BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

A physicist friend (and faithful contributor to UMSL's honors program) wrote to correct two rather large errors in my June 26 essay on Lord Kelvin, as follows: "First, at absolute zero, atoms still move (because of the Uncertainty Principle). Actually, their motion in solids at 0 K is not that different from their motion at room temperature. Second, there is no problem measuring very low temperatures." I think it likely that my colleague is correcting my mistakes, and not any made by Lord Kelvin.

The dangers of a library education.

Children are notoriously curious about everything, everything except the things people want them to know. It then remains for us to refrain from forcing any kind of knowledge upon them, and they will be curious about everything. Floyd Dell.

Living in small midwestern towns (Grundy Center, IA, and Beatrice, NB) at the turn of the 20th century, my grandmother and her sister corresponded about many things, including how best to read Émile Zola and Victor Hugo. Both women were college graduates and each belonged to her small town’s Literary Circle. So we should not be too surprised to learn that at about the same time young Floyd Dell was also becoming an adept and aggressive reader. His much larger town, Davenport, IA, was a rail hub and river port with cultural pretensions that, in 1900, accepted Andrew Carnegie’s $50,000 offer and more than matched it with a bond issue to enlarge its public library, which was already 23 years old. (This, by the way, was the first Iowa election in which women voted.) Floyd Dell, born in Ilinois on June 28, 1887, was to repay Carnegie in spades, but first he parlayed his library education (he had long since dropped out of Davenport high school) by becoming in 1911 the book review editor of the crusading Chicago Evening Post, where he championed a broad range of writers of varied political persuasions (from Chesterton and Belloc to Anderson and Dreiser) and made the paper’s literary supplement into an important publication. But thanks to Carnegie’s munificence, Dell had learned socialism and soon moved to New York where he established his fame by editing The Masses and being prosecuted (unsuccessfully) in two treason trials (1917 and 1919) under the Espionage Act. Unbowed, Floyd Dell went on to write novels and plays, a couple of influential memoirs, and a book on sex and society (Love in the Machine Age, 1930) before settling down to found the Provincetown Players, then to become a leading light in the Federal Writers Project. One might hold Dell up as a reason to censor public libraries, but then he did yeoman service for the government in World War II. A war against fascism (and his wide reading) inspired Dell to embrace patriotism. ©

[Tripps]

His much larger town, Davenport, Iowa, was a rail hub and river port with cultural pretensions

Never mind 'pretensions' - I'd call this proper 'culture'.

It was aso birthplace of Bix Beiderbecke Singin' the Blues

[Stanley]

I often wonder about the number of libraries originally endowed in the UK by Carnegie which have been closed down. I wonder how that squares with the legalities of the original grant and foundation?

[Stanley]

Mothers, children, and the general welfare.

A sound public economy demands an irreducible minimum living standard to be sustained by a minimum wage and other such expedients . . . in a determined effort to give every child a fair chance. Julia Lathrop.

Today’s anti-abortion activists prefer to be called ‘pro-life,’ but their political conservatism often vitiates their concern for child welfare post partum. So we find that states with the severest restrictions on abortion have also loosened or removed restrictions on child labor, cut aid programs to dependent children, and restricted school lunch entitlements, often on the grounds that such welfare programs create “cultures of poverty.” In terms of American history, this is an odd, even perverse, development. Indeed many, arguably most, American social welfare programs began with a concern to offer protection, comfort, and positive support to poor children. “Self-reliance” might work well enough for able-bodied adults, but who could hold a child responsible for the indigence, improvidence, or simply the bad luck, of its parents? On the other hand, who in their right mind would turn over money (greenbacks or silver dollars, public funds or private charity), to a 5-year-old child? So concern for children’s welfare spilled over, naturally, into concern for their mothers’ welfare. Historians such as Katherine Kish Sklar identify this “maternalist” movement as an important root (or the main origin) of a host of public welfare reforms. One of the leading “maternalists” was Julia Lathrop. She was born in Rockford, Illinois, on June 29, 1858, of radical Republican stock. Her lawyer father was a young friend of Abraham Lincoln. Julia followed her mother’s footsteps to study at the Rockford Female Seminary, and then moved to Chicago to work at Hull House with another Rockford alumna, Jane Addams. Their “settlement house” movement focused on the family, specifically on poor families, and as they sought public and private funding they found mothers and children to be their most appealing causes. For Lathrop, this expanded from settlement house activities to child labor laws and, in many states, to direct payments to poor mothers with dependent children. Besides advocacy, Lathrop gathered evidence of the devastating impact of poverty on the lives of innocents. This was a typical method or roadmap of progressive reform, and it was in 1912 that Progressive Era legislation created the federal Children’s Bureau, and that a Republican president, William Howard Taft, made Julia Lathrop its first director. She continued in that post until 1922, and persisted in its work until her death in 1932. We owe to her Children’s Bureau much of our evidence of American poverty in the era of our industrial and financial revolutions. ©

[Stanley]

A model for many.

I play better when it doesn’t matter if I win or lose. After eight attempts at Wimbledon, I didn’t think I was going to win. Shirley Fry, on winning the singles title at Wimbledon, 1956.

When you think of self-reliance, think of little Ms. Shirley Fry, who began playing tournament tennis in Akron, Ohio, at the tender age of 9. She excelled in Akron, thought she’d try her hand elsewhere; and so at 10 Shirley Fry began traveling, alone, to tournaments here and there. “My parents would put me on a bus in Akron, and off I’d go. Usually, someone met me at the other end, but I would go to Travelers Aid if there was a problem.” Not always a bus. At 12, she went by train to a Philadelphia tournament, then on to New York and a subway ride to Forest Hills for another competition. She didn’t do so terribly well there, but assuaged her disappointment by walking from the Forest Hills Inn to the New York World’s Fair, not a long hike but a brave one for a 12-year-old. Shirley Fry was born in Akron on June 30, 1927. As a kid, she played every sport she could think of, and aimed for gridiron glory, but in middle school gender ruled her out and she stuck, more or less, with tennis. It was the amateur era, clay in the bush leagues and grass in the Big Time, and of course international play was interrupted by World War II. Plus she retired a couple of times. But she kept coming back, and when she finally hung up her rackets in 1957 she’d won the singles at all four “Grand Slams” (France, 1951; Wimbledon and Forest Hills, 1956; Australia, 1957). To this day, only ten women have done that. In addition, Fry won twelve Grand Slam doubles titles (4 in France, 4 Forest Hills, 3 Wimbledon, 1 Australian) and a couple of trophies in Grand Slam mixed doubles. At both Wimbledon (1956) and Australia (1957), she bested Althea Gibson in the singles then won with her in the doubles. Along with this long string of successes, Shirley Fry found time for a bachelor’s degree. That was 1949, in human relations, which I guess she found useful. She was a popular player with the fans and with competitors, but on court she was very competitive. She was not of the John McEnroe school of thought, or behavior, but she could be ‘politely forthright’ in disputing an umpire’s call. And in her one visit to the Australian Open she asked that an offending official be removed and not be allowed to oversee any more of her matches. She then went on to win the Australian title and, for good measure, to marry the umpire, become Shirley Fry Irvin, raise four children, and continue to coach and to play tennis for oldies, until her knees gave out in 1962. The rest of her stood up pretty well, though, until she died in 2021. Not surprisingly, several great players of the professional era have called Shirley Fry a role model. And so she was, a sportsperson extraordinaire. ©.

