BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

DAWSON

The King’s life is moving peacefully towards its close. Press notice released at Sandringham, January 20, 1936.

This blandly eloquent statement was written (on a menu) by George V’s physician Bertrand Dawson, who’d been raised to the peerage by the king himself, first as Baron and then as Viscount Dawson of Penn. Fifty years on, in 1986, the release of Dawson’s diary made plain that he had ensured a peaceful death by injecting the king (at “about” 11 PM) with a lethal dose of morphine and cocaine. So George V died “peacefully” or, as in Dawson’s diary. “comporting with that dignity and serenity which he so richly merited.” Dawson also felt that the timing was right, too late for London’s ‘gutter’ evening papers but just right for a notice in the morning London Times. By 1986 this was an open secret, but still it made headlines and raised a flurry of debate about euthanasia. Viscount Dawson was an interesting figure in his own right. He was born Bertrand Dawson on March 9, 1864, an architect’s son. He went to St. Paul’s School and then University College London, graduating MD in 1893. He rose quickly in the profession and established a fashionable practice in 1903. He maintained that private practice into his 70s, but meanwhile (1907) entered public service as physician to King Edward VII, then was promoted to physician-in-ordinary to George V. But what really made Dawson’s reputation was his war service, which convinced him that the public health was a public problem that required a purposeful public solution. His ‘Dawson Report’, published in 1920 as “An Interim Report on the Future Provision of Medical and Allied Services” is regarded today as a foundation document for Britain’s National Health Service, finally passed into law in 1947. But Dawson himself (he died in 1945) would have spun in his grave over that, for he’d come to oppose any notion of a universal, compulsory, publicly administered health service. This owed partly to his view of the medical profession as an elevated elite. In 1936 he opposed euthanasia legislation on grounds that such decisions should be left to the wisdom and ethical understanding of a qualified attendant physician. More importantly, Dawson shared the elite’s ambiguous views on modernization. While he wanted to liberalize marital law and also to rewrite the Book of Common Prayer, he came to fear any hint of collectivization and thought Soviet communism the most dangerous threat to the ‘British way of life.’ In 1936 he accompanied David Lloyd George on the former prime minister’s visit to Hitler at Berchtesgaden, and shared Lloyd George’s view of Hitler as a great German patriot. So Viscount Dawson was not universally popular. As a contemporary jingle had it, ©

[Stanley]

WALD

No surer way could be found to injure any person than to assume that, because of color, race, or nationality they are unfit . . . without claiming the gift of prophecy, one can foresee that our sins must recoil upon the heads of our descendants. Lillian Wald.

Jane Addams’ Hull House settlement in Chicago came before Lillian Wald’s Henry Street in Manhattan and was, to some extent, the inspiration behind Henry Street. Today, what remains of Hull House has become a museum. But the Henry Street Settlement still thrives, and still occupies its original building. Henry Street serves 50,000 people from its near neighborhood, most of them living in the Lillian Wald Houses project on the Lower East Side, where the average family income hovers (or is stuck at) $27,000. In Manhattan, that is poverty, so the Henry Street Settlement still has its work to do. For decades it has provided a wide range of services, mostly directed towards self-help: playgrounds, an arts center, drama and dancing classes, job training. The list goes on and on, but it all began with what Lillian Waldcalled “public health nursing.” She was born in Cincinnati on March 10, 1867, the granddaughter of refugees from the failed German revolutions of 1848. Already well-off, the family moved to Rochester, NY, to further her father’s retail trade (in optical instruments). Lillian got the best of educations Rochester could provide, finally qualifying as a medical nurse in 1891. She took a position in New York City’s Juvenile Asylum. She already knew about Hull House, but her “baptism of fire” came in 1893 when (summoned by a street urchin) she saved a woman from bleeding to death after childbirth. The appalling conditions set Lillian Wald off on her course of voluntary public service, and she did not stop running until her death in 1940. It began with offering a free nursing service, but by 1913 Henry Street was an institution, its 92 nurses working the neighborhood (one of them as New York’s first public school nurse), while others taught neighborhood kids, and adults, how to cope with life on the Lower East Side, training for jobs or experiencing some finer arts, as in painting or dancing or acting. In her work, Wald engaged the support of young socialites like Mary Brewster and Eleanor Roosevelt, but because she knew where the money was she was also staked by the banker-philanthropist Jacob Schiff, who bought and renovated her first Henry Street property. She focused mainly on new immigrants, whether fresh from Ellis Island or from rural South Carolina. For the black southerners, Lillian became a founder-member of the NAACP. Then came World War I, and a new career as a peace advocate, not to mention her work for women’s rights (whether in family planning or at the ballot box). She’s been recently rediscovered, and there’s a move afoot to erect a Lillian Wald statue somewhere in the Lower East Side. But just maybe New York’s new mayor, Zoran Mamdani, has a couple of better ideas, more in tune with the foundational nature of Lillian Wald’s life and work. ©

[Stanley]

BUSH

There were those who protested that the action of setting up NDRC was an end run, a grab by which a small company of scientists and engineers, acting outside of established channels, got hold of the authority and money for the program . . . That, in fact, was exactly what it was. Vannevar Bush.

