BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

Texas, the Red State.

Let's put the jam on the lower shelf so the little people can reach it.   Campaign slogan of Senator Ralph Yarborough (D-Texas).   
 
The political rise of Representative (D-Texas) Colin Allred, likely the Texas Democratic Party’s candidate for the US Senate in November, will raise many issues, not least because Allred, a card-carrying liberal, will be running against the arch-conservative incumbent, Ted Cruz.  No doubt Senator Cruz will be calling Allred ‘leftist,’ or ‘socialist,’ or ‘communist,’ for such rhetoric has become the trash talk of today’s Republican party, and the implication will be that to be any one of these things (let alone all three) is downright un-Texan.   But in historical context, Cruz will be sadly mistaken.   For whatever the issues of 2024, Allred reminds us how very ‘Texan’ it has been to be of the left.   Even in its lily-white days, when most black Texans couldn’t even vote (let alone, like Colin Allred, run successfully for office), the Texas Democratic party contained within it a left wing.  Members of it ran for office, and often won, on the strength of their sympathies for common folk, their commitments to public services, public education, and social welfare.   In this the Texas Democratic Party was much like other southern state Democratic parties.   Along with racist reactionaries there were southern Democrats, like Lister Hill of Alabama or Claude Pepper of Florida, or for that matter Harry Truman of Missouri, who were politically liberal, sometimes even radical. One such was Ralph Yarborough of Texas, born in Henderson County on June 8, 1903.   That had been a Populist stronghold in the 1890s, which may have influenced young Yarborough, who declined a place at West Point in order to serve as a public school teacher.  Instead, he became a crusading lawyer, famed for his success in taking on the oil companies, who often ran roughshod over the rights of ordinary folk.   This brought Yarborough some patronage from like-minded politicians (all Democrats of a leftist sort), and eventually Yarborough improved on all this to be elected Senator in 1958 (in the all-white primary election he beat the infamous red-baiter Martin Dies, also—of course—a Democrat).    Once in the Senate, Yarborough not only supported generally ‘liberal’ causes, but on several crucial votes he broke the color line, for instance in support of the Civil Rights Act of 1965.   All this is interesting, historically speaking, for Ralph Yarborough’s first sponsor in Texas politics was Attorney General (later Governor) James Allred.   Funny last name, that, All-Red, and it’s well to remember that Colin Allred, a  successful Texas politician who is biracial, is in point of fact related to that old ‘lily-white’ Texas liberal James Allred, the man who kick-started Ralph Yarborough’s political career.   So Colin Allred is at least as Texan as Ted Cruz.  ©.      

[Stanley]

Fate, brass, and strawberry shortcake.

Life is fate, time, and circumstance.    Forrest Bird (1921-2015).

The US Patent Office’s “Inventor Card Activity Challenge” program encourages young people to try their wings at inventing things.   One such ‘challenge’ requires entrants to make a working model of the human lung using only recyclable materials “such as plastic water bottles, trash bags, straws, tape, or balloons.”   Weird, eh?   Just the sort of thing an overfed, overfat public bureaucracy would waste our taxes on.   Except that this particular activity, which the USPTO calls “Waiting to Exhale,” is in honor of Dr. Forrest Bird, a man whose most famous inventions came as the result of just such Rube-Goldberg-like messing around with junk and tubes and flywheels, anything to hand.  And since Forrest Bird’s most famous inventions helped to win wars and to save babies’ lives, maybe there’s something in it.   Forrest Bird was born in Stoughton, Massachusetts on June 9, 1921.   His father had been an Army Air Corps pilot in WWI, had his own biplane, and taught Forrest to fly when the boy was only 14.   Forrest seems to have been resistant to learning ordinary things in the ordinary way, but this airborne talent made him eligible for service when WWII came about.   By the war’s end he was a colonel, had been General Patton’s personal pilot, but more importantly had invented a pressure suit that enabled Allied pilots to fly safely at very high altitudes.   This he did by picking up some junk from a wrecked German plane (an experimental flight suit) and tinkering with it to make it better.   His next major triumph was even junkier.   Using  (among other hand-me-downs) strawberry shortcake containers and a brass doorknob purchased at his corner hardware, Forrest Bird invented a small respirator (US Patent No. 3191596) which revolutionized medicine.   It made the iron lung almost redundant.   More importantly it added a vital degree of safety for all sorts of cardiopulmonary surgery.  Bird’s original drawing looks Rube Goldberg-ish too, all 641 elements of it.  But it worked so well that he went back to the drawing board and produced a smaller one for newborns with breathing difficulties.   He christened it the “BabyBird,” US#3842828, not so much after himself but after #3191596, which by then had acquired the affectionate nickname of “the Bird.”   All this made Bird a millionaire, several times over.  He seems to have worn it well.   Late in life, he moved to Idaho where he set up his own rather oddly managed inventing company, from which he traveled to  receive Presidential Medals from George W. Bush (the Citizens medal) and then from Barack Obama (the Technology medal).   Just goes to show what you can do with fate, time, and circumstance—and a well-chosen pile of junk.  ©.  

[Stanley]

Time heals all wounds.

Although many of my experiences as a business man have been trying and bitter, I have satisfaction of knowing that I have lived the life of an honest man, and have been of some use.   Chauncey Jerome, “Autobiography,” ca. 1865.

If you find a really old 8-day clock in your grandma’s attic, in a glass-fronted wooden case and complete with a steel winding spring and brass workings, the chances are that it’s a ‘Jerome.’   A very great many Jeromes were made, tens of thousands of them.   They qualify as a minor miracle of America’s industrial revolution, and were seen that way in Victorian Britain, where the Jerome and/or its inventor, Chauncey Jerome, may have given rise to the phrase ‘Yankee ingenuity.’   The clocks were cheap and came in a bewildering variety of cases, some painted to look like polished brass, others framed in Victorian Gothic, and many decorated with a print (on tin) of some pleasant scene.   However common your parlor (or your taste) you could find a Jerome to grace it.   Chauncey Jerome was born in Litchfield County, Connecticut, on June 10, 1793, where his father farmed and blacksmithed, ingeniously enough to be known as a nail-maker.   When the family moved to the coast, his father entrepreneurially took up sailmaking.   So the Jeromes prospered, modestly, but when Chauncey’s dad died in 1805 the boy had to find work, eventually apprenticing to the clockmaker Eli Terry.   Terry was himself an innovator, making clocks cheaply by fashioning their movements in wood rather than cast brass, but even the hardest wood has problems in keeping time, and when Chauncey went out on his own he reverted to brass.   But instead of casting the gear wheels he stamped them out of sheet brass.   This enabled mass production, interchangeable parts and all, and so Chauncey Jerome’s clock works can stand with Eli Whitney’s gun factory as clichés of Yankee ingenuity.   As if to make the point, Jerome moved his factory to New Haven, near Whitney’s works.   The fact that Jerome had risen from relative poverty to great wealth fit him well, too, into the emergent American myth of the self-made man, a reputation polished by his generous philanthropy.   All this makes that clock you found in grandma’s attic less of a treasure than you might have hoped.   On the other hand, you might take comfort from another way in which Chauncey Jerome conforms to popular American mythology.   Late in his life, flush with success, Jerome decided to augment his fortune by entering a partnership with P. T. Barnum.    Phineas T., he of circus fame, was another American original, the huckster-promoter whose success lay in the oldest truth of all, that there are fools born every minute.   Within two years, Chauncey Jerome was a bankrupt, working for wages rather than paying them out.   He ran out of time in 1868.   ©. 

