BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

FASHION

Taking a tip from the man on the job, the wise feminine shipbuilder wears working clothes for comfort and safety. She wears a man’s type shirt with a close fitting collar for protection. Her hair is up . . . she wears strong, serviceable jeans or overalls without cuffs, low-heeled work shoes and a closely fitting jacket for comfort. From “War Fashions for Feminine Safety,” ca. 1942.

This poster, originally put up at a shipbuilder’s yard in San Francisco Bay, was used to headline a 2014 National Archives exhibit on “How World War II Changed Women’s Fashion.” Such thinking achieved fashion apotheosis in the Harper’s Bazaar cover for March 1943. In it, a very cool girl waits patiently to donate her blood to the American Red Cross. Her auburn locks are not covered but tightly controlled by a white cloche hat and framed by her jacket’s high black collar. She carries a rough, reddish hold-all, and she’s determinedly on duty. The picture is headlined “SPRING FASHIONS”, and it was taken by Louise Dahl-Wolfe, by then an established figure in the American fashion trade. The fall of France, in June 1940, destroyed the publishing calendar of Harper’s Bazaar and other leading fashion publications. Their annual lead had always been the great shows of Paris designers. Would they now turn to London for inspiration? Hardly likely. Indeed it was Dahl-Wolfe who led the effort to find an American theme for American women’s fashion. And with more women in the work force (and, be it said, in the forces) American fashion would develop a new look. And Louise Dahl-Wolfe was ready for it. This all-American woman was born in San Francisco, of Norwegian immigrant parents, on November 19, 1895. They wanted all three of their daughters to prosper in this new world, and in Louise’s case they encouraged her artistic tendencies. She studied painting at the California School of Fine Arts, became “bored” with it, and transferred what she’d learned to photography and architecture. In 1927 she took up with a sculptor, Meyer Wolfe, married him in 1928 and (keeping her own surname) moved back to his home country to capture the feel, the taste, and the design of American life. Her first published photo was “Tennessee Mountain Woman,” aged and wrinkled, half in shadow, wearing a man’s black hat decorated with flowers, and sitting on a cabin porch. It brought Dahl-Wolfe back to New York, where she did commissions for Saks and Bonwit-Teller and covers for Harper’s Bazaar—and portraits of some remarkable Americans, including recent ones like Albert Einstein, exiles like Josephine Baker, and oddballs like Carson McCullers. Who better, then, than Louise Dahl-Wolfe to lead and to document a sea change in American fashion? It would give us Rosie the Riveter, and in that March 1943 Bazaar cover, Dahl-Wolfe gave us the 18-year old starlet, Betty Bacall. Renamed “Lauren,” Ms. Bacall would make her own contribution to the changing image of the new (stylish but defiantly American) woman of a new age. ©.

[Stanley]

FIREWORKER

The fireworks begin today. Each diploma is a lighted match. Each of you is a fuse. Ed Koch.

