BOB'S BITS

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Bel Geddes

I have seen the future. Model for the “Futurama” exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, attr. to Norman Bel Geddes.

In retrospect, 1939 was a year for nightmares, as (in September) Hitler’s mechanized legions crashed into Poland. ‘The War’ (which some say began earlier in Spain, China and Africa) would soon envelop the World. But for Norman Bel Geddes the World’s Fair was a chance to put forward his dream of a world designed to function as a streamlined model for life. He was a practical man, and since his client for “Futurama” was the General Motors Corporation, this dream centered on motor transport, in particular the private motor car, with a sprinkling of smallish motor transit vehicles and a very few large trucks. Bel Geddes’s 35,000 square feet diorama emphasized cityscapes, but in 1940, in his Magic Motorways, Bel Geddes saw “how a motorway system may be laid down over the entire country—across mountains, over rivers and lakes, through cities and past towns—never deviating from a direct course and always adhering to the basic principles of highway design: safety, comfort, speed, and economy.” He did pay some attention to suburbs, full of domestic houses with their integral double garages facing the street and emphasizing the home’s dormitory and transport functions. Sounds like a nightmare. Implemented here, it devastated East St. Louis, now a junction for five motorways. But to see the nightmare in action it’s best to visit two Paris suburbs: La Défense to the north and Les Espaces d’Abraxas to the east, the first lived in by corporations and the latter by the workforce. The fact that Bel Geddes was an enthusiast for eugenics makes it all seem sinister. But it’s easier to remember Norman Bel Geddes as a midwestern boy who in Emersonian fashion tried many fields and (nearly) always succeeded. He was born Norman Melancton Geddes, in Adrian, Michigan, on April 27, 1893. He had a tough childhood in several places, and never got beyond 10th grade. But he learned a variety of skills on a variety of jobs (from shipping clerk to magician), changed his surname (to fit his first wife’s middle name of “Belle”), and in 1916-18 landed as a revolutionary theater designer in Los Angeles (the city’s famed Little Theatre) and New York (the Metropolitan Opera, no less). His cool, simple sets shed the excessive detail of Victorian stages and yet seemed to capture the essence of whatever was being performed. They also tended to save money. Suddenly famous, Bel Geddes saw an opportunity to become the da Vinci of design, set up on his own, and began to design everything: cocktail shakers, radios, workdesks, serving trays, water jugs, even ocean liners. Other than the last-named, which never floated, Bel Geddes originals sell today for thousands of dollars and are much more pleasing to the mind’s eye than his 1939 city of tomorrow. ©.

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NIGHT BASEBALL

I don’t believe there is any question that night baseball is the exact solution to attendance problems in the minors. There is a period from 8 o’clock to 10 at night that the average man has nothing to do, and I believe that the baseball park will be the place to find him this summer. Dale Gear, quoted in The Sporting News, March 20, 1930.

Whatever Mr. Gear’s take on the evening habits of the “average man,” he was president of two minor leagues and he knew that minor league attendance, after a boom in the early 1920s, was declining. He also probably knew of two clubs in his leagues who were planning to install lights for night games, the Des Moines (IA) Demons and the Independence (KS) Producers. Both teams were owned by enterprising businessmen. Des Moines’ Charles Keyser had begun his baseball career in his teens by capturing the franchise for selling scorecards at St. Louis Cardinals games, then moved to Des Moines to take over the Demons. And the Demons were the first professional baseball club to make (lighted) night games the main staple of their home schedule. But the honor (if such it was) for staging the first lighted regular season night game between professional baseball teams went to the Independence Producers, on April 28, 1930. A plaque in the National Baseball Hall of Fame says so, and so does another plaque near the site of the Producers’ “Baseball Park.” Of course the issue is contested. Lighted night games had been played before, here and there, since the late 1880s, between well-heeled amateur clubs, for instance, and sometimes by professional clubs, but it had been temporary lighting and quickly taken down. But why Independence, Kansas, and not Des Moines? The short answer may be that the Producers’ business manager was Marvin Truby, a self-made Kansas oil millionaire and (to judge by his portraits) the owner of a magnificent double-barreled moustache. And Truby had the enthusiastic support of Independence mayor Charles Kerr, portly and moustache-less, but willing to cut corners to get the lights properly installed (huge steel towers embedded in concrete) in time for the regular season opener against the Muskogee (OK) Indians. The Independence Producers had already played a night game, on April 17, an exhibition affair against a touring exhibition team from Benton Harbor, Michigan. That was the “House of David” club, financed by a Benton Harbor religious revivalist who required his players to follow (at least some of) the rules laid down in the Old Testament. For instance, House of David players didn’t cut their hair or beards, so they made quite a hirsute picture. Whether they played under lights on the Jewish sabbath, I do not know. Anyway, April 17, 1930 was a Thursday. Come the depths of the Great Depression, both the Producers and the Demons would go bankrupt. The “average man” might be idle from 8 to 10 in the evening, but he had no daytime job, either. ©

[Stanley]

ARBUTHNOT

All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies. John Arbuthnot.

