BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

"Giving Is Investing." John D. Rockefeller.

Next to doing the right thing, the most important thing is to let people know you are doing the right thing. John D. Rockefeller, Sr.

In 1969-1970, at Oxford, I often elicited laughter (or startlement) by saying that I was on rat poison money. It was partly true. My munificent grant came from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), and its money came mainly from Warfarin® and from its medicinal derivatives, principally Coumadin®. My research was on the 17th-century English empire, and it would be difficult to draw any connections (let alone sinister ones) between that and rat poison, but I was alerted to the ethical problem of accepting foundation money by graduate school friends whose research in Latin American rural sociology was not-very-covertly funded by the US Central Intelligence Agency. Now, why would the CIA be interested in rural poverty in Peru? These memories come back to me because the first charter of the Rockefeller Foundation was sealed 110 years ago, May 14, 1913, by New York Governor William Sulzer. Now the Rockefeller Foundation has done much good work, including (for Heaven’s sake?) in the humanities, arts, and social sciences, in medical research and public health. We owe the UN’s great HQ in New York City partially to the Rockefellers and their foundation, and I’m among those who still regard the UN as a good idea and a noble hope. But anything founded by that oily old rascal John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (1839-1937) and first headed up by his oily only son, a lesser rascal known as “Junior” (1874-1960) requires a closer look. Indeed, I’ve thought that there was a suspicious syncopation between the foundation’s charter and the institution of a federal income tax (both in 1913), but it seems more likely that Senior was worried about inheritance taxes. He intended the capitalization of the Foundation to safeguard the inheritances of all of his heirs, and inheritance taxes (however low they were in 1913) were a threat. Had not Senior’s fellow zillionaire, Andrew Carnegie, advocated higher inheritance taxes to preserve both the moral fiber of the capitalist classes and the equal opportunity so dear to the ‘American Dream’? And along with the many and great things that the Rockefeller Foundation has done there has run themes of the not-so-good and the downright awful, for instance eugenics research carried out in Nazi Germany. Recently the Foundation has promised to look into these worser things, and even (how’s this for irony?) to divest its fossil fuel stocks, and one does hope that at length the good will more clearly outweigh the rest. Meanwhile, although I bear no personal ill will towards rats (the rodent ones, anyway) I remain very grateful for my “Warfarin” research fellowship of 1969-1970. ©

[Stanley]

A militant woman.

We will not stop. For us there is only one outcome. Diane Nash, 1961.

The Presidential Medal of Freedom is the USA’s highest civilian award. John F. Kennedy initiated it in 1963, and thought it such a good idea that he gave out 31 before he was assassinated in November of that year. No president since has hit that pace, and Donald J. Trump gave out only 24 during his whole 4-year term. Trump’s list of honorees is also politically distinctive, including as it does Rush Limbaugh, Devin Nunes, and Jim Jordan (Trump also gave medals, posthumously, to Antonin Scalia, Babe Ruth, and Elvis). On January 11, 2021, a new political wrinkle came in when Bill Belichick, no lefty he, turned down Trump’s offer on grounds of the January 6 insurrection. Every other president has made Medal of Freedom awards across the political spectrum, as if to widen his appeal. It’s noteworthy that every president (except Trump) has given the award to leaders of the Civil Rights movement. So one of President Biden’s most recent awardees was Diane Nash, in 2022, six decades after her biggest civil rights splashes as a fearless leader of the Freedom Rides. I suspect that she refused earlier offers, for she always was a peppery character, difficult to lead, reluctant to follow, and likely to be contemptuous of those who opposed her cause. Diane Nash did not begin that way. Born on May 15, 1938, she was brought up straight-laced, within the cocoon of Chicago’s rising black middle class. Her parents worked. Her birth father was a WWII veteran, her stepfather a leader of the Pullman Porters Union. And they were all observant Catholics. Her grandmother cultivated Diane’s sense of personal worth, but disapproved of “rights talk” as too likely to elicit white backlash. Diane even competed (successfully) in beauty queen contests. So this pretty, well-spoken young woman went off to college where, first at Howard and then, more sharply, at Fisk in Nashville, TN, she learned what it meant to be black in America. She didn’t like it. A widely-read Engish major, articulate in speech and writing, Diane began to resist. She was drawn to non-violence as the only tactic, but she used it militantly. This outraged white segregationists and discomfited the more moderate leaders of the SCLC, including the sainted Dr. King. At one point, Diane admitted that if she had a leader, it was not King, but some power she found in herself, and on the whole she went her own way. Often imprisoned, she usually refused bail, and since she was arrested dozens of times Diane spent much time behind bars. There was some steel, then, in that little old lady who, in 2022, accepted the sash and the medal from Joe Biden. One suspects that she was not awarded for her patience. ©

[Stanley]

There's a deep decency in the American people, provided they have the facts.

I want a language that speaks the truth. Studs Terkel.

Today we commemorate the birth of Louis Terkel, better known as Studs Terkel, who was born on May 16, 1912. He first drew breath in New York City, but at the age of eight he moved (with his mother, father, and two brothers) to Chicago, the ‘second city’ he identified with and which provided him with a platform from which he could lob grenades in the general direction of our national cultural establishment (if such a target exists, although certainly Terkel thought it did.) In Chicago, his parents ran a boarding house. This was not the best way to coin money quickly in Chicago, but one way and another they scraped enough together to send Louis to university and law school, both at the University of Chicago. The professional training soon wore off, but never the spirit of independent inquiry. It was also the era of the Great Depression, and Terkel found some answers in James Farrell’s famous Studs Lonigan trilogy (Young Lonigan, 1932; The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, 1934; and Judgment Day, 1935). These were not ‘inspiring’ tales, at least not in the usual sense, but young Terkel was getting involved in the local arts scene, as an actor and writer, and maybe “Studs” would give him more traction than “Louis.” Acting would not be his main game, however (perhaps he left that to Orson Welles, also working in Chicago in the Federal Writers Project). Instead, Studs Terkel became an important interpreter of American life, his work backboned by his 45-year stand as emcee of a local radio “talk” program. He stuck around for that, and also for his 60+ year marriage with Ida Goldberg. I find it a little hard to believe that Studs let anyone else talk for any great length of time, unless it was Ida. But it was his talk-interview program that transformed him into a national figure and made the rest of us take notice of how ordinary folk (people like us?) lived their lives and formed their values. After a book on jazz, he hit the big time with Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (1970); Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (1974); and “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II (1985). The last won him the Pulitzer Prize. In all three books Studs Terkel brought the talk show into print, giving ordinary folk a voice-in-print. But they are better than any talk show you ever heard. Studs nearly made his century, too, dying in Chicago a few days before the 2008 election of Barack Obama, an event he would have enjoyed, and about which he would have had much to say. After all, Obama was just another young lad who came to Chicago and, unlike Farrell’s Lonigan, made good. ©.

[Stanley]

A self-made man.

‘Money’ cannot make anything, and ‘money’ cannot manage anything. Henry Ford, 1922.

