BOB'S BITS

[Tripps]

Nowt wrong with a good ramble. In more polite circles its called 'thinking outside the box'

Thank you - in fact on reflection I find that I'm rarely 'in the box'. They can't touch you for it. . . . .

[Stanley]

The Great Dissenter
John Marshall Harlan, 1833-1911

There is in this country no dominant, ruling class of citizens. . . . Our constitution is colorblind. Associate Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896.

One does not become famous by being made a justice, or even Chief Justice, in the US Supreme Court. It’s “opinions” that matter, usually ones that articulate a dominant (majority) cast of mind. Thus Associate Justice Stephen J. Fields’ opinions establish him as the creator of a profoundly conservative court, reflecting Fields’ solicitude for the legal rights of corporations and for the power of states (and railway companies) to erode the civil rights of persons of color. Fields, who finished his long tenure (1864-1899) sunk in senility, is now back in fashion in the court of Chief Justice John Roberts. But during the years of Fields’ influence, another associate justice became famous for his minority opinions, landmark dissents that shaped the liberal majority of mid-to-late 20th-century courts. He was John Marshall Harlan, born in Kentucky on June 1, 1833, and supreme court justice from 1877 to 1911, a tenure almost as long as Fields’ and unmarked by senile dementia. Today Harlan is most famed as a slaveowner’s son who became a consistent (though minority) defender of freedmen’s rights. He didn’t begin that way. Like Fields, he was a Unionist Democrat who opposed his state’s secession but was at first equally opposed to the abolition of slavery and the enshrinement of freedmen’s rights (as in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and the policies of ‘radical’ Reconstruction). But that was in the topsy-turvy politics of Civil War Kentucky, and by the time President Hayes nominated him Harlan he was singing to a different hymn book. I don’t think Hayes expected this (Harlan as a southerner was part of the ‘bargain’ that allowed Hayes to claim victory in the disputed 1876 election), but that’s how it turned out. One reason for Harlan’s civil rights dissents may have been his admiration for Robert James Harlan, his black half-brother (or half-uncle, for it’s not clear exactly from which Harlan planter’s loins Robert sprang), but a more likely factor was Harlan’s veneration for Chief Justice John Marshall, for whom he was named and whose doctrine of national supremacy over the states Harlan came to accept. Harlan is most famed for his dissent in the notorious Plessy v. Ferguson case (1896), but Harlan also advocated government’s right and power to regulate private corporations and to tax private wealth. Taken together, Harlan’s dissents defined supreme court liberalism for more than a century, an equalitarian sympathy for the impotent, a belief in the legal instrumentality of the ‘general welfare’ preamble to the Constitution, and a general sympathy for the sovereignty (over the states) of the national government. ©.

[Stanley]

"I'm not generally known." Dorothy West, 1978.
Dorothy West, 1907-1998

Tell me, little girl, and don’t be afraid. Are you white, or colored? Question asked of a lost child on Martha’s Vineyard, in the 1988 novel The Wedding, by Dorothy West.

One of my favorite websites is ‘On this Day in Black History,’ where one can always find ‘anniversary notes’ celebrating birthdates of important African-Americans, early patents of black inventors (themselves now usually forgotten), independence days of formerly colonized nations, and dates of important civil rights laws and court decisions. But on the page for June 2, there’s no notice of Dorothy West, who was born in Boston, MA, on June 2, 1907. West wrote prolifically, lived a very long time, and was in her late ‘teens and twenties an energetic contributor to the Harlem Renaissance. She shared a literary prize with Zora Neale Hurston, proposed marriage (by letter!!) to Langston Hughes (who called her ‘The Kid’ and turned down her offer), and was proposed to by the poet Countee Cullen. So her omission from “on this day” is odd. Perhaps it owes something to her being, in her own estimation, a mixed-up “Kid.” Certainly her long interview for Harvard’s ‘Black Women Oral History Project,’ over 90 pages in single-spaced typescript, is an odd document. It was done in 1978. during the years of West’s relative obscurity, and it’s hard going. In it West the interviewee is more often West the story-teller, and she doesn’t so much answer the questions as use them to kick off another story. Reading it, one gets a whiff of oncoming senility, but that’s belied by West’s later, personal renaissance, “rediscovered “ by Jackie Onassis and Oprah Winfrey, the subject of successful documentaries, and the author of a best- selling novel (The Wedding), only her second, published in her 81st year. West was by her own estimation the ‘best-known unknown’ of writers, and if that’s a puzzle perhaps its answer is that she fitted no stereotype, ever. A black child of wealth, one of her fondest memories was getting ready for a family outing in her upper-class neighborhood and being told by her mother “let’s go out and drive the white folks crazy.” A dark-skinned only child in a huge family network of light-colored cousins and aunties, she wrote about privileges (of wealth and skin-shade) and not about privations. In her forties, she retired to the family’s house in Oak Bluffs, Martha’s Vineyard, reported for the local newspaper, wrote short fiction, and kept pretty much to herself. In her second and final novel, West’s heroine, Shelby Coles, remembers when, as a child, she went missing on the Vineyard. Shelby was a black girl who was almost white, and finding her proved to be as much a riddle as it was an emergency. Perhaps she’s still lost. In the USA, the middle ground between black and white is almost invisible. ©

[Stanley]

A radical life.
Gloria Martin of St. Louis

Our dialogue with each other burst out in a great liberating chorus. Gloria Martin, recalling her 1960s Free University seminar on ‘Women in Society.’

