BOB'S BITS

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Stop beating yourself up! I didn't see it as a blunder just a different viewpoint.
I think the general view amongst historians is that colonisation was possibly inevitable as Western nations developed and some benefits like modernisation were conferred there was also a lot of injustice and exploitation of indigenous people and this is to be regretted.

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X OR Y?

Miss Stevens’s work is characterized by its precision and by a caution that seldom ventures far from the immediate observation. Her contributions are models of brevity—a brevity amounting at times to meagerness. Thomas Hunt Morgan, 1912.

So wrote Professor Morgan in a Science obituary of Nettie Stevens, who had died at only 51, of breast cancer. Morgan was himself an eminent cytologist and would in 1933 win a Nobel Prize for his work on genetic transmission in fruit flies (Drosophila). Some say it was Stevens herself that recommended Drosophila to him, and that could be true. Certainly they had worked closely together at Bryn Mawr, where Morgan was professor of biology and Stevens, at first, a PhD candidate. For Nettie Stevens it was a move ‘back east’, for she’d been born in Cavendish, Vermont, on July 7, 1861. Her father was a carpenter turned builder and property owner with enough money and enough sense to encourage his very bright daughter in her studies. But it took her a long while to find her feet. First a private school, Westfield Academy, then 15 years of school teaching in whatever subjects were assigned to her (English and Latin as well as science) and then finally, financing herself, at Stanford, a new university out west that thought women could be scientists. She did well enough there (bachelor’s and master’s degrees) to win a PhD scholarship to Bryn Mawr, where at first Morgan thought her too cautious, too meager, more interested in lab technique than in ‘real’ science. Stevens studied the animal cell, with particular emphasis on the mystery of sex. Why did some fertilized eggs turn female, others male? Leading theories at the time (following folk wisdom, perhaps?) thought it happened because of this or that external circumstance. Stevens proved otherwise. Working with aphids, a species good at producing new generations quickly, and working with precision and caution, she it was who discovered the great game between what came to be known as the ‘X’ and ‘Y’ chromosomes. Sex was generated internally, inside the embryo, and it seemed certain that the same was true of larger, more complicated embryos, like those of humans and hippos. Her discovery (in 1905) was made nearly simultaneously with that of Edmund Wilson, at Columbia University. Indeed his paper on the subject was already in press when he read her results. In the end, which for Nettie Stevens came with tragic speed, Edmund Wilson and Thomas Hunt Morgan recognized her work as fundamental and conceded her priority. But both were slow to do so. Sex determination in aphids might proceed by the flip of a chromosome, but sex discrimination in the human profession of biological science was more deeply rooted, a problem that would take more time to address and solve. Nettie Stevens’s ‘caution’ and ‘precision’ had been environmentally determined. ©

[Stanley]

BRITANNIA

Rule, Britannia, Britannia rule the waves,

Britons never never never shall be slaves.

“Rule Britannia” was first performed in 1740, part of a masque produced for Frederick, Prince of Wales, at Cliveden House, his country place in Berkshire. Great hopes were placed with Prince Frederick, who might have become the first Hanover king comfortable with English and was certainly a hale fellow, a patron of the arts, and a dabbler in opposition politics. Meanwhile, Britain itself was becoming the European imperial power. The court masque underlined these potentials by celebrating the Saxon king Alfred the Great. And, perfectly, the words of “Rule, Britannia” were supplied by a Scottish poet, James Thomson, then set to music by an Englishmen, Thomas Arne: perhaps even poetically, for Frederick himself had been born in 1707, the very year of the Act of Union. Frederick himself was to die young, leaving the field to George III, but “Rule, Britannia” has lived on to become a favored song of the patriotic Briton. Meanwhile, the goddess Britannia herself has been made a central figure in British iconography. Usually she’s majestic, in statuary and on the currency: a symbol, like Athena in ancient Greece, of strength, beauty, and wisdom. But in classical Roman coinage and medals, Britannia made her first appearance in defeat, seized by her hair (by the emperor Claudius, no less) and about to be skewered. Before the end of Roman rule (circa 410CE) Britannia had recovered her dignity, at least in imperial coinage. But as a symbol of the island she slept for centuries (during which there was no “Britain” to represent), then to be revived during the long reign of the great queen, Elizabeth I, in the 16th century. The reviver was John Dee, alchemist and astrologer. In my time, Britannia was used, or misused, as a Margaret Thatcher figure, and then comically at the summer Proms concerts, during the singing of “Rule, Britannia.” Young enthusiasts, not all of them female, dressed the part and sang and swayed along with the music. The goddess was even used to symbolize Britain’s membership in the European Union, before Brexit made her incompatible. But why bring her up on July 8? Well, Britannia’s modern images have, since the 1670s, been based on one of King Charles II’s mistresses, Frances Stewart, who was born in Paris on July 8, 1647. She came to London in 1663 as lady-in-waiting to Charles’s queen. Samuel Pepys thought her the greatest beauty of the age. The French ambassador thought her brainless. The queen cannot have approved. But, goddess-like, Frances Stewart conquered the merry monarch. Unfaithful to her lawful husband, the Duke of Richmond and Lennox, the duchess became (via her portraits) the modern model for Britannia. ©.

[Stanley]

FANNY FERN

The coming woman . . . shall be a bright-eyed, full-chested, broad-shouldered, large-souled, intellectual being; able to walk, able to eat, able to fulfill her maternal destiny, and able—if it so please God—to go to her grave happy, self-poised and serene, though unwedded. From “A Little Talk with the Other Sex,” in Folly As It Flies, by Fanny Fern (New York and London, 1868).

“Fanny Fern” was the pen name of the then highest-paid columnist in the USA, who in 1868 was calling herself (on legal documents) Sara Payson Willis Parton. She’d been born Greta Payson Willis on July 9, 1811, in Portland, Maine. Her father was a journalist and publisher; three of her brothers became famous, at least moderately so, as writers; so why not Greta? First, she didn’t like her baptismal name and appropriated “Sara” instead. Then she went to Catharine Beecher’s famous girls’ school in Hartford. Miss Beecher, herself a woman of strong opinions, thought this Sara her most ill-behaved and yet best-loved pupil. After Beecher’s female seminary Sara went back home, wrote a bit for Christian weeklies, married a banker, and then became a destitute widow in 1851. The best a poor widow with two daughters could do in 1851 was to marry again. That turned out badly, but (unusually) Sara had the backbone to end it herself, and won a divorce. She then went on the market as a writer, “Fanny Fern”, and performed miracles, becoming (by 1857) a weekly columnist for the New York Ledger at the then stupendous salary of $100 weekly (that would be about $175,000 annually in 2025). The Ledger editor’s secret formula in handling his favorite columnist, “Fanny” boasted on the title page of her Folly As It Flies, was “plenty of oats and a skillful rein,” which may have been the rule “Fanny” laid down when she married, thirdly (and finally) the biographer James Parton. Her pictures suggest she was a woman of strength and strongly-held opinions, the latter of which she vented, wittily, in her columns and in several books, including a couple of now highly-regarded novels. Her advice, always delivered straight from the shoulder, was not conventional in her own time, but she was paid well for it, in oats and cash. In her columns, she urged young women to be themselves, not to swoon for their first swain, and if they wanted to marry to wait until they found a man who could blush and be happy while taking the kids out for a day in the park. And if they didn’t marry, that would be OK, too. Clearly self-liberated, Fanny Fern also championed the revolutionary poetry of Walt Whitman, another self-liberated writer, and one who blushed. One is not surprised to find Fanny Fern in 1868 acting as one of the 14 co-founders of the Sorosis club for professional women. And “sorosis” did not mean “sisters.” It came from the Greek word for “heap.” As in, perhaps, ‘a heap of trouble’? ©

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DUBLIN

Did you ever hear tell,

said Jimmy Farrell,

of the skulls they have

in the city of Dublin?

