BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

I hereby wish to scotch the rumor that I¹d attempt to write on humor, for those who do fall into groups of solemn, pompous nincompoops. Ogden Nash

Ever since Chaucer used the term “doggerel” in the “Tale of Sir Thopas” we’ve been trying to distinguish between bad verse, light verse, and serious poetry. Nowadays, eminent scholars ask us to reevaluate hip-hop, and serious poets like Andrew Motion try a bit of rap (NB Motion’s poem “Better stand back/Here’s an age attack” celebrating Prince William’s 21st). It’s very interesting and may make me read some rap some day, if not, perhaps, just yet. But August 19 calls to mind an earlier poet who long teetered on the brink of respectability but who seems lately to have fallen the wrong way, for the young don’t know him at all. Ogden Nash was born in Seattle, or maybe Rye, NY, (he affected uncertainty), on August 19, 1902. “Doggerel” carries with it more than a whiff of incompetence, so we’d better dispense with that right now, for after Nash dropped out of Harvard he became a master of unexpected rhymes, odder meters, and comic coinages, turning plain words into high and low comedy, almost always clean (although the older I get I have to say that some of his stuff on aging seems in dubious taste). He did work in New York briefly but moved south because he “loved Balti-more” where he wrote his verse, collected his anthologies, banked his royalties, and very occasionally broke out to do the lyrics for a Kurt Weill musical or bring us up short with an unkind poem about the wealthy entitled “The Terrible People.” ©

[Stanley]

The habit of an opinion often . . . makes us incapable of accepting the proofs against it. Jons Jacob Berzelius.

Since 1901, Nobel prizes in six fields have been awarded 860+ times. The Peace Prize has caused controversy, but peace is such a battle-strewn area that this is hardly surprising. The other prizewinners have been generally applauded, a tribute to the Norwegian and Swedish committees and academies that are involved. Controversy has sometime occurred because of who did NOT get the prize, as in 1908 when Dmitri Mendeleev, a dead cert for the chemistry Nobel, was dropped in favor of Henri Moissan. The reason given was that Mendeleev’s discovery of the periodicity of the elements was already too old (his basic research had been published in 1868-70). The “too old” argument was probably just an excuse, but there was point to it, for as in most scientific discoveries, but perhaps more than most, Mendeleev’s Periodic Table depended on a ton of amazing work as pioneer chemists, using primitive equipment and sophisticated brains, isolated atomic elements, calculated their relative mass, and even began to figure out their electron valences. Among them, one of the most gifted and productive was the Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius, born in rural Sweden on August 20, 1779. In his long career he would find several new elements, set his students on discovering others, weigh them and classify them, and develop lab techniques of astonishing sophistication, such as using electric charges (in 1803!!!) to isolate the constituents of chemical compounds. For all this, Berzelius was made a fellow of the Swedish Academy in 1808, exactly 100 years before the Academy did NOT give Dmitri Mendeleev a Nobel Prize for putting it all together. ©

[Stanley]

I was intended for some great purpose. Nat Turner

One of the more ironic themes of the southern “Pro-Slavery” argument was that slavery was good for the slaves. They were brought out of savage Africa and into civilized America, Christianized, and taught useful skills and arts. The fundamental flaw in the argument was that it was usually the most civilized slaves who led the most purposeful revolts against slavery. On 21stAugust, 1831, a slave revolt erupted in Southampton County, Virginia. The revolt was led by Nat Turner, a Christian slave and Baptist lay preacher who believed himself to be chosen by God to lead his people out of slavery and into freedom. After killing Joseph Travis (Turner’s “owner”) and his family, the rebels rallied support from other plantations and, for a few days, terrorized Southampton County and, indeed, the whole south. Turner’s rebels killed 55 whites. Turner was later captured and executed, along with 55 of his confederates. Scores more slaves were beaten to death or lynched. Turner’s rebellion was not the first such incident, nor the last, and acts of rebellion by slaves (which included smaller acts of sabotage and, tragically, self-mutilation, infanticide, and suicide) constantly gave the lie to the Pro-Slavery argument, as did the white response to Turner, North and (more so) in the South. Much later, in his second Inaugural, Abraham Lincoln would insist that slavery was a national institution as well as the root cause of the Civil War. “So the war came,” as Lincoln said, but the war that made our nation was prophesied by a black preacher named Nat.©

[Stanley]

I feel best in weather that makes me shiver. Laurence Gould.

