BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

The girl with the windswept hair.

Among the dwellers in the silent fields
The natural heart is touched, and public way
And crowded street resound with ballad strains,
Inspired by ONE whose very name bespeaks
Favour divine . . .
William Wordsworth.

Wordsworth’s “ONE” was a young woman named Grace Darling,born in Bamburgh, Northumberland, on November 24, 1815. In that very year, her father succeeded her grandfather as lighthouse keeper on Brownstone Island. The Outer Farne Islands buffer a rocky coast, and were a ships’ graveyard. Lighthouses and lifeboats were ways of life. Lifeboats remain so, and though most lighthouses are now redundant, Britain’s greatest charity, the Royal Naval Lifeboat Institution, maintains the Grace Darling Museum at Bamburgh. In the early morning of September 7, 1838, 23-year-old Grace Darling became a heroine. From her bedroom in the tower Grace spotted a shipwreck, the paddle wheeler Forfarshire, driven on the rocks of Big Harcar. Since it was too stormy to call out the Seahouses lifeboat, Grace and her father rowed the lighthouse’s ‘coble’ to the rescue, one at each oar. Even setting out was heroic. The coble, though seaworthy enough at 21 feet, was built for four oarsmen. But they made it, rescuing the Forfarshire’s single woman passenger and four others. Once back at the lighthouse, Grace cared for the injured while her father led a second rescue. Though her father’s courage was not forgotten, the providentially-named daughter—"the girl with the windswept hair”—became a sensation in an England just embarked on the Victorian era. Wordsworth, not yet poet laureate but possibly in training for the job, wrote a pretty awful poem, including the opening lines quoted above. A public subscription raised over £700 (£50 from the queen herself), which would be about £100,000 today. So many painters flocked to Brownstone Island to ‘take’ Grace’s picture that her dad had to ration them. Grace was lucky to get a trustee (for her fund) in the Duke of Northumberland, who took his job seriously, but she became consumptive, possibly from long hours of posing, and died only four years later. She was nursed in her final weeks by the Duchess of Northumberland. So, Grace was not forgotten, but treasured. In 1938, on the centenary of her exploit, Bamburgh schoolboys hauled the coble to the Grace Darling Museum, where you can see it and other rescue memorabilia. From 1990 to 2020 the Seahouses lifeboat was the RNLI Grace Darling. It’s been replaced by an even more technologically advanced vessel, but either one is a far cry from the four-man coble that Grace Darling and her father rowed, against the storm, to save those in peril on the sea. ©

[PanBiker]

We have blue pottery fragments from the S.S. Forfarshire. Easily found on the beaches around Seahouses.

[Stanley]

What is a 'boffin'?

boffin. n. (1). An elderly naval officer (1941). (2). a person engaged in backroom scientific or technical research (1945). (3). British colloquial. in weakened use, an intellectual, an academic, an expert . . . a person perceived as lacking practical or social skills (1954).

Thus the word ‘boffin’ is defined in The Oxford English Dictionary and accorded (as the OED always does) dates of origin. Appropriately, I never heard the word until we moved to England in 1969. In Oxford I met several boffins. Then we moved to Lancaster where boffins were rarer birds, but still enough of them to enflesh the idea. But ‘boffin’ is a modern word, and one can imagine it being coined to describe Frederick Brundrett, who was born on November 25, 1894, and lived long enough to be, in 1941, an elderly naval officer who was engaged in backroom scientific research. Indeed he lived long enough to be knighted, becoming Sir Frederick in 1950. After his retirement he added a 4th and very common usage to “boffin,” for he became the great and good Sir Frederick, UK civil service commissioner, chairman of the Air Traffic Control Board, and (as if all that were not enough) he still chaired the Aeronautical Research Council for the Ministry of Defense. One problem in making Frederick Brundrett the perfect original of ‘the boffin’ is that he’s said to have been loaded to the gills with ‘practical and social skills.’ He had become an expert bureaucrat who knew how and when to fight his corner; then, whether he won or lost a fight, he knew how to make a peace. Perhaps he learned how to be a warm, engaging person during his childhood, in Ebbw Vale, Wales, where his father was a manager for a mining company. He was popular at his private school, then at Cambridge he excelled in mathematics (at Cambridge those who excel in math are named “wranglers,” a usage you can find in the OED). Brendrett went into the Royal Navy in WWI, and come the peace he stayed there, not afloat but in the Admiralty’s research office. There he stayed, succeeding so well that he was appointed chief research officer in 1937, just in time for the second world war. He specialized in sonar and, more generally, in underwater communications. Besides his research, Brundrett also specialized in being an effective bureaucrat. A small man (“birdlike,” one source says), he was a man with many outside interests (including dairy farming and field hockey), an engaging conversationalist, and not least a competent cricketer. He was such good company that, in 1954 his old Cambridge college (Sidney Sussex) made him an honorary fellow. I visualize Sir Frederick holding forth at high table dinners or, afterwards, over port, in the Senior Common Room. If Brendrett wasn’t the original boffin, he was its archetype, one who could hold his own even in the presence of other boffins. ©

[Stanley]

Honest Abe.

No human counsel hath devised, nor hath any human hand worked out these great things. They are the precious gift of the Most High God, who while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. Presidential proclamation, October 3, 1863.

Thus Abraham Lincoln, in proclaiming a national “Day of Thanksgiving” for November 26, 1863, the fourth Thursday of the month. Indeed it went ahead, though the necessities of war set important limits. Not least, Lincoln knew that his ‘national’ thanksgiving would not take place “in the theater of military conflict.” But he noted recent Union successes, military and diplomatic, as reasons for giving thanks. Thanks were due, too, for the productivity of Union farms, mines, and factories, and for increases in population despite the slaughter of Civil War. He hoped these portended a prosperous, peaceful future. But such great blessings could come only in God’s good time, for God had also to deal “with us in anger for our sins.” The 1863 proclamation thus predicts Lincoln’s astonishingly humble Second Inaugural Address of March 1865, where with victory in sight he noted that God’s anger might yet draw forth every drop of blood—North and South—that the nation justly owed for its sins. Clearly Lincoln had slavery in mind as a national sin, contrition as a national necessity. So Lincoln struck a tone of humility that few presidents since have attained. That tone will be absent over the next four years, which is a pity and, in the broad sweep of our history, pitiable. The very first American ‘thanksgivings,’ in the 17th century, were outbalanced by official “days of humiliation,” especially in New England, where the colonists’ Puritanism warned them that to be the apple of God’s eye was to occupy dangerous territory. I haven’t an exact tally, but humiliations outnumbered thanksgivings by (at the very least) a factor of 10. A bad harvest, a war, a shipwreck, even apings of the latest London fashions, could bring divine wrath down (deservedly) on the whole population. Lincoln’s increasingly religious rhetoric, during the crises of the 1850s and the Civil War itself, shows how well he came to understand this religious tradition. His internalization of it does raise the question of his own religiosity. In his younger years (Lincoln was only 56 when he was assassinated) he expressed doubts, and his Springfield law partner, Matthew Herndon, believed Lincoln to be an atheist. That, by the way, was OK with Herndon, although it raised a storm of protest with the publication of Herndon’s Life (1889). We are still uncomfortable with the possibility. With the brief exception of “Franksgivings” (FDR’s attempt to move thanksgiving earlier), our national Thanksgiving, sans humiliation, still happens on the day Lincoln proclaimed it to be, the fourth Thursday in November. FDR made the change in order to stimulate Christmas sales, but today we’re so brave that our Christmas now begins at Halloween. Happy Thanksgiving!!! ©

[Stanley]

Studying tribal cultures, here and there.