Thus Koch, then mayor of New York, inspired a class of high school graduates to do great, explosive things. Commencement speeches are too often like that, meaningless and awkward. And one hopes that in this instance some of the graduands knew that to light the fuse was, anywhere in New York, illegal, and had been since 1909. The statute heads up Chapter 270 in the state’s criminal code, which includes other ‘public nuisance’ offenses like refusing to yield a party line in cases of emergency. Since 1909, the fireworks regulations have been extended and clarified (to keep up with fireworks design) and in one case, in 2014, amended to allow the use of sparklers. The prohibition has, from time to time, been attacked, usually from the libertarian or nostalgic ‘fringe’, but a few years back a local historian lamented the effect of the 1909 statute on the businesses occupying ‘Firecracker Lane.’ That was the local name for a short stretch of Park Place between Broadway and Church Streets occupied almost exclusively by fireworks emporia. At #12, 4 stories in brownstone, was Pain’s Fireworks. It was the chief of them all, proudly announcing its trade every flat surface. And it wasn’t even ‘American.’ Its founder, James Charles Pain, was English, born in Lambeth, London, on November 20, 1836. He came from a long line of gunpowder and fireworks manufacturers, all of them Pains, the first having been licensed in 1670 to make and sell gunpowder, presumably for lethal purposes. But by the time James went into business for himself it was mainly used for entertainment. Indeed his father was listed in censuses as a “pyrotechnist.” James took over the business in 1860, and then after a fire (not a good thing in this trade) moved it to Brixton. Thus the fuse was lit, and his business exploded to include a large (200-acre) manufacturing site, with James traveling the world to find new markets for pyrotechnics (and, incidentally, a new line of marine safety flares). For his services to the Portuguese crown he was named a Knight of the Order of Christ. He established the Firecracker Lane shop in the 1870s and placed it under the supervision of his son Henry. New York’s 1909 statute blew the fuse on that operation, and forced New Yorkers to get their black market crackers from Pennsylvania and then, after the Quaker state’s ban, from Ontario. As for Pain’s Fireworks, it still thrives, but it’s main business is now the design and delivery of fireworks spectaculars. But you don’t light their fuses anymore. They’re set off by wireless signals, from a safe distance, and they cost the earth. ©.

[Stanley]

LEGO

hat basically happens is that when a company becomes great, and I’m being a bit rude here, people think they’re some kind of genius [and] we can move into all sorts of other businesses because the net bottom line is . . . we’re just geniuses. Jørgen Vig Knudstorp.

Here Jørgen Knudstorp diagnosed a a comorbidity which has often afflicted leading members of industrial and financial elites, and not only in Denmark. With a little geopolitical license, we can call it the Musk Syndrome. In Musk’s case, spectacular success in one field encouraged success in another, and another, and then, suddenly, Elon demanded a trillionaire’s salary and cavorted on the stage of populist politics with a chainsaw which, he declared, was emblematic of good government. At such points in the syndrome, modesty is perhaps the only cure, but (by definition) modesty has become the hardest to acquire of all the virtues. Hard, but not impossible, as Jørgen Vig Knudstorp demonstrated when, at the tender age of 32, in the year 2000, he was chosen as ‘director of strategic development’ at LEGO. The Danish company was then a world leader. Built on plastic bricks and the popular supposition that genius lurks in every child, it had expanded into adjacent fields (LEGO theme parks at home in Billund and then in several other countries; video and board games; retail stores.) But LEGO was a feeble giant, overconfident, overextended, and nearly bankrupt. Jørgen Vig Knudstorp thought it past time to be “a bit rude,” and in 2004 the Christiansen family brought him in as CEO. Born on November 21, 1968, Jørgen had a long and episodic education, interrupted by spells of school teaching and then capped by a PhD in economics. He’d also made a good marriage, to Vanessa, a Danish MD, and blessed with four kids (who, one imagines, played with LEGO bricks). Once installed as CEO, he rudely shed the company’s arrogance (in effect, selling off its debts) and set about rebuilding the company “brick by brick”, as the London Financial Times wittily put it in 2009 when, in the midst of the world financial crisis of that year, LEGO moved back into the black, where it has stayed ever since. It’s fitting: LEGO stems from the Danish leg godt, “play well” in English, and if one translates literally the company’s motto it is “the best isn’t excessively good.” But the company’s founder, Ole Kirk Christiansen, preferred “only the best is good enough.” It’s important pointing out that, among Jørgen Vig Knudstorp’s achievements perhaps the most striking is that he preserved the Christiansen family’s ownership of LEGO. Still only the second non-Christiansen to head LEGO, Jørgen resigned as CEO in 2016, to universal plaudits. Visiting consultancies aside (wherein one presumes he preaches rudely about modesty), he still lives in Billund where today he, Vanessa and their four children will celebrate his 57th birthday. ©

[Stanley]

CLUTTERBUCK

It became necessary to destroy the town to save it. Unidentified US Army Major, commenting on the destruction of Ben Tre, February 1968.