While I haven’t been watching closely, my impression is that few geologists become college presidents. Maybe they get siphoned off into the oil industry, or perhaps they are considered slightly second-class among the scientific disciplines. A geologist who confounded both suggestions was Laurence McKinley Gould, who not only became an exceptionally successful college president but was also, for a time, the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Born in rural Michigan on August 22, 1896, of solid Congregationalist stock, he delayed his own education to teach in a one-room school (in the then poverty-stricken community of Boca Raton, FL) when he’d finished high school. After army service in WWI, Gould returned to the University of Michigan where he quickly notched up BS, MSc, and ScD degrees, all in Geology, and joined the Ann Arbor faculty. His involvement in several arctic and antarctic expeditions made him semi-famous and in 1932 he moved to Carleton, serving as president from 1945 to 1962. There he mused much on the human impacts of technology while he helped change Carleton from a merely good Congregationalist college into an internationally recognized liberal arts institution. His services to the liberal arts ideal are enshrined Carleton’s fine Gould Library; his accomplishments in geology are memorialized in the National Science Foundation’s research ship the R/V Laurence M. Gould, currently at work off the Antarctic ice shelf. Gould remained active teaching and research for many years. A staunch Republican, he left the party in 1964 over the Goldwater candidacy (and never returned). ©

[Stanley]

The tongue may be an unruly member/ But silence poisons the soul. Masters, Spoon River Anthology.

Edgar Lee Masters’ life proves, among other things, that you don’t have to be a right-wing loony to think that the Civil War was a dreadful mistake. You can be a left-wing loony, too. Born in Kansas on August 23, 1868, Edgar and his family became early exodusters, moving back to Illinois after crop failures and low prices (a diabolical combination) ruined his lawyer-father’s best customers. It’s barely possible that my granddad, growing up in southern Iowa, saw them on their trek, but that’s another story. Having built a practice in Kansas and lost it, Masters senior leaned towards Populism, a tendency that in Edgar Lee became an obsession. He thought capitalism a vast swindle and “Honest” Abe Lincoln the mastermind behind it all. And (after Edgar, too, became a lawyer, working for Clarence Darrow) he wrote a Lincoln biography that said so. But we know Edgar Lee Masters better as the author of the wonderfully spare, occasionally brutal, yet evocative Spoon River Anthology, poetry that meant to draw out the lives of rural folk who lived along Illinois’ Spoon River and invest them with meaning. He began publication in St. Louis’s Reedy’s Mirror, anonymously (as “Webster Ford”), in 1914, then in book form in 1915. It was a sensation. In a long lifetime of writing (he died in 1950), Masters never again came close to the magic he wrought in Spoon River, but in 1931 he wrote a valuable piece on how Spoon River came to be, and his whole corpus, poetry and prose, earns him a prominent place in our cultural memory. ©

[Stanley]

on Mount Vesuvius broad sheets of fire and leaping flames blazed at several points Pliny the Younger to Tacitus, recounting the eruption and his uncle's death.