It’s not clear that John Arbuthnot authored such a hopeful thought—“hopeful” in view of our present agonies. But he might have. Arbuthnot did write Proposals for Printing a very Curious Discourse . . . Intitled A Treatise of the Art of Political Lying (1712). The proposed ‘treatise’ was to run to two volumes, in quarto, so we must presume that Arbuthnot had plenty to say about political lying. Alas!! The full treatise never appeared, but one can speculate that Arbuthnot would have viewed the death-by-lying of a political party to be a near inevitability or (to put it another way) a very good bet. For John Arbuthnot was a pioneer statistician. John Arbuthnot ‘of that ilk’ was baptized in Arbuthnot, Scotland, just north of Aberdeen, on April 29, 1667. He was probably baptized by his father, who was an episcopalian priest. In Presbyterian Scotland, that was to be baptized on the wrong side of the religious blanket, and indeed Arbuthnot’s family suffered from a kind of political bastardy. Come the excitements of the Glorious Revolution, two of John’s brothers had to flee to France, tarred with the Jacobite brush. He might have followed them but for his other talents. For besides being entirely enamored of the new science of probability, Arbuthnot was a medic gifted enough to become (in 1707) Queen Anne’s physician in ordinary. How good his medical skills were is not well known, but Anne thought he’d cured her husband and that, in addition to his MD from Aberdeen, was enough. He dabbled in other sciences too, deeply enough to be elected to the Royal Society where (being such a hale fellow well met, he tried to make peace between Isaac Newton and Newton’s detractors). And he was a gifted writer, a satirist of great skill and good (if sometimes biting and bitter) humor. Moving to London in 1691, he honed his satirical skills as a reviewer and soon was a member in good standing of that Grub Street fraternity of literary guns for hire, character assassins of immortal fame. In that great group, Arbuthnot became a high Tory. True to his own family past, he was dubious about the ‘glory’ of 1688-89. True to his satirical skills, he was contemptuous of the ‘Whig Supremacy’ that followed, and he became an intimate friend of the greatest conservative satirists of his age, Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. Both felt that Arbuthnot should have produced more satire than he did (Swift tells us Arbuthnot let his children play with, even burn, his manuscripts). When in 1734 Alexander Pope heard that Arbuthnot was dying, Pope wrote the “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot”, an eloquent, angry protest against the statistical certainty of mortality. Arbuthnot’s Proposals and Pope’s “Epistle” are easily available online, and I recommend both to your attention. ©.

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ANNE OF WOODSTOCK

Ah, Gaunt, his blood was thine . . .

What shall I say? to safeguard thine own life,

The best way is to venge my Gloucester’s death.

Thus (in Shakespeare’s Richard II) the widowed Duchess of Gloucester urges John of Gaunt to take revenge on her husband’s murderers, including King Richard II. She speaks a truth. One of medieval England’s biggest problems was that too much royal blood flowed in too many noble veins. His nobility required Gaunt to take revenge. In the play, Gaunt sickened and died, leaving us only with a great, prophetic speech, and for her part the Duchess died (offstage) of her grief. In real life, the Duchess’s noble daughter, also named Anne, forsook revenge for the meaner course of “patience.” Despite her admixture of royal blood (Edward III’s) she played a waiting game. This Anne, known to history as Anne of Woodstock, was born on April 30, 1383. Wealth and royal blood made her a hot property, and in 1391, aged 8, she was married off to the Earl of Stafford. He died in 1392, and his widow was then (1396) married to his younger brother, the new Earl of Stafford. He died (in battle) in 1403, at which point Anne (already, at 20, twice-widowed) married Sir William Bouchier. All very confusing, but what melds the narrative together is this young woman, Anne of Woodstock. By the time of Sir William’s death, in 1420, he (a hero at Agincourt in 1415) had been made Count of Eu, in Normandy. Now Anne of Woodstock was a dowager countess three times over. Accidents of death (her mother’s, her father’s, and her brother’s) had also made her an heiress in her own right, and now in 1420 as dowager Countess she held title to estates all over England and in Normandy. Her letters and papers survive to show us a woman capable of managing those interests. As a well-placed courtier, she also helped to make excellent marriages for the children she’d had with Sir William Bouchier and the one son, Humphrey, she’d had with the younger Earl of Stafford. She was not without courage. Her marriage to Bouchier may have been a love match and was certainly contrary to the wishes of King Henry IV (her cousin). In spite of that Anne made good her claims to the estates of her mother and father, and managed Bouchier’s properties while he was off making a hero of himself in France and then after he died. Literate in French and English, knowledgeable in the law, she proved an astute manager (much admired by her stewards). In her last will and testament (which she wrote in English “for best reading and understanding) she recognized all her surviving children (including one, unmarried, who would become Archbishop of Canterbury) and made gifts to her stewards. She was buried in 1438 (beside her third husband) in the priory that was another of her beneficiaries. Anne of Woodstock could not qualify as a Shakespearian heroine (or villainess), but she was a remarkable person. ©