No quotation better sums up the immorality of America’s war in Viet Nam, unless it is Air Force General Curtis LeMay’s blustering threat (in 1965) “to bomb them back into the Stone Age.” It was the moral problem that fueled campus protests in the 1960s, but there was another way to look at the problem, and that was to stress the disproportionality of the American escalation. This was the tack taken by a friendly critic, a British army officer named Richard Clutterbuck, who had led the successful campaign against a nationalist-communist insurgency in the Malay peninsula. There were those in the US military who wanted to listen. Clutterbuck was invited to teach his subject, which he called “counter-insurgency,” at the US Army Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, KS, in 1961-1963. His ideas had some effect, but not enough, and he returned to SE Asia to continue in his tactical approach. As he worked, so he wrote. Two books came out at the time, The Long Long War (1966) and Riot and Revolution in Singapore (1973) detailing British counter-insurgency in countryside and city. His were piecemeal operations. He left HQ and shed his rank badges (he was a colonel) to accompany small foot patrols. He talked to village elders and urban youths. He was more likely to recommend building roads than bombing jungle trails. He tinkered. One is tempted to stress his engineering degree (1937) at Cambridge in explaining all this, and indeed he was a problem-solver, not a theoretician. But in truth he was a military man, through and through. Richard Lewis Clutterbuck was born on November 22, 1917. Clutterbuck’s father was a career soldier (a major in the Royal Artillery), but he had a civilian education, at Radley College and then Cambridge. He was commissioned 2nd Lieutenant, Royal Engineers, in 1938, fought in France, then North Africa, then Germany. Now Captain Clutterbuck, his education in counter-terrorism began in Trieste, sorting out the warring factions in that ‘neutral’ city, and then continued in Palestine where he focused on Zionist terrorists. So he was prepared for his next big assignment, coordinating police with military in the Malay peninsula. His bravery, and successes, won him further promotion there. But he was also of an academic bent, and in 1968 he enrolled, part time, in a London University PhD. So when Major General Richard Lewis Clutterbuck retired from military service, in 1972, he joined the Politics department at Exeter University. There student radicals didn’t much like his politics, but they liked his openness and his eagerness to learn from and to listen to his students. Whatever his uniform, these were his habits. ©

[Stanley]

THESPIANS

Oh, the man who can drive a theatrical team,

With wheelers and leaders in order supreme,

Can govern and rule, with a wave of his fin,

The whole of the World with Olympus thrown in!

The Gods’ chorus from Thespis: or, the Gods Grown Old, 1871.

Thus the deal is done. A traveling company of players has stumbled upon, or up, Olympus, and found the gods unhappy there and disappointed by their human handiwork, below. The players will replace—play the parts of—the gods and goddesses. If they succeed, Jupiter knows what the rewards will be. But should they fail they will be known as tragedians, condemned forever to play to empty houses and wake to horrid reviews. That is the basic plot of Thespis, the first-ever Gilbert & Sullivan comic opera, which opened at the Gaiety Theatre, London, on December 28, 1871. First reviews were mixed, but the operetta grew on the London crowd and the London critics, and it ran into February. It was even attended by Victoria’s second son Albert, duke of Edinburgh, who is said to have enjoyed it. It first appeared as the second feature in a sort of Christmas pantomime, and so there was a lot of slapstick, even a custard pie thrown by a member of the actors’ company, Stupidas, into the face of another player, Preposterous. But the basic comedy is domestic, for once in place as pseudo-Olympians the actors and actresses discover that the unusual linkages among the gods and goddesses were difficult to carry off, in real life. But Gilbert & Sullivan operettas were never to be known as ‘realistic.’ Sadly, Sullivan’s music to Thespis has been lost, but Gilbert’s lyrics can be read online, including its anachronistic in-jokes, for instance about Victorian railway schedules. But the play does refer to a real event, and a real person, and to one of the few precise datings to come from the 6th century BCE. For it was on November 23, 534BCE, that the actor Thespis of Icaria made theatrical history by winning the first Athens “best tragedy” prize). A lot of the rest is legendary, but it is said that Thespis was the first actor to step out of the chorus and to speak his own lines as his own character. Pretty heroic when you think about it: and Thespis also invented, or pioneered, the use of masks to underline further the individuality of his ‘role.’ And Gilbert’s idea that Thespis and his company might have stumbled up Olympus to interrupt a parley of the gods is based on the legend that Thespis (though an Athenian) did trundle about in Greece with a company of thespians carrying their props (and presumably their masks) in a horse-drawn wagon. In short, Thespis was the very modern model of a modern actor-manager, and that is how he was portrayed by W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan at panto-time, 1871. ©
Bob Bliss

