BOB'S BITS

[Tripps]

Seems a suitable moment to re post the photo of the plaque at 6 Harvey Road Cambridge where he used to live.

Presented by Dr Martha Paas.

Keynes Harvey Road.jpg

[Stanley]

[Stanley]

A battle that turned the tide of war.

They had no right to win. Yet they did, and in doing so they changed the course of a war . . . Inscription about the Battle of Midway, at the World War II memorial in Washington, D. C.

June 6, 1944, everyone knows, saw the launch of “Overlord,” the World War II assault at the beaches of Normandy. It gave the western Allies their first major front on the European continent and offered some relief to the Soviets who, on the ‘eastern front.’ would continue to bear the brunt of the battle against Hitler’s Germany. Nevertheless, “D-Day” still translates, in US popular imagination, as the turning point of the World War, the other main possibility being the Soviet victory at Stalingrad on the eastern front. But that was a bloody, dirty slog (lasting from late August 1942 to early February the next year), long ago and far away and, in the west, has never captured much attention. But two years previously to the Normandy landings there had been the Battle of Midway, the date still officially given as June 6, 1942, but it was a 4-day wonder (June 4-7) and is seen by military historians today as one of the truly great sea battles in all history, ranking with Salamis (480 BCE) and Trafalgar (1805 CE). But Midway was only 7 months after Pearl Harbor, too early to be seen as a ‘turning point.’ And Midway was fought entirely at sea and in the air, if we except the two tiny islands at the core of Midway Atoll. Sand and Eastern islands total only a few acres of land, now sinking as the sea rises, and today populated by only 40 part-time human residents, caretakers of what has become a very remote National Wildlife Refuge. But in 1942 Eastern Island, smaller even than Sand, was a thorn stuck into the far eastern flank of Japan’s “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” and (all the more galling) it had been reinforced as an operational base for the US navy and as an air station. Unwisely, as it turned out, Japan decided to excise the thorn and, with it, to lure what was left of the American navy (after Pearl Harbor) into an ocean ambush. The Japanese decision was made before the Doolittle raid on Tokyo (which, anyway, had been launched from the USS Hornet, at sea), but Doolittle’s derring-do added a tactical urgency to the empire’s planned entrapment at Midway. We might even say that the American navy was lured into the trap, except that US naval operators had broken the Japanese code, so there was some question as to who was luring whom. The Battle of Midway, fought at great speed, at sea and in the air, and over hundreds of square miles of almost empty ocean, inflicted severe damage on the imperial navy which, because of the resource fragility of the East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, was never fully repaired. In a real sense, if in the very long run, the battle around Midway Atoll turned the tide of the Pacific War, and it should not be forgotten as memorialists again tour the Normandy cemeteries. ©

[PanBiker]

Agreed, all the actions mentioned were turning points in their own right and all counted towards the final victories.

[Stanley]

When glove makers take a hand in politics.

Peoples do not judge in the same way as courts of law; they do not hand down sentences, they throw thunderbolts. Maximilien Robespierre.

These days, street protests in France (vide the riots protesting Macron’s arbitrary erosions of social security provisions) include the dismantling of cars and the burning of tires. But each age finds its own weapons. Traditionally (urban riots in France are traditional) barricades were made of wagons and disused carts, and the weapons of choice were cobblestones pried up from the street. Such tactics marked many ‘disturbances,’ e.g. the revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848. All this tradition may have encouraged Napoléon III (reigned 1852-1870) to raze old Paris, make boulevards of its narrow streets, and pave them with something that could not be hurled at the first responders. But each age (and each mob) finds its own weapons, as was proven by the “Day of the Tiles” (Journée des Tuiles), in Grenoble on June 7, 1788. The ‘disturbance’ began in earnest on June 7 and lasted for a week, order being restored on June 14. Today some historians see the Day of the Tiles as the opening bell of the great French Revolution, for one of the rioters’ demands was the restoration of the Estates General, the often abused national assembly of France, and indeed Louis XVI (on learning of the Grenoble affair) did recall the Estates and decreed that open on May 1, 1789. Grenoble’s tile-throwers reacted by shouting “God save the King,” but the opening of the Estates set off a train of events that would include a number of more spectacular riots (including the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789), then Louis’s execution in January 1793 and the establishment of La république. So those tiles assume some importance. Grenoble, a river town in the foothills of the Alps and the capital city of the old Dauphinée province, was in the throes of economic depression, its highly skilled glovemakers scrabbling for survival but its noble governors desperate to shore up the province’s failing finances. So the Day of the Tiles was a local manifestation of the deep troubles of the ancient régime. The Dauphinée aristocrats suspended the local parlement and decreed new taxes, and the glovemakers took matters into their own hands (so to speak). Instead of street barricades, however (Grenoble already had fairly wide boulevards), they took to the town’s roofs, whence they hurled stone shingles (“tiles”) down onto the troops (mainly marines with some foreign mercenaries) who had been called in to restore order. Several citizens were killed, a couple of soldiers too, and among the concessions made by local governors (who wanted only to quell the disturbances) was to petition King Louis for a new national assembly. And you already know the rest. ©

[Stanley]

Is there a right to privacy in the USA?

It is the essence of judicial duty to subordinate our own personal views. Justice Potter Stewart, concurring, in Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965.

When P. T. Barnum lost his first fortune in the late 1850s, Ralph Waldo Emerson thought that it might prove the existence of a beneficent God. Barnum, after all, had already created his own reputation as the greatest huckster of all time, with his “’Feegee’ Mermaid,” his museums of monstrous births, albinos of various species, and other ‘curiosities.’ But Barnum then went into the circus business (“the greatest show on earth”), and quickly restored his bank balances. Then, when his wife died, he married a 23-year-old woman (40 years younger than he), and devoted the rest of his life to circuses and public services. Barnum served as mayor of Bridgeport and as a Connecticut state legislator, and in this latter role was a chief sponsor of a Comstock era law (1879) that made it illegal to manufacture, sell, or use “artificial” means of birth control. Not only that, but it also made it a crime to advise anyone else on the use of such instruments. After Barnum’s death, Nancy Fish Barnum wed an Ottoman nobleman and then a French baron, with the latter of whom she was entombed (in Provence) after her death in 1927. But P. T. Barnum’s anti-contraception law remained in force, until it was declared unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court in 1965. The plaintiff in the case was Estelle Griswold, a Connecticut native of a different cut than Barnum. She was born, 9 years after his death, on June 8, 1900, of German-Irish stock, a Yankee Roman Catholic (to speak of a contradiction in terms), and wanted to be a singer. That ambition took her to Europe for training, but she returned to the US to marry (in 1927) an old school acquaintance, Richard Griswold, at St. John’s RC Cathedral in New York City. Their lives were transformed by WWII, he as a US public servant and she involved with relief agencies in post-war Europe, including the Church World Service. Along the way, they both converted to Congregationalism and she to the view that parenthood should be a planned thing. As he fell ill, with emphysema, Estelle became (1954) executive director of Planned Parenthood, where she organized bootlegging operations by which Connecticut women could obtain birth control in Rhode Island and New York. So she broke the law, was fined, and then appealed the case. Rumor has it that our current Supreme Court majority believes that the right to privacy (the main ground for the 1965 decision) is a mere legal ‘invention,’ and will (when convenient) reestablish the right of legislators to invade our bedrooms. No doubt, like P. T. Barnum, the Ayatollahs of our Supreme Court will make a show of it. ©.