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PORTER

R. Porter & Co. . . . are making active progress in the construction of an Aerial Transport, for the express purpose of carrying passengers from New York to California , , , It is expected to put this machine in operation about the 1st of April . . . for $50, including board, and the transport is expected to make a trip to the gold region and back in seven days. Advertisement, posted and in newspapers, early 1849.

The ad boasted that over 200 tickets had been sold and that further subscriptions would be welcome, so (as capacity was limited to 100) further voyages were to be expected. The ad offers yet more evidence of the astonishing virulence of the ‘Gold Fever’ of 1849. Given the date of the first flight, April 1, 1849, one is tempted to see this as a satire, but R. Porter & Co. was deadly serious. Porter actually built three dirigibles (the drawing suggests it was to be propelled somehow by steam power). The first was destroyed by a tornado before it could take flight, presumably before April Fools Day, 1849. The next two failed less dramatically. The Porter in question was Rufus Porter, born near Salem, Massachusetts on May 1, 1792. He was descended from an old Salem family, once very prominent. One ancestral Porter had been involved, fatally, in the witchcraft panic of 1692. Another survived to become the richest landowner in the district. But by the time Rufus came along his branch of the Porter tree had withered. He responded in Yankee fashion by becoming one of his era’s most prolific inventors. He began, modestly, as a shoemaker’s apprentice. Marriage followed, and ten children. He supported them not by cobbling but by painting, “folk art” we might call it today: portraits, farmhouses, landscapes, done in a variety of ways. Inventing, and patenting his inventions, seems to have been a sidelight but in the end a spectacular one, for Rufus’s obituary (1884) remembered him for his “water wheels, windmills, flying ships, rotary engines, and sundry contrivances for abolishing as far as possible agricultural labor.” In the process, Rufus Porter took out over 100 US Patents, a remarkable achievent. Almost all of them, sadly, were commercial failures, He did sell one of his patents, a “revolving rifle” to one Samuel Colt, for $100. That was a not-inconsiderable sum, at the time, but wisely Colt put it aside for different designs. But you can’t support 11 children (there was a second marriage, in 1849) on pipe dreams, and Rufus Porter seems to have made most of his money in publishing tracts about his inventions, and others. Undoubtedly Rufus’s most successful periodical was Scientific American, first published in 1845. He intended Scientific Americanas a weekly, but after ten issues he sold the venture, for $1,000, to two equally ingenious (but more successful) Yankees, Alfred Beach and Orson Munn. Scientific American is still going strong, and I am a subscriber. But I have never flown from New York to California. ©.

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PEARLY TEARS

The tears of man in various measure gush

From various sources; gently overflow

From blissful transport some—from clefts of woe

Some with ungovernable impulse rush;

And some, coëval with the earliest blush

Of infant passion, scarcely dare to show

Their pearly lustre—coming but to go

--from William Wordsworth, Ecclesiastical Sonnets, number XXXII, “Edward Signing the Warrant for the Execution of Joan of Kent.” (1832).