[Stanley]

Emancipation Day in the Dutch Caribbean

What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? Title of Frederick Douglass’s address to the citizens of Rochester, NY, July 1852.

In the USA, many now celebrate ‘Juneteenth,’ marking the anniversary of the day when the last enslaved people in contiguous American territory—on Galveston Island, Texas—learned that they were in fact free human beings. Cause for celebration, indeed!! But it’s not yet an official holiday everywhere. Here and there (in Florida, for instance) some object to such remembrances on the ethically curious grounds that thinking too much about racial slavery may hurt the feelings of white people. There’s less ambiguity about celebrating the end of slavery in Suriname and the Caribbean islands that used to be known as the Dutch Antilles. All celebrate the memory of July 1, 1863, the day in which the Netherlands abolished slavery in the Dutch Caribbean. Officially, in Dutch, it’s Dag der Vrijheden (Day of the Freedoms), and I do like the plural, which helps us to measure slavery’s multifarious inhumanities. But in Suriname the day has acquired a different name, Keti Koti, a Sranantogo phrase meaning “the chain is cut.” It’s different and perhaps better, for in Suriname there still exist a set of local creole cultures which descend from people who cut their own chains, fled to the interior, and created out of the mix of African cultures from which they’d come their own, unique, African-American societies. Today six main groupings have been identified, or self-identified, and they persist here and there, along this river or that, rather like the Gullah in the sea islands of South Carolina. Those who have resettled in the cities have lost those identities, and in Parimaribo they will gather today. in unison, around “Kwakoe”, an eloquent statue of an unchained man, which was unveiled for Keti Koti on July 1, 1963, freedom’s centenary. Kwakoe may represent an actual individual (same say he was the first freed slave to own land). Others prefer to leave it in the local dialect sense of “Wednesday,” which would have reflected the naming practices of Dutch enslavers. Of course this particular emancipation was compensated. The enslavers were paid pretty well for their 33,000 slaves (about 250 million in today’s Euros). And freed people had to endure another decade of indentured service. But it was a day of freedoms, and it’s celebrated not only in Suriname and in the Dutch Antilles (e.g. Curaçao and Aruba), but also in the Netherlands itself, where white people apparently have thicker skins than those in Florida and feel that it’s important to learn about their own history of racial slavery. ©.

[Stanley]

The pencil and chalk man.

Well, I come down in the morning and I take up a pencil and I try to THINK. Hans Albrecht Bethe, in response to a question about how he ‘did’ physics.

Hans Albrecht Bethe was born in Strasbourg, then part of Germany, on July 2, 1906. He would become one of the leading physicists of his generation, winning the Nobel in 1967, but really of several generations, for he was one of the lead scientists in the projects that led to the creation of the atomic bomb in the early 1940s, then the hydrogen bomb, and then he continued to research and publish well into his 90s. We know less about him than about his ‘nuclear’ colleagues for several reasons, not least a sense of humor that vacillated, quantum-like, between impish and waspish. He was also not enamored of the bomb projects. The atom bomb he regarded as a necessary evil, to win the world war against fascism. Bethe thought the hydrogen bomb a potentially fatal frippery for all concerned, and joined the project, he said, in hopes to prove it impossible. It’s also the case that Bethe didn’t actually write one of the most famous research papers of his era, the so-called Alpher-Bethe-Gamow paper of 1948 (on “The Origin of Chemical Elements”). He was not, however, a plagiarist. The principal author, George Gamow, was Bethe’s graduate students at Cornell, and it struck Gamow’s funny bone to name the paper in the order of the first three letters of the Greek alphabet. So one might say, mathematically as it were, that Alpher-Bethe-Gamow was ~ equal to Alpha-Beta-Gamma. Bethe went along with the joke. Gamow’s draft had inserted “in absentia” after Bethe’s name, and before it was sent in to the Physical Review Bethe erased the in absentia. Later, another of Bethe’s Cornell students, Freeman Dyson, said that among the nuclear pioneers Bethe was the supreme calculator, more associated with the blackboard than the experimental laboratory. And not just the blackboard. Three of Bethe’s most important calculations took place during train rides, the first between Manchester and Cambridge, in England, then one from Ithaca to Washington, D. C., and then on a really short commute from Ithaca to Schenectady. Not a blackboard in sight, needless to say, but in each case Bethe had been tasked to find a formulaic explanation for a surprising or unexpected experimental result. And so he did it, in his head. But I will concede him that pencil. And his 1967 Nobel had little to do with nuclear weaponry, though a lot with nuclear theory. It was given for Bethe’s discoveries concerning the thermonuclear energy of stars. Before and after the A-bomb and H-bomb projects, that had been his main interest, and indeed from the early 1950s Hans Bethe did all he could to distance himself from the destructive potential of nuclear energy and to distance science from the destructive potential of American conservative politics. ©

[Stanley]

A Yankee Doodle O'dandy.

I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy,
A Yankee Doodle do or die;
A real live nephew of my Uncle Sam's.
Born on the Fourth of July.
--from “The Yankee Doodle Boy,” by George M. Cohan.

I’ve always associated that song with World War I, but it was first performed in 1904, at New York’s Liberty Theater, during the musical Little Johnny Jones. The song did have a popular revival during the Great War, and fair enough, for the musical was about a Yankee boy, the eponymous Johnny Jones, a horse jockey, who crosses the Atlantic to ride a horse (the equally eponymous Yankee Doodle) in the Epsom Derby. He loses the Derby. wins some hearts, but then marries his San Francisco sweetheart, a good old American girl named Goldie Gates. Like Goldie, Johnny was a bit brassy, and a patriot who had a few things to say about England. “You think I’d marry an heiress and live off her money? What do you take me for? An Englishman?” This Anglophobic tone may have come naturally to George M. Cohan, born of Irish immigrant parents not on July 4 but on July 3, 1878. The elder Cohans arrived as Keohanes, so may have been renamed by a bored immigration officer, or perhaps picked “Cohan” as sounding more American. Whatever the story, they produced an American patriot of outstanding talent. George began in vaudeville with his parents and sister in a troupe known as “the Four Cohans.” Later, basking in his own success, his curtain speech began with “My mother thanks you, my father thanks you, my sister thanks you, and I thank you.” By then, George Cohan was Big Time, actor, songwriter, lyricist, impresario, and for a time theater owner. He's sometimes said, wrongly, to be the founding father of the American musical, but there’s no doubt that he made the “book” musical famous, and more than that the standard form of the musical play, one that tells a story, has a plot, tragic or comic but (almost) always ending happily. As in that curtain speech, George in his fame always reverted back to his New England past, an ersatz “Yankee” of Irish origin, and the long off seasons spent at his grandmother’s place in North Brookfield, MA. He also always claimed to have been born on the fourth of July, just like that song, but it wasn’t quite true. And he would write songs for World War I, patriotic ditties that experienced a reprise of popularity in the next war, notably “Over There” (1917 ad infinitum). By then, Cohan’s successes had taken him to Hollywood, where he died in 1942, the year of the Oscar-winning biopic-musical of his life and time and songs, a film which had to be titled Yankee Doodle Dandy. With poetic justice, that film has George Cohan born on July 4. He might as well have been. ©

[Stanley]

The tendency to personalize is a characteristic of many people who suffer from innumeracy.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. John Allen Paulos, 2007.