There are three dinner dances, don’t you know, during the season, and the invitations, don’t you see, are issued to different ladies and gentlemen each time, do you understand? So at each dinner dance, you know, are only 150 people of the highest set, don’t you know? So during the season, you see, 400 different invitations are issued. Ward McAllister, quoted in the New York Times, 1892.

The Times then went on to list ‘the 400’ by name, including the grandest dame of them all, Caroline Astor. Mrs. Astor was famous for snubbing the Vanderbilts, a family whose riches were too nouveaux for words. The Vanderbilts would respond, eventually, with their distant cousin Amy’s famous book (Etiquette, in 1952), which told one how to behave as if one were actually ‘in’ the 400. But there were other ways to respond to this American attempt at aristocracy. Donald Trump was too much of a “swell” to break in successfully, so tried to outdo all the rest with vulgar display and abrasive ostentation. In the 19th century, scions of the James family (respectable bankers) left the city altogether. In their exiles, William James became a gentleman scholar (one of the finest ever) at Harvard, while his brother Henry wrote stories and novels in which he weighed America’s new-made aristos against the ‘real’ (European?) thing. Edith Wharton, old New York money to her very core, married a nonentity from Boston and went on to write coruscatingly critical fictions about New York’s upper crust, notably the story of Lily Bart’s fall from grace in The House of Mirth (1905). And then there was Elsie Clews Parsons, born to the Manhattan purple on November 27, 1875. The Clews were old money, “nobs” by Mrs. Astor’s standards. In 1900 she married another nob, for her husband (Herbert Parsons) was an eminent Wall Street lawyer and bosom friend of Teddy Roosevelt’s (whose money was even older). But Elsie was already kicking over her traces with a Barnard BA and then a Columbia PhD (in Sociology, of all things!!). Fiction was not for her. She wrote (under a pseudonym) embarrassingly about The Family (1906), Chastity (1913), and The Old-Fashioned Woman (also 1913), in which she advocated birth control, trial marriages, and no-fault divorces. She also became an adept sailor, captaining her own boat, before writing (using her legal name) critically about “society” and its control mechanisms. Perhaps she had “the 400” in mind. We remember Elsie Clews Parsons best as an anthropologist who lived with and wrote about Pueblo, Hopi, and Zapotec cultures in the American southwest. In one sense, Elsie moved a million miles from the nobs and swells delineated by Elizabeth Schermerhorn Astor and Ward McAllister. Elsie’s anthropological mind had its early training sessions in her debutante season in New York City’s top tribe. ©.

[Stanley]

The Theologian of Marxism?

But this I maintain, the war of the poor against the rich . . . will become direct and universal. It is too late for a peaceful solution. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844).

If you surveyed the whole of 1844 Europe, you couldn’t find a more typically bourgeois person than Friedrich Engels. He was born on November 28, 1820, in Westphalia—the Ruhr—at the very heart of Germany’s own industrial revolution. It was close to the Dutch border. Indeed his mother was of Dutch origin, and both parents were strong Calvinists, the ‘industrious sort’ best fitted to rise in a newly competitive economy. Friedrich was their eldest son, clever, likely the hope of the family. He would spend much of his life working in his father’s yarn works, first at home in the Ruhr and then in northern England. Manchester (the Engels yarn works were in Salford) was a dynamic place, spawning a middle-class culture that was radical and reformist. Mancunian entrepreneurs supported repeal of the Corn Laws. They read The Guardian newspaper. They aimed for parliamentary reform and widening the suffrage. Their civic pride built great institutions, a rising university, a magnificent library, an imposing City Hall. Even their water and sewage works were built as temples of progress. It is easy to think of young Engels, sent to Salford to learn about the English end of the family business, becoming one among many capitalists who thought of themselves as lovers of mankind—philanthropists whose prosperity would ‘trickle down’ to the benefit of all. Instead, as we all know, Friedrich Engels became the other half—some would say the better half—of a partnership (with Karl Marx) that created the modern communist movement, penned The Communist Manifesto (1848), and aimed to set the bourgeois world alight with a “red” revolution. How that could happen is an interesting puzzle. As a young man, Engels fell in with an amorphous group of intellectuals, ‘Young Hegelians,’ romantic poets, pioneer sociologists. It was partly to get him away from such company that Pa Engel send Friedrich to Manchester. But the result was one of the foundation works of ‘Marxism,’ The Condition of the Working Class in England. Engels and Marx had already met, in the radical underground, but only briefly, and Engels’s early works (including his seminal study of Germany’s 16th-century ‘peasant revolt’) were his own early efforts to make scientific sense of the art of history. I like to think that it was Engels’ early exposure to his family’s Calvinism that set him on his singularly revolutionary course. But that would require a much longer essay, Suffice it to say that the Marx-Engels partnership was welded, fused, by the German revolutions of 1848, and that its first fruit was the jointly-authored Manifesto of the same year. The rest is history. ©.

[Stanley]

Rivers of history, rivers of culture.

I’ve known rivers
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
--Opening lines of “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” by Langston Hughes

This is one of Hughes’s earliest poems. He wrote it at 17, on the back of the proverbial envelope. It was first published two years later, in The Crisis, the official organ of the NAACP. In it the young poet makes himself an ancient, one who’s bathed in the Euphrates, slept near the Congo, watched the pyramids rise above the Nile, and has only now “heard the singing of the Mississippi.” So Africa moves to America; and, not surprisingly, the poem quickly won fame as an “anthem” of the Harlem Renaissance. Black was as old as humanity, black had weight and tradition, black was beautiful. In 1944, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” had one of its most dramatic outings when set to music at the Broadway debut of Pearl Primus, dancer and choreographer. A Trinidadian by birth (November 29, 1919), she’d settled in New York City with her parents in 1921. Pearl excelled in school and then (in pre-med) at Hunter College. She’d decided on a career in medicine, as a researcher and clinician, but discovered that her skin shade was considered a disqualification. In the midst of the Great Depression, she found theater work with the National Youth Administration, first on the technical side, and then as a dancer. She was a sensation on stage but also as a politically motivated choreographer with the New Dance Group. Her first major work was entitled African Ceremonial, in which she also danced, in early 1943 at the 92nd Street YMHA. By year’s end she danced in Carnegie Hall before an audience that included Eleanor Roosevelt and Mary McLeod Bethune. The performance was advertised as the African Dance Festival. Then, to make herself ready for putting Hughes’s poem to dance, she researched the black experience along the Mississippi, and not just as a scholar but also disguised as a cotton field worker. Her “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” was another triumph. She went on to put Strange Fruit (a story of a lynching) to dance, and then to study, in person, as an anthropologist, traditional dance in west Africa. She returned to her adopted country, the USA, to perform and choreograph for, among others, Alvin Alley. She never did become a medical doctor. Instead, she electrified audiences with her American readings of traditional African dance. While young Langston Hughes spoke of rivers, Pearl Primus danced them. Loaded down with honors, including the National Medal of Arts, Pearl Primus, West Indian immigrant, died in New York in 1994. ©.

[Stanley]

A model of enlightened despotism.

But what then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal’s deed, however calculated, can be compared? Albert Camus.

