BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

David nudged me to ask Bob for his take on the lack of opposition to Trump, something I have been thinking about for a while. I asked Bob the question and we have a response....

There IS an opposition. I’m part of it, of course, and speak only for myself. My faith in small d ‘democracy’ has been rattled before, for instance by Thatcher’s supremacy in the 1980s (which in turn scared Labour into Blairism, which then, in turn, gave Britain a succession of absurd PMs which in turn gave Britain the supreme absurdity of Brexit). But my “democratic” values have been even more threatened by Trump’s elections and his almost complete domination of the Republican Party.

In terms of practical politics, I as an increasingly radical Democrat (in Britain, 1969-1997, I counted myself a Bennite or, more accurately, a Footite) could care less about the Republican Party, but if one believes in democracy one necessarily accepts the necessity of doing deals, striking bargains with the Republicans, just in order to get things done that need doing.

But increasingly one wonders whether there are ANY Republicans left with whom I’d be at all willing to do business with. I think that’s a more important question, really, than “where’s the opposition?”

Meanwhile, the “opposition” (in terms of anti-Trumpist Democrats) does exist. An old (very old) friend in Vermont and, with me, an ex-Iowan--sends pictures of a weekly picket of a local Tesla dealership =. Now nearly a thousand turn up weekly to show their disdain, or hatred, for Leon Mush, the he-who-can’t-be-named, resident Nazi of the Republican administration. I can’t bring myself to pronounce his strange name correctly (Trump had a similar difficulty with Ms. Harris), and regard him as a particularly undesirable type of immigrant.

Meanwhile I send what money I can afford to send to left wing Democrats like AOC. I cheer on the Democratic governors who dare to confront our wannabe dictator. And I send money to liberals running in three upcoming byelections, one (for a state supreme court seat) in Wisconsin and two for “safe” Republican congressional seats in Florida. They are on April Fool’s Day. The two Florida votes are especially significant. They will tell us whether anything like decency still motivates Republican voters.

At 81, I don’t take to the streets any more to show my complete and utter detestation of Trump and his Congressional Republicans. My hatred for them depresses me, for hate is not a good temperament for small d democratic politics. But Trump himself has long since exhausted my vocabulary. He is a man of gargantuan pettiness, lilliputian intellect, and a whole inland sea of shallow hatreds. He stinks with their brine.

He says he’s a deal-maker. But you should never do deals with a casino queen. And as for Leon Mush, the Air Vice-Marshal Goering of today’s Republican Party, I can’t even speak his name—and keep my breakfast down at the same time. Quoting that old revolutionary Oliver, a more damned crew Hell never vomited.

Cheerio. And let’s see what happens in Florida on April Fools Day.

Bob

[Stanley]

I love Leon Mush....

[Tripps]

Wow - we pressed the right button there didn't we ? Just asked for a few words, and got an essay.

"Stanley - please ask Uncle Bob why there is no voice of
opposition (that I see in the British media anyway) to this
idiot's actions. The Republicans have only small majorities in the
House and the Senate. Surely someone has some guts to oppose him -
perhaps someone who wants to put down a marker for a future
leadership bid? Has anyone tried mocking and laughing at him, in
one of the press conferences. I don't think his ego could stand
much of that."

I was more interested in opposition from within the Republicans rather than the Democrats, though I could have made that a bit plainer. In similar circumstances here - I'm sure there would have been Government resignations by now. My theory is that American politicians are less principled than ours, (hard to believe I know ) and are terrified of falling out with President Trump lest bad things happen to them. I'm not talking cups of polonium tea, or window accidents - just cancellation into the political darkness.

Interesting to get more into Professor Bliss's character. Remarkable that there is so much hatred and venom still active in his mind at his age, and he childishly will not write the name Elon Musk. Can't be good for his mental well being. I was (surprisingly) mildly offended by his phrase "gave Britain a succession of absurd PMs" - coming from a carpet bagger.

His categorizing himself as a "Footite" answers a lot of questions though. His wiki is worth a look. "Agent Boot" paid by the USSR. as alleged by Oleg Gordievsky, the double agent, who died only last month. Long to be remembered as the patron saint of 'donkey jackets'. I sat opposite him on the tube Northern Line, once as he went home to Hampstead. The fact that his head never came out of a book and his face was a very vivid shade of bright pink will be my lasting memory of him. Lost the 1983 election in a landslide.

[Stanley]

David, if Bob's childish then so am I. Leon Mush is brilliant.

THE FOOL

Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise. The Fool. Act 1, Scene 5, in William Shakespeare’s King Lear (1606).

It’s April 1, a good day to celebrate the wisest fool in all of English drama, King Lear’s court jester, known to us only as “The Fool.” Of course there are comparators, and not only in Shakespeare. It’s forever been known that tragedies need comic relief. But Lear is such a blood-curdling tragedy! I first saw it at my parents’ insistence, on Omnibus. All we had was a Magnavox, a primitive B&W TV, and yet Lear sucked me right into the 15” screen. Lear is King, magnified power, and Power must needs be feared. Yet like any father, he wants his offspring to love him, even to sing his praises. Daughters Goneril and Regan do as bidden. But Cordelia loves Lear so truly that she cannot even speak, let alone sing. And she ends up hanged in a prison cell, a dungeon. After that awful injustice, Gloucester’s eyes are gouged out in an utterly horrible scene that begins with Regan wanting him hanged but Goneril going one better by having his eyes “plucked”, an expression packed with cruel irony. All Lear can now do is howl, bewailing the loss of his one true heart—and his own moral blindness. I saw no comic relief in Lear when I was 10 years old, and I still don’t. But what The Fool does is more important. He’s a jester, after all, so he must take care. In early modern England it was treason even to contemplate the death of the monarch, and that’s still observed today in the odd way a royal death is announced. “The King is dead. Long live the King!” So The Fool uses wit to speak truth to Power, and his wit, we begin to realize as the plot unfolds, is as sharp as steel. Does The Fool survive? The short answer to that is that we don’t know. Lear, bereft and broken, laments that “my poor fool is hanged,” but he’s probably referring to Cordelia, for ‘fool’ could also be a term of endearment. All this makes it even more interesting that Lear was first performed at Christmas time, 1606, for King James himself. Did the playwright and the actors (the company was called the King’s Men, and Lear was played by Richard Burbage) think that they, too, were speaking truth to power? If so, I salute them, and hope to see something similar in Washington, perhaps at the Kennedy Center, now made a mere satellite in the White House’s solar system. Maybe Miller’s All My Sons? But it’s likely, in 1606, that the King’s Men thought they would survive. The Fool was, after all, only a jester, and James had brought his own jester with him from Scotland, Archie Armstrong. Perhaps Archie was at the premier? And maybe also Anthony Weldon (1583-1648) was there. He’s the courtier credited with calling King James “the wisest fool in all Christendom.” But I think he waited until James was safely dead. ©

[Stanley]

BABE STRIKES OUT

I don’t know what’s going to happen if they begin to let women into baseball. Of course, they’ll never make good. Why? Because they are too delicate. It would kill them to play baseball every day. ‘Babe’ Ruth, April 2, 1931.