In retrospect, the ‘election’ of George W. Bush to the presidency seems one of the more important political events in modern US history. I put ‘election’ in quotes because the matter still causes controversy. Indeed, Bush lost nationwide, by a half-million votes, but our odd electoral system put the outcome in doubt, and Bush’s margin in Florida was small enough to call for a manual recount. The justices decided only that the Florida recount should not be continued. The justices had many reasons, not least political. But one element in their decision originated in a mathematician’s published opinion that ‘the margin of error in this election is far greater than the margin of victory, no matter who wins [emphasis mine].’ That mathematician is John Allen Paulos, born in Denver, CO, on July 4, 1945, and he’s lived long enough to regret the matter. That’s largely because Paulos has no love for George W. Bush, whose presidency he thinks destructive in too many ways. But Paulos is also unhappy that his mathematical judgment was misconstrued. What he meant was only that the uncertainty about the Florida totals would not have been much lessened by a recount. Too many people vote, too many machines and people in too many places count the votes, then too many are involved in summing the whole thing up. Given that situation, there will always be a margin of error, and in the case of Florida it was larger than the margin of victory. Paulos’s larger argument was, that being the case in terms of numbers, the courts should have looked to other evidences or contexts to decide the matter. In his view, Al Gore’s larger margin of victory in the nationwide popular vote provided both a moral and a mathematical context for a different decision, and a different presidency. Paulos has later confessed and sought absolution, while still always insisting that his mathematics were correct. Not in terms of counting per se, but in terms of thinking out mathematical concepts and applying them logically and rationally to everyday problems (like bank balances, inflation estimates, unemployment figures, and, yes, elections). Paulos, a statistician who earned his PhD at the University of Wisconsin and taught mostly at Temple University in Philadelphia, believes that we are in fundamental ways an innumerate people. He’s written scores of articles and op-eds on our errors, and at least eight books. Their titles include Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences. That was published in 1988, way before we failed the literacy-numeracy-logic test of the disputed election of 2000. So we’d better call it prophetic. ©

[Stanley]

Who did NOT say 'there's a sucker born every minute.'

Clowns are the pegs on which the circus is hung. P. T. Barnum

The word cemetery derives from the Greek for “sleeping place,” and you’ll find its equivalent in several western languages. The actual thing, a burial ground set apart, is a more modern invention, a development away from the church yard (the modern word for ‘cemetery’ in Scandinavia and Germany is still the ‘older’ one, e.g. “kyrkogård’ in Swedish). As the separate burial ground came into being, it often took real shape as the ‘rural’ or ‘garden’ cemetery, truly a sleeping place, greened with grass and trees, landscaped in a natural manner, where practicable with water features. The garden cemetery is not an American invention. Pere Lachaise, in Paris, was a rural retreat, chosen by Napoléon as a place any citoyen/-enne would be glad to be seen dead in, whatever their religion (or irreligion). But in the USA the idea really prospered, the grandaddy of them all being Mount Auburn Cemetery in the Boston suburbs, designed in 1806 and finally dedicated in 1831. Many garden cemeteries, since their founding, have been surrounded by urban sprawl, and some (e.g. Mount Auburn) have become tourist destinations. Among them is the garden cemetery of, now within, Bridgeport, CT, dedicated in 1849. Unlike Père Lachaise, now itself an urban jungle of mausolea and markers, Bridgeport’s Mountain Grove is still a fairly green place, and it does have some interesting monuments. Among them is one marking the burial place of the most famous small person in American history, Charles Sherwood Stratton (1838-1883). In life, he became better known a ‘General Tom Thumb,’ christened such by one of the greatest showmen in American history, Phineas Taylor Barnum, who used General Tom as an attraction, a ‘midget’ who could walk, talk, dance, and even declaim. P. T. Barnum, as he’s more generally remembered, was born in then rural Connecticut on July 5, 1810, and from fairly humble beginnings became famous and rich (several times, for there were reverses) as the greatest showman in US history, and in some ways a quintessentially modern American person. He was like the hero of Emerson’s 1841 essay “Self-Reliance,” the country lad who tries everything at least once, fails and tries again, always landing on his feet. Barnum and his curiosities entertained millions, including Abraham Lincoln, Queen Victoria, and the Prince of Wales. And Emerson too by the way. And as well as founding (with a chap called Bailey) “The Greatest Show on Earth,” Barnum also was the moving force behind the Mountain Grove Cemetery. He’s buried there, not too far from the gigantic monument which marks tiny Tom Thumb’s resting place. As we might expect, Barnum’s monument is even bigger. But not taller. ©

[Stanley]

The maker of gardens worth a visit

Thus one couple after another with much the same irregular and aimless movement passed the flower-bed and were enveloped in layer after layer of green blue vapour, in which at first their bodies had substance and a dash of colour, but later both substance and colour dissolved in the green-blue atmosphere. How hot it was! From “Kew Gardens,” by Virginia Woolf.

The Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, Richmond, have a long history. It began in earnest when, in 1501, King Henry VII built his new palace at Richmond. When a number of nobles followed suit, there ensued a kind of keeping up with the Joneses competition, as the king and his courtiers did their best to embellish their country seats. The “royal gardens” per se took institutional shape in 1762 under the patronage of George III and his mother. At its origin Kew was 9 acres of royal rustic pleasure, but as it grew in size it also took on the function of a scientific institution, collecting specimens from explorers and casual travelers and making them available for study. In 1840, the crown turned Kew over to the government, and in 1841 Kew’s first full-time director was appointed, William Joseph Hooker. He was born in Norwich on July 6, 1785, and though of dissenting stock into a well-connected family. He attended Norwich Grammar School and early developed an interest in collecting specimens from nature, at first mainly bugs. In fact, there was a beetle named after him. But he soon shifted to mosses and plants and, sustained at first by a private income and an advantageous marriage (to a banker’s daughter), became a well-known amateur scientist. An ambition to excel and, perhaps, some financial reverses, led him to take it up as a profession, first as Regius Professor of Botany at Glasgow University in Scotland. There he studied medicine, made himself into a public figure (popular with students, too) and the chief scientific patron of Glasgow’s own Royal Botanical Gardens, founded in 1817. Throughout his professorship at Glasgow Hooker maintained an English residence, and also cultivated his connections with the Royal Society of London and several of its leading members, including Sir Joseph Banks. All this made Hooker the right choice to head the ‘new-minted’ Royal Gardens at Kew. For the next 24 years Hooker made the gardens into a world scientific venture. He encouraged further collection of specimens. He systematized Kew’s collections and devised new ways to exhibit them, including magnificent glass palaces, but also the arboretum. Hooker’s private science library became, in effect, a public resource. And he expanded the gardens’ size, not to its current 330 acres but still a respectable 60+. For all this, Queen Victoria made him Sir William Hooker. At his death his work was extended by his son Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911), Kew’s directing genius from 1865 to 1885 and friend and confidant of Charles Darwin. ©

[Stanley]

Sliced bread and better mousetraps

The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread: Clichés; What They Mean and Where They Come From. Book by Nigel Fountain, published in 2012.