[Stanley]

Race and Art in the USA

Art must be the quintessence of meaning. Creative art means that you create yourself. Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, 1950.

A quarter century of casual observation has convinced me that barber and beautician shops are among St. Louis’s most segregated facilities. But once upon a time in America, north and south, catering to white people’s self-images was a good way for skilled black people to attain success. Such were the parents (a beautician and a barber) of Meta Vaux Warrick (Fuller), born in Philadelphia on June 9, 1877. Indeed, she was named after the daughter of one of her mother’s richest customers, US Senator Richard Vaux. Meta’s parents’ social position (at the top of black society in Philadelphia), their circle of elite (white) clients, and her own light skin shade worked together to ensure good schooling. She also acquired the graces of Philadelphia’s débutante class, not least horseback riding in Fairmount Park.
Her parents encouraged her interest in art, with tuition at the Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts and, later, formal qualification at the School of Industrial Art. And Meta Vaux Warrick enjoyed successes, not least being chosen as an exhibitor at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, when she was only 16. She then won a scholarship to study art in Paris, where she worked with (among others) the sculptor Auguste Rodin. She didn’t do so well at the American Women’s Club in Paris, where she was refused a room on racial grounds, but she carried home great skills in sculpture and a fascination with what might best be called mild abstraction, in Rodin’s style. Once back home, she continued to sculpt, and in 1907 married the US’s first black psychiatrist, Solomon Fuller (an early pioneer in the diagnosis and treatment of senile dementia). In the same year, Meta provided much of the artwork for the ‘Negro Pavillion’ at the Jamestown (VA) Tercentenary. Marriage brought motherhood, and the family moved to Massachusetts where Dr. Fuller established his practice. But Meta continued to sculpt. Rodin thought she had “the sense of form in [her] fingers.” To that she added a growing interest in black American history. Some of her most evocative work memorialized black victims of white racial violence, notably her small sculpture of a grieving woman, Mary Turner (now in a Boston area museum). So, multitalented and with excellent connections (W. E. B. Dubois was a friend from her early days in Paris and then in Massachusetts) Meta became a leading light of the “Harlem Renaissance,” in which she began to explore themes of Africanness. Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller continued to sculpt (and to exhibit) until shortly before her death in 1968. Her work is now seen as classic, but unless you live in or near Boston you’ll have trouble finding it. ©

[Stanley]

A printed page can be a thing of beauty

Everything is designed. A few things are designed well. Truism.

Monetary inflation, the bugbear of our currency and banking system, can have some beneficial effects, including of course making the cheap into the precious. This is what happened, in the 20th century, to the paperback book. Once meant (literally) as a throwaway item, the paperback (or some paperbacks) became things of beauty, design pieces, still cheaper than hardcover but not looking the part. In the Anglophone world much is owed to entrepreneurs like the British publisher Alan Lane (1902-1970) whose "Penguin" trademark was chosen as "dignified but flippant" (a dumpy, flightless bird dressed in a tuxedo). Lane wanted good authors, too, and to bring them to the paperback market (and then to sell their books to the reading public) he cared also about design, not only the distinctive three-band covers of this first Penguins but the typeface, the proportions of the printed page, everything. The people Lane brought in to effect these printmakers' miracles were themselves oddballs, among them the German type designer Jan Tschichold (1902-1974), once a commie agitprop exiled (to Switzerland, where he became a libertarian) by the Nazis. And then there was Tschichold's British sponsor, an even odder concoction born in Galloway (Scotland) on June 10, 1917. He was given the name of John David Ruari McDowell Hardie McLean, too long a handle for modern design. He soon edited it down to Ruari McClean. Although his parents were very well educated, Ruari was drawn to graphic art and began his working life as an apprentice at the Shakespeare Head Press, a fine arts house, where he discovered an enthusiasm for typeface design. McLean then traveled to the Alps to sit at Tschichold's feet and learn not only design but the whole history of typography (on which he would himself become a published expert). In World War II, McLean served on a Free French submarine, laying mines in Norwegian fjords, then transferred to the even more dangerous tasks of sabotage and scouting on enemy-held beaches in France, Sumatra, and Burma. For his heroics, he won the Croix de Guerre (from the French, of course) and the DSC from the Brits. Come the peace, McLean took a commission with Alan Lane and brought Tschichold over, where they devoted their different geniuses to making the paperback book dignified but flippant and well worth its ever-inflating price. Meanwhile, Penguin hatched Pelicans (for the serious reader) and Puffins (for the child in all of us). McLean's fame rests today on his design work for Puffins and his scholarly histories of the fine art of printing. (c)

[Stanley]

I bear the load so men may ride the rainbow road to happiness. From Steinman's "Song of the Bridge."

The light gleams on my strands and bars
In glory when the sun goes down.
I lift a net to hold the stars
And wear the sunset as my crown.

“The Song of the Bridge,” by David German Steinman.

