BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

Democracy is the destiny of humanity. Benito Juarez

Physical stature should not be a criterion of anything but altitude, but there’s no doubt it counts. Hollywood went to embarrassing lengths (pardon the pun) to make Alan Ladd (5’6”) as tall as his leading ladies (“he stood on a box and I wore tennis shoes,” said Carol Matthews, while a trench was dug for Shelley Winters). Likewise, the artist who painted the official Mexican state portrait of Benito Juárez (born on March 21, 1806) tried to make the president look like he might fit his throne-like chair, but there’s a tell-tale footstool that spoils the illusion. Indeed, Juárez was short: at only 4’6” one of the very shortest chief executives in modern political history. If that was a problem for his rise to greatness, he was also a full-blooded Zapotec, speaking only the language of his people when (at 12) his ready intelligence was noticed by a lay Franciscan. Juárez was put in seminary school and began his rise to greatness. Lawyer at 28, governor of a state at 35, leader of the opposition to Santa Anna, political exile (he wrapped cigars in New Orleans), Benito Juárez returned in 1856 to lead the Mexican Supreme Court and then to lead la República, institute liberal reforms, and resist Napoléon III’s attempt to create an American empire in Mexico. His victory is celebrated each year on Cinco de Mayo even though the battle thus singled out was only the opening shot in a long, exhausting, and brutal five-year war. So when you salute our southern neighbor on May 5, offer your toasts to shortness, courage, and persistence (“falta de estatura, el coraje, y la persistencia”). They do often go together. ©

[Stanley]

The water does not flow unless the faucet is turned on. Louis L'Amour.

Literary texts, some say, are wholly recreated with each reading and (therefore) infinitely plastic. It’s not a critical standard, as Joyce Appleby pithily observed, that is applied to letters from one’s tax accountant, but one wonders about the plasticity a hobo (in a boxcar on a train going west) might find in Oscar Wilde’s “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” Louis LaMoore was that young hobo, and he had already acquired an almost pathological reading compulsion. In a long life (he was born on March 22, 1908, in North Dakota, and died in 1988 in LA) he read constantly, voraciously, and once he settled down (besides hoboing, he boxed, jack tarred, felled trees, wrangled, and mined) he would amass a personal library of 17,000 books, read most of them, house them in a great mansion and, eventually, house himself in one of Forest Lawn’s largest gravesites. To do all that took money, and LaMoore made money by a career of compulsive writing that began in Depression Oklahoma (he contributed to the WPA volume on the state) and continued after WWII when (as Louis L’Amour or Tex Burns or a couple of other pen names) he would produce 110 novels, short stories still being counted, and a couple of memoirs. Most of the fictions were westerns, e.g. The Rustlers of West Fork (1951) or Fair Blows the Wind (1978). I don’t plan to read any of his works, but President Reagan thought them great literature (“my husband’s favorite author,” Nancy said) and who would want to challenge that judgment? In case you can’t find a L’Amour in your local bibliothèque, there’s a complete hardcover set in the Reagan Library in Simi Valley. Westward, Ho! ©

[Stanley]

I believe in helping an employer to function more productively. Then we will have a claim to higher wages . . . and greater participation in running a smooth industrial machine. Sidney Hillman.

One of the best novels to come out of immigrant New York was Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), a rags to riches story to be sure but not meant to be about “success.” Levinsky scrambles to the top by dint of keeping others at the bottom. The garment industry was indeed tough, wages low, piecework rampant, and just to keep your head above water might drown others. But it didn’t have to be that way, thought Sidney Hillman, who (like the fictional Levinsky) began his life (March 23, 1887) in a rabbinical way (in Lithuania) but soon moved to reading secular texts by the likes of Darwin, Marx, and Spencer. Joining the Communist Party, he took part in the 1905 revolution, finally fleeing to the USA where he fetched up as a garment cutter in Chicago. There a 1910 labor dispute cast Hillman in a leadership role, one he did not relinquish until his death in 1946. In the process, he shed many of the convictions he’d acquired in his youth, but in some respects we find him on the left of the labor movement, a strong advocate, for instance, of industrial unions as well as craft unions. Still, the approach of WWII found him very firmly in FDR’s camp, even to the point of condemning a UAW strike (for recognition and fair pay) of 1941. Then he ‘took the king’s shilling,’ to use a saying from English politics, serving in FDR’s Office of Production Management and then on the War Production Board. In his last full campaign, 1944, Hillman raised a million dollars for FDR, a huge sum in those days and ideologically a long, long way from the young revolutionary of 1905. But then, Hillman wasn’t Levinsky and this wasn’t Russia. ©

[Stanley]

I have always wanted to travel across seas, like to Canada and stuff. Britney Spears.

