BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

MRS SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON

I do not want to see the Republican party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny, Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear. Senator Margaret Chase Smith, 1950.

We are spending the weekend at Paulette’s 60th reunion at Grinnell College. Yesterday, the college’s president reminded us of attorney Joseph Welch’s (Grinnell, 1914) dismantling of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s reign of terror. “Sir,” he said to the senator, “you’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last, have you no sense of decency.” Welch’s stirring defense (of a junior lawyer in Welch’s Wall Street firm) is often said to have started McCarthy’s tailspin. A liar from the start (“Tail-Gunner Joe” had claimed to be an Army Air Corps war hero), the Wisconsin senator had made news almost weekly with his charges about commies in high places (and under your bed at home), and his campaign of calumny, fear, ignorance, bigotry, and smear rode high in the senate and over the air waves. A few months later (few but too many) McCarthy was censured by the senate and has since faded into a well-deserved obscurity. I have no idea of Joe Welch’s politics, but he was a farm boy from Iowa, born of immigrant stock, who, after he graduated top of his class at Harvard Law, could claim to be a gentleman, and indeed he spoke as a “gentleman” when he confronted the boorish McCarthy. But in retrospect, 1954 was a little late. For on June 1, 1950, one of McCarthy’s senate colleagues, Margaret Chase Smith (Republican, Maine) had skewered him in a speech from the senate floor. It’s a great speech, especially in its dissection of McCarthy’s tactics, and today, with a boorish president in the White House, it needs to be remembered. Too poor to attend Bowdoin or Bates (Maine’s versions of Grinnell College) she raised herself up by her bootstraps to become personal secretary, then wife, of a Maine congressman, and when he died she stepped into his shoes. She did well enough to be elected Senator, by a massive margin, and then was reelected. She would be a candidate for the presidency in 1964. But in 1950 she was still on the backbenches, a loyal Republican specializing in military and intelligence issues. Her 1950 attack on McCarthy is rightly remembered as a profile in courage and a statement of founding American values (free speech and due process). But it was also a political speech. In it she attacked the Democratic administration of Harry Truman as ‘soft’ on communism at home and abroad, and she cited proven cases as sufficient smoke to suggest that fires were indeed burning. But Joe McCarthy had gone too far for her (and for six of her Republican colleagues, who weighed in on her behalf). But the rest of the senate sat sheeplike for another four years. Against Ms. Smith’s courage the timidity of her senate colleagues is a sobering thought in today’s climate of fear, ignorance, bigotry, and smear. ©

[Stanley]

Nothing received.... I have mailed Bob.

[Stanley]

WOMAN OF STONE

Now, why did they bury those two together? Attr. to Mark Twain.

Twain is alleged to have come up with this witticism on seeing an epitaph “Here lies a lawyer and an honest man.” Perhaps to avoid such posthumous japes, my great grandfather Daniel Kerr left his family monument almost silent: just the surname, ‘Kerr’, and then on the uphill side, sculpted out from grey granite, the star and medal of the Grand Army of the Republic. But nothing lasts forever, and while the deeply-carved ‘Kerr’ is still gloomily clear, the delicate tracery of the GAR medal has begun to wear away. In a belated effort at preservation, I took a picture of it at the end of a family visit. It stands out well in slanting morning sunlight. But old Daniel would have done better to specify that his monument be made of Coade Stone, for when properly concocted and properly fired, Coade Stone is virtually immune to the ravages of time. And etched in Coade Stone is an unusual story of business success, the saga of Mrs. Eleanor Coade, born in Exeter, Devon, on June 3, 1733. She was of dissenting (Presbyterian) stock, both parents coming from long lines of successful traders. But when Eleanor’s father died a bankrupt, she was thrown back on her own resources. Her response to the challenge was ‘Coade Stone,’ and in the end she would leave evidences of it all over Britain, not to mention elsewhere. Whether she invented the stuff is not settled, but when in 1771 her first business partner, one Daniel Pincot, claimed credit, she fired him and set up on her own in London. There she attracted a clientele that included two British monarchs (George III and George IV), prominent aristocrats, and some of the age’s finest architects and designers, including Robert Adam. Much of her stuff was decorative, not structural: mythical or majestic animals, elaborate ‘stone’ medallions, and the like. Many pieces survive, even in Buckingham Palace and George IV’s Brighton Pavilion, and not a few adorn burial monuments. There are three pieces in Lancaster, two at the castle and one on the entrance tower of the Royal Infirmary. Whoever invented it, Coade Stone is a strange mix of ground stone, glass, and Devon clay. It can be very delicately modeled (carved or molded), and it stands the test of time, even against the chemical airs of the industrial revolution. Mrs. Coade (she never married; the “Mrs.” was a courtesy title) put her main business premises in the right place, just opposite the Palace of Westminster, and having gained royal patronage she then sold to all the best people, many of whom were then engaged in the Georgian building boom, new structures or remodelings, and they wanted their decorations to be exact and lasting. Eleanor Coade’s artificial stone filled the bill admirably, and continued to do so until her death, in 1821. ©.

