BOB'S BITS

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To love ideas is excellent, but to understand how ideas themselves are conditioned by social forces is better still. Vernon Louis Parrington, 1917.

For those who like to think that the Republican Party has entered its very own Age of Excess, the rise of Trump is a mere frippery. The necessities had already been furnished by, inter alia, the goings-on in Kansas and the meteorological musings of the senior senator from Oklahoma. But it was not always so. Once upon a time, these places were hotbeds of a different radicalism. As is well known among those who’ve read When Farmers Voted Red, young Gene Autry sang and strummed for the Oklahoma Socialist Party. Meanwhile, up in Kansas, Mary Ellen Lease urged her neighbors to raise less corn and more hell. Another crop they sewed was Vernon Louis Parrington who would, when harvested, revolutionize the study of American culture. Born in Aurora, IL on August 3, 1871, Vernon moved to Kansas with his parents during the boom years of the 1880s and then witnessed the bust of the 1890s. Meanwhile, he got an education (at Emporia and Harvard), and then taught literature at Emporia, Oklahoma and finally at Washington. His views of American history cast in the mold of prairie radicalism, he then fashioned his 3 volume, Pulitzer prize winning Main Currents of American Thought (1927), a holistic cultural history that many credit with birthing the American Studies movement. Replete with villains, heroes, and a couple of heroines (many of these judgments have been overturned), Main Currents remains a rollicking good read. And you might never guess, amidst all its provocative entertainments, that Parrington was also the winningest football coach in University of Oklahoma history, and a baseball pitcher who felt that the curve ball was one of God’s finest inventions.©

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What a wonderful world this would be--if only we'd give it a chance. Louis Armstrong.

Louis Armstrong liked to say he was a “Southern Doodle Dandy born on the Fourth of July,1900” and he celebrated his 71st birthday three days before his death on July 7, 1971, but the fact was he started his remarkable life on August 4, 1901. His instincts for showmanship and his patriotism overruled the matter as far as he was concerned. Given the hardships of his childhood, his fame, his fortune, and his three score and ten might all be regarded as miracles. Pa was a stoker in a NOLA turpentine factory and Ma was (probably) a prostitute. Louis began his working life delivering coal to prostitutes’ “cribs” in the Liberty Street neighborhood. Aged 12, he was arrested, and at the Colored Waifs Home for Boys he learned how to play the bugle. He was released having (the Home claimed) attained a fifth-grade education, but carried horn playing out into the streets as a marketable skill. His talents were noticed, and by 1923 he was recording (as second cornetist) in King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band. In a good career move, he married the pianist, Lil Harding, who gave him a few years and some formal musical training which, as we all know, he put to good use. Probably the most famous jazzman of his era (only Ellington rivaled him), Armstrong was sometimes criticized for his glossing over the race issue (he didn’t march but he did donate; for many years he refused to play in segregated New Orleans) and for his willingness to sacrifice pure jazz for popularity. But his brilliant horn quieted most critics. At his New York funeral, pallbearers included the Duke and the Count, Ella and Pearl, Bing and Frank, and (for measure and rhythm) the Governor and the Mayor.©

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Directing a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world. John Huston.

Nowadays, it’s accepted that among war’s casualties are its survivors, soldiers whose battle traumas work out, often tragically, in later life. John Huston knew this in his bones because he filmed actual warfare, in battle conditions, at risk. And so in 1945, right at the end of WWII, Huston put together a remarkable film, Let There Be Light, about psychologically damaged combat veterans. Our government suppressed the film for 35 years as too anti-war for our tender eyes. Meanwhile, John Huston resumed his career as our most famous movieman, creator of classics like Key Largo (1948), The African Queen (1951), and The Misfits (1961), and of many merely very good films like Wise Blood (1979) and Under the Volcano (1984). He also acted, rather well usually, appearing in over 20 films, and he cast his father Walter and his daughter Angelica in Oscar-winning roles (in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, 1948, and Prizzi’s Honor, 1985). This remarkable life was an unlikely outcome for a baby born to a vaudeville actor and a peripatetic journalist, as it were on tour in Nevada, Missouri, on August 5, 1906. His childhood was one of travels and travails, particularly after his parents’ divorce in 1912, but also of excitements, including a brief tour of duty in the Mexican army, a successful short story, some off-Broadway acting, and a reputation as a hard-drinking, talented, but highly unreliable New York journalist and Hollywood scriptman. Then came 1941 and his very first film, The Maltese Falcon, and a lifetime of trying not to slide downhill from an acknowledged masterwork. At this hard task, which lasted until the day he died, in 1987, John Huston did rather well. ©

[Stanley]

Directing a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world. John Huston.

