BOB'S BITS

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Founder member of the Royal Academy.

It shouldn’t be that women are the exception. Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Of course that is good advice—but from a woman whose accomplishments made her exceptional. And in these ‘Anniversary Notes’ I’ve featured women who were, exceptionally, the ‘first’ female—to win a Nobel Prize, to fly a plane, to climb the Matterhorn, to become a medical doctor, etc., etc., ad infinitum. Our culture has been obstinately male, reluctant even to acknowledge women’s accomplishments, let alone to welcome females as members by right in the clubs of the famous. But then here’s the Royal Academy, the RA, the very pinnacle of England’s art world. It was founded in 1768, quite a long while ago, and two of its founding members were women: Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser. And they weren’t artists’ models, either, but painters in their own right. OK, so Moser was known for painting flowers, which some might think a particularly feminine thing to do. But Angelica Kauffman was a master in a man’s field. She did history paintings, crucial ‘scenes’ from Greek mythology or from the Bible, idealized in oil. And when she turned to portraiture (commissioned at good pay rates) she showed her subjects in heroic light as in the manner of leading (male) artists of her day, like Sir Joshua Reynolds. Angelica Kauffman was born in Switzerland on October 30, 1741. Her father was a muralist, and she learned art as his assistant, traveling here and there to create classical scenes on walls, sometimes ceilings, commissioned by Hapsburg aristocrats or Catholic bishops. Once settled in Italy, she began to win commissions from English diplomats and tourists. One of these, the wife of the English ambassador in Venice, brought Angelica back to London. There she quickly established herself as a fashionable painter. Today her works hang in many leading museums, unfortunately not in St. Louis, and she’s celebrated in art history, too, as a leading painter in her ‘school’ but also, inevitably, as a female first. But let’s not give the RA too much credit. Kauffman’s RA status was challenged iin a scandalous painting (an oily slander in oils) and the rumor spread that she must be Sir Joshua Reynolds’ mistress. Such garbage offers an almost perfect definition of “sexism.” As for the Royal Academy, it didn’t elect another female fellow until 1936!! She was Laura Knight (1877-1970), and she got her own back well before her RA election with her revolutionary self-portrait (1913) showing herself painting a living nude (her friend, Ella Naper). Even in 1913 that was called “vulgar.” Today it hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. Simon Schama has called it Knight’s “greatest work, heroically independent, formally ingenious and lovingly sensual.” Truly “pioneering”: but it had to wait for another era, and for another painter. ©

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"All he needed was a wheel in his hand and four on the road." Jack Kerouac.

The automobile won’t get anywhere until it has good roads to run on . . . Let’s build it before we’re too old to enjoy it. Carl G. Fisher, 1912-1913.

Carl Fisher had an interest in automobiles. He’d built the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and in 1913 his Prest-O-Lite was standard equipment on many cars. He then sold his firm to Union Carbide for $9 million (about $270 million today) and turned his attention, and his $$$, to building a ‘national’ coast-to-coast highway. First bruited to his friends at a gala dinner in Indianapolis, the idea became official on October 31, 1913, with the original dedication of the Lincoln Highway. The road didn’t yet exist, but Fisher was a man of vision. By 1928 the Lincoln Highway was a reality, connecting Times Square in New York to Lincoln Park in San Francisco. So much of a reality, indeed, that in 1928 the Boy Scouts of America led the effort to place 2400 markers (not quite one per mile) along the route. With President Hoover promising two cars in every garage and a chicken in every pot, the BSA’s optimism seemed to fit the temper of the times. One of the markers was set along “Lincoln Way” in Ames, Iowa, where my grandfather was Professor of Animal Husbandry and founding director of the Iowa State Extension Service. Grandpa was a believer, too (one of his pet projects was the development of public “farm-to-market” roads), and one of my earliest memories is being taken by him to see the Ames marker. “Lincoln Way” was then Ames’s main street, linking the old town (centered on the CNW railway station) with the new (centered on the Iowa State College campus). Lincoln Way in Ames was also US Highway 30, and I thought it was Highway 30 all the way, coast to coast. It wasn’t, and a lot more has changed since then. Highway 30 now runs south of Ames as a superhighway, overpasses, slip roads, and all. And much more has changed. As a transcontinental highway it no longer exists, having been replaced along much of its route by Interstate 80. Motor cars no longer use acetylene headlights. Prest-O-Lite is long gone, Union Carbide is now a wholly-owned subsidiary, Ames’s ‘cow college’ is Iowa State University, where can even major in English. Ames’s Boy Scout Marker now resides in the Ames History Museum: safely but located far north of Lincoln Way. As for motor cars, Ames still has them (after all, the city is still located in the United States of America) but Ames is now known for having one of the nation’s most effective public transport systems. In 1913, old Henry Ford refused to contribute to the Lincoln Highway Association. He thought the national government should build highways, a doubtful issue (constitutionally speaking) until Dwight Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, a modern embodiment of Carl Fisher’s Lincoln Highway project. ©.

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Antipodean anarchist?

The Greeks are far clearer on many things than modern philosophers . . . they are not, like the moderns, obsessed with ‘the problem of knowledge’ –they do not set out to discover how, or how much, we can know before they are prepared to know anything. John Anderson, 1962.

John Anderson was an empiricist and not an epistemologist. He was also impolite about idealism. There is a real world out there; our ‘perceptions’ change nothing about it. To rabbit on about how, how far or whether we ‘know’ anything is to admit defeat before the game starts. He wrote these words about the ancient Greeks in the last year of his life. They suggest a line of continuity which makes John Anderson an attractive figure. He was born in Stonehouse, Lanarkshire, a rural place just south of Glasgow, on November 1, 1893. His mother wrote poetry and taught piano. His father was an atheist schoolmaster and almost a founder member of the Independent Labour Party. He owed something to each parent, but began to create his own life by earning distinctions in several disciplines (mainly science, mathematics, and philosophy) as an undergraduate at Glasgow. Anderson wrote his master’s thesis on the American pragmatist philosopher-psychologist William James, yet another reason why he found it difficult to settle in the very kirky (churchy) philosophy departments of Glasgow and Edinburgh. Not knowing what to do with him, but acknowledging his brilliance, his colleagues recommended Anderson for the chair of philosophy at the University of Sydney, far away down under. There Anderson became an activist and an eccentric. He wore heavy Scotch tweeds in the Sydney heat. He circulated banned books (his Ulysses was concealed, not very well, as his Book of Common Prayer). He invited students for dinner and tennis at his suburban home, where he and his wife told funny stories about his colleagues. He was an almost charter member of the Australian Communist Party. During World War II he attacked war memorials as profane libels on the dead. All this discomfited his professorial colleagues, the more so when he attacked them for furthering the notion that universities were for training, not education. They tried to censure him in 1943, and then created a second chair in philosophy which they intended as a counterpoint to his activism. Instead, the new professor became a friend and (almost) disciple. Anderson’s inconsistencies troubled some (he bolted the Communist Party over Stalin, for instance). His lack of publications troubled others. But he consistently argued that liberalism required one to be in opposition (to the “State,” whatever its disguise) and to defend the Socratic ideal in education (open discussion as a sufficient end, an agreement to disagree). John Anderson also chopped his own firewood, and that’s what killed him in the Australian winter of 1962. One did, after all, have to recognize the realities of one’s climate. ©.

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Farm boy makes good.

It was the stars that they thought were holes, for the roses didn't know any better. Hans Christian Andersen, “The Neighboring Families.”

