland, in a small laboratory, designed by himself, where he cultivate samples of probable disease agents (starting with pond algaes), studied them on their own (slicing thin samples with a ‘microtome’) under magnification, learning their life stories and their identities as unique species, and then injecting them into healthy macro-organisms (such as sheep and cattle). In these ways Koch followed the hints laid down by his Göttingen professor, Friedrich Henle, and the French scientist Louis Pasteur, to study and define the single-celled creatures that caused (inter alia) cholera, tuberculosis, and anthrax, each disease with its own specific progenitor. Koch became famous not only for these discoveries but for devising, or perfecting, the lab equipment and lab procedures necessary to find them. His major discoveries were made in the 1870s and 1880s. but he continued to work (for instance on the etiologies of the infectious agents that could bring death to soldiers with even minor battlefield wounds); and he lived long enough to receive the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1905. He died in 1910, at Baden-Baden, soon after giving a series of lectures on his work. A fitting memorial came in 1982, when the World Health Organization proclaimed March 24 as World Tuberculosis Day. March 24, 1982 was the centenary of Koch’s announcement that he had identified the bacillus that caused the disease. ©

[Stanley]

One who went to law for us all.
Arthur Garfield Hays, 1881-1954
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Those who want the Government to regulate matters of the mind and spirit are like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they commit suicide to avoid assassination. Harry S. Truman, 1952.

You should be glad to know that our national Bill of Rights Day takes place on Wednesday this week, for December 15, 2021 will be the 230th anniversary of the ratification of the first ten amendments to the Constitution, known then (and still today) as our ‘Bill of Rights.’ It’s also salutary to remember that those rights have not always been favored by the powerful, who have often found freedom of speech inconvenient, or by the bigoted, who have tried to turn the freedom of religion—including the right to be irreligious—on its head, or by racists regretting the 14th amendment’s radical extension of the bill of rights to all citizens and against state as well as national legislation. One might even suggest that we should celebrate the Bill of Rights for its unpopularity. Certainly, our Bill of Rights has required defenders, and this week it’s especially appropriate to remember one of those defenders, Arthur Garfield Hays, a lawyer whose work did much to give the Bill of Rights its modern legal force. Hays was born on December 12, 1881, in Rochester, NY, and named after the assassinated James Garfield and his replacement, Chester Arthur. Those names fulfilled the assimilationist aims of Hays’s German-Jewish grandfather who had earlier changed the family name from Haas to Hays. Like many civil rights lawyers, Hays led a double life, making a fortune (two fortunes, actually) from representing the wealthy in their suits and torts while undertaking pro bono work for the victims—or would-be victims—of laws and customs Hays regarded as oppressive, racist, or just plain wrong. Hays came to regard Clarence Darrow as the greatest living American, but shared Darrow’s defense burden in several famous cases, notably the Scopes and Sacco-Vanzetti cases. And Hays struck out on his own, too, even retained to represent Georgi Dmitrov for his alleged role in the Reichstag fire, 1933. Because he was a Jew, Hays was not allowed to appear in a German court for his client, but that never held him back in the USA. Inter alia, in Alabama, Hays defended the ‘Scottsboro boys,’ young blacks unjustly condemned to die. In Boston, he took the side of H. L. Mencken and his The American Mercury for publishing a prostitute’s biography. And in New York Hays undertook to defend a film distributor for showing a French movie, Remous (1939, freely translated into “Whirlpool of Desire”) which offended conventional moralities about sex (marital or extramarital). Hays’s more usual clients were trades union organizers and pickets, whose rights to make their causes public were constrained by a long history of laws and customs. His work for unions got Hays “exiled” from Jersey City by its dictatorial Democratic mayor, Frank Hague. Politically, Hays began as a Republican (with those names, what else could he do?) but as the party began its rightward drift with its rejection of Teddy Roosevelt, Hays moved to “independent Democrat” in national politics and the Progressive party in New York. On one thing, though, he was utterly constant. Just as he used the law to wax wealthy himself, he used the law, too, to “let freedom ring” (the title of one of his book-length essays) for all of us. A co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union (in 1908), Arthur Garfield Hays was ACLU General Counsel from 1912 to his death in 1954. So when you celebrate Bill of Rights Day, be sure to tip your hat to Arthur Garfield Hays, the Robin Hood of the legal profession. ©

[Stanley]

"There was a time when Doria Shafik was the only man in Egypt." From a 1975 obituary.
Doria Shafik, 1908-1975
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A nation cannot be liberated while its women are enchained. Doria Shafik.