As a college undergraduate (at Tufts University), Vannevar Bushwas bright enough, but he played the role that would in the 1930s and 1940s become a B-movie theme, the big man on campus. A minister’s son (born on March 11, 1890), he proved capable of being the life of the party. But also at Tufts he developed his persona as scientist and inventor. His first patent came in his senior year, a device for easing the task of land surveyors, and then (at GE, MIT, and Harvard) the patents kept coming, one of which led to the formation of the Raytheon Company and considerable wealth for Vannevar Bush. But wealth didn’t stop Bush; his later inventions included the analog computer (and theories showing that digital was the way to go in computing). His administrative resumé kept pace, both in company boardrooms and at MIT (dean of engineering and then vice president). In the process, Bush came to view himself as an apostle of science, hard science, and when in 1938 he became head of the Carnegie Institution he purged Carnegie of its humanities and social sciences work. Come the war, Bush was as responsible as anyone for the creation of what Eisenhower would later call the military-industrial complex, and that is how he is remembered today—as long as we make it the “military-industrial-science” complex, the brain behind (and often the head of) national advisory committees for defense, aeronautics, the Office of Research and Development, the Manhattan project, the Atomic Energy Commission, and others, including the National Science Foundation. While he was organizing us, he took time off to invent the proximity fuse, which may have had as much to do with victory as the A-bomb. If that were not enough, his 1945 Atlantic article, “As We May Think,” is now credited as a chief inspiration of ‘the information age.’ Like him or not, Vannevar Bush was as much as anyone the architect of our modernity, like it or not. ©.

[Stanley]

BERKELEY

estward the course of empire takes its way;

The four first acts already past.

A fifth shall close the drama with the day:

Time’s noblest offspring is the last. George Berkeley, 1726.

The “Yale Band,” so-called, were missionaries, mainly Yale graduates, who were sent west in the 1830s and 1840s to help migrating New Englanders stay loyal to Calvinist theology and Congregationalist ecclesiology. One of them was one of my great-great grandfathers, Philip Eveleth, whose surviving letters show that he enjoyed little success in central Illinois. Other Yale Band zealots got further west, to San Francisco Bay, where they converted few sinners but led the unionist cause in 1860-61, founded the University of California in 1868, and named its city “Berkeley.” Thereby hangs a tale, a poem, and a couple of famous paintings, for Berkeley, CA, was named for George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne in the (Protestant) Church of Ireland, an idealist philosopher who was (in his youth) a westwards-bound missionary and a prophet of (anglophone) empire. In New England, Berkeley (born in Ireland on March 12, 1685) converted few souls to Anglicanism but impressed all with his learning and left his library behind as a gift for Yale College. He also pondered English America’s history and its future course, and in 1728 wrote a famous poem (“On the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America”) whose last stanza begins with the line “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way.” By a long chain of highly unlikely links (‘mere coincidences’ which the idealist Berkeley would have enjoyed) his library gift and his poem would inspire the Yale Band, make him the obvious namesake of a western university town, and place the magnificent Emanuel Luetze mural “Westward Ho” in the American capitol building over the “western” staircase that leads to the main chamber of the House of Representatives. Ever the idealist, Berkeley had hoped that his utopian western university would be placed in Bermuda (which island he saw as the logical center of an English empire). But I imagine he’d be pleased enough with the current location. ©

[Stanley]

No anniversary note yesterday but no surprise..... Bob has been in the UK for 3 days now.....

[Stanley]

LINOLEUM

Men are like linoleum floors. Lay ‘em right, and you can walk over them for years. Mae West.