‘Joan of Kent’ was Joan Bocher, who was executed for heresy—brutally, burned at the stake—on May 2, 1550. She died impenitently, loudly proclaiming that her heresy, in the fullness of time, would be seen as true faith even by her chief accusers. Amongst these men she certainly singled out Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, who is believed to have browbeaten King Edward VI into signing the warrant for Joan’s execution. Perhaps Cranmer did. He certainly led the ‘examinations’ of Joan and her heresy. And, probably, Cranmer took it personally. Joan had been involved in a previous religious dispute, in 1543, and Cranmer’s enemies accused him of letting her off the hook, thus encouraging her into even worse heresies. Joan was indeed a radical Protestant, perhaps brought up in it. The name Bocher is even associated with Lollardy, a peoples’ movement against Roman Catholic orthodoxy (particularly clerical corruptions) and anxious to see the Bible in print, in English, and a man named John Bocher figured in religious trials in 1528. But really very little is known about her. It’s interesting, though, that three centuries later William Wordsworth chose to write a sonnet about her and not, for instance, about the Catholic martyr of 1534, the “Maid of Kent” Elizabeth Barton, a nun executed for her outspoken opposition to King Henry VIII’s first divorce and remarriage. Wordsworth had experienced his own religious trials, and this poetical homage to a Protestant martyr was one evidence of his movement towards a moderate if mystical Anglicanism. It strikes me, however, that the real subject of Sonnet XXXII was Edward VI, the boy king, only 12 years old in 1550 when the aged Thomas Cranmer browbeat the lad into signing Joan Bocher’s life away. Did the boy-king really cry tears of pearly luster when he signed the warrant? It’s an unanswerable question. In any case, Cranmer himself would be burned at the stake, only five years later, for his own heresy. Two other bishops involved in Joan Bocher’s examination and trial, Nicholas Ridley and Hugh Latimer, would suffer the same pains in 1656. We can’t call it Joan Bocher’s revenge. Had Joan survived into the reign of Queen Mary, she would have joined her persecutors at the stake. They were, all of them, Protestant heretics. ©.

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ATWATER

We must be able to balance the income and outgo of the body, and this balance must be expressed both in terms of matter and of energy. Wilbur Olin Atwater, quoted in The Wesleyan Argus (1896).

The Argus was (still is) the student newspaper at Wesleyan in Middletown, CT. And in 1896 Wilbur Atwater was the college’s most famous professor. He was a chemist, and the article focused on his “Bomb Calorimeter.” It was a bizarre sealed box, within which a human subject ate, drank, and breathed measured amounts of matter, while he expended measured amounts of work and heat. Measurement was key, and we remember Atwater today as the father of calorie counting. That’s not an unkind fate. We are becoming the fattest of all modern nations, and we’d do much better to remember Professor Atwater’s foundation principle, the conservation of energy. If our nutrients don’t come out in energy they remain as an unspent surplus that can (as Atwater told his students) worsen health and shorten life. But we should remember Atwater for other reasons. He was (according to The Argus) Wesleyan’s best-loved professor, his lectures and labs popular even though his exams were, well, testing. He supported women’s higher education and employed women in his laboratories (including his daughter). Indeed, Wesleyan waited until two years after his death to stop admitting women (it resumed coeducation in 1970 after a 61-year drought). But Atwater’s best legacy is modern scientific agriculture and its supporting institutions. Wilbur Olin Atwaterwas born on May 3, 1844. His higher education began at at Wesleyan then finished at Yale’s Sheffield School of Science where Atwater’s PhD thesis (1869) was on the chemical composition of field corn. Postgraduate study in Europe followed, and further convinced him that what came out of corn must go into its cultivation. He returned to the US intent on creating American copies of European (particularly German) agricultural research stations. After brief academic appointments elsewhere, he returned to Wesleyan in 1873 as professor of chemistry. There he stayed, but he never rested. He secured state and private funding for the US’s first agricultural research station where he researched the differing effects of different fertilizers on agricultural productivity and on the nutritional quality of the harvests. His successes led to other states enacting similar provisions, and then the national government’s Department of Agriculture. Four decades later, after Atwater’s death, my grandfather would become founding director of Iowa State College’s Farm Extension Service, The whole structure is now being dismantled by Donald J. Trump, whose 2027 budget will cut agricultural research funding by a further $5 billion. While Wilbur Atwater spins in his grave, I take it personally. ©.

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HIGHWAY ROBBERY

Near the cell, there is a well

Near the well, there is a tree

And under the tree the treasure be.