Our neighbors to the north, a.k.a. “Canadians,” are often satirized as dull Charlies. They are far too unexcitable, for one thing, especially about things that should excite them, like baseball and cheeseburgers. They call their coffee shops “Tim Hortons.” I recently spent a week in Halifax and didn’t see a single Starbucks. Their legendary politeness is seen as a kind of inferiority complex, or as a disguise for repressed aggression. Spill a hot Hortons on a Canadian and he’ll apologize for getting wet, or being in your coffee’s way, and maybe even offer you another cup. Canadians’ alleged lack of high culture has led to the usual crop of oxymoron jokes, as in “Canadian art” and “military intelligence.” But we perhaps ought to take them more seriously, not as the source of our blizzards but as another Anglophone implant in the “new” world that has managed to work some things out differently than ourselves (I speak as a unitedstatesian-American). You might begin this reconsideration with a look at their public and private gardens (as proofs that weather is not fate?). Or their bilingualism. Their health care system is a lot cheaper than ours and, Rush Limbaugh to the contrary notwithstanding, works better. Anyone who thinks Canada a (cold) desert of the beaux arts should immediately read Robertson Davies’s ‘Cornish Trilogy’ (ironically, an extended reflection on the same theme) or just spend some time in one of Canada’s cultural capitals (they have at least three, one of them Francophone). I was moved to all this by today’s anniversary of Canada’s extending the vote to those of African descent. That happened on March 24, 1837. ©

[Stanley]

When I like men, I want to . . . lose the outer qualities that give me my individuality and be like them. Scott Fitzgerald.

The expatriate writers of the 1920s--“the lost generation,” Gertrude Stein famously said of them—are a continuing fascination. Their lives—work and carousing in Paris punctuated by Spanish bullfights and Riviera sunseeking—were best recounted by Malcolm Cowley (a minor player) in Exile’s Return (1934) but there have been many other attempts. Cowley also had a hand in another, fictional attempt to recapture those “best times,” Tender is the Night, F.Scott Fitzgerald’s last and darkest novel. It’s obvious to modern readers that Tender is ‘really’ about Scott himself, and his troubled wife Zelda. What’s now less obvious is that Fitzgerald’s fiction starts (more happily) with different characters, Gerald and Sara Murphy, before it implodes into the lives of Scott and Zelda. At the time it was obvious to everyone, including Hemingway and Dos Passos, who both slammed Fitzgerald privately for dragging the Murphys into his tragedy. Gerald (born March 25, 1888) and Sara (b. 1883) were of NY’s social elite who married against their parents’ advices and moved to Paris to get away from it all. There (and on the Riviera) they and their children lived lives of great pleasure with great friends who were drawn to them by their money (to be sure) but also by their heady mix of kindness and style. They, too, were unhappy with Fitzgerald’s caricatures (as they thought) in the form of Nicole and Dick Diver. The Murphys’ response was best summed up in the title of Calvin Tomkins’s 1971 biography, Living Well is the Best Revenge. Gerald died in 1964. Sara lived on until 1975. They rest in peace. ©

[Stanley]

Another roof, another proof. Paul Erdos.

My friend Max Lazarus, a physicist who studied the Doppler shift, moved about the Lancaster campus so quickly as to become a living lab example, his very own doppleganger so to speak. It would have been a mistake for me to conclude from Max that all scientists are eccentric (some behave quite predictably), but a few do inhabit odd universes. I think it’s the math. Take for instance Paul Erdós (read a double accent on the o), born in Budapest on March 26, 1913. His parents were mathematics teachers and he took after them with a vengeance, copping his doctorate at 21 and becoming the most prolific mathematics theoretician of the century. He also anticipated the slogan “you are now free to move about” by doing so with great speed and in random frequencies. Often Erdós decamped for the best reasons (by the late 1930s it was not good for a Jew to stick around Budapest, and in the early 50s he took offense at McCarthyism and exiled himself from the USA), but often for reasons still unclear. Other eccentricities included a private vocabulary (he “tortured” rather than “examined” his students), and he was an atheist who referred to God as “Supreme Fascist” and spent his whole life trying to “copy” all the theorems that the “SF” had written down in “The Book.” At length he was recognized for what he was, a peripatetic genius, the “Oddballs’ Oddball,” Max Lazarus to the nth power, and was granted open visas by both the Soviet Union and the USA. Inevitably he died while on his travels, in Warsaw, in 1996, leaving behind few possessions and legions of puzzled friends. He is buried with his parents in Budapest, home at last. He wanted his epitaph to read “I have finally stopped getting dumber.” ©

[Stanley]

I am not a prophet. I am opposed to prophesying, We shall see what we shall see. Wilhelm Rontgen.