Nowadays, it’s accepted that among war’s casualties are its survivors, soldiers whose battle traumas work out, often tragically, in later life. John Huston knew this in his bones because he filmed actual warfare, in battle conditions, at risk. And so in 1945, right at the end of WWII, Huston put together a remarkable film, Let There Be Light, about psychologically damaged combat veterans. Our government suppressed the film for 35 years as too anti-war for our tender eyes. Meanwhile, John Huston resumed his career as our most famous movieman, creator of classics like Key Largo (1948), The African Queen (1951), and The Misfits (1961), and of many merely very good films like Wise Blood (1979) and Under the Volcano (1984). He also acted, rather well usually, appearing in over 20 films, and he cast his father Walter and his daughter Angelica in Oscar-winning roles (in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, 1948, and Prizzi’s Honor, 1985). This remarkable life was an unlikely outcome for a baby born to a vaudeville actor and a peripatetic journalist, as it were on tour in Nevada, Missouri, on August 5, 1906. His childhood was one of travels and travails, particularly after his parents’ divorce in 1912, but also of excitements, including a brief tour of duty in the Mexican army, a successful short story, some off-Broadway acting, and a reputation as a hard-drinking, talented, but highly unreliable New York journalist and Hollywood scriptman. Then came 1941 and his very first film, The Maltese Falcon, and a lifetime of trying not to slide downhill from an acknowledged masterwork. At this hard task, which lasted until the day he died, in 1987, John Huston did rather well. ©

[If you are interested here's the link for 'Let there be Light' on Youtube. FILM

[Stanley]

You can die of the wrong thought as quick as of a bullet. Helen Hull Jacobs.

Certain aged persons will remember the way championship tennis was played before the advent of the theatrical grunt, the on-court tantrum, and the excessive victory celebration. One would have to be pretty aged indeed to remember who set those standards, but one famous tennis rivalry was played to the hilt by opponents who—though not friends—never forgot that their sport was a sport. The rivals were Helen Wills Moody and Helen Hull Jacobs, and they fought their battles as youth players in California and then as dominating presences in Grand Slam play for a decade. In all that time, Jacobs beat Moody only once, in the 1933 final at Forest Lawn, and then it was marred by controversy as Moody retired hurt. The rivalry had already been so long, and Moody so dominant, that commentators criticized Moody for denying Jacobs a played victory, but neither woman allowed journalists to create a spat. Moody apologized for “spoiling” the final and Jacobs—who had pleaded with her to finish—quickly acknowledged that it was impossible. Besides, she said many years later, “we never nursed grudges.” Born on August 6, 1908, in a small mining town in Arizona, Helen Jacobs learned her tennis at the Berkeley (CA) Club, won nine Grand Slam titles, was runner up many times (often to Moody), served with distinction in Naval Intelligence during WWII and the Korean War, pioneered in both tennis fashion design and teenage fiction, and lived on as a faithful Episcopalian and a lesbian. Helen Jacobs was survived by her lifelong companion Virginia Gurnee and left not a single grudge behind when she died (1997) in Easthampton, New York.©

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My youthful ambition was to be a constitutional lawyer . . . instead, I became a labor organizer. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, speaking in her own defense at her Smith Act trial, 1952.

John Jay, a founding father if ever there was one and the third author of The Federalist Papers, believed that “those who owned the country should govern it.” To say the least of it, that view has never quite died out, and it became particularly strong as the country industrialized and learned how to finance itself. It was both ironic and significant that it found an answering echo on our far left among those who advocated common ownership of the country’s capital as the only way to establish real democracy, the rule of the commons. There were always, among those prophets of social ownership, some remarkable women, and perhaps the most remarkable of them all was Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, born in New Hampshire on August 7, 1890 into an Irish immigrant family of strong ambitions and stronger political convictions, proud of their daughter’s early conversion to socialism and feminism. In her teens and 20s, Gurley Flynn took part in about every famous strike (e.g. in Lawrence MA, Paterson NJ, and the Mesabi Iron Range in MN) as an IWW organizer but also a leader in efforts to insure freedom of speech and expression, even for those who did not own newspapers. Gurley Flynn was, indeed, a co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union. With the collapse of the IWW, however, Ms. Flynn looked for a new home and in 1937 found it in the Communist Party where she rose through the ranks to become chairman in 1961. In this migration, she may have sacrificed some of her earlier principles, notably feminism and free speech, to the demands of political orthodoxy. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, courageous warrior of the left, died in Moscow on September 5, 1964. ©

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To this, to this, after my hope was lost,--/ To this strange victory; Sara Teasdale, "Strange Victory".