A wind speed of 40 miles per hour is considerable. On the Beaufort Scale, it’s number 8 (of 12), right between a ‘near gale’ and a ‘strong gale.’ The US weather bureau warns against small craft boating, and landlubbers are advised to secure any light lawn furniture. It’s a wind that will move whole trees. It’s also a wind speed that did actually cause the collapse of the first Tacoma Narrows Bridge, in November 1940. The collapse was filmed, and the whole episode is horrifying, made more so if you know that the one car on the bridge had in it a dog, a Cocker Spaniel named Tubby, in the end the sole fatality of the collapse. The bridge’s fatal weakness had been spotted at the design & bid stage by critics that a local newspaper, puffed with pride and bamboozled by boosterism, had dismissed as “eastern engineers.” Among these nay sayers was David Berman Steinman, the son of immigrant Jews from Belarus, born in New York City on June 11, 1886. Born poor, Steinman grew up in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. That fabled span fired young Steinman’s dreams. He’d worked his way through civil engineering at CCNY, graduated ‘summa,’ then went on to Columbia University where his PhD thesis was on a steel truss design for the proposed Henry Hudson Bridge. The design won, the Henry Hudson (opened in 1936) still carries traffic, and Steinman went on to a distinguished career in bridge design, sometimes on his own, sometimes in partnership. That steel truss arch became something of a Steinman trademark. He also designed the Hells Gate Bridge and, more famously, the Sydney Harbor Bridge, in both of which the truss arch suspends the roadway rather than supports it. But Steinman was a David of all trades, and he also designed suspension bridges aplenty (the Mackinac Strait Bridge in Michigan being his most famous) and the cantilever bridge (a design familiar to those who love the old Forth Railway Bridge in Scotland). In his designs, Steinman had an eye for grace as well as strength, but strength was his main concern in his now-famous criticism of the winning design for the first Tacoma Narrows Bridge. He predicted the disaster, and the bridge’s collapse (just two years after it opened) proved him to be more than a disappointed bidder. And the collapse made Steinman’s subsequent designs much more conservative. His Mackinac Strait bridge is designed to withstand 365 mile per hour winds!! Many Steinman bridges are also things of beauty, as he intended them. Late in his life, he turned to poetry, the better to express an aesthetic of bridges. (c)

[Stanley]

To see ourselves as others see us.

[Americans] have realized many things for which the rest of the world is still struggling...[yet] the civilization and the morals of the Americans fall far below their own principles. Harriet Martineau.

The USA has always attracted foreign visitors eager to look us over and deliver their opinions. In the early 19th century, with Europe in the throes of political reaction, we looked particularly odd. We had foresworn aristocracy as a governing principle in politics, embraced nearly universal male suffrage, separated church & state, and proclaimed a belief in “equality,” an endlessly explosive concept. Surely we must be a nation of hypocrites! After all, the republic (in many of its states) still embraced racial slavery, and even where slavery had been abolished black people were generally excluded from political participation. The ‘bonds of womanhood’ kept most females out of any public arena. We were, in short, a curiosity. Some observers were downright hostile. Others couldn’t stop making jokesters of us all. But among these travelers and reporters there were a few who were at once sympathetic and critical. Among these the best received (and forever the most famed) was the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America (1835) is still available in a zillion editions. But there were others, amongst whom one of the sharpest was Harriet Martineau, born on June 12, 1802, a middle class woman of impeccable pedigree who could also write, extremely well. She triumphed over a difficult childhood, marred by a distant yet overwhelming mother, made yet more challenging by Harriet’s own increasing deafness, to become well known among a gaggle of early Victorian intellectuals and aesthetes, including on the literary side the Brownings (Elizabeth and Robert) and George Eliot. But Harriet was well known, too, by her friends (and some not so friendly) in political economy: Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, Jeremy Bentham, and J. S. Mill. So Martineau thought she needed to travel west and take a look for herself. She traveled to us, and stayed amongst us, for two years, 1834-1836. The main results were reported in two books, Society in America (2 vols, 1837) and How to Observe: Morals and Manners (1838). Some today call them our first essays in sociology, and indeed Martineau had a yen for seeing society as a kind of laboratory experiment. There was much she did not like. We ate too much too quickly, much of it poorly cooked. We drank way too much alcohol, and our manners and our conversation suffered from it. So on the whole Harriet kept her distance, and yet she found much to hope for. She remains worth a read , and it might be healthy for us to speculate what an observer like Martineau might make, today, of our insistence that we believe in, and practice, the idea of equality before the law. To see ourselves as others see us might help us to get over the threat to our professed ideal of legal equality represented by our very own, home-grown martinet. You know him: he’s the one who eats too much junk food far too quickly. (C).

[Stanley]

US v. Donald J. Trump, June 13, 2023.

The person in custody must, prior to interrogation, be clearly informed that he has the right to remain silent, and that anything he says will be used against him in court; he must be clearly informed that he has the right to consult with a lawyer and to have the lawyer with him during interrogation, and that, if he is indigent, a lawyer will be appointed to represent him. US Supreme Court ruling, 1966.

Given likely events in the Miami today, we should remember a judicial precedent set on June 13, 1966, when the US Supreme Court, in Miranda v. Arizona, ruled that criminal suspects in custody must be informed of their right (under the 5th and 6th amendments to the Constitution) to refuse to give any testimony that might tend to incriminate themselves and, further, to require the presence of a defense attorney. Should the suspect be indigent or otherwise unable to secure legal counsel, such must be provided by the court. Since today’s indicted defendant has abundantly proved his devotion to the 5th Amendment, and is well able to afford a lawyer, “Mirandizing” him on these matters would seem superfluous, but one assumes that it will be done. Ironically, today’s defendant has roundly attacked the Miranda decision as an instance of American courts’ coddling of criminals, but in his case we are accustomed to ironies. It’s worth pointing out that in 1966, the Court majority (it was only a 5-4 decision) was merely codifying the established procedures of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Also, in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” legislation had created the Legal Services Corporation to provide free legal counsel to poor litigants in civil cases. But the justices were well aware that they were doing much more than merely rubber-stamping established custom or validating new legislation. So-called “third-degree” interrogations, intimidating at best and brutal at worst, were customary in police cells across the country and had become staple scenes in Hollywood crime films. And in this particular case, which began in Phoenix, Arizona, Ernesto Miranda had been coerced into confession. Not only that, but he’d been coerced into signing a declaration that he had not been coerced. Icing on the cake, so to speak. And to add to the court majority’s reasoning that something had gone amiss, the Chief Justice, for the majority, added evidence from currently-used police manuals that (in plain English) recommended such coercive procedures. As is usually the case in Supreme Court reversals, Ernesto Miranda was not pardoned or declared innocent. The case was sent back to Arizona for retrial; Miranda was duly convicted (of kidnapping and rape), and after serving his time was stabbed to death in a Phoenix bar. Probably Ernesto Miranda was, indeed, an unsavory character, to whom legal justice was done in his retrial and, some would say, cosmic justice in his 1976 bar brawl. Various court decisions since 1966 (the latest in 2022, by a Supreme Court that Donald Trump has boasted is his own) have whittled away at the Miranda protections. Criminologists still argue over the effect of Miranda. Most have concluded that, in practice, the decision in itself has not unduly hampered our First Defenders. However that argument may run, it is certainly true that legal history makes strange bedfellows. (C).

[Stanley]

Alas, poor Simon. We know him well.