My life is marked, some would say marred, by political inconsistencies. I won’t enumerate them, but suffice it to say that in the 1960 election I (aged 17) canvassed for Richard M. Nixon. But I have always opposed capital punishment. My first political demonstration, at the Iowa governor’s mansion in June 1962, was against an execution. The demonstration, a small one, failed, and the guilty murderer, aged 21, was hanged in September. The best I can say, even at this late date, is that the hanging released the murderer from his fatal diseases of epilepsy and alcoholism. So I am pleased to note that today, November 30, is the Feast of Tuscany. It will be celebrated in Florence, Italy, and in some other parts of the civilized world, but perhaps not in Iowa. The Feast commemorates the abolition of the death penalty on November 30, 1786. This was decreed by Grand Duke Leopold (1747-1792) had assumed the dukedom when aged 14. Leopold was a Hapsburg, a younger son of the empress Maria Theresa. Despite that pedigree, he came to Tuscany determined to act only in the best interest of the people. As soon as he came of age, Leopold started to codify that “best interest.” He simplified Tuscany’s government (bureaucracy and courts), improved its economy (by removing medieval restrictions on production and trade), and invested in public improvements, notably the draining of wetlands in the Val di Chiana. He also lessened the powers of the church, perhaps in reaction to his early training (Maria Theresa had intended him to become a Cardinal). So there was something of the rebel in Leopold. And he signaled that early in his ducal reign (1769) by ceasing to authorize executions. He also stopped the practice of torturing suspects to gain confessions. The formal diktat of 1786 finished the work, and could be seen as a mere tidying up, but had something to do with his project of creating a written constitution, a contract between himself and ‘the people,’ a project he is said to have modeled on Virginia’s revolutionary constitution of 1776. Of course Leopold’s constitution didn’t arise from ‘the people,’ for he believed himself to be an enlightened despot. How that might have worked out, heaven only knows, for in 1790 a death in the family translated Leopold to the seat of Hapsburg power as Holy Roman Emperor, king of Austria and Hungary, etc., etc. He did intend his Hapsburg reign to be an “enlightened” one. So he might have altered the whole course of European history. But the troubles in France (where his sister Marie Antoinette was queen) delayed him. Then he died in 1792, only two years into his emperorship. Austria didn’t get around to abolishing capital punishment until 1968. ©.

[Stanley]

Poetaster supreme.

Come all you friends and critics,
And listen to my song,
A word I will say to you,
It will not take me long,
The people talks about me,
They’ve nothing else to do
But to criticize their neighbors,
And they now have me in view.
--Julia A. Moore, “To My Friends and Critics.”

Every nation must have its worst-ever poet. Indeed there was an English word for it, “poetaster,” invented (possibly) by Ben Jonson who in 1602 produced a play entitled Poetaster; Or, The Arraignment. Jonson was a snob, classically educated, a London gent who first thought Shakespeare a Stratford hick whose “small Latine, and lesse Greeke” made him scarcely worth the paper he scribbled on. In the end, Ben conceded that Will had some talent. So we are reminded that taste is a fleeting thing. And in our more democratic (or demotic) age, it’s become unfashionable to lampoon really awful poetry. The Oxford English Dictionary informs us that the word itself, “poetaster,” has been in steep decline since 1900 and is now a rare usage. But in the 19th-century USA there was widespread agreement that Julia A. Moore was the country’s outstanding poetaster and that there could never be a worser one. Mark Twain used Moore’s verse as a template for the sickly sweet stuff put out by Emmeline Grangerford in Huckleberry Finn. A reviewer in upstate New York wrote that “Shakespeare, could he read [Julia Moore], would be glad that he is dead.” A Hartford paper was driven to tears by Moore’s “steady and unremitting demands on the lachrymal ducts.” Julia A. Moore was born Julia Davis on December 1, 1847, in Michigan. Aged 17, she married a neighboring farmer, Frederick Moore. She worked the farm, ran a country store, birthed 10 children, and in 1876 published The Sentimental Song Book. It became a sensation, soon republished as The Sweet Singer of Michigan Salutes the Public. It was not the sort of sensation that Mrs, Moore hoped for. She responded to critics’ jeers with some even worse poetry, as quoted above, but was glad to take money for her books and for her public readings. Mr. Moore, embarrassed, ordered Julia to stop writing and stay home, but you can’t keep a poetaster down. Much (too much, I would say) of her poetry is available on line; you can judge it for yourself. For my money, Julia Moore’s most valuable contribution to American culture was to convince Ogden Nash to stop trying to be a great poet. The better route, he thought, was to become a “great bad poet.” And so we got Nash’s “The Cow.”
The Cow is of the bovine ilk.
One end is moo, the other, milk. ©

[Stanley]

Piano forte!

These are the smallest and worst hands I have ever seen. It would be impossible to play the piano with them. You must give music up. Ferruccio Busoni to Harriet Cohen.

Many stories Harriet Cohen told about herself are apocryphal, so we can’t be 100% sure that Busoni offered this stern advice. But her hands were really small, and there was some webbing between her fingers. If these were bad things, she made the most of them, becoming one of London’s best-loved classical pianists, playing (for instance) to thunderous applause at the summer Proms. Cohen was an acknowledged master of Bach and Mozart. Scholars admired her (re)discoveries of Tudor music, which she translated to the modern keyboard. She played with such passion that, at one concert, she smashed a thumbnail. But piano alone doesn’t get you an episode on Eamonn Andrews’ long-running TV program, This Is Your Life, on which Harriet Cohen appeared in 1959 as the star biograph. Of course she was surprised to be there, and of course she played the piano, but what made her the ideal subject for This Is Your Life was that Harriet Cohen had known just about everyone—and just about everyone had known Harriet Cohen. She was born Harriet Pearl Alice Cohen in Brixton, London, on December 2, 1895. Her parents were Jews of an assimilationist bent, prosperous, and enthusiastic musical amateurs. Harriet learned piano at home, then went off to the Royal Academy of Music, 1909-1915, where (despite those hands?) she won prizes galore and, extramurally, was bowled over by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russe. Ever after, her friends called her “Tania.” And she made so many friends: too many perhaps but including the aging George Bernard Shaw; the young Albert Einstein (not to mention his cousin Alfred, the German composer); and a whole galaxy of modern British composers, Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Walton. For a full house add Bartok and Sibelius (whose depressions she lightened), composers, and Casals, musician. Politically Harriet knew Eleanor Roosevelt and, closer to home, Ramsay MacDonald. On the literary side there were H. G. Wells, D. H. Lawrence, and (more importantly) Dorothy Thompson, who educated Harriet about the dangers of Adolf Hitler and introduced her to Chaim Weizman who, in turn, converted Harriet to Zionism. Harriet Cohen’s most intimate friend was the composer Arnold Bax, later Sir Arnold. They remained lovers, off and on, until Bax’s death in 1953. Harriet claimed other lovers in her autobiography, A Bundle of Time, which was not published until after her death. I don’t know how many of these amours came out on stage in This Is Your Life, for it was after all a “family” program, but besides Harriet Cohen’s piano artistry her life offered Andrews’s producers a fascinating array of best friends from which to pick and choose. Hers was, and had to be, a group portrait. ©.

[Stanley]

Intelligence, wit, and heart.
If you are labeled as a comedy actress you are never taken seriously. You are looked upon as a funny woman. I don't like funny women; rather, women with intelligence, wit and heart. Moyra Fraser.