From “Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces,” by Seamus Heaney (1975)

The poem goes on to speculate that one of those skulls belonged to “an old Dane . . . drowned in the Flood.” As far as we can know, Dublin’s real history doesn’t incorporate Noah and his Ark, but we’ve long since granted Heaney poetic license. Then, in 1988, Dublin itself brought us down to brass tacks by celebrating its millenium. For it was on July 10, 988, that an old Dane (actually the Norse King Giúniairn) of Dublin recognized the overlordship of the High King of Ireland, Máel Sechnaill. Giúniairn agreed to pay tribute and, more to the point, accept the rule and sovereignty of Irish law, “Brehon Law.” So 1988 saw the anniversary of the year in which Dublin became Irish. There had been settlements at the mouth of the Liffey well before the Norsemen moved in, one of them possibly founded by Saint Patrick himself. And when the Vikings conquered the place in 841 they called it Diflin, a Norse attempt at the Old Irish Duibhlinn (probably ‘blackwater’ or ‘blackpool’ in modern English). The Norse ruled the place long enough for it to become, in effect, a Norse-Gael enclave in a more entirely Gael island, until the year 980, when Ireland’s High King, Máel Sechnaill, conquered the then King of Dublin at the Battle of Tara. It took another 8 years of cultural skirmishing before Giúniairn accepted Irish sovereignty and Irish law. That agreement didn’t really bring peace, for the Gael “High Kingship” was itself often a cause for warfare, and Brehon Law recognized that problem, or rather incorporated it, by making the High King himself a subject of traditional law, not a “sovereign” ruler in the sense of, say, the Saxon or Norman kings of what became England. It didn’t make Ireland into a parliamentary system, however. Rather Brehon Law recognized an elaborate social hierarchy. It regulated a society, or a culture, that was patriarchal, familial, and tribal, one in which men (unless enslaved) were arranged according to their “honor price.” Women and children had no “honor price”, subject as they were to husband or father, but a woman could sue for divorce and take back home her bride price if, for instance, her husband beat her badly enough to leave a mark on her body. Brehon law disapproved of capital punishment as such, although revenge killing was countenanced. Some scholars think that Brehon Law was made by poets, which is, in a rather charming way, where we began, with the Nobel Prize winning Irishman, Seamus Heaney. ©

[Stanley]

BOWDLER

My great objects in this undertaking are to remove from the writings of Shakespeare, some defects which diminish their value; and . . . to present an edition. . . [which we]may place without fear in the hands of the pupil. Thomas Bowdler, from an advertisement for a new edition of The Family Shakespeare (1819).

These days school and library committees have been infiltrated by pecksniffs desperate to prevent children from reading freely. Their motives vary, but taken together they’ve once again made ‘Bowdler’ a bad name. As a blanket term, “Bowdlerization” applies to almost any effort to restrict access to knowledge, especially when “knowledge” is delivered via the printed page. And Thomas Bowdler does seem to have been an odd bird. He was born into wealth, near the spa town of Bath, England, on July 11, 1754. He qualified as a medical doctor, traveled in Europe, became an adept at chess, fell prey to chronic ill health, and abjured forever the practice of medicine. But he remained a scholarly observer of the world around him, was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, and collected a remarkably large library made up of unexpurgated books. He wrote about children’s health, the treatment of chronic illness in adults, about spa cures, and war. Along the way, aged 52, he married, but it didn’t last long and seemed to leave very bad memories. His wife was, so to speak, expurgated from his memory and was never mentioned again. Meanwhile, he worked with an unmarried elder sister, Harriet (1750-1830) to produce The Family Shakespeare. The first issue (1807) expanded in subsequent editions to include almost all the plays, comedies, tragedies, and histories. Many of their expurgations are famous, and obvious. The strumpet Doll Tearsheet was completely disappeared from Henry IV, part 2, along with her earthy name and her earthier libels. The word “prick” disappears from several plays, including Romeo and Juliet. References to Othello’s sexual prowess were omitted from that eponymous tragedy, and in Hamlet the prince’s sister, Ophelia, drowns accidentally. So there’s no doubt that some meanings were lost, some darknesses concealed, and one could hardly call Bowdler’s Shakespeare an improvement on Shakespeare’s Shakespeare. One could never learn, from Bowdler, that in Will Shakespeare’s time the old Anglo-Saxon word “prick” was beginning to be used to describe a “penis” and, generally, a far too cocky fellow. On the other hand, would you want to explain that to a ten year old kid? Later, Algernon Swinburne (no prude he) thought Bowdler had done a pretty good job. On balance, I think it unfair, distorting, to link Thomas Bowdler (and his sister Harriet) with today’s ideological censors. Both Bowdlers were, after all, social reformers in their own time, and they would have had little in common with our contemporary ignoramuses. ©.

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CLINICIAN

I desire no other epitaph than the statement that I taught medical students in the wards. William Ostler, 1905.

Ostler was an excellent public speaker, and he amused his audience by assuring them that he was in no hurry for that epitaph. And in fact he didn’t need one until 1919. That lapse of 14 years gave him time to receive many honors, a baronetcy from King George V, a medical chair at Oxford University, and election to Britain’s premier science institution, the Royal Society. But he had already modernized the study of medicine in North America’s then leading medical schools, first at McGill, then, in fairly rapid chronological order at Harvard, Penn, and Johns Hopkins. And he was sure, morally certain, that the heart of the thing was to be found at the patient’s bedside: diagnosis, prognosis, treatment. He was a clinician, and he insisted that those recently qualified as medical doctors should begin their careers with a period of residency, learning how to deliver their gifts to human patients. But he was also a scientist, insisting that the MD degree must signify command of the latest, most relevant knowledge—not only knowledge gained in the laboratory but in compendious and up-to-date libraries. By the time he needed that epitaph he’d built up a personal library of 14,000 volumes, a collection which still lies at the heart of McGill’s William Osler Library. All this was an unlikely outcome for an unruly child of Anglican missionaries—mother andfather—who’d followed their own callings to what was then the northernmost woods of Ontario, where William Ostler was born on July 12, 1849. His father’s parish rounds covered 120 square miles of frontier territory. While dad cared for souls, William’s own calling fulfilled the myth of the mischievous parson’s son. Pranks, some of them not very funny, got him thrown out of school twice before he ‘converted’ to study seriously for priestly ordination. But at the University of Toronto it was natural philosophy (science) that drew his best attention, then medicine. He qualified at McGill, in Montreal, in 1872. Then came further study in London, Berlin, and Vienna. Work in the wards at Berlin and Vienna was enough to convince Osler that the doctor’s task was to bring science and humanity together for each patient. With this in mind, he returned to McGill and a career which is said to have revolutionized medical study across North America by creating ideal models at leading institutions. Today, his reputation is tarnished by his racism and by modern hospitals’ exploitation of the residency system. Had he lived longer, he might have learned better. But having lived long enough to lose his only surviving son, killed in action at Ypres in 1917, William Ostler himself succumbed to complications of influenza in 1919. He had always said that “The Fever” was mankind’s greatest, and most feared, enemy. ©

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NIGGLI

Grandma, that blouse is perfect! If I had stood over & directed every stitch, it could not have suited me more. Of course I had to put it and the skirt on, & they are the most becoming things I almost ever had. Just putting them on seemed to take me right back home to “Messico.” Josefina Niggli, October 12, 1935.