Around and about, there are (or have been) several “Shakespeare & Company” entities. They have mostly to do with the literary arts, as one might expect, and most if not all derive their name from Sylvia Beach’s famed bookstore and meeting place in post-WWI Paris—on the Left Bank, of course. There’s even one in Paris, still, which touts its direct descent from Ms. Beach’s hangout. The Shakespeare & Company of Seattle. Washington, was the brainchild of Gloria Martin, and began life in the 1960s as “Shakespeare & Martin” before moving to a market stall as Shakespeare & Company. It didn’t last long, and anyway she’s more interesting than her bookstore, which during its short life became a nerve center of its owner’s various activist networks. Gloria Martin was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on June 3, 1916. She grew up there and in North Carolina, but stayed in St. Louis long enough to drop out of school (aged 14) to earn money for her family in a downtown department store. But she read a lot. She observed her family’s poverty and her father’s mental illnesses, brought on (or worsened) by his being a closeted homosexual. In St. Louis and North Carolina, she learned a lot about racism (she was herself Caucasian). In her middle adulthood Gloria birthed and mothered 8 kids (some of whom would help in that Seattle bookstore and all of whom turned up for her funeral in 1996). And along the way she became, by conviction and public profession, a radical feminist socialist, a civil rights agitator, a crusader for abortion rights and welfare moms, for years a thorn in the side of the Seattle police, and at least occasionally an outright revolutionary (once volunteering herself as an armed bodyguard for Seattle’s Black Panthers). That may be why we don’t find her anywhere in St. Louis’s “Walk of Fame,” but it’s still being added to so she might make it still, one day. If she did, it would be among the lesser of her accomplishments. Along her way, 1916 to 1996, Gloria figures as one of the older founders of Students for a Democratic Society, a leading spirit in Seattle’s “Free University” of the 1960s (she had never graduated from college but attended several), and at the Free University was particularly well-known for her ongoing course, a sort of experiential seminar called “Women in Society.” She wrote several books, some of which turn up still in used catalogs, many pamphlets, and innumerable news sheets. Gloria Martin led demonstrations, organized voting campaigns and coalitions, spoke at mass meetings, and, yes, she founded and ran for a few years a bookstore called Shakespeare & Company. That was probably not one of her more original ideas. ©

[Stanley]

Some silly chap.
Christopher Cockerell, 1910-1999

Everything is stacked against [the inventor] but some silly chaps seem to be driven to it, rather like a painter or composer, which is perhaps just as well or we should still be living in the Stone Age. Sir Christopher Cockerell

I vaguely recall our high school physics class being momentarily confused when the teacher, the great Herman Kirkpatrick, asked whether an inflated football would be heavier than a flat one. Everyone knew—we had known forever—that air had substance. After all, you can feel the wind in your face and you can see and hear it rustle leaves, break trees, and make poetic patterns in prairie grass. But that air had weight, mass, was made of constituent parts, and could be fruitfully manipulated awaited discoveries made in the 17th century, mainly in Italy and England. Once these things had been experimentally proven, uses of ‘air’ (e. g. pressurized, in steam engines) was only a matter of time. It took longer for us to figure out that a partial vacuum could “plane” a heavier-than-air vehicle into the skies, and longer still to invent a “hovercraft” a boat that moved on air pressure, above the water. That became the task of Christopher Cockerell, born in Cambridge, England, on June 4, 1910. But before Cockerell could get to the hovercraft, he had to convince his parents that a career in engineering might be morally and aesthetically legitimate. Sir Sydney and Florence Cockerell were, you see, enthusiasts of the arts and crafts movement, not exactly hippies of the back-to-nature sort, but devotees of the arts and determined to return production to its natural basis, the point of contact between a craftsman and his (or her) natural material. Sir Sydney had been secretary to William Morris and was the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, and Florence was into fine arts publication (on hand-made parchments) in a big way. Having won the battle at home, Christopher Cockerell walked across town to study engineering at Peterhouse and, as a working technician, became good at it, notably in wartime radars. Meanwhile he (and his wife Margaret) also sailed, and he became obsessed by the idea of sailing over the water, making air pressure to rise above and making wind speed to move across the water. His first experiments were far more primitive than those 17th-century ones (he used a vacuum cleaner, tin cans, and balsa wood) but by 1955 he’d made enough progress to secure a patent and in 1959 his first hovercraft “sailed” (that’s not quite the right word) across the English Channel. It took a few years for the thing to become commercially viable, but now they’re all over the place—and not always on the water. So where his father was knighted for services to the arts, Christopher was knighted for services to engineering. I suppose that’s progress. ©

[Stanley]

Murders aside, a more civilized way to travel from A to B.
The Orient Express

There’s something about a tangle of strangers pressed together for days on end, with nothing in common but the need to go from one place to another. From Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (1934),

My dislike of air travel has several root causes, now made worse by security checks and Covid 19. But the real driver of cattle-car transport at 35000 feet has been our quest for ever cheaper fares, now computer-driven and, probably, psychotic. Against airborne misery the pleasures of train travel persist in my imagination. Today’s anniversary of the Orient Express, the most fabled of named trains, therefore suffuses me with nostalgia. The very first Orient Express left Paris (from the Gare de l’Est of course) on June 5, 1883. I suppose it was on time, but it was launched with all due ceremony for it was marketed as a luxury train. If you are going to write about it (and I do advise writing about it for it no longer exists as a real service) be sure you know which train is your subject. The original was the brainchild of a Belgian banker with the pedestrian name of Nagelmackers. He’d got together an experimental train (Le Train Éclair de Luxe) the year before, and it went down well enough that he was able to find the money for the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits, which eventually ran luxury trains all over the place. Its “flagship” was always the Orient Express, and its route varied with wars, depressions, and the rise and fall of empires, so you need to take care in plotting your tale. Nagelmackers’ first Express (all sleepers) went only from Paris to Vienna. In 1919, the return of peace, some prosperity, and the completion of the Simplon tunnel (in the Swiss Alps) made possible a more southern route, and a longer one too, all the way to Istanbul via Venice and Belgrade. The Simplon route (1919-1939 and then 1945-1962) is the classic one, figuring in both Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (1934, a westwards journey halted by blizzard and blood just west of Belgrade) and Graham Greene’s superior novel (and seedier passenger list) Stamboul Train (1932, east from Paris). There were several other routes, so be sure you get them right. Greene’s 1932 novel was sold as The Orient Express in the USA, so that Agatha Christie’s USA copyright had to be retitled Murder on the Calais Coach. That latter was a double error, for Christie’s killing of Lanfranco Cassetti (alias “Ratchett”) took place on a sleeper, not a coach. Only if you were as rich as Croeses (an idiomatic expression much older than any train) could you take a sleeper all the way from Istanbul to Calais (uncoupling at Paris). And as we know Hercule Poirot never made it that far. Called to the train on short notice, he had to take a second-class sleeper. Had “Ratchett” not been murdered, Hercule would have had to change trains in Paris. ©