In his rise to dominance in the car industry, Henry Ford shed his work gloves and his greasy coveralls to travel to Wall Street to raise money for his revolutionary notion that motor cars could be mass-produced for a mass market. He failed, and went back home to Detroit to cobble together enough capital (locally and from his own workshop efficiencies) to “do it myself.” Or so the story runs. It’s an important tale for several reasons. In political terms it marked a divide in American conservatism between coastal elites and middle westerners, the former attuned to capital markets and presidential elections. Inland Republicans tended towards ideological enthusiasms (left or right) and provincialism. The story also had echoes in the rising auto industry itself, notably in the rise of the Dodge brothers. They were John Dodge and his younger brother Horace Elgin Dodge. Horace was born in Niles, Michigan on May 17, 1868. Red-haired and aggressive, they were inseparable from childhood, working on shop floors in Detroit and Windsor, Ontario. In 1900 they moved back across the river to set up their own machine shop, making components for domestic stoves for instance, but moved quickly into bicycles. Soon they began to make auto parts for pioneers like Ford and Ramsom Olds. I don’t know how Olds paid them, but Henry Ford, chronically short on capital and thus subject to cash flow problems, paid them partly (and substantially) in Ford stock. Within ten years, the Dodge brothers were major Ford stockholders and John was Ford’s vice president. The Dodge brothers and Henry Ford fed off each other’s efficiencies, and the Dodges even built their own components plant to continue the relationship. But their partnership was transactional, not personal, and time would prove that they were not friends. Ford aimed to buy them out. Horace and John wanted their own motor car, upmarket, all steel, more attuned to ‘performance’ standards, more in line with their own brash personalities. Their cars succeeded, and their money established them as the most nouveau of Detroit’s new rich, building castles in Grosse Point and massive yachts to ply the Great Lakes and then the great oceans. Soon the high life appealed more than did the hard life of innovation and management. Horace outlived John just long enough to live just high enough to die of cirrhosis. His widow sold the whole show (in 1925, ironically, to a New York investment firm) and the Dodge car lived on as an adjunct brand for Chrysler. The Dodges’ abrasive personalities rest today in a large, Egyptian-style mausoleum, guarded (from who knows what horrors) by giant sphinxes, and not very far from their first ‘Ford’ components plant. ©.

[Stanley]

Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go, Nor heed the rumble of a distant Drum!

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough
A jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
O, Wilderness were Paradise enow!
--From The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, 1859 translation.

My last report card in high school English carried the comment that I had “really blossomed out this year.” It took me some months to live that down, because in 1961, in Des Moines, 18-year-old boys did not ‘blossom out.’ My English teacher throughout high school was Oakley Valmore Ethington, who looked like Alfred Hitchcock and sang poetry to us, marking rhythm at his piano and rhyme in his rich tenor. In our sophomore year, he’d embarrassed us all with his noisy rendition of Vachel Lindsay’s “General William Booth Enters Into Heaven,” the line “Booth led boldly with his big bass drum” banged out with heavy chords from the baby grand. Oakley’s poetry was English and American, but there was an import from Arabia, quatrains from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. I can’t remember how Oakley read it, or sang it, but I do vividly recall that bit about “A Jug of Wine--and Thou beside me singing in the Wilderness” with its idea of a “Paradise” far removed from the one promised by my Presbyterian Church. It came from the 1859 translation by Edward FitzGerald, an early expression of the “orientalism” which so skewed western understanding of the rest of the world. Back in Ethington’s class, I loved its temptations and barely (if at all) learned that Khayyam was much more than a rhymester. Omar Khayyam was born on May 18, 1048, in Nishapur, Persia. We know the date not because he was a poet but because his horoscope (cast by a friend) enabled modern astronomers to fix it exactly. Besides (probably) being a gifted poet, Omar Khayyam (birthname in full Ghiyāth al-Dīn Abū al-Fatḥ ʿUmar ibn Ibrāhīm Nīsābūrī ) was certainly one of that legion of Muslim scholars that preserved and extended the wisdom of classical Greece. His family was prosperous enough to send Omar to study under the Seljuq empire’s greatest Imams and scholars. There he became himself a leading scholar and, probably, an eminent courtier. He held forth as a polymath, a sometime theologian but an always scientist. Besides absorbing Greek science, he made original contributions in astronomy, algebra, geometry, seems to have had an inkling of what would become calculus, and among other things calculated with the length of the earth’s year to within a hair’s breadth of the modern finding. And of course he was an astrologer, one who predicted that his tomb would be placed so that the “north wind may scatter roses over it.” If you visit Nishapur, you can view his modern mausoleum, rising strikingly among flowering trees. With luck, a north wind will be blowing. ©.

[Stanley]

Fine English cuisine?? Surely you jest!!

To make good pastry, you simply have to be really relaxed and in a lighthearted mood. John Tovey.

If you’ve not yet seen Fawlty Towers (BBC, 1975, 1979, ad infinitum) you must. It still streams on Britbox, providing excruciating comedy for those who can bear it: its episodes embody every horror you’ve ever wanted to believe about the English private hotel: its hospitality (at its rare best, grudging and calculated), its food (veggies boiled to mush, meat from workmen’s boots), and its dreadful proprietors. In this case it was the bipolar Basil Fawlty, dreaming of his hotel’s glorious future but weighed down by its present realities (including his wife Sybil, she of the serpent’s tooth). But there are—or have been—enough non-Fawlty Towers that one can no longer write of “fine English cuisine” as an oxymoronic conceit. Between 1970 and 1997, we found several such places within shouting distance of our home in Lancaster. Of those, let’s pick Miller Howe, at Bowness, overlooking Windermere (the largest of the English Lakes). First a private mansion, it was an OK hotel when in 1971 it was taken over by John Tovey, and for a quarter century he made it into a place where one could go assured of pleasing service, over-lovely bedrooms, and the sort of food that made headline news, though never (as far as I know) for its e. coli. John Tovey was born in Barrow-in-Furness on May 19, 1933, a working-class boy in a working-class town, where he endured a grim childhood made grimmer by his emerging sexuality. He fled to Southern Rhodesia, but came back, first as a theatre manager in Barrow but then as general dogsbody apprentice at Sharrow Bay Hotel, on Ullswater, the Lake District’s most beautiful lake. Sharrow Bay was often praised in despatches from the food critics’ battle front, and at least once made the New York Times list of the world’s best eateries. However much or little Tovey contributed to this Ullswater success, he soon moved on to Miller Howe. He bought it for £36,500 and with almost indecent speed transformed it into a £2.5 million business, famous for its evening meals (always a set menu) but pretty amazing for breakfast. You didn’t need to stay there to eat there, but it helped. The idea of driving home (in our case, 50 miles) after a Miller Howe meal was daunting. The chances of dying from overindulgence (or sated drowsiness) seemed too great on the Lake District’s narrow and twisting roads. Tovey sold Miller Howe in 1998 and moved back to Southern Africa with his partner Paolo Rebello. He died in 2018, widely mourned by lovers of fine food served with panache and unfailing courtesy. These are always the best condiments, and they were forever beyond the reach of Basil Fawlty. ©

[Stanley]

Making a self-made man

Patient work and excellent judgment amassed for him a large fortune, which he used generously and judiciously. From a San Francisco obituary for William George Fargo, 1881.