Thus Niggli wrote to her “Dearest Family” from Chapel Hill, NC, where she was teaching at the University of North Carolina. The thank you was a belated one, for she had been very busy, casting a play she had written and constantly called to another tutorial task by “the silver voice of Chaucer.” But how belated was this thank you? A few months, I think. Her “dearest family” had sent her a gift package, probably for her birthday. Josefina Niggli was born in Mexico, state of Nueva León, on July 13, 1910. That’s appropriate. Nueva León (officially known as the “Free and Sovereign State”) is a border state, and Josefina Niggli was a border person. Her parents were both US citizens, but new ones, immigrants from Europe, and themselves a rainbow of Swiss, Irish, French, and German colorations. Josefina herself had been baptized as Josephine. She first crossed the border into Texas in 1913, a toddler refugee from the Mexican Revolution, then back home, then a return to Texas for her first college degree at Incarnate Word College in San Antonio. It was then that she published, with her father’s help, Mexican Silhouettes, a poetry collection. Still in San Antonio, she won prizes for similarly themed short stories. Then came Chapel Hill, and a Master’s degree financed by a teaching fellowship. All this was punctuated by periods back home in Mexico, where she also published (fiction, drama, some folklore studies). Anyway, Josephine became Josefina and established her literary reputation with a 1945 novel—first published in English—Mexican Village. Really a collection of connected folk tales, it was taken up by Hollywood and, rather ironically, made into a musical starring Ricardo Montalban and Cyd Charisse (actors born, respectively, in Mexico and Texas). And Josefina Niggli herself was taken in, as a screenwriter first for cinema, then TV, the latter including some unlikely work for Have Gun, Will Travel and The Twilight Zone. Being in one of those Hollywood writers’ stables can make one pretty nearly anonymous, but latterly Ms. Niggli has been recognized as a pioneer writer whose explorations of her own heritage at the Mexican-American frontier are worth another look. Goodness knows what citizenship Donald Trump would have assigned her. If you want to decide the matter for yourself, Niggli’s papers (including many to her dearest family) are housed at Western North Carolina University, where you might also see one of her plays performed at the Josefina Niggli Theatre. Niggli taught there from 1956 to 1975. And a Niggli collection was republished in 2009, in English. ©

[Stanley]

BASCOM

When the collegiate training of women was first on trial there were clamorous complaints that the health of young women was being wrecked; now the same class of public critics are loudly complaining that college women are "Amazons." Florence Bascom, 1923 .

Florence Bascom knew this in her bones, for in 1875 she was among the first cohorts of women admitted as fully equal students at the University of Wisconsin. Her father, John Bascom, had just been made president of the university, and opening the whole institution to women was one of his first reforms. Bascom Hall, still the nerve center of the campus, sits atop Bascom Hill, both of them monuments to the president who built the “Wisconsin Idea,” wherein every university discipline shapes, and is shaped by, the progress of the society it serves. And, no surprise here, Florence’s mother Emma was an ardent suffragist and feminist. But the daughter made her own way, too. Florence Bascom was born in Williamstown, MA, on July 14, 1862, where her father was a professor at Williams College. In 1874, the family moved to Madison, and like her father Florence hit the ground running, winning top honors in high school and then at the university, where she continued on to win a Master’s degree in geology. On the side, she became a cofounder of the campus’s sorority system. And why not? It already had fraternities. But foremost, she was a scientist, and in a field where women were not expected to prosper. She became the first woman to earn a PhD (in any field) at Johns Hopkins, and carried that on into professorial appointments at Ohio State and then, for the rest of her working life, at Bryn Mawr College. Indeed she brought geology to Bryn Mawr. Beginning in a small storeroom as an adjunct to the ‘traditional’ sciences, she created a department, a graduate division, and made Bryn Mawr the country’s main source of female geologists. Her work on Pennsylvania gravels helped to prove the great age of the Appalachian. Her work may have convinced her father of the truths of evolution which he wrote about in his Evolution and Religion (1897). More importantly for geology, her use of crystallography proved that even these ‘sedimentary’ gravels were shot through with igneous rocks and sands, products of unimaginable ages of eruptions and erosions. Another contribution came in the field of petrogeology. Funding from the oil industry helped her to build Bryn Mawr’s geology program. After her retirement, in 1928, she continued her work, in senior positions, for the US Geological Survey. Besides her own contributions to the field, Florence trained a whole cohort of women geologists, many of whom became famous in their own right. And, maybe, some were “Amazons”; if so, the world is the better for them. As for Florence, she died in 1945, aged 83, and chose to be buried near her parents in Williamstown, her home soil. ©.

[Stanley]

PARETO

The assertion that men are objectively equal is so absurd that it does not even merit being refuted. Vilfredo Pareto, Manuale d’economia politica (1906).

Vilfredo Frederico Pareto was born in Paris on July 15, 1848. It was Europe’s year of revolutions, certainly in France and in many of the German states. Italy, too, embarked on a revolutionary course that would eventually unite the peninsula, shrink the pope’s political authority to Rome’s eighth hill, leaving the other seven under the authority of a constitutional monarchy. Caught up in revolutionary romanticism, the baby’s parents called him Wilfried Fritz, which became Vilfredo Frederico when, in 1858, they moved back to Italy. In the midst of the excitements involved in making a new Italian nation, Vilfredo gained an excellent education. At first he seemed intent on following his father’s footsteps, in engineering and mathematics, but instead of applying those disciplines to, say, bridge building or laying out new sewerage lines, Pareto made himself into a scientist of society. This was perhaps forecast by his engineering PhD thesis, “The Fundamental Principles of Equilibrium in Solid Bodies.” Substitute “social systems” for “solid bodies” and you’ve got Pareto in a nutshell. As a social theorist or philosopher or economist (he’s been called all three), he sought a way to attain “equilibrium.” That’s understandable. Born in 1848, as a young man with a life to make he looked out on a jumble of failed or incomplete revolutions: Germany in the throes of political reaction, France finding another Napoleon in the hopes of settling down, and even Italy teetering in a half-way house between democracy and monarchy. An equilibrium had been disturbed. How could an equilibrium be restored? Rather like Emerson in the USA, Pareto thought it best to see society as a wave, but while Emerson gave leave to individuals to master the surf, Pareto saw whole social classes coming to the top. Old elites fractured. New elites, recruited from the most talented (in Pareto’s sense the most unequal) men of the middle class, would take their place. That wavelike flux would continue forever, but stability might be gained by coming to the “Pareto Constant,” defined mathematically (and economically) as a society in which the top 20% owned 80% of the society’s wealth. These elements of Pareto’s thought have made him, for many, the philosophical father of Fascism. He did live long enough to witness Mussolini’s rise, but only barely. Pareto liked some of what he saw in “Il Duce,” not least the masculine swagger and the promise of socio-economic equilibrium. Equally, after Pareto’s death in 1923, fascists in Italy (and other countries) liked to claim intellectual descent from him. It’s a false claim for several reasons, not least because Pareto’s ‘equilibrium’ would include the withering away of the state and the dawn of real liberty—at least for those who were superior enough to enjoy being libertarians. Another side of Pareto’s thinking makes the linkage between him and fascism even more dubious, for one of his prime objectives has been seen as ‘welfare economics’. It was a kind of mathematical noblesse oblige, where the top 20% would (in the interests of stability) ensure the comfort (and the satisfaction) of the nether four-fifths. But he’s almost irrelevant to our 21st-century situation, where a 20-80 distribution of wealth and power would seem radically egalitarian. It would be, in fact, a re-distribution, a sharp move towards functional equality. And equality as a function was something that Vilfredo Pareto never understood. ©

[Stanley]

GINGER

I adored Fred. We were good friends. Our only problem is that we never aspired to be any kind of a team. We didn't want to be Abbott and Costello. Ginger Rogers.