[Stanley]

WILKINSON

Since it was impossible to paint a ship so that she could not be seen by a submarine, the extreme opposite was the answer. Norman Wilkinson.

Thus Wilkinson explained “dazzle camouflage,” not to hide ships from sight but to use broad stripes and zigzags, in contrasting colors, to make them painfully obvious. At the same time, such bold markings would make it difficult to gauge the ship’s course or speed. In 1917 the British Admiralty bought into the idea. By the end of the year, more than 5000 British ships, civilian and military, were camouflaged in plain sight, and in early 1918 the US navy followed suit. How well or even whether it worked remains disputed, but if you think about zebras avoiding lions on the African plains you’ll see the point. For all that, Norman Wilkinson got a £2,000 reward and two workshops in London staffed by model makers, naval officers, and a dozen ‘lady artists’ all devoted to making ships look like a cubist’s nightmare. In 1918 he married one of the lady artists, Evelyn Mackenzie, and in 1939 he returned to the task, this time helping the RAF to conceal its ground installations from the prying eyes of the Luftwaffe. But that is not how he’s remembered today. Norman Wilkinson, distinguished marine artist and poster designer, was born in Cambridge, England, on November 24, 1878. His childhood was disrupted when his father ran away from home, but he still got a good education and, at 16, decided to become an artist. He opened a studio in 1899, but his day job was making pen and ink drawings for the Illustrated London News. Many of these were of seascapes, harbors, and sailing vessels. These brought him his first big commissions (oils on canvas for the ill-fated RMS Titanic and it sister ship RMS Olympic, both of the White Star Line). On the side he did travel posters for White Star and several British railways. After his Admiralty interlude of 1917-1919, it was this latter line, advertising posters, that would make him famous. Wilkinson’s best commissions came from the London, Midland, and Scotland (LMS) and the London and North East (LNER) railways, and today his posters sell in a range from $2000 to $10000. The best ones are of harbor scenes (the LMS, especially, ran boat trains and connected with ferry routes), which reflected Wilkinson’s youthful love affair with boats and sailing, but they all have a distinctive quality, representational but reminding one of simple watercolors. Between the wars, Wilkinson became something of an elder statesman in the poster world, organizing big museum shows in London and New York. But in WWII he returned to duty as a painter with an official military rank, not only concealing RAF aerodromes but making a famous en plein air series on the D-Day landings. He did his original sketches, June 6, 1944, from on board the destroyer HMS Jervis, part of the invasion fleet. Not bad going, for a 65-year-old poster painter. ©

[Stanley]

KRUTCH

Being the inventor of sex would seem to be a sufficient distinction for a creature just barely large enough to be seen by the naked eye. Joseph Wood Krutch, The Great Chain of Life (1957), writing about the very ancient freshwater algae, Volvox.

