BOB'S BITS

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In case you were wondering.... I haven't heard anything from Bob since Sunday.....

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THUNDER

Damn them! They will not let my play run, but they will steal my thunder. John Dennis, 1709.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this is the first recorded use of the idiomatic expression ‘to steal one’s thunder.’ Some scholars regard the attribution as doubtful, but a good—and apparently true—story lies behind it. John Dennis, a playwright of modest talent, had staged a rewrite of John Webster’s Appius and Virginia. As a play it was a flop, but for it Dennis had invented a new way of sounding thunder on stage, banging sheet metal, an improvement on the traditional method of torturing a large wooden bowl with a wooden bat. The theater owner soon (after only three performances) scrapped Dennis’s Appius and, looking for a surer-fire revival, put on Shakespeare’s Macbeth. That play has two scenes (both of them involving the three witches) calling for thunder, and Dennis’s new device was used—and praised. So his thunder was stolen, and he did react badly. Whether or not he actually coined the phrase, John Dennis was a pugnacious sort. Perhaps he had to be, for he was born a saddler’s son in Holborn, London, on September 16, 1658. He had a prosperous uncle, though, a London alderman, who sent the boy to Harrow School and then on to Cambridge where he graduated BA at the then relatively advanced age of 21. In both places he found he had a way with words, which won him an award at Harrow but trouble at Cambridge. There one of his verbal quarrels escalated to violence and resulted in a termination of his fellowship. A little later, in London, John Dennis sued his own mother for allegedly stealing money bequeathed him by that uncle. Settling out of court, Dennis moved on to establish himself as a literary man in what was becoming a very competitive environment. London was filling up with literary men. In this environment, Dennis made his name with patriotic bombast and political invective. He hated France and popery, no doubt sincerely, but it helped to sell his writings. Dennis’s celebration of the great victory at Blenheim, Britannia triumphans (1704) brought him a cash reward from Blenheim’s hero, John Churchill, duke of Marlborough, and a minor post under Queen Anne, at £52 per year. Neither the sinecure, nor his plays or poems, proved enough to keep Dennis out of debtors’ prison. He certainly lived too extravagantly and offended too many people, but his way with words survived, and so did his aggressiveness. Having generally failed as a playwright, Dennis soon emerged as a leading critic and essayist, taking sides in English politics (generally with the Whigs) and sniping at other writers. Such scribblers were, at the time, a dime per dozen, and were also infamous for changing sides on the proverbial dime, but Dennis made his reputation (and enough to live on) with interesting reflections on the old masters, including Shakespeare, combative rhetoric about the French and any Briton who might ally with them, and scathing attacks on other leading essayists of the time, notably Alexander Pope. Their battles won Dennis a minor place in Pope’s Dunciad, itself a landmark in satirical invective, but it was not enough. Blind, aging, and ill, Dennis survived on small gifts from old allies and former patrons, At his death in 1734 he had retained enough friends to be buried in a churchyard and enough money to avoid a pauper’s grave. John Dennis has since been recognized as a pioneer in Shakespeare scholarship, but this came far too late to ease the miseries of his old age. ©.

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"The Queen of Crime" is a registered trademark.

By inclination as well as breeding she belonged to the English upper middle class. She wrote about, and for, people like herself. From the London Times, January 1976.