One can draw several conclusions from this quotation. The first, that Mr. George Herman Ruth never attended a childbirth, deals sufficiently with the ‘delicate’ idea. And then one could say that it was playing baseball that killed Babe Ruth. Playing every day in this town and then that, traveling long hours by train between cruddy hotels, all done tribally in the company of youngish males—all that never helped “the Babe” to break those habits that killed him in 1948, aged only 53. Yet by the same token, Babe the man must have had an iron constitution. And he did try to break those bad habits: often. At his orphanage, he’d learned the art of promising reform, and he did the same periodically in his baseball career. But none of this really explains his 1931 outburst about women. Indeed, he liked women, although not for their delicacy. What burned the Babe on April 2, 1931 is that one of those females had just struck him out, in an exhibition game at Chattanooga, against a minor league team called, inevitably, the Lookouts. Two missed swings and then the humiliation of a called third strike. The same girl then struck out ‘Iron Horse’ Lou Gehrig on three puffs. Of course these things don’t just happen. 18-year old girls just do not strike out batting legends, two in a row. The game was to have been played on April 1, April Fool’s day, and some baseball hacks (at the time, another male monopoly) thought the whole thing was staged, a seasonal jape. But not Babe Ruth. Nor did the baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis. He voided the girl’s contract with the Chattanooga Lookouts, a ban that MLB made ‘permanent’ in 1952. The girl in question was Vime Beatrice Mitchell, born in Chattanooga in 1913. Her dad was a doctor who loved baseball, so taught her the game, and then got a neighbor, the future Hall of Famer Dazzy Vance, to teach her how to pitch. Vance was probably no feminist, but the girl (“Jackie” was her nickname) had talent and he taught her how to pitch a ‘drop curve’, a breaking ball that dipped when it came to the plate. Jackie was signed by the Lookouts on March 25, 1931, and a week later, in the first inning, she became a baseball immortal. Her only pitch was her drop curve, but it proved too much for the Babe, for the Iron Horse, and for Commissioner Landis. Landis’s female ban was broken in 1992. Jackie Mitchell, sadly, had died in 1987. But she’d gone on playing ‘exhibition’ baseball until 1937, with a bunch of bearded men who called themselves the House of David. She lived long enough to have the Lookouts do the right thing by inviting her back to throw the first pitch of the season in 1982. No doubt it was a drop curve. ©.

[Tripps]

Posted here for continuity. This Senator must have read my question to Professor Bliss.

"Cometh the hour cometh the man".

Actually I wouldn't have thought his feat was possible - and best not tell him - but I'd have been content with just an hour or so.

25 houir record Congressional speech.

[Stanley]

Thanks for that David, good news for once. 25 Hours is a long time.....

[Stanley]

OLD RIP

The almighty dollar, that great object of universal devotion in our land, seems to have no genuine devotees is these peculiar villages; and unless some of its missionaries penetrate there, and erect banking houses and other pious shrines, there is no knowing how long the inhabitants may remain in their state of contented poverty. Washington Irving, “The Creole Village,” 1837.

Thus Irving is said to have invented the phrase ‘the almighty dollar.” That’s not quite true, but in this charming short story, a ‘steamboat sketch,’ he goes on to contrast the ‘contented poverty’ of an old French village with its boisterous neighbor, an American town which, though spanking new, is obsessed with getting and spending. In the French village, hierarchy reigns. The place is represented by two quite contrasting characters, the village’s grand seigneur, the portly patron of the place, and its resident fixer, a thin peasant type called Compère Martin. The creole inhabitants, colorfully dressed in hand-me-downs, happily accommodates (and admires) them both men for their characters, and their talents. The community is a community, and it will go on dancing a lot, working only a little. “A fiddle is the joy of their heart.” Just downstream, the American town is already brimful of competing doctors, grasping lawyers, rival churches, and two great banks built in the style of Greek temples, and of course with newspapers which carry all these conflicting ambitions into print. But as rich as it is (and it’s becoming richer every day), the American town is “torn to pieces” by religious enthusiasms and political hysterics. Its camp meetings and its elections “would throw the whole country into a paroxysm.” Washington Irving, born in New York City on April 3, 1783, wrote frequently on these themes. He may not have been the first to do so, but he certainly was not the last. Nathaniel Hawthorne wistfully wondered whether the new world could ever produce the magic and mystery so necessary for good literature (or, indeed, any of the finer arts). The United States’ first literary Nobelist, Sinclair Lewis, would make a fortune out of his discovery that Main Street USA was overpopulated with Babbitts and sunk in Babbittry. Historians have chimed in. So it should be pointed out that George Washington Irving (as he was christened by his patriot parents) began life as a merchant, a merchant prince even, and learned his art in England where he’d gone to recover his family’s fortunes. His early writings sold well, poking fun at America’s pretentious newness, and picking pen-names and heroes to suit, such as Jonathan Oldstyle and Rip van Winkle. On the other hand, one of Irving’s most successful works was Astoria. It was financed by one of our first millionaires, John Jacob Astor, and it sold like hot cakes—though perhaps not too well in that old creole village, where progress was not a deity. ©.

[Stanley]

David, I sent Bob mail about Cory Booker's filibuster.... Here's what he said.
It was an actual speech, too. Longer than that old Nazi’s famous filibuster, Thurmond’s attempt to hold up the civil rights act in (I think) 1964. He only lasted 23 hours and had to use the DC phonebook. I like to think of old Strom being out=talked by a black guy from Newark.

[Stanley]

THE KODAK KID

You Press the Button. We Do the Rest. Early (1888) advertising slogan, Kodak Company.