Doria Shafik was born in Tanta, Egypt, on December 14. 1908. Tanta’s location (straddling one of the Nile’s main irrigation channels) made her truly a Daughter of the Nile, the name she bestowed on her women’s group in the mid 1950s. But in 1908, Doria was the daughter of an upwardly mobile civil servant and thus part of a class that European empires typically called forth from their ‘native’ populations and could point to as evidence of their ‘civilizing’ mission: people whose devotion to modernization and to governing their lives by timetables and clocks made them into perfect imperial servants. But in Doria the British (and the French) got a bit more than they bargained for. She became an important leader of the Egyptian independence movement and then, with perfect consistency, an inveterate enemy of its ultimate leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser. For Doria devoted her life to two liberations, one for the Egyptian nation and the other for Egyptian women. Her family had her educated in a French mission school and then acquiesced in her desire to further her studies (for she had done so very well at her girls’ school) at the Sorbonne, in Paris, where she studied ancient Egyptian art and won her doctorate (with mention très honorable) in 1935. She also found her own husband, an Egyptian PhD student named Nureldin Raga’i. So far, so good, but Doria had also made a study of the history of women in her culture, and gathered from that a determination to raise women’s status and their ambitions. This combination made her unemployable when she returned to Egypt, even at Cairo’s relatively liberal university. Instead, Doria found her best berth under the patronage of King Faud’s first wife to become editor of La Femme Nouvelle, a hopeful title but in its way restrictive. Women’s lib was OK for elite Muslim females (think today of aristocratic Saudi women in London and Chamonix) but only within limits, and when Doria aimed lower (at middle- and working-class women) she broke with her patrons, formed her own vanguard (the Daughters of the Nile), and started attacking symbols of both western and male domination. When Nasser came to power, he was already her enemy, but Doria did not stop and, in the issue, his power was great enough to mute her voice. She spent nearly 20 years under house arrest, even her name banished from public mention. Finally, in 1975, Doria Shafik took her own life. I have evidence (from a Tunisian friend and our daughter’s research on North African women writers) that Doria’s spirit lives on—and thus some reason to hope that the next Arab Spring will be a feminine season. ©

[Stanley]

I, Too, Sing America. Langston Hughes.
John Mercer Langston, 1829-1897
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Freedom and free institutions should be as broad as our continent. John Mercer Langston.

In our diverse society, sexual liaisons ‘across the color line’ have been common. In slavery times most such liaisons were exploitative—white masters taking sex with their black properties as a droit de seigneur—but it was not always so. One exception was the long (25+ years) relationship between the Virginia planter Ralph Quarles and his slave Lucy Jane Langston. In 1806 Quarles freed Lucy (and their first daughter); their relationship continued—publicly but illegally—through the births of three other children. In common with a few other planter-fathers of “mixed-race” children, Quarles’s concern about their children led him to ship them all north and place them under the guardianship of a white friend, in this case the Quaker William Gooch, along with funds for their care and education. They were also made heirs to his estate. Among them was John Mercer Langston (he elected to take his mother’s surname), born on December 14, 1829. Langston turned this good start into a career,
first in law, then in legal education, and throughout as a crusader for black civil rights –including an equally ‘good start’ for all, black or white. For John Mercer Langston and his brother Gideon (who took the surname “Quarles”) it all began with their attendance at Oberlin, first in the preparatory school and then at the college, where John Mercer took degrees (BA 1849, MA 1852) and imbibed abolitionist politics. Denied admission to law school, he read law under a sympathetic attorney (Congressman Philemon Bliss, no relation) and qualified for the Ohio Bar. His later career included recruiting black soldiers for the union army, legal and educational work for the Freedman’s Bureau, and high civil and foreign service appointments from Presidents Grant, Hays, and Harrison. Along the way he married (Nettie, an Oberlin student) and served as founding dean of the Howard University School of Law. What made John Langston really unusual was that he was elected congressman, from a Virginia constituency and long after the end of Reconstruction. He served in the 51st congress along with my great-grandfather, but gets a much longer entry in congress’s biographical dictionary. It was short service in his case, because by the time the 1890 elections came round, Virginia had joined with the rest of the South to make it difficult for black people to vote in, and impossible to win, elections. Sadly, infuriatingly, it is happening again. Langston’s life offered inspiration to his progeny, though, and one thing the congressional biography fails to mention is that Langston Hughes (1901-1967), black poet, playwright, and grandson of John Mercer Langston. ©.

[Stanley]

"Design, design, design."
Ray Eames, 1912-1988.
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The details . . . make the product [and] give the product its life. Ray and Charles Eames

As ‘working from home’ moves from luxury option to felt necessity, we see much ad-time devoted to the home-office chair. Whatever their price, all claim to give both aesthetic pleasure and physical comfort. I’m sitting in one now, as I write, and the chances are good that you’ll be sitting in one, too, when you read this note. This market for pleasurable chairs owes much to the work of Ray Eames, born in Sacramento, CA, on December 15, 1912. She was born Bernice Alexandra Kaiser but nicknamed ‘Ray-Ray’ by her family. She early showed interest in art. Once in college, at Millbrook in New York, this had boiled down to an ambition to pioneer in abstract expressionism. Ray Kaiser enjoyed enough success here to become part of the Lee Krasner-Jackson Pollock circle, but while she was at the Cranbrook Academy (in Michigan) her career took a sharp turn towards design, encouraged by her instructor (and future husband) Charles Eames. They married in 1941 and moved to California where they developed a holistic style based on natural materials and curved forms, and applied to design problems in domestic housing, commercial properties, fabrics, and furniture. These melded together in trademark concepts known today as the ‘Eames Office’ and the ‘Eames Home’. This included their own house, in Pacific Palisades, their living quarters but also a design-and-build laboratory, and houses and offices designed for others, for instance the director Billy Wilder. But their most famous, more lasting, and most profitable design was the ‘Eames Chair,’ or rather Eames Chairs, a whole line of form-fitting furniture. You’ve almost certainly sat in one (or a cheaper spin-off version) and noted their visual appeal as something solid yet balanced and sinuous enough to rest your tired back and/or your broken butt. They were first marketed as Charles’s creations but increasingly historians of art and design have credited Ray with the design concepts, Charles for his technical expertise in material science. Charles died in 1978. Ray carried on until her death in 1988, not only with design and manufacture but also with compiling the Eames archives. Your Eames office chair, in its original design in wood and leather will set you back $8,000 or so. Or you could, as I did, buy a knock-down version made of nylon netting, steel and plastic for about $150. It’s your choice, but remember to give silent thanks to Ray Eames and her devotion to designing for both pleasure and comfort. Today the Eames partners take their comfort in a St. Louis Catholic cemetery, for Charles was born here, as was his first wife. ©