As an obituary ‘summing up,’ that’s a fair comment, even a nicely-turned compliment, but it cannot explain why the deceased author, Agatha Christie, had by the time of her death sold over 100,000,000 books. Her prose (in English, of course) was simple, straightforward, perhaps suggestive of the constrained rhetoric of her class. But by the same token it was easily translated, into about 100 languages, (apparently) easily read by people who were clearly not of “the English upper middle class.” And then there were Christie’s plays, notably The Mousetrap, which is still running in London over 70 years after its opening night. It has had to change theaters, and it took a break during the Covid crisis, but by now it qualifies as an institution in itself. So Christie’s has been an astounding success: unbounded, indeed, by its social class origins. And that’s not to mention the long running popularity of television and film adaptations which have brought worldwide fame to her leading creations, Hercule Poirot and (Miss) Jane Marple. Paulette and I have just finished another marathon run through David Suchet’s dozen seasons as “Poirot,” and we have on DVD all of Joan Hickson’s “Marple” performances. And we still keep about 40 (more than half) of Christie’s novels, most of them featuring Poirot or Marple. And still we are apologetic about it. Christie cannot qualify as a great writer. Her pedestrian prose and impossible plots disqualify her from any such accolade. Agatha Christie was born Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller on September 15, 1890, her father a “gentleman of substance” and her mother sired out of the British army officer class. There was an American connection but Agatha was born in the excessively English town of Torquay. Agatha claimed a happy childhood, though her portraits from that period suggest a stylish sadness. Her first marriage (to “Archie” Christie) didn’t work out well, either, ending spectacularly in her 12-day disappearance (like a bad plot, but maybe genuine)/. Then came a second and happier marriage to an archaeologist, Max Mallowan. Her first books had made a splash, so she retained “Agatha Christie” as her pen name. It became a guarantee of a few hours’ restful reading. And well before she died (of natural causes, I assure you) she’d made it into a brand, a trademark, indeed a company. Agatha Christie Limited continued so, after her death, superintended first by her daughter Rosalind and now by her grandson Mathew. Christie Ltd has, lately, bleached out some of Agatha’s racial prejudices, and it continues to oversee all Agatha adaptations. So what was intended as easy reading remains easy to this day. If you want to enjoy a murder, read a Christie. ©.

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SEX TRAFFICKING

Elizabeth Canning is a poor, honest, innocent, simple soul, and the most unhappy and most injured of all human beings. Henry Fielding, 1753.

Henry Fielding was a writer, even the father of the English novel. HisThe History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749) has come down to us most notably the film Tom Jones (1963), a rollicking and bawdy romp which introduced Albert Finney to the world (as the eponymous hero) and employed the writing talents of England’s trademark ‘angry young man’, John Osborne. Fielding (1707-1754) was interested in the fate of young down and outs; indeed the down-and-out character was a near obsession in his fictions. Fielding was occasionally a down and outer himself, falling prey to his bad habits and then, occasionally, enjoying redemption. He was also a hack for hire, a scribbler-participant in London’s satiric battles. It’s less well known that Fielding was a law and order guy who founded one of London’s earliest police forces and who served as a magistrate. It was Fielding the magistrate-writer who got involved in the case of Elizabeth Canning, a cause célèbre that set 1750s London on its ear and then echoed down the ages. Elizabeth Canning was born in London on September 17, 1734. The family was poor, but respectable, and at 15 Elizabeth hired out as a maidservant. This “obscure damsel, of low degree” set out to another job on New Year’s Day, 1753, and disappeared. Four weeks later she staggered home, emaciated, raggedly dressed, with a story to tell. She’d been kidnapped, held in durance vile, tempted to take up prostitution, and escaped. Fielding examined her story. The ensuing trial issued in a death penalty for her alleged tormenter, Mary Squires, an old, ugly gypsy woman, and mob action against one of the neighborhood’s more notorious houses of ill repute. But her story was not believed by all, and eventually King George II commuted Squire’s death sentence. Elizabeth Canning was put on trial for “willful and corrupt perjury” and found guilty. But even the jurymen didn’t like the “corrupt” part of the charge, and the case continued to roil London between the “Canningites” and the “Egyptians” (so called because they believed the gypsy woman to be innocent). As for Elizabeth, she was transported to Connecticut as punishment, but there found redemption in the house of a minister, Elisha Williams, and then respectability as the wife of the colonial governor’s nephew, John Treat, and the mother of his four children. Elizabeth died suddenly on the eve of the American Revolution. Foul play was not suspected. But her case continues to fascinate legal scholars, psychologists, and not a few scribblers. A recent (2019) article on the Canning affair cites over forty books on the case. ©

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ARCHIE

He who lives much alone within the portals of the temple of Nature learns to think, and deeply, of things which seldom come within the scope of ordinary life. Grey Owl, The Adventures of Sajo and Her Beaver People (1935).