Andersen’s stories charm us because of his ability to see the world simply, as a child (or, here, as wild roses) might see it. In this fable, the roses’ theory makes sense to their neighbors in and around the pond, ducks and geese, a nightingale, and a farm horse. Of course the roses’ notion that the stars are holes in the sky begs the question of where the light(s) came from, but we shouldn’t laugh because wise adults have for millennia puzzled about what lies out there, in what we’ve come to call the “universe.” One astronomer who helped us continue that conceptual journey was Harlow Shapley. It was for him a most unlikely outcome. He was born on a farm outside the nearest town (Nashville, Missouri) on November 2, 1885 and left school at 12, in 1897. In 1921, only 24 years later, he was appointed Director of the Harvard College Observatory, a post he held for over three decades. How Harlow Shapley got to Harvard is an unlikely tale, at least as odd as anything Hans Christian Andersen dreamed up. It started in a Carnegie Library located in Chanute, Kansas, where the cub reporter for the Chanute Daily Sun decided he needed more learning. He then returned to high school, finishing the six year curriculum in a little over a year, and gained admission to the University of Missouri’s Journalism School. When he got there, he found all the places filled, and picked a course from the catalog, Astronomy (it begins with an ‘A’, he couldn’t pronounce Archaeology, and he’d had enough Agriculture). Graduate work at Princeton followed, then (1914) an appointment at the Mount Wilson Observatory. Harlow Shapley was an outsider who’d come in from the cold. His ideas about the Solar System’s place in space led him to argue, in 1920, in a famed “Great Debate,” that space, all of it, was comprehended by the Milky Way. He was almost as wrong as Andersen’s roses, and Shapley quickly came round to accept that the Milky Way’s ‘nebulae’ were separate galaxies. He then mapped thousands of them. But he went on acting as outsider. At the Harvard Observatory, he dispensed with Howard Pickering’s view on the incapacities of women. Harvard’s first woman astronomer was a Shapley student, Cecilia Payne (1900-1979). Later, Shapley’s outspokenness got him in trouble with the House Un-American Activities Committee. He treated HUAC with the contempt it deserved. But he was no ‘communist;’ Harlow Shapley was just a Missouri farm boy who thought the world would be a lot happier if it moved a little to the left in the universe of politics. Some of his best work was done for the United Nations and the National Science Foundation. He continued to observe space and politics (and religion) until his death in 1972. ©

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The hero as a human being.

Madonna Porzia continued: “Friend Benvenuto, have you never heard it said that when the poor give to the rich, the devil laughs?” I replied: “Quite true! and yet, in the midst of all his troubles, I should like this time to see him laugh.” From the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini.

Benvenuto Cellini offered a work of his own hand to an eminent lady, asking in return only her admiration and praise. In this passage, Cellini draws a contrast with a rival artisan who sold an equally “exquisite” piece to Pope Clement for the proverbial sack of gold. Here Madonna Porzia refuses Cellini’s offer. Next day, however, she sent Cellini payment (twice as much gold as Clement had paid Cellini’s rival) and said that she had no wish to amuse Satan. This story offers two moral lessons. Lady Porzia was a wise woman, and Benvenuto Cellini was a great artist. He probably was. Many of his surviving works grace museums and public spaces in Florence, Rome, and Paris, and his clientage included popes, the Medicis, and the king of France (all of whom were, often, deadly rivals of each other). Benvenuto Cellini was born in the Medicis’ city-state, Florence, on November 3, 1500. His parents were very elderly, and Cellini later claimed that his grandfather was even older. When Benvenuto was just a little boy, grandpa (then over 100!!) taught him one of his first lessons about beauty. From then on, Cellini was on a mission to prove himself the greatest artist in Renaissance Italy, and by his own criteria, he succeeded. We know that because he wrote about it, in his autobiography, which he finished in 1558 and has since become a classic, and perhaps ‘the’ classic document of the European Renaissance. It’s been assigned as such, from time to time, in the Honors College’s “western traditions” courses, and it makes a great read for freshmen. That’s partly because it is, indeed, a great read. But its real usefulness is that it can’t possibly be all true. In true Renaissance spirit, Benvenuto Cellini set out to make himself a hero, a man of ordinary clay who accomplished great things as an artist, a soldier, a musician, an adventurer, sometimes a diplomat, even a poet. And, like Oliver Cromwell a century later, he wanted to be known “warts and all.” He could be a great hero and yet he was, after all, human. So his imperfections get fair play, too. As honest (or modest) as he may have been with Madonna Porzia, he was also a juvenile delinquent in his youth and early apprenticeships, now and again a murderer who also took pleasure in mutilating his adversaries, an insatiable lover who could be a devil with women (and sometimes with boys), and a clever fellow who could, when he wanted, drive a very hard bargain for his “exquisite” works of art. It’s this astonishing ambiguity that may explain why the online Britannica, in its piece on the Renaissance, fails even to mention Benvenuto Cellini. Now that would really have offended him, for his was an ego that knew no bounds. ©

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Vision woman.

Do not allow your mind to be imprisoned by majority thinking. Patricia Era Bath, quoted in Black Women in Science: A Black History Book for Kids.

Patricia Bath, one of the most remarkable women of my lifetime, was born in Harlem, New York, on November 4, 1942. She was helped on her way by her parents. Her father, Rupert, was (like V. S. Naipaul’s dad) a Trinidadian journalist. But in New York City such skills in a black man were not marketable. Instead, Rupert became the city’s first black subway driver. He transferred some of his ambition to Patricia, but she did not become, like Naipaul, a Nobel Laureate. Instead, urged on by her mother, Gladys, Patricia excelled in school science. By the time she left high school, she’d won a National Science Foundation fellowship and her school science project had been featured on the front page of the New York Times. At only 18, her ideas on cancer had already been published—by her project supervisor at Yeshiva, who gave her credit—so it wasn’t too surprising that Patricia won a scholarship to Hunter College. For a young black woman in 1960, that meant (I suppose) that the sky was the limit. Instead, Patricia had read about Albert Schweitzer, the medical missionary. Also, some of her school projects had focused on how poor people’s medical outcomes differed from those of the rich, so she took her ambitions to Howard University and then to Harvard’s school of medicine. Graduating MD in 1968, she traveled back to Harlem to begin her medical residency in ophthalmology, focusing on the eye problems of poor folk. Suffering disproportionately from problems like glaucoma, they couldn’t afford good eyecare, so this young doctor, still in her residency, set up a poor people’s clinic in Harlem. Then came a professorship at UCLA. She was the first woman of any skin shade in the ophthalmology department, where she continued on her mission to create health care systems that cared for all. “Eyesight,” she proclaimed, “is a basic human right.” With that in mind, she participated in medical missions, for instance to Africa where (among other things) she restored eyesight to a woman who’d been blind for 30 years. Her focus on widening the social catchment of medical services continued, and took her to visiting chairs in Britain, France, and Germany. But her most signal accomplishments were new devices for eye surgery and eye repair, first a laser and then an ultrasound. She held five US patents in all, and they are still in use. Meanwhile, her partner in New York was Dr. Beny Primm, founder of several free clinics for the treatment of drug addiction. Their daughter, Eraka (b. 1972), also became a medical doctor at UCLA where she specializes in the psychiatric care of young offenders and children on the autism spectrum. Rupert and Gladys, I imagine, would be proud of them all. ©.

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A life well acted.

This Week a Dramatick Entertainment has been exhibited at the Theatre in Lincoln's-Inn-Fields, entitled The Beggar's Opera, which has met with a general Applause, insomuch that the Waggs say it has made Rich very Gay, and probably will make Gay very Rich. From a review in The Craftsman (London, February 3, 1728).