Oddly enough, Fred Astaire made the same point, and in very similar terms. He remembered that after he and Ginger almost stole the show in Flying Down to Rio (1933), in which they were not the lead stars, RKO executives cooked up the idea of selling them as a team. Fred refused, point blank, and told the bosses that he and Ginger were “individuals”, and wanted to be treated that way. So these two individuals went on to star billing in nine films. And in all of them they danced, very well, sometimes spectacularly. Twice at least the plot had them not wanting to dance, but then they did. In Swing Time (1936), to “Never Gonna Dance,” they danced up and down a staircase. It looks like they were floating, but that floating required 37 takes, and at the end of it Ginger Rogers’s feet were bleeding. Suffering for the team, one might say, and the world saw them that way. Hollywood voted them several times, together, as the industry’s best money makers. But after The Barkleys of Broadway (1947) the individuals parted and went on to long careers as themselves. Perhaps it was because both were midwestern in origin, Fred from Omaha and Ginger, more appropriately, from Independence, MO. Ginger Rogers was born there as Virginia Katherine McMath on July 16, 1911. Her mother was a Christian Scientist and had lost her first pregnancy in a hospital delivery, so Virginia was born at home. Mother Lela was also a journalist and of an independent nature, so her marriage dissolved. After a time in Kansas City, mother and kid turned up in Texas, Fort Worth, where Lela found a second husband, and a better one, in John Rogers, and in 1925 “Ginger Rogers and the Houston Redheads” were dancing professionally. Texas proved too small for her talent, and after a whirlwind of shows in the west (and an unhappy marriage with a dancer called Pepper), Ginger was chosen to star, in New York, in George Gershwin’s Girl Crazy (1930). Gershwin’s choreographer was Fred Astaire. No partnership was formed then, never mind a team. As individuals, in Hollywood, they were film tested and neither, apparently, found especially promising. (There’s a particularly funny story about Fred’s screen test.) But then both found themselves billed (Ginger fourth and Fred Fifth) in Flying Down to Rio. That film was intended as a ‘vehicle’ for Dolores del Rio, already Hollywood’s favorite female Latin lover, and it did well for her, too, but it also made Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire into properties in their own right. Or, I should say, their own rights, plural. Ever after (and for both that was a long time) they remembered each other as partners, not as a team together. But when they danced, their steps matched perfectly. ©.

[Stanley]

STEAM BUGGY

Have you heard of the wonderful one-hoss-shay,

That was built in such a logical way?

Thus the ‘autocrat of the breakfast-table,’ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., began his historical poem “The Deacon’s Masterpiece: or, the Wonderful One-Hoss-Shay.” It first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly for September 1858. It so amused its elite audience that the good doctor (a pioneer obstetrician and the father of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.) put it out, in a lavishly illustrated book, along with several other doggerels. It became a best seller, appealing also to the literate masses of 19th-century America. A little later, in 1876, came a steam locomotive called “the Shay.” It’s tempting to think it was named after Dr. Holmes’s buggy. But it wasn’t. While Holmes’s one horse shay carried village doctors and clergy on their rounds of medicine and mercy, this later, steam-driven Shay was an industrial work horse, invented by Ephraim Shay, born in rural Ohio on July 17, 1839. Shay descended from a long line of pioneers, first settled in New York and New England, and since he was born in Ohio’s Western Reserve we can call him a Yankee. And indeed in 1861 he quickly volunteered for service in the Union Army, “to defend my country’s honor and flag,” as he put it. Besides patriotism, Shay was also infused with Yankee ingenuity. So in war he served as hospital orderly. Then, in peace, he puzzled about how to make more money more quickly out of the sawmill he established in Haring, in the far north of Michigan’s southern peninsula. It was hilly country, undeveloped, and the problem was how to get logs to the mill quickly and cheaply. His Shay locomotive first took to the tracks in 1876 and was patented in 1881. Ephraim Shay went on to prosper at tinkering and inventing (he even built a steel house for his growing family and for a time owned his own railway). He sold his steam engine patent to the Lima (Ohio) Locomotive Works, which by 1945 had built almost 3,000 Shays. Like Holmes’s buggy, they were ‘built in a logical way’: vertical steam cylinders and intricate gearing mechanisms mounted on flexible trucks built to several gauges. But they worked best hauling heavy loads on narrow gauge tracks and steep grades. They came in four classes and many weights (from 8 tons to 150!!). There are today 116 surviving Shays, ranging from quaint to monstrous, mainly in steam museums or hauling short tourist runs in the USA, western Canada, and northern Mexico. But in their prime, these steam-driven Shays worked their wages in extractive industries, timber mainly but also minerals and ores. In the US and Canada, in their prime, they were the motive force behind one of the largest, quickest deforestations in human history. I’ve walked Shay engine tracklines in northern Minnesota, in pine forests that are, sadly, second-growths. ©

[Stanley]

GRACE

I should like to say that good batsman are born, not made, but my long experience comes up before me, and tells me that it is not so. W. G. Grace

Grace’s “long experience” in cricket began in his family’s orchard, soon after he learned to walk. It ended in a local club match, on July 25, 1914. So his cricketing went on for about 63 years. In that last match, he scored 70 not out, a creditable performance for a man who’d just celebrated his 66th birthday. During his lifetime of play, cricket itself became an organized sport in England, with the county championships, and in the wider worlds of the British empire, with international “Test” matches. Alongside all that, there continued the older tradition of “Gentlemen versus Players” matches. William Gilbert Grace was born a a doctor’s son, near Bristol on July 18, 1848, and thus was always on the Gentlemen’s side. Grace became a doctor himself, in 1879, and a good one, but his private practice was in a working class district, with some clinical work for the Bristol Poor Law Union, so he never made enough money to be a ‘real’ Gentleman. Luckily for cricket, the Pro-Am divide was not so rigidly policed back then. And in county cricket, in Tests, and in club matches Grace always found some income, latterly in amazingly profitable “testimonial” matches, for just about everyone wanted to see the greatest cricketer of his era—and maybe the greatest cricketer of all time. Like American baseball, cricketing is statistics-obsessed. Grace’s statistics are astonishing. He was a superb batsman, quick to see the ball, adept at defending his stumps, and eager to punish an errant bowler. Indeed he preferred hitting for 4s, boundaries, and his run totals (records which in several cases stood for decades) reflect that preference. But W. G. Grace was also a bowler of note, taking nearly 3,000 wickets in first class and test cricket. As he aged, his medium-pace bowling slowed, in close ratio with his expanding waistline, and in the prime of his career he didn’t look the part of a killer athlete. But he was one, and many anecdotes testify to his other great strength, competitiveness. He knew his prowess, and he played it to the hilt. At bat, he intimidated bowlers. When bowling, his legendary command of line and length made batsmen think they might go out. And he was not above trying to intimidate umpires. As captain of the Gloucestershire side from its formation in 1875 to 1899, he ruled the roster and took no lip from the committee or from his players. But when W. G. died, all that was forgotten in favor of his miraculous abilities and his undoubted kindnesses. Even up in Lancashire, The Guardian mourned the loss of “the greatest and most attractive figure that ever appeared on the cricket field. . . . ‘Style is ease, and ease is strength,’ he once said, and that summed up his creed.” ©.