Written as a children’s book, The Adventures of Sajo made big splash. Grey Owl, who lived with his wife Anahareo in the wilds of northern Manitoba, was already well known and would become more famous yet. A couple of his books were on my father’s family bookshelves in Ames, Iowa, and if that were not enough (it wasn’t), Grey Owl made two wildly successful tours of Britain (in 1935 and 1937). Hundreds (and in one case over a thousand) attended his lectures and book signings, and in December 1937 he gave a Royal Command Performance at Buckingham Palace. The royal princesses Elizabeth and Margaret were mesmerized. On his arrival, Grey Owl offered King George VI a green leaf as a symbol of nature, and when he departed he addressed the king as “brother,” for indeed they were siblings of nature. Grey Owl even called the king a “keen” woodsman. I can’t say whether George VI was a Leatherstocking, but Grey Owl was not Grey Owl. Grey Owl was born Archibald Stansfield Belaney in Brighton, Sussex, on September 18, 1888. His parents George and Kittie (she was only 17, the sister of George’s first wife) almost immediately returned to the USA to resume George’s spendthrift career, so it’s possible that Archie (left behind with his grandmother and aunts) was a dreamer from birth. He roamed the Sussex countryside, collecting specimens, and in his chemistry class he made “Belaney Bombs.” And he read about North American Indians. At 18, he emigrated to Canada where he began the process of becoming Indian at a resort town in the wilds of northern Ontario. There he fell in with an Ojibwe family, learned to run a trapline, married the daughter and got himself an Ojibwe nickname, “Little Owl.” Further adventures followed, too complicated for summary, but might have included Archie wounding himself in WWI, then returning to Canada, still Archie, working in provincial parks in Ontario, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. Gradually, Archie built himself a new identity as an Anglo-Apache, and then in about 1930 a virtual rebirth as Grey Owl, now married to Anahareo, an Ontario Mohawk, and living in a tiny cabin, which they called Beaver Lodge, in the Saskatchewan wilderness. It’s an incredible story however it’s told. Much of it we now know from Anahareo, who was actually a Native American, who became thoroughly disillusioned with Grey Owl (although not with his conservationist causes) and wrote bitterly about him as “Archie” in a later memoir. But Anahareo-Gertrude was not the person who exposed Archie-Grey Owl. Grey Owl died (of exhaustion, apparently) in early 1938, and it was in the process of finding out who this corpse had been that the world (re)discovered Archibald Stansfield Belaney. ©.

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KOSSUTH

The spirit of our age is Democracy. All for the people, and all by the people.. . . My nation will rise, called to resurrection by the eternal principles of the law of nature and of nature’s God. Lajos Kossuth, February 7, 1852, speaking to the Ohio state legislature.

In 1851, the revolutionary Lajos Kossuth embarked a three-year tour of the American republic. It was a triumphal tour, parades, marching bands, greeting committees, parties, and speeches. Kossuth gave good value. He was a lectern spellbinder, but he was not celebrating a triumph. He was a refugee from the failed Hungarian revolution of 1848, a revolution he had led. That in itself was an unlikely outcome, for he could claim noble, or at least gentry, birth. Born in northern Hungary on September 19, 1802, Lajos Kossuth was the son of Slovak parents. His father sprang from an ancient and noble Slovak line, and was very conscious of that, but he was a landless lawyer. He became a prosperous one, and Lajos, an only son, followed the father in that very bourgeois profession to become, himself, a successful lawyer and land agent—and a politician. In his time and place, politics was a limited trade. Hungary was a mere province, a subsidiary kingdom in the empire of the Hapsburgs. If it weren’t for Tsarist Russia, Austria-Hungary would have been the most reactionary of European states. So ‘politicians’ had limited scope, in Kossuth’s case limited still further by his Slovak and Lutheran origins. Reaction set in even more strongly after the Napoleonic wars, and this deepened Kossuth’s sense of alienation. By stages, mostly in so-called ‘county’ assemblies, Kossuth rose to prominence as a leader of an opposition, visible enough that in the 1840s Count Metternich, the Austrian architect of absolutism, tried to buy Kossuth off with an imperial sinecure. It was too late. Kossuth’s skills (as a journalist, an orator, a lawyer-legislator) had made him into a Hungarian nationalist. In the Romantic Era, this made him also an advocate of “Magyarization,” a cultural declaration of independence from the Hapsburgs and the German metropolis of Vienna. Already a master of three languages (Slovak, Magyar, and German), Kossuth added English to his armory, and a growing admiration for that distant republican offshoot of English political culture, the infant United States of America. The Hungarian Revolution went a long way (with Kossuth as minister of finance in a Hungarian government) but not far enough, and in 1849 the Hapsburgs (with a lot of military help from the Russian Tsar) marched back into Buda-Pest and Kossuth went into exile. But he was a hero to Americans (not to mention to Marx and Engels). He went to Ohio because many Hungarian refugees had settled there, a radical leaven that helps to explain that state’s enthusiasm for the Union cause in the US Civil War. Lajos never did make it to Iowa, but in 1851 the new state’s largest county was named after him. It was, no doubt,

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THERMOSMAN

Minds are like parachutes. They only function when they are open. Sir James Dewar.