George Eastman coined the slogan when he got his patent for his childishly simple camera, really a vehicle for selling film. Kodak, based in Rochester, NY, was a runaway success. It established a plant in Britain quickly enough that in 1893 Gilbert & Sullivan used the lyric in a song (sung by two bashful maidens, of course) in their penultimate operetta, Utopia Limited: Or, The Flowers of Progress. The title was a prophecy. For, although Eastman was, in the camera and film business, a ruthless competitor, in Rochester, NY, his rapidly growing fortune financed a welfare capitalism that helped keep the city afloat through two ‘great’ depressions (1890s and 1930s) and two world wars. For his own workforce there was profit-sharing, a pensions plan, and workers’ compensation for those injured or ill. For the city he gave millions (billions today). Some of it went to existing institutions, some to new ones: the University of Rochester, the Rochester Philharmonic, a couple of Eastman hospitals, an Eastman theatre. Some donations were anonymous, others still bear his name. Today his reputation is marred by his racism, paternalistic but thorough, but those institutions still enrich the city. But Kodak itself is nearly dead, It emerged from bankruptcy in 2013, slimmed down to emaciation, and a decade later is still making big losses, still way underwater in capital value. And Kodak killed itself. Not like its founder, George Eastman, who (debilitated by pain and age) shot himself in 1932. Rather, in 1973, Kodak hired a very young electrical engineer named Steven Sasson, born in Brooklyn NY on April 4, 1953. Something of a prodigy, Sasson had earned BS and MS degrees at Rensselaer Poly (ironically, another recipient of Eastman largesse) and (aged only 20) was immediately taken on by Kodak. It was an odd hire. Kodak was not much into electronics. Its main fortune was in films. But it was improving its cameras, and they needed internal light meters and other electronic gadgetries to compete in a market now dominated by Asian corporations. Sasson and his small ‘electronics group’ went a little further, and by 1975 had invented the digital camera, one which took the image on an charged plate and turned it into binary gobbledygook. Their model was a bigger than a Brownie, about toaster size, but it worked. And it was patented. Sasson demonstrated it to his Kodak bosses (using a B & W TV to project the image). His bosses said, ‘why would anyone want to take a picture this way when there is nothing wrong with conventional film photography?’ The moral of this story is that arrogance and ignorance are not profitable commodities. Politicians take note. The rest of us can take pictures. ©.

[Stanley]

GRASSHOPPERS

I may finally call attention to the probability that the association of paternal and maternal chromosomes in pairs and their subsequent separation . . . may constitute the physical basis of the Mendelian law of heredity. Walter Sutton, 1902.

Half a century later, Francis Crick and James Watson nailed this rather modest suggestion down by mapping the whole DNA molecule and demonstrating how it could break in half and yet be (almost) perfectly copied into a new organism. Theirs was a huge discovery, but what needs to be pointed out was that it rested on a whole string of tiny discoveries, a century and more of trials and errors, dead ends and re-routings. Of course we tend to think of genetic inheritance in terms of human babies (or in St. Louis right now it’s polar bear cubs. Our magnificent zoo is jammed with bearcub watchers, while the cubs themselves are just cute parts of a genetics project), but it all began in a Bohemian monastery garden with work on sweet peas. Nice, pea blossoms: but not as arresting as polar bears. Gregor Mendel’s ideas about pea inheritance lay fallow for a long time, then were taken up in the USA by experiments on (of all things) fruit flies. That Drosophila work, by Thomas Hunt Morgan, was conducted at Columbia and publicized to the world in 1910. It's now famous. But what I didn’t know was that Morgan was building on work done on grasshoppers by two youngish scientists at a provincial university, Kansas, where in some years there were just way too many grasshoppers. The humans in this story were both farm boys, Walter Sutton and Clarence McClung. Oddly they were born on the same date, April 5, but seven years (1877 and 1870, respectively) and three thousand miles apart (New York and California, respectively). Fate brought them together in the middle (Lawrence, Kansas) in the 1890s, whereupon they published, separately, in 1902 and 1901 (respectively). Their startling conclusion(s), nicely summarized in Sutton’s quote, above, started us down the road to a big discovery which, in turn, opened the way to even bigger ones about molecules, cells, and living organisms like you and me. Sadly, Sutton died young (at 46, of appendicitis), after having worked with Morgan at Columbia. McClung (who started off in pharmacy) went on to a distinguished career at Penn, where he continued to work on inheritance with a sideline on Cretaceous fishes. So science works in funny little ways and in its remote places, and it takes time, and it takes thought, and it takes money, and it studies things like sweet peas, fruit flies, fossil fish, and grasshoppers. And then a wildly rich stockbroker (one who, by the way, believes in the rule of inheritance, and acts faithfully on it) takes a chainsaw to the whole edifice because it costs too much money and studies silly subjects like, for instance, fruit flies. So, who is the fruit fly in this story? ©

[Stanley]

SAFETY FIRST.

When you design it, think how you would feel if you had to fly it. Safety first!! Donald Douglas.

The plane that made Douglas famous, the DC-3, did exude safety. One climbed up the central aisle to get to one’s seat, but as the plane took off it leveled up, and everyone relaxed. I don’t remember my first DC-3 flight, from Amarillo TX to Kansas City MO in the spring of 1944, for I was not yet a year old. Later I was told about how my mother, an emotional woman, had bumped a General off the flight so that she and her little boy could get back home to Iowa. That plane itself could not have been more than eight years old, for the first production orders had been filled in 1936. It fulfilled the dream of viable transcontinental flights, a feat it managed (with three stops) in 18 hours westwards, 15 eastwards. Even at 8,500 feet, prevailing winds made a difference. The DC-3 was designed for civilian service, and sold like hotcakes. KLM bought 23 of them to fly (a little like relay runners) its ‘imperial’ route from Amsterdam to Batavia, and by 1939 some 90% of the world’s commercial flight miles were flown by DC-3s: an astonishing statistic. The man who accomplished all this, designing the plane and then expanding the production lines, was Donald Wills Douglas, born on April 6, 1892, in Brooklyn, NY, where the fastest mode of travel was underground. But when the Wright brothers proved it possible, Douglas was smitten with the idea of flight. In his teens he badgered his parents into taking him to air shows. In 1909 he entered the Naval Academy, thinking that would be a good place to begin. He didn’t do well there, perhaps because he spent too much time making model airplanes. He transferred to MIT, and in 1914 was the first to graduate with an actual degree in “aeronautical engineering.” From there it was a long series of steps, working for other pioneers like Curtiss and Martin, sometimes for the War Department, sometimes on his own. By 1921 he was CEO of his own company, at work (with 68 employees) on a transcontinental airliner he called, dreamily, Cloudster. DC 1 & 2 followed, and then came the DC-3. It had speed, strength, and safety. To coin a phrase, it took off. Civilian production stopped in 1943, so my first plane was already a museum piece. But military versions were produced in their thousands (in the US as the C-47 transport), and there are still about 150 of them making regular flights. In the 1960s I made several DC-3 flights, planes that felt a lot safer than the Douglas DC-8s, jetliners that flew too high for comfort and seemed to have no moving parts. On one DC-3 flight (Ozark: Chicago to Des Moines, May 1962) I noticed that the starboard engine was pouring oil. I called the stewardess, who said, reassuringly, “they’ll fix it when we land.” We landed, and I suppose they did. ©

[Stanley]

RESISTANCE

Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands on the tyrant . . . but simply that you support him no longer. Etienne de La Boétie, 1548.