When Adam delv’d and Eve span
Who was then the gentleman? Attributed to Fr. John Ball, ca. 1381

There’s not much light relief in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but every tragedy needs its comic moments. One such comes in Act V, scene 1, the gravediggers’ dialogue (latterly joined by Hamlet and Horatio), which may be seen as an extended pun on John Ball’s provocative couplet. That scene is completed with Hamlet’s musing that, alas, he’d known Yorick well when, once, Yorick was the king’s jester. Two centuries before Hamlet’s staging, John Ball’s cutting wit did indeed produce a skull, not of a king’s jester but of Simon Sudbury, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was dragged from the Tower of London by a mob of Kentish men, Wat Tyler’s rebels, and lynched (beheaded, actually) on June 14, 1381. We don’t know Sudbury’s birth date but we do know quite a bit about him, for he was a conscientious churchman who (as priest, then bishop, then archbishop) worked pretty hard and kept good records. All that came to naught, when (on the basis of young King Richard’s hasty promise) the rebels seized and murdered Simon Sudbury (and the king’s treasurer, Sir Robert Hales). Archbishop Sudbury’s skull survived the affray and, today, can be found among the relics at St. Gregory’s Church, Sudbury, in Kent. The skull has allowed modern experts to make a pretty convincing model of what Simon Sudbury looked like. The model is at St. Gregory’s, too, and Simon looks a bit glum, as well he might. For, really, he was (as archbishops go) a pretty good chap, and his murder (at the hands of his own Kentish countrymen) looks like a very perverse kind of joke. Sudbury, born in Kent in about 1316, became a scholar of canon law (probably at Cambridge), and moved up through the church hierarchy not smoothly but through a series of conflicts that made him the king’s enemy (King Edward III, that is) and the pope’s friend (one of the Avignon popes), and (along the way) an avenging angel within the church, known for pushing parish priests and monastery monks to actually pursue their callings and see to the laity’s spiritual health. As archbishop, when both king and pope expected him to condemn the reformer John Wyclif, he did subject the man to close questioning. He reported back that although Wyclif’s answers sounded “ill” they were also true. Prophetically. Sudbury also made clear his common touch by addressing parliament (concerning the crown’s financial needs) in plain Chaucerian English (as opposed to, for instance, Norman French or churchly Latin). But on June 14, 1381, all that came to naught, and all we have left of this model churchman is his skull. And his manuscript records. So we know him well enough to muse on his life and on the unfairness of his death. Simon Sudbury was, after all, a Kentish man. ©

[Stanley]

The battle-axe of Battersea.

There were moments in my hot youth, when I would rail against Heaven for having made me a woman. What might I not have been; what might I not have done had I the freedom and intellectual advantages so largely accorded to men? Charlotte Despard, 1907.

British peers choose their own titles. So when in 1921 Field Marshal John French (1852-1925) was raised to an earldom, he chose to be the 1st Earl of Ypres. That was not the least controversial action of his life, during which he displayed great heroism, abysmal stupidity, nearly constant backbiting, and endless sexual shenanigans. But “Earl of Ypres”? During WWI, the Ypres salient was constantly contested. Historians have sorted it into five “battles” of Ypres, and given that the line moved only a few miles this way or that, Ypres became symbolic of the war’s senseless carnage. In British service slang, it became known as “Wipers.” John French played a command role in the first Wipers (October-November 1914). It was a success in that it stopped a German advance, but judged in the longer run it’s seen as beginning the bloody stalemate of trench warfare. It also virtually wiped out the first incarnation of the BEF, the British Expeditionary Force. Field Marshal French was as much embarrassed as anything, and spent much of his energy blaming France’s general staff or in complaining about a shortage of artillery shells. First Ypres began the process by which General John French was sent home to take up safer employment. But it is possible that he faced a greater embarrassment in the activities of his elder sister, Charlotte Despard. Born Charlotte French on June 15, 1844, she had brought John up after their mother had been declared insane, and institutionalized, in the late 1850s. By 1914, Charlotte had been married (1870-1890, to an Irish entrepreneur), become an author of romantic novels, was widowed, and then in a second life had become a social worker, a socialist agitator, an ardent feminist and militant suffragist. Indeed Charlotte Despard was once of the three widowed ‘harridans’ who led militant British suffragists in their disruptive campaigns of the era. She had, it’s true, distanced herself from the most militant of her sisters-in-strife by using only constitutional tactics in their war for civil equality, but she had stretched the idea of “constitutional” to breaking point (chaining herself to railings, being imprisoned for ‘affray’, etc.). And then, as the vote was won (and as her brother John was becoming 1st earl of Ypres) Charlotte turned to international socialism, Indian and Irish independence, pacifism, and vegetarianism. Quite an odd pair of siblings, really, and made odder still by General John French’s leadership of the British army in Ireland and Charlotte’s close friendship with the Irish nationalist Maud Gonne. But then families sometimes make for very odd bedfellows. ©.

[Stanley]

One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.

Personality is a real thing—made up of intentions and of all kinds of threads. Ottoline Morrell, circa 1922.

If ever there was a “personality,” and whatever that might mean, it was Lady Ottoline Morrell. She knew just about everybody, and as long as your average ‘everybody’ was some way connected to early 20th-century English culture, anything you read about (or read anything written by) that person, you’ll run across Lady Ottoline. Whether she was resident at Garsington Manor, Oxfordshire, sheltering conscientious objectors, or at her London house in Bloomsbury, talking literature, she was always in some circle of close friends. These were not consistent circles, but they were concentric, or at least intersecting, and so (through Lady Ottoline) you can draw odd connecting lines between (say) the ascetic T. S. Eliot and the rather fleshly D. H. Lawrence. Lady Ottoline Morrell was born (on June 16, 1873) into the aristocratic Cavendish-Bentinck clan and thus related to (inter alia) George VI’s queen, Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, better known as Elizabeth the Queen Mother, and thus to Princess Elizabeth the future queen. Ottoline’s brother became 6th Duke of Portland when she was a child. So she was known in the very highest society, but she chose different tiers of dear friends. That winnowing began in earnest when, aged 29, she married the eccentric politician Philip Morrell, vowing with him then (or soon) to live in an “open marriage.” Ottoline and Philip had two children of their own, twins, one of whom died in infancy. Philip fathered a packet on a series of lovers. Ottoline had plenty of lovers but was otherwise childless. An early amour was the future prime minister, Herbert Asquith, but she preferred artistic types. Her longest affair was with the philosopher Bertrand Russell, but there were several shorter ones, for she had (as one of her friends fondly remarked) “a yen for men.” But she was also a religious fanatic, of sorts, attracted to a mystical and rather high-church Anglicanism. So it’s best not to see her as some kind of sexual engine (else, how could she have befriended Eliot?). Instead, she was a lover of art, and culture, and philosophy, a dabbler in those things herself (she decorated houses and herself in odd ways) but more interested in the people. Her long intimacy with Russell produced a correspondence of well over 3000 letters, now collected in Oxford. Other correspondents (in the literary sense) included Virginia Woolf and Joseph Conrad, and there were painters (e.g. Augustus John) and sculptors (Eric Gill). Lady Ottoline died in 1938, almost certainly NOT of her excesses. She was as much lamented as she had been loved, and no one noticed the differences between her and her first cousins (once and twice removed) Queen Mother Elizabeth and the Princess Elizabeth. ©

[Stanley]

Age shall the glowing tale repeat, And youth shall drop the burning tear! Williams, "The Bastille: A Vision"

She wept.--Life's purple tide began to flow
In languid streams through every thrilling vein;
Dim were my swimming eyes--my pulse beat slow,
And my full heart was swell'd to dear delicious pain.