24th August may be a good day for you (I certainly hope so) but it was decidedly not a good day for the Roman Empire. On 24th August 79 the historian Pliny the Elder, who had been complaining for days about noise and smoke and other inconveniences from a nearby volcano, tried to get closer and then, the next day, was incinerated (along with about 20,000 others, citizens and slaves, senators and plebs, for these great disasters are no respecters of status) when Vesuvius actually erupted, suddenly and very violently. The eruption set off a pyroclastic flow (look it up in Wikipedia© or somewhere) that completely buried the towns of Pompei, Stabiae, and Herculaneum (anybody from Herculaneum, MO?). The only good to come of it, I suppose, was that it gave us moderns a wonderful archeological site, catching Romans, so to speak, in their acts of living. And then, in the year 410 (and on the anniversary of the Vesuvius eruption, of course) the Visigoth army, led by the wonderfully named Alaric I, entered and sacked the city of Rome. The emperor Honorius had (seeing which way the winds blew) moved the western capital to Ravenna, but never mind. The sack of Rome marked the end of the Western Roman Empire and the first time in over 800 years that the imperial city had awakened to the beat of an occupying army’s drum. As they said in Pompei (before 24th August 79) and in Rome (after 24th August 410), sic transit gloria. ©

[David Whipp]

The rhythm of 'Sic transit gloria mundi' is lovely...

[Stanley]

Gloria goes by bus on Mondays.....

[Stanley]

Thank God for the model trains, you know? Amber Cole in A Mighty Wind (2003)

For a good part of the 20th century, and certainly in both Britain and the USA, if you wanted to do a large population study of arrested development syndrome you needed to look no further than the serried ranks of model train enthusiasts, both those who had model train setups and those who turned green with envy on seeing someone else’s. Much of the responsibility for this mass social illness lay with the son of Jewish immigrants who worked in the cloth trade. Wanting a better life than his hatmaker dad, Joshua Lionel Cowen (he changed his name from Cohen) became an inventor. Born on August 26, 1877, in Manhattan’s garment district, Cowen had by 1900 already sold a couple of patents, one for a photography flashgun and another (for about $400,000 in today’s money) to the US Navy for mine fuses. Thus encouraged, in 1900 he fashioned a model train for a store window display. The idea was to encourage customers to come into the shop. The upshot was that customers wanted to buy the train instead, and, hey presto, the Lionel Model Train Company was born. As I can well remember, a major part of its business remained the creation of quite spectacular store-front layouts, but also I had cousins whose magnificent Lionel train setups drove me crazy with unfulfilled longings and green-monster envy. Mr. Cowen compounded his sins in 1959 by selling all his Lionel stock to his no-good nephew, the McCarthy committee attorney Roy Cohn. But before then he did good work. ©

[Stanley]

We must trust to nothing but facts. Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier.

26th August offers an embarrassment of riches, from the commissioning of Michaelangelo’s Pieta (1498) to the Ottoman Emperor Suleiman’s annexation of Hungary (1541), but today we celebrate our chemistry majors and commemorate the birth, in Paris, on August 26, 1743, of Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier. That “de” would get him in trouble in the French Revolution, but meanwhile he imbibed Enlightenment principles and (being as rich as Croesus), studied the sciences at the College Mazarin. His first science publications (on geology) came at ages 21 and 24. He then, clever chap, married a brilliant teenager (aged 13), Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze (also rich) and she became his scientific collaborator and translator of various European scientific works. Soon Lavoisier became interested in the air, doing foundational experiments with oxygen (a gas he later named), creating water by combining it with hydrogen (a gas he named but did not discover: “hydrogen” is Greek for “water-former”), and was the first to analyze all sorts of interesting gaseous behaviors. However, he also had become a member of the Ferme, the unpopular method of tax collection in France, and come the Revolution (in 1789) this sealed his fate. In 1794 he was guillotined, one of the early victims of the Terror, and appeals on his behalf because of his scientific expertise were disregarded. As the Tribunal put it, anticipating Tea Party rhetoric, “The Republic needs neither scientists nor chemists.” That, it would turn out, was a factually inaccurate statement. ©

[Stanley]

This is the Great Theatre of Life. Admission is free, but the taxation is mortal. You come when you can and you leave when you must. Robertson Davies.