Thus, way before Gandhi and Martin Luther King, La Boétie argued that passive resistance would turn back absolute power. Or perhaps passive non-resistance. Simply withdraw support, will yourself to be free, and all the edifices of tyranny will crumble to dust. It’s not entirely clear where a young French nobleman picked up such dangerous notions, but La Boétie did attend the Collège de Guyenne with the greatest skeptic of his era, Michel de Montaigne, and after La Boétie’s untimely death (aged only 33) Montaigne made his friend into one of the great Renaissance heroes. But La Boétie did circulate his manuscript call to liberty anonymously, and he did not die at some revolutionary barricade. Over a century later, another young aristocrat attended the Collège de Guyenne and drew a different lesson about tyranny. He was Jacques Fontaine, born in the Charente on April 7, 1658. He was connected to the minor nobility through his mother, the second wife of a Huguenot (Protestant) minister. His parents were comfortable enough to send him to the Collège de Guyenne, where he undoubtedly read Etienne de La Boétie’s Discours de la Servitude Voluntaire. French Huguenots had made it into an almost sacred text, for it offered a way to deal with their dicey situation under the Edict of Nantes (1598) as a minority in a Catholic monarchy. But under Louis XIV, the ‘sun king,’ passive resistance became impossible. Louis had too much power. Like most tyrants, he wanted more, and one route to greater power was to make France ever more Catholic. So even in prison young Jacques Fontaine moved beyond passive resistance. He organized prayer groups. He delivered sermons. Once released, he gained a pardon from the regional Parlement, but then kept to his calling. Once the tyrant Louis, by his own will and grace, in 1685, revoked the Edict of Nantes, even that was impossible, and so Jacques Fontaine joined the flood of Huguenot refugees, people who renounced France with their feet. Unable to conform to England’s established church, he ministered to dissenting congregations in London, Taunton, even in Ireland. He also, in a good, Huguenot way, engaged in the production and sale of fine cloths. But he could never be satisfied with merely passive resistance. As a feted guest, Voltaire delighted in English “toleration.” In contrast, James Fontaine waded into controversy. Having seen tyranny in action in France, Fontaine found it impossible to maintain passivity in the face of Britain’s limited toleration. Forced from his Irish pulpit (at the ‘French Church,’ in Cork) he withdrew from battle to teach school. And one wonders, did he make La Boétie required reading? ©.

[Stanley]

WYCHERLEY

Women are like soldiers made constant and loyal by good pay, rather than by oaths and covenants. Therefore I’d advise my friends to keep rather than to marry. Mr. Horner, in William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675).

Wycherley’s play was considered lewd even in the lax climate of England’s Restoration court, itself a theatre where the ‘merry monarch’, Charles II, played the role of England’s most gracious stud. The supporting cast included the king’s mistresses, but also a brigade of court wits who sought to emulate their king in bed or by writing ribald verse. It was the way of his world, and The Country Wife was popular. Later it became embarrassing. David Garrick produced a bowdlerized version in 1766, entitled The Country Girl, but he had to work from an old copy, because The Country Wife was long out of print. The text (and the play itself) would not see the light of day until the 1920s when flapper girls and their dashing beaus could laugh, knowingly, at the play’s double entendres and cruder puns (including the one in the title itself). But in 1675 such rough stuff played well. And for those attendees ‘in the know’, it was especially thrilling because the playwright, William Wycherley, was even then bedding down with the king’s former mistress, Barbara Villiers. She was cousin to the Duke of Buckingham, and while still in Charles II’s good graces created Countess Castlemaine in her own right. Oh! The scandal! William Wycherley was baptized on April 8, 1641, the elder son of a minor gentry family. He was exceptionally well educated, at home, in France at Oxford and at the Inns of Court, but never took a degree or took up the law. Early in the Restoration he became known as a wit and, better yet, a brave one. Besides attending to important diplomatic missions, he served in the second and third Dutch Wars, at sea and then on land in the Duke of Buckingham’s regiment. While in France he’d picked up on the plays so loved by Louis XIV and his royal court, and his Francophilia made Wycherley more acceptable to Charles II, and perhaps readier to push against the loose boundaries of ‘Restoration Comedy.’ Besides bawdy, his plays were funny, full of characters with suspect names (Mr. Horner, Mrs. Pinchwife, Lady Fidget, Mrs. Rutter, and Old Lady Squeamish, for instance), which made it easier to get the im-moral of the plot. In another of his plays, Wycherley even made daring reference to his affair with Lady Castlemaine. Later, he married an actual countess (not Castlemaine), a widow, but “for her estate” and not for love. She died in 1685, leaving a disappointed widower to a long lifetime of defaulted debts, suits at law and a hint of senility. Moralists may say he deserved this fate. For Wycherley the lesson was simpler. “Fortune leaves those in their Age who were her Favourites in their youth,” ©.

[Stanley]

CONCERT!

In this great auditorium under the sky, all of us are free. When God gave us this wonderful outdoors, and the sun, the moon, and the stars, He made no distinction of race or creed or color. Harold Ickes.