With no apologies to the Texas board of education, I call our economy “capitalist”. American capitalism has many roots, and among them is the Erie Canal. Although it ran “only” from Buffalo to Albany, it launched a market in goods and money that flowed from the new-plowed prairies of the ‘Old Northwest’ all the way to Liverpool, London, and Hamburg. All along it, entrepreneurs ‘bought’ grain not yet planted on land not yet settled, in the process creating the futures market and harvesting fortunes. And it was (as so much in US economic history) funded on public money, taxes and bond issues, which is why Thomas Jefferson called it a “madness.” For others, making fortunes from moving goods and money was a dream, especially if one grew up on or near the canal’s “water-level” route. Among these dreamers was William George Fargo, born on a farm outside Buffalo, NY, on May 20, 1818. The Erie ‘dig’ had then already begun, and would be finished when Fargo turned 7. The canal vastly increased the value of his father’s farmland (before and after the acreage was ‘redeveloped’), but more to the point it gave young Fargo his first gainful employment (he needed that, for he had 11 siblings, who couldn’t all be farmers). As a shipping agent’s clerk at various points along the canal, Fargo thought of greater things. Several prize-winning histories have shown how, along the Erie, economic ambition fused with moral or religious revivals to make such dreams real (for those who succeeded, at least), and we make take Fargo as a model self-made man. He quickly (in 1845) and perceptively moved from canals to the newer-fangled railways (many of them built with public funds), where he became a major stockholder and executive in the New York Central. Inter alia: his RR connections spread like a spider’s web, which is one reason why Fargo, ND, is named after him, but he was not averse to main chance ventures, as in taking over the government contracts for the Pony Express at the outbreak of the Civil War. Though a lifelong Democrat, Fargo was a Union man, and paid part salary of any employee who joined the northern armies. By then he had quite a few employees, and indeed he’s much better known as a cofounder (and sometime CEO) of American Express (think “travelers’ checks”) and the Wells-Fargo banking and investment businesses (not to mention its stage-coaches). Moving money, Fargo foresaw, was at least as profitable as freighting flour. True to his ilk, he remained civic-minded, not only as Buffalo’s mayor but also investing in or endowing several charitable or public enterprises. To do so was his moral imperative and, perhaps also, William Fargo thus remembered where his money had come from in the first place. ©

[Stanley]

David and Ella, David and Ida, David and Mary.

The subject in question has caused me a great amount of pain and sorrow, perhaps more than you could imagine. Ella Stewart Udall to Ida Hunt Udall, March 12, 1882.

For many years, I involved my final-year undergraduates in a contest in which they were to name, and describe, what was (or should have been) “the shortest-ever history text.” Some suggestions were achingly funny, especially when they mirrored “real” historical studies, for instance “the intellectual history of the colonial south” (there was a 3-volume ‘blockbuster’ on colonial Virginia’s intellectual history). Some seemed utterly oxymoronic, like “Mormon Feminism.” We all laughed heartily at that suggestion. Laughed like fools: for studies soon began to appear about the powers and freedoms fought for, and sometimes enjoyed, by the Mormon sisterhood. Joseph Smith, Mormonism’s founding prophet, started preaching, perhaps practicing, the idea in the 1830s. Its biblical warrant was revealed in 1842 by Smith, and was confirmed as orthodoxy in 1852 and again in 1876. It outraged many ‘gentiles,’ of course. Often polygamy was seen as a kind of sexual slavery, one man lording it over a female seraglio. But it wasn’t quite so simple. In 19th-century industrial slums and along the farming frontier, the utter dependence of single wives upon their single husbands made plural marriage seem (to some) relatively secure. Some ‘gentile’ women were drawn to it, as Mormon converts, and within the polygamous household sisterhoods (of two or more wives) offered task sharing, some forms of sexual security, and sisterly counsel. So Mormon feminism did exist. But polygamy could be difficult, even for a woman born within the faith, like Ella Stewart (Udall), born to (polygamous) Mormon pioneers in Salt Lake City on May 21, 1855. After a time working alone on the Mormon frontier (she ran a telegraph office in Arizona territory), she married David King Udall in 1875, and uneasily agreed to his later marriages to Ida Hunt (1881) and then Mary Morgan (1903). The latter union came more than a decade after the Church of Latter-Day Saints had officially abandoned polygamy as a prelude to full statehood and as a practical way to avoid the exactions of a federal law (1888) outlawing the practice. Ella remained wed to David Udall, but for long periods lived alone with her own “natural” children. In Arizona, she built several thriving businesses and, through her sons and grandsons, became the matriarch of the Udall political dynasty (liberal Democrats all of them, by the way). Ella and David together celebrated their golden anniversary in 1925, and both served in high positions in the Arizona church. And, together or apart, they outlived both of David’s ‘other’ wives. Ella died in 1935. David King Udall died three years later, apparently a widower but, one guesses, an unreconstructed polygamist. ©.

[Stanley]

It's no use talking about the problem unless you talk about solutions.

Peace is not wimpy. It’s about sitting down and negotiating with people you hate. Ultimately, wars end, and you have to deal with the enemy. Betty Williams.

The bloodless, heartless euphemism “collateral damage” became common usage in American battlefield reports coming out of Viet Nam. It refers to human beings, bystanders not combatants, “innocents” if you prefer, whose misfortune it was to be caught up in warfare, maimed or killed for no good reason—and no bad reason, either: no reason at all. One of the most heart-wrenching incidents of “collateral damage” happened during Northern Ireland’s most recent period of “troubles” (speaking of euphemisms). In August 1976, in Belfast, a young IRA operative (he was probably a gun runner) was shot and killed by a British army patrol. His car swerved out of control and crushed Anne Maguire and her children against the iron railings of a primary school. Three Maguire kids died, aged 8, 2, and six weeks. Anne Maguire survived, grievously injured in body and mind, and suicided four years later. For an onlooker, though, who rushed to help with the bloody mess of collateral damage, it was the very last of last straws. She was Betty Williams, née Smyth, another Belfast mother, born on May 22, 1943. Herself the product of a mixed marriage (Protestant father, Catholic mother) she had been loosely involved with peace efforts for some time. But the Maguire tragedy moved her to serious and sustained action. First was a peace march of 10,000 women, to the kids’ graves, and when that was disrupted (by the Provisional IRA) 20,000 showed up the next week, Protestant and Catholic, mothers, sisters, daughters, bravely using their bodies and their voices to announce to the world that enough was enough. They called themselves “Women for Peace,” but soon became the “Peace People,” and from their ranks emerged another leader, Mairead Corrigan who joined with Williams to walk, lobby, speak, and write to end the troubles and bring resolution. It was a local sensation, discomfiting paramilitaries on both sides, and bringing Williams and Corrigan threats to their lives (and their families’). To the world at large, the Peace People promised a solution to an intractable problem, and with unseemly haste the world responded, in 1977, with the Nobel Peace Prize. Sadly, the partnership foundered on several issues. Both women continued their efforts for peace, Williams going world wide in her war on war and becoming, for instance, a fierce critic of the American invasion of Iraq and a defender of British Muslims against white nationalist attacks. Both women lived long enough (Williams died in 2020, in Belfast) to witness the Good Friday accords and the beginnings in Ireland of a still-fragile ‘peace process.’ We are all their debtors. They undertook, and sustained, a struggle against the fates. ©.