Among the grosser but less bloody stupidities of WWI was a widespread ban on teaching German. Nebraska, slow as usual, did not get around to it until April 1919. In St. Louis, one of our statelier boulevards, Berlin Avenue, was renamed “Pershing,” perhaps the unkindest cut of all. And you might well think that Röntgen Rays (as they were sometimes called at first) were renamed X-Rays for the same reason. After all, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen had discovered them, more precisely had first systematically worked with them, and he was certainly German (born in the Rhineland on March 27, 1845, though educated in Holland). But Röntgen himself named them X-rays for their properties that (rather unscientifically) he thought “mysterious.” Even romantic: his very first “röntgenogram” was taken of his wife’s ring finger, showing Anna Bertha’s flesh as a ghostly shadow but her carpals and her wedding band in clear detail. His original ‘discovery’ had taken place on November 8, 1895, shooting the cathode rays at a metallic compound which, strange to say, then glowed in the dark. For his work, Wilhelm Röntgen would receive the very first Nobel Prize in Physics, in 1901. Röntgen Rays would indeed revolutionize various branches of science, not least medicine, and a half-century on would enable Crick and Watson to unravel the structural mysteries of the DNA molecule. Besides the Nobel, Röntgen himself was showered with honors and dignities but retained the humility that charmed friends and strangers and moved the Nobel panel to call him “amiable and courteous by nature.” ©

[Stanley]

A lot of my inventions were applying something that works in one place to a different situation. Victor Mills.

I am again lecturing on the American Industrial Revolution, and new interpretations have forced a reevaluation. The great innovations, many imported (notably the steam engine), used to be almost the whole story. Where technology and transport didn’t explain it, scientific discovery took over. Now the process looks much less orderly, took longer to complete, and insofar as innovation was part of it, it was marked not so much by great leaps forward as by random (yet frequent) acts of cleverness. There is now a “cobbled together” aspect to what we used to call a “revolution.” That brings up Victor Mills, born in rural Nebraska on March 28, 1897. After an unlikely youth as a sailor, welder, and jack-of-all-trades, Mills went back to school, got a chemical engineering degree, and in 1926 went to work for Proctor & Gamble. His pictures show him a jolly old guy, and indeed he lived to be 100, but at P&G he was a whirlwind. He’s most famous these days for Pampers and thus for revolutionizing parenthood. But his real genius was in figuring out how to improve production processes, e.g. for Ivory Soap and Duncan Hines cake mixes. He was also largely responsible for production improvements for Crisco, Jif peanut butter, candles, Pringles, and P&G’s bandages brand. Mills tested a lot of this stuff on his children and then (with Pampers, circa 1960) his grandchildren, so it’s good he never got into insecticides. In WWII, though, he solved a production problem with synthetic rubber by adding Ivory Flakes to the mix. 25 patents, in all. A genius? Perhaps. But in line with the new thinking “gadfly” might be more appropriate. ©

[Stanley]

People with a self-image of worth are going to see value in what they do. . . . It's a drive that comes from within. William Walton.

Today is the birthing day of Sam Walton, about whom enough is known, and William Walton, who can stand a bit of publicity. This quietly passionate modern composer was born (on March 29, 1902) in Oldham, on the outskirts of Manchester, where his father and his mother had, in their younger years, played and sang (respectively) for Charles Hallé at the Manchester College of Music. Musically precocious, William went to Oxford as a boy chorister and stayed (at Christ Church) as an undergraduate, deepening his fascination with music but failing to get a degree. One of his earliest works, a collaboration with Edith Sitwell, enjoyed the distinction of being walked out on by Noel Coward, and a reviewer wrote of its “relentless cacaphony,” but he soon hit his own stride musically and was composing somewhat more melodically for the likes of Sir William Wood (of “Prom” fame), Sir Thomas Beecham, and Malcolm Sargent. Even more exalted patronage came in the form of “Crown Imperial” (1937), the coronation march for King George VI, and Walton also composed quite a number of distinguished film scores. Shortly after “Crown Imperial” Walton himself assumed the role of patron to Benjamin Britten. who not entirely unkindly called Walton “the head prefect of English music.” Despite a bout with lung cancer (which cured him of his pipe), Walton would survive Britten (memorials to the two rest adjacent in Westminster Abbey). Whether his “head prefect” music will survive longer or wear better is another question, but the few pieces I have heard have been worth listening to. ©

[Tripps]

The Oldham connection, - it must however be noted that. . .

