BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

Putting out a hand to help.
Mary Catherine Booth, 1847-1939

Booth led boldly with his big bass drum—
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?) --“General William Booth Enters into Heaven” (1914)

So wrote Vachel Lindsay seven years before Booth’s death. It’s a poem through which I first heard poetry’s beat and musicality, in Oakley Ethington’s rich baritone, while Oakley sat and played the tune on his baby grand in my 10th-grade English class. Sophomorical to a fault, I thought the poem a satire, or hoped it was, but I was wrong. Lindsay himself had been a down and out who found solace in Salvation Army HQs, and for him William Booth was a savior. But there was another Booth, Charles Booth, no relation to William, who worked to understand poverty and cure its ills. Charles was not born poor like William, but was a Liverpool shipping magnate who, after he inherited the business, extended its reach in Britain and into the world. This Charles Booth (1840-1914), William’s near contemporary, was not uninterested in religion (far from it), but he saw poverty as a secular phenomenon, a social disease and not a malady of the soul. Poverty, he argued, was not to be salved by mere charity. His publications (notably his multi-volume Life and Labour of the London Poor, 1891 et seq) initiated the systematic study of poverty in industrial societies. It was hardly “natural” for a Victorian shipping magnate to do this work. But there was a strain in Victorian and Edwardian liberalism that helps to explain it. And there was Charles Booth’s wife, Mary Catherine Macaulay Booth, born on November 4, 1847. Like Charles she was born to wealth. She was also born to radicalism, one grandfather being the famed historian Charles Babington Macaulay and the other “Radical Dick” Potter. Mary Catherine was educated mainly at home where, because of her mother’s mental illnesses and early death, she also became general factotum. After a long courtship, she married Charles Booth in 1871 (ten years after he’d inherited his family businesses). They set up house in London, where (besides birthing seven children) she contributed to his estrangement from his family, served as his agent while he was away (often in the Americas) on shipping business, and strengthened his social conscience. Socially, she introduced him to radical reformers (often over dinners) and, intellectually, to the works of Karl Marx. She also “put out a hand to help in all this misery”, for instance supporting miners and their families in the strike-torn 1890s. And she helped to research and write his books. Theirs was a remarkable partnership, as fruitful as (and longer than) that of William Booth and his wife Catherine, cofounders and co-commanders of what was a different army, engaged on a different mission. ©.

[Stanley]

Bernie Sanders as documentary filmmaker.
Eugene Debs, 1855-1926

I am for Socialism because I am for humanity. We have been cursed with the reign of gold for long enough. Eugene Debs, 1897.

When Bernie Sanders was deciding which political party to join, if any, he was also at work on a film about Eugene Debs. Trouble was, there was not much film available, and no recordings, which was a pity for Debs had been a devastatingly effective speaker. But Debs had left texts of his speeches, so Bernie (short of funds) played the Debs role in his documentary. It was in some ways autobiographical. Eugene Victor Debs was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, on November 5, 1855. His parents were immigrants, and he grew up in a trilingual household (French and German as native Alsatian tongues, English to be learned of necessity). Necessity it was that drove Eugene to drop out of school, aged 14, and take work (at 50 cents a day) in a Terre Haute railyard. He soon graduated to fireman, at double the wage, and after a brief hiatus rejoined the railway. It was dangerous work, in an unregulated time, and it politicized Debs. He first expressed himself as a Democrat, serving as city clerk and then state representative, while on the rails he joined the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen. Debs found that neither the Democratic Party nor the Brotherhood was willing to address the real issues of the day. He began his leftward trek seeking to move the Brotherhood from its focus on welfare (not least, funeral expenses) to engaging with the employer on working conditions and wages. Casualty and death rates were high in an unregulated industry, wages low. Failing to awaken a common interest in employers and workers, Debs moved towards the use of the strike as a bargaining tool. He then became convinced that the various railroad “brotherhoods” were so fractured (firemen from brakemen from linemen from engineers) that an industry-wide union was essential. His radicalism began to attract notice, persecution, fines and imprisonment, but Debs remained committed to an American solution. And so Debs resorted to electoral politics, supporting the Democratic-Populist ‘fusion’ campaign of William Jennings Bryan in 1896. However, increasingly convinced that both main parties worshipped at the temple of capital, Eugene Debs became a socialist, one wholly committed to the principles of political democracy. He ran five times as a socialist (in 1920 from prison), each time increasing his popular vote. Bernie Sanders followed a similar route, first as a Democrat (elected Mayor of Burlington, VT, in the year of his Debs documentary) but latterly as an independent socialist. And so he remains, though never as a presidential candidate. And as recent negotiations have shown, efficiency in railroad labor relations is still frustrated by a fractured union structure. ©.

[Stanley]

What did Charles Booth write?
A very knowledgable subscriber wrote to tell me that Charles Booth did not write London Labor and the London Poor. That was the equally unusual Henry Mayhew. Charles Booth did write Life and Labour of the People of London. I'd like to blame m my sources but it's. probably better to blame my haste.

[Stanley]

A man of war, culture, and law.
Süleyman I the Magnificent, 1494-1566

What men call sovereignty is worldly strife and constant war; Worship of God is the highest throne, the happiest of all estates. Süleyman the Magnificent.