Des Moines, IA, my home town, is not usually celebrated as an incubator of genius or a hotbed of innovation, but let us consider the possibility, for on July 7, 1880, Des Moines became the birthplace of Otto Rohwedder. His German-American (2nd-generation) parents, perhaps chafing at the town’s ambition to play it safe with insurance, printing, and government, soon moved to Davenport, where Otto discovered his own ambition to become an optometrist. Following that star, he got a degree in optics in 1900, in Chicago (unquestionably a more dynamic place), but when that didn’t turn out too well he took up as an apprentice jeweler and, now married, moved to Louisiana. He prospered well enough there to move back northwards, to St. Joseph, MO, as owner of a smallish chain of jewelry and watch shops. So far, good enough, but not yet the stuff of legend. But Otto was a tinkerer, an inventor of this and that, and somewhere along the line (MIT’s Lemelson Foundation website says in 1912, when he sold his three jewelry shops) Otto developed a new idea. Lemelson should know. It exists to document and encourage innovation and entrepreneurship, and “sliced bread” is, along with Emerson’s better mousetrap, an almost universal trope for clever inventions that sell like hotcakes. For after trying his hand at optics and jewelry, Otto became much better known as the inventor of sliced bread. The idea came to him early, but there were obstacles. First, Otto needed to invent a machine that would slice a baked loaf and then slide it neatly into a wrapper, at speed. Secondly, he had to find a baker willing to risk the challenge of making sliced and packaged bread. Thirdly, there had to be a market for it. The technical problem was solved in stages too complicated to recount but won Otto seven patents. He found his baker in Chillicothe, MO (certainly no more dynamic a place than Des Moines). On the demand side, another Iowan (Charles Strite, 1878-1956) patented a pop-up toaster in 1921. Strite then moved to Chicago to make millions of toasters. So it was that on July 7, 1928 (Otto Rohwedder’s 48th birthday) the Chillicothe Baking Company rolled out its first sliced and packaged loaf. It was sensation enough in Chillicothe that the Papendick bakery in St. Louis took it up, with a better Rohwedder machine, in 1929. That was just in time for the Great Depression, but in 1930 an infant Chicago bakery already known as Wonder Bread made its own version and quickly transitioned to selling sliced bread. Despite this competition, or maybe because of it, Otto Rohwedder sold his own patent to a new company, became Vice President of the company, and prospered well until he retired to Albion, MI, an even quieter place than Des Moines. ©

[Stanley]

A woman of strongly held opinions.

As long as I live I will have control over my being. Artemisia Gentileschi.

Among the favored painters at the court of King Charles I (reigned 1625-1649) was a woman. She was there because her father had already been taken on as a court painter, but also because her reputation had preceded her. Indeed she was a remarkable person. Artemisia Gentileschi was born in Rome on July 8, 1593. Her father Orazio was already a well-established painter in the style of Caravaggio, and may have wanted Artemisia’s brothers to follow along in his path, but Artemisia was the talented one, and honed her talents in Orazio’s workshop. In many senses she followed him along, not least to her tenure in London, circa 1637-1642. In other ways, she was emphatically her own person, her own artist. In her era and in her school (broadly defined as Italian baroque), women were often subjects, and not just in portraiture. Historical treatments were a favored theme, goddesses and nymphs from classical myths, but also women from the Bible. Madonnas abounded, of course, but the Old Testament provided many women whose stories were as at least as interesting as Mary’s, and not as doting mothers of newborn babes, but as heroines resisting violence and, as often, visiting violence on others: usually to save or to revenge Israel. Artemisia did do Madonnas (it would have been odd had she avoided the task), and a few Madonna-ish portraits, including one of herself-as-artist, still in the royal collection in London, The Allegory of Painting (1638). There she looks strong, inspired. Bathed in a light from above, she is totally absorbed in her work. She seems to be unselfconscious, unobserved. One sees a similar image in Self-Portrait as a Woman Playing a Lute (1617). Those strengths are revealed more clearly in several of Gentileschi’s more famous biblical paintings. Perhaps the titles say enough: Susannah and the Elders; Judith Slaying Holofernes; Jael and Sisera. The Judith and Jael paintings (Gentileschi did more than one version of each) are telling: women killers who know that their bloody business is to do justice. Some scholars see in these a psychic resolution of Artemisia’s ordeal, aged only 18, when she was raped by her father’s painting partner, Agostino Tassi. Orazio took Tassi to court, not for the rape per se, but for besmirching his family’s honor. Worse still, the court tested the truth of Artemisia’s testimony by torturing her (thumbscrews)!! But even before the rape, Atemisia Gentileschi had painted two of her most famed “feminist” works, including her Susannah (1610), naked, ogled, propositioned by old men clothed in power. She was already mad as hell. Tassi’s rape was confirmation, not disillusion. ©

[Stanley]

Woman of the Year

There is nothing to fear except the persistent refusal to find out the truth. Dorothy Thompson.

When Dorothy Thompson died in 1961, her long New York Times obit failed to note that she was the model for the Tess Harding character in the Katherine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy comedy Woman of the Year (1942), a film now streaming and well worth watching. Like Kate Hepburn’s Tess, Dorothy Thompson was a prominent journalist, an international correspondent of great stature who enjoyed the distinction of being the first foreign journalist expelled from Nazi Germany (in 1934). She never wrote that Hitler had little hands, which might well have angered him, but she did ridicule Hitler as “formless. . . inconsequent . . . ill-poised and insecure . . . the very prototype of the little man.” This “blasphemy” (as she called it, sarcastically) seems to have got under das Führer’s skin. Dorothy Celene Thompson, born on July 9, 1893 in upstate New York, was the daughter of a Methodist minister. Her parents may have had a romantic streak (‘Celene’ was a Greek moon goddess). But Dorothy was a bit more down to earth. She majored in economics and politics at Syracuse, where she also was bitten by the suffragist bug. Determined to vote, she was also determined to fashion her own life as a journalist, and began writing for money, in Europe, in 1920. Indeed she may have missed voting in the first national election to come after the suffrage amendment. My guess is that she would not have liked either major party’s presidential nominee. Neither Harding nor Cox were her type of guy. Whether she would have voted for the prisoner Debs remains an open question. At any rate, by 1925 Thompson was chef de bureau in Europe for the Philadelphia Public Ledger, based in Austria and feverishly becoming fluent in German. In the process she fashioned a unique network of sources in Germany and Austria—including Thomas Mann, Berthold Brecht, and Stefan Zweig, and also established a long-running affair with the flamboyant Hungarian-German author Christa Winsloe (at that time Baroness Christa von Haratny-Deustch). During this period, Thompson also became an early advocate of the Zionist movement. I think we can say that a woman with friends like Thompson’s could scarcely be friends with Adolf Hitler, and she wasn’t. Indeed part of her fame came from her early and continuing denunciations of the German leader (and of his American friends in her Who Goes Nazi?, 1941). By the late 1930s she had a large audience for her own column (“On the Record”) and for her current affairs essays in Ladies’ Home Journal. The column (which originated in her popular radio broadcasts on NBC) would eventually appear in 170 dailies, and the Ladies’ Home Journal’s circulation was 3 million. In 1939, Time magazine called her the most influential woman in America. That was, of course, after Eleanor Roosevelt, with whom Thompson sometimes dined. Dorothy Thompson did marry the novelist Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win the Nobel for literature. But that marriage was not the source of her fame. In 1961, Thompson’s obituary (in the New York Times) did mention that she was married to the novelist Sinclair Lewis (from 1928 to 1942), but only very briefly and because Dorothy Thompson died in Lisbon where she had gone to visit her (and Lewis’s) daughter-in-law and grandson. “Miss Thompson” was, after all, her own woman, and ‘woman of the year’ for many years. At Iowa State, where my dad edited the student newspaper, his deputy editor for one year (1934?) was named “Dorothy Thompson,” but it was a married name and she made nothing of the coincidence. I did meet dad’s Dorothy Thompson in Niagara Falls, NY, in 1965. She was still writing. I thought that there was some similarity between the two Dorothys, but I was then only 22, and what did I know? ©