August 27, 2014 is the 101st anniversary of the birth of Robertson Davies, with whom we would be so very familiar had he not been so emphatically Canadian. The problem is Canada’s reputation for being a ‘desert of the beaux arts,’ a reputation which Davies’s own career amply proves a calumny and falsehood. Born to newspapering, Davies caught the culture bug while studying, and acting, in England in the 1930s. He returned to Canada to try to settle down to journalism, got entangled in the academy as Master of Massey College, University of Toronto, where he wrote some wonderfully witty ghost stories (as after-dinner speeches: see High Spirits, 1982) and humorous (mostly) essays on literature, gave two or three great boosts to Canadian drama, and all the while collected factoids and characters for his great trilogies, The Salterton Trilogy (1951-1958), The Deptford Trilogy (1970-1975), and his masterpiece, The Cornish Trilogy (1981-1987), whose hypnotic plot turns on an art forgery, a trio of slightly frayed academics, a monstrous birth, and an astonishing Gypsy woman who might have become a brilliant scholar but marries a millionaire instead. Davies was working on a fourth trilogy when death caught him, probably unawares, in 1995. He left a host of friends including J. K. Galbraith and John Irving (who wrote him into A Prayer for Owen Meany) and a world that should now know that Canada can, indeed, produce great art.©

[Stanley]

Peace is not merely the absence of tension. It is the presence of justice. Martin Luther King, Jr/

Given recent events in St. Louis County, August 28 is a good day to remember that things can be changed, and sometimes with some deliberate speed. On August 28, 1955, Emmett Till, a black teen-ager from Chicago, was abducted from his uncle's home in Money, Miss., by white men after he had supposedly whistled at a white woman; he was found murdered three days later. His murderers were well known, were arrested, brought to trial, and found not guilty. (You can, by the way, read the trial documents on the UMKC Law School site.) Only eight years later, on August 28, 1963, 200,000 people participated in a peaceful civil rights rally in Washington, D.C., where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial. Within a very few years after that, civil rights legislation had secured for African-Americans (in Money, Mississippi, and elsewhere) the right to vote and made cases like Emmett Till’s murder subject to federal law as well as to state law. That is why Attorney General Holder came to Missouri this month. So politics can work. For the more theologically inclined, there is another, longer-range coincidence. For, on August 28, 430, St Augustine was born at Hippo (present day Annaba, Algeria). “Augustinian piety” became an important part of Christian tradition, and would inspire many Protestant theologians, not least Martin Luther and, much later, Martin Luther King, Jr. ©

[Stanley]

I was the shyest human ever invented, but I had a lion inside me that wouldn't shut up. Ingrid Bergman

No one would have mistaken my parents for movie buffs. But an abiding memory of my early teens was the excitement as they awaited and then attended the 1956 opening, in Des Moines, of Anastasia with Ingrid Bergman. I don’t remember why they so admired her, but I can guess. Her astonishingly natural presence (as it were despite her beauty) had something to do with it, and her wartime roles (in Casablanca and For Whom the Bell Tolls) touched their strong anti-fascist feelings. And my dad, for sure, would have been infuriated by the hypocritical, hysterical reaction in America to Bergman’s divorce and remarriage (to the Italian director Roberto Rosselini). Dad also admired Steve Allen, whose prime time variety and talk show was the vehicle by which Ms. Bergman once again found American acceptance and her great role in Anastasia. So Ingrid Bergman may have been the first movie star whose existence I was aware of. Born in Sweden on August 29, 1915, her 1932 studentship at Stockholm’s Royal Theatre brought her into movies. Her Swedish acting career blossomed, she was “discovered” by David O. Selznick, and she starred spectacularly in Intermezzo: A Love Story, in 1939. Then Ingrid, playing as the brave and beautiful Ilsa, found immortality by melting Humphrey Bogart’s hard heart in Casablanca. Her final acting role, 40 years on, was an almost equal success, despite her suffering from terminal cancer. ©

[Stanley]