This review of The Beggar’s Opera was especially clever, for John Rich was the theatre’s manager and Peter Gay wrote the play, and it made them very rich and very gay. The play’s run of 62 performances, almost unheard of at the time, netted the two something like $400,000 in today’s dollars. The play brought franchising to a fine art before there were, legally speaking, franchisees, e.g. souvenir fans imprinted with the image of Polly Peachum, the heroine. And it spawned a genre, the musical comedy. It’s best known today through adaptations by Kurt Weill and Berthold Brecht (Berlin, 1928: The Threepenny Opera) and Benjamin Britten (London, 1948: in proper operatic form). But thing itself, the play, became a theatre staple in its own time, with “revivals” almost beyond counting. It improved the bank balances of many beyond Rich and Gay. The original had no “formal” music, its ballads sung a cappella to popular tunes. Several composers ‘improved’ that with formal scores, not least Thomas Arne who’s better remembered for “Rule Britannia,” a different piece from an Arne effort to immortalize Alfred the Great and to please the ego of the then Prince of Wales. In a 1759 revival a young woman gained temporary fame (and fortune) for dancing an entre acte hornpipe and singing ‘Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush.’ But the actress who in the 1730s became London’s favorite Polly Peachum became a heroine herself, an intimate of London’s intellectual establishment, a friend of dukes and countesses, and a businesswoman who invested her Polly wages so wisely that she called her annual income her “salary.” She was Catherine Clive, better known to friends and fans as Kitty Clive, born on November 5, 1711. She began acting in the later 1720s, married (unwisely) a distant cousin of Robert Clive (he of India fame), left him and lived, thereafter, a virtuous life. She first appeared as Polly in a 1732 revival, beginning by apologizing for taking that role and offering (if the audience wished) to move down the billing and play a supporting role. But they loved her Polly and continued to love Kitty Clive well enough to make her the best-known comedy actress of her era. She retired from acting in 1758 and managed herself and her money well enough to support her siblings and make of herself a figure in London society. It was the denouement that audiences had dreamed for Polly Peachum and her true love, the otherwise reprehensible Macheath. Kitty Clive died in December 1785 of a fever incurred when she attended a society funeral. She was buried near her home in fashionable Twickenham. The executor of her will was her good friend and admirer Horace Walpole. She deserves our admiration, too. ©.

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Art, business, and slander.

In merry old England it once was a rule,
The King had his Poet, and also his Fool:
But now we’re so frugal, I’d have you to know it,
That Cibber can serve both for Fool and for Poet.

A witty stanza, taking aim at one Colley Cibber, an actor who in 1732 was named Poet Laureate by King George II, a monarch not noted for his command of the ‘King’s English.’ The appointment caused incredulity and outrage amongst the chattering classes, and none other than Alexander Pope, the age’s chief chatterer, included this stanza in later versions of his famous diatribe-poem, The Dunciad. Indeed Pope made Cibber the ”king of dunces,” and Cibber obligingly responded with comic descriptions of Pope’s performances in a London brothel. Since Pope was physically deformed (shortened and twisted) by a childhood bout with tuberculosis, we regard Cibber’s response as impolite at best. But London’s theatre-going public loved its comedy broad. Leading characters’ names attest to this. Cibber himself was Lord “Foppington” in one play, Sir Charles “Easy” in another. Another Cibbey role was a Mr. “Loveless” led into rakery by Sir “Novelty Fashion” and receiving no moral support from his manservant “Snap.” Later, Cibbey was Sir “Courtly Nice.” Audiences could not be in suspense over characters with such names. As a poet, history has accepted Pope’s judgment. Cibbey’s verse was, to coin a phrase, worse. But Colley Cibbey was much more than that. Born on November 6, 1671, he lived long enough and worked hard enough to become a playwright, a theatre manager, and a successful entrepreneur in a dog-eat-dog world. A rising middle class provided a good market for drama (and for printed libels), but for much of Cibber’s life there were only two lawful theatres. Around them, sometimes distressingly near, grew up other theatres, often jerry-built speakeasies, and there were also open air performances. Some of the bitterness and impropriety of London satire boiled up out of this hothouse, highly competitive environment. Cibbey navigated his jungle aggressively and successfully, an entrepreneur of the arts. He knew just about everybody, was still around when David Garrick leapt into stardom, and trod the boards with (or paid wages for, or tried to hire) a very broad dramatis personae, from the aptly named Anne Bracegirdle through Sarah Siddons and Kitty Carlisle. He wrote about it, too. Cibber’s An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber (1740) sold very well. It was motivated in part by a desire to have a go at his critics, not least Alexander Pope, and is of course coarse and sometimes way too imaginative. But it remains one of our better sources for 18th-century theatre history. It also reminds us that Colley Cibber had a good eye for the market, however execrable his poetry. ©.

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Truth, lies, and politics.

I hope you will believe the King. Sir Francis Winnington, in parliamentary debate, 1676.

Sir Francis Winnington was Solicitor-General for King Charles II, and he’d said much the same thing a year earlier, in a law court. The king had asked parliament for more money so that he could meet his treaty obligations. A faction in parliament wanted to know what those obligations were before voting new revenues. It seems a reasonable request, but precedent held that the king’s treaties were, indeed, the king’s business. Winnington won the case and then, in the House of Commons, won the debate. Charles II kept his treaties secret. But the trouble was that ‘his sacred majesty’ was lying through his teeth. He had asked for money to meet his secret obligations to the Dutch, but he needed the cash to meet his even more secret obligations to the French king, Louis XIV. As it became more obvious that Charles II was pursuing his own interests and not those of the nation (Charles was in receipt of a large bribe from Louis, not to mention military help should the natives grow restless), Sir Francis jumped ship. He became an opposition leader, in law courts and in parliament. As a result, he was cast into the political wilderness, no longer Solicitor-General and no longer Member of Parliament for royalist Windsor. It was a bad turnout for a man who had been one of the Bright Young Things of Restoration politics. Francis Winnington was born into the Worcestershire gentry on November 7, 1634. Too young to take part in the Civil War, he self-identified as a royalist at the Restoration of 1660. A barrister (lawyer), he was made attorney general for the king’s brother, the Duke of York, and developed a prosperous private practice representing the king’s aristocratic friends (including even Prince Rupert), purchased a Worcestershire estate, and was knighted in 1672. Then came the solicitor generalship and the Windsor election (selection, really) as MP. Alienated by royal duplicity, Winnington became (in the courts and in parliament) a leader of the not-so-very loyal opposition. In the end, the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, Winnington and his allies emerged victorious and further whittled down the royal prerogative. Believing the king is OK when the king speaks truth. But when the king is a liar, where is the remedy? In 1776-1787, American revolutionaries built on Sir Francis Winnington’s experience to make the American president subject to the ordinary laws of the land and his (or her) treaties subject to congressional oversight for their costs and for their substance. Now, in Trump versus United States (July 2024), the US Supreme Court has called that whole chain of precedent into question by making the president immune from prosecution for his “official” acts. I wonder what Sir Francis Winnington would have made of that. ©.

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A saintly sinner?

Don't call me a saint. I don't want to be dismissed so easily. Dorothy Day.