[Stanley]

Service is the rent we pay for being.
Marian Wright Edelman

If you don’t like the way the world is, you change it . . . one step at a time. Marian Wright Edelman.

The intentional cruelties of racial segregation are clarified by its language. In Bennettsville, South Carolina, for instance, the local high school for black children was called a training high school. So that’s where Marian Wright went, for she was black enough to be thought capable only of training. In her life she’s proved the absurdities of that vocabulary. Marian Wright Edelman was born on June 6, 1939, in Bennettsville, the child (one of five) of a Baptist minister. Jerome Wright died when she started training school, his last words to her “don’t let anything get in the way of your education” [emphasis mine]. So she didn’t. She entered Spelman, an elite black women’s college in Atlanta, spent a year at the Sorbonne before graduating from Spelman to go on, loaded up with scholarship money, to Yale law, where she performed brilliantly. Marian has accomplished much in an educational and professional sense, a bulging sheaf of honorary doctorates, service on the governing boards of Spelman and Yale itself (where she was the first female trustee elected by alumni), and prestigious prizes and fellowships, most notably from the MacArthur Foundation. More notably still, she’s one who crossed color lines, as a student activist at Spelman (first arrested in Atlanta sit-ins), then for summer fun (during her Yale years) organizing NAACP Legal Defense Fund efforts in Mississippi. She was the first woman of color to pass the Mississippi bar. During these “freedom summers” she got to know quite a bit about Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department, not entirely to her liking, but it was supportive enough that in 1967 she fell in love with Kennedy aide Peter Edelman, another lawyer, and they became among the first couples to enjoy a Virginia “interracial” marriage. While Peter’s had his own career (in government and now at Georgetown law) Marian Wright Edelman turned her attention to that next generation, their own three sons but more generally to children of poverty. No child comes into the world deserving privation, and if that child’s biological parents can not provide we—the rest of us, society as a whole—must be the parenting generation. Edelman is best known, herself, as the founder (and now president emerita) of the Children’s Defense Fund, which she saw through its birth years in Mississippi, sparring against that state’s two segregationist senators who worked so very hard to erase or starve it, and it’s been successful in educating (and feeding, housing, and, I suppose, training) new generations to think they can do better, and then to act that way. I wish them well, and for Marian Edelman a happy 83rd birthday. She’s earned it. ©

[Stanley]

When up jumped one Norwegian.
Norwegian Independence: June 7 , 1905

Ten thousand Swedes ran through the weeds, chased by one Norwegian. A song from my childhood, sung by Professor Martin Tollefsen, the son of Norwegian immigrant farmers.

For a decade Gallup has been running a world ‘happiness’ poll. It must be a whimsical exercise, but it’s consistently found the Scandinavian peoples among the world’s happiest. Finns have won this happiness race for four years running, but Finland is Scandinavian by propinquity, not cousinage. The other three are surprising partners in bliss. One thinks not only of their gloomy literatures, paintings, and filmographies (try Nolde and Bergman if you don’t believe me) but also of their intrafamilial squabbling which dates back at least to the era of Viking raids when they terrorized each other and the rest of Europe—and then took their holidays in Greenland. My childhood neighbor, a legal scholar with a heavy Norwegian accent, lived just across from a former Swedish diplomat and used to sing a jingle about thousands of Swedes beating the weeds when up jumped one Norwegian. The Norskie put those Swedes to flight. It’s a reminder that poor Norway didn’t establish full independence from its rich, powerful cousins until modern times, a rip in the Scandinavian fabric that grew into a tear on June 7, 1905, when the Norwegian parliament voted to declare its independence from Sweden. But there was not much “Vikingry” about it, no raids nor reprisals; it was more like a divorce, and just to reassure themselves (and the world) that they meant no harm the Norwegians chose to remain a monarchy, electing a Danish prince as their ‘king’ and giving him the all-Scandinavian name of Haakon which, translated, means only “high son” (Hâkon in Norwegian, Hâkan in Swedish, Hakon in Danish). If it was a revolution it was a quiet one, and the new monarch arrived (by ship, of course) carrying his own high son wrapped in swaddlings, and greeted dockside by what must have been restrained cheering. The Norwegians did underline the break by renaming their new national capital city Oslo (it had been Kristiania). But they didn’t even make June 7 their National Day, their July 4 so to speak. They already had one, dating from the Napoleonic era when an earlier parliament had (nem con, of course) voted itself a nation. That was May 17, 1814, and it was a few years after ten thousand Swedes had indeed been beaten, in the weeds, at the Battle of Copenhagen. But not by Norwegians. In Norway, anyway, “Constitution Day” as they call it is a happy occasion, marked by children’s parades, garden fêtes, high school graduation parties, and if any two feel so inclined, marriages. And just to make sure, the bride and groom will wear something identifying their places of origin. ©.

[Tripps]

That's interesting - I knew almost nothing of that.

Love the word 'propinquity' - not so sure about 'cousinage'.