[Stanley]

Not the 'brownie queen' of San Francisco.

In the summer of 1881, my sister and some friends and I visited Woods Hole, where I got my first view of the sea.  We had a delightful time.   Mary Jane Rathbun, unpublished memoir.   

Look up ‘Mary Jane Rathbun’ and you’ll read much about the ‘brownie queen’ of San Francisco who, true to her name, laced her sweets with marijuana and, true to her nature, worked tirelessly as a volunteer nurse and caregiver to the first victims of the AIDs epidemic in the 1980s.   Such courage did not go unrewarded, and when this Mary Jane Rathbun passed away, in 1999, she was widely mourned and earned long, loving obituaries even in the respectable press.   My Mary Jane Rathbun displayed a different sort of selflessness, giving her life over to the scientific study of crustaceans, mainly those of the ocean-going varieties.   This Mary Jane was born in Buffalo, NY, on June 11, 1860, the youngest of five children.   Well schooled, she never attended college, and didn’t even see the ocean until, aged 21, she visited her older brother Richard—a Cornell graduate—at  Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where he’d been hired as a lab assistant in a US Fisheries Commission research project.   Richard’s career path would take him to a museum directorship.   His kid sister, suddenly smitten by the sea, volunteered to help.   But there was no career path for her, so she moved from being an unpaid volunteer to being a clerk at the Smithsonian.  As Mary Jane worked, she became expert, describing specimens meticulously (drawing them beautifully), and classifying them in the Linnaean manner.   In the process she became a one-woman department, indispensable if you wanted to know about crabs, lobsters, and their ilk.   As the fisheries grew in importance, more people did want to know, and by 1916 it was apparent that Mary Jane Rathbun needed help.   When it was admitted that there was no payroll available, Mary Jane did the sensible thing, “retired” herself, and used her salary to pay her assistant.   If she made brownies, I’m sure they were not laced with marijuana.    By the time she’d finished (at her death, in 1943), Mary Jane Rathbun was credited with over 150 scientific publications, including several books.   Her authority rested on her discovery and description of 1147 (!!) crustacea species and subspecies and was certified, so to speak, by two honorary graduate degrees.   And her colleagues honored her by naming nearly 30 crustacea taxa after her.   Next time you swim in the sea, you may meet one of them, they’re known as the rathbunae.  I don’t know that any are edible, but if so they will probably be better for you than marijuana brownies.   And this particular Mary Jane Rathbun is known, today, as the “crustacean queen, for we are now more accustomed to think of women as scientists. ©.   

[Stanley]

Can a craft be an art?

It was threads that caught me, really against my will. To work with threads seemed sissy to me. I wanted something to be conquered. But circumstances held me to threads and they won me over.   Anni Albers, in “Material As Metaphor,” (nd). 

The website “This Month in Women’s History” identifies Anni Albers as the first woman to have a solo show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MoMA).   That’s not quite true, but it does point out the plain fact that even in art, women had a hard time making their mark.   The first woman to go solo at MMA was in fact Florence Wyman Ivins, in 1921, and she was an illustrator for children’s books.   Granted, Ivins’ work is now collectible, and there was some wit in her drawings, but one cannot escape the implication that female artists were likely to be pigeonholed in some “not quite ‘art’” category.  So, too, with Anni Albers, who’d wanted to be a painter but found herself relegated to ‘women’s work’ as a textile designer.   Anni Albers was born Annelise Fleischmann, in Berlin on June 12, 1899.   She wanted to be a painter, and her parents indulged that ambition, but her instructors were not impressed.   She found no more encouragement when she moved to Walter Gropius’s ‘Bauhaus’ school at Weimar.   The Bauhaus’s radicalism did not extend to gender issues.   There was only one woman master, and young Anni (as she now called herself) was only able to enroll in the textile workshop.   Women’s work?   Perhaps, but Anni soon made the most of it, later reflecting that “any craft . . . may rise to the level of art.”   Thirty years later, she became the first weaver—not the first woman—to have a solo show at the MoMA.   By then she’d been through a lot.   After marrying Josef Albers, a junior master at the Bauhaus, she had put on some exhibitions, but the rise of Naziism closed the Bauhaus and sent Josef and Anni Albers, both Jews, on their travels.   They set up for a while at Black Mountain College, in Asheville, NC, a gallant experiment in democratic higher education, including on its staff such visionaries as Buckminster Fuller (architect-engineer), Ruth Asawa (sculptor), and John Cage (composer).   Anni’s work began to be more widely known, and as Black Mountain’s finances wobbled, the Alberses moved to Connecticut.  Anni’s MoMA exhibition (1949) was preceded by her successful show (1941) at a leading private gallery in Manhattan, one founded by a woman, Marian Willard Johnson.   Her Willard Gallery made something of an art ‘thing’ of the ‘crafts,’ and often featured women artists.   Anni Albers continued to weave, and exhibit, her captivating threads; she also moved into printmaking for, according to her, “there is no medium that cannot serve art.”   One of her prints can be seen in the Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM), but (alas) none of her weavings.  ©

[Stanley]

When does probability become certainty?

The true logic of this world is the calculus of Probabilities, which takes account of the probability which is, or ought to be, in a reasonable man’s mind .   James Clerk Maxwell.   

Our fascination with lists is a testimony to our desire to rid the world of uncertainties in order to find, for instance, the 15 best restaurants in New York or the world’s 10 best port wines.   Such rankings appear often in leading publications, and (as often) the rankings change.   About 20 years ago, the New York Times picked a port from a small winery in Augusta (MO), and the village fell into a swoon.   Augusta has since recovered, and the port in question is still pretty good, but it’s never again made the list.   But if one looks up a list of the 100, or sometimes 50, of the world’s greatest physicists, there is a surprising consistency at the top, where Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein vie for supremacy.   And a consistent #3 is James Clerk Maxwell.   Everybody knows about Newton and Einstein (#1 and/or #2) but a common response to #3 is ‘Maxwell who?’   James Clerk Maxwell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on June 13, 1831.   His father was a prosperous lawyer, also a man of some rank in the Clan Maxwell, and his mother descended from a line of high court judges.   They’d married rather late in life, and James came along even later, so they doted on him.   When James was only three his mother called him “a very happy man” and boasted of his precocious interest in how things worked.   “Show me how it doos,” he would say.   But as Maxwell matured, he became interested in things that were not of the ‘show me’ sort.   What was light?  What was magnetism?  What was energy?   While he was happy doing observational work (on the rings of Saturn, for instance, or on bridge construction) he turned towards these more theoretical questions.   The questions themselves, and the experimental or observational tools available to him in the 19th century, cast him back on the higher mathematics, which had been his first love.   He had  published his first paper at age 14, on a rather odd (to me) problem in mathematics, and in school he excelled in geometry.   As an undergraduate at Edinburgh and then on the faculty at Cambridge, then Aberdeen, and finally at the University of London Maxwell came to think that the only good answers to the most difficult questions were to be found by using the higher mathematics.   ‘If it can’t be measured, it’s not science,’ was a favorite aphorism, but Maxwell’s problems required a language that could deal as precisely as possible with uncertainties, with probabilities.   So it was that when, decades after Maxwell’s death, a young patent clerk in Switzerland named Einstein sat down to unravel Newton’s orderly universe, he did so sitting under a portrait of William Clerk Maxwell.   #1, #2, #3?  Like most listings, it doesn’t really matter.  ©.    