None of us got where we are solely by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. We got here because somebody ‹ a parent, a teacher, an Ivy League crony, or a few nuns ‹ bent down and helped us pick up our boots. Thurgood Marshall

Since racism seems once again to be part of our public discourse, certainly in some political quarters, let’s today remember someone who suffered from racism in his youth and then triumphed over it in his age, Mr. Thurgood Marshall, Esq., Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Justice Marshall was not born on this day (b. Baltimore, July 2, 1908), but it was indeed on 30th August 1967 that he was sworn in as our first African-American supreme court justice, and by a confirmation vote rarely seen in these culture-war days, 69-11. Marshall graduated with honors from Lincoln University, but was denied entrance to his state university’s law school (University of Maryland) because of his “race.” Instead, he took law at historically black Howard University, graduated magna cum laude, and within a year (1934) joined the legal team of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). A hard headed advocate, he could seem hard-hearted, but through his careful case selection and brilliant jurisprudence, Marshall won 29 of the 32 cases he argued before the US Supreme Court, including most famously Brown v. Topeka Board of Education (1954) but also, oddly enough, a segregation case against the University of Maryland Law School. Revenge is sweetest when it embodies justice. So a tip of the 30th August hat to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. ©

[Stanley]

men, accustomed to think of men as possessing sex attributes and other things besides, are accustomed to think of women as having sex, and nothing else. Mary Jacobi.

Among the many disabilities that were thought to render women not only different from but lesser than men was the monthly period. Indeed, women—at least women of a certain social standing—were strongly recommended to withdraw and rest during their ‘flow’. Predictably, it took a woman to prove this to be, so to speak, an old husband’s tale. She was born Mary Corinna Putnam, in London, the eldest child of American parents, on August 31, 1842. Her father George Palmer Putnam had moved temporarily to England to set up a branch of his publishing house. Mary was brought up to believe she could do just about anything, and took George at his word although he thought medicine a very bad (“repulsive”) career for a female. She was not the first American female doctor, but one of the first, and certainly the first woman to be admitted to the College of Medicine in the University of Paris (where she took her second medical degree and won an academic prize). She also was a published fiction writer but gave that up to practice medicine. do research, marry (Dr. Abraham Jocobi), and raise a daughter. During her career Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi published over 100 medical papers, including her 1878 Boylston Prize essay The Question of Rest for Women during Menstruation, pressed very hard for female equality in all things (and at all times!), and successfully advocated for the integration of clinical and laboratory studies in medical education. ©

[Stanley]

No one cared what St. Louis thought, although the city got a wink for pluck. Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City (about the 1893 World's Fair).

On September 1 we celebrate two anniversaries in Missouri’s historic role as gateway to the west and, perhaps, confront the puzzle of why Chicago, and not St. Louis or Kansas City, would be the ultimate winner, becoming a national transportation hub and the true “gateway city.” For it was on September 1, 1821 and 1836, that two pioneering expeditions created the most famous of the trails west (before, that is, the Union Pacific snaked its way west out of the City on the Lake). First, in 1821, William Becknell led a party out of Independence, MO, to establish a trading connection with the Mexican outpost at Santa Fe. His route became the Santa Fe Trail. Secondly, in 1836, the Reverend Marcus Whitman and his wife Narcissa (great name, that) set off (also from Independence) on a trek that would make the Oregon Trail an American byword, on their way to establish a Protestant (and antislavery) utopia in the Oregon country. In due course, these routes would be followed by the Pony Express, the Mormons, the 49ers who rushed to California, and eventually also by several minor railroads. But Chicago, in 1821 still unborn in its swamp (the very word means stinking water in the local Indian language), would reap the lion Cub’s share of the benefits of Missourian enterprise. On September 1, 2014, the 193rd anniversary of the Santa Fe Trail, we ask, Why does Chicago lose in baseball and win in banking? ©

[Stanley]

Two hours is about as long as any American can wait for the close of a baseball game, or anything else for that matter. A. G. Spalding.