In my Junior year, a punch-card error put me in a PhD seminar on the medieval history of the Levant. When I realized the mistake, I modestly offered to withdraw, but the visiting professor (then dean of the faculty at St. Andrews) kept me on as his “token undergraduate.” My research paper (on Venice in the Levant, 1204-1571) was so charitably received that it changed my life. It also introduced me to the Ottoman Sultan Süleyman I, known (in the west) as Süleyman the Magnificent and, in his own empire, as Süleyman the lawgiver. He was indeed both, and in his long reign (1520-1566) made many conquests, brought the empire to the peak of its power and made his capital city a fabled center of art, culture, and scholarship. Süleyman I was born (probably) on November 6, 1494. His father was governor of Trabzon, on the Black Sea, and a military hero who became emperor (sultan) in 1512. Even before that, the family was well-connected, and as a youth Süleyman was prepared for rule in study at Constantinople’s Topkapi Palace. Much like the boy who was to become Henry VIII of England, Süleyman practiced the arts, became adept in languages, and knowledgeable in religion. When he inherited the throne, the Venetian ambassador thought him aptly named, for süleyman translates as ‘man of peace.’ But in warfare and diplomacy, Süleyman took up where his father (known to Ottoman history as ‘Selim I the Grim’) left off, and by conquest brought the empire to nearly its largest extent. His dramatic advances in the Balkans took the Ottomans to the outskirts of Vienna and made Hungary a client state. He kicked the Knights Hospitallers off the island of Rhodes and laid siege to Malta. This last was unsuccessful, but it laid to rest memories of the ‘Christian’ Crusades. Süleyman’s ambitions moved the Ottomans eastwards as well, towards Persia and into the Indian Ocean. Meanwhile, at home, Süleyman’s scholarly instincts brought about a codification of law and legal practice, while he transformed the fine arts from crafts into prospering professions. In warfare he could be terrible. In court politics he was more ruthless (even to his own sons) than Henry VIII. But he could be a man of mercy if his enemies surrendered, and he instituted policies of toleration for religious minorities, including Jews and Christians, who would recognize his political supremacy. If not a ‘man of peace’ (as Venice learned to its cost), Süleyman knew that rule (if not conquest) required peace, predictability, and some principles of governance over the emperor’s arbitrary powers. ©.

[Stanley]

What's in a name?
Ruby Ruffin Hurley, 1909-1980

You can find virtually everybody black as far as the 1870 census. Why 1870? That’s when the ex-slaves first had surnames. Henry Louis Gates.

In China, surnames have been in use for a very long time. In the west, not so much. Danish surnames spread like wildfire after early 19th-century land reform. Lands distributed to new owners or to tenured tenants required that each should have a legal family name; whereupon many adopted the ancient folk custom of using dad’s first name. So there is still a surplusage of Jensens in Denmark. In England, 250 years earlier, Henry VIII declared surnames universal when he required that all legitimate births be recorded under the father’s family name. Before, surnames had trickled slowly downwards from the nobility to rural gentlemen and urban tradesmen. In the USA immigrants followed the surnaming customs of their home cultures. But then what of enslaved Africans? What function could be served by a surname for a person who was owned by someone else? Black surnames came with freedom (manumissions or escapes), and then by emancipation. Many surnames date from the records of Union army paymasters, a way of dealing with (then of paying) slaves who had fled to the Union lines, voting down slavery with their feet and then with their bodies. Some former slaves adopted their masters’ surnames, but as Frederick Douglass made clear it did not appeal to most. Still, it would be a nice irony if Ruby Ruffin, born black in Atlanta, GA, on November 7, 1909, was somehow descended from the Ruffins of the Virginia plantocracy: even directly, not by mere ownership, for she was very light in skin pigmentation. The Ruffins were fire-eaters of southern secessionist movements, and one of them demanded the honor of firing the first shot at Fort Sumter in early 1861. In 1865, he committed suicide at the collapse of the white-supremacy Confederacy. Ruby Ruffin, after her marriage Ruby Hurley, was a firebrand leader of the NAACP, an organizer of its youth chapters. She did this by choice, for she’d been brought up in the north and moved south in 1951 to help begin the civil disobedience campaign. There she played a leading role in the Emmet Till case (she gathered oral evidence from local black folk ‘in disguise,’ dressed as a cotton-picker) and in the admission of Autherine Lucy to the University of Alabama. And it was Ruby Ruffin Hurley who talked Myrlie Evers into seeking burial rights for her martyred husband Medgar at the Arlington National Cemetery. That’s another irony, for Arlington was once the home plantation of the secessionist hero and slaveowner Robert E. Lee. Ruby’s left her name behind, too, for she’s on a US postage stamp. I don’t think you’ll find too many other Ruffins there, but for the record the Ruffin surname derives from an Old French first name, long ago and far away. ©

[Stanley]

What is a trowelblazer?
Dorothea Minola Alice Bate, 1878-1951

One of the jolliest, most capable, and fearless girls I ever knew…The young American archaeologist Edith Hall, writing home to her parents about Dorothea Bate. (Crete, 1904.)