[Stanley]

Ura's sister?

A woman of unfailing poise, she once caught a burglar in her bedroom—and gave him the name and telephone number of a man who would give the thief a job. “He didn’t look like a bad man,” she would later say. From a memorial to Ima Hogg.

“Big Jim” Hogg (1851-1906), elected 20th governor of Texas in 1890, was a conflicted character: corncob-rough, he embraced many elements of radical populism, won significant black support until he bowed to the segregationists, and is remembered for the regulations he imposed on Texas railways. He even created a state-owned bank to ease credit for farmers. Something of his Flem Snopishness (see Faulkner’s Snopes trilogy for this reference) showed, perhaps, when he named his second child and only daughter Ima Hogg. Born on the family farm in Mineola, on July 10, 1882,Ima hated her given name, and it was no comfort that her dad chose it because “Ima” was the heroine of a bad epic poem written by his brother. There are myths about the name, including the fabrication that she had a sister called “Ura”, but she forgave her father and then made her name legendary. The legends started in 1890 when the rambunctious Hogg kids took over the governor’s mansion, and (predictive of Teddy Roosevelt’s children in the White House, 1901-1909) transformed it into a playground complete with circus and zoo. But as she grew into her long adulthood, Ima Hogg became her own person, and one nothing like Alice Roosevelt. Helped along by the discovery of oil on her dad’s farm (in 1918, after Big Jim died, ), Ima Hogg made herself into an extraordinarily progressive patron of art, culture, and education, and not only for herself (she never married) and her brothers but for all the people of Texas, black, white, Hispanic, and especially Houston where, at Bayou Bend, the family fashioned a 14-acre estate, its plantation house holding an art collection with no equal in Texas and few elsewhere. In this Ima was supported by her brothers, philanthropists all, who apparently believed that their good luck didn’t really belong to them. Her elder brother William (who died in 1930 while on a European trip with Ima) willed $2.5 million to the state university ($44 million in today’s dollars), and that turned out to be only a drop in the bucket. Ima outlived them all, and was their guide, seeing to it that their gifts included American arts and crafts along with their Picassos, their Klees, and their Cezannes. (Bayou Bend now houses her collection of American arts and crafts). But her bass note was music, at which (pianist and teacher) she became proficient. She was also the principal philanthropist of the Houston Symphony. In her old age, Ima began to call herself “Imogene,” but we may concede her that. To everyone else she was “Miss Ima” and she will forever be the First Lady of Texas. ©.

[Stanley]

It's not often that someone comes along who is both a true friend and a good writer.

'Why did you do all this for me?' [Wilbur] asked. 'I don't deserve it. I've never done anything for you.' 'You have been my friend,' replied Charlotte. 'That in itself is a tremendous thing.' A conversation from Charlotte’s Web (1952), by E. B. White.

We must set aside July 11 as a national pig and spider day. At our woodland cabin, we are almost within scent of an industrial piggery, and at this season we also have, closer by, the beautifully iridescent green crab spider, who may be addressed by her formal name, A. missumessus oblongus. That “A.” stands for Aranea, a name shared by all spiders, not least Charlotte A. Cavatica, a dully brown barn spider who achieves beauty by saving the life of a runt pig called Wilbur. All that happened in Charlotte’s Web, published in 1952 and an instant family favorite. I read it for myself, taking a break from the Hardy Boys, then read it for my kid sister, and then for my own kids as they came along. I celebrate pigs and spiders today because the book’s author, Elwyn Brooks (‘E. B.’) White, was born July 11, 1899, in Mount Vernon, New York, the youngest and, possibly, the slightest and shyest of the five children of Samuel and Jessie White. As an adult (and then as an elder) White was certainly slight and shy. Funny stories abound about the trouble he took to avoid meeting people. According to James Thurber, White would flee down a fire escape, leaving gladhanding to more sociable types at their cubby-hole offices at The New Yorker magazine. White was particularly shy around women, which he later used to explain why it took him so long to propose marriage to his editor, Katharine Sergeant Angell (1892-1977). On the other hand, this shyness may have been the learned behavior (or the assumed persona) of a man who, as he became more famous, hankered after being less well-known. As a student at Cornell, 1917-1921, White joined all the right clubs, pledged a top fraternity, edited the student newspaper, volunteered for the army cadet corps, and still managed to graduate Phi Beta Kappa. There he acquired the nickname ‘Andy,’ a Cornell custom for young men named White. He also became a newspaper reporter, not a profession for the shy, first in Seattle and then in the Big Apple. There, he began submitting essays to Katharine Angell, at the infant New Yorker. She liked them, and liked White too, and he was not too shy to start a love affair with his editor. They married in 1929. Out of it came remarkable careers for both of them, as writers, editors, parents (one of their own, Joel, a boatbuilder, and Katherine’s Roger Angell, sportswriter extraordinaire), and smallholder farmers on the Maine coast, where E. B. White met a pig or two, perhaps a barn spider, and dreamed up Fern Arable, a providentially-named girl who loved her pig and, before she grew up, worked with Charlotte A. Cavatica to save Wilbur from the butcher’s knife and the Sunday table. ©

[Stanley]

The archeology of the Tower of Babel

All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language until it finds a willing and prepared hearer. Robert Louis Stevenson.