[Stanley]

When does probability become certainty?

The true logic of this world is the calculus of Probabilities, which takes account of the probability which is, or ought to be, in a reasonable man’s mind .   James Clerk Maxwell.   

Our fascination with lists is a testimony to our desire to rid the world of uncertainties in order to find, for instance, the 15 best restaurants in New York or the world’s 10 best port wines.   Such rankings appear often in leading publications, and (as often) the rankings change.   About 20 years ago, the New York Times picked a port from a small winery in Augusta (MO), and the village fell into a swoon.   Augusta has since recovered, and the port in question is still pretty good, but it’s never again made the list.   But if one looks up a list of the 100, or sometimes 50, of the world’s greatest physicists, there is a surprising consistency at the top, where Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein vie for supremacy.   And a consistent #3 is James Clerk Maxwell.   Everybody knows about Newton and Einstein (#1 and/or #2) but a common response to #3 is ‘Maxwell who?’   James Clerk Maxwell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on June 13, 1831.   His father was a prosperous lawyer, also a man of some rank in the Clan Maxwell, and his mother descended from a line of high court judges.   They’d married rather late in life, and James came along even later, so they doted on him.   When James was only three his mother called him “a very happy man” and boasted of his precocious interest in how things worked.   “Show me how it doos,” he would say.   But as Maxwell matured, he became interested in things that were not of the ‘show me’ sort.   What was light?  What was magnetism?  What was energy?   While he was happy doing observational work (on the rings of Saturn, for instance, or on bridge construction) he turned towards these more theoretical questions.   The questions themselves, and the experimental or observational tools available to him in the 19th century, cast him back on the higher mathematics, which had been his first love.   He had  published his first paper at age 14, on a rather odd (to me) problem in mathematics, and in school he excelled in geometry.   As an undergraduate at Edinburgh and then on the faculty at Cambridge, then Aberdeen, and finally at the University of London Maxwell came to think that the only good answers to the most difficult questions were to be found by using the higher mathematics.   ‘If it can’t be measured, it’s not science,’ was a favorite aphorism, but Maxwell’s problems required a language that could deal as precisely as possible with uncertainties, with probabilities.   So it was that when, decades after Maxwell’s death, a young patent clerk in Switzerland named Einstein sat down to unravel Newton’s orderly universe, he did so sitting under a portrait of William Clerk Maxwell.   #1, #2, #3?  Like most listings, it doesn’t really matter.  ©.    

[Stanley]

What is electricity?

Electricity is really just organized lightning.   George Carlin. 
  
The fundamental inutility of aptitude tests was demonstrated in 1959, when my test scores placed me in a ‘special’ physics class drawn up by a well-meaning group of MIT professors, the “Physical Science Coordinating Committee” or PSSC.   Out of 23 pupils thus chosen, I routinely came in 23rd in the class’s weekly multiple choice exams, occasionally 22nd.   So I never became a physicist.   But by good fortune my PSSC physics class was led by Herman Kirkpatrick, one of the finest teachers in human history.   “Mr. K.” was a real PhD, in nuclear physics, who delighted in telling us of the harmonies of the universe and how we could make them work for us by employing the “fudge factor” when our lab experiments didn’t quite work out.    One of Mr. K’s favorites was Coulomb’s Law, the ‘inverse square law.’   It held that the attractive force (say magnetism) between two objects weakens inversely by the square of the distance between them.   So if you double the distance, you quarter the force.   Or, as Mr. K. put it, absence does not necessarily make the heart grow fonder.   We adolescents had a good laugh at that one, a witty confirmation of experience and proven, fudge-free, in our PSSC lab experiments.    The ‘law’ was first formulated by a Frenchman, Charles-August de Coulomb, born in Angoulême on June 14, 1736.   He was not a proper nobleman, but the son of a ranking bureaucrat, so he made his own way through a military academy to become an army engineer, especially adept at the design of fortifications (in the era of the cannonball, this was a question of geometry).   He was also a child of the Enlightenment, and became fascinated by “electricity.”   I would like to think that Coulomb met (or corresponded with) Ben Franklin on this subject, but can’t find evidence for that.   So while Ben flew kites in lightning storms and invented a primitive battery (thus beginning to understand electricity as a ‘current’), Coulombe took his interest in friction to work on what we call electrostatic force, the sort of attraction you get if rub two balloons together.   And it was he who came up with the inverse square law.  Coulomb, like Franklin, got involved in revolutionary politics; and he proved a survivor despite the ‘de’ in front of his name.  While others lost their heads, he helped La révolution to come up with its universal (“metric”) system of weights and measures.   So it was doubly appropriate that one measure of electrical or electromagnetic force was later (in the 1880s, I think) named the ‘Coulomb,’  the amount of charge delivered in one second by 1 ampere of current.   The ampere is named after a later Frenchman, André-Marie Ampère (1775-1836), but that’s another story. ©

[Stanley]

Pope's favorite woman.

What a pleasure it would be to me . . .  to see you at ease; & then I could contentedly leave you to the Providence of God, in this Life, & resign my Self to it in the other.   Alexander Pope to Martha Blount, 1743. 
  
The ‘Augustan age’ of English literature is conventionally said to have ended with the nearly contemporaneous deaths of Alexander Pope (1744) and Jonathan Swift (1745).   And the two had much in common.   Their enemies said that much bile was buried with them, for each had proven that words could wound.   And though they lived in a combative age, and competed for patronage and favors, we can call them friends.   They were also unlucky in love.   This was possibly deliberate, possibly fated.  Certainly neither of them could be called great catches on the marriage market, before or after they established their literary reputations.   Whether either Pope or Swift wanted to marry is another question, but each of them did have in mind (and leave to us in their writings) pictures of what we might call the Ideal Woman.   With Swift she was in fact two, “Varina” (Jane Waring) in his youth and “Stella” (Esther Johnson) in his maturity.   By his own wish, he’s buried next to “Stella” in Dublin’s Anglican cathedral, and scholars still argue over whether there was more to it than that.   Alexander Pope also had two women in mind, the sisters Teresa and Martha Blount.   They first met in the narrowing circles of Roman Catholic London during the reign of Queen Anne.    The Blounts were early called “Pope’s favorites,” and so they may have been.   His mind stayed longer with Martha Blount.   She was born on the Blount family estate, in Berkshire, on June 15, 1690, just after the Glorious Revolution (1688-89) had made England’s monarchy safely Protestant.   The sisters’ Catholicism and their father’s deepening debts rendered them less attractive as marriage partners, and this may have made them more sympathetic to Alexander Pope, himself of a Catholic family in newly straitened circumstances.   As his reputation grew, he fell away from Teresa but his friendship with Martha deepened and became the subject of comment, some of it inevitably unkind, in literary London.   What may have been meant by their friendship is another question.   Pope himself was never securely established, and physically he was gnomish, disfigured by childhood tuberculosis.   But friends they certainly were.   Martha figures, positively, in some of Pope’s more famous works.   Late in his life Pope settled her in a house of her own, in London, and then left her a goodly inheritance (£1,000) at his death in 1744.    But when Martha died in 1759 she chose to be buried with Teresa, in Catholic (consecrated) round.   Although Pope took his last rites as a Roman Catholic, his remains lie in a Church of England cemetery.   So, I suppose, ne’er the twain shall meet.   ©. 