[Stanley]

Sorry, no word about June 2 Anniversary Note.

[Stanley]

Yesterday's note is missing. I have mailed Bob again.

[Stanley]

BENEDICT

The purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences.

This statement is often attributed to the anthropologist Ruth Benedict. But she never wrote it, and certainly not in her Patterns of Culture. That work is still in print, a remarkable achievement for a book published in 1934. When I first read it (in 1963, in Professor William Fontaine’s “Philosophy of the Social Sciences”) it was already old, even ancient in the ‘publish or perish’ world of the American academy. But Fontaine saw it as essential reading for budding social scientists. In several short essays on contrasting cultures, Benedict made it clear that the judgments one might make about different cultural practices must be cloudy, nuanced, difficult, and interesting. There is an arc of human possibilities (unaided, human beings can run but cannot fly). And from this arc, each culture has chosen a sector (or sections). The process is historical and is shaped largely by the natural environment and humans’ inexhaustible cleverness. So (for instance) water has a different function and meaning for the Kwakiutl of the northern Pacific coast and the Hopi of the southwestern desert. And even similar traits, similarly revered or rewarded, can have starkly differing functions. In the modern USA, acquisitiveness has generally benefited the acquisitive among us, and we encourage the acquisitive to accumulate wealth and then pass it on. But in another culture, the function of acquisition is to give it all away, to anyone who shows up for the feast. And if, when the party is over, there is still wealth undistributed, it’s burnt to ashes. Such skepticism about cultural virtues and vices was not new in 1934. See for instance Michel de Montaigne’s essay “Of Cannibals” (circa 1580). What was new in Patterns of Culture was academic rigor and actual on-site observation, whether by Benedict herself or others who made their livings from the new science of anthropology, the ‘study of mankind.’ Ruth Benedict was born Ruth Fulton, in New York, on June 5, 1887. Her parents were progressives who gave her more ambition than direction. Her father’s early death (and, more, her mother’s grief) profoundly affected Ruth. She first found relief in school, then in marrying Stanley Benedict but, more lastingly, in studying anthropology at Barnard (Columbia) with “Papa” Franz Boas. She got her PhD in 1923, took up teaching (at Barnard College) and counted among her first students Margaret Mead, who then became first among equals among those influenced by Benedict’s approach. Anthropologists like Benedict are today often seen as moral relativists, a view strengthened by the misquotation given above. Their public service careers suggest otherwise. They were not afraid of making moral judgments, and acting on them. But they had the knowledge, and the humility, to understand that such judgments had always to be relative and conditional. It is a nice distinction. ©.

[Stanley]

BARON GLENAVY

Patrick Campbell has done for stuttering what the house of lords have done for abortion and homosexuality. He has made it a discussable subject.