[Stanley]

The climate is changing, but weather is changeable.

Mathematicians seem to have no difficulty in creating new concepts faster than the old ones become well understood. Edward Norton Lorenz.

My Uncle Ed, a farmer, was good at predicting the weather, and he often made a show of it, standing in the farmyard, scanning the skies, wetting his finger and holding it up to get the wind’s flow just right. Ed was generally right and, generally, in the days before NOAA radar, we took his word for it. Generally but not infallibly. Indeed, ‘generally but not infallibly’ might well be the motto of any serious meteorologist, and today it filters down to the rest of us in the forms of forecasts like “a 30% chance of thunderstorms.” And even if we live mid-continent, well away from any likely hurricane path, we are familiar with how different “models” of hurricane prediction (the “American,” the “European,” and others) make exact forecasts devilishly difficult. As far as weather goes, we live in a world of ‘certain uncertainty.’ That oddity owes much to the work of Edward Norton Lorenz, who was born in Connecticut on May 23, 1917. A meteorologist sans pareil, he spent most of his working life at MIT, and we might say he was fated to go there. His grandfather had been on the faculty, his engineer father was an alumnus, and if that were not enough his mother was a games fanatic, especially chess. But for Lorenz, fate was one thing, chance another, and his path to MIT was circuitous. First there was a BS in mathematics at Dartmouth, then an MA (math also) at Harvard, and then, as chance would have it, there was WWII. The military needed to know the weather as exactly as possible, and there were already visionaries who thought that objective required mathematicians, and so Lorenz became a forecaster for the Army Air Force, viewing the data (or wetting his finger) as a mathematician. So it was that he went back to math (at MIT, indeed) but now as a weatherman. And he modeled the weather. The more data he modeled the more it looked like ‘predictable unpredictability.’ In his most famous paper, 1967, Lorenz called it “Deterministic nonperiodic flow.” In 1969, Lorenz posited that a Caribbean hurricane might originate thousands of miles away in the beat of a seagull’s wings. It’s since been popularized, or poetized, as “the butterfly effect,” the idea that a chance event in one part of the weatherverse can cause a storm somewhere else. Or prevent. It looks like quantum theory, or the fable of Schrodingers Cat, but in meteorology and other fields it's called chaos theory. Just like Uncle Ed’s, Edward Lorenz’s predictions tell us that when it comes to the weather, all predictions, though deterministic by definition, have limits. To grasp that problem is also to begin to see the differences between ‘weather’ and ‘climate.’ ©

[Stanley]

A founder of Reform Judaism.

Draw from the past, live in the present, work for the future. Rabbi Abraham Geiger.

Growing up in Des Moines, most of my Jewish friends worshipped at B’Nai Jeshurun, a ‘Reform’ temple. My Presbyterian confirmation class went there to study the links between Judaism and Christianity, and at my friends’ homes I learned more of the three Des Moines congregations, ‘Reform,’ ‘Conservative,’ and ‘Orthodox.’ I learned more, later, for a course I taught, in England, on “Religion in America, 1607-1865.” Given my Des Moines experience, and my book learning, I initially presented American Reform Judaism (which took root before the Civil War) as the more liberal and assimilationist of the three, and more accommodationist too, more likely to adapt Jewish ritual (and substance?) to the revival temper then sweeping American Protestantism. Warned by the historian Timothy Smith (himself an evangelical Protestant), I then abandoned those simplicities. Smith’s work showed that European Judaism was already being altered by the kinds of economic and political change that “evangelized” US Protestantism. In Eastern Europe, there were even rabbis “riding circuit,” doing their best to keep up with their mobile congregants just like Ohio Methodists. More than that, there was the rabbi identified as the chief founder of Reform Judaism, Abraham Geiger. He was a reformer to be sure but neither an assimilationist nor an accommodationist. Geiger, born in Frankfurt on May 24, 1810, might better be seen as a Jewish militant. As a rabbi, he wanted to stop ‘assimilation,’ that process by which western European Jews were secularizing, and, in many cases, converting to Christianity. To do this, he wanted to modernize Judaism, not to make it more Protestant, certainly not more American. Geiger came to this insight through his study of ancient languages, Hebrew of course but also Greek and Aramaic, and via a broad attack on rabbinical tradition. If Christianity could modernize and become more vital, more relevant to the modern lives of its adherents, then why not Judaism? Judaism, he argued, was not a nationality but a faith, one that in its essence didn’t require special diets, particular dress, or prayers for a return to Zion. Geiger went much further to point out how other faiths, Christianity and Islam, had depended on Jewish ideas (notably monotheism and the notion of covenant) to become the dominating communions of his 19th-century world. He proposed a new dynamic for his faith, and pushed it through at synods in Breslau and Frankfurt. Reform Judaism was not peculiarly ‘American,’ nor was it assimilationist. Reform Judaism is what it is, and that’s what Abraham Geiger intended. ©.

[Tripps]

I was thinking about religion yesterday - leaving aside Reform Judaism and Ohio Protestantism, and Abrahamic faiths in general, I serendipitously and slightly by accident accidently googled into this -Thaipusam Festival at Batu Caves Kuala Lumpur Malaysia.

I visited this place in 1966. It was not at all commercialised then and there were no statues. I'd never heard of 'Lord Murugan'. The star attraction was a five legged sacred cow. I climbed all the stairs then I went to stare at it as did everyone.

I had in mind that Rishi Sunak is a practising Hindu. Couldn't help remembering that when he read from the Bible at the Coronation.

Try googling Thaipusam and Kavadi. Lots of interesting rituals. rarely seen in Westminster

[Stanley]

A successful female courtier.

“Connection" was the cement of the governing class. From Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam.

Kerfuffles in and conflicts about the new King Charles III and his court, how the crown giveth and taketh away its favors and its duties remind us that once upon a time the king and his court were the government, with (proportionately) much more money and many more favors to dispense. In that wider world of patronage and clientage men gave and received the choicest plums and the greatest powers, but some women made their own way. One such cut her teeth in the court of a queen regnant, the first Elizabeth, but then scrambled to enjoy success in the courts of James I (VI of Scotland) and his queen consort, Anne of Denmark. This lady courtier was born Lady Lucy Harington, probably in early January 1581, but died Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford, on May 25, 1627. Well-finished at home (the Haringtons had homes in Warwickshire and at court) to have fluency in languages and nurture a yen for writing herself, she seemed a good adjunct for the courtier Edward Russell, 3rd Earl of Bedford, and was married off to him in December 1594. After a quick miscarriage (in 1596) Lucy never did produce a living heir, but she compensated by helping her husband escape the bloodier penalties of supporting the Earl of Essex’s rebellion (against Elizabeth I) in 1601. Instead of losing his head, Bedford was assessed a £10,000 fine, a stupendous sum that brought his total debt to £40,000. Working together and apart, they set about paying it all off. Aged only 22, Lucy had the foresight to travel to Scotland with a gaggle of lady friends, meet the new Queen Anne, and escort her to London, where Anne’s court would be Lucy’s main base. There she acted in several ‘masques,’ court plays of a peculiar sort, established herself as a patron of the arts, and enjoyed office (and its perks) in Anne’s royal bedchamber. Lucy was an active patron of John Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays, also for John Donne, Ben Jonson, and other Elizabethan and Jacobean writers, and was a successful latecomer in the paintings market. She worked wider fields too, and secured patents, or shares, in various royal monopolies (Newcastle coals and gold and silver threads, for example) and in a couple of colonizing ventures. So the Bedfords “made do.” Perhaps the current duchess of Sussex had Lucy in mind. But maybe not, for Lucy Russell was of the Puritan persuasion, patron of many religious publications and sometime protector of ‘The Protestant Queen,’ Elizabeth of Bohemia. The Russells’ country mansion at Moor Park is now the home of a very posh country club, more in the Sussex style, but the earl’s title went to his cousin and then percolated down through the ages to make much more substantial history. ©.