I know Moyra Fraser best—that is, most recently—in her role as Penny, Judi Dench’s sister-in-law in As Time Goes By, the long-running (1992-2005) BBC serial that Paulette and I have watched at least twice—as time goes by, you might say. It’s good viewing for an elderly couple, for it deals with a late season (but rekindled) romance between Dench’s character, Jean Pargetter, and Lionel Harcastle (played by Geoffrey Palmer). Moyra Fraser’s Penny is a formidable character, dominant in her own marriage (to a hapless dentist) and, as far as Jean and Lionel are concerned, too dominating to be helpful to them. But Penny means well, really well, for she’s one who knows exactly how things should be done. It is this great distance between intention and result which makes her a comic character. Penny is played perfectly by Moyra Fraser, indeed an accomplished comedy actor. What I did not know is that Fraser was also best friends with Judi Dench and had been since the late 1950s when they played together with Maggie Smith in modern and classic stage comedies. The three of them shared a dressing room at the Old Vic (in the 1959-1960 season), Moyra Fraser doing her stuff as Audrey (As You Like It), Lady Froth (The Double Dealer), and Mistress Page (The Merry Wives of Windsor). According to others at the Old Vic that season, there were more laughs in that dressing room than there were on stage. Lasting friendships were formed that continued for decades, professionally of course (as in As Time Goes By) but also socially in the form of Sunday lunch get-togethers at this or that house. the meals often cooked by Fraser, who was also quite a chef: the three women, their husbands/families, and their friends (including Joss Ackland and Alex McGowan). It’s less well known that Moyra Fraser began her career as a ballerina. Born of wealthy parents (in Australia, on December 3, 1923), Fraser was educated in fairly posh English schools, then won a scholarship to the Sadler’s Wells Ballet School. She did very well as a dancer, at Sadler’s Wells and then Covent Garden. Perhaps too tall to make prima, she moved to the West End stage in the early 1950s. She came into her own as Lady Squeamish in a Wycherly revival (The Country Wife). It did so well that it’s said to have saved the Adelphi Theatre, in deep financial trouble. Then came that wonderful tri-partnership at the Old Vic. Moyra Fraser’s was a life very well played. She died, widely mourned, in 2009. Today her commanding though comic presence can be experienced in television reruns, on stream. But it’s also pleasant to think of those Sunday lunches. ©.

[Stanley]

How to heat the world.

Gentlemen: ... There is much ground for encouragement in the belief that your Company have in their possession a raw material from which they may manufacture... very valuable products. Benjamin Silliman, Jr., to Messrs. Eveleth, Bissell, and Reed, circa 1860.

This ‘raw material’ oozed from the ground around Titusville, PA. Native Americans made some use of it, then Euro-American settlers. Thinking there might be something in it, Edwin Drake sank a well. “Rock Oil,” as he called it, gushed forth, but what was “Rock Oil”? The Wall Street law firm of Eveleth, Bissell, and Reed sent a sample to Benjamin Silliman, Jr., who invented the process of fractional distillation to figure out what ‘rock oil’ was made of. Silliman was an important figure in the history of American science for other reasons, too. He was born in New Haven on December 4, 1816, where his father, Benjamin Sr., was in process of founding science studies at Yale. At the time, few American colleges thought “science” a worthy partner in the education of young gentlemen. College education was a humanities monopoly: Latin and Greek, theology, some modern literature, maybe a bit of history thrown in as spice. Modern languages had only begun to creep in, through the back door. Harvard kept “science” at bay by establishing a separate unit, the Lawrence Scientific School, in 1847. Yale, although far more conservative than Harvard in most ways, was quicker, and the Sillimans , Sr. and then Jr., led the way as Yale’s first and then its second professors of chemistry. So it was that Messrs. Eveleth, Bissell, and Reed sent a sample of Pennsylvania Rock Oil to Professor Benjamin Silliman, Jr, and paid his $526.08 for his report. That’s about $20,000 in today’s dollars, but still a very good deal for what was to become one of the world’s great industrial successes (and one of our most damaging pollutants). The whole thing went to Benjamin Jr’s head, and he later became more famous, or infamous, for finding great oil reserves where they weren’t, notably in Utah and New Mexico. It was partly thanks to Silliman that worthless oil stocks became, so to speak, a favorite theme of British humorists, notably in the stories of P. G. Wodehouse. But we shouldn’t be too hard on the man. His contributions to the refining process were important enough. It’s also worth noting that he, like his father, was an ardent abolitionist. And, besides wanting Yale to admit that studying chemistry was a worthwhile endeavor for young gentlemen, he was (like his father) a crusader for women’s rights, notably the right to a college education. Here Yale proved even a tougher nut to crack. Even so, we find Benjamin Silliman’s daughters among the first women formally registered as Yale students. But when Alice and Susan Silliman entered Yale (in 1869) they registered in the School of Fine Arts. Perhaps the girls had already learned all they wanted to know about chemistry. ©.

[Stanley]

Hobbit-town, USA.

I said before I left Germany that I would never again support a war for any reason. People are always exploited. Mildred Scott Olmsted, 1985.

Mildred Olmsted had a long memory. She’d left Germany long ago, in 1919. She’d gone ‘over there’ to support American soldiers (as a YWCA volunteer in Paris), then moved to Berlin to lead relief efforts (against famine and flu) for the defeated civilian population. She was then Mildred Scott, born on December 5, 1889, the rebellious daughter of a conservative Quaker father who believed that a woman’s best place was ‘home & hearth.’ Mildred didn’t like the way he’d reduced her mother to a cipher, then further blotted her copy book by campaigning for women’s suffrage. She broke away from Philadelphia quakerdom by attending Smith College and, worse, majoring in history. She returned to Philadelphia’s Main Line to create and staff a new “welfare” department at the Bryn Mawr Hospital, where she advocated birth control and family planning. Then Mildred married a Philadelphia lawyer, Allen Olmsted, and made that into a negotiation. She refused to “love, honor, and obey.” Allen Olmsted was OK with her promise that she would “strive” to love him. They settled in Rose Valley, PA, where they raised three kids. But to really understand Mildred and Allen you’d need to visit Rose Valley. It looks like a set for the Hobbits in Lord of the Rings. Most houses are smallish (if perhaps a bit large for hobbits) and at first sight ramshackle. Closer inspection reveals a distinctive character, stone mixed with stucco and often set off with half-timbered gable ends. A few have odd tower-like additions, and most are set back from the road. Building lots are small or smallish, and most properties sell today at well below Main Line averages. The house Mildred and Allen built is smaller than most, but it sits rather prominently right by Rose Valley’s main throughfare. Rose Valley was, as its founder (the architect William Price) intended, an important center of the American Arts & Crafts movement. Soon after the Olmsteds moved in, the community declared its political independence as a borough and set severe limitations on what suburban planners liked to call “development.” The Olmsteds named their dwelling Thunderbird Lodge, but “Thunderbolt” might have been more appropriate. Today quietly it houses the Rose Valley Historical Museum. But in the Olmsteds’ time “Thunderbolt” was the center of Main Line dissent. While Allen founded the Philadelphia chapter of the ACLU, Mildred became an active campaigner for peace abroad and civil rights at home. One local journalist jokes that her whole life is best seen as a rebellion against her dictatorial father and an ‘acting out’ against her timid, self-effacing mother. It was more than that, and it didn’t stop until Mildred Olmsted died, just short of her 100th birthday, in 1989. ©

[Stanley]

Life as a play.

