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. ©.

[Stanley]

SHERRINGTON

That pleasure is not a good thing is admitted from the fact that certain pleasures are evil . . . if we choose some pleasures and shun others, it is not every pleasure that is a good thing. Similarly, the same rule holds with pains. St. Clement of Alexandria, circa 200AD.

The occasionally perverse relationship between pleasure and pain has long fascinated poets, playwrights, philosophers, and pornographers. It became even more puzzling when modern physiologists discovered that the human nervous system, objectively considered, made no obvious distinction between pain and pleasure. Physical stimuli travel along identical nerve paths, synapse by synapse, so to speak; the messages are delivered to the same region of the brain; the brain sorts them into pleasures and pains and adjusts accordingly. The physiologist most closely connected with these discoveries was Charles Scott Sherrington, who turns out to be a person of many interests. He was born in Islington, London, on November 27, 1857. But we do not know who his father was. Nor are we very sure of his mother. He was well cared for, though, by Caleb Rose and Anne Sherrington (who married in 1880). Their household was a light and lively one, and young Charles was brought up amongst art, artifacts, books, and physicians (for Caleb Rose was an eminent surgeon). Charles was well schooled, became an excellent athlete, and in 1886 graduated from Cambridge with the highest academic honors. Meanwhile, he had already apprenticed as a surgeon, and in 1881 declared an interest in the nervous system. Sherrington’s early experiments were with other animals than homo sapiens; removing this or that portion of the brain and observing the effects. Experiments continued through academic appointments at London (1886), Liverpool (1891), and Oxford (1913). In all these he distinguished himself as a superb mentor, eager to share what he knew (and, importantly, what he hoped to learn) with his students, several of whom would (as did Sherrington himself, in 1932) go on to win Nobel prizes. Sherrington’s award came in physiology, and was for a range of discoveries about how the nervous system recorded and then responded to external stimuli. Along the way, he fought for women to be admitted to Oxford’s medical program. When he became interested in nervous fatigue as a medical phenomenon, during WWI, he volunteered for long shifts in a munitions factory (80-hour weeks) in order to make a guinea pig of himself. I can just about picture this 60+-year-old professor toiling away at his work bench with high explosives. He blew no one up, and learned a lot. As for the odd distinctions we make between pleasure and pain, Sherrington had long since decided that these were not “learned” responses but evolved ones. It’s a conclusion I am content with. ©
Bob Bliss

[Stanley]

WEATHERVANE

. . . . . but see,

WEATHERVANE

The mist is now dispersing gloriously:

And language fails us in its vain endeavor—

The spirit mounts above, and lives forever.

“In Honor of Mr. Howard”, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1817.

Given the date, and Goethe’s known sympathies, one might guess that this poem was written to praise “Mr. Howard” for some signal role in ‘dispersing’ Napoléon Bonaparte’s imperial mists, perhaps at Waterloo. Not a bad guess, but unlikely. “Mr. Howard,” Luke Howard by name, was a Quaker, an upholder of that sect’s peace testimony, and was too old to be in Wellington’s army. He was born in London on November 28, 1772, the son of a wealthy maker of tin-plated metalwares. Luke was sent to a Quaker school at Burford, then apprenticed to a chemist-pharmacist in Stockport, even further north. At school, Howard learned to disapprove of flogging; but he prospered in pharmacy well enough to return to London, marry a Quaker, Mariabella Eliot, and then, in 1798, set up in partnership with another Friend, William Allen, at the Plough Court pharmacy. Luke Howard waxed wealthy as a pharmacist. He and Mariabella raised seven children (of eight live births) to prosperous adulthoods. While Mariabella wrote books on household management and child rearing, Luke wrote about pharmacy, but guardedly. Pharmacy was his business, an “art,” not a science. But its processes brought him into contact with scientists. Howard produced ether for John Dalton, who besides being a pioneer chemist was also a Quaker. And he developed his own interests in science, notably in geology and botany, in which he could freely exchange ideas with other pioneers. This brought election to scientific societies, but also an eagerness to apply his new learning, his ‘science,’ to other areas, including what we today call meteorology. Here his laboratory was London’s ever- changeable weather, and he would produce his landmark The Climate of London (2 vols., 1820 et seq). But Goethe’s poetic tribute dated from his discovery, in translation, of Howard’s earlier effort, 1803, On the modification of clouds, an on the principles of their production, suspension, and destruction. This was not ‘scientific.’ Rather, as Goethe may have suggested in 1817, it was a triumph of observation and of descriptive language, with a little art thrown in. Luke Howard had not remembered much Latin from that Quaker school in Burford, but it was he who gave us the Latinate cloud classifications we still use today: cirrus (fibrous);stratus (layered); cumulus (heaped); and nimbus (producing lightning). Along with, of course, their various compounds, as in the cumulonimbus clouds that still send Midwesterners into their cellars. As an observer (not as a physicist), Luke Howard got the details wrong. Poetically, he has been triumphant. ©.