The “cell” is Markyate Cell, and the buried treasure proceeds of a robbery that went wrong. The ‘perp’ was Lady Katherine Ferrers, a highwaywoman dressed as a highwayman, who was shot during the robbery. She fled the scene on horseback, buried the booty, then died in her house, Markyate Cell. Her servants concealed her body in an old ‘cell’ (the core of the building had been a medieval convent), then buried Lady Katherine in the dead of night. The doggerel above is still sung by local schoolchildren. Before that the story was romanticized by 19th-century novelists and then rendered on two films, both titled The Wicked Lady and starring, in their turn, Margaret Lockwood (1945) and Faye Dunaway (1983). Markyate Cell, Elizabethan manor, is now on the market for £7.5 million. And the estate agent makes much of the legend, but also praises the house itself, its 11 bedrooms, and its 12,000 square feet perfect for fine living. Trouble is, it’s all made up. Not Markyate Cell, of course. It does exist. And if you’ve got £7.5 million, you can live there, entertain lavishly, and commute to London (only 25 miles away). Those stories were told, that doggerel is still sung, those films were made, the ‘Cell’ is for sale. And there was a Lady Catherine Ferrers. She was born of good family, gentry, as Catherine Ferrers, on May 4, 1634. And she may have been born at Markyate Cell, near Dunstable, for the family owned property nearby. But then came the Civil Wars, or the Puritan Revolution, and the Ferrers cast their lot with King Charles I—a bad bet as it turned out. Soon, family deaths (her parents and both her brothers) made Catherine an heiress, but a royalist one. To safeguard her royalist estate and shore up another one, Catherine was (in 1648, but she was not yet 14) married off to Thomas Fanshawe, another royalist orphan two years her senior. Since he was of knightly status, the bride became Lady Catherine Fanshawe. One of the Fanshawes, Lady Ann Fanshaw, remarked that Catherine held a “very great fortune and [was] a very fine woman.” No doubt. But her real story ended badly. The groom spent much time embroiled in royalist plots, and indeed was imprisoned in the Tower of London. As for Lady Catherine Fanshawe, she died in London in 1660 having never once robbed a stagecoach. It seems almost certain that her marriage was an unhappy one. It is barely possible that the marriage was finally consummated, for young Fanshawe had just got out of the Tower in time for the arrival of the new king, Charles II. Some speculate that Lady Catherine died following a miscarriage. If so, the truth is much sadder than the fiction. As for the treasure, it’s never been found. ©.

[Stanley]

RARA MAVIS

Give me a Lever and a Rock and I can move the Universe. Dilly Knox, circa 1941.
This clever allusion to Archimedes’ calculation of how one might move the earth came from Dilly Knox (Alfred Dillwyn Knox, 1884-1943), and it’s about his codebreaking team at Bletchley Park that included Margaret Rock (1903-1983) and Mavis Lever (1921-2013). It concerns the work done by Rock and Lever to break the Italian “Enigma” code, which led to the ambush of the Italian fleet by British warships in March 1941. It was a great victory, which (Donald Trump needs to be reminded) happened a year before the US joined the fray. Plus, Dilly Knox was an equal opportunity employer and found talented women to do the work that made Bletchley Park legendary. It’s significant that one of his heroines, Rock, was a mathematician. She died before she could speak about her Bletchley work. But Mavis Lever lived long enough to write about it (including a biography of Dilly Knox) and to serve as a consultant to Kate Winslet for Winslet’s role in the film Enigma (2001). Lever did much else, becoming an eminent historian of gardens and a popular writer about the arts and sciences of gardening. By then she was Mavis Batey, for she’d married one of her fellow codebreakers, Keith Batey, with whom she broke the German code. Not for nothing did Dilly Knox write of her that Mavis was a rara avis—like the black swan (Nigro cygnis), his couplet went, in rhyming Latin. Mavis Batey, née Mavis Lillian Lever, was born into the English working class on May 5, 1921, so she was only 19 when she and Rock broke the Italian code. That happened because, in school, she discovered in herself a high talent for language. With war in the offing, she entered University College, London, to start a major in German. When she realized that “German Romantics” were soon to be bombing her, she volunteered for war service, and she was brilliant enough to come to Dillwyn Knox’s attention. He preferred working with women, anyway (his Bletchley team was referred to as Dilly’s Fillies), and had the out-of-date view that linguists were as vital to coding, and decoding, as mathematicians. From his point of view, she was indeed a rare bird, and soon enough she proved it. After the war, Keith Batey was hired to be a senior administrator at Oxford University, and the couple moved into a somewhat derelict University property in Nuneham Courtenay. Its garden was particularly derelict, so of course Mavis decoded it. She went on decoding gardens (including one of our favorites, at Levens Hall om Cumbria) and became a recognized expert on England’s favorite outdoor sports of planting, mulching, and weeding. Once freed of the Official Secrets Act, in the 1990s, Mavis wrote about her work at Bletchley. Mavis Batey also helped design the Bletchley Park gardens. And in case Trump wants to know, Batey included memorial stones for the hundreds of Americans who worked there, too, after December 1941. ©

[Stanley]

HITTITES

From the wilderness, and this Lebanon, even unto the great river, the river Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites, and unto the Great Sea toward the going down of the sun, shall be your border. Book of Tanakh, I:4.