Do poets feel emotion more profoundly than other men and women? Their business—unending, exquisite searches for just the right word—lends itself to just such a conclusion, and examples of deep feeling are plentiful enough in poetry, e.g. Lord Tennyson’s intense poetic tribute to Arthur Henry Hallam, In Memoriam, written immediately after Hallam’s death and then constantly revised for 18 years before publication. A pair of poets whose deep feelings for each other may have ended in tragedy were Vachel Lindsay and Sara Teasdale. Teasdale, born in St. Louis on August 8, 1884 and educated at the Mary Institute, first published poems (1911) in a St Louis weekly, but two full volumes shortly thereafter, romantic, deeply felt and yet quite spare, strongly attracted the more florid Lindsay. But he withdrew from the chase, pleading relative poverty (Ms. Teasdale was well heeled), and both married others, unhappily in Sara Teasdale’s case. Teasdale went on to win the precursor of the Pulitzer Prize for Love Songs (1917), to grow ever more lonely, to win a surprise divorce against her husband, reestablish a probably platonic relationship with Lindsay (still married to another), and live a reclusive life, troubled by bouts of illness and punctuated by other publications, notably The Answering Voice: 100 Love Lyrics for Women and Dark of the Moon. Her poems sold quite well but did not offer her sufficient solace. Her perhaps predictable suicide came two years after Lindsay’s. Sara Teasdale is memorialized in her hometown by a plaque in the St. Louis Walk of Fame and remembered too for the characteristic poems of her posthumous volume, Strange Victory (1933). ©

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Knowledge is my most ardent pursuit. Thomas Telford.

Bridges link, span, transcend, bring together, provide crossings to safety, and for these reasons (thought my bridge builder father-in-law) they should please aesthetically. He regretted that so few of his bridges merited a second look. Modern materials and taxpayer parsimony rendered most bridges utterly plain if not downright ugly. Most but not all. A pioneer bridge builder of the modern age, Thomas Telford, has left us his creations littered about the British countryside. Often cheaper than what went before (he was a genius at saving weight and money in masonry and iron); they did indeed span, link, and cross; and those that still do these poetic things (over 40, erected between 1792 and 1832) have pleasured people well enough to become listed buildings in their own right. They do well their quotidian tasks (a number still carry main highways or working canals) but also offer delight to any who pause to look. Telford, born poor and orphaned poorer in Dumfriesshire, August 9, 1757, started out as an apprentice stonemason but began learning about design from architect Robert Adam and acquiring patrons who liked his style and manner. At 30, he was appointed surveyor of public works in Shropshire, and his work there was so successful that soon he was abuilding from London to the highlands, from Edinburgh to the Menai Strait, and was christened the “Colossus of Roads” by the poet laureate. If that were not enough Thomas Telford was licensed by parliament to build cheap, pleasing churches and kirks, several of which, like his roads, bridges, and aqueducts have withstood tests of time and taste to provide the discerning traveler with safety and pleasure. ©

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The cause of freedom . . . is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity. Anna Julia Cooper.

Students often have to be reminded that slavery—the absolute ownership of one human by another—produced awful situations. But since humans are humans, it could produce some strange ones too. Thus Thomas Jefferson’s mistress, Sally Hemmings, was his slave and his sister-in-law. Another such liaison was between George Washington Haywood, eminent North Carolinian slaveowner, and Hannah Stanley Haywood. Hannah was his slave (a house servant) and mother to seven of his children. One such child was Anna Julia, born on August 10, 1858. Freed by the verdict of battle, Anna won a scholarship to a new Episcopalian school for children of color, in Raleigh. She so distinguished herself that, upon graduation, she became a teacher there. There followed a brief marriage, and then the young widow, Anna Cooper, attended Oberlin College, to earn a BA and then an MA (in math). Later, as teacher and school principal in Washington, DC, Anna Cooper advocated for civil rights for African-Americans and became a leading feminist. Then, at 56, she began her doctoral studies in medieval history at Columbia. Cooper then transferred to the Sorbonne, Paris, where in 1925, at the tender age of 67, Anna Cooper became the fourth African-American woman to earn a PhD (for a thesis on French slavery). Cooper lived on until February 27, 1964, a child of slavery in the Civil Rights era (whose work also earns her an entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). If you have a current American passport, you can find an apposite Cooper quotation spread across the top of one of your visa pages. It’s worth a look. ©

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For a while we wondered what the computer could be used for in any practical sense. Tom Kilburn, interviewed in 1982.