[Stanley]

"You can give without loving but you cannot love without giving." Amy Carmichael.
Amy Carmichael, 1867-1951
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I don't wonder [that] apostolic miracles have died. Apostolic living certainly has. Amy Carmichael.

For Mark Twain, no profession was quite as contemptible as that of Christian missionary. Having destroyed Hawaiian culture and oblivious to the deep moral fissures in their own society, they were now going further afield—to China, Africa, and the Indian subcontinent—to wreak havoc on their converts’ cultures and serve as justification for the exploitative cruelties of imperialism. I wonder what Twain might have made of Amy Carmichael, who began her mission career just as Twain’s was winding down. Amy Carmichael was born into middle-class comfort in Northern Ireland, on December 16, 1867. Her first missions were to her neighborhood children, then to Belfast cloth factories. After her father’s death she shifted to Manchester as her mission expanded to take in industrial England’s “dark satanic mills.” Along the way Amy’s rock-ribbed Presbyterianism was kneaded into softer shape by her association with leading Quaker reformers, and she arrived in south India, in 1895, as a non-denominational do-gooder: still intent, though, on spreading a Christian gospel. Amy began by working in Anglican Zenanas (missions for Indian women), but soon shifted her focus to children, girls especially. Twain would have found this particularly galling, but for Amy Carmichael this was the greater necessity as the girl-child was often, in traditional Tamil culture, surplus to requirements, neglected or, worse, sacrificed to temple culture. Amy’s settlement, at Dohnavur, was based on the first step of restoring these children to family life as valued additions to a holistic community. For the next 50 years Carmichael continued this work with little help from westerners but mainly self-help from adult Indian converts who, with these children, built a self-sufficient community. Along the way, Carmichael won the respect of Indian nationalists, including Gandhi, and her Dohnavur community grew to include nearly a square mile farmed by community labor, and marked out clearly by the red-roof architecture of its many buildings. It still exists today, in Tamil Nadu, working with local authorities to take in abandoned children and give them a better start in life than they might have had. At its center, you can find Amy’s grave, where she was buried (in 1951) with no coffin, wrapped in native shrouds. She wanted her grave to be unmarked, but her neighbors implanted a birdbath headstone, still filled daily with fresh water from a community well. Dohnavur members still call her Amma, “mother,” which seems appropriate. ©.

[Stanley]

A biography too little known.
The Reverend Henry Adams, 1802-1872
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Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen, nobody knows the sorrow. Opening phrases of a traditional Black spiritual.

Many people know of Henry Adams (1835-1918) the historian and famous author of a classic American autobiography. He was also in his last decades a leading arbiter of acceptability (or exclusion) in social Washington, DC, the city where his grandfather and great-grandfather had once dominated politics as the nation’s 2nd and 6thpresidents. But there was another Henry Adams, born a slave in South Carolina on December 17, 1802, and who learned to cope with more challenges and come to a very different understanding of American history. This Henry Adams became a free person of color in South Carolina and then, largely through self-study, a “licensed” preacher of the gospel in his home state and neighboring Georgia. To get and keep such a license in the deep South, and also still hold his congregations, a black preacher needed to tread a narrow line, especially to preach of freedom only in the hereafter. Perhaps because he became so good at this, or perhaps because he didn’t, Adams then moved to Louisville, KY, just on the slavery side of the Ohio River, where at first he ministered to the few black members (enslaved and free) of the city’s oldest Baptist church. As the national battle between slavery and freedom heated up, and as the Baptists sundered into a northern and a southern division, Adams’s work in a white church became, at best, uncomfortable. He then seceded and, from the mid 1840s, built Kentucky’s first independent black church. It was a vigorous one, able to take on a debt of $5000 to purchase a church building. What’s interesting about this is that Henry Adams, by this time, could have chosen a free state for his work. He’d married a freedwoman from Ohio and was well-known in anti-slavery and abolitionist circles; yet he stayed in slavery Kentucky. There he led his congregation towards full financial independence, established a free school for black children (enslaved and free), and taught many leaders of the coming generation how best to cope
with freedom. In 1865 Adams founded a regional federation of black churches in order to make self-help into a community endeavor. It was not easy. His flock wouldn’t pay off that original $5,000 debt until decades after his death. But, since we know so much about the other Henry Adams, the one who by his own estimation failed to meet the challenges of America’s new age (or succeeded in ignoring them), it would seem time to learn more about the Henry Adams who faced greater challenges and negotiated them with at least some success. ©

[Stanley]

He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,And away they all flew like the down of a thistle. Clement Moore, 1822
Charles Dickens. Ebenezer Scrooge, and the real War on Christmas.
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“Bah,” said Scrooge, “Humbug.” Ebenezer Scrooge in Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.”

Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol: In Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas first appeared in booksellers’ shops on December 18, 1843. Perfect timing, a cynic might say, and since it sold out almost immediately especially fortunate for Dickens and his family, who in 1843 were facing the possibility of a straitened, pinched Christmas. Since it was soon pirated (in the USA too) the novella soon became part of its author’s copyright battles, but he also made plans to write more Christmas stories, one every Christmas, which he did for the next five years. But none came close to matching A Christmas Carol in sales or in cultural longevity. It can’t be too far wrong to say that A Christmas Carol has become the most read of all English fictions. It is a warming story; old Ebenezer Scrooge, miser and misanthrope, is shown things about his past, present, and future that convert him to the new Scrooge, no younger of course but now lover of mankind, practitioner of charity, and Tiny Tim’s
kindly, generous great uncle. Since Dickens knew his audience, the story can be taken as marking a cultural shift from the old times to the new. English Protestantism, particularly its Calvinist flank, had long viewed Christmas as pagan in origin (the Romans’ winter Saturnalia) and Roman Catholic in its drinking of toasts, its giving of gifts, its days off work. When Puritans were in power (very briefly in old England and for a longer time in New England) Christmas was indeed made illegal. Historically speaking, these Calvinist killjoys had it right, and it was Scrooge himself and not some gloomy spirit who was the real ghost of Christmas past. But by 1843 the shift was on, well on, witness the popularity of Dickens’ more serious fictions, many of them all about poverty and embodying the hope of a rising middle class that something might be done to make prosperity more widely shared (and thus more secure). Prince Albert helped too, importing the Christmas tree and his personal gift of Teutonic gaiety into Queen Victoria’s life. Across the water, in old Dutch New York, Clement Moore rhapsodized “the night before Christmas” as a time for mice to sleep and for children to dream of airborne sleighs full of gifts. By 1843, the traditional Protestant war on Christmas had had its day, and if people were to make a Saturnalia of it, let them follow Old Scrooge to Tiny Tim’s house, weighted down by gifts—which were much more easily shed than a guilty conscience. ©.

[Stanley]

Every damn thing you do in this life, you pay for. Piaf.
Piaf!!!
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Non, je ne regrette rien. One of Piaf’s most famous songs.

Sometimes a life is so shrouded in legend, indeed become legendary, that it becomes wiser to see the legend as the main point and the rest (which may loosely be called the facts) as nihil ad rem (not at issue). Where the person has done much to create the legends, and may indeed have come to believe them, what is legendary assumes ‘real’ explanatory function. And so we come to Édith Piaf, and we’ll read “probably” or “perhaps” or “maybe” into much of this essay. Indeed that’s the way she’s been represented in most of the biopics that have been devoted to her life and/or legend. But to get down to basics, this ‘Édith’ was certainly Édith, named after a British army nurse, Edith Cavell, executed by the Germans (in October 1915) for spying, and so our Parisian Edith was born on 19 December 1915 in Paris’s 20th arrondissement, on the street or in a street barrow perhaps, but recorded as being hospital-born. She was not, however, particularly well-placed for life. Her dad was a street performer whose mother ran a brothel. Her street performer mom was of Berber descent and abandoned her. After a spell in grandma’s brothel, Édith became a street performer, was “discovered,” and in the 1930s became known as La môme piaf, ‘the little sparrow.’ She sang wonderfully, was implicated in her lover’s murder, became famous, acted on stage, and during the war probably did not join the Résistance but did discover Yves Montand. Whatever her role during the occupation, and there were conflicting stories; the French forgave her afterwards and she became La fameuse. At her first wedding, in 1952, Marlene Dietrich was her matron of honor. Piaf’s songs make strong men weep and it must be said that women like them too. The most famous (look them up please) are “La vie en rose,” “Milord,” “Hymne à l’amour,” and (forever famous and indeed legendary) “Non, je ne regrette rien.” Piaf lived hard, and she died, one might say, of her life, aged only 47. And we are still not sure, even, of her name. Her grave, in the Père Lachaise cemetery, calls her “Madame Lamboukas dite Édith Piaf.” It is still much visited. ©

[PanBiker]

No one could roll the "r's" like Edith.