[Stanley]

Is 'raspberry beer' an oxymoron?

Yeast is a machine.   Max Delbrück, 1884.    

It will surprise no one that the city of Berlin annually hosts its very own ‘Berlin Beer Week.’  German beer is notoriously good, and by law and custom (the Reinheitsgebot , or ‘purity order,’ was issued in 1516) must be made only from hops, barley, water—and, of course, yeast.   But it is, therefore,  a very great surprise that in 2015 the Berlin Beer Week first prize (in the ‘home brew’ category) went to a Belgian-style beer brewed with raspberries. Framboise Fantastik, it was called, and its Braumeister was a woman from Australia, Cristal Peck.   The German beer gods, if there are any left, must have trembled.   It might have been an even more delicious irony that Ms. Peck was a biologist working, in Berlin, at the Max Delbrück Center.    For it was a scientist named Max Delbrück who did for German beer what Louis Pasteur did for French wine.   That was to explain, scientifically, exactly how yeast made alcohol.   Max Emil Julius Delbrück was born in Bergen auf Rugen, an island just off the Baltic coast, on June 16, 1850.   His family tree was peppered with clergymen, scholars, and professionals, and he trained, as a chemist, in Berlin.   Doubtless inspired by Pasteur’s work, he early (1874) took up a research post with a trade organization, which he helped to transform (1882) into the ‘Research and Educational Institute for Brewing.’   There Delbrück studied the biological and chemical processes by which yeast digested sugars to make alcohol (of course), but also fashioned technical equipment that would make that ancient art amenable  to modern industrial processes.  His work had immediate effect on German brewing, but in the much longer run would be used in the very modern political business of making tradition (that old Reinheitsgebot) work towards a new goal.   Not so much ‘purity’ as ‘monopoly,’ as German beer became the gold standard (if I can mix metaphors) for “beer” made or marketed in the nations of the European Union.   At one point, even Budweiser had to conform.   For several years, in the 1980s, my college bar at Lancaster University served a very good “Bud,” bottled or barreled, made only of barley, hops, water, and (of course) yeast.   This would make a nice story, the ironic twist of raspberry included, if only the Max Delbrück Center, in Berlin, were named after Max the brewing technocrat-scientist.   But the Center is named after his nephew, also Max Delbrück (1906-1981).   A biophysicist, this Max was also brother-in-law of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and, before he fled Germany in 1937, was active in the anti-Hitler resistance.  He also won the Nobel Prize for Physiology in 1969.   But that is another story entirely, for it had nothing to do with raspberry beer. ©. 

[Stanley]

Poet, diplomat, educator, agitator.

Lift every voice and sing
‘Til earth and heaven ring.    James Weldon Johnson (lyrics) and John Rosamund Johnson, melody. 
  
Stanton College Preparatory School in Jacksonville is recognized as one of Florida’s, one of the nation’s, best public high schools.   Its students shine, whether you look at their test scores, their college entrance records, or for that matter their debate teams.  Its principal since 2010, Nongongoma Majova-Seane, was born in Soweto, South Africa, under the harsh reign of Boer apartheid, but is happy to lead a racially integrated student body and teaching staff, and under her leadership the school has adopted the motto “ubuntu”, human kindness, which ‘Mama Majova,’ as the students call her, translates into “I am because we are.”   But in its origins Stanton was all-black, founded by the Freedman’s Bureau and named after Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton.   After Reconstruction, Stanton was ‘integrated’ into the city’s school system (and its white power structure) as an all-black grade school.   Its slow climb to excellence may be said to have begun when one of its alumni became principal and insisted that it should move towards providing a high school education for the city’s black kids, and not just vocational training, either.   “You are young, Black, and gifted,” was his message to pupils: so make something of it.  His name was James Weldon Johnson, already on his way to becoming one of the great pioneers of the civil rights movement and a man of immense personal achievement.   James Weldon Johnson was born in Jacksonville on June 17, 1871.  His father was a headwaiter in a local restaurant, his mother a school teacher but also an exotic transplant, a Bahamian whose own father had been the first black elected to the islands’  legislature.   It can be inferred that they wanted the best for their children, and began by sending James (and his brother John) to the Edwin Stanton School.   James Weldon Johnson’s talents would take him through college (in Atlanta) and then on to New York (where he enjoyed successes as a songwriter and an aspiring Republican Party politician), to the US foreign service (consul) in Latin America (where he married Grace Nail, a tornado in her own right, in 1910).  The Johnsons then returned to Grace’s territory, New York’s Harlem, where James would become a published poet, a leader of the Harlem Renaissance, and, from 1920 to his death in 1938, executive secretary of the NAACP, which he (and Grace) had helped to found in the 1910s.   His was an extraordinary life, and (together with the history of the Stanton School, a history in part his own) it shows us what education can accomplish when spread widely and wisely.   It’s worth noting, in that regard, that today’s Stanton pupils can be a rather troublesome lot, even for Mama Majova.   ©.  
 

[Stanley]

Between two worlds.

I am a dreamer who dreams, sees visions, and listens always to the still, small voice.  I am a trail-blazer.   Susan La Flesche Picotte. 
  
Susan La Flesche Picotte lived her whole life in the troubled borderlands between tradition and assimilation.   Both of her parents were of mixed ancestry, French-Canadian, Anglo-American, and a small rainbow of Native-American, but both Joseph La Flesche and Mary Gale La Flesche identified as Omaha when Susan was born during the traditional summer buffalo hunt, June 17, 1865.   Indeed, Joseph La Flesche, known as Iron Eye among the Omaha, had been designated tribal chief by Big Elk, who had seen the coming white flood and felt his people needed an adept navigator,   So Joseph challenged all his children ‘to be somebody’ in this new multicultural world.   Meanwhile, Mary Gale, though fluent in several languages, pointedly spoke only in Omaha.   And the Omaha people were themselves divided on the issue.   Daughter Susan chose the path of assimilation.   She excelled at the reservation’s Presbyterian school and, encouraged by her Anglo teachers there, went ‘Out East’ to the Hampton Institute, Virginia’s premier historically black college.   She graduated there second in her class, gave a rousing Salutatorian speech, and then went on to the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania.   So she crossed gender, racial, and cultural boundaries to become the first Native American medical doctor, qualifying MD (this time, first in her class, as Valedictorian) in 1889.   She was also, by then, a convinced assimilationist, and she returned to the Omaha reservation to care for her people by using scientific medicine, ‘modern’, clinical, and certainly not traditional tribal cures.   Back in Nebraska, serving as medical missionary on the grand salary of $750 per annum, she continued her father’s crusade to convince the Omaha to accept the idea of individual land ownership (“allotments”).  But this policy was used by whites to take over  reservation lands, plying Omaha landowners with drink and debt and walking away with the title deeds.   This hit home for the young doctor, for she had married a Sioux Indian, Joseph Picotte, who had (or developed) a drink problem.  So “Dr. Susan” (as she was called by her patients) became also a temperance crusader.  She also became a parent, of two boys, raising them to assimilate successfully into the Anglo world.    It was a tough life for Susan La Flesche Picotte, made tougher by her own illnesses and general physical frailty.   She continued her medical practice in Walthill, NB, built herself a two-story frame house that would not be out of place in any ‘Anglo’ town of the high prairies.   She died there in 1915.  She died of her labors, having embraced a new ‘native’ cult, based on peyote consumption, in her lifelong fight against the principal diseases of assimilation: alcoholism and poverty.  ©.  