[Stanley]

ONWARD AND UPWARD AT UPPINGHAM

I don’t want stars or rockets; I want every boy to have a chance of showing his little light to help the world. Edward Thring, Headmaster of Uppingham School.

To be fair to Thring, he would also advocate for girls’ education, so it’s best to get rid of the gendered language and say that, if you want to be a good teacher, you start with the student, the pupil, and not the curriculum. That perspective led Thring into many educational reforms, not least, from the 1850s, using the vernacular (in his case, English) to teach the mysteries and powers of grammar. Latin and Greek came later, as did all the other curricular impedimenta (mathematics, the sciences, other modern languages) that good teachers ought still to have in mind, for there was still a scale of values in education. Thring, whose writings overflowed with aphorisms and similes, accepted that bread was more important than verse. But that did not make the baker superior to the poet. The child was at the center of the enterprise, and “it is impossible to overate the importance of giving a child confidence.” In his most influential book, Theory and Practice of Teaching (1883 and many subsequent editions, including in the USA) he put it this way. Children haven’t got wings, so you start with legs in hopes that, one day, each might take flight. All this would seem to make Thring a radical, a rebel. He began conventionally, the son of a vicar who was also a country squire. Edward Thring was born on November 29, 1821, in rural Somerset. After some fairly brutal education in a private grammar school, he went off to Eton. His success there is implied in a tutor’s comment that he was “King of Boys”, a star in everything he tried. His record at Cambridge was as good. But then he went on to a cure of souls in Gloucester and a spell of teaching non-stars at a “national” school. Here the old ways didn’t work, and by the time he took over at Uppingham, in 1853, he was ready to make big changes. Uppingham was then a decaying local grammar school. By the time of his death, in 1887, Uppingham was a thriving “public” school and Thring was recognized internationally as a leading educational reformer. He did not democratize Uppingham. He was too much into “virtue” for that, but he did broaden the curriculum in order better to seek out each boy’s genius. Organized sports became part the “machinery” of education. But music too. Here his German-born wife, Marie Louise Koch, helped, and she also encouraged recruitment of German faculty to teach in other disciplines. The Thrings preferred married schoolmasters, the best of them running their ‘houses’ like families wherein new boys might feel “at home.” It was a successful experiment, but not too successful, for Edward Thring thought that 300 students were more than enough. He needed to know them all, for each pupil, individually, was the very matter of education. ©

[Stanley]

ZANJ

God is great, God is great, there is no God but God, and God is great; there is no arbitration except by God. Battle slogan of Ibn Ali Muhammed, leader of the Zanj Rebellion, 869CE.