So wrote a London critic in a review of the P-p-penguin Patrick Campbell (1965), a collection of short journalism pieces written, generally on a weekly basis, for a staggering variety of newspapers and journals, including The Times (the London one), The New Statesman, and several less exalted rags. He’d begun this habit in 1945 as a 32-year-old, writing as “Quidnunc” in The Irish Times. His father, Gordon Campbell, 2nd Baron Glenavy, had got Patrick the job in hopes that it might lead to something better. It never did, and what better could you expect from a nom de plume that can be translated as “what’s up”? But as a habit, it proved life-sustaining enough for Patrick Campbell to enjoy his life well enough to find humor in it, and to entertain the rest of us. Patrick Campbell was born on June 6, 1913, in Dublin. It was a time of Trouble in Ireland, and his father, though a Protestant, gave up a promising post in England to become, in effect, the Treasurer of the new “Free State”. He was thus a target of the more radical republicans, and it may have been their arson attack on the Campbell home that left young Patrick with his stutter—or, as he preferred to say when he could say it, his stammer. This ‘mild impediment,” as Patrick learned to call it, went along with a retiring personality which many thought stand-offish and others though snobbish, but which ill-fit his hefty 6’5” frame. He suffered for both at school, and though he spent a brief season at Oxford his only educational achievement was a way with words. This found outlet in his weekly columns and in some other media, for instance as a screenwriter. Campbell collected an audience and, along the way, a very few friends. These connections led to an unlikely run as a team “Captain” in the BBC’s long running Call My Bluff, ‘unlikely’ because it depended on conversation, as the two teams traded definitions of rare, often lunatic, words. The challenge was to pick the right definition out of the merely chaffish ones, but to do so with style, with wit, and on the spot. We arrived in the middle of Campbell’s long run in partnership (or rivalry) with his unstuttering friend Frank Muir, the opposing “Captain” in Call My Bluff. P-p-patrick p-p-performed wittily, sometimes eloquently. I was recently reminded of these weekly triumphs over mild impediments when, for my 82nd birthday, Paulette unearthed an out-of-print copy of another Campbell collection, entitled 37 Years on the Job. It’s mostly his short pieces, so it’s mainly miscellany, but it begins with a long, loving eulogy of his father, ‘the Lord,’ indicative of Patrick’s promise as a writer of serious prose. Upon the “Lord’s” death, in 1967, Patrick succeeded to the Glenavy title, which died with him in 1980. ©

[Tripps]

I suppose I must mention again that me and the Lord both had our suits made to measure at Abe Sacks in Spring Gardens, Manchester. I saw him there when I went for a fitting. Abe (jnr) told me he came when he was recording in Manchester, because it was as good as Savile Row, and a lot cheaper.

I know that's bad grammar, (me) but it feels right. . . .

[Stanley]

I'm glad you did David because I had forgotten...

[Tripps]

for my 82nd birthday, Paulette unearthed an out-of-print copy of another Campbell collection, entitled 37 Years on the Job. It’s mostly his short pieces, so it’s mainly miscellany, but it begins with a long, loving eulogy of his father, ‘the Lord,’ indicative of Patrick’s promise as a writer of serious prose. Upon the “Lord’s” death, in 1967,

Ex Libris TRIPPS - Charity shop 35p.
The eulogy is a tear jerker, and I like the quote -
"Once I asked Charles Eade the late editor of the Sunday Dispatch, if I could have a holiday. 'A holiday' said Charles - 'from what'?.

PatrickCampbell.JPG

[Stanley]

I like that!

[Stanley]

IMPERTINENCE

He flew to the Laws of his County, and made it appear, that a poor Man with the Laws may be always a Match for the over-bearing Great One. From the London Magazine (1752).