When Joseph Wood Krutch’s grandparents fled Germany after the failure of the 1848 revolutions, they settled in Tennessee. It’s an accident of history, for most of their fellow German refugees settled in the northern and border states where they formed a liberal, even radical leaven, anti-slavery and pro-unionist. In Missouri, for instance, recent German immigrants played a vital role in keeping the state in the Union in 1860-61. In Knoxville, the Krutch grandparents became musicians and then sprinkled the city with artistic and scholarly offspring, perhaps a different yeast. Joseph’s father became a noted landscape artist, one of impressionistic tendencies (perfect for the Great Smokies), while his brother Charles developed into a remarkable photographer, famous for (among other things) documenting the great TVA project of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Today, in Knoxville, Charles’s bequest to the city, Krutch Park, still serves as a gathering point for progressive activists. Joseph Wood Krutch (pronounced, as it should be, “crewch) was born in Knoxville on November 25, 1893, But he did not stick around. After a science degree at the state university, he fled northwards to graduate studies in the humanities, and (with an MA and PhD from Columbia) launched himself on the stormy waters of Manhattan as a professor, critic, and prophet. In early 1929 his The Modern Temper appeared, a timely prophecy in which he worried that Americans’ love affair with technology and consumerism could never be truly fulfilling. That Fall’s stock market crash and the ensuing depression further convinced him. A string of books followed, almost one per year, along the same general line. His was a comprehensive attack, wittily expressed. Modern logic, he wrote in 1929, is “only the art of going wrong with confidence.” To change course humans needed to take better counsel from nature, both their own “human nature” and the nature they could easily find in the world around them—if they would stop befouling it, clear-cutting it, ploughing it under. As he aged Krutch grew mellower and presented to his reading public the image of a modern Henry David Thoreau. It’s a nice, attractive mix, and I am surprised that Joseph Wood Krutch is not better known today, for we badly need his prophetic voice and would be refreshed by his underlying faith in our abilities to retrieve a better world for ourselves. In his last two decades, he moved to his own sunny uplands, in the southwestern desert. He moved there for his health, on his doctors’ orders, taught at the University of Arizona, and (luckily for us) continued to write. ©

[Stanley]

Dr. WALKER

A woman reasons by telegraph, and [a man’s] stage-coach reasoning cannot keep pace. Mary Edwards Walker.

More than most, this quotation is firmly rooted in time, for in Mary Walker’s era the stage coach and the telegraph were at nearly opposite ends of the speed spectrum. Taken by itself, it does raise the question of whether Mary really believed in gender equality. And in some of her writings, notably her 1878 Unmasked: or, the Science of Immorality, she did lecture to “gentlemen” as if they represented a lower order of creation. It’s better, though, to take this striking comparison as evidence that she knew a good joke when she saw it. This talent owed much to her upbringing. Mary Edwards Walker was born near Oswego, New York, on November 26, 1832. This was the ‘burned over’ district of New York, but her parents (Alvah and Vesta) were not much moved by the evangelical fevers of their neighbors. Instead, one of the disciplines of the Walker farm was for Mary and her siblings to pick out and declaim upon the logical fallacies of revealed religion. Alvah and Vesta were ‘Freethinkers,’ dissenters of a radical bent. They were abolitionists, and (more importantly in Mary’s case) they didn’t conform to gendered stereotypes. Alvah shared in household duties. Vesta worked in the fields and did farmyard chores. Mary followed suit, literally, and learned that boys’ clothing was much more practical. She wore trousers before they became bloomers—albeit often under a shortened skirt. Thus encouraged to be her own self, Mary Edwards Walker would become the second woman MD in US history, graduating from Syracuse Medical College in 1855. While there, she married, but it didn’t stick, and it was as Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, surgeon, that she volunteered for service in the Union Army. The army turned her down, because she was a she, but she nursed the wounded at Bull Run. Eventually the Union took her on and, dressed comfortably and with her hair cut short, she served most of the war as a field surgeon. Bravely, and in battle. She tended all the wounded, blue and gray, and then when captured and imprisoned she was exchanged for a rebel surgeon (presumably male, for the South was the South). For all this she became the first (and, I think, still the only) female recipient of the Medal of Honor. That seems not to have slowed her down. Come the peace, Dr. Mary Edwards Walker continued to advocate for civil, social, and political equality for women. In her prose, she granted no quarter to the enemy, whom she defined as the hypocritical male, often outlining his hypocrisy in graphical, medical detail. Recently, predictably, she became a casualty of the Trump administration (a southern fort had been named after her, and now it’s been made Confederate again), but she can still be found on a woman’s quarter, newly minted just last year. She is worth more. ©.