Got the computer blues? Crashes shortening your temper or your life? Do you believe that just one more “App,” the right one of course, will bring you eternal happiness? Tom Kilburn, born on August 11, 1921, in Dewsbury, Yorkshire, England, is the one to blame. He did not set out to harm anyone. Starting at university just as Hitler was bombing Britain, he finished his first degree in two years, and did it so well that C. P. Snow recruited him for secret war work. Kilburn worked on radar for four years. One problem he couldn’t solve was how to make, store, and recall radar memory. Come the peace, at Manchester University, Kilburn worked on a way to make memory, store it, and then recall it in usable forms. This “small scale experimental machine,” as he called it in his rather literal-minded patent application, ran the world’s first genuine “software” program on June 21, 1948. Why “soft”? While other computers were already up and running, for instance at the University of Pennsylvania in the US, their programs were “hard” wired, and to run any new program these primitive computers had to be rewired. Kilburn nicknamed his invention “The Baby,” although like most early computers it was a good deal bigger, and yet very much simpler, than any baby. I have not been able to discover whether, or how often, it crashed. Completely unaware of the damage he had thus wreaked on modern society, innocent of any malign purpose, Kilburn went on to a distinguished science career, was elected to the Royal Society, holidayed in Blackpool, and (unpardonable sin) supported Manchester United heart and soul. ©

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America, America! God mend thine every flaw. Katherine Lee Bates. America, The Beautiful.

How long has Katherine Lee Bates’s “America the Beautiful” graced the American “Scout Songbook”? Perhaps since 1931, when it lost out to the Star Spangled Banner as our official national anthem. It’s no surprise to see it in the songbook; it’s good scouting stuff: religious, patriotic, and a paean to the beauties of American—and human--nature. Bates wrote it after a trip to Colorado’s “purple mountain majesties” and first published it in the religious magazine, The Congregationalist. But did the scout movements (the songbook does duty for both boys and girls) know that Katherine traveled through those “amber waves of grain” with her lifelong romantic partner, fellow Wellesley College professor Katherine Coman? Perhaps not, given scouting’s long (but now waning) antipathy to same-sexers. Do our aspiring politicians know that Ms. Bates and Ms. Coman were rock-ribbed Republicans? Perhaps we should tell them. We should add that Katherine Bates was born August 12, 1859, daughter of a clergyman, that (besides becoming Professor of English at Wellesley and a more than passable poet) she created the fictional character of Mrs. Santa Claus, was a strong feminist, and was sustained in her grief at Katherine Comans’ death, in 1915, by her religious faith and her ability to render her feelings in verse (published as Yellow Clover: A Book of Remembrance). But perhaps we could say, without much fear of contradiction, that time changes many things, even in the USA. If that is so, then perhaps, one day, the party of Huckabee, Santorum, and Perry will once again welcome same sex partners with open arms, read their poetry, sing their patriotic songs, and remember that Santa Claus had a hard-working wife. ©

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Artists must be given every opportunity to develop their talents. It is their work by which future generations will judge the civilization of today. Florence Nightingale Levy, Guidance in Art Education, 1938.

What does a little girl—an only child—do with her life when her parents name her after the woman who was then the most famous medical person in the Anglophone world? Well, if you were Florence Nightingale Levy, born in Manhattan on August 13, 1870, you study art, in New York and Paris. Then, realizing that you are not going to be another Rembrandt, you study art history and criticism, in the same cities but now in museums, libraries and universities. Florence Nightingale Levy (for that is how she signed) went on to become an eminent critic and curator. But she started freelance, “Florence the Clipper,” so called because she religiously cut, collected, and collated newspaper and magazine stories about art. In 1898, she turned her clippings into the American Art Annual, and was its founder-editor for 21 years. There immediately (1901) followed the weekly Art Bulletin, and a book publication that went through six editions, a guide to Art in New York. Finally, museums got wind of Florence and she curated at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for many years, her tenure there interrupted by four years as director of the infant Baltimore Museum of Art. But her most important contribution to American art was her lifelong concern for art education and for waking industry to the aesthetic duties (as she saw them) and bottom-line advantages of good, pleasing end-product design. In this role she founded (and directed) what must have been the nation’s first regional Arts Council and, not content with that, edited the occasional publication Occupations Requiring a Knowledge of Art. With Florence Nightingale Levy at the helm, we can bet that that was a very long list. ©

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We feel the beauty of nature because we are part of nature. Ernest Everett Just.