On every continent (except Antarctica), pictographs suggest that humans (homo, including Neantherthals) have been capable of symbolic thought for a long time. But they were not scripts, abstract symbols of discrete sounds. Likely they did function as prompts for story telling or rituals, but they cannot be held as evidence for written language, which began to appear about 5,000+ years ago. That they originated at all is inspiring evidence that there is indeed something ‘special’ about human beings—not always to our advantage, as is suggested by the biblical myth of Babel. It is almost as wondrous that many of these long-forgotten scripts have been translated into modern tongues. But we moderns are not the first translators, though ‘decoders’ might be the better word. Decoding got a great boost with the discovery of ancient inscriptions which, were themselves ‘translations,’ like the famed Rosetta Stone, brought to Europe from Napoléon’s Egyptian campaign in 1799. The Rosetta, now in the British Museum, carried the same decrees in three different scripts, (Egyptian hieroglyphs, “Demotic” script, and ancient Greek). Decoders used their Greek to figure the whole thing out, which only took about 30 years. But the Greek itself had precursors, from the Minoan or Mycenean civilization, centered on Crete and discovered in the 1890s by Sir Arthur Evans (1851-1941). He couldn’t decode the two scripts he found, but he could tell them apart, and called them Linear A and Linear B. In the decoding business, Evans is best described as an exceptionally persistent amateur. It was at the British School in Athens that he interested another amateur (then only 14) in the problem. That second amateur, who would eventually decode Linear B, was Michael George Francis Ventris, born into a multilingual household on July 12, 1922. His English military father knew Hindi and a bit of Mandarin, his Jewish-Polish mother was differently gifted, and their boy turned out to be a linguistic genius, fluent in a dozen modern languages—and another very persistent amateur. He heard Evans speak at Athens in 1936, published his first scholarly piece on the problem in 1938, and kept at it despite his formal education (Stowe and Cambridge), war service in the RAF, and his architectural training. Ventris keyed Linear B in 1952, when he announced it in a BBC radio broadcast(!!). He published his discovery in 1953, then died in a weird car accident in 1956, only 34 years old. In any language, we can call that a tragedy. But there is a street named after Ventris in Heraklion, Crete. The next time you are there, you should walk down it. ©

[Stanley]

Writing in the borderlands.

He knew she loved to dance. She knew he was a herder of goats. But there is another kind of meeting...the meeting of eye and eye, and spirit and spirit. From Josefina Niggli’s Mexican Village (a collection of stories reprinted by the University of North Carolina Press in 2012).

In the mid-1920s, the nuns at Incarnate Word College, San Antonio, TX, spotted a rare writing talent in one of their students. But she resisted their urgings to enter a story in a nationwide Ladies Home Journal contest. So they locked her in a room and wouldn’t let her out until she’d done it. She won second prize, got her story in print, and decided that writing voluntarily might be a better strategy. Her writing career lasted another five decades, and more, during which she wrought a baker’s dozen of plays, three novels, and a couple of volumes of poetry. She also spent some time as an anonymous ‘ghost’ writer in Hollywood studios (which may have been rather like her convent experience). Most of her published work had to do with the border crossings and cultural transitions that had been native to her from her birth, in Monterey, Mexico, on July 13, 1910. She was christened Josefina Niggli. Her parents were expatriate US citizens of mixed northern European heritage, and (perhaps fearful of the period’s political instability) sent her to school in San Antonio. But Josefina felt herself Mexican, Hispanic; she explored that sense of loneliness in her first published volume (of poetry), entitled Mexican Silhouettes (1928). Besides her second place in the Ladies Home Journal contest, she won first in a national Catholic colleges poetry competition, and her writing career was underway. She began by writing Spanish-language broadcasts for NBC and writing (in English) for a San Antonio radio station, but then moved on to North Carolina where (with those Hollywood entr’actes and a couple of Mexican interludes) she stayed for the rest of her life. She began with the “Carolina Playmakers,’ whose founding director aimed to make drama out of the lives of marginalized Carolina populations, which fit Josefina nicely. She also earned an MA at Chapel Hill and, thus armed with experience and qualifications, embarked on a teaching career at Western Carolina University at Cullowhee. Her plays, especially, were a by-product of that experience, and it’s not accidental that the university’s studio theater is named after her. Josefina Niggli’s own uncertainties about “home” and her cultural identity inform most of her work. She died in 1983 and was buried in Cullowhee, which may have settled the matter, but for a time several factors left her work in a cultural limbo, not least her ‘racial’ background (which defined her in Mexico as an ‘Anglo’ who wrote mainly in English). But nowadays she is increasingly recognized, and accepted, as a pioneer Latina writer, having seen her world, for so long, as if from a borderland. ©

[Stanley]

'Just the facts, ma'am.'

My books are based 98 percent on documentary evidence. Irving Stone.

Although academic historians have somewhat widened their definitions of “evidence,” their reliance on evidence remains a defining characteristic, even in a world that buys more historical novels than it does histories. Just so, there’s a frontier, a region of the mind, that can be usefully explored through novelistic techniques. One of the masters of this art was Irving Stone, born as Irving Tennenbaum in San Francisco on July 14, 1903. He changed his surname when his divorced mother married a Mr. Stone, her colleague in a San Francisco department store. Young Stone crossed the Bay to study at Berkeley, and at that stage seemed more inclined to social science than literary invention. He obtained a Masters in economics and embarked on a Ph.D. On the other hand, he also played sax in a Bay area jazz band, which got the better of him, for he left Berkeley for a European tour, intending to become a writer. In the summer of 1926, Paris was the place to do that, for it was the cultural playground of the ‘Lost Generation,’ and Stone did write a number of unsuccessful plays. But then he went to a gallery mounting a retrospective exhibition of the works of Vincent Van Gogh. Later he called it ‘the single most compelling experience of my life,’ and it eventually moved him from avant garde plays to an established genre, the fictionalized biography. Stone made that genre his own, but not right away. Before he could write Van Gogh’s biography he had to learn more, much more, about his subject, maybe something like 98%. That took him several years of study, financed by writing romantic trash for pulp magazines, and by 1931 it had grown into a huge manuscript that no one wanted to publish. Coasting downhill on 17 rejections, Stone embarked on an affair with Jean Factor, a book editor, who cut his script down to size. Stone divorced his then wife, married Factor, and accepted her suggestion of Lust for Life as a working title. They took their honeymoon on a piddling advance ($250), but the book turned into a best seller, allowing the couple to set up house in Beverly Hills where Irving, often edited by Jean, would write several more best-selling fictions about famous people. I filched Lust for Life (1934) and The Agony and the Ecstasy (1961) about Michelangelo) from my parents’ bookshelves, and those remain his most famous works. There are several others, and one I must read is Immortal Wife (1944), Stone’s imagining of the (by any factual measure) astonishing life of Jessie Benton Frémont. He also ‘got inside the brain and heart’ of Mary Todd Lincoln, Rachel Jackson (Andrew’s wife), and Charles Darwin, inter alia. But I am careful of my time, and Jessie is the one I want. ©.

[Stanley]

"You can actually do extremely well out of not winning a Nobel Prize."