The “poor Man” who won this praise was a cobbler, Timothy Bennett, who in defiance of King George II restored a customary right of way for ordinary folk resident in (or wanting to do business in) Hampton Wick, Middlesex. In 1752 the problem was already a half century old, for during an earlier reign it had been decided to provide Hampton Court Palace (by any measure the most desirable residence in or near Hampton Wick) with a new ‘grand entrance’. This required a new road, lined by new trees (chestnuts, as it happened), and made yet more pleasant by a new fountain designed by Sir Christopher Wren. Thus “Chestnut Avenue,” a royal right of way lined with gardens and fences, blocked an ancient path which, time out of mind, had connected Hampton Wick with the wider world. Chestnut Avenue caused grumblings from the very first, but no confrontation. Now, circa 1750, a similar battle over access to the Princess Amelia’s estate at Richmond Park, inspired Timothy Bennet to take on the problem of Chestnut Avenue. But that other battle was led by John Lewis, already a rich brewer seeking his own gentlemanly status, and historians have generally focused on the conflict between a mere cobbler, Timothy Bennett, whose direct opponent was not George II but his courtier-lieutenant, the 3rd Earl of Halifax, appointed “ranger” of Hampton Court and its extensive grounds. Halifax thought Timothy Bennett “an impertinent fellow,” and we can confirm that, for though of humble origins (we don’t even know his birth date) Bennett was by 1750 a stubborn old codger of substance, not only a shoemaker but also a cordwainer and owner of some eight properties in and around Hampton Wick. We know about all that because Bennett died on June 7, 1756, and his will distributed his holdings to a collection of offspring and in-laws. Impertinent and unbending, the old commoner bluffed the old earl, and in fact the case never came to court. The common right of way was conceded, “Chestnut Avenue” be damned (and in 1700 the avenue had cost about £1,000 to build, a pretty stupendous investment not counting Wren’s fountain). All this helps us to put into context the ‘Great Trespass’ of 1932, wherein an unruly crowd of dedicated ramblers and left-wing activists helped to restore public access to aristocratic grouse moors. It’s a long, long battle, involving traditional rights (to the “commons”) versus the relatively new invention of private property. It helps us to understand why, in southern Britain especially, maps are crisscrossed with thousands of “public footpaths.” Old Timothy Bennett put it more simply. “I was unwilling to leave the world worse than I had found it.” In its way, it’s an heroic statement. It is also a tribute to impertinence. ©.

[Stanley]

HIRSCH

It is hoped that, because of America, things will also be different in Europe. Rabbi Samuel Hirsch, 1879.

During the revolution, or soon after, American religion (overwhelmingly Protestant) began a momentous shift. It has been characterized in as many ways as the language affords, but call it a shift from catechism to evangelicalism. Or from belief to believer, from intellect to sentiment: the list goes on. Meanwhile, from about 1840, the era of mass migration brought varied protestant sects and whole new communions. Each found it at least advantageous to adjust its old ‘tribal’ dogma, its ancestral ritual, to become more ‘American.’ If you did not change, you might lose your faithful; nor could you gain new converts. Such modifications might also quieten the fears of the nativists (among the native-born) that your religion was a threat to the American way(s) of life. Something like this happened to all sorts, Lutherans, Presbyterians, even Eastern Orthodox. So, for instance, Reform Judaism became a typical adjustment of an old-world faith to a new world reality. Except it didn’t really happen that way. As Timothy L. Smith, in a seminal 1978 essay, “Ethnicity in American Religion,” would point out, ‘traditional’ religions were in Europe already adjusting to similar challenges. Old World industrialization, urbanization, and their country cousin, agricultural specialization, set whole populations adrift. Even ‘orthodox’ Jews developed their own rabbinical circuit riders, mounted on mules, to follow their flocks—just like American Methodists. So, too, “Reform” Judaism was alive and well in Europe before it crossed the Atlantic. We can see this in the life of one of its most influential Rabbis, Samuel Hirsch, born in Thalfang, Prussian Rhineland, on June 8, 1815. His personal story of educational success (at Bonn, Berlin, and Leipzig) could have fit him for “assimilation” into German Christian culture. Instead, at 23, he became a rabbi, a teacher and scholar who believed that Judaism itself had to change, not to survive but to make good its claim to be a real religion of the people. His ‘reform’ program was radical enough to get him kicked out of his community at Dessau, but established him as Chief Rabbi in Luxembourg, in 1843. Then, having survived the storms of the 1848 Revolutions (with which he sympathized) and the ensuing Europe-wide reaction, he was in 1866 “called” to Keneseth Israel, a Reform congregation (temple, not synagogue) in Philadelphia. There he continued (as he had in Europe) to preach and promote his modern message and to play a leading role in the formulation of “Reform” Judaism. His story parallels those of other religious leaders of peoples in motion, immigrants whose move to America was but one of their adjustments to the modern world. ©.