To credit Sir James Dewar with this useful quotation seemed dubious to me, not least because he said the same thing about books, which were in his era in much more common use than parachutes. The word parachute is a borrowing, from France, where romantic souls were much more likely than the phlegmatic British to try outlandish stunts. Parachute first entered English in 1784, in a report about the atmospheric adventures of the Montgolfier brothers who entertained Paris (and Benjamin Franklin) by rising up under hot air balloons and then floating down under “parachutes.” Later, during the French Revolution, André Jacques-Garnerin did the same thing. He later toured Britain.

Bold Garnerin went up

Which increased his Repute

And came safe to earth

In his Grand Parachute.

There’s no way of finding whether Sir James Dewar was familiar with parachuting, but he was a clever, inventive, daring scientist. He was born in Perthshire, Scotland, on September 20, 1842, his father a prosperous wine merchant. After local schooling and a stint at the already-famous Dollar Academy, Dewar studied chemistry at the University of Edinburgh, then at Ghent on the continent. Afterwards he held important posts at Cambridge and back in Edinburgh. Disciplinary boundaries were porous, and we could as well call Dewar a physicist as a chemist. At any rate, after chemical experiments with such useful things as benzene and gunpowder, Dewar turned towards light, electricity, heat, and cold. Many of his experiments were as daring as parachuting, often made more risky by the necessity of using only primitive equipment and open minds. Not a few 19th-century scientists died of such combinations, but Dewar survived. He’s best remembered today not for whiskey (as with another branch of the Dewar clan) but for his work in the liquefication of gases. I have no idea how such low temperatures could be achieved in late 19th-century laboratories, but Dewar did it. Not only did he achieve several “firsts”, for instance making liquid oxygen and hydrogen; in 1891 he built a machine capable of producing liquid gas in industrial quantities. Next time you are in London you can see it, in the Museum of the Royal Institution. Along the way (in order to preserve these frigid liquids) Dewar invented the ‘vacuum’ container. But he failed to patent the idea, so we don’t call the thing we take on picnics a “Dewar”. Instead, it’s a “Thermos,” the name of the German company (founded in 1904) that developed the idea.

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DOMESTICITY

Just as the whole country exploded into a volcano of affluence, I was snatched up by a Montana mining engineer and taken to South America. Kim Williams, in an interview on PBS, 1980.

Kim Williams was interviewed on PBS because she was a popular commentator on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.” It wasn’t exactly a career, but she did it for over a decade, so it qualifies as an occupation. It’s said that she played that role for longer than anyone else in NPR’s short history. Williams’s commentaries on American life were folksy, witty, down to earth. A lot had to do with what she called “urban foraging,” finding odd stuff to eat (e.g. fungi) or use (empty jars) in and around her city (Missoula, Montana). This was not radical left wing stuff, but there was a bite to it, especially when it came to the destructions wrought by that “volcano of affluence.” Our consumer culture, then in its boom years, had distressingly bad effects on nature. It corroded our moral sensibility, encouraging wastefulness. And it hazarded our health, for instance through epidemic obesity. Thus Kim Williams had a critical reading on women’s diet magazines. On page 1, you got the diet. On page 2, you got an advertisement for chocolate cake. It was, she said, “a losing proposition.” Kim Williams was born on September 21, 1923 as Elizabeth Andrea Kandiko, the middle child (of 7) of Hungarian immigrants who’d settled on a small holding outside of Hudson, New York. Hard work and thrifty ways governed their days and her life. So when she got into Cornell University (a triumph in itself) she majored in Home Economics. Except Cornell, after all a progressive institution, had from 1925 called it Human Ecology. Kim Williams was a modern young woman, intelligent and ambitious for a successful ‘career;’ and yet she wanted to be the great homemaker that her immigrant mother had been. So after hit and miss jobs in writing and advertising in New York and LA, she got ‘snatched up’ by a mining engineer, Mel Williams, and spirited away to Chile. This did produce a lightly comic, semi-autobiographical novel, fetchingly entitled High Heels in the Andes (1959), and Kim Williams also began a personal journal which details her gentle, but deepening, alienation. Her husband’s retirement brought them stateside, in Missoula, where he could fish and hunt and she could go back to college. She added an interdisciplinary master’s degree to her resumé, then taught, and started commenting for a local newspaper and Missoula public radio. Hers was not an unhappy life, but it was governed by tension between traditional ideals of womanhood and the ‘new’ feminist challenges of personal identity and ambition. In 2020, a University of Montana undergraduate, Emmet Ball, captured that tension in the title and text of his honors dissertation: “Kim Williams: Professionalizing Domesticity in Montana and Abroad, 1923-1986.” It’s well worth a read. ©