One of the greater ironies of Dorothy Day’s life is that the Catholic Church is now considering her as a candidate for the sainthood. Born in Brooklyn, NY, on November 8, 1897, she became by any account a most unusual person, and since saints are not supposed to be “usual” I suppose she qualifies in that sense. But for her first thirty years, speaking spiritually, she ranged from indifferent to opposed when it came to religion—of any sort. Indifference characterized her early relationship to the church of her birth, Episcopalian. Then, caught up in progressive and radical reforms (women’s rights, peace, labor unions), Day went pretty much atheist. And the life she lived was one which most Catholics regarded as antichurch, for it included (inter alia) two common-law marriages and an abortion. She was uneasy about the abortion, perhaps because she feared it would keep her forever from conceiving. Her entry into the ranks of the faithful may indeed have begun when she learned she was pregnant, in 1925. Against the wishes of her then sexual partner, Day had her daughter baptized a Catholic, and became one herself. But in the context of that time, she was (or, perhaps, remained) a most unusual Catholic, for instance joining in street protests against the judicial executions of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. Nor did church communion lessen her taste for writing. Her first regular job was writing dialogue for the new Hollywood talkies coming out of Hollywood, not work one normally attributes to saints. And as a communicating Catholic she continued her radical activities, retaining her membership in the IWW, condemning Francisco Franco’s Catholic campaign to subvert the Spanish Republic, marching with hunger strikers during the Great Depression, and condemning the American bishops for their unchristian stances on politics, law, and poor relief. She attacked them all, but her favorite targets were Archbishops Francis Spellman (New York) and James McIntire (Los Angeles). Neither of them reticent men, they returned the favor, in spades. But the Church of Rome has always (or certainly often) been broader than it likes to admit, and Day always found brothers and sisters within the flock to support her in her journalism (for the Catholic Worker) and her activism (on the streets and in politics). And all things must pass, even Catholic Cardinals, and after Spellman (1967) and McIntire (1979) went to their rewards other Catholics (notably, I think, from among the Jesuits and Benedictines) began to see Dorothy Day as a true sister in faith, a woman tried in the fire even to the point of martyrdom. In 1963, a pope (John XXIII, of course) recognized her peace work as godly, and even the American bishops came along in the 1980s. Posthumously (she died in 1980) Dorothy Day’s saintliness has been commended by Notre Dame University and even by the New York Archdiocese (her gravestone, in consecrated ground, is inscribed Deo gratias). She’s not yet officially sainted but now stands ready as, in the words of the church, a “Servant of God.” Meanwhile, as she wanted, we can all take her more seriously than as a saint. She was a someone who never doubted that the poor and the despised were those who most deserved—had done the most to earn—her devotion. ©

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Health as a public issue.

The rich can pay when they have to pay. The poor can go, when necessary, to hospitals free of charge. But between 75 and 90 per cent of our population, that which constitutes our very backbone, find it difficult to be relieved from the intolerable burden of illness. Dr. Florence Rena Sabin, 1930.

In 1944, anticipating victory in WWII, Colorado’s governor John Vivian appointed several commissions to make the state a fit home for its returning soldiers. He appointed Florence Sabin to chair one on health. He’d been criticized for appointing no woman to any commission. Sabin was a Colorado native. And one of Vivian’s aids assured him that she was a “little old lady” who’d do no harm. That was partly correct. In 1944, Florence Sabin was 73 years old, having been born in Golden, CO, on November 9, 1871. And she was small and softly spoken. But once she’d been given the reins there was no heading her. She’d long thought that health was a public problem. Her commission endorsed her suggestion for a PR motto, “Health to Match Our Mountains,” and set out to study the issues root and branch, starting with such mundane problems as sewage and garbage disposal, and going on to look at the diseases of childhood and old age, the relationships between poverty and illness, and the costs of health care. For her, health had to be a ‘public’ issue. All that put old Florence on a collision course with the state’s medical establishment, the ‘graybeards’ as she called them, and she traveled the state—every one of 63 counties—to observe Colorado’s illnesses and their cures. The result, before Governor Vivian left office, are now called the Sabin Health Laws, and Dr. Sabin’s statue now stands, or more accurately sits, in the National Statuary Hall in Washington, DC. It doesn’t make her look like a little old lady, not at all. That owes partly to the Sabin Health Laws but also to her distinguished career as a medical doctor and scientist. She was in the first graduating class (1900) from Johns Hopkins Medical School. She was the nation’s first female professor of medicine (1907), the first female president of the American Association of Anatomists (1924), and the first woman elected to the National Academy of Sciences (1925). Her research record brought her to the Rockefeller Institute, where she headed the section studying tuberculosis and its cures. Her lasting contributions were in histology and endocrinology, where she’d begun (in 1901, at Johns Hopkins) by studying the embryological development of chickens and their internal organs. Along her way, she campaigned for women’s rights, not only the right to vote but the right to be heard. And in her ‘retirement’, back home in Colorado where her father had once been a ‘horse and buggy’ doctor, Florence Sabin made herself heard. Today you can find her ashes, and Governor Vivian’s, in the same cemetery. Hers make more noise. ©.

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Questions of identity.

I would gladly change my sex to meet your requirements, but since the way to such change has not been revealed to me, I have no recourse but to appeal to you to change your minds. Are you to tell me that one is as difficult as the other? Anna Pauline Murray, 1944.

This layered quotation needs a lot of unpacking. Murray graduated from Howard Law at the top of her class: traditionally this achievement merited a graduate fellowship at Harvard Law. So Harvard Law admitted black Americans to graduate study: but not yet women. Rejected on grounds of her gender, Murray protested, as quoted above. She would get graduate degrees in law from California (a Masters, in 1945) and then Yale (a PhD, in 1965), so give her top marks for persistence. But she was possessed of many other qualities. We’d now identify her as transgender, but in 1944 that solution had not been revealed to her. Instead, she’d experimented (unhappily) with marriage, changed her name to the more male-ish ‘Pauli’, and would in future embark on long-term lesbian relationships in which, generally, she played a male role. And there was much more than that. To begin with her birth, Anna Pauline Murray was born in Baltimore on November 10, 1910. Her birth family was multiracial, descended from enslaved Africans, displaced Native Americans, and Euro-American planters and enslavers. It’s a family tree right out of Faulkner, and some Murray cousins successfully ‘passed’ as white. Anna Pauline, or Pauli, identified as black, and was arrested (in 1940) for sitting in the white section of a Virginia bus (wearing trousers, she gave her name as Oliver). Despite “Oliver’s” police record, Pauli Murray joined a Wall Street law firm (where she and a young attorney named Ruth Ginsberg became friends). Murray was a brilliant legal scholar, and her 1950 book on state laws concerning race became the “bible” of the NAACP’s legal campaign against American apartheid. Besides her race consciousness, there was gender. During the New Deal, she had joined an all-female CCC unit (Murray called it ‘she-she-she’), and begun a long correspondence with Eleanor Roosevelt. Besides all that, Murray’s sense of female identity made her an outside agitator inside the Civil Rights movement. Besides her legal support and public action, there were trenchant commentaries on the maleness of CORE, the NAACP, and Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington. Nor was all this all there was to Pauli Murray. Still searching for answers to many puzzles, she began theological studies in the 1960s and (while a professor at Brandeis) joined the Episcopalian Church. In 1977 she was ordained a Episcopal priest. She is now on the Episcopalian calendar as one of its Holy Men and Holy Women. At Yale, you can find a residential college named after Pauli Murray. And if that’s not enough, her published poetry offers testimony to her miraculously full world of works. ©.

[Stanley]

Armistice Day?

It is the belief of this paper that since the Negro’s loyalty to America has forced him to shed blood on foreign battle fields against enemies, to safeguard constitutional rights, he is in no mood to sacrifice these rights for peace and harmony at home. Front-page editorial, Arkansas State Press, December 13, 1957.

Were history ‘really’ poetic, this editorial would have appeared on November 11, Veterans Day or as my father advocated “Armistice Day” (to memorialize the hopes for peace that swept the world on November 11, 1918). In fact, the editorial was written in fear of violence. Rumor was that President Eisenhower aimed to withdraw the 101st Airborne from Little Rock, where they’d protected the nine black teens who integrated Central High School. And not only those kids. Arkansas’s white racists claimed that the ‘crisis’ had been caused by evil agitators. The City Council demanded the membership lists of the state NAACP so that the guilty could be identified and punished. That demand would eventually be ruled a violation of several sections of the US constitution. But never mind. The city council knew exactly the NAACP leadership, notably its state president, Daisy Lee Bates, who was also co-publisher (with her husband) of the Arkansas State Press. Not only that. It was Daisy Bates who led the Little Rock 9 to school each day at the height of the crisis. It was her house that local Ku Klux Klan bravos had attacked, in the dead of night. It was she whom the KKK warned should “Go Back To Africa!” Now, I don’t know whether Bates wrote that editorial, but she could write well enough. Her book on Little Rock, The Long Shadow, came out in 1960 and (eventually) won a National Book Award. Nor was she a black veteran who’d shed blood on foreign shores. But she was a ‘veteran’ all right, and to complete the poem Daisy Lee Bates was born on November 11, (1914 to be exact), in Huttig, AR, on the Louisiana border. When she was just a toddler, her mother had been murdered, maybe raped, by three white toughs, who’d never been troubled (let alone tried) for the crime, so she knew quite enough about bloodshed, too. She may well have grown up with a chip on her shoulder, and when she and her husband bought the Arkansas State Press, she had the opportunity to slough the chip. In 1957 the city council did have her arrested, imprisoned, and fined, for they knew who she was (and she surrendered voluntarily anyway). Ms. Bates went on to fight further battles in Washington, DC, to be one of the few women speakers at the 1963 March on Washington, and a force to be reckoned with within the SCLC leadership. She retired to an a majority-black town in the Arkansas countryside, where she led efforts to provide clean water, pave the streets, and improve public safety. Daisy Lee Bates seems to me a person to celebrate on Armistice Day 2024, her 110th birthday. ©.