In the face of the Klan terror that followed the fall of Reconstruction governments in the south, some black people decided that safety could be found only by establishing their own towns. The most famous of these was Nicodemus, Kansas (1877) but there were others, mostly in the west but some in the south. Eatonville, Florida (also 1877) produced Zora Neale Hurston. Another southern all-black town was Maryville, South Carolina, named after its founder, Mary Matthews Just. She was a Charleston schoolteacher in the winter, but worked the Sea Island phosphate mines in the summer to keep her family together. One of her boys, Ernest Everett Just, born on August 14, 1883, was a sickly lad, and his schooling was a hard, drawn out labor for mother and son, carried out at home, in Maryville. But it paid off. In due course, Ernest Everett Just of Maryville would graduate magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth, where he also won merit awards in zoology, botany, history, and sociology. After a while teaching at Howard, Just met Frank Lillie, director of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, who noticed his talent and urged him to join the work at Woods Hole. In the process, Just earned his PhD at Chicago and became associated with major research institutes in Europe. He is known today as a pioneer of molecular biology, one whose work at the micro level also strongly reinforced the Darwinian model of evolution by natural selection. He is commemorated in many ways, not least in his native South Carolina, and (one hopes) in Maryville (now a Charleston neighborhood). As for Mary Just, she died before her son entered Dartmouth. ©

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Being an old maid was a great deal like death by drowning--a really delightful sensation when you ceased struggling. Edna Ferber, 1911.

The Algonquin Round Table was a floating circle of arty types that met in New York’s Algonquin Hotel. Great romance surrounds it now, and one would have liked to have been a fly on its wall for its number included the engine room of The New Yorker, not to mention oddballs like Tallulah Bankhead, Harpo Marx and Robert Benchley. But not all in the circle got on well together. At one point or another, Dorothy Parker’s barbs wounded just about everyone, and it’s not clear that she meant well, either. Other Algonquin regulars who spat rather than supped at the Table included Edna Ferber, the novelist, and Alexander Woollcott, the critic. Perhaps it was because Woollcott thought Ferber’s fictions sentimental and overrated by a credulous public, and there is no doubt that Ferber was popular. Born on August 15, 1885, in Kalamazoo of all places, Ferber spent most of her childhood in Appleton, Wisconsin, where she learned to be a journalist, and most of her adult life in New York, where she learned to be a writer. An outsider herself (immigrant family, unmarried, no romantic relationships), she invented strong characters, often women, clothed them in easy, flowing prose, located them in American folk history, and narrated their triumphs over adversity as outsiders who broke in. It was a winning formula that gave Ferber a Pulitzer and a string of best sellers, and gave to us some great stories, including So Big (1924), Show Boat (1926), Cimarron (1929), Saratoga Trunk (1941), and Giant (1952). Hollywood and Broadway liked them too, and those titles are today remembered as successful films and musicals. Maybe that’s why Wollcott didn’t like her. ©

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All football comes from Stagg. Knute Rockne.

Let’s face it, college sports (Division I) is “Big Busine$$,” raking in and spending millions annually at each of 345 universities. Division I football leads the pack, its 125 schools having proven (to the NCAA’s satisfaction) that they can afford to make their coaches the highest-paid campus employees (often the highest paid public officials in their state), support scores of players on big scholarships (as long as eligibility lasts), build absurdly large stadia, and pamper wealthy supporters with private, climate controlled suites whence they can watch the grunt work down on the field or enjoy gourmet food and drink, or both, all the while praising the virtues of competition. Except for that last bit, competititon, in which he was a true believer, all this would have horrified Amos Alonzo Stagg, whose teams dominated the Big Ten when it had ten schools and one of them was the Maroon tide at the University of Chicago. Born in New Jersey on August 16, 1862, Stagg played college ball for Yale and then coached at Chicago for 41 years (1892-32), then at the College of the Pacific for 14 years (1933-46), then (as advisory coach for his son, Stagg, Jr., for six, then as an assistant coach at a junior college. He finally retired at 98, in 1960, already (for my football-mad family) sign and symbol of amateurism in college athletics. He has about a hundred things named after him (including the Division III championship and the stadium where the atomic bomb was concocted) but his most fitting memorial is that when the College of William and Mary was thinking about Big Time Football, in 1979-80, the student-faculty group that successfully opposed the daft plan called themselves the Amos Alonzo Stagg Society. Vive Stagg!! ©

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I wonder that every colored person is not a misanthrope. Surely we have everything to make us hate mankind. Lottie Forten Grimke.