It is now accepted that when isolated (e.g. on an island) species can evolve in strange ways. Dwarfism is common (mammoths on Catalina and humans on Flores), but there are cases of giantism. These tend to be small giants, for instance a ‘giant dormouse’ found on Cyprus. Only squirrel-sized, this once diminutive rodent was unearthed by Dorothea Bate, herself something of an oddity: neither giant nor dwarf but a woman of usual size who found what was an unusual niche, the first woman ever hired by London’s Natural History Museum, in 1898. But even then she wasn’t exactly hired. Indeed, she did not gain paid professional status there until 1948. But she showed up at the Museum, aged 17, and within two years was taken on as a “volunteer,” paid piecework for preparing specimens (at the time, mainly bird skins) for classification and display. Dorothea Minola Alice Bate was born in South Wales on November 8, 1878. A policeman’s daughter, she managed to avoid much of her formal education, but in her wanderings in Carmarthen hills and valleys she became fascinated by natural history and thought she might become one (a natural historian) herself. That’s why she showed up at the Museum’s Kensington (London) HQ and attached herself to the ornithologists. Soon she was doing much more than bird skins, but gaining short-term stipends and grants to do her own fieldwork, which tended more and more towards paleontology, sometimes on her own (as in the Wye valley in 1902), more often attached to a bigger operation (which was characteristic of her extensive work on eastern Mediterranean islands and in the Palestine mandate). She didn’t just find things, for instance dwarf elephants and hippopotami and a very early fossil dog (canis familiaris) but developed important evolutionary theories and a (deserved) reputation as an expert. Still only a volunteer, she was pictured in 1933 as a member of the geology department, one of (by then) three women among 43 men. It really took quite a long while for Dorothea to become established, her first professional position coming in 1948 (when she was technically beyond retirement age). Among the young whom she instructed (and patronized?) were such as Louis Leakey, who brought his early Olduvai Gorge finds for her evaluation. For all that, and more, some in her profession now call her a “trowelblazer,” but it seems that she preferred dynamite, at least in the early stages of her own digs. It took her even longer to get her Tourist Board ”blue plaque.” That didn’t come until 2017, 66 years after her death, and not in London, either: it’s affixed to the wall of her birthplace, where you can read it in Welsh or English, as your own qualifications may warrant. ©

[Stanley]

A modern instance of the legend of Robert the Bruce and his spider.
Gail Borden, 1801-1874

I tried and failed. I tried again and again and succeeded. Epitaph on the gravestone of Gail Borden, 1874.

Gail Borden wrote his own epitaph and, as short as all epitaphs must be, it’s accurate. If he’d wanted to tell the whole truth he’d have needed a much larger headstone, for his life was full to overflowing with tries and failures before his one undoubted success, creating condensed milk by heating it in a condensing vacuum container. Gail Borden was born on November 9, 1801, in Norwich, New York. In its never-ending search for prosperity, the Borden family moved first to Kentucky (1813), then Mississippi (1822), then to Texas (1829) when it was still part of Mexico. Along the way, Gail learned from his father the science of surveying and picked up enough literacy to found, with his brothers, the Telegraph and Texas Register. Its first issue came at the start of the Texas revolution, and the paper survived long enough to print in memoriam the names of those who died at the Alamo. For that importunity and for its editorial policy, General Santa Ana ordered the press thrown into the bayou and arrested several Bordens. Afterwards the Bordens (including Gail) played minor roles in establishing the new nation’s constitution (which bought freedom and slavery to Texas) and Gail picked up work as the new customs collector at Galveston Island, where he also surveyed (laid out) Galveston City. His street plan survives, but various reverses cast him back on his own ingenuity, for instance patent cures for the yellow fever and a wagon that one could convert to a sailboat. Along with these failures he experimented with preserving foodstuffs. His dried, pressed beef (a cooked pemmican) won Borden a prize at London’s Great Exhibition (1851). But it was on the way back from London that shipboard tragedies led to Borden’s most successful “try.” Small children dying from spoiled milk from infected cows produced, by 1858, Gail Borden’s patent for Eagle Brand Condensed Milk. It was by no means the first-ever condensed milk. Marco Polo reported its use by Tatar cavalry in the 13th century. But given existing methods of producing and transporting milk in 19th-century America it can be seen as a public health measure. And it sold well on the market and was (for instance) used to supply the Union army, or at least those units of it drawn from Connecticut, where Borden established his first factory. There were other spinoffs, condensed fruits and such, but none caught on. When Borden died in 1874, besides his flourishing milk business and his true-story gravestone, he left behind him Borden County, Texas, named for him two years after his death. Its county seat is called Gail, and the 2020 census lists the county as having a total population (including Gail) of 841. It produces oil, as far as I know not condensed. ©.

[Stanley]

Novelist of imperial derring-do.
Winston Churchill, novelist, 1871-1947

The political faith of our forefathers, of which the Constitution is the creed, was made to fit a more or less homogeneous body of people who proved that they knew the meaning of the word “Liberty.” From the Afterword of The Crossing, by Winston Churchill, 1904.

Winston Churchill the famous prime minister was also a writer. Indeed he won the Nobel in 1954 for his multi-volume history of WWII. He’d first taken up writing to gentrify his army salary, and after dropping out of the army he dropped in as a war correspondent-cum-irregular in the first Boer War. Encouraged, he produced three books in rapid succession (1898-1899). All had to do with imperial heroics. One of them was a novel, and it won the attention of another Winston Churchill, also a young novelist and a more successful one. The two met in Boston, MA, and the less well-established writer agreed (to avoid confusion or even lawsuits) to use the pen-name ‘Winston S. Churchill,’ not a great strain for he’d been christened (after ancestral fashions) Leonard Winston Spencer-Churchill. The other writer was St. Louis’s very own Winston Churchill, born here on November 10, 1871. He was also possessed of an aristocratic lineage, descended on his father’s side from the stern Jonathan Edwards and the not quite so stern Timothy Dwight. Our young Winston attended the best private school St. Louis had to offer, but when both parents died he had to fend for himself and found a place at the US Naval Academy where he rowed, excelled in academics, and (fatefully) wrote. After graduation, he resigned from the Navy with indecent haste to become the very young editor of Cosmopolitan, then resigned again to take up novel writing. His first appeared in 1896. Selling well, it inspired a second, and then in 1899 came a third, Richard Carvel. A novel of historical derring-do, it was similar enough to the other Winston’s earliest works to add to the potential confusion between the two, and thus the English Churchill became, in the book trade, Winston S. Our Winston may never have returned to St. Louis, save maybe on a book tour, but he went on in the same rich vein, broadly speaking historical romances, about one a year, including his all-time best-seller, The Crossing (1904). I read it myself, circa 1954, when my father was trying to wean me from the juvenile fiction of Joseph Altsheler and his multivolume series, potboilers really, which took a cast of more or less heroic figures from the French and Indian wars of the 1750s to the “liberation” of Texas in the 1830s. Sadly, I remember the Altsheler books much more clearly than I remember Churchill’s The Crossing. Our Winston gave up writing to become the husband of a rich young woman, the leading spirit of her artists’ colony at Cornish, New Hampshire, and an aspiring but unsuccessful politician of the Teddy Roosevelt sort. Teddy himself was an aristocratic warrior-writer-politician, but that’s another story. ©