[Stanley]

Ideas man.

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

Well, yes. But the more one thinks about this, the shallower it becomes. All sorts of people get ideas, and get taken somewhere by them: Adolf Hitler, for instance, or Albert Schweitzer, Albert Einstein, and Albert Camus. All were ideas people. But DeWitt Wallace became a successful purveyors of ideas, a thought-retailer, for he was the founder of Readers Digest, the magazine that looked like a book and that offered its readers pre-digested ideas, bite-sized. My parents subscribed to Readers Digest , and I read it regularly despite my father’s repeated warnings that it was not quite the real thing. If I really liked this or that idea in the Digest, I should go out and buy the book or at least learn more about the original patentee. Nor was Wallace’s Digest omnivorous. Its diet was balanced, to be sure (fiction, fact, observation, reporting, sometimes poetry) but its fulcrum bent one’s mind towards conservatism convention, and success—as was clearly demonstrated by the Digest’s monthly feature “The Most Unforgettable Character I Have Known.” To my recollections, its heroes (and its few heroines) were as safe as houses. In this they reflected DeWitt Wallace, “Wally” to his friends and to his wife, Lilla (herself a relentless digester), who was born on November 12, 1889, in St. Paul, MN. His father was a Presbyterian preacher who became president of McAlester College. Like many preacher’s sons, Wally was a mischief maker, a boy who today might be diagnosed with some kind of disorder. But St. Paul Presbyterians were not disorder-minded, so Wally went to a posh-ish private school in the east, then returned to McAlester where he was a distinguished prankster. He was then dispatched to World War I where he might have become a charter member of the Lost Generation, but that Presbyterian strain kept him out of the grasp of Stein, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. But he was an avid reader, and (apparently) a fanatical note-taker, qualities that Lilla Acheson shared. She married him, and together they read, took notes, digested them, and in 1922 published the first Digest, which they hoped might net them $15,000 yearly. No small ambition, (it would be $300,000 in today’s $$$), but their idea proved a bigger winner in America’s Aspirin Age. So the Readers Digest became an institution, published in all the languages fit to print, and selling millions. Wally and Lilla, worried that they might become too, too rich, gave a lot of it away, including to the Republican Party and, latterly, Richard Nixon. But also, of course, McAlester College. Nixon set a precedent by awarding Wally the Presidential Medal of Freedom while he, Nixon, was compiling his own digest, an “enemies list” a wherein you would find many ideas people. Just proves where ideas can get you. ©.

[Stanley]

The People's Lawyer

The makers of our Constitution . . . conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone—the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men. Justice Louis Brandeis, in dissent, Olmstead v. United States (1928).

Decades later, Louis Brandeis’s 1928 dissent became settled law through several decisions, notably Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) and Roe v. Wade (1973). Both later decisions turned, in large part, on the right of privacy. With the recent reversal of Roe, that right is under fire. It’s a mere invention, Justice Clarence Thomas maintains. But Louis Brandeis was not an inventor; he was a synthesizer. A compelling Supreme Court justices, he was a brilliant legal scholar, a courageous advocate in private practice who remade our legal landscape. He’s thus a person of interest. Louis Brandeis was born in Louisville, KY, on November 13, 1856, the son of Jewish immigrants from Prague who also considered themselves refugees from the autocracies that snuffed out the liberal revolutions of 1848. As ‘Frankist’ Jews, they were oddballs in another way. Though not among the most extreme followers of Rabbi Jacob Frank, the Brandeis family did reject orthodoxy and might best be regarded as assimilationists. They celebrated Christmas as a secular holiday and at home (especially at dinner) cultivated their children’s tastes in art, literature, and politics. Louis thrived under this regime and would become one of the most brilliant students ever to attend Harvard Law. Louis first established himself as a lawyer in St. Louis, but soon moved back to New England to partner with his classmate Samuel Warren. They prospered, partly because they were both brilliant lawyers, partly because their firm studiously maintained its independence. They represented clients. They took cases. They were not (in Brandeis’s words) “somebody’s lawyer.” Brandeis raised the flag for “The Right to Privacy” in a 1890 Harvard Law Review article, and strengthened his reputation for independence as “the people’s lawyer,” often defending the poor and the persecuted and their rights (to join a union. or just to be themselves). He grew to see the law, the common law, as an organic thing and thus, potentially, an agent of change. And law was the property of the people. Brandeis prospered professionally, and politically became a leading Progressive, enamored of the people and their liberties, whether against government or against the large corporations that were coming to dominate the American market place. He was thus a Progressive of a particular stripe, nominated to the court by a Progressive of the same ilk, Woodrow Wilson, and over much anti-Semitic talk. As justice, Brandeis helped the Supreme Court manage its own transition from laissez-faire to New Deal liberalism. He also set precedents for our personal liberties which we should be loath to abandon to Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. ©.

[Stanley]

t home and abroad.

If I loved and married, I would say to my mate: ‘Come, I know where Eden is,’ and . . . desert the land of my birth for Japan, the land of love–beauty–poetry–cleanliness. Nellie Bly.

Nellie Bly did soon marry, aged 31. in 1895. Her ‘mate’ was a millionaire 42 years her senior, and as his health faded she took over his company, Iron Clad, and ran it as a utopian industrialist who paid good wages, provided child care to her female operatives, and gave all employees free access to the higher culture. Iron Clad made containers (mostly steel). And Nellie contributed directly to its industrial enterprise by inventing a new milk can. She held the patent in her ‘real’ name, Elizabeth Cochrane, which also was on her marriage license. As an industrialist, she may have been too generous. She was certainly too trusting, for her money and Iron Clad’s reserves disappeared into the pocket of the firm’s accountant. So bankrupt Elizabeth became Nellie again, a journalist reporting on the suffrage movement. “Suffragists Are Men’s Superiors” headlined one of her reports. In this she was returning to form, for when she broke into journalism, in Pittsburgh, in 1885, she wrote as ‘Lonely Orphan Girl’ and attacked a previous writer who had argued, in print, that women were useful only as baby-making machines. Soon she became “Nellie Bly”, the black lass of all work in Stephen Foster’s eponymous song, “Nelly Bly.” As Nellie Bly, journalist, she then reported undercover on the mismanagement and cruelty in a local insane asylum. She traveled to Mexico to report on the Diaz dictatorship and its oppressions. Bly the reporter or Cochrane the capitalist: at home she was a radical reformer, through and through. But we remember her as the fearless maid who, aged only 25, on November 14, 1889 set off from New York to beat the fictional Phineas Fogg at his own game, to travel the world in (less than) 80 days. She made it, too, in only 72 days, sponsored by Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and, here and there, helped by Pulitzer’s millions to travel faster (including, on her return, by a chartered Santa Fe train). En route, the radical reformer became the unashamed imperialist, envying the British for their empire and, along the way, filing gratuitously insulting reports about the lesser breeds she encountered, especially in Africa and Asia—though not Japan, where she saw only delicacy, cleanliness, and grace. In Pittsburgh, today, the Heinz Foundation prefaces its Bly webpage with a politically correct apology for her abusive language. But that’s exactly where the moral lesson lies. The reformer who railed against social abuses at home could not see that imperialism was an international abuse. So the ‘dirty’ Arabs of Aden and the ‘bizarre’ Buddhists of Colombo in some sense ‘deserved’ their colonial fate. It’s a minefield we need to negotiate. On balance, it’s best to see Nellie Bly/Elizabeth Cochrane as a quite extraordinary woman for her time and place, and to see her warts and all. ©

[Stanley]

An African modernist.