[Stanley]

Nothing inspires forgiveness quite like revenge.
Scott Adams: small town boy makes good

When did ignorance become a point of view? Scott Adams

I was an honors college dean long enough to meet several valedictorians, young folk who’d graduated first in their high school class. They were good people to know. But some seemed embarrassed by their distinction, especially when they came from small (usually rural) schools. It’s as if coming top among thirty who (friends or not) one has known since childhood, is a matter for apology. If it’s OK to be intelligent, it’s dreadful to be a drudge, like having bad breath or flat feet. Far better, in a small place, to be tops at tiddlywinks or judged “most likely to succeed” or even “best practical joker.” Irreverent thoughts like this moved Scott Adams (valedictorian in a class of 39) to joke that he must have been the only one who could spell “valedictorian” correctly. Scott Adams was born in rural New York on June 8, 1957, his neighborhood so lightly populated that he grew up in a ‘consolidated’ K-12 school. Having done well there, at least at spelling, he went on to nearby Hartwick College, another small place where he did well enough (BA, Economics) to go on to an MBA at the University of California. After that, reality set in, and valedictorian Scott Adams started at the bottom of one of San Francisco’s big banks, the Crocker, as a mere teller. The Crocker is I think named after one of California’s first “robber barons,” Charles Crocker, whose partners in crime and capital were Leland Stanford and Collis Huntington, so it was ironically appropriate that Scott Adams’ first distinction was to be robbed, in the bank, at gunpoint, from behind his teller’s window—and not just once but twice. That may have outweighed being a rural school valedictorian—or at least got Adams plugged into Crocker’s management trainee program, but it still seemed a long slog. Luckily Scott Adams had a sideline, drawing cartoons of a somewhat sardonic nature (he’d started at 10, one presumes non-sardonically), and whether in search of satisfaction or of wider recognition the would-be banker Adams started to submit samples of his work, for instance to The New Yorker and to Playboy. These early efforts were rejected, and Adams began, instead, to make up graphic cartoon panels which poked fun at life in a corporate office (the Crocker bank, maybe?). These strips had an immediately recognizable straight guy, who may well have been a high school valedictorian. His name was Dilbert, and he and his eponymous strip have been runaway successes. Not all of us were high school valedictorians, but most of us work in organizations, and Dilbert’s insights into organizational behaviors are both funny and sad, and therefore therapeutic. ©.

[Stanley]

David, re. the Norwegians. It was all new to me as well. Incidentally, Bob's wife was a Jutlander.... she kept interesting customs like the Leaving Meal.... Black bread, pickled herring and Aquavit that had been on an ocean voyage to complete its maturation.

[Stanley]

Gender and medicine.
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, 1836-1917

I think he will probably come around, in time. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson on her father’s opposition to her choosing a medical career.

Politicians’ blatherings about “trans” persons have produced some of the dumbest ideas in American history (a stunning achievement), not least the assertion that transsexuality is the ‘new’ product of a godless culture. In fact it’s a human characteristic. Among many examples, one could argue that the first ‘female’ medical doctor in Britain was James Barry who qualified MD at Edinburgh University in 1812. Some faculty were reluctant to graduate such a young lad (his voice hadn’t broken and he was of very slight stature), but they relented. It wasn’t until James died that a post-mortem showed, conclusively, that he was physically female. We now know that he was born (circa 1789) and raised as Margaret Bulkley before he became a male medical student and embarked on his distinguished career as a British army surgeon. Barry’s revelatory post mortem happened in the same year (1865) that Elizabeth Garrett Anderson qualified MD, in London, to be Britain’s first medical doctor who was born female, lived female, and died one too (in 1916). “She” was born on June 9, 1836, upstairs from her dad’s pawnbroker’s shop in one of London’s poorest districts. Her parents would persevere to produce 11 children in all, most of whom survived and became active citizens while Newson Garrett survived pawnbroking to become a leader in barley malting, a stalwart in the brewing trade, and mayor of Aldeburgh, Sussex. Elizabeth would in her turn be elected Aldeburgh’s mayor (in 1904), thus becoming England’s first female mayor. But well before that she and her younger sisters had vowed to make England into a place where women could be public citizens. One of the sisters became a leading interior designer, another gained fame as a militant suffragist, and Elizabeth (who led household “Talks on Things in General”) took the medical road. She was inspired to begin by Elizabeth Blackwell (1821-1910) the USA’s first woman doctor, who visited the Garretts in the late 1850s. It wasn’t easy (James Barry had already, in his own way, proven that), and no English medical school would admit her (she was, after all, a woman) but she did it, and from 1865 began transforming English medical practice. Known professionally as ‘Garrett’ (a family name) she also married, birthed and raised three children, created a hugely popular women’s and children’s clinic, and (finding her profession still female-resistant) cofounded (and became dean of) the London School of Medicine for Women. Given all that, why should we quibble about James Barry’s “real” gender identity? He was a he. She was a she. It’s not politics. It’s not morals. It’s life. ©

[Stanley]

Barley, beer, and politics.
James Baverstock, brewer, 1741-1815

He is a wise man who invented beer. Plato (in the course of arguing that there is nothing new under the sun).