The more diverse a research group or a business, the more robust it is, the more flexible it is, and the better it succeeds. Jocelyn Bell Burnell
Much of the discourse of modern physics and astronomy is Greek to me, but I am encouraged by the abundant evidence that physicists and astronomers are dosed enough with whimsey to show tendencies of literary inventiveness. The term ‘quark,’ for instance, was lifted from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. It was followed (inevitably?) by ‘antiquark.’ A ‘gluon,’ on the other hand, is just a reconstruction of the very ordinary ‘glue’; the ‘on’ comes from ‘neutron,’ and gluons are particles that tend to attach themselves to whatever else is spinning around in atomic space. ‘Charm,’ ‘dark matter,’ and ‘strange’ are also ordinary words rendered extraordinary by their scientific definitions and usages. But LGM, which stands for ‘Little Green Men,’ is a real puzzler. You’ll probably not find it in a conventional list of physics terms, but an early use of it came in 1967. That was when a young scientist noticed some odd, inexplicable data coming from what (at that time) was the world’s largest radio telescope, Cambridge University’s ‘Interplanetary Scintillation Array’ (Let’s call it “Inscar” for short). That young scientist was Jocelyn Bell Burnell, born Jocelyn Bell in Northern Ireland on July 15, 1943. She began as an indifferent student, made more so when she discovered (at her high school) that girls were not allowed to take physics. Her parents protested, and at length Jocelyn enrolled in a Quaker academy where her physics teacher found real promise in her. Then it was on to Glasgow for her BS, then Cambridge for her PhD, where part of her graduate study was to work on design and implementation of “Inscar.” Reading some of the data, one day in 1967, she did not know what to make of it, and in her notes called it “a bit of scruff.” Clearly, in astronomy, “scruff” won’t do, and so Ms. Bell (as she then was) worked on the scruff and made it into a “pulsar” (short for “pulsating radio source”, which is pretty literal-minded, and nowhere near as poetic as “pulsar” but much more science-sounding than “Little Green Men”). There was a Nobel prize for that (the science, not the etymology) in 1973, but the prize went to Jocelyn’s PhD supervisor, Anthony Hewish. She was OK with that, but angry that the press asked her a lot of sexist questions (like “do you have a boyfriend?”). Just to show them Jocelyn went on to a superlative career as an astrophysicist (mainly in Britain and the USA) and is now recognized as the person who first thought that there might be something important in those little green men, that bit of scruff in the data that, when it grew up, acquired a much better and more poetic name. Jocelyn never did get a Nobel, but there are a lot of people who think that she should have. ©

[Stanley]

When, if ever, can the unlikely become the impossible?

A ball player has to be kept hungry to become a big leaguer. That’s why no boy from a rich family has ever made the big leagues. Joe DiMaggio.

It’s a statistical commonplace that Americans are not good at statistics. Some say it’s because we are bad at mathematics in general, and there’s truth in that. International testing has shown Americans less competent than Estonians, Slovaks, and Vietnamese, not to mention Germans, Japanese, and Koreans, in both arithmetic and in abstract mathematical reasoning. Doubtless that has to do with education, a gap we felt severely when we saw that our two kids’ schooling in England made them mathematically literate in ways we could scarcely grasp, let alone help them with their homework. With statistics there is also a cultural problem. Our faith in “individualism” has brought us some benefits, but it doesn’t help us to address or solve broad social problems like pandemics or climate change. We also have debilitating trouble with understanding statistical realities which illustrate and perpetuate the differences between wealthy and poor families. Of course it’s possible for a person born poor to become well-educated and rich and to live a long and healthy life. But it is unlikely and becoming unlikelier, a statistical truth drawn from mountains of social science research. Modern natural sciences also deal in probabilities, about (for instance) the rise and spread of a viral pandemic, the causal connections between (say) smoking and lung cancer or between our emissions of greenhouse gases and the climate crisis. Why all this guff about statistics? It’s because that it was on July 16, 1941, that Joe DiMaggio set the most improbable record in all of baseball—improbable in the sense that no one else has (yet) come close. He began compiling it (and it was compiled) on May 15, with a single against the White Sox. Then, in the next 55 games Joe hit safely at least once, getting his last hit (of his compiled streak) against Cleveland on July 16. If course, nothing that actually happened is “impossible,” but in 1991 Ed Purcell (a Nobel Prize winner in physics and, mathematically speaking, no slouch) examined the problem and decided that Joe’s streak must be defined as “impossible.” Purcell published his conclusion in 1988. Then, in 2016, 75 years after DiMaggio’s magic, PBS produced a documentary featuring Stephen Jay Gould’s delightful essay on the subject. Then, to complete my statistical confusion, in 2021, 80 years on from DiMaggio’s miracle, a couple of computer nuts fed a big computer with a raft of baseball stats and a near infinity of random numbers and concluded that a 56-game streak is, well, statistically very likely. But Joe says otherwise. There he stands. Only Pete Rose came close (not very close); and we know all about Pete Rose. ©.

[Stanley]

If at first you don't succeed, sue.

At that moment in my life I was too ignorant in business law to be able to do it right, and if I did it over again probably the same damn thing would happen. Gordon Gould, reflecting on his role in inventing the laser.

Last week I celebrated the poesy (or eccentricity?) of nomenclature in the physical sciences. However, some physics nouns are distressingly literal-minded. Among all the awful examples, two stand out, the Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation and the Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. As my caps might indicate, both were cleaned up and presented to the public (and the US patent office) as acronyms: the Maser and the Laser. They are related; both trace their parentage back to a 1917 suggestion by Albert Einstein. But actually inventing them took longer (until the 1950s) and involved quite a few very bright people solving some very intractable technological problems and has produced two Nobel prizes (1964 and 2018) shared by no fewer than six different physicists. Of course, science at this level is often (usually?) a cooperative enterprise, but inevitably some are left out when it comes to prizes and patents. Perhaps the best-known of the meritorious absentees was Richard Gould, who worked with a prototype Maser as a Columbia graduate student, and then (he always claimed) was the first to get the idea for a Laser, Richard Gordon Gould (he went by the ‘Gordon’) was born in New York City on July 17, 1920. Academically inclined and the son of the founding editor of Scholastic Magazine, he steamed through high school (Scarsdale) and then physics (BS at Union, MS at Yale, PhD at Columbia). In between Yale and Columbia, young Gould worked on the Manhattan Project, so clearly he was a hot prospect in physics. But he’d blotted his copybook by joining the Communist Political Association, so he had to move out of weaponry and into optics and microwaves. Work on the Maser led him, inevitably one might say, to the Laser, an idea that, in 1957, he recorded in a notebook, then (like any halfway decent communist entrepreneur) had the notebook page dated and notarized. Soon someone else ‘invented’ the Laser, began commercial production, and made it obvious that Lasering was a fertile field. There ensued a long battle, or battles, over patent rights. In terms of both science and law, the details are impossible to recount, but at great length (the two main judgments came in 1985 and 2002), Gould’s role in the invention of the Laser (and in some of its technical applications) was established in law. It was one of patent law’s most important cases, and it you’ve got a laser at home the chances are good that you have contributed to Gordon Gould’s bank balance. I’ve got two Lasers in my toolbox, which I will now name Gould I (a laser level) and Gould II (a laser measurer). ©.

[Stanley]

Equality as a Calvinist creed.

If you have any Love to yourselves, or any Love to this Land, if you have any Love to your fellow-men, Break these intolerable yokes . . . Least they Be retorted on your own necks, and you Sink under them: for god will not hold you guiltless. Lemuel Haynes, “Liberty Extended” (1776?).