Anyone doubting that slaveowners had sexual partners amongst their slaves might check out the genetic entanglements of the Jefferson and Hemmings clans. Or the Fortens will do just fine. Charlotte “Lottie” Forten, born on August 17, 1837 into the free black community of Philadelphia, was the grand-daughter of North Carolina slaveowner James Johnston and the great-granddaughter of a North Carolina Governor, Samuel Johnston. She may on her father’s side also have been a descendant of yet another planter, Captain James Wood. The mind boggles. Anyway, as free persons of color her parents fetched up in Philadelphia where they were welcomed into Richard Allen’s “mother” African Methodist Episcopal Church. As if to complete the sexual circle amongst slaveowners and slaves, although assuredly for different motives, Lottie would later (1878) marry the Rev’d Francis James Grimké, yet another product of a master-slave liason and a nephew to the famous Grimké sisters, Sarah and Angelina, who (though fully white) had also jumped the slavery ship to become important leaders of northern abilitionism. So we should not be surprised that young Lottie became deeply involved in anti-slavery. Educated in New England, in 1862 Lottie joined up with the Union Army to work in the Port Royal Experiment (in occupied territory in the Sea Islands), became friends with Col. Robert Gould Shaw of the 54th Massachusetts, and nursed the survivors of the regiment’s bloody assault on Fort Wagner. After the war, Lottie—a Treasury official—continued to agitate for equality, a life’s purpose that did could hardly cease with her marriage to a half-white Grimké, the very Reverend Francis James.©

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To be an actor/ see Mr. Factor/ he'll make your pucker look good. Hooray for Hollywood, Johnny Mercer, 1937.

People name baby boys after their fathers for reasons that vary with time, place, and family. In my case, dad was in a high risk profession (forward observer, Timberwolf Division), and my name was a sort of bring-him-back-alive talisman. (It worked.) But why would a grown man, aged 34, change his name from a perfectly serviceable Francis to Max, Jr.? In the case of Francis (‘Frank’) Factor, filial piety and the profit motive were inextricably blended together. So then, Max Factor, Jr., as he became known after his father’s death, was born in St. Louis, MO, on August 18, 1904. Max, Sr., was one of those immigrants whose name got changed by a customs inspector, and it was under that name that, in 1904, he opened a booth selling rouges and creams to lady fairgoers (and their swains?) at the World’s Fair. They sold well, but jilted by his wife and by his partner, Max moved to California as an agent for an established cosmetics company. On the side Max began experimenting to produce cosmetics for the nascent film industry. By 1920, Frank (only 16) had joined him in the workshop and at the retail counter, and was (in both roles) the genius behind the firm’s skyrocketing profits and certainly the man who moved the product outside Hollywood to the nation, inventing in the process such amazing aids to feminine allure as smear-proof lipstick and, more to the point, developing a “make-up” (his word) that rose (pun intended) to the challenge of Technicolor filmmaking. It is said that women stole Frank’s make-up from the studios to use it on unsuspecting males in civvy street. So Frank became Max, in 1938, but he’d already made an empire. ©

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We did not all come over on the same ship, but we are all in the same boat. Bernard Mannes Baruch.

One hears a lot about money in politics these days, and after Citizens United and the unseemly antics of Republican candidates auditioning in front of the Kochs, it makes sense to worry about stopping “those mouths . . . who subvert whole houses, teaching things which they ought not, for filthy lucre’s sake.” (Paul’s epistle to Titus 1:11). Two cautions, though. Motivation is hard to prove. And, as importantly, do remember that Democrats also listen to lucre. We have liberal plutocrats. Indeed Cyrus Eaton, who built two fortunes on steel, was way to the left, maybe a socialist. But the most famous of our 1% who were card-carrying liberals was Bernard M. Baruch, born August 19, 1870 as a loyal son of the Confederacy (his dad was a field surgeon in the CSA). In 1881 the family moved to New York City, put the kids through public schools, and set Bernard up in business after he graduated from CCNY. He was good at it, a millionaire and a seat on the stock exchange at 30. A Jew of assimilationist leanings (he married an Episcopalian), Baruch soon identified himself as belonging to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party and gave much of his time to many Democrats (and a couple of Republicans). But he also felt that money and politics should be kept apart if possible, and twice (in WWI and WWII) sold all his holdings (and his seat on the Stock Exchange) before he would work for presidents Wilson and Roosevelt (he bought liberty bonds with the proceeds). He was a particularly close advisor to FDR and Harry Truman, and was modestly famous, too, as a man who would sit on park benches and discuss politics with John and Sarah Public, just to see what was on our minds. ©

[A great friend of Winston Churchill as well....]