Thus began the first published poem of the young (17 year-old) William Wordsworth. He would go on, of course, to become the poet of his era, a defining figure. So perhaps we should all know a little more about “she [who] wept.” The adolescent poet’s sonnet was entitled “On seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams weep at a tale of distress,” and Miss Williams was then 28 years of age, having been born in London on June 17, 1759. Just the right age, one guesses, to bowl young William clean over. To judge by her portrait (taken when she was 33) she was pretty enough, too, but there was more to Helen Williams than a pretty face and a pearly tear. When William Wordsworth saw her weep, she was already a published poet. She’d won much praise from the great Dr. Johnson for her An Ode on the Peace (1783), and by 1787 she had other publications out. Her 1783 “Ode” expressed her heartfelt relief that the American war was over, but was not obviously political. She did express an admiration for the American shore
Where liberty unconquered roves
but she delighted, too, in “parent” Britain’s decision to sheath its sword. And her admiration for American republicanism was muted by her already strong commitment to the abolition of slavery. So it wasn’t surprising that she found more to celebrate in France’s revolution where (in the beginning at least) republican revolutionaries found that liberté, egalité, and fraternité were inconsistent with human bondage. From early 1790 to the end of her life, Helen Williams was in Paris, off and on, and would be buried (in 1827) at Père Lachaise. At first, like Wordsworth, she celebrated the revolution, and published volumes of reportage in its praise.. When things turned sour, first with the reign of terror, then (in some ways worse) with the rise of Napoléon Bonaparte in his imperial ermine, Williams turned sour, too. But not on republicanism per se, nor on what we’ve come to call Romanticism which (for her, certainly) meant that if we’d just leave human nature to itself things would work out much better. She also became an expert reporter on natural science. Of course her enemies didn’t like her politics, and some spread scandals about her sex life. These were likely malicious libels. Helen Maria Williams remained much as William Wordsworth had seen her. She continued to campaign for peace, against slavery, and to lionize the great heroes of the republican revolution. ©.

[Stanley]

He also loved Gilbert & Sullivan.

Charity itself fulfills the law. And who can sever love from charity? William Shakespeare, from Love’s Labour’s Lost, circa 1595.

The Folger Shakespeare Library, in Washington, DC is a monument to an earlier era of American philanthropy, when our richest families thought it best to leave their memorials as temples of art and culture. The library is a storehouse of Shakespeareana; in its gothic nave and cloisters it houses the world’s largest collection of original folios by the bard, later printed works about him, and a huge collection of letters and papers of Shakespeare scholars. I always thought (casually) that the library must smell of coffee, assuming that its endowment came from J. A. Folger (1835-1889) who went west as a teenager to find gold but instead, cleverly, made a better business out of supplying miners with ground coffee and spices. But if the Folger smells of anything it will be oil, for it was established by J. A. Folger’s nephew, Henry Clay Folger, whose father had also left Nantucket, but not for the gold fields. So Henry Clay Folger, Jr., was born in Brooklyn, NY, on June 18, 1857, within sight of the gold mines of Manhattan, which is where he ended up after graduating from Amherst College, and where he spent most of his time looking after the interests of the Rockefeller family. This Folger helped execute the maneuvers by which the Rockefellers (John D. and John D., Jr.) tried to evade efforts to break up (or regulate) the Standard Oil monopoly. You know them today as Esso, Sohio, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, not to mention the Chase Manhattan Bank. But Henry Folger’s brainchild was Standard Oil of New Jersey, the first of the Rockefeller holding companies, of which he duly became a major stockholder. In that guise, Folger intensified an obsession he’d picked up at Amherst, the works and life of William Shakespeare. He’d then met his wife, Emily Jordan, at a Shakespeare club in Brooklyn, and she happily shared his mania. Folger’s first Shakespeare purchase was in 1889, a first folio, cost $107.50 (over $3,000 today, but still a great buy) and he went on (avidly, madly) from there. Childless, the Folgers decided to make a gift to the nation, and in 1928 they wangled, from Congress, a modest acreage to the east of the Capitol, and despite the 1929 crash were able to finance the library’s construction, which was completed two years after Henry Folger’s death. Emily, quite a Shakespearean herself, saw to the completion of the library, presided at its opening, and made sure its governing trusteeship was held by Amherst College. And so it remains today. Folger Coffee is now a corporate subsidiary of Smucker’s Jam, valued at $10 billion. The Folger Shakespeare Library is, on the other hand, priceless. ©.

[Stanley]

Of lighthouse towers and arctic tubers.

Empire and the naming of places. A curious tale about Point Barrow, Alaska.

In 1968, the discovery of oil in Alaska made urgent the settlement of Native American land claims. You can’t develop an oilfield, wells, pumping stations, pipelines, and the like, without private property. The result came in a piece of federal legislation, the Alaskan Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971. Besides President Nixon, the lead actors included Senator Ted Stevens, Vice-President Spiro Agnew, and Interior Secretary Walter Hickel (who had started rolling the ball when he was Alaska’s governor). Great show was made of involving native peoples in the change, but the group most affected, the Inuits of the northern slope, voted overwhelmingly against the ANCSA. For them “private property” was an alien concept. Nor did they like being transformed into an entity called the Ukpeagvik Iñupiat Corporation. Given the list of ANCSA’s guiding lights, I suspect that some shady dealings were involved, and Inuit resentment simmered. It has since boiled over in several incidents, most recently in a referendum that renamed the city of Barrow as Utqiagvik, from the Inuit word for an arctic plant blessed with a nutritious tuber which, before oil, was a mainstay of Inuit life and diet. Originally, by the US Postal Service, the settlement had been called “Barrow” as it lay near Point Barrow, the northernmost point of the USA, The name “Barrow” came from another kind of imperialist legerdemain, the conflict between the British and Russian empires, itself heated up by hope that the polar ice cap might melt enough to open a sea route through the Arctic Ocean. In 1825 a British naval officer planted the Union Jack and named the point after Sir John Barrow, then Permanent Secretary in the Admiralty. Barrow was an extraordinary chap. Born (on June 19, 1764) a leather tanner’s son in the Furness district of old Lancashire, he’d made himself into a paragon of British virtues, too many to list. Inter alia, he was a naval officer, diplomat, explorer, linguist, geographer, and scientist. Above all, he was a gifted civil servant, a prolific author, and a publicist of Britain’s rising ‘second empire,’ the one that colored the world’s map red. However, Point Barrow would not stay British. Intead, Russia took it, then sold it to the USA, and the Inuit, unconsulted but in situ, lived on, digging tubers in the short summers and harpooning whales and seals in the longer winters, until in 1971 they and their lands were incorporated into industrial America. John Barrow’s more lasting memorial, a lighthouse without a light, stands on a hill outside Ulverston. It affords sweeping views of the Cumbrian mountains and of Morecambe Bay, but even it is no longer called the Barrow Monument. Locals call it “the Hoad,” after the hill on which it stands. ©.