[Stanley]

A man of cannons and calculus.
David Gregorie, 1625-1720
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God help England if she had no Scots to think for her.– George Bernard Shaw

Let me tell you today about the extraordinary Gregorie (latterly, ‘Gregory’) family of 17th-century Aberdeen, in Scotland, more particularly about David Gregorie who was born near Aberdeen on December 20, 1625. As Anglicans (David’s father was a Church of England priest) the family sat somewhat aside from their neighbors, but David increased the distance by being an incompetent farmer, a whiz medical doctor, and something of a scientific genius. He also fathered 29 children, from two wives (his first wife died on her 16th), 20 of whom survived into adulthood, three becoming leading exponents (in English and Scottish universities) of the Newtonian Enlightenment. But back to David, the patriarch of this numerous tribe. His father intended him for Aberdeen’s trade (direct to the continent) in herrings and woolens, but instead David became a bad farmer famed rather for his eccentricities than his produce. He was, for instance, a surprisingly competent doctor, serving but never
charging his patients, rich and poor alike. He also owned the only barometer in Aberdeenshire, and became so good at predicting the weather that he was suspected of witchery. And he was a mathematician who was bowled over by the new findings, or provings, of Isaac Newton, down in Cambridge, concerning the music and motions of the spheres. All or most of these arts (medicine, mathematics, meteorology, and more) he absorbed by self-study in the witching hours, from about 2 AM to dawn, as he rose to think about them instead of about farming. In the winter, in Aberdeen, 2AM to dawn can be a very long time, long enough to make Gregorie, though no farmer, an outstanding autodidact of his time. In 1688-9, however, the combination of his add-man-out Anglicanism and England’s “Glorious Revolution” made Gregorie an advocate of the losing side, the Jacobites, and when he returned to Aberdeen after the Jacobite rebellion of 1715 he kept his head down and became an historian. In 1720 David Gregorie died, at the grand old age of 95, his history unfinished and his farm, presumably, in even worse shape. At some point he also designed a revolutionary cannon, an artillery piece designed mathematically to deliver heavier payloads to more distant targets, but this was suppressed when Isaac Newton urged Gregorie to put it aside as a project too likely to destroy humanity. For all his achievements—and for this one non-achievement—David Gregorie deserves our attention. ©

[Stanley]

On charms, quarks, quirks, and nuclei.
Robert Brown, 1773-1858
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These motions were such as to satisfy me . . . that they arose neither from the currents of the fluid, nor from its gradual evaporation, but belonged to the particle itself. Robert Brown, A Brief Account . . . (1827).

New science has generally required new vocabularies, and this tendency has particularly marked physics, for instance the words quark, quirk, and charm, the last (obviously) a borrowing. In this physics was anticipated by biology, especially during the great Linnaean age of discovering, classifying, and thus naming new (and renaming known) species. One botanist stole the march on physics by noticing, and naming, the core or center of cellular structures. He called it the nucleus, which was rather charming and has stuck, being the Latin for little nut. The botanist in question was Robert Brown, born into an Anglican family in Angus, Scotland, on December 21, 1773. To be Church of England in Presbyterian Scotland was to stand aside from one’s neighbors, which Brown’s father made more uncomfortable for being, or becoming, a Jacobite (one not reconciled to the Hanoverian succession), but Robert himself learned enough conformity to enter, first, Marischal College (Aberdeen) and then the
University of Edinburgh, where his medical studies led him into botany. After a slight detour (into military service in Ireland) botany became his abiding interest and he a “professed naturalist” to quote from one of his odder letters of recommendation. There the core of his reputation, the nucleus, arose from his service on scientific-military explorations of the antipodes, Australia and then New Zealand, most famously as the lead scientist in the Flinders Expedition of 1801-1805. During that time he collected and sketched, but once back in London he devoted himself to classifying and thus confronting the issue of speciation—for he discovered thousands of plants, “new” ones in the sense that they represented unknown species and a previously unimagined natural diversity. Brown continued to explore, sub-Saharan Africa in particular, and to discover yet more unique species, which makes him an important precursor of Charles Darwin, but how exactly he might have reacted to Darwin’s evolutionary theories is problematic for Brown died in 1858, one year before the publication of On the Origin of Species. Meanwhile, Robert Brown had another scientific term to give us, “Brownian Motion,” a concept he formed from watching (through a microscope) the apparently randomized movements of water-borne pollen. This would later be picked up, and made much of, by Albert Einstein. But that’s another story, another science, and another vocabulary. ©

[Stanley]

Saturday Night Fevers.
The Brothers Gibb
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More Than A Woman; Night Fever; How Deep Is Your Love?; and Stayin’ Alive. Today the four most-streamed of all Bee Gee hits, all written for the film Saturday Night Fever (1978).