[Stanley]

GENERATIONS

If you give a man a fish he is hungry again in an hour. If you teach him to catch a fish you do him a good turn.

This quote comes not from an old angler sitting slouched in the rain and waiting for a fish to bite his bait, but from Anne Thackeray Ritchie’s 1885 novel Mrs. Drymond. It is an old proverb which she rescued by putting it into print. Ritchie, a prolific author, was known for that. Many of her short stories, essays, and some plot lines in her novels were concerned with bringing old folk tales to new life. But she is better known today as the oldest daughter and literary executor of William Makepeace Thackeray. And in 1877 she married her cousin, Richmond Thackeray Ritchie (1854-1912) who, though 17 years younger than she, was already on his way to becoming Sir Richmond Ritchie, a very successful civil servant in the India Office. Lady Anne Ritchie was born Anne Isabella Thackeray on June 9, 1837. Her father was soon to be hailed as an eminent novelist, rivaled only by Charles Dickens. His satires could bite (like fish, I suppose) but not too deeply, and his wit made him an important public figure as a lecturer and essayist. There is some evidence that Thackeray favored his younger daughter, nicknamed “Minny,” as the moral balance wheel of the family, but both girls functioned as his female company as their mother fell prey to mental illness. After Thackeray’s death in 1863 the daughters lived in Paris with their grandmother. During this period, Anne Thackeray began to write, and when in 1867 Minny married Leslie Stephen, Anne became the chief guardian of William Makepeace Thackeray’s literary heritage. That, today, is seen as her major achievement, marked by her long series of essays on Thackeray (many published in a journal he had founded) and then by her biographical introductions to his works when (1916) they were republished as “Centennial” editions. That her novels and stories fell into obscurity can be seen as the normal fate of female authors in those times. But Lady Anne Ritchie was also the step-aunt of Virginia Stephen who, as Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) would enjoy a greater reputation as a writer in her own right. The step-relationship between Anne and Virginia was more than merely formal, for there was some mentoring, and some modeling, but Virginia’s mixed feelings about her step-aunt are evident in the obituary she wrote for Anne in 1919, which was printed in the Times Literary Supplement, but also in Virginia’s diary entry on the matter. She admired her step-aunt, but for what? In the published obituary, Virginia praised so faintly that later critics have called it damnation. In her diary, she feared that she had painted Anne Ritchie “a little [too] rosily.” “The generations,” Virginia concluded, “look very different ways.” Indeed. ©.

[Stanley]

LOEWE

We could feel movement in the structure of our work, and it wasn’t termites. Frederick Loewe.