Paulette and I have long engaged in ‘political’ consumerism, a quixotic pursuit when you think about it (anyone know of a radical banker?). It may have begun in or about 1970, in England, in our search for ‘liberal’ citrus fruits. That task was eased with the falls of Franco (Spain) and Salazar (Portugal), but leftist beer proved a more elusive quarry, which is one reason I started brewing my own. I didn’t know, then, that once upon a time brewers had been at the forefront of reform politics in many English towns. For instance the Samuel Whitbreads, father and son, both brewers, were notoriously radical MPs in the era of the American and French revolutions. Founders of what became one of England’s biggest brewers, they supported wider suffrage and electoral reform, religious toleration, and the abolition of slavery; and the younger Whitbread was a dangerous devotee of the French Revolution. They approached the brewing business with a similarly radical outlook, applying science to their traditional craft. Very likely the Whitbreads learned their brewing science from James Baverstock, born on June 10, 1741. James’s father was the biggest brewer in their market town, viewed it as a traditional craft, and did not welcome his son’s growing interest in the science of brewing. James made no great discoveries, but he made quick use of the new hydrometer to measure a beer’s progress from malted barley to alcoholic drink, and when he became a brewer in his own right (at royal Windsor, of all places) his ales became famous for their clarity and consistency, and the beer (known as Baverstock & Ramsbottom) and James’s writings on the subject brought him a new circle of friends, many of them radicals, brewers like the Whitbreads, MPs like Henry Thrale, bankers (yes, Virginia, once upon a time there were radical bankers, some of them were even Quakers), and infamous pamphleteers like William Cobbett, aka the “Porcupine,” who didn’t like anyone. James Baverstock never (like the Whitbreads) became a Big Brewer, but he did move back to his father’s town, Alton in Hampshire, to become the biggest brewer there (30,000 barrels per annum), did keep on writing about the science of brewing (some of his essays appeared in Cobbett’s Political Register), and did continue to meet and plot with others who hoped that politics could (like good beer) be made cleaner and clearer. James Baverstock died in 1815, in the midst of a projected printing, in English, of Baron Paul Henri d’Holbach’s radical tract Ecce homo. ©.

[Stanley]

'Danish is spoken in this household.'
Denmark's National Flag.

Der er et yndigt land. “There is a lovely country,” first phrase of Denmark’s national anthem (circa 1818)

The oldest national flag still in existence today is that of Denmark, a white ‘Nordic cross’ (a cross recumbent) on a red field. It’s a very old basic design, going back beyond the high middle ages, but its proportions and colors were laid down by formal decree (of the Danish royal house) on June 11, 1748. Its use was already ‘traditional,’ especially as a battle flag in the Danes’ ongoing spats with Sweden. Both kingdoms had had great power ambitions and a nearly continuous casus belli having to do with control of the ‘øresund’, the narrow shipping strait which connects the Baltic and North Seas at Copenhagen. But the 1748 decree probably had more to do with another ongoing rivalry, over control of the Schleswig-Holstein region. That rich farming country, originally a couple of principalities at the base of the Jutland peninsula, excited tension and occasional warfare between the Danes and the Germans, most notably in the Prusso-Danish war of 1864-1866. Thanks to better guns and more modern battlefield tactics, the Prussians won that war but 50 years later, at the end of World War I, it was decided to move the border back southwards, not all the way but as far south as Danish was the leading household language. That led to a period of study during which the Danes’ Nordic Cross flag became a kind of cultural weapon. Danish-tongued (and Danish-minded) householders and farmers literally flew the flag to let the world know who they were and that they wanted to be on the Danish side of that boundary line. And there, more or less (some minor adjustments were made after the next war), is where it sits today, and in that area of South Jutland (Sønderjylland to the Danes) you’ll still see more national flags flown over private homes and farms than anywhere else in the world. At least that was the case in the 1970s, when we visited Paulette’s cousins there, near Tønder, each of them with flags in their farmyards—and each family took in Danish-speaking children who lived in north Germany, just to teach them what it means to be Danish. Today the Nordic Cross is a constituent part of many national flags, not just in the ’Nordic’ countries (the Ukraine, for instance). But at Christmastime Danish flags (red and white paper pennants on a string) still decorate our tree, and we still celebrate with a Christmas-eve meal of “æbelskivers”, popovers with apple slices, but at least as Danish as the Nordic Cross. Thus we remember that seven of Paulette’s great-grandparents brought the flag and æbelskiver pans with them when, in the era of the Prusso-Danish war, they moved to western Iowa. And the eighth was a Swede. ©

[Tripps]

æbelskivers

Looks like Denmark's answer to Yorkshire puddings. abelskiver

I think we've done 'shive' for slice a long time ago.

[Stanley]

To the victors belong the spoils.
The 51st Highlanders Surrender at St. Valéry

Wars are not won by evacuations. Winston Churchill, on the Battle of Dunkirk, in one of his first speeches as Prime Minister, 1940.

From almost every point of view, the Battle of Dunkirk (May 26 to June 4, 1940) was a disaster for Britain and its allies, and we must view as pure propaganda (or even poppycock) Winston Churchill’s decision to call the evacuation “Operation Dynamo.” Hitler’s motives, in pausing his attack on Dunkirk, are still debated by military and diplomatic historians. Whatever was in Hitler’s mind, or in Churchill’s for that matter, there was gallantry to the British evacuation, and the war’s final outcome has inclined us to see only its gallantry or, failing that, to highlight the “pluck” of the Brits as the retreating survivors were picked up and ferried home by a motley fleet (of over 1000 vessels) that included not only 34 “tugboats” and some canal barges but almost 350 boats now classified only as “other small craft.” The Dunkirk evacuation ended on June 4, 1940, and with it ended the British presence on the European continent. Except that it didn’t. Further west, along the Normandy coast, the 51st Highland Division, Scottish infantry, still held its ground and did so until overwhelming odds forced its surrender on June 12, 1940, at Saint-Valéry-en-Caux. No “Operation Dynamo” came to its aid (the village’s tiny harbor could not have managed one, and Britain could not supply it), and all survivors were packed off to prisoner of war camps located here and there within Adolf Hitler’s thousand-year Reich. Hitler, however, forecasted wrongly, by a factor of (roughly) 250x. And when St.-Valéry-en-Caux was liberated, in September 1944, the British saw to it that the troops who marched in were from the (reconstituted) 51st Highland Division, infantry. Thus these new 51st Highlanders widened the beachhead established on June 6 by “Operation Overlord.” Our old friend John Harris, then a farm boy in a north Lancashire village, remembered from spring 1944 a highland division marching from their Red Well encampment to the Carnforth railhead. They were on their way to the Normandy beaches, preparing for Overlord. They marched two abreast, in full battle gear, with pipers regularly spaced along the line. All the way (some six miles) the pipers played a slow march, a dirge. These were sights, and sounds, that John never forgot. And we are reminded of two things. There is a poetry to war, however awful. And to the victors belong the spoils, including the inestimable privilege of calling a disaster a victory. ©

[Tripps]

51st Highland Division, infantry.