[Stanley]

"You don't have to agree with people to defend them against injustice."

I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions, even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group. Lillian Hellman, letter to the House Committee on Un-American Actvities, May 1952.

Lillian Hellman was, in fact, as “American” as apple pie, having been born to immigrant parents (in New Orleans, LA) on June 20, 1905. When J. Edgar Hoover put her under FBI surveillance in 1943, he ordered the agency not to breathe a word of it to anyone. In 1943, her (well-deserved) reputation as a crusading anti-fascist had made her too popular to be publicly “outed” as a subversive leftist, so Hoover wanted his investigation to be kept hush-hush. But by the early 50s, McCarthyite hysteria was in full cry, and Ms. Hellman was paraded in front of HUAC, where her refusal to name names brought her only trouble, blacklisting, and the loss of most of her significant income (in today’s dollars, more than $1.5 million annually). Of her persecution (by HUAC, Joe McCarthy, and other superpatriots) Hellman perceptively said that she was too much of a rebel to be a revolutionary, which should be the last word on the issue. Hellman’s parents were German-Jewish by background, which helps us to understand why, with the rise of Hitler, Hellman identified with anti-fascism. Her hit 1940 play (Watch on the Rhine) ran for well over a year and wowed the New York critics. Through its lead villain, a smooth Romanian aristocrat of “good manners and odious character”, the play dramatized what Hannah Arendt would later call the ‘banality’ of Nazi evil. But, written at the time of the infamous Nazi-Soviet pact, Watch on the Rhine also offended American Stalinists and, in that sense, underlined Hellman’s self-characterization as being too rebellious for any party’s line. She’d already won fame, or notoriety, with her 1933 hit drama, The Children’s Hour, which dealt with the devastation visited on two women by accusations of lesbianism. Hellman certainty sympathized with those who were persecuted for their gender preferences, and she certainly had close female friends; but she became much better known, romantically, as Dashiell Hammett’s long-time lover. (Hammett claimed, perhaps jokingly, that he modeled Nora Charles—and several of his villains—on Hellman’s saucy and smart approach to life.). Lillian Hellman was not, however, everyone’s cup of tea, note the novelist Mary McCarthy’s devastating indictment of Hellman’s far too imaginative autobiography (“every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’”). Hellman, combative as ever, responded with a $2.5 million lawsuit, which was left unsettled at the time of her death in 1984. One guesses that she might have wished to pursue the matter in a higher court, but on the other hand, Hellman was an atheist. ©.

[Stanley]

The "line" art.

The passion of personal conviction belongs to the playwright; the physical interpretation of the character belongs to the actor; the delineation in line belongs to me. Al Hirschfield, 1970, in an autobiographical essay.

Albert (Al) Hirschfield was born in St. Louis on June 21, 1903. The address (1313 Carr Street) is now occupied by a rather down-market Macdonald’s, or more accurately by its parking lot, and I think Hirschfield would have appreciated that, might have incorporated it into his essence. For he became the most famed of all American caricaturists, and (besides “line”) one could argue that irony is the essential element of successful caricature. Hirschfield also cultivated his oddities, and lived long enough to make them famous. After some point early in his long life, he drew (and relaxed) in a barber’s chair, and became so attached to it that his third wife, the theater critic Louise Kerz, expressed some sadness that he could not have died there. But he was 99 years old, in midwinter 2002-2003, and far too worn out to climb the stairs to his third-floor studio. So he died (of “natural causes”) in a ground-floor bedroom. Hirschfield’s artistic talents were noticed early, when his family moved to New York, and in 1924 he went on to Paris to learn how to be an artist, to study painting, drawing, and sculpture. Perhaps he could have excelled at all of them (and he did paint, profitably) but it was drawing that drew him and that got him his first commission, from the old Herald Tribune. Later, Hirschfield became identified with the New York Times (the old-lady paper that, of course, eschewed cartoons as unfit to print), principally for his caricatures (of actors, scenes, and playwrights) that headed up first-night reviews in the paper’s “arts” sections. Over his career, he drew just about everybody who was anybody, not only in theater but in music, literature, popular culture, politics. One thinks that people must have clamored to be caricatured by Hirschfield. The list of his subjects is both daunting and inclusive. But perhaps not. Caricatures at their best are ironic and essential, not complimentary, and one of Hirschfield’s subjects threatened to sue him unless the drawing was, so to speak, withdrawn. But cooler heads prevailed and the picture was pictured. Hirschfield did paint, skillfully enough to make good business as an illustrator, but caricature won out. He insisted on using only genuine crow quills for his lines, rose to his easel from his barber’s chair, added a stroke, and returned to rest. Another eccentricity that appeared in most of his drawings, almost hidden, was “Nina,” his daughter’s name (the child of his second, and longest, marriage to actress Dolly Haas). “Nina” survived Al to become a crossword clue. As for Hirschfield himself, he’s best summed up by the title of the 1996 documentary on his life and art. In that, Al was called The Line King. ©

[Stanley]

The two Scotch Tape stories.