Thus Interior Secretary Harold Ickes began introducing Miss Marian Anderson’s outdoor concert on April 9, 1939. Overflowing every public space between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, a huge crowd waited to hear her rich contralto. Probably they knew it well, for she’d been broadcast on national radio. She was already famous. Or, you might put it, she was finally famous. She was 42 years old. Born in 1897, she’d had a rough childhood. Once she found her voice, she had a hard time getting it trained, and then a harder time getting accepted as a singer of the classics. She found her feet in Europe, singing a varied repertoire in German and Italian opera, Finnish folk songs, Scots ballads—and “slave” spirituals. For Marian Anderson was black, and it was because she was black that in the Spring of 1939 she was singing outside in her nation’s capital. Anderson didn’t want to sing outside. She’d rarely done so, and never in such a huge non-arena as the capitol mall. But Washington DC was a racially segregated city, and the only appropriate indoor spaces were closed to her. The obvious one was owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR). They called the place “Constitution Hall,” ironically enough. The other was Central High School, another “whites only” institution. The DAR’s refusal sparked angry reactions. Eleanor Roosevelt forsook her revolutionary ancestors and resigned her membership, and way out n Grundy Center, Iowa, my grandmother—a rock-girdled Republican—did the same. But Eleanor had First-Lady experience of pulling strings behind the scenes. Harold Ickes, a lifelong supporter of black civil rights, was happy to oblige, and as Interior Secretary he was the landlord of the National Mall. Eureka!! It was a huge success, in all sorts of ways. The crowd was transported by Anderson’s voice and by their own realization that they were, in themselves, by their massive presence, a manifestation of the promise of racial integration. Harold Ickes denied himself the opportunity to note that April 9, 1939, was also the anniversary of the enslavers’ surrender at Appomattox Courthouse, on April 9, 1865. That’s a pity, because looking further down the mall you can see Robert E. Lee’s shinywhite mansion at Arlington, itself the produce of generations of enslaved labor. If you want to read more about this, visit the Kennedy Center website, where you can hear Mr. Ickes’ speech and, better yet, Miss Anderson’s singing. Unless of course the website has been taken down by the Kennedy Center’s new board president, who has the very bad habit of erasing history when it hurts his feelings. ©.

[Stanley]

SWEET GRAPES

The grapes grow sweet and heavy on the vines, but they will have to wait while we reach out first for our freedom. The time is ripe for our liberation. Dolores Huerta, 1969.

Dolores Huerta, born the daughter of farm workers on April 10, 1930, knew whereof she spoke. But in 1969, she had powerful enemies. She’d already fought the employers, on several battlefields (New Mexico, her birthplace, and California, her home). Beaten senseless by San Francisco police—an incident recorded on film!!—she’d used her wounds (including a ruptured spleen) to best the city’s mayor. In 1968 she forced California’s governor, Ronald Reagan, to talk turkey (and grapes) with her in closed door session. Then Dolores, with a speech and a news conference, made it into a public relations triumph. But in 1969 she faced a more powerful enemy, America’s “I am not a crook” president, who was breaking her national grape boycott by buying grapes by the ton and putting them in mess kits for the boys fighting in Viet Nam. No slouch in harvesting words, in English, Dolores acidly commented that “the grapes of wrath are being converted into the grapes of war by the world’s richest government.” And Nixon’s aim was to humiliate and defeat America’s poorest people, the migrant workers of the great southwest, most of whom, Dolores delighted in pointing out, were migrants, native born, and thus, by the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, citizens. Just like Dolores Huerta. Her baptismal name signifies sorrows or pains, and her life gave her plenty of both. But she shed them like water off a pata’s back. The only time I heard Dolores speak in public was at my daughter’s college graduation, in 2000, when Dolores was 70 (and I a mere 57). She’d lost none of her fire, nor any of her rhetorical brilliance. Grinnell recognized this service with a DHL degree: perfect, for a woman who is indeed a Doctor of Humane Letters. She still is. After her Grinnell holiday she continued campaigning for her fellow campesinos and campesinas but extended her remit to include women’s rights (generally but especially their rights to make decisions about their bodies), for gay people and transgender people (she says they are people, after all), and always for the poorest folk in the USA, a country where if you want to be free and brave it really helps to have good food, secure lodging, a warm bed and an earned income that affords all three—for you and for your little ones. In 2008 Dolores was going to support Bernie Sanders, but his supporters wanted her to speak only in English, so she switched to Hillary. But then she gave Barack Obama his best line, “Yes, We Can!!” In Spanish, that’s “Sí, se pueda,” and Dolores had been using it for years on picket lines and in the streets. Given a life so well lived, one can only say Feliz cumpleaños, Dolores Huerta!! And please take a few more, on the house. ©

[Stanley]

PUBLIC HEALTH

You have to be honest with people. You have to have respect for yourself. If you see something that is not right, you must do something about it. Annie Dodge Wauneka.

So reads Annie Wauneka’s prescription for leadership. In her long lifetime, she filled out many prescriptions, but usually for medicines. Her people, the Navajo, had great need for good prescriptions, for illnesses stalked their lands, the great ‘reservation’ that still takes up most of northeastern Arizona and much of the adjoining states of Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. So she started out in a usual way for a young woman, as a nurse, and a good one. But whatever Navajo tradition says about gender roles, it was a ‘first’ for a woman to be elected to the Tribal Council, and so she was, in a 1951 contest that was made more unusual because her opponent in that election was her husband, George Wauneka. Her reasoning was simple enough. She was, she said, the better candidate for the job. The voters agreed, and kept on agreeing for another 30 years. Once on the Council, she kept at her calling, not only treating individuals for what ailed them but diagnosing the reservation’s endemic poverty as its chief disease vector. Her lifelong labors won her fame. On her retirement, then then Tribal President called her the “Legendary Mother” of the Navajo. So said the President of the Navajo nation. In this he was only echoing the words of Lyndon Johnson when, late in the troubled year of 1963, he bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom upon Annie Wauneka. She was then only 53, having been born on April 11, 1910. Since her father, Henry Chee Dodge, was then tribal president, perhaps leadership came naturally to her. More likely, her elevation came from her nursing. She survived the great flu epidemic of 1918 and, aged only 8, helped her school nurses with basic infirmary tasks. She learned more about medicine in school, and then (much later) at the University of Arizona, and all along the way recognized the necessity of blending her ‘new’ medical science with traditional Navajo treatments. And why not? After all, her father, despite his great wealth, had seen to it that she would be born in a traditional hogan, so the mixing came easier to her and, doubtless, to her patients. Along the way, unavoidably, she saw that medicines alone (traditional or modern) could not rid the Navajo of their illnesses. So along with her medicines, Annie Wauneka diagnosed the underlying social illnesses that plagued Navajo Nation. It’s a lesson the rest of us should learn from our recent bout with Covid and our continuing struggles with Fentanyl, in which death and survival have (like taxation) shown a social incidence. We have a public health problem. We can learn much about it from the prescriptions of Annie Dodge Wauneka, the Legendary Mother of the Navajo. ©

[Stanley]

AMBULANCE MAN

Medicine represents an imposition of human values on a random universe, an assertion that compassion, reason and decency constitute a higher ethic than chance. Peter Safar.