Walton was the son of a church musician and amateur bass-baritone. He successfully auditioned to become a chorister at Christ Church cathedral, Oxford, at the age of 10 and, apart from school holidays, never lived in the North again.
He shed his accent and later explained that he was driven to begin composing by a desire to stay in the sophisticated south. "I must make myself interesting somehow or when my voice breaks, I'll be sent home to Oldham," he said. But Northerners are tolerant of genius and did not take offence. Oldham later gave Walton the freedom of the borough.

Love the phrase 'tolerant of genius'

[Stanley]

I passed your comment on David....

The chief art of an Husbandman is to feed Plants to the best Advantage; but how shall he do that? Horse-Hoeing Husbandry, by Jethro Tull, p. 14.

Being my Uncle Ed’s nephew, I grew up with some tall talk about how farming was going to become super-efficient and super-scientific, at least as soon as the Republicans got kicked out. But besides politics Ed often referred to “Jethro Tull” as a prophet of modern farming. I thought it was a made-up name (it has that quality) and laid it aside, only to be brought up short in graduate school when I heard a seminar paper on Jethro Tull’s Horse-Hoeing Husbandry (1731) and its great influence on American pioneers of intensive farming such as Thomas Jefferson and the Rev’d Jared Eliot. And it was an important book. You can read it on-line right now if you want, and if you go to the right place you can read John Adams’s very own copy (the 1762 edition, at the Boston Public Library). We don’t know when Jethro was born but he was baptized in Basildon, Berks., on March 30, 1674. His father was a gentleman farmer and so Jethro went to Oxford, but instead of doing something sensible, like lawyering, he renamed his dad’s farm “Prosperous” and set out to make it so. His accomplishments included a seed drill which, by planting in rows, made weeding efficient, which he also advocated. Tull rotated crops, treated the soil and exposed it to air before planting, selectively bred livestock, and built efficient, purposeful farm buildings (you can still see some of them in Berkshire). Tull exercised great influence in the American colonies, and in France, and he had nothing to with the cleverly named progressive rock band, “Jethro Tull,” even though one of their albums was called “Heavy Horses.” They were from Bedfordshire. ©

[Stanley]

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things. Rene Descartes

I am one of those cranks who believe that the “modern world” began well before the inventions of the spinning jenny and the whirling dynamo (never mind the Erie Canal and Isambard Brunel’s SS. Great Eastern), in “my” century, the 17th, the “century of revolution.” Thomas Hobbes is my man, for he not only dared to think that change might be progressive and continuous but built an ethical system based on observation rather than tradition (without worrying overmuch about the “relativist abyss.”) These ideas got him into a lot of hot water, but thanks to friends in high places he survived the scalding. Hobbes was a mathematician too, and reminds us that the century birthed experimental, empirical science. But I am told that my enthusiasm for Hobbes is misbegotten, that pride of place belongs to René Descartes, un français of all things, born on March 31, 1596, just in time to usher and then identify this most remarkable of centuries. Virtually orphaned, educated by Jesuits (in math and physics inter alia), he wrote his most famous works in Holland, a society just learning to be tolerant, and crusaded (bravely or prudently, as circumstances recommended) for a philosophy based not on “truth” but on precepts which he could make certain by observation, logic, and reason. In his wilder moments, Descartes hoped that all knowledge could be measured mathematically, and along the way he invented modern mathematical notation and laid the groundwork (upon which Newton and Leibniz would build, later in ‘my’ century) for the calculus. “Move over, Hobbes, your place has been taken.” Sic transit gloria mundi. ©

[Stanley]

Is this heaven? No, it's Iowa. Conversation with Sergei Rachmaninoff, April Fools Day, 1935.

The Iowa State College of Agricultural and Mechanical Arts (to give Iowa State University its old, full title) had, nevertheless, pretensions to culture, and not just of the Ag variety. “Moo U” did much to introduce its students to a wider world. During and after the Depression the college had its own sculptor in residence, Christian Petersen, whose wonderful works grace the campus to this day. I hope courting college couples may still plight their troth at his “The Marriage Ring” (1942). The College also had a concert series, and it was one of my father’s greatest thrills to interview Sergei Rachmaninoff before his “College Concert” in the year my dad edited the Iowa State student paper, 1935 I think it was. The composer-pianist stayed at the Hotel Fort Des Moines because it wasn’t thought that Ames had a suitable inn. Anyway, Rachmaninoff (born on April 1 1873 as we reckon dates) was then 63, and still (dad reported) a vigorous man. Dad never mentioned to me that the composer (who had fled Russia at the time of the Revolution) felt that he had left his inspiration behind, composed little, and toured compulsively to maintain the style of life to which he had become accustomed in Old Russia. Goodness knows what the great man thought of the Hotel Fort Des Moines or of his Ames college concert hall, or for that matter of the two young journalists (dad’s assistant editor went along) who disturbed his rest to ask him how he liked Iowa (he said he did), but he granted them quite a long interview, treated them with exquisite courtesy, and that night, in concert at the piano, convinced my dad (a dab hand with the cornet) of his musical genius.©