[Stanley]

And Florence Owens Thompson, 1903-1983

Bad as it is, the world is potentially full of good photographs. But to be good, photographs have to be full of the world. Dorothea Lange, 1952.

Dorothea Lange spent her working life documenting the bad world through good photography. She’s best known for her pictures of American poverty, working for the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression. Lange insisted that her pictures were born of her compassion, not ‘liberal’ voyeurism. She was herself no stranger to poverty. The child of 2nd-generation immigrants, born in Hoboken, NJ, on May 26, 1895, Dorothea Lange took her mother’s maiden name when her birth father abandoned the family and sank it deeper into poverty. Her childhood polio left her with a bad limp but, she later said, “formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me, and humiliated me.” Meanwhile her mother Johanna worked to ensure that Dorothea got a good education, in NYC public schools and then at Columbia University. Along the way, Dorothea developed a burning ambition to be a photographer. She was in San Francisco running her own portrait studio when the Depression hit. Almost immediately, Lange turned herself into a documentary photographer of rare sensitivity. Her pictures, first of migrant workers in California, later of sharecroppers in the deep South, then of Japanese internees during WWII, are achingly familiar. They include the most famous of all Depression pictures, the one today called “Migrant Mother.” It was taken near Nipomo, in the Imperial Valley, at a huge ‘resettlement’ camp. It shows a mother and two kids in a roadside windbreak. The mother peers into a distance, gaunt but noble. Her girls shelter behind her. One could write an imagined life into that picture, and many have (including Lange), but in 1978, 13 years after Lange’s death, the real subject was (re)discovered. She was Florence Owens Thompson (1903-1983), born on tribal lands in Oklahoma, and (almost certainly) part Cherokee. Over her long lifetime, Florence married three times and birthed ten children. Hers was a hard life, but after the Depression and with her third husband she found security, a measure of happiness, and pride in the role her picture had played in awakening America to its own realities. Florence had even lived in a house, for a time, but when her third husband passed several of her children (including the two in the famed photo) indulged her fondest wishes and bought her a nice mobile home in the Modesto Mobile Village. Whether Thompson’s pictures (Lange took six shots) could be exhibited today in a Florida school is an interesting question, for they might hurt someone’s feelings, Florence being part-Cherokee and all, but Lange and Thompson remembered their 1936 encounter as embodying equality. For more, see the Library of Congress at http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/list/128_migm.html. Most of Lange’s pictures belong to the Deep State. ©

[Stanley]

The Commodore

I for one will never go to law when I have got the power in my own hands to see myself right. Cornelius Vanderbilt, in testimony to the New York state legislature, 1867.

The American cult of the “self-made man” has a history. The phrase came into common usage in the religious revivals of the early 19th century to describe the task of creating one’s own ‘character.’ Not out of whole cloth, perhaps, but as an individual cast adrift from family, often the family farm, working alone to make a new life in the bustling cities of Jacksonian America. Best to make that life a moral one, to be an honest, hard-working, good fellow and to follow the advices of that old rogue Ben Franklin, early to bed and early to rise to become healthy and wise. In that way, becoming wealthy might signify a moral as well as a material triumph, and so the phrase became increasingly associated with the country’s great plutocrats, the so-called “robber barons” of the industrial and financial revolutions. In point of fact, as scholars Thomas Cochrane and William Miller pointed out decades ago, most of these men were, if not silver-spooned, then at least racers with a head start, but there were a few whose stories really were of the rags-to-riches genre. Among these was Cornelius Vanderbilt, descended from Dutch indentured servants whose very surname was a fantasy (one ancestor, named Aertszoon, was from the city of de Bilt, and later restyled himself Van der Bilt). But Cornelius Vanderbilt was born poor, on Staten Island, on May 27, 1794. His was a hard-scrabble youth, sailing his dad’s ferry around New York’s harbor, but he kept at it, penny-wise, borrowed more money, and set himself up as ferryman and ferry owner. He worked so hard and was so eager to please that his competitors called him “Commodore,” probably in derision, but as he waxed wealthy the name stuck as an honorific. He started in steamboats, succeeded in that, leased some of his ships to the Union Navy during the Civil War, and then decided that railroading was the way to even greener pastures. No doubt he worked really hard, but he was a hard man, and many of his competitors felt his sting, in open competition and, if that failed, in courts and legislatures where he broke old monopolies in order to make his own new ones. He fathered 11 kids, most of whom he didn’t like, so he left the bulk of his fortune to just one of them, Billy. The others had learned enough from the Commodore to challenge the will in court. Their winning were small in relation to the whole estate. Billy’s haul was so big that his own large brood became famous for the mansions they built, including The Breakers, Newport, RI, and The Biltmore, Asheville, NC, although there was a castle in Hungary. Of course Billy and his kids were all “self-made men”: except for Billy’s daughters, who were self-made women, including the one who married a Hungarian count. ©

[Stanley]

The last of the summer wine

There's a sign on the bottom of my bed that says: 'Don't stop doing things 'cos you're growing old, 'cos you'll only grow old if you stop doing things.' Thora Hird, 2001, in The Guardian.

One of the longest-running TV sitcoms was BBC1’s Last of the Summer Wine. We became addicts shortly after its first pilot (1973), and continued to watch fairly faithfully until we moved to St. Louis. Now, if ever we need a fix, it’s being streamed. Overall, it ran for 31 seasons (there were interruptions) between 1973 and 2010. It centered on the exploits and imaginings of three retired men. Each was crotchety in his own way, and each of them singly (and occasionally in unison) were endlessly capable of exasperating their neighbors in a small northern mill town. Many (later, all) episodes were filmed on location, Holmfirth in West Yorkshire, a charmingly dull place packed into a Pennine valley. Among its strengths was nostalgia (surprisingly unsentimental, for the three main characters’ crotchets could be downright tiresome), but perhaps its greatest strength was the utter professionalism of its cast, drawn almost entirely from the ranks of local and regional theatres, some even from London’s West End. Many of them stayed with the series forever. Or, more accurately, almost forever. Among the longest-lived of these old hoofers was Thora Hird, who played Edie Pagden, a sharp-tongued woman of a certain age, whose comic role was sagely to provide silly advice to her neighbor women, her harried husband, and to the three central characters. Thora Hird was born of acting stock in the Lancashire seaside town of Morecambe on May 28, 1911. She made her first stage appearance at the age of 2 months. Thora was 62 when the series began. After she joined the cast she played the wife of the local mechanic, Wesley Pagden (acted by Gordon Whamby, another old pro). By then, she’d acted plays, films, and radio, usually in ‘character’ roles, but in the process attracting many admirers both in and outside the theatre. Among the latter were several members of the royal family, which may be one of the reasons she was made (in 1993) a Dame of the British Empire. More than that, her abilities won her “character” Shakespearean roles (e.g. the nurse in Romeo and Juliet) and the admiration of contemporary playwrights like Alan Bennett, who crafted two scripts for Thora in his Talking Heads monologues. And my own university, Lancaster, had already (in 1989) honored Thora Bird with a D.Litt., a local girl made good. I could not find her role in her début, in Morecambe, late summer of 1911, but I imagine her as playing it in character. In the audience there were perhaps a few folk from Holmfirth, for Morecambe was but a train ride away and a favorite holiday spot for the working folk of Yorkshire’s mill towns. ©