[Stanley]

Poet, philosopher, politician.
Abul Kalam Azad, 1888-1951

It is illusion to think that your neighbor is someone other than yourself. Abul Kalam Azad.

The 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent was not the least of the 20th century’s many tragedies. Many of its advocates had good intentions, but instead of bringing peace the separation of Hindu from Muslim brought (in 1947 and 1948) an immediate intensification of conflict (mass violence, ethnic cleansing, hordes of refugees) and then decades of inter-national tension: an uneasy truce punctuated by bursts of warfare. Worse, in both inheritor states, the dynamic has been towards ever more extreme versions of religious and ethnic nationalisms. Perhaps, as in all ‘real’ tragedies, it had to work out that way. On the ‘Indian’ side, Mohandas Gandhi, ‘the Mahatma,’ thought not, and in 1948 he was assassinated by a Hindu fanatic. Among the Muslims, those who would make peace by opposing partition were led by Abul Kalam Azad, born in Islam’s holy city of Mecca on November 11, 1888. His father was an eminent Indian scholar of Islam, his mother a niece of the mufti (religious judge) of Mecca, and at birth he was named Muhiyuddin Ahmad. In his late teens, already a writer, he adopted Abul Kalam Azad as a pen name. Roughly translated, it means “free” or “the freed”, but it would be mistaken to think of him as freed from Islam. Deeply educated in Islamic tradition and in the Koran, a fluent reader, writer, and speaker in several languages, he came to see himself as a modernizer, more properly speaking a reformer of religion. Meanwhile, experience and observation made him a nationalist in politics, specifically the politics of the subcontinent. Early on, Azad allied with Gandhi in an independence movement he saw as promising the full fruition of Islam in India. In his journalism he spoke to Indian Muslims. In politics he allied himself to the National Congress, joined in civil disobedience campaigns, and he endured long imprisonments with Gandhi and other Congress leaders. Azad was twice elected President of the Congress, serving his second stint in 1940-1946, a crucial period. Throughout he maintained hope that an independent India would be as fruitfully diverse in its religion, culture, and ethnicity as it had been in its colonial past. But in the end Azad gave way to Muhammad Ali Jinnah, at first reluctant and then an enthusiast for partition (for the sake of peace, Jinnah hoped) . While Jinnah became first Governor-General of an independent Pakistan, Azad was made Education Minister of the new India, but one of dissipated dreams. No assassins for him but drink and tobacco. Broken in health and hope, Abul Kalam Azad died in 1951. Partition lived on to deal death to his dream of preserving India’s fruitful diversity. ©

[Stanley]

the digested reader
DeWitt Wallace, 1889-1981

I believe in the value of ideas—and that, eventually, they get a man somewhere. DeWitt Wallace.

DeWitt Wallace was born in St. Paul, MN, on November 12, 1889, the son of a Presbyterian theologian and professor at Macalester College. His father went on to become president of Macalester, but DeWitt never was to excel at intellectual pursuits. Precocious enough, but troubled, he was sent to various schools (including Mount Hermon prep in New England) by parents who hoped he might find some grounding. Nothing really worked. After two years at Macalester he became a bank clerk, but in 1910 decided to try his luck at the University of California. He had another two years there, leaving without a degree, but in Berkeley he met Lila Acheson, a Canadian, a friend’s sister. They did not marry until 1921, in New York City, after her first engagement fizzled. Together, DeWitt and Lila were to transform the reading habits of a substantial slice of the American population (and beyond). Their vehicle was called The Reader’s Digest, an almost perfect title for a magazine (which in its maturity would look more like a paperback book) that produced readable extracts, usually short (‘condensed’) and almost always digestible, from other sources. This grew out of DeWitt’s habit (apparently formed while he was bank clerking) of compiling card indexes of useful reading notes. It gave him a wide if superficial knowledge, which may have attracted Lila, and in 1922 they set up shop, in a cellar below a Greenwich Village speakeasy, and baptized their baby Reader’s Digest. From these bohemian origins the baby grew into a middlebrow monster. It did well enough to move to the suburbs, at Pleasantville (providentially named one might say), and by 1929 it was producing massive profits ($25 million in today’s values) and moved yet again, to Chappaqua, NY. It continued as a digest but, starting in 1935 with a narrative of a motoring disaster by DeWitt himself. This article probably contributed to growing concern with car safety, but it would be mistaken to see the Digest as a reform vehicle. Certainly it was not radical: middle-of-the-road and middle-browed would fit it better, a publication that helped Mr. and Mrs. America feel themselves well-informed and good-natured, and that could safely be left in the living room for the kids to pick up. Lila and DeWitt had some right-wing tendencies, but not over the top, and although they gave a lot of money to Nixon they gave even more to good causes: Macalester College itself, Mount Hermon School, and further afield to the exploration of Egyptian antiquities at Abu Simbel and to the restoration of Claude Monet’s wonderful house and gardens at Giverny. After all, DeWitt and Lila thought, ours is a wonderful world. ©

[Stanley]

Founder-member of the American College of Surgeons.
Daniel Hale Williams, 1858-1931

A people who don’t make provision for their sick and suffering are not worthy of civilization. Dr. Daniel Hale Williams.