One reason we lasted so long is that we usually played two people who were very much in love. . . . So we had a divertissement: I had an affair with him, and he with me. Lynne Fontanne.

Growing up in Des Moines didn’t give me much contact with “theater,” but I did remember Peter Brooks’ 1953 TV production of King Lear. I was only 10, far too young to bear Orson Welles’s Lear, even on a 16” black and white Magnavox. My parents made me watch it. They also took me along to see ‘community theater’ at the Roosevelt Playhouse. There I hugely enjoyed seeing the fathers of two school friends play (and sing) the Guys and Dolls roles made famous by Stubby Kaye and Johnny Silver. And, at home, mom and dad talked about the stage and real life partnerships between Lynne Fontanne and Alfred Lunt. Exactly why Fontanne and Lunt intruded so often was a mystery, for the two never played in Des Moines. Now I find that they performed for US and UK soldiers throughout France and Germany in 1944-1945. Perhaps dad saw them then, on his rare breaks from forward observing. The simpler explanation is that Lunt and Fontanne were so famous that everyone talked about them. They were lovers on stage and off, he handsome, she beautiful, and each smart as a whip. And they were innovators in stage dialogue, interrupting each other, speaking at the same time, to each other (or past them) just like real people. The female half of the partnership, Lynne Fontanne, was born near London on December 6, 1887 as Lille Louise Fontanne. Her dad was named Jules Pierre Antoine, which suggests a French connection, but a more important connection was with the great Ellen Terry, who took Ms. Fontanne on as an informal understudy and taught her well enough to land Lynne in good West End roles. Her fiancée was killed in action in WWI. Then she traveled to the USA where, playing summer stock near Washington, DC, she met young Alfred Lunt, a blue-eyed boy from Wisconsin. Lynne talked Alfred into marriage, and the two began to play together, on stage, in New York. Modern dramas (e.g.plays by Shaw, Sherwood, and O’Neill) were their meat. They got rave reviews, even from Dorothy Parker, and in 1932 Noel Coward wrote a play for them, Design for Living. Rather risqué, it plotted Fontanne pirouetting between two lovers, then ending up with Lunt, and was thought by some to mirror real life. They also played Katherina and Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew, which I would like to see but it was on stage only. During WWII they returned to Britain to suffer with Lynne’s family, and then after D-Day followed the troops to remind them of the excitements of real life. In 1960 they retired to the grand home they’d built in Alfred’s home town, in Wisconsin. There Lynne survived Alfred by 6 years. She died at home, aged 95, in 1983, the last act of a legendary love affair. ©.

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Poetry painter.

He is gone—he died with the most perfect ease . . . so quiet that I still thought he slept. Joseph Severn, reporting from Rome on the death of John Keats, February 27, 1821.

Forty years later, in 1861, Joseph Severn was appointed British consul in Rome. It was a troubled time. The Italian risorgimento had just proclaimed Victor Emmanuel king of the new Kingdom of Italy and named Rome as capital city. Trouble was, Rome was still the seat of power for Pius IX, who besides being pope was ruling prince of the Papal States. The more fiercely Pius clung to power, the more reactionary he became. In this struggle the British struck a pose of watchful neutrality. Trouble was that their new consul in Rome, Joseph Severn, sympathized with the Italian revolution. He provided shelter to some, legal help to others, angered the pope, and infuriated Britain’s official ambassador at the papal court who was doing his best to hew to the official line. But the foreign office sent only a rebuke, and Severn kept his post, resigning only in 1872, when the Italians finally dethroned the pope. Severn owed his survival to several factors, mainly British sympathy for the risorgimento and hostility to France (Pius held power thanks to the French garrison in Rome). But Severn had friends in high places, for instance the rising young politician William Ewert Gladstone. His daughter Ann Mary was busy painting portraits of Queen Victoria’s children (and was, anyway, the wife of the previous consul in Rome). And Severn was generally well thought of in London’s political and artistic circles. He was himself a painter who had done well enough to afford a house at Buckingham Gate. And there was about him an aura of the Romantic movement. In particular Severn had been an intimate friend of John Keats. Born near London on December 7, 1793. Joseph Severn fell in with a somewhat disreputable circle while a student at the Royal Academy Schools, particularly John Keats and his two brothers but also Percy Bysshe Shelley. Severn’s interest in expressing great poetry through painting was probably his entrée, but he became an intimate through his care for Keats, diagnosed with consumption in 1820. Severn went with Keats to Italy, but instead of convalescing Keats sickened and died. There’s evidence that this was not an entirely happy relationship (Keats, an atheist, was angered by Severn’s religiosity), but Severn emerged from it as the saintly carer who’d seen the poet through to a transforming death. Once back in London, Severn’s art sold well, portraits and, still, paintings on poetic themes. He made a good marriage, spent much time in Italy, helped Monckton Milnes complete his classic Keats biography, and eventually settled in Rome in a more official capacity. He settled there permanently in 1879, for he would be buried next to Keats in Rome’s ‘Protestant’ cemetery. ©.

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Equality as a theory of matter.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. Thomas Jefferson, et al, The Declaration of Independence, 1776.

Here eloquence inspires, but is loaded with ambiguities. Since Jefferson was in his family a patriarch and in his private life an enslaver of human beings, what could he have meant by “equal”? But in some ways “happiness” is even cloudier in its meaning, especially if we have only the ‘right’ to pursue it, while life and liberty are (apparently) birthrights. I first thought that Jefferson was only editing John Locke, the English philosopher for whom life, liberty, and property were the sacred trinity of political ethics. In an American society characterized by growing discrepancies of wealth, “happiness” was a better buzzword, a “hot button” to press all to action. But “happiness” was also a philosophical construct of great significance, particularly in the European Enlightenment. Perhaps its greatest exponent was Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach. We’re not sure of his birth date but we do know that he was baptized on December 8, 1723, in the Rhenish Palatinate. His parents were prosperous enough, but even better he had a rich maternal uncle who financed the boy through university (Leiden) and then introduced him to Parisian high society. In due course, Paul-Henri took the uncle’s name and inherited his estate. Just southeast of Paris, his landholdings made Paul-Henri one of the wealthiest of the philosophes, friend and sponsor of Diderot and Rousseau. d’Holbach’s readings of Locke and Isaac Newton made him a materialist, too, and by the same light a radical egalitarian. Since men, humans, were not much more than “matter” (he did give us credit for being thinking animals) they had to be equals. So they could best find happiness in concert, working together for a better society or, failing that, to find truth in agreement. So the Baron d’Holbach became famous not only as a thinker in his own right but one of Enlightenment Paris’s best party givers, a friend to all. Besides Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the Chevalier de Chastellux, d’Holbach’s ever-widening social circle took in the Anglophone radicals Joseph Priestley, David Hume, and Laurence Sterne. And in due course, d’Holbach became bosom buddy to wise old Ben Franklin, representing the newly-independent American republic in Paris. It seems very likely that Jefferson had read d’Holbach’s materialist tract, The System of Nature, before he joined Franklin in Paris. But we do know that when Jefferson sold his library to the nation (to form the basis of our Library of Congress) it included multiple editions of d’Holmbach’s works, including Système de la nature, which advises us that the pursuit of happiness is most likely to succeed when it’s undertaken by equals. ©.

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Woman of many parts.

There’s no right way of performing Shakespeare. And that’s why the plays are still being done. Judi Dench, in her Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent (2023).