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Abashed the Devil stood, and felt how awful goodness is, and saw Virtue in her shape how lovely; saw, and pined his loss. Milton, Paradise Lost. Book IV

How or even whether early authors profited from their printed works is a bit of a mystery. The first copyright law in the Anglophone world was the British Act of 1710, and printers in the colonies and then in the infant USA proved very adept at piracy. Among the reasons Dickens and Mrs. Trollope came to the US (other than to record their bad impressions of the place) was to establish their right to sell their own books for their own royalties. It’s a timely subject only because today is the anniversary of the first (surviving) author’s contract with a printer. And it was a doozie. On August 20, 1667, John Milton signed with printer Samuel Simmons for the printing of Paradise Lost. It is a work, it seems to me, of the purest genius, verse “freed [in Milton’s words] from the troublesome and modern bondage to rhyme,” something like 10,000 lines now usually published (from the 1674 edition) in twelve books. Paradise Lost was, famously, Milton’s attempt to “justify the wayes of God to man,” a tall order that Milton fulfilled with a great story and the most amazing verbal and syntactical invention, language freed from rhyme, perhaps, but perfectly enslaved to line and rhythm. And what did the blind poet (glaucoma, probably) get for this daemonic labor (Satan got the best lines)? Milton, former scribe to the Commonwealth, defender of the regicide and of free speech, widely recognized poetic genius, was to get £5 at signing and another £15 if the whole first edition (4500 copies!!) was sold. And so it was that on August 20, 1667, for peanuts, John Milton turned Adam and Eve out of Eden: “Som natural tears they drop’d, but wip’d them soon;/ The World was all before them.” ©

[Stanley]

Th- th- th- th- that's all, folks!!

In the 1950s, I was so taken by Walt Kelly’s daily comic strip, Pogo, that I failed to realize I was also living through the golden age of movie cartoons. But almost every Saturday during the school year I was at the Varsity Theater’s Kids’ Matinee, taking in the feature serial or short (usually a western or The Three Stooges) and maybe 3-4 accompanying cartoons, many of them now regarded as classics. It was an era when technical expertise, drawing abilities, studio finances, and creative plot lines came together to create cartoons of brilliance. We loved them, even though (or more likely because) later generations of child minders thought them too violent, too misanthropic, too stereotypical, too silly, or perhaps just too human for feeding to the young and impressionable. Among these classics were the Looney Tunes cartoons, featuring (inter alia) Yosemite Sam, his nemesis Bugs Bunny, Sylvester the Cat and his intended meal Tweety the Canary, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and, latterly, Speedy Gonzales. One of the presiding geniuses of the Tunes team (a Warner Bros. studio) was Isadore Freleng, better known as Fritz, born in Kansas City (where he learned his craft, along with Walt Disney) on August 21, 1906. He followed Disney to California when he was but 21, but was happier when he moved to other studios, including a couple of independents, fetching up at Warners in 1939. Fritz Freleng would direct 266 cartoon features, win four Oscars, and entrance the children of Des Moines with such classics as Pizzicato Pussycat, Sandy Claws, A Mouse Divided, Stork Naked, and Of Thee I Sting. Freleng also did The Pink Panther, but that was another story, another studio, and a lesser era. ©

[Tripps]

Mighty Mouse was the best cartoon, and Nyoka was the best serial with cliffhangers.

[Stanley]

All sounds make meaningful language. Stockhausen.

We forget many victims of Naziism by concentrating on the Holocaust. There were other racial undesirables (and would soon be more with the drang nach Osten), and there was a generous assortment of misfits in the Reich itself, left-wingers and homosexuals for instance, but also the mentally ill. These latter were among the most useless of the “useless eaters,” as Hitler called them in a 1939 directive, actually backdated to September 1 to provide “legality” and a “wartime need” rationale to the “mercy killings” already carried out. Among the victims of this particular cruelty was Gertrud Stupp Stockhausen, since 1932 an inmate of an asylum near Cologne and gassed in 1942. Gertrud was the mother of Karlheinz Stockhausen, born on August 22, 1928. Gertrud’s murder would be dramatized by Stockhausen in his opera Donnerstag aus Licht, one of the seven of the “Light” series of operas (one for each day of the week). This series (Stockhausen’s answer to Wagner’s Ring Cycle?) was characteristic of Stockhausen’s approach to composition, innovative in every way (including one that begins and ends outside the theatre), eclectic in sourcing, modular in structure, and with odd orchestration and casting. It must be said, however, that by the time Stockhausen got round to the Licht cycle (1977-2003), he hardly needed to strengthen his reputation for modernism, not to mention eccentricity. His compositions were not to everyone’s taste, not mine for instance, but in his lifetime he was widely recognized by composers and performers (in classical and other genres) as pathbreaker and guide. On the other hand, there were very few who followed Karlheinz Stockhausen every step of the way. ©

[Stanley]

Cultural analysis is not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after. Clifford Geertz.