Thus Frederick Loewe reminisced about the early history of his partnership with Alan Jay Lerner, a partnership that would later produce some of the greatest Broadway musicals, notably Brigadoon (1947), My Fair Lady (1956), and Camelot (1960). Their success was a long time coming. Before Brigadoon they were best known for their flops, and Loewe’s music must share the blame. Some say this was because Loewe’s melodies weren’t yet “American” enough, whatever that means. And it’s true that he was, by birth and training, a European musician. Frederick Loewe was born in Berlin on June 10, 1901. His father Edmund, a tenor, was an established star in light opera, and both parents were Viennese Jews. Their decision to educate Frederick in a Prussian military academy suggests that the family had decided on an ‘assimilationist’ strategy, but it was Frederick’s precocious musical talent, seminary-trained, that took him on a different course. A pianist, he became one of the youngest ever to perform with the Berlin Philharmonic. So no doubt his music was European and classical. But when his father took Frederick to New York in 1924 (Edmund went to perform) the young man wanted to get into “American” music, Broadway so to speak rather than Carnegie Hall. Breaking in wasn’t easy, and he spent some time out west as a cowpuncher before returning to part time musical labors in New York. It was there he became acquainted with Lerner, 15 years his younger, and the two began to work together in the early 1940s. Their best early efforts, in 1942 and 1945, had only two-month runs. Then came Brigadoon, which ran for nearly a year and won many awards. But while certainly a success, it was hardly “American,” a fantasy set in the Scottish highlands and bejeweled with such hits as “The Heather on the Hill.” And there may always be a feeling that the duo’s triumph owed mainly to Alan Jay Lerner’s astounding talent with words, especially in My Fair Lady which is, one might say, all about words. The tunes are always fine. But perhaps Loewe’s particular triumph was to compose music for actors who couldn’t sing, Rex Harrison (Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady) and Richard Burton (the cuckolded Arthur in Camelot). After Camelot the partnership lapsed for two decades, Loewe occasionally making self-deprecating but witty remarks about his music, which he claimed still not to like. But then, as he said, millions disagreed. “American” or not, Frederick Loewe knew to make melodies. Even at this distance, I can recognize Loewe’s tunes on any dark and foggy night. They still make Lerner’s words come easily to mind. ©.

[Stanley]

WACO KID

If the physical thing you’re doing is funny, you don’t have to act funny while doing it. . . . Just be real, and it will be funnier. Gene Wilder, Kiss Me Like a Stranger (2005).

The on-line Britannica rates as a “flop” the film See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989). Having seen it recently on streaming TV, I beg to differ. It’s a brilliantly crafted, madcap joke about two handicaps or, more correctly, “disabilities.” These are Gene Wilder’s deafness and Richard Pryor’s blindness. Mainly about. For the partners share a few other debilities, lust and lying, for instance; so they have more than their fair share of human frailties. In the end, they surmount their limitations. So the film is funnier than a crutch and quite heartening. Plus it grossed almost $50 million at the box office, on a budget of less than $20 million. Britannica needs to rewrite its piece on Gene Wilder or at least to rethink the meaning of ‘flop’. Here I concentrate on the comic talents of Gene Wilder, who was born as Jerome Silberman on June 11, 1933. In Milwaukee, of all places. His dad made and sold knick-knacks, but his mother had a yen for drama and saw acting talent in her son (and in her daughter), and Wilder was encouraged to refine his at a special school in Hollywood and then at the University of Iowa. He did well enough in Iowa City to win admission to an English acting academy, where he overcame his disabilities to win a fencing championship. Back in his auld soil, his career went through several stumbles. It may have been helped when he changed his name to Gene Wilder (the surname came from Thornton Wilder, for Gene liked Our Town). More importantly in the longer run, this new “Wilder” was spotted as a genuine talent by Anne Bancroft and Mel Brooks, then not yet wife and man, and it was this connection that made Gene Wilder into a household name and a comic classic. There were some non-Brooks winners, notably as Willy Wonka and in a bit part for Woody Allen; but it is thanks to the Bancroft-Brooks-Wilder connection that we will always have, for late-night laughs, several great films in which Gene Wilder played it for real, and made funny films funnier. First there was The Producers (in 1967, perhaps a little too early to tell jokes about Hitler). Then came Young Frankenstein (1973) or, as Wilder’s character preferred it, wanting to escape the horrific stain of his unfortunate family connections, “Fronckenschten.” But the crowning glory of the Brooks-Wilder connection came in 1974 with another spoof, Blazing Saddles. And this one was a spoof of the holiest of all American memes, “the Western.” In it the Jewish kid from Milwaukee plays the gunslingin’, sharpshootin’ Waco Kid. They are all great, culture-bending comedies. But at the time many thought them flops. The moral seems clear. When you first hear that a new release is a “flop,” rush out to see it. It might, in the longer run, turn out to be real. ©.