Taking this as her cue, Judi Dench goes on to explain why she’s played Shakespeare so differently—even the same part—over so many years. It can vary on the night. Something funny happened off stage. The director made a sarcastic remark in rehearsal; an actor responded on stage. Some nights, in some venues, the audience got the point immediately. Somewhere else, at some other time, the players have to knock the playgoers over the head. And what was the point, after all? Scholars have yet to agree even on who Shakespeare was, let alone on what exactly he meant in this or that scene or through this or that form of words. And as for stage directions, there aren’t many. “Exit, pursued by a bear”!!!! That “lack” amounts to license. I’ve seen Macbeth played by 1920s gangsters and by spacemen dressed in aluminum foil. Dench’s recent book on these uncertainties takes the form of her answering questions about how she played Shakespeare’s women (over three dozen of them) in an acting career that’s lasted for decades. Judi Dench was born in York, England, on December 9, 1934. She was schooled in York, in a Quaker school. She converted to Quakerism. As importantly, her doctor dad served as the medical officer for York’s Theatre Royal while her mom was its wardrobe mistress. Maybe acting was inevitable. At any rate, Dench took to it like the proverbial duck, and after bit parts here and there and a spell in acting school, she debuted in London—as Ophelia, no less—in 1957. Her career since is the stuff of legend: “Shakespeare et cetera” with the stress on et cetera. Dench has acted in every medium (stage, TV, film, radio), in tragedies and comedies, sitcoms and murder mysteries, musicals and even soap operas. She’s portrayed queens of all sorts, real and fictional, and an alarming range of low-lifes. I remember especially her worldly wise Elizabeth I in Shakespeare In Love and her eccentric, willful Victoria in Victoria & Abdul. One could say she’s also played herself, beautifully, in the sitcom serial As Time Goes By and the two Best Exotic Marigold Hotel films. In these late life roles, she’s an aging but not old woman with more than enough wit and energy to manage herself and orchestrate others. Quite rightly, she doesn’t like to be thought of as an aging actress. Her eyesight, or lack of it, is troubling her now, but her insight is as acute as ever in her chosen role as the world’s leading Quaker environmentalist. I also recommend (unreservedly) her perspectives on Shakespeare, the man who’s paid her rent for so many years. And today I wish her the happiest of birthdays. After all, it’s her ninetieth. ©.

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The tiger moth of the jazz world.

Nica’s generation was the first that felt it could escape. The irony was they weren’t quite sure where to escape to. Hannah Rothschild, 2013, speaking of her great aunt Nica, aka “The Jazz Baroness.”

Hannan Rothschild was giving interviews to publicize her biography, The Baroness: The Search for Nica the Rebellious Rothschild (New York, 2013). It was timely twice over, for 2013 was also the centenary of Pannonica Rothschild’s birth (December 10, 1913). ‘Nica’ was the youngest daughter of Charles Rothschild, who (it could be said) had begun to escape from the iron rules of the five-branched banking family. Charles did continue to work at a Rothschild bank, and indeed played a creative role (as a metallurgist) in a Rothschild mining concern. But in his spare time, Charles Rothschild made himself into a leading entomologist, lepidopterist to be exact, and so it was that Nica was named after a rare moth, Eubemma pannonica, native to the flatlands of eastern Europe. Perhaps Nica’s first rebellion was to claim that her namesake moth was really a butterfly. Her second rebellion, ironically, took place in a DeHavilland “Tiger Moth,” a two-seater biplane (of 1920s vintage) used by the RAF to train fighter pilots. Nica learned to fly in a Tiger Moth, and it was aboard one of those that she accepted a marriage proposal from Baron Jules de Koenigswarter. Baroness Nica then joined her baron in yet another (her third) rebellion, fighting for the Free French in Africa and then across northern Europe. In gratitude, or perhaps not knowing what else to do with her, the allied armies commissioned Nica as a lieutenant. Come the peace she seemed destined for the tamer role of a diplomat’s wife (Baron de Koenigswarter having joined the French foreign service). Instead, there was another rebellion. In New York (where Jules was at the United Nations) Nica discovered jazz, and the effect was revolutionary. Separating from Jules, then divorcing, Nica became “the jazz baroness.” Famously she was friend and patron of Thelonius Monk and Charlie Parker, undeniably jazz greats, but also of Art Blakey, another jazz pioneer, and a whole roster of lesser musicians. From her bases (Manhattan hotels and then a hilltop home in Weehawken) he traveled in her Rolls and then her Bentley to hear them play. She went on tour. If “her” musicians were in trouble, she bailed them or sent groceries, as required. As one of them later wrote, “I suppose you could call Nica a patron of the arts, but she was more like a brother. . . There was no jive about her.” Her kindness to the troubled, especially Monk and Parker, extended even to paying for their funerals. And why not? She had the money. Overall, Nica was something more than a rebel. She might better be seen as the patron saint of the bebop world. ©.

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The Romantic Era in Music

Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down. Hector Berlioz.

This might be the most characteristic expression of the Romantic Era. In distant America, Ralph Waldo Emerson would utter it, almost identically, in his famous yowl entitled “Self-Reliance” (1840). So in England William Wordsworth had the temerity to biograph (in verse) his own growth as a poet. Much later, in the USA, Walt Whitman would sing of himself as the embodiment of a whole people. For Hector Berlioz, the tocsin sounded when he was 25, a long year during which he first heard Beethoven’s music and first attended a play by Shakespeare. And of course the drama was—and had to be—Hamlet. Hector Berlioz was born in rural France, the Isère, on December 11, 1803. His father was a doctor, one of a liberal bent, but dad’s liberalism did not mean self-expression for Hector, who instead was educated to be a physician, first in nearby Grenoble and then at the heart of things, Paris. Hector did go through with it, passing all his exams. But it wasn’t easy. Dissections horrified him partly because of the rotted-ness of dead bodies, but also by the finality of death itself. Time was a great teacher, he would later write, but the trouble with time was that, in the end, it killed you. The real problem was how to live. In Paris he found answers in music and theatre, and liberation in Beethoven and Shakespeare. Hector also found love, perhaps as an antidote to death, in the form of the Shakespearean actress Harriet Smithson. He would pursue her in words, and in music, too (for he had begun composing), until he did finally marry her in 1833. They had children, but it was hardly an ideal union. (He learned English. She never mastered French.) By then Berlioz was already a composer, well regarded by some. His Symphonie Fantastique (1832) impressed Niccolo Paganini who, though famed as a violinist, asked Berlioz to compose a concerto for the viola. As music critic and scholar, Berlioz was already thinking of, and writing about, musical instruments in biographical terms, placing each here and there in an orchestral genealogy. So his Harold In Italy raised the viola, a neglected sibling in the string family, to near heroic status. Berlioz’s viola biographs a romantic wanderer, the hero of Lord Byron’s romantic narrative poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. These two masterworks together epitomize the Romantic Era. Much later, they would be the first Berlioz pieces I heard, in 1963, courtesy of the Philadelphia orchestra and its guest conductor Paul Munch, a Berlioz aficionado. I was 20 then, and probably in a Romantic frame of mind. At any rate, I found the music overwhelming. It still is, and I recommend it unreservedly. ©

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Angry Young Man

I suppose people of our generation aren’t able to die for good causes any longer. We had all that done for us, in the thirties and the forties, when we were sill kids. Jimmy Porter, in John Osborn’s Look Back in Anger (1956).