December 22, 1949 is a date to remember in the history of rock music, for it saw (in Douglas, Isle of Man) the births of twin brothers Maurice Gibb and Robin Gibb. In time they would become two-thirds of the Bee Gees, short for the Brothers Gibb, the others being their elder brother Barry (b. 1946, and who thus became a BG twice over). Andy Gibb (1958-1988) never played more than a peripheral role. One might say that Bee Gees’ careers were foreordained, for their father and mother were music folk, respectively the leader and vocalist for a band that played ballrooms in and around Manchester, northern England. The elder Brothers Gibb first formed “The Rattlesnakes”, from its name a charming act and made more so by the fact that Barry, the eldest of the Rattlers, was only nine years old. They made petty cash, at least, by appearing at Manchester cinemas in the interval between first and second features. They became the Bee Gees after the whole family moved to Australia in 1958,
inspired by the successes of the Everly Brothers in the USA. Their talents were varied, Maurice being the most versatile and skilled musician, Robin being (usually) the lead vocalist, but together they were great enough to return to England in the mid-1960s where they were often junior-partnered, on tour, with the Beatles. Off tour, Maurice became especially close with John Lennon, who gave Maurice a guitar and apparently one of his bad habits, excessive consumption of alcohol. The Bee Gees stood out in the musical world for their distinctive vocal harmonies, but they also wrote quite a few songs, lyrics and music, for themselves and for others. There followed a period of instability and change, marked by (for all three) unhappy first marriages and, in pop, some individual ventures, but they came back together with stabler second marriages and their move to the USA (Miami, in what had been Eric Clapton’s house). Their own music became more distinctive, including high falsettos from Robin, but arguably their greater success was in their composing, especially for women of quite varied styles like Dolly Parton and Diana Ross, Céline Dion and Barbra Streisand. They also wrote five tracks for the immortal rock film Saturday Night Fever. Barry Gibb (now Sir Barry Gibb) is still with us, performer, composer, and now impresario, but the December 22 twins have passed on, Maurice in 2003 and Robin in 2012. Andy died of an overdose in 1988. The three survivors called what turned out to be their final album (in 2001) This Is Where I Came In. ©

[Stanley]

If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me. Texas proverb.
Alphonse Mingana, 1878-1937
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Languages, translations, and the early history of Christianity. The contributions of Alphonse Mingana. 1878-1937.

Since its founding, Christianity has been riven by schisms, so much so that each schism tends to regard the others as “schismatics.” But some churches are so ancient as to deny any such identification. Their claims are good, as they arose shortly after Jesus’ death, and their traditional homes are to be found in or close to the ‘Holy Land.’ In their lives and their rituals, they are also preservers of ancient languages spoken in Jesus’s era, and their classic texts have been particularly important for scholars wishing to trace the early history of Christianity (and its very earliest schisms). Among them are the Chaldeans, whose language at home and in church is still Aramaic, likely the language used by Jesus and his first followers. That we know so much about the Chaldeans today, and about their sacred texts, owes much to the labors of Alphonse Mingana, born Hurmiz Mingana on December 23, 1878 near Mosul, Iraq, where his father Paôlôs was a Chaldean priest. ‘Hurmiz’ became ‘Alphonse’ when he was ordained to the priesthood at the Chaldean seminary in Mosul, in 1902. Already fluent in Arabic and Aramaic, Alphonse Mingana became linguist and translator at the seminary, working in several ancient and modern tongues. By 1913, he was in double trouble, with western scholars for having ‘invented’ a chapter in a 10th-century Aramaic text and with his own church for having denied the historicity of one of the church’s first founders. Alphonse went west, to take up a post (Arabic and Hebrew) at a Quaker academy in the English Midlands. His reputation restored, he was taken on by the John Rylands Library, Manchester, to collect and translate manuscripts in Aramaic, Arabic, Syriac, Hebrew, and Greek. Financed largely by Quaker money (the chocolate fortune of the Cadburys) Mingana collected over 2000 such texts, traveling to the Middle East and then working at his home (which he called Manuscripta) in King’s Norton, now a part of greater Birmingham. Mingana married a
Norwegian Lutheran and himself became a Quaker, then a British citizen. If you want to know more about the earliest Christian traditions having to do with the birth of Christ and the status of his mother Mary, judged to be schismatical by medieval Catholics, Mingana’s collections would be a good place to start. As for Mingana’s first church, Mosul’s Chaldean Christians (well over one million of them) have since the American invasion of 2003 been scattered to the four winds. Many who fled to the USA were later deported by the Trump administration as undesirables, so today the closest Chaldean church to St. Louis is in one of Chicago’s northern suburbs, where you can still hear Christian services conducted in Aramaic. ©

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'Rich people march on Washington every day.' I. F. Stone
I. F. Stone, 1907-1989
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Lifelong dissent has more than acclimated me cheerfully to defeat. It has made me suspicious of victory. I feel uneasy at the very idea of a Movement. I see every insight degenerating into a dogma, and fresh thoughts freezing into lifeless party lines. I. F. Stone, 1969.

The journalist I. F. Stone was born in Philadelphia (as Isidore Feinstein) on December 24, 1907. He died in 1989 and would be delighted to know that today, more than 30 years on, he remains a subject of controversy. He was certainly controversial in his long life of investigative journalism, during which he managed to irritate almost everyone he reported on, from J. Edgar Hoover to Joseph Stalin. His ‘enemies list’ (he would never have written up one himself) included the Dulles brothers (Allen and John Foster), German Nazis, and Jewish Zionists. After his death, one would have to add to Stone’s legion of unfriendlies that odd alliance between the American right and former Soviet KGB agents, all of them eager to prove how many, on the American left, were “actually” Soviet spies or at least communist fellow travellers. Their motives have varied, but what they all shared was the sting of Izzy Stone’s pen as, for over five decades, he had reported on their power plays. That included Stone’s time (1938-1953) with The Nation magazine and then, yet more famously, 1953-1971, as the reporter and writer for I. F. Stone’s Weekly. That latter role was not a one-man show, for throughout he was aided by his faithful assistant, guide, editor, chief penny-pincher, and wife, Esther Roisman, who not only consented to marry him (in 1929) but also stuck with him throughout and then outlived him. It was a credit to both that throughout its publication run, the Weekly stayed profitable and ended with a circulation list of over 70,000—not all of whom have yet been identified as fellow travelers. It was his heart attack that led Izzy and Esther to suspend the Weekly, but ‘retirement’ wasn’t Izzy’s style. Instead, he returned to the University of Pennsylvania (he’d dropped out in the late 1920s), changed his major from Philosophy to Classics, and graduated BA from (Penn had the good grace to say) its Class of 1928. He learned much, second time around. Stone’s last major work was based on his new-found ability to translate classical Greek. His The Trial of Socrates, published in the year of his death, characterized Socrates not as a hero of free enquiry but as a faithful disciple of Plato and, thus, as an agent of oligarchy, authoritarianism, and elite rule. I read it when it came out, and I still recommend it as timely. It’s also good reporting, and in it there’s scarcely a trace of Izzy Stone, Soviet agent. ©