Speaking of which (and dangerous crossings elsewhere) - check this out.

I find it all quite emotional.

[Stanley]

[Stanley]

Marriage and the Reformation
Martin Luther Marries Katherina von Bora

How I dread preaching on the state of marriage! . . . it will make a lot of work for me and for others. Martin Luther, 1522.

It’s difficult to determine exactly when the breaches between various ‘reformers’ and Rome became final. Some reformers (for instance Erasmus) never left the church, while there were others who left only to come back. For Martin Luther the final breach did not occur until after October 31, 1517, when he pinned those famous questions to the door of All Saints’, Wittenberg. There followed a period of uncertainty, governed partly by slow mail service between Rome and Wittenberg. One high point came in December 1520 when Luther burned, in public, a threatening letter from the Pope. When Rome learned of that, Luther was excommunicated. But even excommunicates can be forgiven. Amidst several possibilities, we can say that Martin Luther himself put the icing on the cake by marrying Katharina von Bora on the evening of June 13, 1525, after having announced their engagement, before witnesses, only that morning. It was a serious step, dividing Luther’s friends and forever divorcing Luther (once a monk) and von Bora (once a nun) from their former vows. Indeed the whole episode reeks of drama, not to mention fish, from Easter time, 1523, Katherina and some of her sisters fled their convent hidden (legend has it) in herring barrels. There is reason to believe that Luther had a hand in it, at least as a co-plotter, but Katherina and her sorority had their own motives, for they had been inspired by Luther’s idea of sola fides:faith, not duty, truth, not vows. Catholic propagandists would also make much of the fact that most of the fugitives, perhaps all, also wanted to marry, and that Luther himself helped them do so. Those factors led to an extreme purpling of the rhetoric, “pimps” and “whores” and so on, and burned to a martyr’s crisp any lingering hopes of a rapprochement. What’s even more interesting is that Katherina, then in her mid-20s, had set her sights on Luther himself. She’d led the nuns from their convent. He’d led the Reformation in Wittenberg. So there it was. Although he had some doubts, it all went ahead and became momentous. The marriage clarified Luther’s secularism (his belief in separate realms for the civil and the sacred) and expressed his conviction that men and women of and in the church were also, inevitably, human creatures. Martin and Katherina were also of their time. So she called him “boss” and he used the diminutive “Katie.” And in those realms they made a go of it. Today we have a strikingly “modern” view of her, and her portrait (done in 1526) strengthens that perspective. She looks like a woman who knew where she was going and what she wanted to do. ©

[Stanley]

The past as physical evidence
Peter Harrison, 1716-1775

We shape our buildings. Thereafter they shape us. Winston Churchill.

Upon returning to the USA one of my first political arguments was with a lawyer (he favored ‘concealed carry’ and I did not). To my horror (he was a lawyer) my opponent had no knowledge of (in fact, he denied) the English basis of American laws and institutions. At issue was the 2nd Amendment and its origins in the colonies’ “well-regulated” militias, now totally obscured by (inter alia) Justice ‘Tony’ Scalia and the National Rifle Association. But another colonial heritage—architecture—has proved more difficult to erase, for it has left physical evidence. There is the colonial “style,” examples of which I see daily in my neighborhood walks, but scattered along the eastern seaboard are actual colonial buildings designed by actual colonial architects. Among the most prolific of these was Peter Harrison, born in northern England (Yorkshire) on June 14, 1716. Harrison probably learned his craft through apprenticeship to architects in York, but he went to sea because there was more money in being a mariner. But Harrison took his design books with him and, as he made contacts in the colonial world began designing buildings for associates, friends (and Friends, for he began life as a Quaker), and royal officials. Harrison wrought well, and while the original meaning of a “well-regulated” militia may be an arguable point you can still see Peter Harrison in American (and many other) places. Buildings that we know he designed are found everywhere, not least in Newport, RI, where he took up residence in the 1740s. He also designed classic colonial churches (Christ Church Boston and Christ Church Philadelphia among them), at least one synagogue (in Newport, now the oldest surviving synagogue in the USA), and a smattering of buildings elsewhere, including at the then new Dartmouth College. There is no doubt at all that Harrison designed many more (he was an apostle of the Palladian style), but those have been more difficult to prove because, in 1775, a colonial mob anxious about its liberties (in New Haven, CT) invaded Harrison’s house and burned his papers. This may have been because Harrison opposed concealed carry; more likely he was thought an agent of the British crown. And the rioters were right because the architect Peter Harrison was also a customs official who was by then (he’d wed fashionably in 1745) an in-law relation of several important British politicians, not least the Pelham family (dukes of Newcastle). This marriage may have convinced Harrison to abjure Quakerism, but that’s an arguable point. His buildings remain, physical evidence of an actual past and, as yet, uneradicated. Perhaps they’ve been overlooked by the NRA. ©

[Stanley]

"I am a girl."
Ruth Cowan, 1901-1992

I am a girl. Sight unseen I pass for a man. But notwithstanding my femininity, I need a job, want one with the AP, and can hold it. Ruth Cowan, ca. 1929. applying for a job with the Associated Press,