By 1900 American individualism had run aground. Organization had become a dominant theme. At the top, ‘robber barons’ like Rockefeller pursued monopolies or set up trade groups to lobby Congress and set prices. At the bottom, workers saw labor unions as the best way to counter the bosses’ power. In the middle classes, where “individualism” had become sacred, people began to band together, often by way of professional bodies. Thus scholars founded the American Historical Association, the American Sociological Association, et cetera ad infinitum. So the creation of the American College of Surgeons hardly made headlines. More newsworthily, at its organizational meeting of November 13, 1913, the College of Surgeons elected as one of its founder-members Dr. Daniel Hale Williams. In one sense, that was no surprise, for Dr. Williams had made a name for himself as an innovative surgical practitioner in Washington DC and then in Chicago, and (moreover) he was an active supporter of several Good Causes, especially in sterile surgical procedures and medical education. But what made his election unusual is that he was the first, and for a time the only, African-American member of the American College of Surgeons. He was born black in Pennsylvania, a free state, in 1858. In his teens, he (and two siblings) were raised by relatives in Maryland, once a slave state, and then rejoined their mother in northern Illinois. Along the way, Williams picked up an education of sorts, and then (in Janesville, WI) he apprenticed to a barber. That was what his father had been, and it seemed a good berth for a young man of color. But ambition (fueled by his elder brother’s success as a lawyer) burned bright, and his boss urged him to move from barbering into medicine (a very traditional transition) and a place in the Chicago Medical College (now Northwestern University). From there his career blossomed. He pioneered in medical education, founded Chicago’s Provident Hospital and College of Nursing (both desegregated institutions), and was appointed to the Illinois state board of health. Along the way, his landmark surgeries included heart operations where his antiseptic procedures produced high success rates. His 1893 pericardial surgery (on a patient with a knife wound to the heart) was not the very first even in the USA, but all this was more than enough to justify his election to the American College of Surgeons. Dr. Williams finished his career as Professor of Surgery at Meharry, in Nashville, TN, a fitting coda to a career which illustrated important trends in American social and economic history. ©.

[Stanley]

Build a better mousetrap . . . .
Malcom McLean, 1913-2001

The farm boy who became a truck driver who reinvented the shipping business. Malcom McLean of Maxton, NC.

The recent bankruptcy of FTX has cost a lot of people a lot of real money, including (apparently) Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady, and it may be that the whole cryptocurrency fad will fizzle before I’ve figured out what ‘cryptocurrency’ is. My interest was merely academic, for as a student and then a professional historian I had an interest in an earlier speculation, Augustan England’s ‘South Sea Bubble.’ That had cryptocurrency aspects to it, but at least the Bubble’s explosion (or implosion?) had the effect of stabilizing the “real” (or realer?) currency of the Bank of England, which still survives despite the recent efforts of Lyn Truss, herself the most cryptic of all British prime ministers. The evaporation of FTX won’t leave much of a vacuum, since there was never much to it anyway; its best epitaph may be ‘easy come, easy go.’ If you are looking for a capitalist who did make a difference, though, you should consider Malcom McLean, born on November 14, 1913 on his parents’ farm near Maxton, North Carolina. It was a poverty-stricken place and an inauspicious start, and it took McLean 22 years to move through the k-12 system. To come on the job market in 1935, with no money and only a diploma was not good timing. So he and his brother bought an old truck and set up in the haulage business. You could call it a ‘container’ business, for their main trade was to move empty tobacco barrels from the rolling plants back to the farms, where they could be filled up again with cured leaf. Those barrels used to be called ‘hogsheads’, and it may have been from them that Malcom got the idea that would make him a millionaire at least twice over (he gained a fortune, then lost it, then clawed it back), and has utterly transformed our urban geographies, our landscapes and our seascapes. The idea was to make the trailer of the semi-trailer truck into a module. If you did that, you could move the module from truck to truck, from truck to train, and from either to (or from) a ship or barge. In a word, Malcom McLean was the implementer (not, strictly speaking, the inventor) of containerization. He was first a sea-to-land-to-sea man, delayed slightly by a law prohibiting trucking firms from buying sea freight firms, but he launched his first container ship in 1956. By 1970 his Sea Land company was valued in the hundreds of millions, new terminals were being built, struggles were being fought with longshoremen’s unions all over the world, and McLean’s ideas had become transformative physical facts. He would later sell out, then buy in again, and then sell out; that’s more of a cryptocurrency subject, and a different story. ©

[Stanley]

A basketball dynasty, or two.
"Phog" Allen, 1885-1974

Dunking isn’t basketball. Forest Clare ‘Phog’ Allen, 1935.