[Stanley]

When there is a hard job to be done, I give it to a lazy man. He is sure to find an easy way of doing it. Walter Chrysler.

Years ago (The Age of Enterprise, 1961) Thomas Cochrane and William Miller demonstrated that the myth of the self-made man was, indeed, a myth, and one (moreover) assiduously cultivated by captains of industry who found it congenial to believe—or have others believe—that they’d succeeded “on their own.” Cochrane and Miller used ‘collective biography’ to study the thing, and of course they admitted many exceptions, Andrew Carnegie being the most prominent. Another truly self-made man was Walter P. Chrysler, born in a small Kansas town on April 2, 1875. His father was a train driver, and Walter began his working life at 14 as an apprentice in the Union Pacific machine works at Ellis, Kansas. He had a pretty long career in railways, working his way up slowly through various RR lines to become “master mechanic” (1908) for the Chicago Great Western at Oelwein, Iowa and then works manager for the American Locomotive Co. in Pittsburgh. At that point, 1911, his career took a decisive turn when he moved to Flint, Michigan, to take charge of Buick production, and at a huge salary plus stock option bonuses. Chrysler aided William Durant in his reorganization of General Motors, which in turn raised the value of his GM stock and made Walter Chrysler an independent player in the burgeoning motor car business. He took over the bankrupt Willys Company in 1921, then bought up the Maxwell Company and transmogrified it into the Chrysler Corporation which we American taxpayers all helped to bail out a few years ago. But let’s be charitable. That was not Walter Chrysler’s fault. ©

[Stanley]

Mother never laughed at my dream of Africa, even though everyone else did, because we didn't have any money, because Africa was 'the dark continent' and because I was a girl. Jane Goodall.

Some parents, I know, put quite a bit of thought into the toys they give their children, for who knows what shapes the child’s values or personality? Indeed. Take for instance Jane Morris Goodall, born in London on April 3, 1934. Her parents Mortimer and Margaret gave her a chimpanzee doll which she named “Jubilee” and which she still has. Oddly enough, at the very start of the life’s work that has made her famous, Jane got in hot water for naming 'her' Gombe Stream chimps. This seemed to many to violate the ideal of objectivity in animal behavior (ethology) studies. There are, doubtless, some who still feel that way, but Jane Goodall has made converts of the rest of us and eloquently extended the concept of “a life’s work” to her 55 years in and around Gombe. She got into it (aged 23) by convincing the Kenyan paleontologist Louis Leakey that she was fit matter to help him with a study of primate behavior, He sent her back to London to study up on chimps and then she spent the rest of her days proving that you can’t understand chimps in London. You live with them on their Gombe turf (and find that it is, indeed, theirs). You give them names like Frodo and Freud, Goliath and Gigi, names that seem appropriate to the varied temperaments you notice in them, as individuals. You watch them invent tools (for catching termites, for instance) and hunt Colobus monkeys for meat, and you upset long-held notions about our nearest genetic relatives. And you wear your fame well, always on behalf of those who made you famous. Jane Goodall turns 81 today. Happy Birthday!! ©

[Stanley]

Segregation shaped me, and education liberated me. Maya Angelou.

All human lives are interesting, but sometimes you have to delve deeply to find that out. At the other extreme are lives whose sheer wild variety overwhelms one’s sense of the possible and the plausible. That was surely the life of Marguerite Annie Johnson, born in St. Louis on April 4, 1928. In the course of a very long life (she died only last year) Marguerite conducted street cars, worked briefly as a prostitute, danced with Alvin Ailey, acted with James Earl Jones, reported for an English-language paper in Cairo (that’s Egypt, not Illinois), produced broadcasts at Radio Ghana (and served as an administrator at the University of Ghana), cut an album of calypso music (as Miss Calypso), and worked on civil rights issues with both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. And all that was before she was 40. Then, on her 40th birthday, King was assassinated, an event which seems to have focused her frenetic energy on writing. For by now (well before, indeed) Marguerite was Maya Angelou, a name she took from her brother’s nickname for her and from her first husband, a Greek sailor. She knew “why the caged bird sings,” and so, now feeling free, she sang. Her autobiography may be her most lasting contribution, beginning with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) and running through six more volumes. There were also a couple of pretty famous poems that had a ‘this is my story: listen to me’ ring to them, including the one read at (Bill) Clinton’s inauguration. Seven volumes of autobiography seems a lot, even without the poems, but one could say that Maya earned every word. ©

[Stanley]

The greatest service that can be rendered to any country is to add a useful plant to its culture. Thomas Jefferson.