[Tripps]

Or, more accurately, almost forever. Among the longest-lived of these old hoofers was Thora Hird, who played Edie Pagden

Or even more accurately - Edith (Edie) Pegden. nee Utterthwaite.. (Brother was "our Seymour").

Scandal that Roy Clarke was never knighted. There's still time though - he's only ninety three. . .

[Stanley]

The Viscous Circle at the Algonquin

My name is my identity and must not be lost. From the original motto of the Lucy Stone League, May 1921.

One of the members of an entertainment troupe bound for Europe and the battlefields of the War to End All Wars was a 25-year old woman who had gone to New York (aged only 16!!) to be an opera singer but instead became the first full-time, paid female reporter at the city desk of the New York Times. She’d started out at The Times reporting (part-time, of course) on women and their doings, but fretted about it because she felt that she could be as hard-bitten (and as fully paid and put upon) as any cynical (male) journalist. Thus armed in advance, she worked her way over to the city desk. Come American entry into WWI, Grant reverted to singing and dancing, for the Young Men’s Christian Association, no less, not (yet) carrying an Enfield but entertaining the (male) troops near the front lines. So here was Jane Grant, doing her bit for the war effort. She was born in Joplin, Missouri, on May 29, 1892, and raised in rural Kansas to think she was just as good as anyone else, and better than some. She was doubtless to young to hear Mary Ellen Lease urge farmers to “raise more hell and less corn,” but she learned something out there on the prairies. At the Times Jane became someone to know if you enjoyed thinking, writing, and sharp conversation. Once in Europe, her friend from the newspaper, Alexander Woollcott, introduced her to several other like minds, one of whom was another 25-year old from the provinces (born in Colorado but by way of California, Kansas, and Panama), Harold Ross, then reporting for the Paris edition of Stars and Stripes. And thus was born the nucleus of The New Yorker magazine and the ‘Vicious Circle’ that would do so much to give Manhattan its sparkle during the 1920s and into the 1930s. Grant and Ross (who married in 1920 and divorced in 1929) co-founded the magazine (in uneasy partnership with the yeast manufacturer Raoul Fleischmann), and Grant was especially important in finding (and, when needed, grubstaking) promising young writers, including women of course for Jane Grant—who kept her name through two marriages—was also a founding sister of the modern feminist movement, and in 1921 (with Ruth Hale) founded the Lucy Stone League (“My name is my identity and must not be lost”) bringing into it such future Vicious Circlers as Anita Loos and Heywood Broun (men were allowed to join this equal opportunity organization). Grant later (by then married to Fortune editor William Harris) revived the League and widened its objectives. In 1950 Grant won the legal right (which she had, of course, long exercised as a private person of the female persuasion) to retain their birthnames on passports, voter rolls, and drivers’ licenses. After Jane and Harold divorced, she picked up with William Harris, an editor at Fortune magazine. Both of them well-heeled, financially speaking, they married in 1939, left the Big Apple to start a fruit farm near Lichfield, Connecticut, and then expanded it as the White Flower Farm, a successful mail order business for home gardeners. Jane also continued to write, including for H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury, which (given Mencken’s reputation as The Bad Boy of Baltimore) must have been a sparkling relationship. Jane Grant died in 1972. Two years later, William Harris did the right thing with their money and left $3.5 million to the Jane Grant Women’s Study Center at the University of Oregon. There you will also find Ms. Grant’s letters and papers which, I think, would make a fascinating read. ©

[Stanley]

Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

So in the dark we hide the heart that bleeds,
And wait, and tend our agonizing seeds
Taken from “From the Dark Tower,” by Countee Cullen

Countee Cullen’s life was from its beginning on May 30, 1903, full to bursting with enigmas. Scholars have generally accepted his birth-date, but remain unsure of his birth-place. He sometimes claimed it was New York City, but then he also claimed the surname of the Rev’d Frederick Asbury Cullen pastor of what became Harlem’s largest church, Salem Methodist, who in 1918 adopted (perhaps unofficially) Countee LeRoy Porter, recently orphaned by the death of Countee’s grandma, a Salem Church parishioner. Already young Countee was a prodigy, and he continued being one at DeWitt Clinton High School, an academically selective public where Countee became a classicist (Greek, Latin, and the ancient mythologies) and went on to graduate Phi Beta Kappa at NYU, in 1925. Cullen never quite reconciled that background with being a black poet in a racist society. Much of his poetry is full of classical allusions, and he also often referred to his puzzlement at being ‘African.’ In one of his best poems, “Yet I Do Marvel,” Cullen wonders why a benevolent God (“good, well-meaning, kind”) did such a “curious thing” as to “make a poet black, and bid him sing.” This enigmatic ambivalence may be why Cullen never attained the heroic status, in the ‘Harlem Renaissance,’ as did Langston Hughes or Zora Neale Hurston. He was, however, an acknowledged member of the Renaissance, even a leader, and recognized as such by many black artists and scholars, not least Duke Ellington and Alain Locke. Not only them, and others, but there was also W. E. B. Dubois, who gladly took Cullen on as a son-in-law and in 1928 threw one of the biggest weddings in Harlem history for the poet, as groom, and for Dubois’s daughter Yolande, the bride. The wedding, of course, took place in Salem Methodist, hundreds in attendance and the Rev’d Frederick Cullen presiding. That marriage, Cullen’s first, played out in Paris, and ended there, too, in 1930, probably because of another of Cullen’s ambiguities, his sexuality. Yolande thought him gay, but he was more likely bisexual. He continued to have affairs with men, but his second marriage, to Ida Robertson in 1940, lasted until his death in 1946 and was a happy one. By that time, Cullen had branched out, creatively, to write children’s books, more poetry (in much of which he tussled with the ideas of the Négritude movement), and even adapt an Arna Bontemps (she of the Harlem Renaissance) novel as a Broadway Musical (St. Louis Woman, 1946, score composed by the white jazzman Johnny Mercer). Much of Countee Cullen’s work would, today, be banned in Florida schools. But he is a legendary figure, and his poetry would be well worth your while. ©.

[Stanley]

Will the 'real' Rube Goldberg please stand up?