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PICKERING

A man superintending the work of several assistants can often have their number doubled, and his output increased in nearly the same proportion, with no additional expense except the moderate one of their salaries. Edward Charles Pickering, in The Future of Astronomy (1909)

Pickering has been hanged for these words, metaphorically. In his long tenure as director of the Harvard Observatory, he did hire many assistants, he didn’t pay them well, and he didn’t give them much credit in his many publications. So he comes across like Charles Dickens’s Gradgrind, the skinflint schoolmaster who named his children after great utilitarians and thought of his pupils as mere machines. And Pickering called his assistants “computers.” Worse, in modern retrospect, most of these ‘computers’ were women. My ‘anniversary notes’ have featured a number of these women. Annie Jump Cannon, Antonia Maury, Cecilia Payne, Henrietta Leavitt, Williamina Fleming: all of them worked years for Pickering, feathering his cap but not their own bonnets. And it was deliberate. In his short essay on astronomy’s future, Pickering used “man” in its gendered sense. The word appears 39 times. “Woman” (or any variant) is absent. So I classified Pickering as a male chauvinist. And he was that. But Dava Sobel has modified my judgment, contextualized it. Her 2019 study The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars gives the “computers” the praise due to them, but resists the temptation to damn Pickering. Edward Pickering was born on July 19, 1846, in Boston, a child of the Unitarian aristocracy. His was a man’s world, and continued so in school, at Boston Latin, then at Harvard. Pickering finished at Harvard in 1865, took a professorial appointment at MIT, married the daughter of a Harvard president, and continued his boyhood fascination with the sky at night. His marriage was childless, but his 1877 appointment at the Harvard Observatory made him a patriarch. And he ran it as a ‘family’ enterprise. For his era, Sobel writes, he was remarkable in his high estimation of women’s abilities, and for their era most of his female computers found their role satisfying. And they had important work to do. Photography expanded the universe of astronomy geometrically, creating huge backlogs of unexamined observations. Who better to catch up than college-educated young women, of which there was now a ready supply? These ambitious women found a home at the Harvard Observatory, and only Antonia Maury clearly established her own career as an independent astronomer. “I do not think it is fair that I should pass work into other hands until it can stand as work done by me.” For most of the others, it was enough of a liberation to be doing professional work for their own wages, a liberation overseen by the patriarchal Pickering. ©

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FANON

Why write this book? No one has asked me for it.
Especially those to whom it is directed.
Well? Well, I reply quite calmly that there are too many idiots in this world. And having said it, I have the burden of proving it. –Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952)

Frantz Fanon was born in Fort-de-France, Martinique, on July 20, 1925, into the secure circumstance of being a child of what he would later call “the national bourgeoisie.” His father served the French empire as a customs officer. His mother kept a shop in town. Together they had enough resource to send him to an elite local school. French was his language and his culture, and he considered himself French. So he felt the pain of the fall of France in 1940, and the worse pain of Martinique falling under Vichy rule. So he gloried in the local revolution that overthrew Vichy in Martinique and, only 18, volunteered for an Antillean battalion of the Free French army. He served in the desert war, then in the bloody invasion of southern France. Severely wounded, he was awarded the Croix de Guerre for valor under fire. It was his nation’s highest military honor, but meanwhile he had discovered that France was not “his” nation. Once the liberation was complete, and with indecent haste, the 5th Antillean Marching Battalion was segregated out and sent ‘back home.’ Throughout his service, he and his comrades had been subjected to racist jibes from their (white) Free French comrades. Sick of it, he returned to Martinique determined to cure himself. And over the next 15 years, Fanon became leader and theoretician for a worldwide liberation. He died in 1961 (complications of leukemia), and when I got to graduate school in 1965 his insights were being applied to the pan-African liberation movements, to the Vietnamese war for independence, even to the root causes and long-term effects of American racial slavery. Besides Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon’s other main contribution was The Wretched of the Earth (1961). These were not so much written as they were dictated by Fanon to his French wife, Josie, and there is something of the analyst’s couch about them, an intimacy. Indeed it was Freud (along with Karl Marx) who provided Fanon with his interpretative tools, and one of his most important contributions was to assess the mind damage done to “subject peoples,” especially colonial elites, by European imperialisms. The colonized could not avoid Europeanization, for them a psychological (and cultural) emasculation. In his darker moments (and there were plenty) , Fanon saw violence as the most likely outcome, the one solution that might match the violence of the oppressor. Not surprisingly, the recent carnage in Gaza (both the Hamas massacres and the Netanyahu genocide) have brought Frantz Fanon’s life and writings back into focus. ©.

[Stanley]

PICARD

We must look to the heavens . . . for the measure of the earth. Jean Picard, Mésure de la terre (1671).

Alan Rickman’s film, A Little Chaos (2014), starring himself as Louis XIV, is about the gardens at Versailles and the efforts of a fictional woman gardener (‘Madame de Barra,’ played by Kate Winslet) to introduce ‘a little chaos’ into their severe geometries. The film’s plot turns on a flood. Villains nearly destroy her unfinished garden by diverting Versailles’ water system into it. Their man-made flood is worsened by a torrential rain, but in a great scene de Barra—almost single-handedly—saves the day. The film closes with the king appreciating her genius. It features Louis XIV’s real head gardener, André le Nôtre (a brooding Mattheus Schoenaerts). But Rickman missed a trick by not casting a role for the Sun King’s master plumber, Jean Picard, who diverted water from the River Seine to Versailles where it fueled a dozen great fountains in what had to be the 17th century’s greatest water show. This involved moving Seine water fourteen miles cross country and lifting that water high enough to run all those fountains (and, fictionally, to inundate Madame de Barra’s chaotic masterpiece). But the Versailles fountains were not Picard’s greatest achievements. He it was who discovered how to measure the size of the solar system and its known planets and satellites, including the earth itself, and to do so with earth-bound instruments, and it was Picard’s measurements that were used by Newton in his foundational calculations about gravity. Jean Picard was born in La Flèche, Val de Loire, on July 21, 1620. He was educated there, at the Jesuit College, where Picard became an enthusiastic astronomer (as well as taking holy orders as a Jesuit). He learned a lot, using the best telescopes available to him, but no telescope could have made the measure of the earth, or Jupiter, or the great distance between the Sun King and the sun. To do that you needed to take different readings from different places and then to apply to them the most exacting geometries. Where Picard learned his geometry (and thus how to triangulate the dimensions of the solar system) is anyone’s guess. Likely he was self-taught, using his bookseller father’s library. So after La Flèche he moved along a base extending to Tycho Brahe’s observatory in Copenhagen, and back again, to give us (and Isaac Newton) amazingly accurate readings, for instance of the distance from the earth to the sun and the circumference of the earth itself. And he dared to say that earth was not a perfect sphere, for his geometry told him that our planet was flattened at its poles. Compared to all this, his Versailles water show was very small beer. Still, if you get the chance to see A Little Chaos, you should take it. It’s a great film, even without a Picard character. ©

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LAZARUS.