Since Darwin didn’t know about DNA, one of his more persuasive arguments about the power of inheritance was the success of farmers in employing selective breeding to get good results in animals. I suppose he must have mentioned plants, too, and certainly seed selection was a big part of horticulture from way back. By the 19th century plant breeding was big business, and one of the most famous success stories is that of Washington Atlee Burpee. Burpee was born in New Brunswick on April 5, 1858, where his parents were visiting family. His dad was a doctor, which may have encouraged Atlee’s boyhood enthusiasms for breeding farm fowl, at which he enjoyed some success. Atlee also corresponded with breeders in North America and Europe, knew about Darwin’s work, and soon (aged 20) was selling Burpee chickens and seeds out of the family home (in Philadelphia). Ten years later he had taken over the family’s country estate (Fordhook, near Doylestown) as an experimental farm, and was trawling the world for more and better varieties of all sorts of veggies, blossoms, and bushes. By 1910 he added experimental farms in New Jersey and California, and Burpee Seeds was by far the largest seed company in the world. Among other things, Burpee was responsible for iceberg lettuce and the Fordhook lima bean. And at a time when all sweet corn was white, he made a mint by introducing yellow sweet corn, trade name Golden Bantam. And speaking of heredity and blood lines and all that, it seems to me mildly interesting that one of Atlee Burpee’s cousins was Luther Burbank. Possibly Darwinism itself runs in families.©

[Stanley]

That alone is worthy to be called Natural History which investigates and records the condition of LIVING things. Philip Henry Gosse.

One of the major difficulties for creationists is the existence of fossils. They’ve dealt with it in various ways. One is to argue that God ‘salted the mine’ with fossils. I first heard this argument in a cemetery (in 1963) in rural Iowa, when I was also assured that God’s aim was to entrap sinners like myself. This theory introduces us to an omniscient and omnipotent Creator who is also a Con Artist, a borrowing, perhaps, from the Greek myths, and indeed it was old, for it far antedated Darwin’s Origin (1859). It received perhaps its most elaborate statement in an 1857 tract by the gifted English naturalist Philip Henry Gosse, who felt moved to make the case because geologists like Charles Lyell were already convinced that the earth was unimaginably ancient and, what was worse, were saying so. Gosse was born on April 6, 1810, and was already famed as a prolific writer on nature and as the inventor of the public aquarium (at London Zoo). Gosse entitled his work Omphalos, which is the Greek for “navel”, because he was entranced by the question of whether Adam had one. But since God had created all those fossils, all at once, and put them all over everywhere including on mountaintops, it was clear to Gosse that Adam must have had a navel even if it were not needed. This argument—coming as it did from a man of considerable scientific achievement—amazed contemporaries in England, including Christians who did not want to believe that God had “written on the rocks on enormous and superfluous lie.” Gosse’s tract did not sell well, but in our own time it has found more support. ©

[Stanley]

I never hurt nobody but myself and that's nobody's business but my own. Billie Holiday.

The disabilities we impose on those fellow citizens who have run foul of the law are once again at issue, and rightly so. When a “debt to society” has been repaid by a completed prison term, surely quits should be called. Take the case of Billie Holiday, the astonishingly gifted jazz singer, who was jailed on a narcotics charge in 1947 and (at her request) sent to a federal rehabilitation hospital to kick the habit. On her release, her fans packed Carnegie Hall for a celebration concert, which was fine and in its way heart-warming, and I am sure earned her some money, but a New York law barred Billie from performing in clubs and bars because she was a convicted drug user. She toured Europe successfully, appeared in a couple of films, and enjoyed a brief Broadway revue-revival, but the magic was gone and there remained more than a whiff of narcotics around her life. She died of heart failure in July, 1959. Billie Holiday was born in Baltimore as Eleanora Fagan on April 7, 1915. Her mother, Sadie Fagan, was 13 at the time. Her father, Clarence Holiday, was 15. It was a tough start to a tough life. Through a series of adventures and misadventures she became a famed singer in Harlem clubs and there was “discovered” by a white jazz enthusiast. Thereafter she recorded with famous bands, black and white, including Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and Count Basie. But after her conviction she could not return to the clubs. Her New York Times obituary noted the irony, in 1959, and so should we, in 2015. ©

[Stanley]

How a weary old girl like me can be a threat to state security only they can say. Helen Joseph.