[Stanley]

What is 'public health'?

I was the only person with authority . . . and I used it to stop anyone exercising any authority.  George Scott Williamson, 1946. 
  
George Scott Williamson was indeed a Scotsman, born in Fife on June 19, 1883.   He was the son of a mariner.  Not only that, but Williamson married (twice, in 1907 and then 1950) daughters of mariners.   Merchant seamen are, notoriously, an unruly lot, and ‘unrule’ was his standard.   He was, almost certainly, an anarchist, but his anarchism was closeted.   With due caution we can call him the ‘leading spirit’ behind the Pioneer Health Centre, in Peckham, London, which he founded in 1926 and which (other than an interruption courtesy of the Luftwaffe) flourished until 1951, when it ran afoul, sadly, of Britain’s new National Health Service (NHS).   Medical care free at the point of service was the NHS’s guiding principle.    At the Pioneer Health Centre (better-known today as the Peckham Experiment) the guiding principle was the public health.   It’s not entirely clear how Williamson got there, but he was a medical practitioner (educated at Edinburgh University), and he did serve at in World War I as a doctor.   Gallantly: providing medical care in the heat of battle, where (in 1916), he was captured by the Germans and later awarded Britain’s Military Cross.   Back in London, where he’d married Nellie Madden in 1907, he worked as a pathologist who specialized in chronic conditions (thyroid deficiency).   That may have inspired him to think of ‘health’ as a public problem, but his was a special public health advocacy.    Indeed, as a young medic, he’d opposed  the National Insurance policy of the Liberal government.   The immediate root of the Pioneer Health Centre, however, was his involvement with women’s health, notably access to birth control, and child care.   In this activity he met the woman who would in 1950 become his second wife, Inez Pearse.  In 1926 became his partner-practitioner in the Pioneer Health Centre.   Its members (not its ‘patients’) were fee-paying families who paid sixpence a week (later one shilling) for the privilege of pursuing a healthy way of life.    Supported also by private donations, the Health Centre would in its heyday provide, in a new building of strikingly modern design, a gymnasium, a swimming pool (for a time, London’s second-largest), meeting rooms, a garden, and even a dance hall.   And, oh yes, medical care: appointments only, provided by Williamson, Pearse, and their staffers.   But the clinic hours were at the convenience of members, mainly skilled working class, 2PM to 10PM every day but Sunday.    And what members received was, in the main, advice and counsel.    This stress on whole-life health and voluntarism inspired many, but in its early years the NHS treated illnesses, not people.  And so the Peckham Experiment lapsed.   It is now becoming orthodoxy which I think a healthy symptom.   ©.   

[Stanley]

How to write a life.

Twinkle, twinkle little star,
How I wonder what you are!
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky.    
         --from Rhymes for the Nursery, by Jane Taylor and Ann Taylor (London, 1806)

I can’t remember not knowing this poem.  Its charm (there are five stanzas in all) is its nearly perfect childishness, its wonder.   And behind it there’s a story.   Its author, Jane Taylor, and her sister Ann may have had just such childhoods, full of wonder and delight.   That, at least, was the hope of their mother, also Ann Taylor, as expressed in her Reciprocal Duties of Parents and Children (1818).   Reciprocal Duties went through many English editions (and at least two American ones), and along with seven other ‘advice books’ it made Taylor one of the most widely read authors of the 19th century.   If you want to sample it, a facsimile edition (2019) is available.   It will tell you of the innocent wonder of the child, of the attraction between parents and their offspring, and advise how that natural “harmony” can be nurtured, then strengthened in order to arm the child for adult life.   That’s interesting, for the bare bones of Ann Taylor’s life suggest, instead, a brooding melancholy.   Ann Taylor, wife, mother, and author, was born in London on June 20, 1757.   Her childhood was marred by her father’s death (in 1763) and then by her unhappy relations with her stepfather and step-siblings.   She found relief in writing, and was encouraged in that by her teachers, but in 1781 Ann put aside childish things to marry Isaac Taylor, a skilled craftsman who would become a dissenting (Calvinist) minister.   Hers was a life of genteel poverty and hard work, made harder by eleven pregnancies, and then darkened by the brutal fact that only six of her children survived to adulthood.    Melancholy indeed!!   And there is plenty of evidence that Ann Taylor took life seriously, notably in her extended reflection on preparing for her own death, The Itinerary of a Traveller in the Wilderness (1825).   And yet she found many silver linings, in her living children (including, besides Jane and Ann, writers themselves, a philosopher—Isaac—who invented a beer tap) and in her husband (another Isaac).   Their courtship began with a prank (a message in a teapot), continued with a war of words, and then issued in a long and happy marriage.   He died in 1829, whereupon she could not find the strength to go on.   Along the way, Ann educated all her children, at home, in writing and in other matters, and published nothing herself until after her daughters beat her to the punch with “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”   It all goes to show that you never can know how people are going to turn out, until they turn out.   ©.  

[Stanley]

The Proclamation of Izlaz.

Bourgeois revolutions . . .  rush onward rapidly . . . their stage effects outbid one another . . . but they reach their climax speedily, then society relapses into a long fit of nervous reaction.   From Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoléon (1852).   

1848 was “the year of revolutions,” the most ‘revolutionary’ period in western (especially European) history.    Serious unrest occurred everywhere, and several monarchies or principalities fell to revolutionary governments which were, broadly speaking, ‘republican.’   How widespread it had become was demonstrated on June 21, 1848, midsummer’s day, in the unlikely setting of Islaz, a village located in the province of Wallachia (today, southern Romania).    There a group of inspired revolutionaries issued the “Proclamation of Islaz.”   It was partly a declaration of independence (from the region’s Russian and Turkish overlords) but it demanded that their puppet prince call an elective assembly and for “the people” to elect an assembly that would end slavery, establish religious freedom, emancipate Jews and Gypsies, create a universal (“equal”) educational system, and transform the military into a “national guard” to protect the liberties of “the people”.    This revolutionary vanguard moved first to a larger town, then finally to Bucharest where it was greeted by cheering ‘citizens’ (some said 150,000).    A government took power and to followed these (and other) revolutionary mandates.   But it all fizzled out, and that despite the concessionary stance originally taken by the Ottoman Emperor.   Russia’s Tsar and the Orthodox Church were, from the first, having none of it.   In the end, which came quickly, the Russian and Turkish armies reestablished order, and the Wallachian Revolution was over before the year’s end.  But there were important internal fissures in the radical movement, over land reform for instance, and whether there should be a property qualification for voting.   Did freeing the slaves mean also the empowering of the peasantry?    Similar problems afflicted all of Europe’s “Romantic” revolutions.   Their internal divisions rendered them impotent in the face of the almost universal European reaction.    The situation was later (1852), and with savage wit, explained by the German radical Karl Marx, especially in his essay on the rise (in France) of Napoléon Bonaparte.   But there were some positive results, here and there.   This was true even in far distant Missouri, where in the troubled winter of 1860-1861, refugees from the failed German revolutions of 1848 banded together to frustrate Missouri’s secessionists and keep the state in the (northern) Union.   These ‘expatriates’ saw in slaveowners the same attributes as the Jünker aristos who’d thrown them out of Germany.  So, in St. Louis, they marched, singing German revolutionary songs, to kill an American counterrevolution before it could begin.   ©.  