The Zanj Rebellion was probably the largest, longest, and most successful slave rebellion in modern history. It began in 869 and its ‘official’ end came on November 30, 883, when Ibn Ali Muhammed’s head was exhibited in a great victory parade in Baghdad. At its height, in the mid 870s, the Zanj rebels controlled the swamplands and waterways around and to the south of Basra, had taken Basra itself and raised their own capital to the southwards. The Zanj collected taxes, printed their own currency, and attempted to systematize their justice system in line with Ibn Ali Muhammed’s idea that only God could arbitrate. This notion proved particularly attractive to the enslaved men who formed the bulk of the Zanj armies, and in one of the more dramatic early scenes of the rebellion masters had indeed been called to account, prostrated on the ground before their slaves, and subjected to 500 lashes each. “Zanj” itself was a word already in general use to describe the peoples of east Africa, the main source of the Arab slave trade. But the Zanj was not a rebellion against slavery as such. In their successful battles, the Zanj took slaves, and Ibn Ali Muhammed, who claimed descent from the Prophet, regarded slavery as justified by holy writ. On the other hand, “race” was certainly part of it. Most of the Zanj were indeed black east Africans, and their savagery in the wars became part of Arab folk lore. Ibn Ali Muhammed found most of his recruits, and a flashpoint for the rebellion, in the way slavery had evolved in the Basra marshlands. In the Baghdad Caliphate generally, slavery had been an urban institution, and some slaves (male and female) had achieved high status as merchants’ clerks, bodyguards, soldiers, and concubines. Some even won their way to freedom. But the promise of greater wealth that might come from draining the swamps, using enslaved labor, had produced a particularly bloody labor system. Brutal work, under dreadful conditions, seemed to require an especially brutal management. Ibn Ali Muhammed’s message that only God could decide causes and dispense justice proved liberating for an already converted enslaved population; and that staged morality play, the mass whipping of the masters, took place in the swamps. Probably, then, we should not be surprised, though we must be horrified, by the brutalities of the Zanj Rebellion, brutalities inflicted by both sides. The Zanj’s conquest of Basra itself was particularly bloody. But had the Zanj lost their fate might have been worse. At this distance, one moral to be drawn from the Zanj Rebellion is to keep religion and “race” at bay and certainly to keep both out of politics and warfare. ©

[Stanley]

THE PUDDING LADY

Every good cook or housekeeper is, in these days, a good patriot. By the wise choice of food and care in its preparation, she may do her part in utilizing to the uttermost the national resources. Florence Petty, The Pudding Lady’s Recipe Book, 1917.

In World War II, food rationing came in almost immediately (in early 1940), and it was ‘democratized.’ It quickly became the butt of national humor, and still is, even though some say that, under rationing, the British were better-nourished than ever before. . And before the war began, she was ready for the task. Florence PettyBritain, an island nation, was self-sufficient in only a few food items, dependent upon seaborne trade for the rest. So it comes as a mild surprise to learn that, in the very similar crisis of the First World War, which began in 1914, compulsory rationing did not come in until 1918, and then only piecemeal. But the necessity of restraint was obvious, and Florence Petty was one of necessity’s chief evangelists, the “Pudding Lady,” was born to the far north, in Forfarshire, Scotland, on December 1, 1870. Unmarried, she moved south circa 1900 to take up lodgings with an elder sister, a nurse, did some gardening, and became involved in charity work amongst the London poor. Florence was not really a ‘lady bountiful;’ her father was only a timber merchant’s clerk, but soon after her arrival in London she began to work with some women of that rarer breed in ‘The St. Pancras School for Mothers,’ an organization devoted to helping poor women cope better with poverty through better hygiene and improved diets. Visiting the poor in situ convinced her that more was needed than advice. Demonstrating the arts of poverty in poor homes required understanding, empathy, and a practical sense of how a poor woman could actually cook good food at home in the slums of London’s near north side. Florence Petty taught domestic science using the laboratory equipment of the poor household. And she wrote about it. She became known as the ‘pudding lady’ because, for sweets, she recommended suet puddings, suitably cheap, but her real line was in seasonal vegetables, the cheapest of meats, and not least economies in energy. Good food fueled the body, but preparing it required real fuel, costly stuff, so Florence recommended bringing foodstuffs to the boiling point, then putting them in an insulated “haybox” so they could, so to speak, stew in their own juice. Under the patronage of the bountiful Lady Meyer, Florence wrote, and traveled up and down the country (as far as Forfarshire!) to spread the message in person. In 1914 the war found Florence ready to continue, and now for patriotism as well as prudence. She continued after the war, becoming one the BBC’s first foodies in 1922, writing for newspapers and, yes, continuing to demonstrate her practical art of domestic science to those who, she thought, most needed it. ©.

[Stanley]

MS ROCHE



My hobby is humanity. Josephine Aspinwall Roche.