Like most professions, basketball has its genealogies, some of them dynasties that rise, rule, and then fall at a particular place and in a particular style. In that class, one thinks of the Iba brothers, Henry (‘Hank’) and Clarence, whose teams at Oklahoma A&M and Tulsa weaved, wove, and defensed their way to hypnotic boredom (and too many low scoring games and soporific championships) in the Missouri Valley conference. But here’s a line that traces its origin to the original Ur of the game, James Naismith, and persisted (at least) through the amazing career of North Carolina’s Dean Smith, not only a brilliant coach-tactician but the only liberal in the state who could have whupped Jesse Helms. The linchpin of this particular family line was Forest Clare (“Phog”) Allen, who was born in Jamesport, Missouri on November 15, 1885 but who then (traitorously, Missourians think) ruled Big 8 basketball from his HQ at the University of Kansas. Jamesport was then the main Old Order Amish settlement in Missouri, but Allen had little to do with the Amish brand of pietism. Not only did he attend public schools, but he became a demon baseball player and then umpire in a local amateur league (he picked up his nickname because of the foghorn voice he used to call balls and strikes). Then, fatefully, he skipped across the border to Lawrence, KS, where he fell under the missionary influence of Naismith, who’d given up an early interest in evangelical theology to invent basketball as a strenuous, demanding physical sport with a far lower casualty rate than football. Canadian-born, Naismith devised the new game at the YMCA in Springfield, MA (where he had learned football from Amos Alonzo Stagg) Then, after acquiring an MD, Naismith moved west to Kansas to teach PhysEd, act as college chaplain, and coach basketball. Among his first players was young Phog Allen. As coach, Naismith didn’t do so well (the only losing career in KU basketball history), and he advised Allen never to coach, but Allen disobeyed to become the most famous, and one of the winningest, coaches in basketball history, 50 years at Kansas. At Kansas, until the advent of Wilt Chamberlain, Allen sharply deviated from James Naismith’s belief in racial integration (of classrooms and sports teams), and another of Allen’s coaching disciples (Adolph Rupp) kept Kentucky basketball lily-white way past the final buzzer, but Allen also taught Dean Smith how to play, then coach, and at Chapel Hill (and throughout North Carolina) Smith fought many battles for racial integration, and won a few. For all three of them, heirs of James Naismith, basketball was the thing: for better and for worse. ©

[Stanley]

A midwesterner in tinsel-town.
Burgess Meredith, 1907-1997

I’ll just take my amusement at being a paradox. Burgess Meredith.

Hollywood is tinsel-town, a city-but-suburb of dreams, a fantasy factory that remakes remakes and transforms draft dodgers into heroes: not a place eminently associated with “reality.” But one Hollywooder whose real life reflected his silver screen life (or vice versa) was Burgess Meredith, born Oliver Burgess Meredith in Cleveland, Ohio, on November 16, 1907. OK, so he did die in Malibu 90 years later, and although it looks out upon the waters Malibu is not a lot like Cleveland. On the other hand, his mother Ida Beth made her boy into a Methodist reform-revivalist type, and (somewhat fearfully, perhaps) he stayed that way for the rest of his life. Secure enough to be sent to Amherst College, he left there without a degree and soon fetched up in an adventurous theater company in New York, where his acting (in classical and avant-garde roles) provoked a favorable New Yorker “profile” by the usually irascible Wolcott Gibbs. This helped to make the Cleveland kid a hot property before he was 30, and while he expanded into directing he also moved west, to tinsel-town. There he tended to be cast in ‘real-life’ roles, in Steinbeck’s Mice and Men for instance (1939), while off the set with his second wife Paulette Goddard he became identified with “liberal” Hollywood. This led to his second holiday from acting, directing, and screenwriting for he was blacklisted for his defiant testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). His first Hollywood holiday had been in 1942-45, when he served in the US Army Air Corps, another rather un-American activity judging by the wartime behavior of John Wayne. Meredith got his revenge for the blacklisting in 1977, starring in Tail Gunner Joe, a TV docudrama satire on the tawdry leader of the anti-commie crusade, “tail gunner Joe” McCarthy whose wartime exploits were entirely fictive. After the war, Burgess Meredith became noted for the breadth and variety of his roles, his directing, and his writing, on stage, in film, in recordings, and on TV. He even worked (as a voice over) with Peter, Paul, and Mary in an early video treatment of their “Puff, the Magic Gragon.” Meredith got his revenge on Hollywood playing Harry Greener in The Day of the Locust (1975) in which a quintet of hopefuls, come west to realize their fantasies and their fortunes, suffer varied disillusions: comic, pathetic, and/or tragic. Harry Greener dies after a faith healing by a holy-roller tent preacher known as Big Sister. No such end for Meredith himself. Instead, he became a major contributor to the Democratic Party. Among his honors was an honorary degree from Upper Iowa University, which was, in its origins, as Methodist and as midwestern as Burgess Meredith. ©

[Stanley]

An unvanished American.
Molly Spotted Elk, 1903-1977

Katahdin: Wigwam Tales of the Abnaki Tribe. A posthumous publication (2003) of Molly Spotted Elk, 1903-1977.