For various reasons, most of them obvious, baseball exceeds all other sports in its devotion to and fascination with statistics. The game’s natural flow hasn’t been much changed, for one thing, and other changes (lengthening the season, for instance) have been easily incorporated into the numbers game. So we can compare Babe Ruth to, say, Barry Bonds, in a more or less objective fashion before arguing about the impact of drink and/or drugs on performance. But it can get a bit silly. Look up Hall of Famer Al Spalding, for instance, and you’ll find that his baseball debut happened (5/5/1871) when he was 20.245 years old and his last (8/31/1878) when he was 27.363. You can work backwards from that if you want to discover that he was born aged 0.000 on September 2, 1850 (in Byron, IL). 7.118 years is not a very long career for a Hall of Famer, even if he was a good pitcher, so you have to look beyond the stats, where you will find that Albert Goodwill Spalding got into the Hall by other means, manager and club president (of the Chicago "White Stockings") organizational pioneer (he founded the National League), and sport historian (he chaired the committee that decided the game was founded by Abner Doubleday). But without a doubt Albert Spalding is most famous for founding (in 1874) the Spalding Sporting Goods Co. In 1977 Spalding was displaced by Rawlings as the maker of the “official” MLB baseball, but then who was Rawlings, anyway? ©

[Stanley]

If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water. Loren Eiseley.

Among the courses at Pennsylvania that I wanted to take but never found time for was almost anything offered by Professor Loren Eiseley. When I was there in the early 60s Eiseley was aleady famous, formerly the Provost, and holding an endowed interdisciplinary chair. So, while at Penn, I did the next best thing, which was to read two of his books. Thus when I began courting Paulette I knew what to give her for Christmas 1965, Loren Eiseley’s poetic, philosophical book called The Immense Journey (1957). She’s still got it. We’re still married (it’s our 48th anniversary today). And it’s still a great book. It ponders evolution, a scientific story Eiseley sometimes regarded as “an apparition”, a sort of message from nature that “contains—if anything contains—the explanation of men and catfish and green leaves.” Eiseley was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, on September 3, 1907, to an amateur Shakespearean and an amateur painter, unhappy with each other but imparting to Loren a love of words and of nature so strong that he knew already in his teens he wanted to write about the natural world. Eventually he went into it more deeply than that, becoming a leading paleontologist himself, an insightful historian of science, and a philosopher of men and green leaves. As for the catfish, his essay on finding one frozen solid (and alive) in Nebraska’s River Platte, is typical of his writing style and substance, and by itself is well worth the price of admission of The Immense Journey. ©

[Stanley]

I felt now that I knew my boss, that I could feel the very limits of his narrow life . . . because I had read a novel about a mythical man called George F. Babbitt. Richard Wright.

Richard Nathaniel Wright was born on September 4, 1908, on the Rucker Plantation in Adams County, Mississippi. His life journey ended in La Père LaChaise cemetery in Paris, where his gravesite has become a place of pilgrimage for those who admire lives truly lived and truly written. But Wright the novelist had first to be Wright the little boy, and his childhood was marred by abandonment, poverty, and racial violence. At length his grandmother Margaret took him in to a life stiflingly religious but disciplined enough that he read voraciously, became high school valedictorian, and a published writer. Wright then moved north, to Chicago, where he joined the Communist Party, continued to write, married, and won a Guggenheim (1938) on the strength of a fine volume of short fiction. The fellowship sped the completion of the novel that made him famous, Native Son, published in 1940. The novel’s protagonist, Bigger Thomas, is a low-life nearly rescued by political activism but in the end fated to fail. The character, powerfully but unsentimentally drawn, became an icon of the black experience in urban America. After WWII Wright moved to France, established himself in literary circles (his friends included Sartre and Camus), became a French citoyen (1948) and in due course renounced the Communist Party. Wright was survived by his wife, the former Communist Party organizer Ellen Poplar, and their daughters Julia and Rachel. ©

[Stanley]

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood . . . Daniel Burnham.