[plaques]

Spooky. My Christmas read is a tome of a book (1,300 pages) on Plato. I'll let you know my thoughts in about two years time, if ever.

[Stanley]

"Yet the lost fragments shall remain// To fertilize some other ground." Dorothy Wordsworth, 'Floating Island.'
Dorothy Wordsworth, 1771-1855, and William, 1770-1855.
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I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about & about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as a pillow for weariness & the rest tossed & turned & reeled & danced & seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the Lake, they looked so gay . . . Dorothy Wordsworth, Grasmere Journal, April 15, 1802.

William Wordsworth’s poem about daffodils—aka “I wandered lonely as a cloud”, 1804—has long been one of my favorites, for I have seen the flowers (their descendants, I suppose) on Ullswater’s western shore where we often camped and canoed during spring break. I was the more delighted when I learned that William had (likely) been inspired by his sister’s delight in them when they, with a friend, had walked up and over the Helvellyn ridge from Grasmere to visit friends. I’ve walked half of their route myself, and it’s a tough one, so I can well imagine that when, back down on more or less level ground, they espied those dancing flowers and, among them, “rested again and again.” Dorothy Wordsworth was born on December 25, 1771, in Cockermouth, on the far western fringes of the Lake District. She was baptized with William, her next-oldest sibling, and they enjoyed childhood together until their father’s death in 1783 ‘orphaned’ them to relatives, Dorothy to Halifax and William to Penrith. They corresponded and then, in 1795, were reunited at William’s lodgings near England’s south coast. They moved back to the Lake District and became inseparable until death parted them (both died in 1855), through William’s various friendships with other leading poets and his marriage (1802) to Mary Hutchinson. From Grasmere, they walked a lot, to Ullswater for instance, often together but sometimes not (as when Dorothy climbed Scafell Pike) and shared their experiences in talk and in writing. When they reunited William was already a rising poet, the best of his age, but Dorothy never tried (indeed may have renounced even trying) to share in his fame. Her diaries and journals were published after 1855. So while we know much of Wordsworth’s collaborations with (for instance) Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, Dorothy remained a shadowy figure, the more so as she began her long decline into senility. But the rise of feminist literature and feminist criticism, has made us think again about William Wordsworth’s “dear, dear sister” in whose “voice I catch the language of my former heart and read my former pleasures in the shooting lights of thy wild eyes.” ©

[Stanley]

The short and simple annals of the poor.
Thomas Gray's "Elegy"
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Where ignorance is bliss// ‘Tis folly to be wise. Last lines of Gray’s “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College.

Thomas Gray, poet, was born in London on December 26, 1716, if not under an evil star then in circumstances that weren’t any too promising. He was the only one of 12 children who survived to adulthood, the rest the grim harvest of an abusive father, an overworked mother, and an ill-drained neighborhood. His father’s death was, for Thomas, something of a blessing, for it cast him upon the tender-enough mercies of his two Antrobus uncles, who taught at Eton and saw the boy through what he later remembered as the happiest of times, his school days. What came after, to judge by his “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” (1747) were the realities of aging, missing one’s mark, decaying, and dying. A grim prospect indeed, which may be why I was not required to learn that poem (and recite it by heart) when I was a senior in high school. Instead, my lot was to be Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751) which, if not exactly jolly, was at least serene, reflective, even
nostalgic, and thus well within the emotional range of your average 18-year-old. It also contained many phrasings that were already (or would soon become) familiar to me: “the paths of glory lead but to the grave;” “full many a flower is born to blush unseen// And waste its sweetness on the desert air;” and “far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife.” As a mood-setter, the worst you could say of it was that the “Elegy” had a “melancholy” about it, a sadness that would at some time mark us all “for her own.” And it was this democracy of death that made the poem one of the most popular of the age and, after, one of the most reprinted too. There was in it some essential notion of the democracy of life, too, and Abraham Lincoln made use of that when (in the fateful winter of 1859-1860) he was asked to tell a journalist something of his past. Nothing to it, Abe replied, just “the short and simple annals of the poor.” But for Lincoln those short and simple stories were the core of it, and he would return to the same journalist, a bit later, to be more expansive about his humble, poverty-stricken youth, his hard work, and his successes as a self-made man—soon to be the Republican candidate for the presidency. In truth Gray’s poem is much more subtle, and on reading it again this morning I decided that Thomas Gray just might not have approved of the rustic Lincoln’s rising up from obscurity to unsettle the surface orderliness of America’s country churchyards. ©

[Stanley]

Editorial Board Chair, Washington Post, 1968-1999.
Meg Greenfield, 1930-1999.
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There is a little Mussolini in every editorial writer . . . pompous, meddlesome, pretentious, a figure of fun to everyone but himself . . . issuing grandiose orders that have no effect on anything at all Meg Greenfield, editor of the Washington Post editorial page, 1968-1999.