From its start in Vienna, on April 12, 1924, Peter Safar’s life was full of chances, a lot of them life-threatening. First of all, Vienna between the wars was not a good place to grow up Jewish. It got worse in the 1930s, with the rise of a home-grown Nazi movement and then the Anschluss, the absorption of Austria into the greater Reich of Adolf Hitler. Peter could hardly expect to escape. The dice were loaded against him. And he was expelled from medical school; he did spend some time in a labor camp; but he did beat the odds. The stories of his escapes are the stuff of legend and suggest that amongst his survival arts was a genius at lying, or at the very least at daring pretense. At any rate, Peter Safar saved his life. And, having done so, he devoted most of the rest of his time to saving the lives of others. Of course we all die, sooner or later, but “later” was Safar’s route to imposing his human values on our random universe. First he went back to medical school, at Vienna and then Yale and the University of Pennsylvania. He trained in surgery and anesthesiology. It was in his research in the latter that he staked his claim to fame. Going under for surgery is a kind of ‘little death,’ and Safar was fascinated by those tiny, fleeting moments. Extending them became his reason for being. He’s best known for inventing (or, he said, re-inventing) mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Given that he had to do this against considerable opposition, that ought to be sufficient. And Safar was nominated, three times, for the Nobel in medicine and physiology. But what strikes me about Safar’s contribution to lengthening our lives is his creation of Pittsburgh’s Freedom House Ambulance Service. Noticing that the DOA (‘Dead On Arrival’) statistics for emergency patients from the city’s Hill District—Pittsburgh’s black ghetto—were terrifying, defying any other explanation than institutional racism, Safar went to work, recruited volunteers (almost all were young men from The Hill), trained them up in emergency medicine, put them in borrowed ambulances. They went to work as our nation’s first public paramedics. In their first year on duty (it was 1967) they answered 15 EM calls each day, and their DOA was 1.9%. In a reasonable universe that should be rewarded, and indeed Freedom House crews continued to serve The Hill for a decade. But when the city organized its own ambulance service, in the late 1970s, the Freedom House crews were disbanded, and few if any of them were rehired. But the universe has been reasonable enough that Freedom House Ambulance Service techniques have been widely copied. We are, all of us, luckier for that. And good luck is a leveler. ©

[Stanley]

HEANEY

Human beings suffer,

they torture one another,

they get hurt and get hard.

No poem or play or song

can fully right a wrong

inflicted or endured. Seamus Heaney. 1991.

That’s the opening stanza of a short poem, “Doubletake”, which itself opens Heaney’s The Cure at Troy. That book of poetry is itself an adaptation of the ancient Greek play Philoctetes, by Sophocles. It might be taken to sum up Heaney’s poetic career and his genius. Except that the “song . . . wrong” rhyme is a little too obvious. Heaney didn’t reject rhyme, far from it, but what strikes one about Heaney’s rhyming is its subtlety. More typical here are the sounding rhymes, “suffer . . . another”, “hurt . . . hard,” “right . . . wrong”, Also showing Heaney’s maturation as an artist rather than a rhymester, his play on Philoctetes is not a translation but an ‘adaptation.’ Over a long career he made himself into a linguist, working with classical Greek, Latin, the Norse legends, Irish (Gaelic) bardic tales. Bringing them to life (in modern English, generally) required something more than translation. “Transformation” might suffice, but Heaney’s own “adaptation” is humbler and better. The end results look very good on the page, but they sound so very well when read by the poet. His maturing voice was itself an adaptation. Born at Mossbawn farm in County Londonderry on April 13, 1939, Seamus Heaney grew up Irish Catholic in Protestant Ulster. This could have been a transformative experience, but for Heaney never was. He lived all his life in border country. Heaney played Gaelic football in his teens, a bruising, chaotic sport for the uninitiate, but poetry in motion if you know what’s going on. Meanwhile, in schoolrooms, Heaney excelled, and for his bachelor’s degree he went on to Queens in Belfast, historically a very Protestant place. There the farm boy became a poet, winning first-class honours in English Language and Literature, but already writing modern poetry about peat bogs and the diamonds to be found therein by those who wield “squat pens” rather than a farmer’s spade. Some of his early poetry made waves, but some critics were enough put off by its simplicity to call it superficial. Then came Seaney the linguist. His first adaptation was of the old Gaelic Buile Suibhne (1984). His most famous was of the Old English Beowulf, which came out as “A New Verse Translation” in 1999. Not everyone liked it, but one fellow versifier, then England’s poet laureate, said that Heaney had “made a masterpiece out of a masterpiece.” And that’s not really “translation.” Throughout, Heaney tried, poetically, to disprove the notion that no song could right a wrong. The Cure at Troy was itself inspired by the release of Nelson Mandela in South Africa and the hope that Mandela could, magically, right the wrongs of apartheid. It was this accommodating temper of his poetry that won him the Nobel Prize in 1995 and, by the way, made him the Irish poet most quoted by American politicians, especially liberal Democrats. But in Heaney’s own mind he remained that Irish farm boy, spading peat, spurning the turf.

[Stanley]

THERAPY

Can you lend me a thousand pounds?

Yes. Cable exchange between Elizabeth Casson and her brother Lewis, 1929.

It’s not like Elizabeth Casson was asking for housekeeping money. At today’s values, she was asking for about £55,000. Nor was brother Lewis rolling in dough. He and his wife Sybil Thorndike were just getting underway in their stage careers and using the proceeds to found a touring company. Anyway, Lewis coughed up. He couldn’t do otherwise. The family at large, their in-laws and cousins were into banking, solidly comfortable if not stinking rich, and they believed that if you were a Casson you did something useful with your life. Their father Thomas had proved a flop at banking, so he was set up as an organ builder and did pretty well at it. Lewis and Eizabeth’s other brother were war heroes, and the whole family tree is boughed down with judges, professors, actors, and soldiers. You can see the Casson tree summarized on the website of the Elizabeth Casson Trust, still alive and doing good works in Britain 70 years after Elizabeth’s death in 1954. So Lewis’s £1000 still bears fruit. Just goes to show what money can do when it’s empowered to do good works. In this case the power came from Elizabeth Casson’s life as a pioneer in occupational therapy. Born in Wales on April 14, 1881, she moved to London when her father took up pipe organs. She was well-schooled, started off as a secretary, then did some volunteer war work. Wanting to do more, Elizabeth then became the first woman to earn a medical degree from the University of Bristol. Once again, family connections helped. Her uncle Isambard Casson, an eminent physician himself, was at the time Bristol’s vice-chancellor. But she had already discovered her life calling. As a volunteer at a London sanatorium she’d seen that even severely disabled patients were happier when engaged in creative activity. There, it was an occasional thing (patients were making Christmas decorations). Elizabeth Casson determined to make it institutional. So she got Lewis’s £1000 and set up Dorset House, Bristol, as a residential facility for women with ‘mental disorders.’ She kept it going, too, with her own money and further contributions, as a public non-profit. There’s no historical rule that good ideas must succeed, but in this case Elizabeth’s talents and the injuries and mental anguishes of another World War worked together to make occupational therapy into an industry. Never married, she became something of a patriarch among the Casson family and a force of nature in her various institutional roles. And yet as a therapist she could, and did, put on different faces. In a production of Pride and Prejudice put on by Dorset House patients in 1934, she played the role of Mr. Collins. It must have had a liberating effect. ©.