[Stanley]

Bill of Rights, and some Wrongs.

One of the first men who went to college on the GI Bill was my grandfather, and I would not be standing here today if that opportunity had not led him West in search of opportunity.    Barack H. Obama, 2009.   
On June 22, 1944, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act.   We all know it better as the GI Bill, or the ‘GI Bill of Rights.’   Come the peace, it would give returning floods of veterans reasons to hope for better lives than they’d been able to fashion in the pre-war depression years.  And not just the vets.   Almost every city still has its “GI Tract” housing.   Even in the not very big Iowa town of Ames, it helped my uncle kick start his own transition from building airplanes for Boeing to building houses for Iowans, who (if they were vets) could move into a Bliss house with no downpayment.   Also in Ames, the GI Bill’s educational benefits brought veterans to Iowa State College, their subsidized tuition fees beginning that “A & M” campus’s transition to multiversity status.   At least a few of Dick Bliss’s first contracts were with returning GIs who were also students at the college.   So it was a win-win situation, much beloved by the bipartisan coalition that passed the bill through congress for the public good and in gratitude to America’s citizen soldiery.    And with each new war it’s been added to, even strengthened.   It’s part of our culture, so that many young people today see military service as an opportunity as well as a duty.   In the 1960s, when I tried to talk one of the brightest kids in my Philadelphia ghetto tutorial project to apply for college admission, he chose instead to enter the army, seeing it as a better way “for people like me” to get into college, acquire marketable skills, and get paid for it.   And at the end of my career, in St. Louis, in 2015, I was still teaching veterans.   So, the GI Bill was a triumph.   But it was not flawless.   To take education alone, it was not originally intended to have any educational benefits.   That it did owed to the labors of the unsung heroine Anna Marie Rosenberg who went to Europe to ask soldiers-at-war what they really wanted when peace came.   Her report added higher education to the GIs’ Bill of Rights.   And then over the years, from WWII to Afghanistan, where has the tuition money actually gone?   The biggest beneficiary has been the University of Phoenix and among the other leaders is a for-profit place called “Full Sail University.”   Another flaw, by design, was that the original Bill disproportionately (by any statistic you use) benefited white vets, whether we’re talking family homes or tuition benefits.   In this sense, it’s been called a legislative enactment of white privilege.   And there were other, deliberate, exclusions, merchant mariners for instance who’d braved the hazards of the North Atlantic crossings.   The GI Bill, still justly regarded as a triumph, will be the more valuable to us as we also reconsider its failings.   © 

[Stanley]

Clothing makes the man?

So take care, take care,
Never let your mother buy your underwear
For she’ll be thinking
That wool’s in keeping.   Doggerel from The Bay Area Council Pow-Wow (1994). 
  
These ‘anniversary notes’ notes have (more than twice) celebrated the eccentric dietary reforms of Dr. John Kellogg and Sylvester Graham. Their common idea, pushed with religious fervor (Kellogg was a 7th-Day Adventist and Graham a Presbyterian minister), was that we might improve our soul’s (as well as our body’s) health by eating exactly right.   So today some, millions I think, continue to eat Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and Graham Crackers, some of them unaware that they are thus ingesting greater moral powers.   Just so, some of us don Jaeger clothes (Jaegar was, in my youth, known as a sportswear brand) ignorant of the ways in which clothes make the inner (as well as the outer) person.    This was an article of faith of Dr. Gustav Jäger, born in Württemberg, Germany, on June 23, 1832.   This son and grandson of Lutheran ministers was expected to become one himself, but he left his Lutheran seminary to study medicine at Tubingen and then zoology and anatomy at Vienna.   In an era when German higher education was the western world’s gold standard, Jäger qualified in all three.   He also, in several senses, pursued all three throughout life.  He married a Lutheran minister’s daughter, practiced medicine, lectured in anthropology, and (intellectually overwhelmed by the new theory of evolution by natural selection) he studied Charles Darwin’s (and God’s) favorite invertebrate, the beetle.   Jäger’s beetle book went through several editions and is still consulted.   Recognizing that Darwin had not pinned down the material means by which heredity was transmitted between generations, Jäger developed a ‘germ plasm’ theory that sounds a lot like DNA.   But we must remember that this polymath was also a medical doctor and a Lutheran, thus deeply concerned about the illnesses and the sins of modern humans.  Thinking it through, he was convinced that we were troubled by our clothing, which was even then artificially concocted of “lust compounds,” and he urged a return to nature.   Not ‘naturalism’ or nudity, heaven forbid, but “natural” in the sense of being animal fiber. “Normal clothes” (normalkleidung) was his trademark, woolens were his thing, and Jäger convinced many European reformers and intellectuals to wear, both next to the skin and as outer layers, rougher woolens, and to sleep only under very rough Jäger blankets.   Among his most unlikely converts was Oscar Wilde, a person not usually thought of in a normalkleidung way.    More predictably, George Bernard Shaw bought a one-piece Jäger suit, donned it enthusiasitically, and made him appear to one critic “a Jäger Christ” and to another (less sympathetically perhaps) a “forked radish.”   By the time Shaw donned his woolen-moral armor, Jäger’s ideas had been taken up by a British capitalist, Lewis Tomalin, who marketed his stuff (mainly underwear) as “Dr. Jaeger’s Sanitary Woolen System, Ltd.”  It was pretty popular, as it were despite Oscar Wilde’s endorsement.   Besides Shaw, it was endorsed by several British polar expeditions, notably Sir Ernest Shackleton’s.   Jaeger woolens even caught the fancy of King George V, who in the first year of his reign gave scratchy underwear the royal warrant.   So “Jäger” became “Jaeger,” as British as Yorkshire pudding.   In 2021 the brand was purchased by the Marks & Spencer chain, than which nothing could be more British.  So, check out this hot summer’s Jaeger catalog, especially the woolens, and prepare to improve your morals.   And sweat.   And scratch.  After all, it has long been known that discomfort strengthens the soul.   ©    

[Stanley]

At war with Naziism.

I am asking for equality of opportunity for all human beings, and as long as I stay here, I am going to continue that fight.    President Harry Truman, defending his ‘Executive Order 9981’ to desegregate the armed forces of the United States of America, 1948.