Then smiling, thou unveil’dst. O two-faced year,

A virgin world where doors of sunset part,
LAZARUS

Saying, ‘Ho, all who weary, enter here!

There falls each ancient barrier that the art

Of race or creed or rank devised, to rear

Grim bulwarked hatred between heart and heart.

That’s the stirring finish to Emma Lazarus’s hymn to “1492,” the year Columbus made landfall in what was, to him, a New World. To her, it was a still newer world, a hopeful one, as she had already made clear in her “The New Colossus” (1883). The last lines of that particular poem are better known, inscribed as they are at the base of the Statue of Liberty: “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” Nary a mention, in Emma Lazarus’s mind or her poetry, of America’s drawing in (from “shithole countries”) rapists, murderers, gang members, drug dealers. Emma published the “1492” lines (part of a larger poem) in 1887, the year of her death. She’s often thought of as an immigrant herself, but when Emma Lazarus was born, on July 22, 1849, she was as American as any person of European descent could be. Most of her ancestors had been ‘Americans’ for two centuries. The exception was a great-grandfather who’d come from Germany at about the time of the American Revolution—a “latecomer”—and she was educated to be an American. More specifically, an American scholar: she became a devotee of William Cullen Bryant and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and her first volume of poetry (published in 1871, when she was 22) was dedicated to the latter. To be sure, Emma was better educated than most of her fellow Americans, literate in French, German, and Hebrew. And she was well-traveled in Europe, not more than other wealthy New Yorkers of her generation like, say, Edith Wharton (although, like Wharton and Henry James, most of Emma’s European friends were of Britain’s intellectual elite). Back home she became bosom buddies with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s daughter Rose, who would be inspired by Lazarus’s poetry to found a new religious order. Emma began to feel her Jewish roots stir when she considered the rising anti-Semitism in the Tsar’s empire. So for her, “1492” became a symbolic year, two-faced. For it was in 1492, the same year that Columbus landed on an island he called “San Salvador,” Saint Savior, the King of Spain announced the persecution of Spanish Jews. That made Emma’s ancestors exiles in their own land and set in motion their eventual landfall in New Amsterdam. So, in New York, their American descendant took up the immigrants’ causes (persecution and poverty) and lifted her lamp beside the open door. Emma’s history lesson needs to be relearned. ©.

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JANNINGS

My heart and soul belonged to the art of acting; they ordered my head not to worry about things that were none of its concern. Emil Jannings.

One of Adolf Hitler’s triumphs was to remake Hollywood. One can draw up various lists, but a recent estimate counts about 800 exiles from Nazidom in Tinseltown. There they served cinema in varied capacities, including as stage hands and seamstresses. At its higher end, the list includes great names like Billy Wilder, Marlene Dietrich, Paul Henreid, William Wyler, Otto Preminger, and Peter Lorre. That’s just a sample. A few of them did return to Germany, briefly. One of the great pictures of WWII shows Marlene Dietrich, glorious and glamorous in US army boots and fatigues, at the liberation of Aschaffenburg, in mid-Reich, early April 1945. She’s riding into the city in a jeep with three lucky GIs: lucky in more ways than one, because it had been a particularly bloody battle. But one German star who did play big roles in Hollywood returned to Germany and served the Nazi regime. He was Emil Jannings, and the quotation above is from his autobiography, published posthumously in 1951 as a last-ditch effort to prove that he was not, at heart, a Nazi. Although Jannings did have an American father (from St. Louis no less!!) his claims of innocence don’t wash well. Emil Jannings was born in Rorschach, Switzerland, on July 23, 1884. After a somewhat dodgy youth, he settled down in Germany as an actor, working with such as Ernst Lubitsch, first on stage and then on film. They both migrated to Hollywood in the 1920s, and with great success. Jannings it was who won the first-ever Best Actor Oscar in 1929, for The Last Command in which he plays an inadvertently heroic Russian general (at the time of the communist revolution) torn apart by his love and his conflicting loyalties. In 1930 Jannings costarred with Dietrich in The Blue Angel. The film made her American reputation (via YouTube, you can still see her singing “Falling in Love Again”), but Jannings’ heavy German accent (in the film’s English version) sent him back home. There he became a leading player in the Nazi film industry, starring in films that pushed the Führerprinzip. In 1938, no less an authority than Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, named Emil Jannings a Statsschauspieler (“Artist of the State”). Meanwhile, Dietrich and Lubitsch, and all those other exiles, made a new home for themselves in the town some wit once called the “Weimar on the Pacific.” Emil Jannings Oscar was forever tarnished by the choices he made. In 1960, 10 years after his death, he was memorialized in the Hollywood Walk of Fame, but the citation is utterly silent on his work for the Third Reich. According to Marlene Dietrich he was just a “ham,” a scene stealer. Let’s give her the last word. ©

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EARHEART

The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. Amelia Earhart.

Amelia Earhart was born in Atchison, Kansas, on July 24, 1897, in a small white frame house with a gable window identical to the one that Grant Wood used for his famous American Gothic painting. However, the people who lived in the Kansas house were nothing like Grant Wood’s human subjects. Of course, Kansas was already a place where girls could fly: remember Dorothy Gale in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz? That fantasy was an immediate hit in 1900, and it seems likely that Amelia knew of it. But little Miss Gale flew in a tornado, and not by choice. Amelia Earhart became famous in manned (or womaned) flight, as an airplane pilot—by no means the first woman pilot, but very quickly the most famed of all female flyers. And that was not until her early 20s, when her dad took her to see air shows, first in Toronto and then in Los Angeles (where she did actually take to the air, though as a passenger). So some credit is due to her father, Edwin Earhart (1867-1930) whose struggles with alcoholism did not make him a bad parent. But Edwin was not a forceful father. If one looks to parentage to find the source of Amelia’s courage—to decide on a course, and then tenaciously execute it—it was her mother. Also an “Amelia,” mom chose to be called “Amy,” and through all the difficulties of having a drinker for a husband Amy Otis Earhart (1869-1962) raised not one but two unconventional daughters, not only Amelia (“Millie”) but also Grace (“Pidge”) who attended Smith College, graduated from Radcliffe, and spent her own long life (1899-1998) teaching school, causing good (feminist) trouble, and after 1937 safeguarding Amelia’s memory and reputation. To start with, Miss Otis defied her banker-father by marrying beneath her stratum in Atchison society, a failing lawyer whom became a railway clerk. Having produced two girl-children, Amy Earhart announced that she did not want her kids to grow up as “nice little girls.” So she dressed them comfortably, in bloomers and things, and encouraged them in their crazy backyard stunts and then in their schooling as the family moved around to find work for its drinker dad, first to Des Moines, then Minneapolis, then Chicago. It was dad who introduced daughter Amelia to airplanes, in Des Moines (where she preferred the merry-go-round) and then Toronto and LA. There, over Los Angeles, as a passenger, Amelia was hooked. Having made her decision to act, she stuck to it, becoming famous as a daring, darling flyer. Amelia’s biggest dare was to pilot a plane around the world, and she almost made it. But she and her copilot were lost midway across the Pacific, homeward bound, in July 1937. Her own courage is also a family story. ©