If a man has good corn or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods. Ralph Waldo Emerson

That is what Emerson wrote, but we credit him instead with “build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.” This distance between the ‘real’ quotation and the revised version measures our modern fascination with labor-saving gadgetry. It’s really a cult, and thus it invites satire, for too often the gadget requires more labor than it saves (not to mention the frustration involved in setting it up). It’s often a visual satire, as in the USA with Rube Goldberg’s cartoons. My dad remembered best those that ran in Colliers Weekly (1929-1931) as “The Inventions of Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts.” Goldberg then moved over to the Des Moines Register & Tribune where he continued to draw up fantastical devices for such simple tasks as blowing one’s nose. Goldberg, trained as an engineer, did not invent the genre of gadget-bashing. Indeed, several nations have laughed heartily at what, in Germany, is called the “what-comes-next-machine.” The British Rube Goldberg was Heath Robinson, born in London as William Heath Robinson on May 31, 1872. Robinson came to his art naturally. For several generations his forbears had been skilled tinkerers, bookbinders, watchmakers, engravers, and his father was successful enough to provide Heath with a good mechanical education. Except that Heath, by his own account a rather willful lad, didn’t like the schooling and preferred to draw things. That yen bore fruit in a Royal Academy scholarship, and then in illustrations for fantastical children’s stories and poems (the Arabian nights, Hans Christian Andersen, Edgar Allen Poe) before Robinson hit his stride by illustrating his own fantasy, The Adventures of Uncle Lubin (1902) and then a spoof edition (2 vols) of The Works of Mr. Francis Rabelais (1904). He continued as a children’s fantasy illustrator for the rest of his life, but was encouraged (by his own inventiveness and an evident taste for the absurd) to go into the mousetrap business, to the extent of designing a whole house full of impossible gadgetry (1934) and if that was too much (even for Robinson) he downscaled to write, and of course illustrate, How to Live in a Flat (1936) and then upscaled again to How to Build a New World (1941), a kind of reprise of his very successful WWI cartoons. When I first arrived in England (1969) and heard about Heath Robinson, I was inclined to see him as the ‘British Rube Goldberg.’ But in truth it may have been the other way ‘round. The better mousetrap cult recognizes no national boundaries. ©.

[Stanley]

Haussmann's banal canvas?

Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty. Charles Baudelaire.

Perhaps the greatest urban renewal project of the modern era was the remodeling of Paris which began in earnest under the Emperor Napoléon III (the great Bonaparte’s nephew) and his hand-picked chef-d’oeuvre Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann. It’s famous for its grand, open boulevards (which made “vista” an urban possibility), its great parks and green spaces, and its grand squares or Places, notably the ‘star’ of the show, the Place d’Etoile. The project (which may be said to have lasted until 1927) was not without its critics, who have persisted through time, for instance to give its style, its architecture, the bad name of “Second Empire”, bulbous, monumental, and bourgeois to its core. That old sourpuss Emile Zola (1840-1902) claimed it was also designedly reactionary, making Paris resistant to the street barricades ad revolutionary mobs that had defined so much of its history (especially from 1789 to the coup d’état of Louis Napoleon himself). Scholars have pieced together enough of Haussmann’s comments to make this accusation seem rational, but on the whole the Emperor and his baron aimed to make Paris a city of light, and they seem to have succeeded. It’s less well appreciated that Haussmann’s project provoked Charles Baudelaire into adding a whole new section to his Les fleurs du mal, first published on June 1, 1857. As the title (‘the flowers of evil’) indicates, Baudelaire meant his poetry to have revolutionary effect. He created an essay in cultural criticism, and it has had a lasting effect on modern French culture: all the arts, philosophy, even down to the French vogue for the American “noir” films of the 1940s and 1950s. In the foreword of the original edition, Baudelaire challenged his readers to think their worst of their patrie:
If rape, poison, dagger and fire,
Have still not embroidered their pleasant designs
On the banal canvas of our pitiable destinies,
It's because our soul, alas, is not bold enough!
So, predictably, Baudelaire was inspired by Napoleon’s project to add, in 1861, another section to Les fleurs, called Tableaux Parisiens, a series of 18 scorching criticisms of ‘modernity’ in general and of Haussmann’s vandalisms in particular. In cleaning Paris up, Haussmann had made it antiseptic, sterile, bad soil for genuinely creative plantings. Art, to survive, needed humanity for its main subject, and where in this new city of light could the poet find the truly humane? Flawed human nature needed a flawed setting, and Baron Haussmann had made only a “banal canvas.” To judge the matter for yourself, I recommend a trip to Paris. ©.

[Stanley]

How to play Monopoly?

Game theory is a mathematical study of conflict and cooperation between any number of rational decision-makers, or “players.” Lloyd Shapley, Nobel Prize lecture, 2012.

Modern ‘game theory’ apparently originated in a speculation (by Plato) about a soldier preparing for battle and deciding whether to stand and fight or to flee for (presumed) safety. He (I use the male pronoun advisedly, for Plato was not speculating about Amazonian armies) might first consider whether he was likely to be on the winning side, but the more deeply he thinks he must consider many more factors, including (very possibly) the notion that every soldier in the field, friends and foes, is making the same speculation. Rationality being the issue, one might conclude that the most likely outcome would be that all soldiers, in both armies, would call it a day and decide, instead of battle, to have a symposium, then go home to sleep it off (“symposium” derives from the classical Greek word for “drinking party”). But it’s nowhere near as simple as that. Whatever Plato’s solution, “game theory” has become a complex, many-layered combination of logic and higher mathematics and is used (by some) to sort out all sorts of problems. First fully (or formally) worked out in 1944 by a Hungarian mathematician (who, it seems, had rationally decided to leave the field of battle), it has since become an important adjunct of econometrics, especially as applied to the market. In today’s incredibly complicated world economy, one decision on whether to buy, or sell, or sit tight, is preceded and followed by a veritable host of other decisions to buy, sell, or sit. Almost every such decision has some bearing on almost every other decision. The more we think about the market, the more relevant game theory seems to be, and in fact at least three recent Nobel Prizes in Economics have gone to game theorists. Among them, the American Lloyd Shapley stands preeminent. Shapley, perhaps appropriately the son of an astronomer, was born in Cambridge, MA, on June 2, 1923, and certainly appropriately came to Economics (and his Nobel Prize) by way of Mathematics. While doing his PhD at Princeton, he devised a game called “So Long, Sucker.” It involved players in competition (each wanting to win) and in cooperation (each needed help to win), and “So Long, Sucker” is a neat title, for (always?) someone must lose. It might (for instance) apply to the just-completed negotiations over the US debt ceiling. Or you can try it the next time you go out to dinner with friends and decide on whether or how to split the bill (and the tip?). Or you could, as Shapley did, win the Economics Nobel for 2012. Typically, he is said to have argued with his sons over whether he should accept the prize. But the game itself won out, as it always must, and Shapley accepted. ©

[Stanley]

The ghost of Buddy Holly, 1936-1959?

Lonesome Dove is the Gone with the Wind of the West . . . a pretty good book. It’s not a towering masterpiece. Larry McMurtry.