It’s a possibility that when President Truman reached his (long-overdue) decision to integregate the US military, he had in mind one of the lesser-known military engagements, 'the Battle of Bamber Bridge,' which took place on June 24, 1943.   It was but a minor skirmish, with seven wounded and one dead, and in fact it was quickly and effectively hushed up.   And no wonder, for it was certainly not part of the liberation of Europe from the terrors of Naziism.   Indeed, the British civilians of Bamber Bridge joined in battle against some American troops (from the 234th Military Police Company) and in support of other American troops (from the 1511th Quartermaster Truck Regiment).  The MPs were all white; the men from the truck regiment were all black, and the battle was a consequence of the fact that when the ‘Arsenal of Democracy’ finally went to war, in 1941-1945, it did so as an apartheid nation.    Bamber Bridge, a large industrial village in south Lancashire, became a staging post for various American units, mainly Army and Army Air Corps, preparing for what we now call D-Day.   The presence of an all-black truck regiment (most of its officers were white, of course) aroused tensions amongst the Americans, especially in light of news from home about the Detroit Race Riots of 1943.   Things did not improve when black soldiers were welcomed by civilians at the village’s pubs.   In an effort to pacify the situation, the US army segregated the pubs, allowing blacks access only to Ye Olde Hob Inn.   That’s where the battle began, and went on all night, ending (at about 4AM, June 25) at the 1511th  base.   Seven soldiers were wounded, one killed (Private William Crossland of the 1511th was shot in the back).   Otherwise the casualties were, so to speak, democratically distributed, for the 1511th could dish it out as well as take it.   In light of all this, it is interesting, if merely poetic, that in 1863, during the American Civil War, the weavers and spinners of Bamber Bridge had issued a pro-Union, anti-slavery petition against Britain taking the side of the Confederate States of America in the American Civil War.   More immediately, and although the black soldiers of the 1511th had laid down their guns on the promise that the MPs would also be subject to disciplinary proceedings, American military courts punished only black soldiers, sentencing them to imprisonment and/or hard labor followed by dishonorable discharges.   Bamber Bridge would later mark these injustices with a memorial beer garden at Ye Olde Hob.   And it would be good to think that Harry Truman had them in mind when he issued Executive Order 9981.   ©  

[Tripps]

That's interesting - I'd never heard of the incident.
My first reaction was to say 'I got married there' - but then a second thought arrived.
In fact it was at Higher Walton - which is not too far away.

[Stanley]

Neither had I David. I think Uncle Bob did good!

[Stanley]

Sportswoman of the year, many times.

It’s not enough just to swing at the ball.  You’ve got to loosen your girdle and really let the ball have it.   ‘Babe’ Didrikson Zaharias.    

Did Babe Zaharias wear a girdle?   Probably.   It was a standard item for women, and Zaharias was a woman; but if she ever needed a girdle it would have been only to hold up her silk stockings—if ever she wore them.   In her prime, which lasted for more than two decades, she stood at 5’7”, weighed in at 115 lbs., and according to the classic sportswriter Grantland Rice was “the most flawless section of muscle harmony, of complete mental and physical coordination, the world of sport has ever seen.”  Whether the world liked what it saw was another question, for in Babe Zaharias’s time the world of sport was unsure about the role women should play in sporting competitions.   Zaharias, though aware of that uncertainty, seems not to have felt it herself.   Babe Zaharias was born Mildred Ella Didrikson, in Port Arthur, Texas, on June 27, 1911.   Her parents were Norwegian immigrants, and because she was the sixth of seven kids her mother called her ‘bebe’.  That’s probably where the ‘Babe’ originated, although Zaharias herself would claim it came from the most famous Babe of them all, the one who used to pitch for the Red Sox and then hit them out of the park for the Yankees.   And young Ms. Didrikson did the same, pitch, hit, and run for sandlot and school teams.   She also learned to sew and sing, but it was sports that turned her on.  Babe never played with dolls, she later told an interviewer, but she played all sorts of ball games and competed at the highest level (notably at the 1932 Olympics) in track and field.   She took up golf in 1935, which is how she met George Zaharias, whom she married in 1938.   In the wrestling ring, he played the villain’s role.   For the Babe, he proved a loyal manager of her stellar sporting career, mainly in golf.   They ran a course together, in Florida, and she competed in PGA tournaments, sometimes making the cut, before there was a “Ladies’” PGA.   Despite her “manliness”, or possibly because of it, she became popular, certainly famous, and was in 1950 a founder-member of the LPGA when that seemed to be the best way to get women into the professional game.   So it has proven to be.   For Babe Zaharias, the women’s tour was a life-saver, and it proved a better source of money than playing in PGA events.   Sadly, in 1952 and still in the prime of a remarkably long sporting career, Babe Zaharias came down with cancer.   Typically, she made it public.  She used her affliction to raise awareness and to raise money for cancer research.    Babe died in 1956, in love with the ladies’ golfer Betty Dodd but still under the management of George Zaharias, once the beefy bad guy of wrestling.   Today, the Zaharias Golf Course is a national landmark.   I think that qualifies as progress.   ©.   

[Stanley]

Identity as a construction.

To me, the atmosphere created by the women's movement was like breathing fresh air after years of gasping for breath.    Carolyn Wood Sherif, quoted in a posthumous (1983) ‘appreciation’ of her work and life.

One of the most influential social psychologists of her era, Carolyn Wood Sherif was born in Indiana on June 26, 1922.   She was educated to be her own person.  As an undergraduate at Purdue, an institution devoted to engineering, she pursued a new major in the history and philosophy of science.   She performed in that with great distinction.   More to the point of her life, she wrote a play adopted by the US government to encourage community projects aimed towards the sale of war bonds.  Then she did an undergraduate research project on how her drama achieved its aim.   That took her to the University of Iowa and an MA in psychology, then to a research post in the same field at Princeton.   Princeton University had then no place for a woman, but in 1945 she married Muzafer Sherif, already a leading researcher in social psychology.   Theirs was a tense, occasionally stormy, and always productive relationship: three daughters, several research projects, publications, and a shared feeling that Carolyn was not getting enough credit for her work.   At Muzafer’s suggestion, she  began her own PhD program, which issued in a PhD from Texas, then (in 1965) a joint appointment at the Pennsylvania State University.  Their work had been focused on the social construction of psychological identity, most famously in the so-called Robbers Cave Experiment with groups of boys at a summer camp.  Now Carolyn turned more to issues of gender identity, focused on girls and women.   This can’t be ‘blamed’ on Muzafer.   He was progressive on equality issues already, having been exiled from Turkey and then grilled for his alleged Communism by US congressional snoops.   It makes more sense to credit it to Carolyn, for she’d long been studying how people construct their world views and assume their ‘proper’ place in that world.   As a young woman researcher she’d played second fiddle to an older man, Muzafer. Why had that happened?  Why so easily?   The marriage survived, as did the collaboration, but Carolyn Wood Sherif became a force unto herself.   She’s credited with many feminist advances, not least the women’s studies section in the American Psychological Association (APA), the discipline’s guiding body.   A visiting professorship at Cornell led to that institution’s new degree program in women’s studies.    The sad ending is that Carolyn Wood Sherif fell victim to cancer in 1982.  Memorials to her abound at Penn State.   As for Muzafer Sherif, he drifted into depression and died in 1988 while in the care of their daughter Sue, chief librarian for the state of Alaska.  ©.   

[Stanley]

The caged bird.

I know what the caged bird feels, alas!    The opening line of the poem “Sympathy,” Paul Lawrence Dunbar, 1899.