The Ludlow Massacre took place in the southern Colorado coal fields in April 1914. Oppressed by low wages (piecework), unsafe mining practices, and (in their camps) epidemic disease, the miners went on strike. It was a violent affair, a war, first between the miners and company guards. Anxious to support the companies (the leading owner was John D. Rockefeller), the state governor called in the National Guard (then called the “Colorado Rangers”) who joined with company guards to encircle the miners’ camp at Ludlow and install a machine gun in a commanding position. But fire was used, too, for Ludlow was a tent city. Thirteen of the dead were women and children, all of them by fire. The surnames of the victims suggest something of a culture war: Costa, Pedregone, Valdez, Petrucci, Rubino, Tikas. In the face of the evidence, the leaders of the Rangers received awards for bravery, and as a warning to others dead bodies were left exposed for days. But some were horrified, including Josephine Aspinwall Roche, the daughter of the President of one of the smaller mining companies. Born in Nebraska on December 2, 1886, she’d gone east to college (Vassar), majored in economics and the classics. She followed that with a Masters in social work at Columbia (1910) and some field work amongst the urban poor of New York City and Baltimore. Meanwhile, her banker father had moved to Denver and had invested in the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company. Josephine stayed out east until 1912, when she became Denver’s first policewoman, and a very unpopular one because of her crusade against prostitution. While her father supported the bloody suppression of the strike, and the miners’ union, Josephine took a different view. When she inherited his mining stock in 1927, she set a different course for the company’s coal mines. She recognized the United Mine Workers union, raised wages to the unheard of $7 per hour, introduced profit-sharing, and set about investing in welfare projects. With the coming of the Great Depression and FDR’s New Deal, Josephine Roche capitalized on her old New York connections—notably, with Frances Perkins—to take agency posts in the new administration. There she helped to draft the legislation which birthed social security and set her sights on making health care a matter of right for the citizen and a matter of state for the government. And, withal, she maintained her close connections with the United Mine Workers, sometimes in an official capacity. Recently, Democratic administrations in Colorado have officially recognized her contribution to the state’s history of progressive reform. Along there has been an official ‘reconsideration’ of the causes and consequences of the Ludlow Massacre. ©.

[Stanley]

OEKOLOGY

As theology is the science of religious life, and biology the science of [physical] life … so let oekologie be henceforth the science of [our] normal lives … the worthiest of all the applied sciences, which teaches the principles on which to found a healthy … and happy life. Ellen Swallow Richards, 1892.

Ellen Swallow Richards has been remembered for many things, but in most of them she was a pioneer, the first woman to do this, that, and the other. She was born Ellen Henrietta Swallow on her family’s farm near Dunstable, MA, on December 3, 1842. Her moderately prosperous parents believed in educating all their children, girls included. They particularly encouraged Ellen’s interest in the workings of nature, on and around their farm. Then they sent Ellen to the Westfield Academy where she excelled in classical Greek, still thought by many to be beyond the capacities of the female mind. After Westfield, Ellen earned enough money as schoolteacher (in subjects around the curriculum) to enroll at Vassar, aged 26; granted advanced credit she graduated in just over a year. Then it was on to MIT as its first woman student. Despite MIT’s grudging admission decision (she, as a “she,” was to be an exception, not a precedent), it was an association that continued for the rest of her life. Among other firsts, she was the first American woman to earn a degree in chemistry (a bachelor’s only, for MIT would not go so far as to award advanced degrees to a female). Ellen followed that up in 1875 by marrying Robert Hallowell Richards, MIT professor (of mining engineering). He was a good deal younger than she, and would become a distinguished metallurgist, MIT’s chair of mining engineering. Ellen helped him along by serving at MIT as his ‘volunteer’ tutor and lab instructor. Her skills and indomitable energy soon made that designation an absurd one, and from 1884 she held a variety of ‘official’ positions in MIT’s experimental laboratories. Already she’d hit upon her specialty, which today we’d call environmental chemistry, but it was as a scientist of sanitation that she made most of her many marks. Richards was particularly interested in the home, not only as the woman’s realm but also the natural environment of human beings, men, women and children. She called her interdisciplinary approach euthenia, a Greek coinage meaning ‘to be in a flourishing state.’ That didn’t stick for several reasons, so today Ellen Swallow Richards is celebrated as a founding mother of home economics, nutritional chemistry, public health, child studies, and of ecology which she (Greek scholar that she was) insisted on spelling as Oekology. We, less insistent on proper forms, call it ‘ecology.’ Richards got her MIT doctorate, honoris causa, in 1910. She died the next year. ©