On a hot summer day in the late 1940s, my dad was sent out into the Iowa countryside to report on a search for a man who’d brutally murdered his wife. On the scene, dad was deputized and found himself in a field of tall corn, searching rather blindly for a man armed with a butcher’s knife and, as they say, nothing to lose. The murderer was captured, dad phoned in his story, and my guess is that he thought his scary task had not been “women’s work.” He never told the story that way, but he’d had a strong-willed mother and he'd found a strong-willed wife, and when he became a professor of journalism (“news-editorial”) he thought of his female students as potential reporters, fully capable of the rough-and-tumble world he’d left behind. And dad helped some of them to get good reporting jobs. One of his best (and shortest) recommendations, to an editor-friend at a big midwestern daily, said “if you do not hire this young woman you will have only yourself to blame.” Dad may have been thinking of the women in his own life, for there were few female reporter models to work from. Among them was Ruth Cowan Nash, born Ruth Cowan in Salt Lake City on June 15, 1901, who in a long journalistic career (ca. 1924-1956) reported on just about everything, including from the front lines at the Battle of the Bulge during WWII. Right from the first (in Austin, Texas) Ruth found her gender a professional handicap, and as a stringer for the United Press called herself ‘Baldwin Cowan.’ Baldwin was her mother’s maiden name, an innocent enough deception, but when her UP superior turned up to praise Baldwin’s work and found him to be a her, he fired her. That was in 1929, and I hope it's a true story. Whatever, Cowan turned herself into a good reporter, first on the difficult subject of Texas politics, then on Al Capone, and then on FDR’s New Deal. Come the war, Cowan wangled herself a European assignment where she was expected to cover the war from the woman’s angle. She did so, but also got into the thick of the fight, including even with General George Patton’s support, first in Africa and then in Europe. After the peace she found her employer taking the view that women reporters (if there had to be any such oxymorons) must retire at 55, so she married a Harvard man called Nash and, semi-retired, became mayor of Harper’s Ferry, VA, yet another “man’s job.” Ruth Cowan Nash continued to write, too, almost until she died, aged 91, having proved to almost everyone’s (and her own) satisfaction that a she-person could indeed report the news. ©

[Stanley]

Life and leisure in the Jewish Alps
Jennie Grossinger, 1892-1972

The Jewish summer camp blended American notions with yidishkeyt [and] demonstrated that being Jewish could be fun and not a burden. From Phil Brown’s Catskill Culture: A Mountain Rat’s Memories . . . , 1998.

A smallish region of low, forested ridges, the Catskills have seized more than their fair share of American cultural history. Once the mountain lions had gone, the Catskills became a favorite setting for the ‘sublime’, the nature-painting style favored by the Hudson River School. The young Henry James used them as sunset vistas, backdrops for his early fictions on the proper sort of people (e.g. the Vanderbilts and the Roosevelts) who settled their country houses opposite the Catskills, along the Hudson’s east bank and safely distant from the teeming city. More recently, from World War I through to the 1970s, they became known (less poetically?) as the Jewish Alps (or the Borscht Belt), a place where New York Jews could holiday as themselves, whether “they” were secular or orthodox. Soon all the best resorts were Jewish-owned. Some were full Kosher. A few served bacon with their bagels. All offered menus of distinctive humor, training grounds for the likes of Milton Berle and George Burns, Sid Caesar and Mel Brooks. Later still, Kutsher’s Resort became the (likely?) setting for Dirty Dancing, a film of which, we may imagine, Henry James would not have approved. The other plausible inspiration for the film’s “Kellerman’s” was Grossinger’s Catskill Resort Hotel, which began early in the 20thcentury as a producing farm, a reminder that not all the “new” Jewish immigrants were urban in origin or destination. Without doubt, the main mover of this transition was Jennie Grossinger, the eldest child of the founders, herself Galician-born on June 16, 1892. Jennie came over with her parents, worked like a beaver in the city, married a cousin (Harry Grossinger) and then, her father Esher having suffered a breakdown, moved the whole lot to the Catskills. It seemed a good idea, for Esher had been an estate manager in his first life, but soon farming fizzled, and the Grossingers began to rent rooms and provide Kosher meals, and as those sidelines grew the farm became a resort, Jennie as hostess, booking agent, and (no doubt) occasional plumber. Her first summer take was $91, not much but enough to encourage a modest expansion to 20 guests, and so the business grew, and grew, to become part of American legend, a symbol of success, of assimilation and (at the same time) of a distinctively Jewish identity (Grossinger’s was all Kosher until 1948). Jennie ran the show until Harry died, in 1964, when she turned the whole operation over to her kids. Now it’s all rubble and remembrances, not for any fault of the Grossingers but because the country has moved on. Which, I suppose, is the way it should be. ©

[Stanley]

A context for Representative Bennie Thompson.
Thomas Ezekiel Miller, 1849-1938

Not having loved the white less, but having felt the Negro needed me more. Inscription on the gravestone of Thomas Ezekiel Miller, Charleston, South Carolina.