Years ago I did some volunteer interviewing for a Lancaster colleague’s oral history project, and thus found out more than I needed to know about ‘L’ile Jimmy Williamson, first baron Ashton (1842-1930). Love him or hate him (and two of my interviewees hated him), he shaped the town with his charity (about £32 million in today’s values) and employed much of the town’s working class in his mills and factories. Was that the reason my interviewees were (still, in the 1970s) staunch working-class Conservatives? For “L’ile Jimmy” was a Liberal. They also called him “the Lino King,” and I concluded from this that he (or one of his employees) invented linoleum. But, really, Jimmy Williamson only produced more of the stuff than almost anyone else in the world. The inventor of linoleum, that accursed but cheap and cheerful floor covering, was Frederick Walton, born on March 13, 1834 in Halifax, Yorkshire. His family produced devices for woolen mills, and Frederick was brought up in the business and, soon, made a partner. He was the firm’s chief tinkerer, and among other things invented a new device for carding wool. He also messed about with linseed oil and cork, which his father thought extraneous, eccentric, and wasteful, and which Frederick thought promising. So Frederick moved off to invent linoleum out of solidified linseed oil and cork. He patented the invention (and named it) in 1863, set up his own company in Chiswick, west London, and licensed an American offshoot (in a factory at Linoleumville [sic], New York). Meanwhile, up in Lancaster, L’ile Jimmy Williamson picked up the idea, ran with it, and created his own ‘Linoleumville’ on the banks of the River Lune. Along with tons and tons of lino, low wages, and factory gates that closed at 7AM (if you were late you didn’t in and you didn’t get paid), Lancaster got the beautiful and charming Williamson Park, the Ashton Memorial (topped by the 3rd-largest dome in England), a grand Edwardian town hall, its facing Victoria memorial, and (in the shape of the first Baron Ashton), the Liberal party peer that the town loved to hate. In return, in 1911, the first Baron Ashton divorced Lancaster, but that’s another story that had almost nothing to do with linoleum. ©

[Stanley]

MARTYROLOGY

Do not think I regret coming. No, far from it. I would not go back for a world. I am contented and happy, notwithstanding I sometimes get very hungry and weary. Narcissa Whitman, in a letter home,

In the 1830s, my Bliss ancestors started giving their children classical names (Horace) instead of the biblical names (e,g, Nehemiah) that had been their old New England practice. They were now westerners, or westering; they were good Whigs, too (naming one of their boys William Henry Harrison Bliss), but they were beaten to it by the Prentiss family, who named their third child Narcissa. So I’ll guess that Judge Stephen Prentiss, her father, was a Federalist. Narcissa Prentiss was born on March 14, 1808, in Plattsburgh, NY, at about the right time for her, as an adolescent, to have been swept up in the religious enthusiasms of the Second Great Awakening. Meanwhile, Marcus Whitman had always wanted to be a minister but couldn’t afford the education, so became a doctor instead. Before he met Narcissa, Whitman had applied to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, who first turned him down and then decided that a medical missionary would be a good idea. Since Narcissa wanted to be a missionary, that was perfect, so the couple married in 1836 and set off for the Oregon country. It was a difficult journey, in a seven-wagon train led by the fur trader Milton Sublette (and Narcissa was pregnant), but they were well settled on the Walla Walla River by Spring 1837. There they established a famous mission, and school, and adopted eleven children, and there they were massacred by their Cayuse Indian charges in 1847. The Cayuse thought the Whitmans had brought smallpox among them. Back in the USA, the most popular theory was that the massacre had been got up by Jesuit priests. Actually John Baptiste Brouillet, SJ, saved some of the mission settlers and helped to bury the Whitmans, but as we know today religious prejudice makes for powerful political propaganda, and the Know-Nothing movement in US politics was just around the corner in 1847. ©

[Stanley]

GOLDSMITH

Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no fibs. Tony Lumpkin, in She Stoops to Conquer, 1773.

One of the great survivals of the 18th-century theater is Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops To Conquer, a comedy, which opened in London on March 15, 1773. The play thrived well enough over the centuries to be chosen as a required text in the freshman year English course that, in 1961-62, was supposed to teach me how to read and to write like a discerning person. It was chosen to demonstrate the important distinction between sentiment (in right hands a Good Thing) and sentimentality (a mere manipulation of emotion, and therefore a Bad Thing). There is some evidence that Goldsmith meant the play to do just that. After all, Goldsmith dedicated the play to his good friend Dr. Samuel Johnson, a man of consummate erudition who certainly knew the difference between deep and shallow waters. Moreover, the play’s prologue, spoken on opening night by none other than the great David Garrick dressed in mourning black, is a lament for the disappearance from the English theater of real comedy: “morals won’t do for me; to make you laugh, I must play tragedy.” Also, just a year before the play appeared, Goldsmith himself (probably) wrote an essay (subtitled “A comparison between laughing and sentimental comedy”) lamenting the rise of the latter and the desuetude of the former. Alas!! I was not a good student in Freshman English. Not only did I miss Goldsmith’s whole point, a failure of discernment, but in another part of Freshman English one of my ‘review’ essays (on the film version of West Side Story, then just released) got the lowest grade I ever received for any piece of work in any course: 8%, assessed thusly by the course instructor, Mr. Osborne, on the ground that I had made no spelling errors. (The course’s grading rubric awarded 8% for perfect spelling). Now a good deal older and (I hope) wiser, I regard that grade and its rationale as an excellent example of “Laughing Comedy.” And the joke was on me. ©