Because my dad wanted his journalism students to see what could be accomplished, he kept (in the reading room next to his office) a rack occupied, in its top row, by the “five best dailies” is the USA. The five he chose were by no means assured of their place, so the listing changed every year, and there was no obvious political bias for the very conservative Chicago Tribune usually occupied a spot even though the Trib’s devotion to phonetic spelling (“thru” for “through” et cetera ad nauseam) angered him almost as much as its politics. Another (almost) perennial “best” was the Washington Post, where the editorial board hewed to a line too liberal for conservatives and too conservative for liberals. Dad’s control of the reading room withered in the mid 1960s, but the Post continued to adhere to its irritating neutrality, thanks part to its editorial page editor, Mary Ellen (‘Meg’) Greenfield, born in the other Washington (Seattle) on December 27, 1930. After graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Smith College, Meg Greenfield made irritating neutrality her stock in trade as she rose through the ranks as reporter and columnist at The Reporter, a DC-based weekly, and then Newsweek, a Post property under the control of Kenneth and then Katherine Graham. She moved over to the Post in 1968, which began to look like part of a plan when, in the very next year, Katherine Graham made Meg the editor of the editorial page. And there Meg stayed, for 30 years. Meg Greenfield was Graham’s special chum, and they often traveled together to see for themselves this or that hot news spot, but Meg was no cookie-cutter liberal. She brought into her editorial stable such irritating (to me) figures as Charles Krauthammer and George Will and encouraged them to become eminent in their own right. Meanwhile, she directed her own withering prose to the shenanigans of the crooked (from Spiro Agnew to Marion Barry) and the life-endangering heedlessness of DC’s tribe of red-light runners. She never grew weary of dodging them all while she chaired the editorial board in a tolerant or, more accurately, Socratic style. She was proud of “making it”—as a woman in a man’s world—to the top of her professional tree, but wary of those whose feminism seemed little more than sloganeering. Meg Greenfield lived, worked, and died as her own person, irritatingly neutral to the end, which came in 1999, when she was mourned even by her enemies. ©.

[Stanley]

The Cavalier style.
Lord Bernard Stuart, 1622-1645.
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A very faultless young man, of a most gentle, courteous, and affable nature, and of a spirit and courage invincible; whose loss all men exceedingly lamented, and the King bore it with extraordinary grief. Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, 1667.

The longer they last and the more deeply they cut, civil wars generate lastingly divisive cultural symbols, as we can see in our current agonies over memorials that venerate heroes of the “lost causes” of slavery and secession. One can find similar artifacts of England’s civil wars, notably in the court portraits of Antoon van Dyck (1599-1641). Van Dyck’s work gives us a complete picture of the “cavalier” style, one that soon would be thrown into battle with Cromwell’s dourer “roundheads,” men for whom, we might say, ‘style’ was itself a sin. Among van Dyck’s symbolic portraits, one stands out, that of the Lords John and Bernard Stuart, taken (we think) in 1638, just before they set out on their European Grand Tour. They were kinsmen of the royal family, sons and grandsons of Stuart dukes, and once one gets past their foppishness (poses and ‘clotheses’) and their cavalier locks tumbling down their backs, one can see the arrogance that would bring them back to England to serve Charles I, gallantly and with reckless courage, in his civil war against the upstarts of the parliamentary cause. Lord Bernard Stuart, the younger of the two, was born on December 28, 1622, and thus still in his teens when the portrait was painted. Charles I paid for Lord Bernard’s education and upkeep and Bernard would repay the debt by becoming Captain of the King’s Own Life Guards, a cavalry unit distinguished from others by its finery, its place in the line of battle, and in its death-defying charges at Edgehill (1642) and Naseby (1645), the latter a disaster. Regrouping, King Charles led his forces north to relieve royalist Chester, and it was there, on September 24, 1645, that Lord Bernard Stuart led the King’s Own out of the city to attack the Parliamentarian center. It is said that King Charles himself (from afar, standing on one of the city’s towers) witnessed Bernard’s death and was stricken “by extraordinary grief.” Two of Lord Bernard’s elder brothers (including the Lord John of the portrait) were also lost in the king’s lost cause. A family servant obtained license to find and bury the bodies of John and Bernard, which were duly interred in Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, but this was not until 1646, by which time their wonted foppishness was well and truly wasted. In the issue, one prefers the “warts and all” portrait of Oliver Cromwell, a miniature painted by the upstart artist William Cooper, which shows the civil war’s victor plainly and soberly, a new style and a new symbol. ©.