When I entered Penn in 1961, I was enthused by the description of the (then) new Freshman English course which, in two semesters, promised me the gift of informed articulacy. I’ve since found that the course was indeed an innovation, designed by Professor Jerre Mangione (1909-1998), a somewhat eccentric second-generation immigrant and an accomplished novelist (and no relation, apparently, to the Penn graduate Luigi Mangione who is currently in the news). But to me the course was a bust. One measure of my disappointment was an essay grade of 8% (!!!) for my ‘theatre review’ of West Side Story. Another was the play we read in the fall semester, Look Back in Anger. Enough of Shakespeare, we were told. And enough too of the sentimentalism exemplified by Thornton Wilder’s very, very American Our Town. John Osborne’s play, very recent (1956) and a big prizewinner in London and New York, would bring us life as life was really lived. No tragic heroes here. No daemonic villains. No poetry, either. And whatever sentiment appeared, it seemed patently false, a make-believe reconciliation between irreconcilables, a young married couple whose class warfare subsides (in the last scene) into a bears and squirrels playtime. John Osborne was indeed born too late to be a hero, December 12, 1929. So he was only 10 when Hitler invaded Poland, 16 when peace was won. And he couldn’t even be working-class. His father was a copywriter who died in 1940 and left Osborne with the curse of a private education at a very minor ‘public.’ Osborne did make a mess of it, being expelled in 1945 for non-heroic reasons. He took his talents to London where he knocked about a bit, joined a traveling theatre company and began to write plays. Look Back in Anger wasn’t his first, but it’s the one that made him famous and, through its lead character, Jimmy Porter, would define a whole generation of Angry Young Men (Kingsley Amis, Alan Sillitoe, John Braine, etc.) The play is tangentially autobiographical, its Jimmy and Alison characters echoing a downwards spiral in Osborne’s own love life, but in my view, “looking back” so to speak, the real key to the play is that Osborne wrote it in seventeen days in Morecambe, a Lancashire seaside resort of the gloomy second class (behind Blackpool). Night times he acted in a repertory production of Seagulls over Sorrento (a comedy). Daytimes he wrote he wrote in anger while looking out at the tidal flats of Morecambe Bay. We lived near (but never in) Morecambe for 27 years. Whatever else one can say about the place, it’s not Sorrento. And Look Back in Anger is not Shakespeare. ©.

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The sinking of HMS Duke William

Still stands the forest primeval; but under the shade of its branches
Dwells another race, with other customs and language.
Only along the shore of the mournful and misty Atlantic
Linger a few Acadian peasants, whose fathers from exile
Wandered back to their native land to die in its bosom.
In the fisherman's cot the wheel and the loom are still busy;
Maidens still wear their Norman caps and their kirtles of homespun,
And by the evening fire repeat Evangeline's story,
While from its rocky caverns the deep-voiced, neighboring ocean
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.
--From Canto V of Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie (1847), by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Longfellow was already famous in 1847. Evangeline made him rich, perhaps the richest poet in US history (omitting two later poets who were also insurance company executives). Evangeline sold like hotcakes, and Longfellow’s royalty was 25%. It’s written in dactylic hexameter (hard to write but easy to read, Longfellow said). The story line, two lovers separated by tragedy and death, twanged a nation’s heart strings. It was, I happen to know, favorite reading for my maternal great-great aunt Mary and for my paternal grandmother Ethel. “This is the forest primeval,” the poem’s opening phrase, was part of my dad’s vocabulary, and now mine. I use it to label photos of Missouri hardwood forests, second-growth though they are. More importantly, Longfellow’s poem has become an Acadian folk myth. Statues of heroine ‘Evangeline Bellefontaine’ abound, as do “Evangeline” place names. The Acadians’ tragedy can be followed along the “Evangeline Trail” in modern Nova Scotia which takes tourists down the Annapolis Valley from Grand-Pré to Port Royal, the departure point for most deportees. The state of Louisiana (where many Acadians settled) boasts a “Longfellow-Evangeline State Historical Site.” It’s an ironic jointure, for Longfellow descended from New England Puritans, the very folks who in the 1750s howled for the forced deportation of French-speaking, Roman Catholic Acadians from maritime Canada. Prince Edward Island was once l’Île Saint-Jean, where until the 1750s French colonists lived in sometimes discordant harmony with Mi’kmaq clans. Longfellow’s Evangeline (and her lover Gabriel) lived in Nova Scotia, and were among the 11,000+ deportees forced out of “Acadie” to take their chances elsewhere. Most died in transit or soon after their arrival. But today in Prince Edward Island it’s Acadian Remembrance Day. The date is chosen because it was on December 13, 1758, that the British ship Duke William sank in an Atlantic storm. It was carrying Acadians—more than 360—back to European France. Almost all the deportees drowned. Most of the British crew survived. The story itself (one of both martyrs and mariners) has become mythic, and awaits its own Longfellow. Meanwhile, have a thought for all involuntary deportees. ©

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Shakespeare's Falstaff?

A goodly portly man, i’faith, and a corpulent; of a cheerful look, a pleasing eye and a most noble carriage, and, as I think, his age some fifty, or, by ‘r lady, inclining to three score; and now I remember me his name is Falstaff. From Henry IV, Part 1, by William Shakespeare.

Thus speaks Falstaff, in a lengthy verbal knockabout between himself and Prince Hal (the future Henry V). It’s a dangerous game, to jest and joust with a prince of the blood, and in three of Shakespeare’s finest histories ‘Sir John Falstaff’ plays it to the hilt. He is one of Shakespeare’s best characters. These days, you can watch all of Falstaff’s scenes (in four plays) on streaming television, and take in a fifth, too (wherein the dead Falstaff is eulogized). But it will take less time, and bring you more enjoyment, to watch Chimes at Midnight. That’s the title of Orson Welles’s cinema collage (1966), which makes Falstaff the central character. Welles thought that Falstaff was Shakespeare’s “greatest creation:” a big man, a blusterer, a wordsmith. He’s bold, too; reckless enough to play-act with a prince in the political context provided by early 15th-century England. Murder brought Henry IV to the throne, and Falstaff grooms Prince Hal for kingship. Falstaff is also a hale fellow well met, the leader of disreputables who make merry in the Boar’s Head Tavern. So who else could play Falstaff but Orson Welles? Welles, by 1966 no small man physically, was also blessed with an ego monstrous enough to bring in, in supporting roles, John Gielgud (as Henry IV), Jeanne Moreau (Doll Tearsheet), and Margaret Rutherford (Mistress Quickly). But who was John Falstaff, really? The easy answer is that Shakespeare’s Falstaff was modeled on Sir John Fastolf (1380-1459), a real knight-landowner—and a soldier of note who was involved in the court of King Henry IV. And the spelling is close enough. The more likely candidate, though, was Sir John Oldcastle. Oldcastle was a knight. He was involved in court politics. Better yet, he was a bosom buddy of Prince Hal. But considered as a model figure for Shakespeare, the real Oldcastle was dangerous. He was a religious radical, a Lollard. He may have supported the use of the common tongue, English, in worship and even in readings from scripture, and certainly Oldcastle believed that bishops had too much power in the medieval church. Still worse, he may have been involved in a Lollard plot to overthrow the monarchy, rid England of its bishops, and simplify its church. So Oldcastle he was tried for heresy and sentenced to death. His old friend, the new king, Henry V, stayed his execution but not for long, and Sir John Oldcastle was hanged (and burned) on December 14, 1417. In Queen Elizabeth’s England, such a model was impolitic at best. So Shakespeare dropped Oldcastle and invented “Falstaff.” Sometimes, it pays to be prudent. ©

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To promote the general welfare.