In the Christian Old Testament, this is Joshua 1:4 and translates similarly. It’s the territorial small print of God’s message to Moses, so it gave Israel’s kings carte blanche to expand and conquer. I sometimes think that Prime Minister Netanyahu takes it seriously, but then ‘Bibi’ is not particularly known for his religiosity. In Christian Europe, it led to the view that the Hittites were (must have been) a people tributary to the Israelites. So it helped explain Uriah the Hittite’s bad luck. He was one of King David’s bravest soldiers, which brought him rewards, but also the husband of Bathsheba, the beautiful bather after whom David lusted. Cuckolded, Uriah was ordered to the front lines and killed in battle. So David got Bathsheba, but then he also got a tongue lashing from the prophet Nathan. To be the apple of God’s eye is not necessarily a privileged position. But today let’s consider the Hittites. Modern scholarship has shown that they were their own masters, rulers of one of the ancient world’s largest empires, rivals to the Egyptians. Israel’s king’s might have peeled off a bit of their lands, but the Hittites were in no way a tributary people. This scholarly revision of Old Testament history began with archeological discoveries of great Hittite cities and was completed by the translation of Hittite cuneiform tablets. The translator was the Czech scholar Bedřich Hrozný, born in Bohemia (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) on May 6, 1879. By the time he graduated from the University of Vienna he was fluent in many languages, living and dead, which gave him a good start when in 1906, now a professor at Vienna, he found the archives of the Hittite kings (at a site about 200 Km east of Ankara). They were inscribed on tablets, in hieroglyphics. Already expert in Egyptian cuneiform, Hrozný was stumped, but he knew enough to identify (in 1917) the Hittite language as belonging to the Indo-European family tree. He kept at it, and later (now professor at Prague’s Charles University in liberated Czechoslovakia) he translated the whole of it. It’s a fascinating story of codebreaking, beginning with the key words for “water” and “bread,” staples of the Hittite diet and its taxation system. Thanks to Hrozný and other scholars, we now know that the Hittites controlled almost all of Asia Minor and much of Palestine. They were rich and powerful. Uriah may have been cuckolded by King David, then killed by David’s orders. But ancient Israel was most likely tributary to the Hittite Empire, perhaps as a buffer state against Egypt, and probably a good customer for Hittite products, foodstuffs, lumber, maybe even chariots and ironwork. And the Hittites probably believed that they were a chosen people. It’s a common delusion. ©

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POLYMATHERY



The masses have never thirsted after truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim. Gustav le Bon, 1896.

When published in English, Gustav le Bon’s 1896 book was entitled The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. That’s a neutral title, and there’s little doubt that some progressive American politicians, notably Teddy Roosevelt, latched on to le Bon’s analysis to create a progressive energy in early 20th-century America. Certainly le Bon admired Roosevelt. But the original title, in French, suggests caution: Psychologie des foules (1896) was soon followed by Psychologie du socialisme (1898), so we can guess that le Bon was a conservative, even a reactionary. Certainly he was no small ‘d’ democrat, and it’s likely that Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini used le Bon’s insights into crowd psychology to create their own mass movements, based on their own illusions. One is tempted to see Donald Trump and his MAGA movement as a manifestation of the terrible force of ‘illusion’ in mass politics. But Gustav le Bon was not a polymath, not a politician. Gustav le Bon was born in the Loire region on May 7, 1841. The family moved to Paris during the political chaos of 1848-1850 which, in France, led to the establishment of the Second Empire under Napoléon III. Le Bon finished his medical studies and qualified as a doctor in 1869, and served in the medical corps in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. Napolean III’s gaudy empire fell in defeat, and in Paris le Bon witnessed the rise and fall of the revolutionary “communards”. One reaction to both was to write a book on (and praising) military discipline, which won him a certain following, and may have led to his flowering, It was a time of intellectual ferment, and over the next decades le Bon launched himself into several fields, becoming expert enough to publish widely in anthropology, physics, art, and astronomy. He traveled widely, too, sometimes under government grant, and helped to strengthen the 19th-century craze for things “oriental.” Typically, he could see great strengths (even beauties) in different cultures, but having imbibed the Spencerian distortion of Darwinian theory, was always anxious to find evidence of European superiority. It was a world, he thought, that by rights should be hierarchical and orderly, the very opposite, perhaps, of Paris during the Commune. Sharing with his elite friends a discontent with the raggedy operations of France’s Third Republic, it is not surprising that in the 1890s, in the midst of the Dreyfus affair, he should turn to crowd psychology as a new line of study, nor that he would see the Dreyfusards as the crowd moved by its illusions to seek to destroy the French army. But at the same time le Bon was turning to physics, to become an admirer of Albert Einstein and an defender of Einstein’s theories of the atom and of the universe. His idea that the crowd had a “mind” became popular with Freudians. In short, Gustav le Bon was a puzzle. ©.

[Stanley]

BAKER



Extend thy narrow sight, consult with art;

And gladly use what it can impart.

Each better glass will larger field display,

And give thee fields of life, unthought of, to survey.

Henry Baker, “Universe,” circa 1727.