5th September is a good day for American architects and city planners, for on this day in 1846, Daniel H. Burnham was born in Henderson, New York. His family soon moved to Chicago, where Daniel was brought up in a Swedenborgian church and community, following the teachings of an 18th-century Swedish scientist and theologian that seem to have inspired people of artistic temperament from Emerson to Borges. At any rate, Daniel Burnham became an architect, first as an apprentice and then, at age 27, in an architectural partnership with John Wellborn Root. This firm would become a focus not only of building design but also of city planning, a novel idea in an era of “organic” (read chaotic) urban growth. One of the Burnham and Root’s biggest contracts was to design the site and many of the buildings for the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. Upon Root’s death in 1891, Burnham took over as chief architect, and his neoclassical White City was to become the signature of the fair. Burnham would go on to design New York’s Flatiron Building and Union Station, in Washington, D. C. His most ambitious work, however, was a book, called The Plan of Chicago (1909), which precociously addressed the problem of urban sprawl and called for serious planning to avoid the fissiparious tendencies of unplanned urban development in an age of rapid transit. Perhaps we should have listened to him. ©

[Stanley]

Don't buy a single vote more than necessary. I'll be damned if I'm going to pay for a landslide. Joseph P, Kennedy

When John F. Kennedy ran for the Democratic nomination in 1960, he had a few serious handicaps. His Catholic religion was an issue, and important elements of the Democratic establishment didn’t like him. Among the doubters was former president Harry S. Truman, who famously and wittily located his distrust. It’s not the Pope I worry about, said old Harry, it’s the pop. Truman referred to the patriarch of the Kennedy clan, Joseph P. Kennedy, father of Jack, Bobby, Teddy and a whole passel of Kennedy girls, who had intended his oldest son, Joe, Jr., for the presidency but made do with Jack after Joe’s death in the war. Joseph Kennedy, Sr., was born in Boston on September 6, 1888, grandson of Irish immigrants but prosperous enough to go to Harvard. He married well, too, Rose Fitzgerald, daughter of an Irish political family, and the couple waxed wealthy and powerful. Joe’s ruthlessness is documented, his wealth through the stock market, his connections with Prohibition bootlegging, his Hollywood investments and affairs (the latter including Gloria Swanson). But for Harry Truman it was his politics that stuck in the craw, his conservatism, his conduct as ambassador to Britain when he supported appeasement and tried to establish negotiations with Hitler, and then his support for Senator Joe McCarthy, whose red-baiting caused Truman so much grief and anger. In the end, Jack got the nomination and Harry’s support, and Joe got his presidency. Joe then lived long enough to see both Jack and Bobby assassinated, an American tragedy. ©

[Stanley]

Paper or Plastic?

It can be a sad comment on our species that we’ve designed almost everything we use, even pointed sticks. “Sad” because we homo sapiens sometimes sacrifice basic function to some other consideration. My shoes have fairly attractive laces but they are also “designed” to come untied in about 30 minutes, sooner if I am walking. And how many uncomfortable chairs have you sat in lately? Some designs, however, work so well that we can hardly conceive of being without them, and it can come as a shock to discover that once they did not exist. Take for instance the square-bottomed grocery bag. Of course when those bags get wet all bets are off (we learn that design lesson by experience), but kept dry their sheer ingenuity is apparent; they are strong because their folds are self-reinforcing. Not only that, but the folds are designed so that the bags can be mass-produced. And they have been with us for a long time, for the bag in your back seat may well bear US patent no. 123,811, dated 1872. The patent’s owner was inventor Luther Crowell, born in Wellfleet, MA, on September 7, 1840. Crowell, clever chap, also invented the sheet delivery and folding mechanism that assembles your daily bad news (patented 1873) unless you read it digitally. But as with many brilliant, functional designs the square-bottomed paper bag was an idea whose time had clearly come. Before Crowell’s 1872 patent, it seems to have had three inventors, Crowell himself (in 1867), a paper factory worker named Margaret Knight (sometime before 1870), and a clever clergyman called Francis Wolfe (at roughly the same time). Oregami, anyone? ©

[Stanley]

Before women were human beings. Article title, Ida H. Hyde, in the Journal of the AAUW, 1938.