Lemuel Haynes never published this anti-slavery tract. He identified it as inspired by the preamble of the Declaration of Independence, which he must have read in late July 1776. Or perhaps he first heard the declaration, for Haynes was then a private soldier engaged in the capture and (unsuccessful) defense of Fort Ticonderoga. Whether he read the Declaration, or heard it, Haynes was sure that freedom inhered in every human. There was something of the Enlightenment in this, but at base Haynes believed that liberty was God-given. Like the ‘New Divinity’ clergyman Samuel Hopkins, Haynes believed the highest good was “Disinterested Benevolence,” or “free-floating benevolence”: to do good with no thought of its consequences. Theologically, along Calvinist lines, Haynes thought that only converted Christians could exercise disinterested benevolence, but in the enthusiasm generated by a popular revolution, Haynes lowered that bar and opened up ‘benevolence’ to all his neighbors, saved or not, and even, potentially, to those enslavers who had declared that equality among men was a “self-evident” truth. Samuel Hopkins wrote and spoke bravely. Lemuel Haynes wrote viscerally, for he was himself black by common definition: in his own words “a young Mollato who obtained what little knowledge he possesses, by his own Application to Letters.” Lemuel Haynes was born to an African father and an English mother in Hartford, CT, on July 18, 1753. His parents’ identities are unknown, but it's likely that his mother was connected to the eminent Haynes family. Whatever, her ‘black’ baby was a disgrace, and the infant was put to indentured labor (until he reached 21). He was not a slave, and the couple who held Haynes’s indenture (the husband was blind) treated him as one of their own, taught him to read and write, and delighted in hearing the lad declaim from published sermons. That talent grew on him. Offered a scholarship to Dartmouth, Haynes instead apprenticed to two New Divinity clergymen, became adept in Latin and Greek, and in 1785 became the first formally-ordained black minister in the new republic, a Calvinist Congregationalist preaching to white congregations for nearly 50 years. He was a successful preacher, at one Vermont church for three decades, and a prolific writer. Some of his sermons are still in print, as is a volume of his poetry. One of his homes is on the National Register. But Haynes never published “Liberty Extended.” It was found in a Harvard University archive in 1981: muted in his lifetime, today it challenges the slaveowners who proclaimed independence and equality in 1776. ©

[Stanley]

Architecture as decoration.

Afterwards, clothe the building so planned in the most fitting dress you can devise. Alfred Waterhouse, 1890, presidential address to the Royal Institute of British Architectts.

Nineteenth-century Britain celebrated its imperial power by coloring the world red. At home, it rebuilt itself, sometimes by vandalizing perfectly fine Norman churches or by draping ancient stately homes with ‘new’ front elevations. More often, brand new buildings rose like mushrooms on new grounds; but the favored style was deliberately “retro.” It assaults the eye under several guises. “Gothic revival” is the commonest descriptor, if not always a precise one. The most famed of these buildings was one of the earlier ones, the ‘New Palace’ of Westminster. You’ll know it more familiarly as the Houses of Parliament, Big Ben and all, done (it took three decades) in “Gothic Perpendicular.” There it sits, recently the scene of high comedy and low morality, but still doing its very best to look ancient, or at the very least a good deal older than it actually is. It didn’t fool me, for I was an historian and knew that the Old Palace had burned down in 1834. But, Westminster aside, some early ‘revival’ architecture was harder to spot, at least for this architectural amateur. I misidentified two Oxfordshire churches as ‘Norman’ only to be corrected by Nikolaus Pevsner’s ‘Architectural Guide’ for Oxon. Much early revival work was really quite simple, even spare. A “Norman” church should look like a Norman church even if it was built in 1857, like the Church of St. Mary-the-Virgin in Wheatley, just east of Oxford. The career of one of the most famed of ‘revival’ architects began that way, with simple renderings (churches and country houses) at first, but soon (as his list of clients grew and as the fevers of reinvention and decoration took hold) moving to the elaborate, the highly-decorated, including the aggressive use of different-colored bricks laid in horizontal bands. This was Alfred Waterhouse, an architect who waxed wealthy on the prevailing fashion for gothic. Born into a rich, progressive Quaker family on July 19, 1830, Waterhouse learned his art by sketching old buildings on an extended European tour (1853-54) he took after working as an apprentice in a Manchester architect’s office. He cultivated eclecticism, and in today’s world might have become a post-modernist, but in Victorian England it was post-Gothicism. As he aged and prospered, he became ever more stylish, as concerned with decoration as with structure. He’s not guilty of the worst Victorian excesses (Keble College is not his; nor, as far as I know, is Hogwarts), but he did litter the visual landscape with town halls, museums, churches, colleges, and even a prison. That prison today goes by the name of Strangeways, in Manchester, and if ever a mere name captured a purely visual style, that’s the one. ©.

[Stanley]

Shipwreck, slavery, and salvation.

Madagascar songs, for I had forgot to sing in English. From Robert Drury’s Journal (1729).

Daniel Defoe’s Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner (1719) was a runaway best-seller from the first, and in my lifetime it has produced a cornucopia of critical theory. It’s been used to illustrate what happened to Dissenter (Calvinist) theology in the era of the Enlightenment, it’s been named as the first ‘real novel’ (!!), in English, and even been used as a guide to the corrupting origins of modern, capitalist imperialism. More prosaically, Robinson Crusoe has been interpreted as a creative plagiarism on the ‘real life’ of one Alexander Selkirk, a Scots sailor once marooned on the Pacific island of Más a Tierra. (Indeed, the island has been renamed Robinson Crusoe Island.). But Defoe had many models to go by, for since the launch of English oceanic commerce in the Elizabethan age, voyaging to shipwreck or adventure had been staples of English writing, not least Will Shakespeare’s The Tempest. I’ve read quite a few of them myself, ones that functioned as real estate come-ons for would-be colonizers (rich soils, soft breezes, friendly natives eager to clothe their nakedness in English woolens, gold in them there hills, et cetera ad infinitum). Whatever: if Defoe needed sources to excite his rich imagination, there were plenty to choose from. Then, ten years after Crusoe’s publication, there appeared Madagascar, or, Robert Drury’s Journal, during Fifteen Years captivity on that Island. Its preface admits that it was ghost-written, and a few think by Defoe himself, but Robert Drury was a real person, born in London’s early dockland (a place called Crutched Friars), on July 20, 1687. Modern scholarship, including fantastical (but real) archaeological digs in Madagascar, have affirmed the facts of Drury’s birth, his early life at his parents’ tavern, and his taking to sea (the East India trade) as a cabin boy, aged 13. On its return voyage, his ship (the Degrave) foundered (rotted and fell apart, no drama there), and most of the crew were taken prisoner and many were ultimately killed by the locals. Drury and other youths became slaves, Drury himself a successful slave who escaped to live by his wits (he knew bees and honey and learned to hunt with a javelin) until he was rescued by a British slaver(!!), and finally returned to London in 1717. Drury told his story often, continuously, both before and long after it appeared in print. It’s now accepted that his ghost writer of 1729 was not Daniel Defoe and Drury was not ‘Selkirk II’. It was thought that Drury himself was a figment of someone else’s imagination. But he was who he was, born and raised at the King’s Head Inn, London, and his untoward adventure story was, of its genre, remarkably “true.” ©