“Universe: a Philosophical Poem Intended to Restrain the Pride of Man,” is not a great poem, and it may have been a plagiary. But then Jonathan Swift, in his turn, may have plagiarized Baker’s poem to produce his witty “On Poetry: A Rhapsody” (1733). This was not word-for-word plagiarism, but a use-in-common of satirical ideas about natural history, a fledgling science where one might find that every flea

Hath smaller fleas that on him prey,

And these have smaller yet to bite ‘em.

A progression that proceeds, of course, ad infinitum. Plagiarist or not, Henry Baker was an interesting person. Born in fairly humble circumstances (his father and maternal grandfather were both court clerks) on May 8, 1698, then apprenticed to a bookseller, Henry Baker in the early 1720s taught three children, all born deaf, how to speak. They were the offspring of an Enfield, Middlesex, attorney, John Forster, and Baker’s success—astounding, really, at the time—brought him further commissions, some fortune, and considerable fame. It also brought Baker into the household of the aging and gouty Daniel Defoe, where Baker fell hopelessly in love with his “darling Sophy,” the most charming, intelligent, and beautiful of Defoe’s three daughters. As he was yet a man of little estate, his courting was a fraught affair. Baker’s account makes a lovely read, and was published in full in the journal Modern Philology in 1932. The first challenge was Sophy herself, then the father-in-law to be. The wooing of Sophy is the charming story of a young man sick with love. Sophy responded in kind. But convincing Daniel Defoe was a practical matter. Sums of money are mentioned (the actual amounts were inked out by some later hand). Suffice it to say that the negotiations included a publishing venture, The Universal Spectator and Weekly Journal, that brought Baker a wider circle of friends and made him something of a “scribbler.” Baker also parlayed his successes with deaf and dumb children to become a man of science, not a profession but an avocation, and the high status of being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS). There he was a generous patron of humbler practitioners, and a frequent publisher of his experiments with “better glasses” (microscopy). And there was Sophy, two sons, and 32 years of blissful married life. At his death, Baker endowed the Royal Society, so we still have the Bakerian Lectures, and now the Bakerian Medal. The rest of Henry Baker’s considerable estate went to his grandson, for Sophy and their two sons had predeceased him. ©

[Stanley]

WOODHOUSE

For the first lessons, send the owners away and leave the dogs behind. The dogs only take a few minutes to train, but the owners take a lot longer. Barbara Woodhouse, quoted in The Washington Post, 1982.

Already a sensation in Britain, with a weekly BBC television program, “Training Dogs the Woodhouse Way,” Woodhouse was in the USA to tout for her latest book No Bad Dogs and to negotiate with PBS for an American TV series. The Post interviewer did a pretty good job, letting Woodhouse do most of the talking, but did make one mistake, writing that Woodhouse had left her “native England” to make this foray into the American market. In fact, Barbara Woodhouse was born (on May 9, 1910) Barbara Blackburn, just outside of Dublin, where her father was headmaster of St. Columba’s College, a Church of Ireland prep school much favored by the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. Her father died in 1919, and her mother moved ‘back home’ to England, where Barbara’s grandfather was a wealthy banker. In a way, it didn’t matter. In County Dublin, she was surrounded by animals (pets of all sorts). And in rural Oxfordshire, that continued, with the addition of ponies to train and ride. That was fine with Barbara. She’d once heard her mother lament “why can’t Barbara be beautiful, like the other children?” But her animals “didn’t seem to mind what I looked like.” Woodhouse learned more about animal science as the only woman student at an agricultural college in Shropshire, but that early lesson on preferences stayed with her. Through two marriages (the second, happier one to a medical doctor, Michael Woodhouse), she continued to work with animals (and raise three small children), on the Woodhouse family farms in Buckinghamshire. There she discovered that if you kept your cows warm and comfortable in the dairy parlor they would produce more milk, a bit of kind common sense that brought her public recognition, and she continued to train dogs—and to write children’s books about dogs. That led, starting in 1980, to the BBC program “Training Dogs the Woodhouse Way.” Paulette and I lived in England then, and although we had become (through no fault of our own) cat people, we found Barbara Woodhouse a fascinating figure and watched her regularly, Whatever Barbara’s mother had thought of her, she had become, at 70, an attractive person, a commanding personality. On screen she dominated the dogs’ owners (people applied to be on the program) while cooperating with the dogs to produce smoothly working partnerships. In a country where well-trained dogs were a ‘thing,’ an accustomed part of the landscape but also a mystery (especially, perhaps, to cat people), Barbara Woodhouse became a sensation. Her country manner helped; her cheerful but stentorian command, “Walkies!!” became her trademark, and the nation walked with her. Rather obediently, it seemed to us. ©.

[Stanley]

FAIR MARGARET

Fair Margaret daughter of Evan has

A large claw and a small claw,

One to drag the dogs from the corner.