A woman scientist who was born before Lincoln’s election and died after Truman’s swearing in has to have a good story to tell, as indeed does Ida Henrietta Hyde (without the middle name we’d be calling her Ida Hyde which would not suit). Born in Davenport, Iowa, September 8, 1857, of German-Jewish parents who’d demonstrated their assimilationist credentials by changing their surname, Ida also went through Chicago’s Great Fire and a long period of hard labor (the family lost all to the flames) during which, among other accomplishments, she paid for her brother’s university education. While still working, she fell upon Alexander Humboldt’s Ansichten der Natur and was inspired to become a scientist. Her education, much interrupted by poverty, would take her to Cornell, Bryn Mawr, and Heidelburg (where she was only the third female PhD). (Her scholarship to Heidelburg was given by the American Association of University Women, who have funded a couple of scholarships at our Honors College!!). She was 39 when she got her PhD, then moved to Harvard where she achieved several firsts, and then to Kansas, then California, leaving discoveries at every place, including (most significantly) the microelectrode (in 1902!!) which has diagnosed so many and saved so many lives. Ida wrote wittily, too, about the years “Before Women Were Human Beings,” a period she knew well enough to help bring to a close. Not bad for a little girl from Davenport, IA!!!! ©

[Stanley]

any political party has got to recognize the problems of a ... complex industrial civilization. And I don't think the Republican Party is really wide awake to that. Alf Landon, 1962.

It’s difficult to decide which class of American politician is less well remembered, winning vice presidential candidates or losing presidential candidates. Who was James Buchanan’s vice-president? Who did Coolidge defeat in 1924? But one losing presidential candidate who is very much worth remembering is Alfred M. Landon, the landslide loser (to FDR) of 1936. There are several reasons we should place Mr. Landon’s bust (if one was ever made) in our hall of memory. Not least, he lived to be 100 years old, born on September 9, 1887, and died on October 13, 1987. Plus he lost really big, garnering only 36.5% of the popular vote (still a record) and 8 electoral votes (another record). Most striking in these latter days, however, he represents a vanished species, the passenger pigeon of American politics, for Alf was a liberal Republican or, as he would have called himself, a progressive Republican. Landon supported much of the New Deal, and liked and admired Roosevelt. At a time when the dominant wing of his party was veering towards isolation, he clearly saw the Nazi menace and warned against even the appearance of neutrality. After war broke out in Europe, he opposed Lend Lease only because he thought we should give Britain what she needed. Much later he supported LBJ’s Great Society, doubtless seeing in it many echoes of the New Deal. And, to cap it all, he was a Kansas Republican, a successful governor (who did not resign his office), and an articulate and intelligent public speaker. A rare bird indeed, our passenger pigeon, the Honorable Mr. Landon of Kansas. ©

[Stanley]

No, painting is not interior decoration. It is an instrument of war . . . . Pablo Picasso.

On 10th September 2014 we celebrate the homecoming (to Madrid’s Prado) of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, a political painting if ever there was one, in which he attacked fascism and memorialized the people of the Spanish Republican stronghold of Guernica, destroyed by Nationalist bombers in one of the first, but alas not the last, examples of the deliberate aerial bombing of civilian populations, on April 26, 1937. The bombs were supplied by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. The Spanish Republic commissioned the painting, and it first appeared that very year in the Paris International Exposition. The Republic fell to fascist Francisco Franco, still in power when Picasso died in 1973, and in his will Picasso directed that Guernica should be returned to Spain only when democracy returned, which happened after Franco’s death in 1976. And after the usual complications and formalities involved with valuable works of art, the painting came “home” to Madrid on 10th September 1981.