What I really want is a creative person. You can always hire a Ph.D. to take care of the details. Richard Gurley Drew

This advice (rather dismissive, I think, of intellectual attainment) was apparently Richard Drew’s guiding personnel principle when (after 1943) he was head cheese at the Products Fabrication Laboratory of the 3-M Company, then in St. Paul, MN. Since the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company became one of the Midwest’s great success stories, one thinks that its “Pro-Fab Lab” must have been an unusual place. And so it was. People at head office sometimes called the lab the ‘funny farm,’ and certainly Drew ran it that way. If “running” is what he did: he exercised a very light hand as boss. One of his Ph.D. scientists (Drew seems not to have had a settled prejudice against hiring those with a doctorate), later remembered it as the gang that couldn’t shoot straight, “a bunch of misfits—people who wouldn’t fly in formation.” In sum, Drew knew how to herd cats. One of his rules (if he had any) was that you worked on assigned projects about 85% of the time. The rest of it was “dream time,” when one contemplated the universe’s need for innovative, useful stuff. Out of dream time came all sorts of things: special paints for road signs, breathable surgical tape, and respirators were among the better imaginings, but there were also post-it notes, which have always seemed to me a clever excuse for putting things off until tomorrow at the earliest. But the Pro-Fab Lab’s brainstorms sold well, some spectacularly, and Drew—like his company—became legendary. Not bad going for a man who, in his youth, was known as a banjo player in a local Twin Cities musical group that, inaccurately, called itself the Atlantic Orchestra. Richard Gurley Drew was born in St. Paul on June 22, 1899. He enrolled in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Minnesota, but dropped out in 1920 to take a job with 3M, apparently as a product tester. In his career, he claimed 30 patents, not too many, but the first two were world-beaters. Back in the day when 3M made sandpaper, and not much else, a lot of it was used to repaint motor cars, and in working with a local car painter Drew came up with the idea for masking tape, patented in 1925. That was called, at first, “Scotch” tape (as a local joke, for the 3M management were then notoriously stingy), but five years later Drew invented the ‘real’ Scotch Tape ®, the clear cellophane stuff (known in Britain as “sellotape”) and Drew’s first tape discovery reverted back to its merely functional name. Had he been more of a publicity hound, I suppose it might be called “Drew Tape.” Instead, Richard Gurley Drew is remembered today as a pioneer in the light management of creative labor and as a reminder that flying in formation is useful only when it’s needed. ©.

[Stanley]

Equality as an ideal and as an issue

No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, or be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance. Title IX, Education Amendments of 1972.

Having proclaimed the self-evident truth of human equality in 1776, the USA has since spent much time and struggle (and blood and ink) on what exactly that truth means. The original rhetoric was approved by a gaggle of white men, some of them enslavers, all (or most?) of them self-conscious patriarchs. But equality as a principle has an explosive quality about it. Everybody wants it, but fewer are eager to concede it to someone else. The troubled history of the “Equal Rights Amendment”, endorsed by both houses of congress in 1971 and intended to remove all traces of discrimination on grounds of sex, is a good example. Most states ratified it, but not enough, and some have since withdrawn their ratifications. A few states rejected it at first but have since withdrawn their rejections. So it languishes in legal limbo. But in the same (or nearly identical) spirit, congress passed Title IX, as above, and with no show of reluctance Richard Nixon signed it into law on June 23, 1972. It’s had a huge impact on all educational institutions (including even the very few that can be deemed ‘really’ private) and has been brought to bear not only on sports (its most highly publicized aspect) but also on classroom etiquette, advising protocols, scholarship programs, and even on the knotty problems that can arise when a teacher and a student meet privately to discuss the rules of pronoun reference. The promises of the bill’s sponsors (that it was all very simple and straightforward, in addition to being just) have run aground, and today the Department of Justice’s handbook on Title IX runs to almost 100 pages, 38,000 words, and references scores of judicial decisions, legislative amendments, and executive orders that have sought to clarify, or limit, or extend the meaning of Title IX. As might be predicted, the Department of Education’s Title IX handbook is even longer. And across the land, educational institutions (very broadly defined) spend much time and money—including interminable online, interactive tutorials—on ensuring that everyone knows the current state of Title IX play, whatever it may be. The problem is that sex, like equality itself, is a concept without borders and full to bursting with shades of grey. Construed (as sex now is) in terms of gender identity, or even gender preference, it becomes greyer still. It has thus become an ideal arena for politicians who like to strut their stuff by magnifying our uncertainties. 1972 was, I think, a simpler year. ©.

[Stanley]

Of tartans, neeps, tatties, and haggis.

By Oppression's woes and pains!
By your sons in servile chains!
We will drain our dearest veins,
But they shall be free!

Lay the proud usurpers low!
Tyrants fall in every foe!
Liberty's in every blow!
Let us do or die!

--Robert Burns, “Scots Wha Hae” (translated from Lowland Scots).

I am ~ 50% Scottish, through Kerr and McKinley great-grandfathers, and although the rest of my admixture is Sassenach-English, I can claim family tartans. The ubiquitous and powerful clan Kerr has several, the lesser McKinleys (of the vale of Leven) but one. But chances are that at least some of those tartans are ‘fake.’ After the massacre of the clans at Culloden in 1746 (the bloody finale of the ’45 insurrection), clan tartans were banned, not for their indecencies but as symbols of the Stuart cause. That ban was officially lifted in 1782, but tartan-bearing remained somewhat outré until, in 1822, King George IV came north to Edinburgh and threw a series of feasts and levees. He insisted that all clan chiefs come in their tartans. Some didn’t have any to hand and, worse, others couldn’t remember an ‘official’ pattern. Panic ensued! Into the breach stepped the designers and weavers of the Wilson mills, near Stirling, producing new editions of genuine plaids or ersatz creations suitable for public display at Edinburgh Castle or Holyrood House. It was all a bit shameful, but spawned a whole industry, soon enabled Queen Victoria to make rather a thing about the tartan, and in the longer run gave ‘mctourists’ something to buy besides shortbreads and haggis when visiting the auld soil. It was a nice irony, then, that in 1822 most of the Wilson mills drew their power from Bannock Burn, It’s a small stream just south of Stirling Castle, and somewhere around it, on June 24, 1314, in the battle of Bannockburn, a Scottish army led by Robert the Bruce soundly defeated an English force led by King Edward II. The exact site of the final assault (the battle began the previous day) is not known, and for accuracy’s sake we should say a mainly Scottish army won the day against a mainly English one. The main thing was that it was a Scottish triumph. Better yet, the Scots were vastly outnumbered by the English (about one to five!!), and gained the day not only against the odds but with cleverer, nay, brilliant tactics. It was a great day for Robert the Bruce, whose kingship of the Scots had lain in tatters only eight years before, and who had been forced to watch while the English lorded it over the northern kingdom from castle redoubts (and with the help of Scots turncoats. Whether they were also turnkilts I cannot say.). In his darkest days, Bruce may well have hidden in caves, but the story about Robert the Bruce and the spider is a later invention, just like some clan tartans. ©.

[Stanley]

Friend of the American Revolution

It is best to let children read what they like best, till they have formed a taste for reading; and not to direct what books they shall read. John Horne Tooke.