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DAS RHEINGOLD

My beloved Elsa! Your cruel father has torn us apart. Eternally yours, Heinrich. King Ludwig II to Duchess Sophie Charlotte, October 1867.

Thus the engagement between Ludwig and his cousin the Duchess Sophie came to an end. It’s a sad verse in the long swansong of the Bavarian monarchy. Ludwig II’s part in it would end with his deposition and still-mysterious death in 1886. He was deposed on grounds of insanity. It was a dubious diagnosis, and the deposition was certainly ‘illegal,’ for Bavaria had no 25th Amendment in its constitutional law. But Ludwig was eccentric. His bizarre enthusiasms exhausted his personal fortune and threatened Bavarian state finances. In this, notably in building and equipping fairy-tale castles and patronizing the arts, he was even odder (and more spendthrift) than his grandfather and namesake, Ludwig I, who had abdicated during the failed revolutions of 1848. One of Ludwig II’s many enthusiasms was for the composer Richard Wagner. The break-up letter to Duchess Sophie offers some evidence of this, for “Elsa” and “Heinrich” were leading characters in Wagner’s Romantic opera Lohengrin (1850). Whether or not the Duchess Sophie liked being cast as the tragic Elsa, she also was a Wagner devotee. She later made a more suitable match with a French prince. Ludwig II’s passion for Wagner never abated, and there’s no doubt it was a passion, both artistic and sexual. In the 1870s the king would finance the building of Wagner’s villa, Wahnfried, at Bayreuth, in Bavaria of course. There’s an aptness here: Wahn (madness, delusion) and fried (freedom, peace). And it's fitting that a brass bust of Ludwig II was installed in 1874 and still stands guard in front of Wahnfried. There was a kind of affair between Ludwig and Richard, who first met face-to-face at the beginning of Ludwig’s reign. An unpleasant aspect was Wagner’s eagerness to exploit the romance. He needed the money for his long-planned “Ring Cycle” operas, and (already in his 50s and vigorously heterosexual, just beginning his affair with Cosima von Bülow) Wagner encouraged the young king with what can only be called love letters. But there was at least one brief spat between Ludwig and Richard. It concerned Wagner’s opera Das Rheingold. Ludwig, who held the copyright, wanted the opera to be performed right now, at his very own opera house, in Munich. Wagner wanted to wait until the other three operas of the Ring Cycle were ready. Ludwig scheduled the premier for August 1869. Wagner did everything he could, which wasn’t much, to sabotage the production, for instance by changing conductors, but Ludwig prevailed, and the premiere performance of Das Rheingold took place, in Ludwig’s presence of course, on September 22, 1869. Richard Wagner was refused entry. Cosima von Bülow reported that the reviewers called the opera “lavishly decorated” but “boring.” ©

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DARK AND STORMY NIGHT

The chimney crashed through the roof the school dining hall at 6:15 o'clock while the students were eating dinner. There were 140 girls in the hall at the time and it is considered miraculous that many more were not killed. New York Times, September 22, 1938.