[Stanley]

MATILDA

Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Roald Dahl, Matilda (1988)

I had long thought ‘Matilda’ an appropriate name for a girl child of extraordinary orneriness. Then came Dahl’s novel, dynamite for young readers; then a film (1996), then a musical (2010), and now young Matilda Wormwood (as in “gall and bitter wormwood”) is on everyone’s mind. A little girl wise beyond her years, Matilda can spot adult hypocrisy at a distance and then explode it with words and/or telekinetic deeds. This Matilda is especially adept at terrorizing her evil headmistress, Miss Agatha Trunchbull, and holding Trunchbull accountable for her abuses. It’s said that Dahl got his inspiration from Hilaire Belloc’s comic poem “Matilda Who Told Lies and was Burned to Death.” Fair enough: but the name itself comes from the Old Germanic Malhthildis, “mighty in battle” and that fits Dahl’s Miss Wormwood like a boxing glove. And then there was the 12th-century Matilda, Countess of Chester, a woman who has a good claim to being “mighty in battle” and certainly survived to a long life as a landed magnate in her own right, suo jure as they said in the law books. She descended from the wrong side of King Henry I’s blanket, her father Robert, Earl of Gloucester, being the king’s illegitimate (but acknowledged) son. So she was good marriage property, and in 1135 she was married off to the Earl of Chester. So when her significant others (father, husband, brother, and brother-in-law) led an aristocratic revolt against King Stephen, she played a crucial role in the capture of Lincoln castle and was present in Lincoln when, in 1141, King Stephen was captured and brought to terms. This put her (after all, she was of royal blood) in a good position. And she held on to that position even when her husband Ranulph, Earl of Chester, died. She survived Ranulph by 44 years, acting throughout as Countess of Chester suo jure. She collected rents, of course, and held feudal fealties from the great men of her territories. She also, on her own authority, granted charters to towns and monasteries. More notably, she granted a charter of privileges to the Bishop of Chester, who in gratitude reversed the excommunication of her dead husband, who thus got into heaven. An earthly measure of her power was that she secured good marriage alliances for her children. Begging the question of whether Countess Matilda was ever really “mighty in battle” (she captured Lincoln castle by deception, not by the sword), she lived the life of a great territorial magnate for four decades, a remarkable achievement in her time. Matilda, Countess of Chester, died on July 25, 1189. Among her descendants was the rebellious Scotsman Robert the Bruce Perhaps we should also include Miss Matilda Wormwood? ©

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CUTPURSE

Tell them ’twere base to yield, where I have conquered.

I scorn to prostitute myself to a man,

I that can prostitute a man to me.

--Moll, in The Roaring Girl, OR Moll Cutpurse. Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker (1611).

The Roaring Girl has interested scholars for several reasons, not least its female characters, as sharp-tongued as any Katherine in Shakespeare: Moll especially but Goodwife Openwork, a seamstress, has some good lines, too. Close textual analysis has suggested that Thomas Middleton wrote the Moll Cutpurse scenes, leaving the rest to Dekker. Even more interesting, it’s been determined that Moll Cutpurse (“cutpurse” was street slang for pickpocket) was a real person, an actual London lowlife named Mary Frith. Mary was born in the late 1580s and, despite her hazardous occupations, lived quite a long life. She died on July 26, 1659 and, as she wished, was buried in St. Bride’s churchyard, Fleet Street. So Mary Frith, the Roaring Girl, had at least something in common with John Milton, who worshiped at St. Bride’s, and Samuel Pepys, who was baptized there, and it is within the realm of possibility that both men gazed at Mary’s marble tombstone. Sadly, that can no longer be done, for the slab was burned to powder in the Great Fire of 1666. It’s likely that Milton and Pepys knew about her, for her life was made even more sensational by a biography, The Life of Mrs. Mary Frith, published in 1662: sensational, but mostly false. It even has Mary mugging Sir Thomas Fairfax, general of the parliamentary army during the Civil Wars. But the realities of Mary’s life can be traced through court records (including even an offense tried in Star Chamber), hospital registers, and, yes, the Middleton play, and these realities are in their way stranger than fiction. She was first in court, in 1600, accused as a cutpurse, then a potentially fatal offense. She got off that hook, but was occasionally found guilty of lesser crimes (fencing stolen goods, cross-dressing, prostitution, etc.), and was sentenced to Bedlam (London’s dreadful insane asylum) in the early 1640s. She also spent time in the stocks, suffering public humiliation for this or that petty crime. On another side of her life, she seems at times to have aided the authorities in recovering lost or stolen property! She made enough from that to leave substantial bequests to friends in 1659, including one of £20, a stupendous sum for an old woman of the streets. So there was some backbone to our “Moll” who remained, like her character in the Middleton play, unbroken. It’s even likely that she appeared in one performance of The Roaring Girl, as herself, dancing a jig after the last scene. Defiantly, one hopes. ©.

[Stanley]

A BOATLOAD

The revolution in America . . . gave to a people advancing towards civilization, the first opportunity of establishing a government, which would, by degrees, permit them to acquire that greatest of blessings, MENTAL LIBERTY. Robert Dale Owen, July 4, 1826.

Owen, speaking in New Harmony, Indiana on the 50th anniversary of American Independence, announced new goals for his new community: unions of head and heart, mind and body, and a commonality of property which would incline all inhabitants to promote the public good. But that ‘good’ was not a merely material prosperity. Of course New Harmony needed farmers and millers, herdsmen and tanners; but a higher goal was that which could be achieved by “mental liberty.” Relieving citizens of their private concerns would enable them all to achieve some mental liberty. But just in case New Harmony’s farmers and tanners needed a boost, Dale imported what became known as the “Boatload of Knowledge.” So in 1825 the keelboat Philantropist came downriver, from Pittsburgh, filled to the gunnels with knowledge. The French spelling of Philantropist honored the presence of Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, artist and ichthyologist, first president of the Philadelphia Academy of Science, and Marie-Louise Duclos Fretageot, educational reformer. Owen himself was aboard. And so was Thomas Say. Born into a wealthy Quaker family in Philadelphia on July 27, 1787, Say trained as an apothecary but found his life’s mission in his explorations of William Bartram’s garden west of the city. Thenceforth Say devoted himself to identifying and classifying new species in what was, for European naturalists, a new world. By 1812, his work with insects and sea snails had established his reputation, and in that year he cofounded the Philadelphia Academy of Science. He then went on three famous explorations, the sea islands of Georgia and South Carolina, and then the Long expeditions, first to the front range of the Rocky Mountains and then the headwaters of the Mississippi. The Philantropist’s voyage down the Ohio proved a difficult one. Several ladies had to take turns at rowing, and one of them, Lucy Way Sistere (1800-1886), married Say shortly after arrival at New Harmony (they married secretly, for marriage was not entirely approved at New Harmony). It helped, no doubt, that besides being a willing oarswoman Lucy was an accomplished illustrator and an enthusiast for the educational reforms of Johann Pestalozzi. One of Thomas Say’s best works, American Conchology, was first published in New Harmony. Lucy was, of course, the illustrator, and the book itself must be counted among New Harmony’s successes. The utopian experiment failed, as (in 1836) did Thomas Say. Lucy lived on to make a career as a naturalist and illustrator, but she always remembered “the freedom I used to enjoy on the banks of the Wabash.” So should we. ©

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POPPER

Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945).