Pictures of the young Larry McMurtry look disconcertingly like pictures of the forever young Buddy Holly. Of course this must be mere coincidence. On the other hand . . . they were both born in 1936, three months apart, McMurtry in (on June 3, 1936) Archer City and Holly (in September) only 30 miles away in Wichita Falls. In Texas, that’s like next door. And both were to have great impact on anyone who grew up in mid-America in the mid-20th century. I suppose he might have become a musician, a singer, even a rock idol, then died in a plane crash near a frozen Iowa lake, but fate is always fickle and instead Larry McMurtry (who died just a couple of years ago) became a bookman. He wrote a few. He sold a few more. And before the end he stockpiled thousands and thousands of them, more than 400,000, and made Archer City and his “Booked Up” storefront the Hay-on-Wye of the western hemisphere. This was an unlikely outcome for a boy who grew up on a bookless ranch where people told stories and didn’t read them (let alone write them or sell them). McMurtry claimed his first books, 15 of them, came as a gift, a series of westerns. This may be just another McMurtry tall tale, but somehow he ended up in college, first North Texas State, then Rice, and finally at the Stanford Writers’ Workshop where one of his most influential instructors was Malcolm Cowley, among other things the real-life chronicler of the Lost Generation (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Paris, and all that). The bulk of McMurtry’s writing would take a very different tack, starting with the semi-autobiographical The Last Picture Show (1966). That was made into an unforgettable film (by Peter Bogdanovich) which may be said to have explored several sides of Buddy Holly’s unpromising youth. But as a writer, McMurtry is most famed for the Lonesome Dove quartet, four novels telling tallish tales of the Texas frontier, circa 1840-1900, the third one (Lonesome Dove) winning the Pulitzer Prize for 1986. McMurtry passed that one off as good but not great, but it was a compelling read and it was made into a successful television series. McMurtry was, however, more than a bookwriter, bookseller, and bookstocker; he believed in books, and became in his last four decades a crusader for free speech, against Ayatollahs wherever he found them, whether in Tehran or in the United States Congress. Among his finest final acts was his marriage (his third, her second) to Ken Kesey’s widow, Norma Faye, in 2011. They’d all three known each other at Stanford, all those years ago, when maybe they’d listened to the music of Buddy Holly and thought about the day the music died. ©

[Stanley]

Hell Fire and Heaven in Oxford.

By rule they eat, by rule they drink,
By rule they do all things but think.
Accuse the priests of loose behavior.
To get more in the laymen's favor.
--Student satire on John Wesley’s “Holy Club,” circa 1730.

In the 18th century, Oxford acquired a reputation tarnished enough to help explain why the ‘new’ colonial colleges of that era (notably Princeton, Penn, and Dartmouth) were woven from the stouter (and cleaner?) cloth of Scotland, notably Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen. Young John Wesley (at Christ Church, Oxford) thought the place so bad that he gathered close friends (including his brother Charles) into the “Holy Club,” and methodically catechized its members into evangelicalism and moral reform. Meanwhile, at Christ Church and other colleges, rich young rakes hankered after the perverse rituals and riotous assemblies of the ‘hell fire clubs,’ campus versions of which prepared them for the stewpots of London. Surviving portraits of one of Oxford’s most distinguished scholars, Thomas Shaw of Queen’s College and St. Edmund’s Hall, seem to reflect the higher side of Oxford’s low life. He looks like someone who lingered long at High Table, ate way too much, drank more (port, perhaps?), and remained on the lookout for a joke or a jape. Later memoirists recalled his wit and his extreme sociability. He looks like the anti-Wesley, and perhaps he was. But there’s another side to his story. Thomas Shaw was born in Kendal, Westmoreland, on June 4, 1694, the son of a freeman of the town who was industrious enough (a woolens dyer) to see Thomas well-schooled, then sent him to Oxford as a commoner: BA in 1716, and in 1720 (the same year that Wesley entered Christ Church) took the MA. Shaw had done well enough to secure holy orders and a post as chaplain to the British factory at Algiers, where he may have saved souls but also based his extensive travels in North Africa and Palestine. Besides being kidnapped, stripped naked and cast into a dungeon. and ransomed (at least twice), he collected artifacts, took notes, married the widow of his ransomer, and returned to Oxford with a certain reputation: traveler, adventurer, hale fellow well met, great company . . . and scholar. Besides spinning tales at high table, he published his adventures in several forms. It all these, Shaw was scholar enough to attain quite a reputation as a collector and linguist. He became a fellow at Queen’s, but also a Doctor of Divinity, the Regius Professor of Greek, and Fellow of the Royal Society, Elected “President” of St. Edmund’s Hall, he rebuilt the place with his book profits and restored its high table with his bonhomie. What John Wesley thought of Shaw, heaven only knows. But Shaw’s work and his life suggest that there was something more to 18th-century Oxford than its drinking clubs and its high tables. ©

[Stanley]

The sunny science of economics.

Out of their disparities and weaknesses the treaty was born, child of the least worthy attributes of each of its parents, without nobility, without morality, without intellect. John Maynard Keynes on the Versailles Treaty of 1919, in his The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 1919.

In Keynes’s view, the Versailles treaty had three parents, each of them with a good quality (Wilson the most moral, Clemenceau the noblest, Lloyd George the smartest), but these excellences were wasted in the treaty, notably its greed, its thirst for revenge, and its insistence that the moral tragedy of the Great War was a German responsibility. Keynes’s analysis of the treaty’s likely outcome was prescient. His palpable moral fury had already led to his resignation from the British delegation at Versailles. It would make his 1919 book into a world-wide best seller and, in the 1930s, make Keynes the intellectual darling of those who felt that to resist Hitler required first a real understanding of how and why the Nazis rose to power—as one of the economic consequences of the peace. John Maynard Keynes was born on June 5, 1883, in Cambridge. His father lectured there on economics and on the “moral sciences;” his mother was a social reformer. It should not surprise us, then, that in Keynes’s adult life as an economist and advisor, he rejected the view that economics was “a dismal science.” That phrase was coined by Thomas Carlyle in the 1840s to lambast the Rev’d Thomas Malthus’s “mournful, dreary, stolid” idea that the only way to cure the poor of their habitual demands for better pay was to let them die off—which they inevitably would, since there was only so much bread to go around. For Keynes, there were still scarcities of supply and the expansive elasticities of demand. You can’t get away from them, but you could tinker with them, and you should make the attempt. His oft-repeated aim was “full employment,” or a rising prosperity built on expanded productivity: both sustained by wise public policy. This could bring many more good things into many more people’s lives. Promoting the general welfare was thus a moral aim, congenial to democracy, and so it was that Keynes became the distant (and sometimes present) guru of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Deficit spending on a good cause was likely to achieve good ends. The other key to Keynes was increased productivity, something Malthus left out of his dismal equation. As Adam Smith had seen, judicious investments could make even a pin factory more efficient, an engine of prosperity for its owners and its workers. Keynes endorsed this notion but urged that it should be used on a national, even a global scale. So it’s a nice irony that Keynes and Adam Smith (June 5, 1723) share the same birth date. They also shared the common-sense view that economics can be a moral science, an affinity that seems to have escaped some of our more dismal commentators on economics and public policy. ©.