Readers will be familiar with the closing line of this three-stanza poem, for Maya Angelou used it (with acknowledgement) to title her I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969).  Angelou wrote the book when she was still young, at 41.   It’s the best, and best-known, of her other autobiographical volumes, and it’s really about how she broke free from her own cage while still living in a cage built by others.   Free to be black and love it, Angelou sang plenty, including at a presidential inauguration, and died full of years (aged 86) and honors.   Life for Paul Lawrence Dunbar was less happy.   He died at only 33, in 1906, and in 1914 his wife Alice would remember that he wrote the poem while working as a clerk, in the hot understory of the Library of Congress.   He was the caged bird.   The iron grate above his head was the one he beat his wings against until they, and the grate, were bloodied red.   He knew plenty about blood, for he would die of tuberculosis, just as he was weakened by it for most of his adult life.   Paul Lawrence Dunbar was born in Dayton, Ohio, on June 27, 1872.   Both parents had been born in slavery and had freed themselves during the Civil War, his father as an infantryman in the 55th Massachusetts and then as a blue-coat cavalryman.   Paul went to high school in Dayton; he integrated it as its only black pupil.   Very black.   As it were despite this he was popular, known for his literary talents (he’d begun writing, or singing, at age 6) and a good friend of Louis and (particularly) Orville Wright who, after graduating, would help Dunbar get his first work published before the Wright brothers made history by taking to the air themselves.   Paul’s poetry flew, too, and was early praised by none other than William Dean Howells, himself an Ohioan but by then the literary lion of Boston.   Howells particularly praised Dunbar’s mastery, in poetic verse, of black dialect, and Dunbar did write a lot of that.   Howells praised his friend Mark Twain for the same facility, and Twain gloried in it.   But Dunbar wanted to ‘write white’ as well.   “Sympathy” offers evidence for that, but Dunbar’s prose fictions were not well received and he remained, for the white world, a black writer best at writing black.   This wore him down, and like his gallant father, Joshua, Paul Dunbar fell victim to alcohol as well as to tuberculosis.   In 1902, in a depression made deeper by drink, he nearly beat his wife to death.   Alice, a writer herself, left him, and Paul returned to live with his mother in Dayton.   He continued to write—some of his best works.  Alice continued to love him.   His memorials are many, not least high schools and libraries named for him.   But the best memorial may be Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.  Indeed she did.  ©   

[Stanley]

Psychoanalysis as a way of life.

She cannot tolerate praise, triumph, or success, not any better than failure, blame, and repudiation.   Sigmund Freud, 1922, on his analysis of Joan Hodgson Verrall Riviere.    
Given the British royals’ reputation for bourgeois stodge in matters of style, it’s interesting that during the Edwardian era the firm of Nettleship dressed at least some members of the royal court.   Ida Nettleship (1856-1932) pioneered in “rational clothing,” daring stuff that allowed women to move comfortably, even ride bicycles.   She also designed for actresses  (Ellen Terry, for instance) and even did the wedding dress for Oscar Wilde’s bride, Constance Lloyd.   I bring her up because Nettleship’s ‘court’ division was where Joan Riviere found her first gainful employment, as a seamstress.   Joan Riviere was quite a stylish young woman herself, born (on June 28, 1883) into a high-powered middle-class family, educated at home and in Germany, and already a suffragette and divorce law reformer.   Later in her life (she was only in her 20s when she joined Nettleship), she would be one of Britain’s most influential psychoanalysts, produce the best English translations of Sigmund Freud’s works, and produce, herself, a still-influential article entitled “Femininity as a Masquerade” (1929).  Of course she didn’t dwell on dress (rational or otherwise), but rather on the female’s encounter with the unconscious in birth, childhood, and later life.   She’d come to psychoanalysis by her own route, going into analysis herself because of the agonies she suffered when her father died. The death was premature, she felt, and the hurt and anger sent her first into a nursing home.   In 1916 she began five years of analysis with Ernest Jones, then Freud’s leading British disciple.   Already familiar with Freud’s work, she reacted angrily to Jones: so angrily that he ended the sessions, but so intelligently that he recommended her to the master himself.   Rivière disagreed with Freud, too, on several points, including his notion of women’s phallic insufficiency.   But Jones, Freud, and Freud’s daughter Anna, had begun to think of Joan Riviere as a colleague.   And so she was, already in 1919 a founder-member of the British Psychoanalytic Society.   After her sessions with Freud, she translated his papers and his most important works, including Civilization and Its Discontents, and with Anna Freud and Melanie Klein—but always as a woman with her own point of view—became an acknowledged leader of British Freudians.   In 1906, as a stylish young woman with advanced ideas, she’d married Evelyn Riviere, a barrister from another high powered middle-class family.   The marriage survived her several affairs, and when he died in 1945 she wrote another essay of lasting influence, “The Bereaved Wife.”   Given the year, it hit a responsive chord.   She continued her work until her own death in 1962.   ©. 

[Stanley]

A modern missionary.

I just started all over again.  I set up practice in my neighborhood, and everybody was happy to see a Japanese woman doctor.   Dr. Kazue Togasaki, recalling her return home in 1943.  

Kazue Togasaki was the second-eldest of nine children (most of them daughters) in a Japanese immigrant family in San Francisco.   She was born on June 29, 1897, and the 1906 earthquake provided one of her early, enduring memories.   While the city burned, her parents opened their house to the injured, treated them as best they could, and offered them provisions (including, of course, tea) from the family’s grocery store.   Her parents were Christian converts, and she inherited their tradition of service to the community.   She also inherited her father’s ambition for all his children to do something useful.   Despite handicaps placed in her way because of her race, she carried this ambition with her to Stanford, where she majored in Zoology.  Unable to find employment in her field, she then graduated (at the top of her class) in the city’s school of nursing.  But San Francisco hospitals and doctors “didn’t use” (her words) Japanese nurses, so in 1929 Togasaki traveled across the country to enroll in that redoubtable engine of medical reform, the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania.   After qualifying MD in 1933, she returned to her native city and began to practice as a GP and obstetrician.  Her patients were mostly Asian, mostly poor, but soon she developed a clientele among “white” Californians.  She also developed a kind of welfare service, taking in the poverty-stricken, the unwed mother, and the terminally ill (some into her own home) and treating them according to their needs.   This was not so much stopped as temporarily transferred by Executive Order 9906, by which FDR established the USA’s very own concentration camps for Japanese-Americans.   Dr. Togasaki immediately pressed herself into service, delivering babies, treating the ill and the infirm, giving medical advice.   Doctoring all the time, she moved with her people from the “relocation centers” to various camps, until, in late 1943, the government decided Dr. Togasaki was safe enough to release back into the wilds of San Francisco.   Once back home, she continued her medical work.  And she continued, also, her personal tradition of charitable care.   Togasaki was one of the very first Asian-American women to qualify as a medical doctor, anywhere in the country.   She also became one of San Francisco’s most distinguished citizens, welcomed and honored wherever she went.   But what I like best about her is that through her example, and at her urging, all of her younger sisters also became medical professionals, nurses or doctors.   Thus the Togasakis: yet another tribe of ‘undesirable’ immigrants.   Today, the thought occurs that more may be needed.   ©.