[Stanley]

PROGRESS

The red stone of the mountains of Verona is found with shells all intermingled, which have become part of the stone . . . and if you should say that these shells have been and still constantly are being created in such places as these by the nature of the locality or by the potency of heaven . . . such an opinion cannot exist in brains possessed of any extensive powers of reasoning because the years of their growth are numbered upon the outer coverings of their shells; and both small and large ones may be seen; and these would not have grown without feeding, or fed without movement, and here embedded in rock they would not have been able to move . . . Leonardo da Vinci.

Apologies for the length of the quotation, but this one is remarkable in many ways, not least in that it’s an almost perfect illustration of the difference between an opinion and an argument. Leonardo found sea shells high in the Apennines. Had he simply said, ‘Aha! The sea must have been here’, that might have been an opinion about a coincidence. But he knew something about shelled creatures, how they lived, moved, fed, and grew. Joining evidence with knowledge, Leonardo concluded that “above the plains of Italy where flocks of birds are flying today, fishes were once moving in large shoals.” In these stones Leonardo perceived not a ‘wonder,’ but a once living natural community. He didn’t get everything right, of course. It was ‘only’ 1480 and he wasn’t yet 30. And he was engaged in other work, designing a “great horse” sculpture for the Duke of Milan. So, typically, he was studying horses, their anatomy, their mechanics, how they walked, galloped and reared, and how he might get all that into a great statue, a monster horse cast in 70 tons of bronze and standing about 26 feet high. That was a huge technical challenge which itself required experiment. So Leonardo wrote a treatise about Weight while sketching horses in various poses, different moments of motion. The sketches are beautiful. But war intervened. The bronze was cast into cannon, and Leonardo continued to live his monumental life in art, philosophy, science, and mathematics. Not bad going for the illegitimate son of a legal notary. Leonardo da Vinci was born near Florence on April 15, 1452. Not very propitious, and how he became the genius of his age (or of the ages) is shrouded in legend. He was taken in by his paternal grandfather, placed out to an artist-sculptor, and at 20 qualified for guild membership. Soon he sold his talents to the Duke of Milan, an inheritor of the Sforza dynasty. Da Vinci did much more, of course. But one measure of his genius is that the great horse itself was not completed until 1999. Working from da Vinci’s sketches and musings, and at a cost of millions, something very like it was produced in Allentown, Pennsylvania. One copy graces modern Milan. The other stands magnificently in Grand Rapids, Michigan. And the world we live in is dominated by brains possessed of some other power than that of reasoning. ©

[Stanley]

SCIENCE

The knowledge of Natural-History, being Observation of Matters of Fact, is more certain than most others, and less subject to Mistakes than are Reasonings, Hypotheses, and Deductions . . . Hans Sloane, 1707.

As is well known, Hans Sloane made himself into an indefatigable observer of ‘matters of fact,’ and a collector of them. Over the course of a long lifetime (93 years) he collected some 90,000 artifacts, most of them specimen products of natural history. Many he’d collected himself, others by purchase from other collectors. And then Sloane willed them to the nation, on condition that the nation cough up £20,000 for his heirs. It was a colossal sum (£4 million today) but the collection was worth a good deal more. In 1753 Parliament accepted the gift, met the condition, and thus birthed the British Museum. It was not bad going for Hans Sloane, born in distant Ulster, on April 16, 1660, and in modest circumstances. So his is a personal success story. It’s also a story of how some members of the British elite became enamored of science. Observation and experiment—and collecting—promised better ways of getting at agreed truths. Better than the religious enthusiasms that had plunged the whole of Britain, and Ireland, into the bloodletting of the Civil Wars. This fond hope (and some foundational experiments) led to the formation of the Royal Society. And once he got to London Hans Sloane broke into this charmed circle by collecting for, among others, Robert Boyle, an aristocrat and pioneer physicist. In 1685 this got Sloane—then aged only 25—into the Royal Society, of which, in 1727, he became president. But not everyone admired him. Sir Isaac Newton (whose death led to Sloane’s election) thought Sloane a mere amateur and indeed “a damned nuisance.” Science was more than artifact-collecting, as Newton himself had shown. To make “science” out of mere “knowledge” (these words were interchangeable in the 17th century) you had to engage in reasoning, formulate hypotheses, and arrive at deductions. In his observations of West Indian plantations, for instance, Sloane viewed human slavery as a mere fact. Thus he described the punishments meted out to lazy or rebellious slaves as observations, mere factoids, when “in fact” they were utterly diabolical, exquisitely painful, and clearly designed to terrorize the plantation’s working population. Indeed, much of Sloane’s wealth arose from his connections with the British sugar plantations, including marriage. All this recently led the British Museum to repurpose its Sloane exhibits. In 2020, his bust was moved away from the entrance and placed in a glass case along with evidences of his connections with the slave system. Thus museum visitors were encouraged to observe facts and consider hypotheses, maybe even come to a couple of deductions. That, I think, was progress. ©

[Stanley]

BUREAUCRAT!!

Whoever says he has the solution to our problems speaks too soon. Dorothy Fosdick, 1955.