I have been absorbed by Bennie Thompson’s performance as chair of the ‘January 6 Committee.’ He’s cast himself as justice personified, and he’s played the role perfectly. In our queer racial vocabulary, he’s been cast as ‘black,’ and he plays that role well too. But it takes only a glance to see that Thompson is not very black, and his ‘whiteness’ is highlighted (pun intended) by his hair and beard. Because of that, and because he’s from Mississippi, he calls to mind all the ambiguities of William Faulkner’s favorite ‘black’ character, Lucas Beauchamp, who turns up in the novelist’s Yoknapatawpha saga (in three novels and three stories) as the personification of justice. Lucas’s white ancestry is manifest in his full name, “Lucas Quintus Carothers McCaslin Beauchamp;” he is indeed descended from an old slaver and he carries his mixed heritage so well that it almost kills him. But he carries it well, and so does Bennie Thompson. American history, particularly southern history, is full of Bennie Thompsons and Lucas Beauchamps. Among them was Thomas Ezekiel Miller, born in South Carolina on June 17, 1849 and of impeccable pedigree. His grandfather was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and his father a rich youth of the planter class. On his female side Miller descended from enslaved people, and although he was not very black at all, South Carolina wanted him “black.” His white father was forced to put him out for adoption, and Miller was brought up by a not-very-black couple (freed slaves). So, come the Civil War and the end of racial slavery, Thomas Ezekiel Miller chose to be black. Educated in the north at a black college (Lincoln, in Pennsylvania) he returned home, married black, called himself black and embodied the causes of equality and justice for all shades. He got his law degree from the University of South Carolina during its brief “integrationist” period, and spent his whole, long life in education and in politics, as schools commissioner, state legislator, and (miraculously in the succeeding age of “Jim Crow”) in the national House of Representatives where he sat with my great grandfather (representing an Iowa district) from 1889 to 1891. Miller was gerrymandered out of that seat in 1890 but he remained a thorn in the side of racist, race-baiting, politicians like Cole Blease and “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman. And Miller remained the very symbol of justice until his death in 1938. Today I see him—not to mention Lucas Beauchamp—in the implacable face of Representative Bennie Thompson, chair of the select committee investigating the treason of January 6. ©

[Stanley]

A 'demoiselle' of science.
Eleanor Glanville, 1654-1709

Mr. Rae defended the lady’s laudable inquiry into the wonderful works of Creation. From a contemporary report on the (unsuccessful) defense of Eleanor Glanville’s last will and testament against the charge of insanity, circa 1712.

On yesterday’s walk through Forest Park’s small (~5-acre) ‘succession forest’ I encountered many odd bugs, very black, quite delicate, erratic in flight and a seeming cross between a butterfly and a dragonfly. I’d seen them before but had to look them up, to find that they were damselflies, most likely the common ‘black damselfly.’ In Britain some damselflies are ‘demoiselles,’ an even more feminine name, and in the course of my researches I found another female oddity, Eleanor Glanville, odd because she was, way before her time, a pioneer entomologist, who may very well have collected demoiselles. She was born on June 18, 1654 as Eleanor Goodricke, of good Puritan stock (her father a major in Cromwell’s army). Through no fault of hers she became an heiress, a rich one, and able to marry whom she wished. Her first husband was an artist. It may have been a happy match, but when he died Eleanor (only 25 but with two children) became herself a collectible. She married, secondly, Richard Glanville, bore him several children, found him to be a fortune hunter (he had a mistress whom he may have bigamously married). Unhappy, now living in Lincolnshire, Eleanor Glanville turned to butterflies. She was entranced by their delicate beauty but also puzzled by their mysterious life cycle, so she not only collected mature specimens but also butterflies in their earlier forms. She had the money to do so, and connections, and her collections were well-known to other pioneer (male) entomologists, with whom she traded news and notes as well as pinned specimens. Here and there, not least in the British Museum, some of her specimens still exist, though as parts of other collections. She was the first to name the Lincolnshire Fritillary, now one of Britain’s rarest and now renamed the Glanville Fritillary. I like to think that she also collected a demoiselle or two. In any case her collecting of these “worms and flies” aroused the suspicion of her neighbors and provided an avenue of attack for her greedy second husband (and the children she had by him). They used her eccentricity to prove her insane and to contest her will. For remember, Eleanor was of Puritan stock and had inherited her properties in her own right. Isolated by her cruel second husband and their greedy children, she had willed her properties (real and personal) to others. The courts took this as yet further proof of her oddity, and the will was voided. But her butterflies still hang on. One of them, now called the Glanville Fritillary in Eleanor’s honor, is found today only on the Isle of Wight. ©

[Stanley]

One's drug is another's poison.
Friedrich Sertürner, 1783-1841

If you want to understand a society, take a good look at the drugs it uses. Bill Hicks.

Pharmaceutical advertisements are illegal in several nations, for good reason. Apart from the real dangers and neurotic temptations of making us into our own doctors, there is the question of “side” effects. These can be so dangerous (indeed, fatal) as to make that word, “side,” seem more a really bad joke than a prudent adjective. But in the land of the free we don’t like regulations and red tape, and many of the limitations we have on the marketing of prescription drugs have been imposed not by legislation but by lawsuits. It’s been a cumbersome process with some benefits to the general public but many more to the legal profession. We see or hear it in the ads, sotto voce reminders that the product can harm or kill against pictures that show only healthy, happy people engaging in life’s best moments. But the drugs advertised are almost always new, recommended for new, or newly-discovered, ailments. Ads for oxycontin seem to have disappeared. And I don’t think I have ever seen an advertisement for morphine. It was named (I think with a view to its market potential) for the Greek god of sleep and dreams, Morpheus, by its discoverer, Friedrich Sertürner. Sertürner was born in Rhine-Westphalia on June 19, 1783, and made his discovery in 1804 while still on his pharmaceutical-chemical internship. He was investigating opium, a traditional drug already well known for some its beneficial effects and, better yet, a ‘natural’ product. But this was chemistry’s golden age. Scientists were finding out what stuff really was made of (new “elements,” for instance), and that was what Sertürner tried to do with opium. In his success he invented a new field of science, alkaloid chemistry, and isolated opium’s most important active ‘ingredient.’ It was a remarkable achievement for such a young person, and it brought him fame and at least a measure of adulation. Like so many scientific pioneers, he proved that his discovery was a beneficial one by testing it on himself. Control group testing was not yet part of the rubric, let alone regulatory legislation. Remember that Madame Curie herself would die of radiation poisoning over a century later (not to mention those Illinois factory girls who killed themselves by painting radioactive numerals on clock faces). Like Curie and many others, before him and since, Sertürner died of his researches. His benefaction was to relieve the pain felt by tens of thousands of people, on battle, in childbirth, in the throes of excruciating, death-dealing disease. Just how much morphine we needed, and when, was a matter for later research—and regulation. ©