This was from a very short news report, for the 1938 hurricane had spread fatalities and destruction throughout New England, so two deaths at the Northfield (MA) Seminary for Girls didn’t get much space. Cut off from Northfield Hospital by the flooding Connecticut River, without electricity, the seminary’s doctor worked by candlelight to triage patients, clean and stitch wounds, stanch blood, and set broken bones. There were only two deaths, girls killed instantly by the falling chimney, and come daylight and relative calm, only two others would be listed as “seriously” injured. But it wasn’t a miracle. Call it good luck that the seminary had in 1934 hired Dr. Harriet Louise Hardy as resident physician and that at a time when it was very difficult for a female doctor to find work anywhere else. Harriet Hardy was born on September 23, 1906, in Arlington, Massachusetts. Family deaths (her father when she was 4, and a brother when she was 11) fired her ambition to become a medical doctor, so after a Wellesley College BS, she graduated MD at Cornell in 1932. Cornell medicine had been coeducational since its founding (1898), but in 1932 it was still difficult for a woman doctor to find work. So, after a residency at Philadelphia General, Dr. Hardy settled for a job at the Northfield Seminary. It proved congenial, and for the rest of her working life Hardy worked in institutional settings. And she worked well. After the ‘miracle’ of September 1938 she moved on to Radcliffe College. At Radcliffe, she showed mettle by tacking her study of 100 Radcliffe women to a highly-publicized and generously-financed study of the “normal American male,” a study conducted entirely within the Harvard College student body. But her real fame was to come later, as a public health specialist, first in Massachusetts Division of Occupational Hygiene, then at Las Alamos, NM, at the national atomic laboratory. In both she proved important causal connections between work and disease. Back in New England, Hardy founded MIT’s Environmental Medicine Service. Then, in 1958, she became the first woman to hold a faculty (clinical) appointment at Harvard Medical School. Such a flurry of intense activity (which included research work, worldwide, in what Hardy called “man-made diseases”) looks almost miraculous, until you consider what she had accomplished on that stormy night in 1938, at a girls school, when she worked by candlelight to stem panic and to mend bodies. Still, in the retrospect provided by Hardy’s later career, this was a news story that deserved more than two column inches. ©.

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KINGMAKER?

There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money and I can't remember what the second one is. Mark Hanna.

Whether Mark Hanna (1837-1904) ever uttered these words, the attribution is understandable. Hanna was the first modern kingmaker in American politics because he had a lot of money, and he used it generously to elect William McKinley as president in 1896. Hanna spent $100,000 just to help McKinley get the nomination, and he then led the fundraising effort for the general election. While McKinley ‘ran’ from his front porch in Canton, Hanna labored to convince other ‘captains of industry’ that their wealth depended on a McKinley victory. And it was a credible argument. There was already a depression on, which was bad enough, but here was William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic candidate, who wanted to get the country out of hock by abandoning the Gold Standard, lowering tariffs, and reining in the railroads. All three were “money” issues, and the country’s monied men had to stump up to ensure McKinley’s election. In the end, Hanna and his agents spent $7 million for McKinley. The Bryan campaign raised only $300,000. (In 2025 $$, that’s $270 million versus $11 million). McKinley won—Hey, presto!! But it was more complicated than that, of course. Setting aside the high participation rate (in some states, 90% of eligible citizens actually voted) and the relatively narrow outcome (54% for McKinley, 46% for Bryan, with a much wider margin in the always-skewed electoral college), there was also the relationship between McKinley and Hanna. Marcus Alonzo Hanna was born in New Lisbon, OH, on September 24, 1837, into an enterprising Quaker family. Coming into his own, he invested his grocery profits in coal, steel, and newspapers and waxed pretty rich, though not as rich as his old schoolmate John D. Rockefeller. But he was not a reactionary employer. Once, when coal miners in Hanna’s pits went on strike, he met them. made concessions, and got them back to work without the help of the National Guard. He met William McKinley when the young lawyer was representing striking miners in another labor dispute. McKinley won the case and won Hanna’s admiration. Like many Republican politicians at the time, McKinley and Hanna believed that there was—and should be—a “real” common interest between capital and labor, between factory and farm. It was an interest worth investing in. Today, especially after the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC, we live in a different political world. Hanna may well have “bought” the election of William McKinley, but he hadn’t purchased his party, as the party proved in 1900 when it nominated Theodore Roosevelt as McKinley’s new running mate. After McKinley’s assassination in 1901, kingmaker Hanna was consigned to the political wilderness. ©.

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DROSOPHILA

Now that we locate [genes] in the chromosomes are we justified in regarding them as material units; as chemical bodies of a higher order than molecules? Frankly, these are questions with which the working geneticist has not much concerned himself, except now and then to speculate . . . . If the gene is a material unit, it is a piece of chromosome; if it is a fictitious unit, it must be referred to a definite location in a chromosome—the same place as on the other hypothesis. Therefore it makes no difference in the actual work of genetics which point of view is taken. Thomas Hunt Morgan, 1934.