And the other to break people’s bones.

Welsh folk song,

This song has several verses, and (in its original Welsh) actually scans and rhymes (the latter on an AABB pattern). In it, “fair Margaret” possesses various implements, in pairs one large and the other small, which she uses to demonstrate her Amazonian strength, sometimes on human subjects. So she sounds legendary, and indeed many Welsh stories are about mythic figures stalking the mountains and valleys and striking terror into the hearts of strangers (y saesneg, aka ‘the English’) unwise enough to venture into wild Wales. But in this case ‘fair Margaret Evans’ (fwyn Marged ach Ifan) actually existed. She was baptized in an Anglican church—at Beddgelert in mountainous North Wales—on May 10, 1696. She then married the unfortunate Richard Morris, apparently in the same church, on May 8, 1717. By then fwyn Marged had already built her reputation as a woman of strong opinions and stronger physique, and she did much (in the next 7 decades) to build on that reputation. She built boats, using them to transport copper ore from the Snowden mines to the foundries. She shod her own horses, unaided, and for that matter made her own clogs. She lifted great weights, and in her younger years (which lasted, apparently, well into her 60s) wrestled many a man onto the ground and into submission. And she enjoyed herself. Margaret had her own hounds and followed them afoot, slaughtering foxes as she went. There was a softer side. She sang beautifully, providing her own accompaniment on harps (Welsh harps, of course) that she made herself. For a good part of her life Margaret sang and played in a roadside inn of her own building. Yet, remember that she was a she, attractive enough to excite the aforesaid Richard Morris, a harpist himself, too bad for him. Margaret beat him to a pulp twice, once on their wedding night (!!!) and then again when poor Richard joined the Methodists. Nevertheless, she birthed him three children, and was the faithful wife of his bed, When a local landowner, Thomas Smith of Vaenol (1752-1828) tried his luck with Margaret (unwisely, while being ferried on one of her boats), she dropped him overboard and wouldn’t save him until he coughed up 10 shillings as a tribute to her virtue. By then, Margaret must have been about 70. Of course all this is as true as legend (arysgrif) can be. You have to listen to the song and decide for yourself. Fair Margaret died, undaunted no doubt, in 1793. She was buried in an Anglican churchyard. ©

[Stanley]

SHAKESPEAR

Would I lay down my life to save my brother? No, but I would to save two brothers or eight cousins. John B. S. Haldane.

Thus a great biologist suggested an implicitly mathematical rule concerning the evolutionary importance of a common genetic inheritance, in which cousinage ranks lower than siblingship, then that much lower than parentage. Still, cousins were linked by more than mere fate. So here’s a test case, involving first cousins whose real lives (never mind their genes) were very closely linked, at least for a time. They were William Makepeace Thackeray and Richmond Campbell Shakespear. They were born at about the same time, Thackeray in July 1811 and Shakespear on May 11, 1812, in about the same place (Bengal, India). Add to that they were both ‘imperial brats’, for their fathers were senior civil servants in the British ‘Raj’, as was their common grandfather, the elder William Makepeace Thackeray (1749-1813). As was common with such boys, both were sent back “home” to be educated. They sailed together and entered the same prep school; then followed that up at Charterhouse School, which neither of them liked very well (Thackeray later called it “Slaughterhouse”). From that point, however, their stories diverged. Thackeray went on to Trinity College, Cambridge, then (after a few years of dissolute behavior and gaming debts) mended his ways to become a leading satirist and novelist. You could say it was in his blood, for Thackeray’s other grandpa had been headmaster at Harrow, while Shakespear’s was a mere ropemaker. Certainly Thackeray’s cousin Shakespear (who’d undoubtedly been chaffed too often about his surname) turned out differently. After Charterhouse, he went to military college, which he loved. Commissioned 2nd Lieutenant in 1828, Shakespear returned to Bengal to become one of Victorian England’s greatest war heroes and, with that, an influential writer—but not about middle-class eccentricities and anxieties. As he rose through the empire’s ranks (both military and political), Richmond Shakespear became a publicist for imperialism. His greatest exploits were military, beginning with an heroic (indeed, almost unbelievable) rescue of Russians from slavery in distant Uzbekistan, at the same time scoring a diplomatic coup in the long-running Anglo-Russian competition for imperial eminence in central Asia. Subsequent exploits led to a major-generalship, a knighthood, and a very senior position in the Indian Civil Service. Looking at Shakespear’s career from another angle, one can only think of Jawaharlal Nehru’s comment that the “Indian Civil Service was neither Indian, nor civil, nor a service.” In that satire Nehru sounded very much like William Makepeace Thackeray. But that was a historical circumstance, and had nothing whatsoever to do with cousinage. ©