My stiffest earthly assignment is ended and my major life’s work is done. My country is now free and I have been honoured to be its first indigenous head of state. What more could one desire in life. Nnamdi Azikiwe, 1960, on assuming the presidency of an independent Nigeria.

Modern Nigeria is a huge country by area, population, and wealth. But it’s been a troubled country, because it contains so many cultures. Nigeria’s 250 ethnic groups speak in 350 distinct languages. Its three largest cultures (Hausa in the north, Yoruba in the west, Igbo in the east) have been frequently at war with each other, and the Biafran War (in the late 1960s) led Nnamdi Azikiwe to speak differently: “It is better we disintegrate in peace and not in pieces.” Some thought disintegration inevitable. “Nigeria” was, after all, a modern creation (the name came from a British journalist, Flora Shaw), and as a colony Nigeria was a political and economic overlay created by the British. But modern Nigeria was also a tribute to Nnamdi Azikiwe, who knew better than most the fault lines of British Nigeria, and who contributed more than most to the emergence of an independent, and unified, nation in 1960. Although he was an Igbohe, and a baptized Christian, he was born in the Hausa and Muslim north, on November 16, 1904, where his parents were minor officials in the British colonial service. Educated in Muslim academies and then in Christian mission schools, Benjamin (as he was baptized) was by his teens fluent in the colony’s three major languages. Troubled by Nigeria’s disunities, he found hope in the messages coming from Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. Dubois. Whatever their disagreements, they were pan-Africanists and black pride advocates. So Benjamin aimed to study in the USA. Owing partly to his sports skills, he got there, starting at historically black colleges and finishing with a Masters from Penn. He also made contact with leading British academics, notably the anti-imperialist historian Margery Perham and the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. He returned to Nigeria with a more African name, Nnamdi. Still supported by his long-lived parents, he became a successful journalist and publisher, always working for unification and independence. A sometime mentor of Kwame Nkrumah (in Ghana), ‘Zik’ hoped to be independent Nigeria’s first prime minister, but settled for the ceremonial (and, he hoped, unifying) office of the presidency. All that came to grief with the Biafran insurgency (which, at first, he supported) and then the long series of coups and countercoups that followed. Occasionally in but mostly out of power, Azikiwe devoted most of his time to scholarship and the building up of the University of Nigeria. Nigeria remains a troubled polity, but it’s a sadness that Azikiwe did not live to see the reboot of democracy in Nigeria in 1999 and its persistence (through five general elections) since then. After all, his father lived to 104. But Nnamdi only made it to 92. ©.

[Stanley]

Not a yes man.

If you are going to ask me, then listen to me. Barbara McLean, film editor for 20thCentury Fox.

Darryl Zanuck (1902-1979) stormed out of Wahoo, Nebraska to make 20th Century Fox one of Hollywood’s most successful studios, beginning as an ‘independent’ producer in 1933, then as one of the linchpins of the ‘studio system.’ He was a pugnacious man, as shown by his later (1942) participation in a looney-tunes commando raid on occupied France. The commandos retreated, of course, but Zanuck paused long enough on the beachhead to collect (and send back to his wife) a packet of “Nazi sand.” This reckless courage doubtless contributed to Zanuck’s Hollywood triumphs. He was also unusual among Hollywood’s ‘Big Five’ to zero in on the technical side of cinema, notably film editing. There one of his best and earliest decisions was to hire another pugnacious sort, this one a woman, Barbara McLean. Unlike Zanuck, whose parents ran a travelers’ hotel in Wahoo, Barbara McLean was born (on November 16, 1903) into film making. Her dad’s pioneer film studio in Palisades Park, NJ, serviced some of New York City’s early production centers. So in 1924 she married a projectionist, Gordon McLean, and went out to LA where, it then appeared, most of the action was. By the time she divorced him (25 years on) she was one of tinsel town’s most prolific editors, mistress of 20th Century’s cutting rooms and with (by then) 44 films to her credit. She then married a director, Robert Webb, and went on to edit 18 more movies before she retired in the early 1960s to nurse Webb in his ill health. He survived until 1990, so she never did return to cinema work. But ‘Bobby’ McLean, as she preferred to be known to colleagues, is now in the history books as one of the best of her era, when editing was literally a matter of cutting and splicing celluloid (today it’s all digital). She did some great films (Tobacco Road, 1940; Song of Bernadette, 1943; A Bell for Adano, 1945; All About Eve, 1950) and for some great directors, including John Ford, George Cukor, Joseph Mankiewicz, and Michael Curtiz. And it’s a matter of record that when she talked, Zanuck listened. So she was not one of Hollywood’s fabled and satirized “yes men.” Indeed I know of no such satire that features “yes women.” As a credited editor, she only started with the talkies, in 1929, so in the long span (93 years) of her lifetime, Barbara McLean’s editing career was brief. Still, she was nominated seven times for an Academy Award. And she won once, for her Wilson biopic (1943), which I saw on stream only a month ago. A film about Wilson the president, it includes creative montage, cutting and splicing with early newsreels, but McLean’s real triumph was to be a successful female in a patriarchic industry. ©.

[Stanley]

"I am not a crook."

I welcome this kind of examination because the American people have a right to know if their president is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook. I earned everything I’ve got. Richard Nixon, November 17, 1973.

Watch a documentary on the Nixon presidency and you are likely to see him utter these words. His detractors think he looks sweaty and shifty, and maybe he does. But Nixon was notspeaking about the Watergate cover-up, and the documentaries I have seen do not make that clear. Nor was Nixon, however sweaty and shifty he appears, testifying under oath to a hostile audience. He was speaking (in an ersatz ‘press conference’) to 400 managing editors, and (in the 1972 campaign) he’d been heavily endorsed by their newspapers. And he spoke not about Watergate, or its cover up, but rather about his tax returns. It had come to light that Nixon had paid only nominal taxes in his first term (which began in January 1969), and now his “enemies” (as Nixon called them) added accusations of tax evasion to his other alleged crimes. After all, for a long time, he had been called “Tricky Dick” and pilloried as the man from whom one would not (wisely) buy a used car. And then the Watergate disclosures had by November 1973 put Nixon in a desperate position. Senator Sam Erwin’s committee demanded to hear the tapes. Nixon, claiming executive privilege and admitting that the tapes contained earthy language, suggested a patently crooked compromise, and then (one day later, October 20, 1973) fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox who had refused to accept the compromise. So Nixon was in such desperate straits that he regarded the tax evasion charge as a relief. So he told the AP editors that he had paid only “nominal” taxes because he had already determined to lodge his vice-presidential papers with the national archives. They were worth a lot of money, weren’t they? So as a munificent gift to the nation, they would qualify as deductions. Probably the nation owed him some money!! So, “I am not a crook.” Spiro Agnew might be one (and it was as a convicted crook that he’d resigned as Nixon’s vice president), but Richard Nixon was not even a tax evader. Well, you’ll have to make up your own minds on that, because when Fred Buzhardt, one of Nixon’s few remaining lawyers, revealed (on November 24, 1973) that there was an 18½ minute “gap” in the tapes themselves, the Watergate issue swamped everything else, including the question of Nixon’s tax returns. And it was, indeed, a relatively minor point. But following Nixon, every president (every presidential candidate) has published their tax returns so we can see for ourselves where their money comes from and whether they pay their share of Uncle Sam’s taxes. Everyone, that is, until Donald J. Trump. He promised us in 2016 that he would do so. But I’m still waiting. And I am not holding my breath. ©.