I first encountered Karl Popper’s paradoxical world in my Junior year. The Open Society and Its Enemies, all two volumes, was required reading in William Fontaine’s “Philosophy of the Social Sciences,” Philosophy 21, a course required by my history major. Fontaine was himself a paradox, then the only tenured black professor in the Ivy League, a friend of Kwame Nkrumah and Nnamdi Azikiwe, leaders of African decolonization, and thus certainly a radical. But Fontaine was a conservative radical, Karl Popper fit him to a ‘T’, and The Open Society and Its Enemies got star billing in Fontaine’s weighty list of required readings. Karl Popper was born in Vienna on July 28, 1902. His father was a lawyer, rich enough to afford young Karl access to the family’s private library of 12,000 volumes. But the son proved difficult, left school at 16, and could only enroll in the University of Vienna as a guest student. Meanwhile Popper worked in construction, trained as a cabinet maker, became a communist, and was involved in street riots. That experience left him disillusioned with Marxism and sent him back to university as a regular student where he studied various subjects and in 1928 earned a doctorate in psychology, but his thesis was really about theories of knowledge, and his first publication (1934) was in philosophy. But 1930s Vienna was no place for an assimilated Jew (Popper was baptized a Lutheran) and in 1938 he emigrated to New Zealand where, now a devoted enemy of all totalitarianisms (and thus intolerant only of the intolerant), Popper began work on The Open Society and Its Enemies. In the fulness of his very long career (Popper died in 1994) Popper would become much better known, famous indeed, as a philosopher of science. There, his insistence that a theory could be called “scientific” only if it were falsifiable has become an orthodoxy of its own, yet another Popperian paradox. But it’s a sensible paradox. Science’s greatest heroes are doubters who look for inconsistencies and errors in the orthodoxy of the day, and then propose solutions to them. Science progresses insofar as it maintains openness and welcomes criticism. But it proceeds from insight to experiment. It assumes a cause and effect universe. It does not regard as “criticism” the absurd notion that the idea of a warming climate is some species of political conspiracy. As for me, I remember Popper still as a brilliant philosopher of history, the man who made Plato villainous and Socrates heroic and who inspired William Fontaine’s view that any theory of history that explains everything really explains nothing at all. ©

[Stanley]

KASSEBAUM

We will never agree on all issues, nor should we. But we can respect and understand. Nancy Kassebaum Baker, Commencement Address, Kansas State University, May 15, 2015.

Nancy Kassebaum, as she was known through her political life, was a rock-solid Republican, conservative on fiscal issues, distrustful of ‘big’ government, and certain that the free market was the best of all regulatory mechanisms. One might say that she had to hold these positions, for on July 29, 1932, in Topeka, Kansas, she was born Nancy Josephine Landon. Her father Alf was running for political office, and in 1933 he became Kansas governor. He was also his daughter’s hero. She absorbed his principles and, as far as I know, has never abandoned them. Of course those principles took Alf Landon to one of the most lopsided losses in American presidential election history, in 1936, when (still in the depths of the Great Depression) the American voter desperately wanted big government to step in, spend money, and corral the ‘free’ market. Alf Landon won in only two states (neither of them Kansas), and the final electoral vote tally was 523-8 in favor of Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal for the American people. But, as Ms. Kassebaum never tired of pointing out, Alf Landon got the point. A progressive Republican of the old school (think Teddy Roosevelt or Bob LaFollette), he understood that government had a role to play in bad times. And he could learn. Alf lived long enough (100 years) to apply the lesson. He supported Harry Truman’s Marshall Plan, backed Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program, and taught his daughter that compromise is the very essence of democracy. So when Nancy ran for the Senate in 1978 (in the throes of a divorce from her talk radio mogul husband), she ran as a conservative (of course), but also as a consensus candidate. And, in the Senate for three terms, that’s how Kassebaum acted. Still a fiscal conservative, she defied Reagan’s nonsense that tax cuts would reduce deficits. When it came to good sense and issues of public morality, there was no aisle to cross, as she proved in engineering a crushing defeat of Reagan’s desire to leave apartheid South Africa harmless. She demanded sanctions and the release of Nelson Mandela. Later, in the 1990s, and with a Republican majority behind her, she worked with Ted Kennedy to reform private health insurance abuses (on the issue of pre-existing conditions), thus predicting a major feature of “Obamacare.” Kassebaum retired from the Senate in 1996, having married another aisle-crossing conservative, Howard Baker, one who’d applied the coup de grace to the liar-president Richard Nixon. So it was no surprise when Nancy Kassebaum Baker jumped ship entirely after her Republican Party betrayed itself by nominating Donald Trump in 2016. Her 94th birthday is today, and from across the aisle I hope she’s well enough to enjoy it. ©.

[Stanley]

CONGRESSWOMAN

I have a brain and a uterus, and I use both. Patricia Schroeder, 1972, answering a question on whether a woman who was a mother could be a “congressman.”

Pat Schroeder, mother of two boys and wife of another, went on to win that election and become the first woman to represent Colorado in congress. She found the House of Representatives a manly place, a “guy gulag,” but then so was Harvard Law where, in her year, there were only 15 women in a class of 500. Along with her law degree (and her Harvard Law husband) she settled in Denver, birthed two boys, and made enough spare time to serve as volunteer counsel for Planned Parenthood, engage in Democratic Party politics, and demonstrate against the war in Vietnam. When “establishment” Democrats timidly chose a conservative to run in her district, her husband suggested she should contest the primary. She won it, went on to win in the general election, countering the Nixon landslide of 1972. Pat Schroeder won eleven more elections, always by healthy margins. In the House she identified as a progressive, a challenging choice in the Reagan era (and not much less challenging when so-called “new” Democrats occupied the White House). She was particularly effective on issues involving women and families. On the abortion issue she proclaimed herself ‘pro-life’ and ‘pro-choice,’ sensible enough for a woman who’d chosen marriage and motherhood. But women were more than functioning uteruses, and she was a lioness on employment issues: equality in pay, equality in hiring and promotion, and no penalties for pregnancy. It was a measure of her effectiveness that Lt. Col. Oliver ( “Ollie”) North, that paragon of patriotism and promoter of executive lawlessness, called her one of the 25 most dangerous politicians in America. She returned his favor by her hard work, her wide-ranging activism, and, not least, her sharp tongue. In an earlier age, when men had ruled unchallenged in public places, an earlier Ollie might have put an earlier Pat in the stocks for her razor wit. But he just had to listen. My personal favorite is her comment on Vice-President Dan Quayle, who (she said) “thinks Roe versus Wade are two ways to get across the Potomac.” No wonder that in 1972 the USA’s champion paranoiac, J. Edgar Hoover, put Ms. Schroeder under FBI surveillance, using US tax dollars to hire Mr. Schroeder’s barber as a scissors snoop. ‘By their enemies you shall know them.’ I’m thus especially pleased to find that Pat Schroeder and I have a couple of other things in common. She was born in Portland, Oregon, on July 30, 1940. And then she grew up in Des Moines, where she graduated from Theodore Roosevelt High School in 1958. Only the dates are different. But I don’t have a uterus, and I never learned how to pilot a plane. Patricia got her pilot’s license even before she got her TRHS diploma. Her dad was a pilot; why not the daughter? ©