[Stanley]

HARRIET

In a place like Cincinnati, where every man may gratify his virtuous will, and do, with his own hands, the deeds of a generation, feelings should be as grand as the occasion. If the merchants of Genoa were princes, the citizens of Cincinnati, as of every first city of a new region, are princes and prophets at once. Harriet Martineau, Society in America (London, 1837), vol I, p. 143.

In the early 19th century, the USA attracted many European observers. It was, after all, an odd place, a republic that had foresworn both aristocracy and an established church. It had proclaimed equality as a political axiom, yet practiced human slavery. So Europeans came to observe. Today, the best-known of these ‘foreign correspondents’ is Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America (1835) remains a classic, often required reading in undergraduate courses. And it is a good read. But on the whole, de Tocqueville told Americans what they liked to hear. But there were others, and among the sharpest was Harriet Martineau. She was born in East Anglia on June 12, 1802, into a prosperous family of Huguenot descent and liberal religious views. That didn’t produce for Harriet an entirely happy childhood, but it did give her an excellent education. So, when economic ill-fortune befell the household, Harriet stepped forward to become the most famous woman of her era, an extraordinary writer who sold enough output to support her family. Some of it was fiction, but most of it was reportage, essays of observation and analysis, inspired by the relatively new idea that there should be a science of society, a sociology of what exists, a reasonable hope that it might be improved. So Miss Martineau (she never married, to the certain relief of the Darwin family) became famous, well enough known to be invited to Queen Victoria’s coronation, and confident enough to join an ever-expanding circle of influential British intellectuals. And then brash enough to undertake a voyage to America to see what made the place tick. It's interesting to me that she found her favorite test tube in Cincinnati, the self-proclaimed Queen City of the West, an exploding urb that was in almost every respect “new”—even its disassembly-line butcheries which, significantly, were dominated by the “newest” of Americans, German immigrants. In this place, Martineau found much to admire, more to hope for. But in her very next chapter she turned to race as a subject, and there she found much to lament. Enslaved or freed, Americans of color presented a moral test to the new Republic, and in 1837 Martineau the academic observer delivered a failing grade so far, and much to fear for the future. Two years later, she found more faults in our Morals and Manners (1839). So despite her paean to Cincinnati (which does have much to recommend it), she was read in America as a critic, a nay sayer. Perhaps this is why she has never gained what might be called Tocqueville traction. ©.

[Stanley]

PORTIA

Men have made a more comfortable world for boys and men than for girls and women, and the women now want the power to make the world more comfortable for girls and women. Chrystal Macmillan.