In 1991, I was a research fellow at the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University. In mid-November, my parents flew east to visit, and we went to the ‘Plimoth Plantation’ outdoor museum. It turned out to be an instructive visit despite a bitterly cold nor’easter. The site staff acted their roles well, and in ‘period’ dress and behavior, even down to the old English accents (west country and Yorkshire) of the first settlers. The museum’s Native Americans chose not to brave the cold in traditional Wampanoag dress but stayed inside and in winter clothing that looked to be from L. L. Bean. I reflected sadly on this, but had to admire their survival skills. Perhaps the most successful of native New England survivals have been the Penobscots. Once powerful (and feared) members of the Abenaki confederation, practiced in a long war against the English invaders, the Penobscots were by 1900 reduced to a tiny remnant on a ‘reservation’ headquartered on the aptly-named Indian Island in the Penobscot River. From that nadir they have survived and expanded, and have won important lawsuits against the state of Maine, concerning (mainly) their tribal treaty rights. Their revival owes partly to the ‘Penobscot High Stakes Bingo Casino’ in Old Town, but there has also been a revival of traditional crafts, clothing, dance, and stories. This sunnier side of their success depended significantly on Molly Spotted Elk, born on Indian Island on November 17, 1903. She was christened Mary Alice Nelson but in Penobscot pidgin was ‘Molly Dellis.’ Her father was a tribal leader who’d had a year at Dartmouth College but Molly took after her mother Philomena, who made ends meet by selling traditional Penobscot wares to tourists. Molly embarked on a bizarre career which included vaudeville, stints (in New York and Paris) as an artists’ model, a ‘native’ dancer for various American tribes in the high plains west, an actress (in a ‘silent’ about native Americans), and finally as a war refugee fleeing across the Pyrenees and settling, at length, back on Indian Island. But throughout Molly kept her eye on her mother’s knowledge of Penobscot tradition. Indeed it was that which had first taken her away from Indian Island, to study at the University of Pennsylvania under the sponsorship of a Penn anthropologist. As Molly Spotted Elk (a traditional Sioux name given her by the Cheyennes) she became moderately famous, and it was that name she used, when she returned to Indian Island, to encourage her people to remember, and to perpetuate, their own cultural and linguistic heritage. Molly Spotted Elk died on Indian Island in 1977, leaving behind her granddaughter Theresa as a leading Penobscot cultural activist. ©

[Tripps]

I knew I'd seen the name before. He married Major 'Hot Lips' Houlihan in M.A.S.H.

Lt. Col. Donald Penobscott
Lieutenant Colonel Donald Penobscott was played by two actors, Beeson Carroll and former football player and Tarzan actor Mike Henry. Donald is introduced in name only at the start of the fifth season. Tall, dark, handsome, and muscular, he is a graduate of West Point whom Major Margaret "Hot Lips" Houlihan (Loretta Swit) meets while she is on leave in Tokyo. She falls in love with him on the spot, and he quickly asks her to marry him. Margaret promptly accepts, leading to a falling out with her former flame Frank Burns.

[Stanley]

I've sent that to Uncle Bob.... I'm sure he will be interested!
Something nags at my memory. What was the name of the river that the submarine Red October took refuge in in the last scene of the film?

[PanBiker]

Penobscot River in Maine.

The Hunt for Red October

[Stanley]

Thanks Ian, that's what I remembered!

The many uses of gelatin
Rose Knox, 1857-1949

Happiness Headquarters. A workplace slogan at (Rose) Knox’s Gelatin factory.

When Clement Moore injected St. Nicholas into mainstream American culture, he made him a “right jolly old elf” with “a little round belly that shook when he laughed like a bowlful of jelly.” In 1822, Moore’s ‘jelly’ was gelatin, a common household product with many uses, in the kitchen, at table, in the workshop, on the farm. This versatility, and its labor-intensive production methods, made it a perfect candidate for industrialization, and where else but in Johnstown, New York, already a leather goods center? Making leather leaves a surplus of bones and gristle, and the woman who took that surplus and made it a really big gelatin business was Rose Markham Knox, born in Ohio on November 18, 1857. Her family moved east to grow up with the country, and it was there (in Gloversville, NY) that she met, and in 1883 married, Charles Knox. He was then, fittingly in Gloversville, a glove salesman, but ambitious, and the couple made a partnership out of their lives and work. In the great depression of the 1890s they used $5,000 of their savings and inheritances to buy a gelatin works. Working together to make and market gelatin, Rose and Charles floated on a rising tide of prosperity to to find more uses for gelatin and better ways of producing it. Rose concentrated on its kitchen uses, but when Charles died in 1908 she took on the whole thing, from soups to cosmetics, lubricants, and more. At first, Knox’s Gelatin was a pure, flavorless stuff (even powdered), but when Jell-O rose up to contest the territory, Rose added flavors and sweeteners to Knox’s kitchen lines. A Progressive Republican (now an extinct species), she also reformed the Knox workplace, factory and office. They’d always employed women, but early on the ‘girls’ entered by a back door and worked for low pay. Rose announced equal pay promotion policies and touted Knox Gelatin as a “happiness” place. One executive announced his unwillingness to work for a woman, and left, but in the next Great Depression (in 1937) Rose was pleased to note that 85% of her employees had been with the company for at least 25 years. Good pay, good prospects, long tenure, all are good money-saving management tactics, and Rose used her profits to become a leading philanthropist in and around Johnstown. She retired in 1947, died in 1949. It was left to her grandson to sell the business, to Unilever, in 1973. It’s now owned by a German company, but here and there you can still buy Knox’s Gelatin, perhaps to leave hot soup for St. Nick on Christmas eve. Interestingly, it’s now also being used for regenerative gene therapies, a fitting end, one might say, to Rose Knox’s long labors. ©

[Stanley]

Penicilin and grape soda.
Gladys Hobby, 1910-1993

I found penicillin and have given it free for the benefit of humanity. Why should it become a profit-making monopoly of manufacturers in another country? Howard Florey, on hearing that American firms had patented their penicillin processes.