Ever since (in 1963) Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture knocked me sideways with the argument that “human nature” did not explain anything, I have thought of anthropology as a foundational social science discipline. It has certainly had a big effect on my corner of history, the American colonies, where small scale societies lend themselves well to anthropological questions and methods. Among the anthropologists colonial historians have learned from, pride of place belongs to Clifford Geertz. Geertz was born in California on August 23, 1926, and (orphaned by a divorce) brought up by distant cousins. Along with many other war vets (Navy, 1943-46) of his generation, his college education (BA Antioch, Philosophy) was paid for by the GI Bill, and he went on to Harvard for a PhD in “Social Relations.” After Harvard, his contributions to anthropology (and other social sciences and the humanities) came thick and fast. Geertz accepted that critical study of other cultures must needs work within a philosophical relativism—but that that does not require one to accept the moralities of (for instance) burning widows or starving babies. To shy away from immersive cultural studies (“thick ethnography,” he called it) for fear of falling into the “relativist abyss” was to condemn oneself to parochialism, ignorance, and prejudice. Geertz thus proclaimed himself an “anti-anti-relativist.” His safety net (both moral and intellectual) was provided by the Weberian model of interpretative social science: the amassing of evidence, the insistence on telling the story of a culture as an historical construction, a narrative. Cultures work (or do not work, it is important to note), and our job is to figure out how they work (or not), not to treat their symbols or icons or taboos as meaningful in themselves or as merely performing some peculiar function. Geertz’s influence on my field, as nearly as I can tell entirely benign, was best demonstrated by the South African/Australian scholar, Rhys Isaac, in his marvelous study of The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790, which copped the Pulitzer in 1983. ©

[Stanley]

Be kind and considerate with your criticism; it is just as hard to write a bad book as it is to write a good book. Malcolm Cowley.

Malcolm Cowley first saw the light of day in Belasco, PA, the Harvard-bound son of a homeopath, on August 24, 1898. If you are at all interested in American literature, he’s worth knowing. In his 90 years, he was ambulance driver, poet, essayist, novelist, and for a time an official in the New Deal. Accepting his own estimation that he was a minor literary figure, note that he was a perceptive one. His greatest influence was as review editor of The New Republic and then as consulting editor for Viking Press where he championed (inter alia) William Faulkner, John Cheever, and Jack Kerouac. Faulkner regarded Cowley with something like veneration, an attitude he usually did not adopt with editors. But the reason Cowley is with us today is that he was also a brilliant chronicler of his “lost” generation, and wrote the most entrancing literary memoir of the 20th century, Exile’s Return (the revised edition of 1951 is the one you want). It presents Paris portraits of Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Hart Crane, Scott Fitzgerald and a whole host of other characters, minor and major. Exile’s Return manages this near-catalog of the great and nearly great without ever name-dropping. It’s an evocative first-person piece of cultural history, and it’s still in print, written by an active participant in one of our most prolific literary generations. If you are serious about writing yourself, or interested in those who do write, take a spin through Exile’s Return. Then, if you enjoy the experience, follow it up with Cowley’s 1973 retrospective, A Second Flowering: Works and Days of the Lost Generation, in which (I am told) he modifies yet enriches several of his earlier judgments. ©

[Stanley]

I want to remain an eternal mystery to myself and others. Ludwig II of Bavaria.

The excesses of Las Vegas architecture render comment superfluous, but in 1957 I thought Cinderella’s Castle at Disneyland pretty spectacular, at least until dad told me it was a complete fantasy. Dad was right, but for the wrong reasons. Indeed it’s now said that the Anaheim excrescence “quotes” a half-dozen European castles, plus Notre Dame of Paris. More precisely Disney’s inspiration came when he and Mrs. D. were guests at Bavaria’s Schloss Neuschwanstein which (given its dates of construction, 1869-1892) outdoes Disney and puts Vegas to shame. And it may have been the product of a man quite out of his head, for it was commissioned (and in parts designed) by King Ludwig II of Bavaria. Ludwig, born on August 25, 1845, became king in 1864, an eccentric youth soon to be made irrelevant by the rise of Prussia to German supremacy. Irrelevant but rich: Bismarck and Ludwig’s uncle, Kaiser Wilhelm I, took away Ludwig’s power but not his wealth, and so Ludwig retained the ability to leave his mark in other ways. He did this, for instance, by rescuing Richard Wagner from what might have been obscurity and helping to finance the completion (and staging) of the Ring Cycle. More to the point of this little essay, “Mad King Ludwig” (before his deposition and bizarre death in 1886) peppered Bavaria with fantasyland castles, one in Munich intended to rival Versailles but Neuschwantstein perched impossibly on a rocky peak where, later, its wild spires and turrets would capture the imagination of a fantasist from Kansas City. Like Cinderella’s Castle, Nueschwanstein has paid for itself, many times over, through tourism. Perhaps, after all, King Ludwig II was just a man before his time, a Donald Trump in imperial drag. ©