The Congress shall have Power . . . to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. US Constitution, Article 1, Section 8.

The ‘Founding Fathers’ of the Republic would fall out over a number of issues, but whatever their disagreements Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson were as one on the issue of patent rights. Granting of patents (or copyright) was an essential mark of sovereignty. vital to the nation’s economic progress. Hamilton went so far as to encourage patent piracy, as long as the pirates were American and their booty was foreign. In this context, the infant republic was the China of its day. So it was of more than usual importance that the first US Patent Office burned to ashes on December 15, 1836. And thereby hang several tales. Not least was the tragedy that the first 7000 or so patents, including drawings (some by Robert Fulton of steamboat fame) and working models, went up in smoke. Consternation reigned, and in 1837 anti-monopoly Democrats agreed with establishment Whigs that a new patent office should be housed in real government property (the old patent office was in rented space in Blodgett’s Hotel, which is where the fire started and got most of its fuel). So a new Patent Office was planned and commissioned, in a ‘new’ architectural style, Greek Revival, as befit a democratizing republic. The project took forever (18 years) and was plagued by cost overruns and contract disputes, thus establishing a tradition. But the grand building (modeled on the Parthenon!!) went on granting patents, preserving original papers and drawings, and collecting (and displaying) working models of American ingenuity, pour encourager les autres, for ingenuity meant progress, progress meant prosperity, and both were governmental responsibilities. But we might better say that the Patent Office enshrined Yankee ingenuity. During the Civil War, the national (northern) patent office issued over 20,000 patents, while at the same time the Confederate government (southern) issued only 266. So it was that in his annual messages President Lincoln touted economic progress (population growth, inventions, prosperity) as essential to the Union cause, as important as battlefield successes (and more important than battlefield failures?). The Confederacy, modeled on the distrust of government and devoted to the protection of a peculiar form of private property, was unlikely to win the Civil War. And it could not possibly have won a peace. So it was, after a second patent office fire in 1877, “reconstruction” was swift. Duplicates were preserved elsewhere, and the Patent Office was open for business a week after the fire. After all, the then Patent Commissioner had been a hero at Gettysburg, and you can’t keep a good man down—or a good idea, either. ©

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A family story.

The Kitchens are not soup kitchens, nor are they cooking schools, but simply the depots from which pure milk, more than anything else, is given free to the sick poor. Fanny Garrison Villard, 1903.

But they were soup kitchens. Fanny Garrison Villard was writing in her own journal, Social Service, and justified in her poetic license. She’d been pushing food reform since at least 1881, when a series of articles appeared by a food scientist linking all sorts of epidemic diseases to raw milk, and she was also a financial backer of the New York Diet Kitchen Association. “Quality Charity” might have been a good motto, for the soup (there was soup, cauldrons of it) was prepared by Delmonico’s trainee cooks following a recipe written by Delmonico’s head chef. The poor who ate at the Diet Kitchen ate well. Just so, across town at Charles Fleischmann’s Yeast bakery, the poor ate really good bread. All they had to do was show up at 2AM. There’s a journalistic coincidence here, for Mr. Fleischmann’s son would become the chief backer of The New Yorker, while Fanny Villard’s son was editor and publisher of The Nation. Indeed, Fanny’s husband, Henry Villard (1835-1900) whom she married in 1866, was a journalist who when he became rich bought The Nation (and The New York Post). He became rich as CEO of the Northern Pacific Railroad, but that’s another story. This note is about Fanny Villard, born Helen Frances Garrison on December 16, 1835. There’s a lovely picture of Fanny, just after her marriage, embracing her aging father William Lloyd Garrison, the radical (and indefatigable) abolitionist editor of The Liberator. Like her siblings, Fanny never forgot her father, or his causes. While her husband was transitioning from radical journalist to captain of industry (he became CEO of the Northern Pacific), her reforms were private ones, whether as (amateur) social scientist or a moving spirit behind those soup kitchens. But once Henry died (in 1900) Fanny shifted into high gear to become a very public leader (and bankroller) of several reform movements, most notably women’s suffrage. She led the campaign in New York and put the matter concisely to a state legislative committee, that the word “male” should simply be “struck out” of the US Constitution. In 1914, Fanny picked up and ran with her father’s (and her husband’s) pacifism, campaigning against World War I with the Women’s International League for Peace. She didn’t like racism, either, and in 1919 she figured as one of the cofounders of the NAACP. It was her son who wrote the famous “Lincoln’s Birthday Call” for the organization’s founding conference. But then his name was Oswald Garrison Villard, and he was a chip of the old blocks—his father, his maternal grandfather, and his mother. It’s a family story, a good one to tell at holiday time. ©.

[Stanley]

The Red Tractor

Crops are green. Tractors are red. Early (1940s) advertising slogan for the Farmall ® tractor, International Harvester Corporation (IHC).

Last year was the centenary of the “Farmall” tractor. A new book came out (Farmall Century, $55), but the Farmall is long gone, and so is International Harvester, now owned by an Italian corporation. The ad slogan was a lie, for even then tractors came in several colors, especially the green John Deere. Deere’s leading inventor was Theophilus Brown, and the bitter red-green rivalry was reflected in the nickname given Brown at IHC, “Mr. The Awfullest Brown.” IHC’s chief ideas man was the very equable Bert R. Benjamin, born on a Jasper County, Iowa farm on December 17, 1870. Benjamin was a modest sort, so modest that today there is no entry for him in Wikipedia. But he became a friend of my grandfather because both were graduates of Iowa State College (B. R. Benjamin 1893, R. K. Bliss 1905) and because both pioneered in agricultural extension work. Indeed Benjamin had taught special summer school classes on farming to earn his tuition money. The young man’s general subject was the ‘new science’ of farming, but he drew old farmers in because he was already known, in Jasper County, as a whiz-kid mechanic who could fix your reaper-binder in a minute, better than new. So it was that Bert Benjamin went to ‘the College’ (now Iowa State University) to study mechanical engineering. As a mechanical engineer he prospered, producing 140+ patents for IHC. The most famous had to do with the “Farmall.” Indeed, Benjamin’s tractor was a “farm-all.” It was powerful enough to plow. Its tricycle design enabled it to cultivate and harvest row crops. It needed special add-ons to do all this, and Bert Benjamin had his hand in these new inventions as well. Benjamin’s most important patent was for the Power Take Off (PTO), which would make his little red tractor the farm’s most productive worker. And it was affordable. The combination was unbeatable. It killed the farm horse, and in the upper Midwest (row-crop heaven) it cut demand for agricultural labor, the “hired man” of so many stories. There was a patent dispute with John Deere and The Awfullest Brown, which was settled by IHC paying a kind of royalty fee (and insured that some tractors would be green, just like new-planted crops). The first tractor I knew well was a Farmall F-12, 1936 vintage, which retired the mules on my great uncle Eddie Kerr’s farm. I came along in 1943, and don’t remember the mules (“Jack” and “Jenny” of course) even though they’d been humanely retired to pasture. I remember the F-12 as fondly as one can remember a machine. But its crank starter had a mule’s kick that could break your wrist. I never dared start the thing. I learned to drive on a Ford, a more tractable tractor. ©