This is timely advice for Americans today, even though Dr. Fosdick issued it 70 years ago. It was one of the conceptual headings of her book Common Sense and World Affairs. The book’s title suggests some debt to the revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas Paine, whose original Common Sense (1776) libeled King George III (and got away with it). But Fosdick always said that her greatest debt was to the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and his idea of ‘Christian realism.’ Dorothy Fosdick was born on April 17, 1913, when her father, Harry Emerson Fosdick, was an evangelical preacher of national reputation. He would soon be called to the prestigious pastorate of the Riverside Church in New York, where he preached and authored books which staked out a liberal world view. The family lived on the campus of Union Theological Seminary, where daughter Dorothy learned the harder-nosed liberalism of Niebuhr, a professor at Union. She took that perspective to Smith College, where she majored in Sociology, then to Columbia and a PhD in Public Law. She was back at Smith, teaching sociology, when in 1942 she was recruited by the US State Department as the first (and for some time the only) woman in its onboard think tank, the Policy Planning Committee. There she quickly became influential. In the midst of a World War, she argued for the development of a post-war system based on collective security and a world body with some enforcement powers. So she was among the first to see the wartime ally, Soviet Russia, as a threat, one made acute by the devastation of most of Europe. And so it was that she became a principal advisor to President Harry Truman and one of the main architects of the Marshall Plan, named (of course) after her boss, the then Secretary of State George Marshall. Her contributions are still being sorted out, but it is known that Fosdick shuttled between ‘foggy bottom’ and the White House and several international conferences that hammered out the shape of the postwar world and, until now, assured American dominance in diplomacy and trade. Her liberal Christian realism made her into a devoted Cold Warrior, and after the Republicans took over the White House and State Department, she served out her time as counselor to Senator Henry Jackson (D, Washington). In my lectures on foreign policy, I used to call him the “Senator from Boeing.” So I would have a few bones to pick with Dorothy Fosdick, too. I would, nevertheless, recommend her common sense and its ethical moorings to our current administration. But in today’s Washington she would be regarded as a mere bureaucrat or, even worse, a DEI hire. ©

[Stanley]

SUPERMAN

It’s not entirely your fault that you’re delinquent—it’s these slums—your poor living conditions—if there was only some way I could remedy it! Superman, in Issue #8 of Action Comics, January 1939.

Such a sentiment puts paid to any notion that the “Superman” hero created by Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel was derived from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Übermensch. That’s “superman” in German, but Shuster and Siegel were not much up on such dark, European thinking. They’d grown up in Cleveland, met at Glenville High School, and at the start of the Great Depression they came to share a preference for kinder, warmer solutions to the human dilemma. They began working it out while still in high school, and finally came up with their all-American “Superman,” who burst on the scene on April 18, 1938, in issue #1 of Action Comics. It sold, I think, for 10¢. Today, if you can get your hands on a clean copy of that original, you could sell it for $4 million. Thus inflated, Superman is still with us. He’s become an American Icon, thanks to radio, TV, and latterly spectacular cinema. And comics of course. In the process he’s become more like Nietzsche’s “overman” and, to me, much less lovable. In Superman comics today, ‘delinquents’ have become ‘punks’ and can now be ‘rubbed out’ or, perhaps, kidnapped and sent to El Salvador. But Shuster’s and Siegel’s original could never kill. He could only make things better. And that was enough. In that first issue he spent a good deal of his time protecting Lois Lane from a ballroom masher and saving a woman from her wife-beater husband. He was a reformer-hero, and superhuman though he was he could only use his powers for improvement. In that Superman shared some of the hidden virtues of his plain-clothed alter ego, the mild mannered and excessively nice Clark Kent. Kent was OK but he needed to step into a closet or a phone booth, rip off his civvies, and emerge empowered to do right, but only in the right way. Having long ago done a study of working-class fiction (short stories) published in the 1930s by two Midwestern socialist newspapers, I can tell you that the Shuster-Siegel “Superman” was a child of his time. Their Clark Kent was drawn from Buster Keaton (in his long-suffering persona, pre-slapstick), while their avenging angel Superman was really a outlandishly muscled Douglas Fairbanks gussied up in tights and a cape. And for these two kids from Cleveland, that New Deal hero was enough. Throughout the depression years, they worked up the whole legend, the lost planet, the devoted parents, the kryptonite, the little orphan sheltered by a kindly old couple and taught to use his strange powers only for good ends. Superman may have been born on April 18, 1938, but his was a very long (and very American) gestation. I don’t think he’s improved with age. ©

[Stanley]

LADY LIBERTY

I am not sorry to applaud duty before it is recommended by success. When success shall have come, men eager to celebrate it will not be wanting, and I shall leave to them the care of demonstrating then that the North has been in the right, that it has saved the United States. Mary Louise Booth, March 19, 1861.

Brave words! Lincoln had been president for only a fortnight. To get to Washington, he’d sneaked through Baltimore with only one bodyguard. Once installed he puzzled what to do to preserve the union. Meanwhile, in the seceding south, enslavers rode high and boastful. But Mary Louise Booth knew that “the cause” would triumph—and that ‘triumph’ would include the extirpation of racial slavery. Her prophecy appeared in the translator’s ‘preface’ of a Frenchman’s book about the young republic, Agénor de Gasparin’s Un grand peuple qui se relève which Booth rendered as The Uprising of a Great People. Charles Scribner, an enthusiastic Unionist, wanted to publish it, but a translation would take too long. Mary Louise translated (and then proofread) the whole thing within a week. Two weeks later it was in print, in American English. It was a sensation. The great anti-slavery Senator Charles Sumner called it “worth a whole phalanx in the cause of human freedom.” And, he might have added, so was Mary Louise Booth herself. She was, after all, only a female. Decades before Nellie Bly and Ida Tarbell, Booth made herself into a professional journalist. Already in the 1850s she’d been reporting for The New York Times, at so much per line. She’d also translated and then published at least four French books, two of them technical manuals (on making watches and sculpting marble), two of fiction. In 1859 Booth published (to wide acclaim) her History of the City of New York. After the war, in 1867, aged 36, she would become the founding editor of Harper’s Bazaar, an early mass-circulation magazine and the arbiter of all things tasteful and intelligent about domestic life. She was indeed a prodigy, and she’d go on editing for Harper’s, reporting for newspapers, and translating (from German as well as French) the better sort of European book. This prodigy, Mary Louise Booth, was born on April 19, 1831, in a tiny, shingle-sided house at the far end of Long Island. Her father was not rich, but he was well educated, and her mother was French Canadian. They read, and so she did too. Lugging big books around the house, the toddler demanded to hear what they said, and well before she’d reached her teens she was reading the very biggest books all by herself. She continued her self-education after her dad moved to Brooklyn to set up that city’s first truly public school. She also learned a craft, dressmaking, and was paid for it, too. But ambition won out, and Mary Louise Booth became the incarnation of the American self-made man. Except, of course, she was a self-made woman. ©.