[Stanley]

"On this rock . . ."

As a mere promenade, St. Peter’s is unequaled. It is better than the Boulevards, than Picadilly or Broadway, and if it were not the most beautiful place in the world, it would be the most entertaining. Henry James, 1873.

Forty years earlier, Ralph Waldo Emerson had waxed even more poetic on seeing the Basilica. “It is an ornament of the earth.” Of course Sam Clemens, aka Mark Twain, had a completely different take. In Innocents Abroad: Or, the New Pilgrims Progress (1869), Twain admitted that he liked to look at statues of monks and paintings of monks, monks doing all sorts of things. But even more Twain was gratified that the Pope had let him wander through the place for free and unmolested—a least, for as long as he behaved himself. St. Peter’s provided entertainment for James. It awed Emerson. It amused Twain. But for their American ancestors, St. Peter’s had been the home cave of the Antichrist, the physical manifestation of “the Whore of Rome.” And today it’s appropriate to remember all that because it’s the anniversary of the dedication of St. Peter’s by the then Bishop of Rome, Pope Urban VIII, on November 18, 1626. He’s known today as a great patron of Renaissance art, and no doubt he was. St. Peter’s was the work of (inter alia) Bramante, Michelangelo, and Bernini, and had been a long time in the building. And Urban VIII understood the politics of basilica’s beauties, a baroque rebuke to the plain, primitive church buildings (‘meeting houses’, they were called) favored by the Protestant Reformation. And it went beyond that. Calvinists especially insisted that the ‘church’ was not a building, could not be a monument. All that decoration, columns topped by curlicues, the great piazza, all those paintings and sculptures, chapels and side chapels, high altars and elaborate baptismal fonts—mere human invention or, worse, paeans to worldly power. And on that side, it has to be said that Urban VIII, not only Bishop of Rome but the temporal ruler of the Papal States, had his eye on worldly power. Besides dedicating St. Peter’s, Urban fortified the city of Rome, modernized its port, and aggressively consolidated his military alliances, especially with the French monarchy. And hadn’t it always been thus, ‘always’ at least since the Roman Emperor Constantine had converted to Christianity and made the church ‘catholic,’ universal, embodying both church and state? And there’s little doubt that Urban VIII understood all that. For the dedication day of the new basilica was chosen with purpose. Old St. Peter’s had been consecrated on November 18, 326 AD, by Pope Sylvester I, 1300 years before. So today is a double anniversary. Both old and new basilicas were placed on the Vatican hill, where in pre-Christian times soothsayers interpreted their oracles. “Vaticinor” means ‘to prophesy.” ©.

[Stanley]

Religion and reform.

If God is our common Father, His truth is our common property. But the religious world may be likened to a vast market, where every religious sect sells only a portion of truth. Keshub Chunder Sen, in a sermon delivered at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, London, 1870.

I don’t know how many heard Sen’s sermon, but the Metropolitan Tabernacle was in 1870 home to England’s largest and oldest dissenting congregation, seated 5,000, and was in 1870 the home pulpit of Charles Spurgeon, a spell-binding Baptist preacher of the ‘Particular’ variety. It’s interesting that the Tabernacle opened its doors to Keshub Chunder Sen, no Baptist he but a child of India’s Brahmin caste, born in Calcutta on November 19, 1838. His family was not only high caste Hindu but also rich bankers. His grandfather had been diwan for the local maharajah, and (conforming to the evolving British ‘raj’) his father moved easily into the Bank of Bengal and also served as mintmaster for that part of the British empire. Keshub was well educated in the best schools, Hindu and Christian. A terrible famine helped to make him into a Hindu reformer. He might have become a pioneer nationalist, precursor of an independent India, but he saw too much wrong with his native culture, the caste system itself, what he came to see as the ‘idolatry’ of modern Hinduism, the subjugation of women. So he proposed to use Britain as a model for reform. Not wholesale, for there was much wrong with the British, who had their own caste system and, besides, were purveyors of barley malt whisky. So Keshub Chunder Sen turned to “syncretism.” An amalgamation of the best elements of both worlds might produce some progress and even, in time’s fullness, a perfect harmony. He was a prolific writer and a gifted orator, and his utopian notions proved popular, for a time. During a visit to Britain, in 1870, he was a sensation. He made a hit with the rising Liberal politician William Ewert Gladstone and even with Queen-Empress Victoria. Mostly he preached to Unitarian congregations who liked his notion of a universalism in all (or maybe most) religions, but his sermon at the Metropolitan Tabernacle suggests a wider catchment. He appealed to everyone, even producing a hymn of praise that included 108 names for “God”, a Being he referred to as the ‘universal Father’ of mankind. Back home, his extreme (but catholic) mysticism in religion (his “New Dispensaton”) isolated him from most conservatives and many reformers. He even lectured Christians on their sectarian tendencies. Keshub Sen died (a martyr in the eyes of his remaining disciples) in 1884. A century later, another Indian famine would inspire an Indian named Amartya Sen to propose a new approach, totally secular, to the problems of famine and poverty. Amartya Sen (born in Bengal in November 1933 but no relation, I think) made a similar pilgrimage west, in 1972, stayed in the west, and would win perhaps greater success with the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics. ©

[Stanley]

Politics and art in Restoration England.

Love in their little veins inspires
Their cheerful notes, their soft desires.
While heat makes buds and blossoms spring.
Those pretty couples love and sing.
Thomas Shadwell, 1678.

The verse, in itself unmemorable, comes from Shadwell’s Shakespeare adaptation, The History of Timon of Athens the Man Hater (!!!). Shadwell did many adaptations, a couple of Shakespeare but more of Molière, who was in fashion in Charles II’s England partly because Molière was á la mode in Louis XIV’s France. But in 1678 Shadwell was lining up with the anti-French party, the ‘whigs’, who also wanted to exclude James, the Catholic Duke of York, from the royal succession. The whigs’ failure led to the ‘tory reaction’ of the 1680s, during which Shadwell fell from favor. He also became the butt of brutal satires from his once-friend John Dryden. Dryden had seen the light, converted to Rome, and been made poet laureate and historiographer royal. But the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 changed all that. At the top it replaced King James with his safely Protestant daughter Mary. Down the food chain Thomas Shadwell replaced John Dryden as poet laureate and historiographer royal. And so it was that Shadwell’s plagiary on Shakespeare’s Timon was set to music by Henry Purcell, a good enough composer to survive the 1688 Revolution but smart enough in politics to switch from composing for Dryden to making incidental music for Shadwell. In later Stuart England, fashion in the arts mirrored faction in politics. Thomas Shadwell didn’t live long enough to enjoy this whig resurrection. He died, probably of an opium overdose, on November 20, 1692. His life in literature had followed a political rhythm. Thomas Shadwell was born ca. 1640, at the start of the Civil Wars. His royalist father lost much of the family estate in support of Charles I, so young Thomas inherited a dicey position at the time of the Restoration of monarchy. Dicey enough that he married an actress, Anne Gibbs, who may have drawn Thomas into the Restoration theatre. Anyway, she acted (and sang, and played the lute) in several of Shadwell’s early plays. At court Shadwell fell in with a witty, rowdy bunch of courtiers who liked his bawdy wit. Thus began Shadwell’s (initially) friendly rivalry with John Dryden. As the king’s court dissolved in acrimony, Dryden and Shadwell traded in their rapiers for bludgeons, and their repartee became a literary brawl, entertaining but not ennobling. After a very long dry spell, scholars espied merit in Shadwell, and the Royal Shakespeare Company revived a couple of his plays, the first in 1991. He hasn’t yet supplanted Dryden, but who knows what will happen to fashion in the arts, these days? ©

[Stanley]

The greatest nom de plume.