Thus Chrystal Macmillan spoke, in Dumfries, Scotland, for a woman’s right to vote. She would in 1908 identify herself as a suffragist, not a suffragette. That places her on the moderate side of Britain’s suffrage movement, and indeed at Dumfries she went on to assure her audience that she meant no “harm to the boys and men.” This qualification won “laughter and cheers” from her lively audience—or so the press reported it. If she was ‘moderate’ in her approach, it arose from her childhood, and reminds us that politics can indeed be personal. Jessie Chrystal Macmillan was born in Edinburgh on June 11, 1872. She was named after her mother, née Jessie Chrystal Finlayson, and chose to be called Chrystal. She would be the only girl in the family, and learned to hold her own with her eight brothers in a terraced mansion (one blessed with a long back garden) in Edinburgh’s “New Town.” In that setting, compromises had to be made with the more numerous gender, but her wealthy parents, father and mother, gave her good support, and after private boarding school Chrystal became one of the first females to enter Edinburgh University, and the very first woman scientist, graduating with First Class Honours in 1896. Study in Berlin followed, with a shift in emphasis, and she returned to take another degree, this one in moral philosophy, at Edinburgh. As with England’s two ancient universities, so with the Scottish four, universities were also parliamentary constituencies, and in Scotland the university franchise was open to “persons” who had graduated. Already a suffragist, but not yet a lawyer, Chrystal Macmillan argued the case (that “persons” included women) first in Scotland and then, on appeal on 1908, before the Law Lords in London. There she spoke for three hours, sometimes eloquently and always pointedly. She lost again, but her ‘performance’ won gendered compliments from all sides. Stylishly dressed, she was dubbed “the Scottish Portia” after one of Shakespeare’s strongest women characters, a proud woman whose father’s will made her a lottery prize. No such fate for Chrystal Macmillan, who never married anyone and became better known as a leading peace campaigner before and during World War I. Her advocacy of a real peace, at the 1915 International Congress of Women, was cast in a woman’s words: she demanded not a “negation of war but a peace that is living and growing and active.” Then, in 1919, at Versailles, she derided the peace the world actually got from its man-diplomats, one which “can only lead to future wars.” She did not live to see the next war. Chrystal Macmillan’s strong heart failed her in 1937. ©.

[Stanley]

EDITOR

She is a young woman of some enterprise and independence, having been born into a perfectly conventional English family and having shaken herself free of ready-made traditions, to the dismay of her parents, in order to earn her own living on the Saturday Review . . . She has no money except what she makes. Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf, 1933.

As a reference, this letter lacks fire, perhaps because Vita Sackville West didn’t approve of domestic conventionalities. Vita’s 1913 marriage to Harold Nicolson was unconventional in almost every way imaginable. But her letter did get Ivy Davison the job she sought, as secretary to Virginia Woolf, one of Vita’s many unconventional friends. Nor was Ivy’s birth family quite so boringly “conventional”. Ivy Lillian Margaret Davison was born on June 14, 1892, the third of six children of well-connected parents. They did, conventionally, think that their four girls should be educated at home, but her mother was a leading light in the Parents’ National Education Union. So Ivy’s was not a constricting education. It left her very well read in literature and philosophy and with a yen to become better read. Family friendships (including with the Sackvilles) kept Ivy aware of what was new in English literary culture. When the World War came, she did her voluntary bits, nursing for the Red Cross and the army. There was something unconventional, too, in her peacetime decision to take lodgings, in London, with the new Women’s Pioneer Housing movement. But what is a well-read, modern young woman to do in 1920s London? Of course she became an editor (sub-editor at first) with a leading intellectual journal, the Saturday Review. In 1933, the same year she began work with Virginia Woolf, she began editing for The New Statesman. She wrote a lot on her own, too, but most were unsigned short pieces, and the world would not know much of Ivy Davison but for her role as friend. editor and ‘literary advisor’ not only for Woolf but a number of others, including Vera Brittain, L. P. Hartley, Rose Macauley, and Laurie Lee. There were also a couple of Huxleys in her literary mix. In 1939 Ivy Davison switched to the Geographical Magazine and, given her connections, had a noticeable impact on its literary content, bringing in (for instance) V. S. Pritchett. Davison, who never married, still managed to have a bad World War II, losing a brother and two nephews to battle and then, in 1944, her sister Enid. One of the more important “unknowns” of literary London, she enjoyed a long retirement, first in Pioneer Housing and then back in Sackville country. At her death, Ivy left her 11,000 books to a library named after her cousin Sybil Campbell, another woman of independent means, Britain’s first (for a long time its only) female judge. ©