I quote at length from Morgan’s Nobel Prize (physiology) lecture, because it shows a scientist who has broken through one scientific barrier, sees another, but does not despair. Morgan’s experiments with fruit flies (Drosophila) had within only five years produced over 125 “new types” of the wee beasties. So their material origins were “completely known.” Their distinctive characters would be passed on to new generations of Drosophila through a ‘genetic material’. The exact nature of this material was not known. “Beyond this point our strongest microscopes fail to penetrate.” Morgan entitled his 1916 study A Critique of the Theory of Evolution, and so it was a “critique,” but it was one that experimentally confirmed a mechanism for Charles Darwin’s theory On the Origin of Species (1859). It was a mechanism that scientists could use without yet knowing what, exactly, the genetic material was. To put it another way, the ‘theory’ was no longer a theory. Thomas Hunt Morgan was born 7 years after Darwin’s publication, in Kentucky, on September 25, 1866. His own inheritance came from the southern slaveholding aristocracy, with a spice of ‘new money,’ but environmental hard times encouraged Morgan to look elsewhere for an identity. While his father played at racial romance with Confederate States Army (CSA reunions), Morgan studied biology and natural history at the University of Kentucky (BS) and then Johns Hopkins (PhD). Pioneer work on embryology (of marine arthropods) led him into work on speciation, and by 1910, now at Columbia, he’d established his famous (or infamous, for it reeked) “Fly Room.” Fruit flies reproduced fast and in great numbers. ‘Mutations’ could be reproduced, counted, manipulated. It’s also worth noting that Morgan attracted brilliant students to help him, and he was not reluctant to credit them, notably Nettie Stevens, Theodosius Dobzhansky, and Linus Pauling, each pioneers in their own right. As for the exact identity of the “genetic material,” Pauling and his son would work on that, but in the end a solution required something quite other than a better microscope. Working from crystallography (thus trespassing on physics), Francis Crick and James Watson would, in 1953, produce a full working model of the DNA molecule, genes attached to chromosomes. This ‘double helix’ opened a new experimental frontier in the science of life and, beyond that, new problems of theory. ©.

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PROGRESSIVISM

The Nation is today more than a source of satisfaction to its subscribers. It is a weapon in our common fight for a democratic victory and a decent peace; against reaction, isolationism, and appeasement. Freda Kirchwey to Harris L. Kempner, March 1, 1943.

I’ve subscribed to The Nation, off and on, for sixty years. I’ve received many fundraising appeals from it, but this 1943 letter is interesting. Harris Kempner (1903-1987), was a graduate (cum laude) of Harvard and the Sorbonne, a keen golfer and tennis player, a cotton and sugar millionaire. And he was a radical. Not only was he a Nation subscriber. He was a Texan who supported all sorts of ‘liberal’ causes: medical research, mental health, the NAACP among them, putting them all together in efforts to bring minority enrollment to the University of Texas medical school. Kempner had been a faithful donor to The Nation from 1923, when he was still a fresh-faced Harvard undergraduate. That in 1943, Freda Kirchwey thought Kempner might be a good touch testifies to the breadth and depth of American progressivism, and why that ‘progressive coalition’ so discommoded another Texan, Martin Dies (1900-1972), then chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Freda Kirchwey’s friendship with Kempner (and her dislike of Dies) had deep roots. She was born in Lake Placid, NY, on September 26, 1893, the daughter of a law professor, a pacifist with impeccable progressive credentials. At Barnard College (then Columbia’s female division) she gravitated towards the suffrage movement, and after graduation took her skills into newspaper journalism. There she adopted a more militantly feminist stance. The Nation hired her in 1918. She became its managing editor in 1933 and, ten years later, its owner and executive editor. At The Nation she ran an open shop, encouraging a diversity of progressive views and engaging in debates with respectable conservatives (a classification which did not include Martin Dies). Though a militant on many issues (including her ‘free love’ marriage), she urged progressives to bury their sectarian animosities for the greater good of The Nation and, for that matter, the nation too. And it paid off. At a dinner celebrating her 25 years with The Nation, even Franklin Roosevelt was welcome, although Kirchwey had often lacerated him for his timidity on American racial issues and his failure to offer salvation and citizenship to Germany’s Jews. Given the value she placed on consensus, it was ironic that Kirchwey did so much to fracture the progressive coalition. At issue was her generally tolerant view of the USSR (and of Soviet communism in general). In the late 1940s and early 1950s many leading liberals deserted Kirchwey, and The Nation, on just such grounds. In the end, even the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr jumped ship, thus making fundraising letters a constant necessity