When I was five, I very nearly died from a lung infection which I can call pneumonia. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but my uncle Bill and my mother’s friend Varina DesMarias, in effect my attending physicians, later took care to tell me that I owed my salvation to penicillin. A whole lot of it. By so many injections that they had had to map my bottom. Despite Bill and Varina working for free, my whole hospital stay, penicillin and oxygen tent included, cost more than my dad’s 1948 salary (his reporting job included no health insurance). But it made me especially grateful to Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey. Fleming was the Scottish doctor who’d discovered the stuff, and Florey the Australian who proved its general effectiveness. Fair enough: but later I learned that my debt was owed also to others. Among them was Dr. Gladys Hobby. At Columbia University, New York’s Presbyterian Hospital, and then at Pfizer she was part and then leader of a team that made Fleming’s mold suitable for mass production. Gladys Lounsbury Hobby was born in New York on November 19, 1910, the daughter of a schoolteacher and a museum curator. She got her BA at Vassar and then her PhD (in Bacteriology) at Columbia. There she researched the medical uses of organic (nonpathogenic, of course) materials: in a word, “antibiotics.” The start of WWII made theory into urgent practice, and very soon factories were turning out the stuff in great enough quantities to make a big difference in the treatment (and survival) of battlefield casualties. A great many people were involved, in many places (including in a fruit market in Peoria, Illinois), but Hobby and her Columbia team made discoveries crucial to the industrialization project, and it was she, after her retirement from Pfizer, who put the story together in her aptly-entitled Penicillin: Meeting the Challenge (Yale U. P., 1985). Besides a world war, another circumstance that helped to save Bobby Bliss’s bacon was that Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey had decided it would be “unethical” (their word) to take out a patent on the stuff. So in the early 1940s it was easier than it might have been to make penicillin into a public health project. Then, as peace returned, Allied governments opened it all up to civilian use, Australia first, and then the USA in the late summer of 1945. Just in time, I might have said in December 1948, if only I had known. But what I remember most vividly is the grape soda (O-So-Grape®, now sadly deceased) that a kindly nurse gave me when I was discharged from the Allen hospital, Waterloo, Iowa, just in time for Christmas. ©

[Tripps]

Re - Penobscott. . . .

We're quite knowledgeable together aren't we?

Strange how certain facts stick in the memory. I've remembered (since 1956 I find) that the ship this chap Buster Crabbwas 'inspecting' when he vanished was called the "Ordzhonikidze".

I can't explain why it should have stuck. I now find it's the name of a district in South West Crimea. I'm waiting for it to be the million pound question on 'Millionaire'.

[Stanley]

David. I've always put it down to what I call a Velcro memory. Some facts stick and cling, others don't.

[plaques]

I remember Buster Crab. (who wouldn't) but "Ordzhonikidze" is in Alzheimer's territory.

[Tripps]

What a stupid thing to say. . . . .

[Stanley]

I don't agree Ken, it's more like mastermind territory in my book!

A woman's place . . .
Mary Buckland, 1797-1860

Ladies ought not to attend the reading of the papers—especially at a place like Oxford—as it would turn the place into a sort of dilettanti meeting instead of a serious philosophical union. William Buckland to Roderick Murchison, 1832.

The term-time house of William and Mary Buckland was part of the fabric of Christ Church College, Oxford, where William was a fellow in geology. A visitor described it as full to bursting with children and fossils, and a family silhouette confirms this, the Bucklands standing at either end of a dining table loaded with specimens while, underneath, a child toys with a mastodon tusk. The table can still be seen at a Lyme Regis museum, though without its fossil clutter: including crystallized dinosaur poop, “coprolites”, a term coined by William. Or perhaps by Mary, for she was a working partner, in the field and in the study, and it’s known that she did much to improve William’s prose. Mary Morland Buckland was born in Abingdon, Berkshire, on November 20, 1797, and into an excessively entrepreneurial family (brewers, solicitors, canal builders, improving landlords). Educated first at home and at a girls’ school, on her father’s death she moved into the Oxford home of Sir Christopher Pegge, anatomist and scientific gadfly. There she learned to draw from his specimen collections, and indeed inherited them on Pegge’s death in 1822. Contrary to a romantic legend of how she met William Buckland on a coach traveling to Dorset, she probably began drawing for him, too, as early as 1818, specializing in his fossil specimens. They married in 1825 and took their honeymoon as a year-long exploration of continental fossils and geological formations, Mary taking drily scientific notes, for instance, on how the beauties of Carrera marble came to exist. Exactly how extensively she “helped” in her husband’s work is today an issue. Despite his devotion to geological “fact,” he was hidebound in some views, for instance sticking to biblical catastrophism (Noah’s flood, etc.) in his theoretical work. He also stoutly opposed women’s attendance at scientific conferences (as unladylike and unscientific). Mary may have been more experimental in her approach, for instance once covering that dinner table with plaster of Paris and marching the family’s pet tortoise across it to help identify Cretaceous fossil tracks. Given that, Mary may have been the one who helped William move slowly (if never completely) away from his notion that all landscapes were Noachian in origin. Meanwhile she birthed nine children and raised five to adulthood, and before and after her death (in 1860) they testified to the central importance of her working relationship with her husband the famous geologist. Just like in that silhouette with its coprolites, its ammonite, its mastodon, its Irish elk hanging from the wall, and the child under the table (who became, himself, a famous naturalist). ©.