Life is bristling with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to cultivate one's garden. Voltaire, in a letter to a friend, 1769.

Enlightenment France produced eloquent writers, deep thinkers, accomplished scientists, and famous lovers, but it gave us only one Voltaire. And he was all those things, in a single package. Voltaire was ‘really’ François-Marie Arouet, born in Paris on November 21, 1694. Although he later claimed to have been the illegitimate son of an aristocrat, his father was in fact a minor bureaucrat in the royal treasury. It was in the time of Louis XIV, the Sun King, who tended the state as carefully as he did his own toilet (“L’état, c’est moi”), so being a bureaucrat seemed like a good wrinkle. And that’s the course his parents set for François-Marie. They sent the lad to a good Jesuit school, where he learned more than enough to become a secretary in the diplomatic corps. At the same time, he polished his prose finely enough to become a poet, and found (while still in school) that his ready wit won him friends. Wit could also wound, though, and when one of François-Marie’s verses wounded France’s prince regent, he spent his first (of several) tenancy in prison: this time, 1717, it was the Bastille. This recommended a certain caution, and François-Marie adopted a pen name. Quite a few, in fact, but the one he made famous was “Voltaire.” First gaining real fame as a playwright, he proved he could write safe stuff, but his taste for trouble never left him. Voltaire was back in the Bastille in 1726. Along the way he began to think more deeply. An exile in England caused philosophical speculation on what life could be like in a different place and time, or how it might appear from a different perspective. So Voltaire the playwright became Voltaire the outside observer, witty and wise, and that’s how he is remembered today through his journal-novella Candide (1759), sometimes required reading for Honors College freshmen. Along the way Voltaire more than dabbled in philosophy, contributed to Diderot’s great Encyclopédie, wrote histories, and campaigned courageously for religious toleration and against human slavery. Voltaire tutored Frederick of Prussia and Catherine of Russia in the arts of enlightened despotism, enjoying some successes with the former. Last but not at all the least, it was probably Voltaire’s interest in science that enriched one of the era’s most famous affairs, his with Emilie, Marquise du Chatelet (1706-1749). Their long love (certainly spanning the early 1740s) was also a collaborative study and synthesis of Isaac Newton’s great works in mechanics and mathematics. On the whole, he did the physics and she did the math, but it’s beyond my talents to sort that one out. And so Voltaire stands, one of the greatest representatives of Europe’s great Enlightenment. ©.

[Stanley]

Founded by Agnes Mellers.

Agnes Mellers, intellectually steeped in the old order, had done as much as anyone to broaden the social and educational horizons of her neighbours. If there is a single figure who, Janus like, links medieval and modern Nottingham, then it is surely her. From A Centenary History of Nottingham. J. V. Beckett, ed., 1997.

Snow was forecast for Nottingham, England, this morning. It didn’t happen, but last night Nottingham High School put out a notice that, ‘Snow Day’ or not, the school would open. Quite right! The school is 512 years old, chartered by Henry VIII on November 22, 1512, and in that span it’s weathered all sorts of challenges. Quite apart from the meteorology, too: in 1649 one of its ‘old boys,’ Colonel John Hutchinson, signed King Charles I’s death warrant. When monarchy was restored in 1660, the school chose not to boast of it, and Hutchinson himself would die in prison. 231 Old Boys perished in the Great War (1914-1918). In 1921 the school paused to memorialize them, but sailed on through the next century to become one of modern England’s most successful private day schools, a noble pile, dressed in institutional gothic. Its prosperity was enhanced, during the Great Depression, by a munificent gift from another Old Boy, Sir John Player, he of tobacco fame. But it was not until 2013 that Nottingham High School went coeducational. And that’s odd, for the school’s founder (and benefactor) was a woman, ‘Dame Agnes Mellers, Widow.’ It’s just possible that she may live on in literature, for the gamekeeper in D. H. Lawrence’s (Lawrence was another NHS ‘old boy’) Lady Chatterley’s Lover is called Mellors, but Dame Agnes is certainly remembered in the school’s shield, marked as it is by three “merles,” blackbirds that is, thus mirroring the fashion for punning in designing coats of arms. And Agnes Mellers was a force in Tudor Nottingham, a canny business person who (as a widow operating in her own right) bought and sold properties in the city and environs, collected rents, and also traded in goods within the city’s limits. In all this she followed her husband, but there’s a hint in the 1512 charter that he was a hard man, and her endowment for the “frei scole” was in part her apology for him. But having made the plunge into public philanthropy Agnes Mellers continued to swim happily. In her last will and testament, 1514, she left additional properties to the school as endowments. Indeed Mellers’ endowment still exists, and although Nottingham High School is no longer ‘free,’ her original generosity funds several scholarships for poor scholars of the city. These days, some of them are girls and many are kids of color. Whether Dame Agnes would have approved of that, heaven knows. But in the words of the charter and the original school ordinances (which she wrote) she intended to endow the “education, teaching, and instruction of boys in good manners and literature.” I’ve added the emphasis, but the available evidence suggests that Agnes Mellers knew exactly what she wanted, and got it. ©.

[Stanley]

A statuary matter.

Today was absolutely fantastic. But it took too long—we’re right outside parliament. How could they not have even one woman here? Suzy Senghor, April 23, 2018.

Ms. Senghor, aged 15, was inspired by the unveiling of a statue honoring Millicent Fawcett (1847-1929), the suffragist who lived just long enough to see British women accorded fully equal political rights. There Fawcett stands, 8’2” in bronze, staring directly at Winston Churchill’s bronze image, all 12’ of him. As far as I know, Fawcett’s is still the only female memorialized in Parliament Square, where she stands with males, mostly UK prime ministers (Palmerston, Disraeli, Churchill, etc.) but including a foreign contingent (Lincoln, Gandhi, Mandela, Smuts). But the sculptor who ‘did’ Fascett righted the gender imbalance by carving the faces of 53 (!!) other women suffragists into the plinth: four Pankhursts, of course, and Emily Davison, who’d died for the cause in 1913. And then there’s Agnes Maude Royston, who was born on November 23, 1876. She’s there because she did, after all, campaign for the vote. But Maude Royston (as she was known) campaigned too for broader equalities, equality with men within the church and also for a secular equality between rich and poor. Her father was a Liverpool shipping magnate, and a baronet, so Maude got a running start (despite an awkward congenital hip deformity). She attended a posh ladies’ college, then was a pioneer student at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford (before Oxford granted degrees to females). By then Maude was committed to mission work. First she worked at a London settlement house, then she met the Anglican rector Hudson Shaw and from 1901 served as his assistant in rural Rutland, doing good works in the parish, caring for his frail wife, Elsie, and running the Sunday School. There she developed a gift for preaching, which brought her conflict with the Anglican hierarchy, drove her out of the Church of England and into a dissenting pulpit. Famously calling the established church to the “Conservative Party at prayer”, she campaigned (eloquently, for she was a gifted public speaker) for many other good causes: peace, for instance, and social assistance for the poor, and of course for women’s suffrage. Royden stuck to her peace testimony through WWI, but Hitler was too much for her, and in her old age she warred against Naziism. It was also during WWII that Maude (aged 74) married the good Rev’d Shaw, whose wife had just died. Shaw, then 85, died only two months after this second wedding. Then, in 1947. Maude revealed in A Threefold Cord (her autobiography) that Shaw had been the love of her life since they first met in 1901. Besides making her a militant equalitarian in church, state, and society, her faith had given her the gift of self-denial. Surely she deserves her place on the Fawcett statue. ©.