This is good advice, though not much heeded in Florida and in many school boards around the country. As a youth, John Horne Tooke chose Milton and Shakespeare. Either can be dangerous to any settled order, especially John Milton, a Puritan poet who found a human nobility in Satan and who wrote eloquent in favor of freedom of expression. Tooke himself was born John Horne, in Westminster, on June 25, 1736. Much later, in 1782, he became John Horne Tooke in honor of an ally, William Tooke, who’d helped Horne out of prison and, probably, promised to make Horne his heir. John Horne Tooke was, himself, of very comfortable origin, his father prosperous enough to live next door to the then Prince of Wales, independent enough to sue the prince, and then entrepreneurial enough in victory to become exclusive poulterer to the prince’s household. Young Horne Tooke did well at Eton, then (in mathematics!) even better at Cambridge, then took holy orders and took up an Anglican pastorate in 1760. He even published sermons. But they show him uninterested and inexpert in theology. Indeed he appears to have been more interested in his parishioners’ physical and secular health than in their soul state. Soon he was an absentee vicar, pursuing (never successfully) a career in the law and more than dabbling in radical politics. He became a leading advocate of John Wilkes, the excluded MP for Middlesex, like Wilkes a vocal supporter of the American Revolution, and even went on a sort of ‘radical Grand Tour’ of Europe, meeting philosophes, soaking up some Italian (Horne Tooke was an enthusiastic philologist), and achieving some level of polish. Once back in England he campaigned against the death penalty and then rushed into print excoriating the “king’s troops” for their attack on colonial patriots at Concord and Bunker Hill. Americans were, he conceded, a very inferior breed, but they deserved their rights including the right not to be “inhumanly murdered.” This landed him in jail and saddled him with health and financial problems that stayed with him for the rest of his life. Horne Tooke went on to support other radical causes including, dangerously, the French Revolution. His fascinating life ended in 1812, racked by pain (gout and ‘the stone’), and cared for by his surviving children (he had never married their mother, for marriage was among the things of which Horne Tooke disapproved). His daughters insisted on a church funeral, and Horne Tooke was too dead to resist or rebel, even though in life he had done little else. He’s honored today by a memorial tablet donated (in 1919) by American citizens and installed in St. Mary’s Church, Ealing. His tombstone, designed by his daughters, stands in the churchyard. ©

[Stanley]

If you can't measure it, it ain't science.

When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be. Sir William Thomson, 1883.

William Thomson (later Sir William and finally, from 1892, Lord Kelvin) was born in Belfast on June 26, 1824. The quotation above (from one of his lectures) has been mis-rendered in nearly infinite variety, but still enjoys pride of place as marking one of the great dividing lines in intellectual culture, not only between science and non-science but within science itself. His insistence on quantification helps to explain why Thomson rejected Darwin’s theory of evolution. He regarded Darwin’s timeline as hopelessly vague, and thought that the work of fossil-hunters was, at best, a species of antiquarianism. One irony here is that several of Thomson’s own discoveries led eventually to more accurate ways of measuring the ages of bones and rocks. We now see Darwin’s guess(of 20 to 400 million years) as far short, but still much closer than Thomson’s mathematical calculation (of maybe 1 million years), which is seen today as misguided or silly. However, some of Thomson’s measurements still stand. Not least, he mathematically determined the temperature at absolute zero, and we honor that today in the ‘Kelvin’ scale, which starts at -459 Fahrenheit or -273 Celsius. I don’t have any idea of how Thomson did this, for I am several dividing lines away from his astonishing mathematical talents. But I do appreciate the irony that by Thomson’s own methods absolute zero cannot be measured, for at absolute zero there would be no measurable motion. The boy’s mathematical genius was encouraged by his father, professor of mathematics at Belfast and then Glasgow, and recognized when (after graduating from both Glasgow and Cambridge) William Thomson was elected to the chair of mathematics at Glasgow when he was only 22 years old. He held that chair for a very long time, but he was a man of many parts, in his youth an accomplished athlete. He was also an innovative, combative, and occasionally heroic figure in the laying of the first transatlantic cable. Thomson was a gifted linguist and hugely successful entrepreneur (in electricity as well as cable telegraphy) with townhouses in Glasgow and London and a country mansion on the Ayrshire coast. But we can perhaps best measure the contradictions in this man’s life by the name he gave his 126-ton schooner. The SS Lalla Rookh, launched in 1870, was named after the mystical Oriental heroine of a Romantic-era epic poem. On that grand vessel, Thomson entertained fellow scientists and mused on the many ways in which we can measure our universe and its workings in terms of heat, light, energy, and motion. ©.

[Stanley]

A woke woman.

Haunted by Slavery: A Southern White Woman in the Freedom Struggle. Title of Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s autobiography, published in 2021.

Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, as she became known, was born in New Orleans, LA, on June 27, 1929. ‘NOLA’ was a tough environment for the daughter of Jewish immigrants, made a bit tougher by her father, Herbert Midlo’s, identity as a lawyer for black people, especially but not only those involved in civil rights action and trade union activities. Perhaps the easier road for her would have been to become more safely “white”, but even in her teens she identified with the poor and oppressed of her city. In a long lifetime she never shed that identity, and at her death (in 2022) she was mourned as an historian of the African-American diaspora, and not only that but as the compiler of an immense database of African-American genealogy. Her work survives in her books, in a computerized database, and at the Whitney Plantation Slavery Museum (Edgard, LA) in more solid form, a stone and steel memorial into which are etched the names of the 107,000 enslaved Louisianans she identified and traced from their African origins to their lives as freed people in the Jim Crow south. These works embody just the sort of history that some politicians want us to forget, lest it hurt the feelings of white people. For Gwendolyn Hall, there was indeed ‘hurt,’ deeply felt, but she translated it all into a good life spent in the service of liberation, not only for people of color but for women of all skin shades. Her first documented involvement in the civil rights struggle comes in 1945 when, aged 16, she joined—and helped to form—interracial action groups in New Orleans schools. Of course she broke the law, and in 1949 her parents sent her off to Paris to study music but also for safety’s sake. Instead, she married her teacher, had a son, divorced, and then married the black American activist Haywood Hall. That relationship produced two more children and a deepening frustration with Hall’s male chauvinism, then a common feature of the liberation movement. Indeed, as Gwendolyn became involved in her own education, as an historian, Hall took credit for her work. The couple separated, and besides raising her children (one became a medical doctor, the other an historian), Hall continued her researches, producing in her own name notable histories of Louisiana slavery and black culture and, come the digital age in the 1990s, that immense database. She also contributed an effective strategy in the campaign against addiction (particularly heroin), first proposed when she was a PhD student at Michigan State. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s life and work stand as a positive antidotes to the sickness and arrogant forgetfulness inherent in current campaigns against educating all Americans about their black pasts. ©.