One of the miracles of our time was the (largely) peaceful overthrow of apartheid in South Africa, consummated with the election of Nelson Mandela as president in 1994. One of the heroes who did not live to see that day was Helen Joseph, born Helen Fennell in England on April 8, 1905. She almost made it, living to see Mandela’s release and her own unbanning, dying on Christmas Day, 1992 (a nice coincidence, for she was a fierce Christian). Helen settled in South Africa in 1930, and apart from a spell in England fighting Hitler she spent the rest of her life there. Helen first became involved in politics through her work for the Garment Workers Union where she became close to its Communist leadership. She was particularly offended (the right word, I think) by what she called the ”double oppression” of black and colored women. Her first public act of defiance came in 1956, leading a march of 20,000 in Pretoria, and she never stopped. She was tried for treason that year, “listed” as an enemy of the state, subject to repeated banning orders, placed under house arrest several times, peppered with bullets and tear gas, and in the midst of all this (1971) diagnosed with the cancer that finally got her. But she never stopped, this childless old lady, divorcee but sometimes acting in loco parentis for the children of jailed African National Congress leaders, including the Mandela girls. Asked about her epitaph, she suggested—with her disarming humor-- “Grandmother of the Nation.” Instead, the ANC made her Isithwalandwe-Seaparankoe, its highest honor, “The One Who Wears the Plumes of the Rare Bird.” And who could say better? ©

[Stanley]

No man becomes a fool until he has stopped asking questions. Charles Proteus Steinmetz.

The bitter, occasionally bizarre battle over AC current (George Westinghouse) and DC current (Thomas Edison) has been a staple of my lectures for a while, but let’s ignore those two giants to introduce the dwarf who demonstrated conclusively that Westinghouse was right. He was born Karl August Rudolph Steinmetz, in Breslau, on April 9, 1865, and despite congenital deformities (besides drawfism he inherited from his father a hunchback and a deformed hip) early demonstrated a great proficiency in math and physics. This carried him a ways, but in Prussia he had the additional handicap of being a socialist. He fled Prussia, accordingly, and fetched up in the USA, not a haven for socialists but free enough for young Steinmetz, who took up with different political mentors including Thorsten Veblen. He kept up with his physics, and (suggesting a well-formed sense of humor) changed his name to Charles Proteus Steinmetz, ‘Proteus’ after the worldly-wise, infinitely mutable deity in The Odyssey. (“Charles” was picked as more American than “Karl.”) His published lab work on alternating current made him famous, his connections with General Electric made him fairly rich, but professionally and socially he really blossomed out at Union College and in various engineers’ associations, including the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, which happily elected this rather odd immigrant as its president. At Union, the annual undergraduate research fair is called the Steinmetz Symposium, and a Union fraternity he literally electrified also remembers him fondly and is, presumably, happy to be AC rather than DC.©

[Stanley]

By understanding many things, I have accomplished nothing. Last words of Hugo de Groot.

Hugo de Groot, better known as Hugo Grotius, was a child of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Dutch War of Independence, and his character and life help us to define these momentous eras (since the Dutch war against Spain lasted 80 years and indeed encapsulated Grotius’s whole life, it qualifies as an era). He was certainly a man of parts, just as he had been a precocious child. Born in Delft on April 10, 1583, he produced his first book in 1599 (a translation of a Latin classic on the seven liberal arts) and, aged only 18, was appointed official historiographer of the Estates General. Before he was finished (1645) he had established himself as a philosopher, a theologian, a dramatist and poet, a politician and a diplomat. I know Grotius best as an eminent and rather militant advocate of Arminianism, which my Puritans (and most of his own countrymen) regarded as a popish heresy, but his universal reputation is that of a jurist, more particularly as the founding genius of international law. His particular vision was intimately bound up with the interests of the rising Dutch Republic, a small but hugely energetic society utterly dependent on its abilities to trade with all comers and carry to all nations, but it was saved from narrowness by Grotius’ deep learning and saved from obscurity because, in a sense, it predicted the future of international capitalist trade in goods, services, and money. His international law classics are Mare liberum (The Free Sea, 1609) and De jure belli ac pacis (On the Law of War and Peace, 1625). Ironically, he died as a result of injuries suffered in a shipwreck. ©

[Stanley]

Families and children are so important to our society that dedicating your life to trying to improve their lives is entirely satisfying. Jane Bolin.

On July 22, 1939, Fiorello LaGuardia, the crusading Republican mayor of New York City invited a young lawyer, Jane Bolin, to join him at the World’s Fair at Flushing Meadow. She was surprised by the invitation and even more surprised when—at the fair—LaGuardia swore her in as a judge of the city’s Family Court. So was the nation, and the world, for thus Jane Bolin made headlines: she became the first black woman judge in US history. Jane Bolin was born on April 11, 1908, in Poughkeepsie, NY. Her dad, Gaius Bolin, was the son of a Native American woman and a black man. He was the first black graduate of Williams College and became a successful lawyer in Poughkeepsie (serving as president of his county bar association). Her mom, Matilda Emery, was a white Englishwoman of—let me guess here—interesting character. This “protected child” steamed through high school, graduating at 15, and then (aged 17) entered Wellesley College where she (and the one other black student) had to live off campus with a sympathetic white family. She never forgot her resentment but graduated near the top of her class, and against all advice went to Yale Law where she was one of three women students and the first black woman to attend (and graduate). She had a distinguished career as a judge, where she displayed “a broad sympathy for human suffering.” Perhaps we need her in St. Louis County. Alas, she retired at 70 (“they kicked me out”) and, after spending another three decades crusading for women’s rights and teaching math and reading to grade school children, Jane Bolin died at the ripe old age of 98.©

[Stanley]

There have been only two geniuses in the world, Willie Mays and Willie Shakespeare. Tallulah Bankhead.

The American South, now solidly Republican, was once solidly Democratic. Race has defined both solidities, but the Democratic South was deeply fissured on other issues for, besides being solid, the South has been poor, much of its population, black and white, ill-educated. ill-fed, ill-sheltered. These deep fissures occasionally surfaced, as during the ‘populist revolt’ of the 1880s and 1890s, and the Great Depression of the 1930s. During the latter decade, one of the Democratic politicians who broke ranks to cast his lot with the poor was William Bankhead of Alabama. Born to a planter family on April 12, 1874, Bankhead starred in football at the state university and studied law at Georgetown in Washington, D. C. As a budding politician, he was a “for whites only” Progressive, just like Woodrow Wilson, but proved his independence by supporting Al Smith, a Catholic. The Great Depression, however, moved him to think there might be something really rotten in Denmark. Like his fellow Alabamian Hugo Black, Bankhead became an enthusiast for the New Deal’s economic and trades union legislation, its financial reforms, and even supported FDR’s effort to pack the Supreme Court. More unusually, Bankhead was an internationalist and supported Roosevelt’s early efforts to help Britain against Hitler. As Speaker of the House, he was a very powerful advocate for Rooseveltian politics. And it should be noted that both William Bankhead’s mother and his younger daughter were named Tallulah. Politically, the actor-daughter took after the dad as a taboo-breaker, and then went him one better by becoming an ardent supporter of the civil rights movement. Tallulah was not very solid, at all. ©

[Stanley]

For all I know, writing comes out of a serious devotion to reading. Eudora Welty.

I sometimes wonder whether successful novelists, once their writing career is underway, every read anything (other than the pages they cranked out yesterday morning), but it’s clear that Eudora Welty kept on reading (others) and writing (hers). There’s a Welty interview (Linda Kuehl asked the questions, shortly before her suicide) in The Paris Review for Fall 1972, “The Art of Fiction,” and it’s peppered with Welty wonderfuls about other writers, from Jane Austen (“I admire all she does”) to William Faulkner (a fellow Mississippian: “I liked him ever so much . . . it was like living near a big mountain”). The occasion of the interview was Welty’s trip to Paris (with her aged mother), but it gave Kuehl a chance to ask Welty about her recent (1970) best-seller, Losing Battles, which the NY Times said appeared “with a liveliness and inventiveness which are almost unseemly.” Welty, unused to “popularity”, thought “it must be a fluke.” I wrote it, she said, not for the public but for “a handful of friends I would love to have love the book.” It’s a wonderful interview, and it intensifies my regret that I waited until Welty was dead to read anything by her. Like Faulkner, she had a great sense of the past, but used it as a controlled set for far more intimate plots, “ideas about characters and situations.” But she did write a story about Medgar Evers, so she wasn’t immune to History with a capital H. Eudora Welty, born at home on April 13, 1909, died at home on July 13, 2001. For a Welty start, read one of her first (1936), “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” a short story that lasts forever.©