BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

We Abolition Women are turning the world upside down. Angelina Grimke Weld.

Angelina Grimké was born (February 20, 1805) the youngest of 14 children, so much the youngest she became the godchild of Sarah, her 13-year old sister. This close relationship would last until Sarah’s death in 1872 and survive Angelina’s marriage in 1838. Of Huguenot stock, Angelina’s father was of the South Carolina aristocracy: merchant, planter, owner of humans, and pillar of Episcopalianism. Angelina, precociously independent even at 13, refused Anglican communion and converted to Presbyterianism which in turn inspired her to preach to and pray with the family’s slaves. Her minister approved, for he hoped that patience and prayer would end slavery. Angelina was disinclined to wait and was excommunicated (on this issue) by the Presbyterians. Whereupon she and Sarah left for Philadelphia, joined the Quakers, became advocates for women’s rights, and continued their anti-slavery activities. When (1835) William Lloyd Garrison published a letter from Angelina in The Liberator, they became more deeply involved, valuable members because of their intimate experience of slavery. However, Angelina’s habit of addressing “promiscuous” meetings (with both men and women in the audience) split the movement, with the Grimkés moving to the more extremist women’s rights wing, dragging along with them Angelina’s new husband, Theodore Dwight Weld. After the Civil War, discovering suddenly that they had mixed-race nephews, spurious offspring of a hated institution, they took the boys in and nurtured them through Harvard Law and Princeton theology. Auntie Angelina lived long enough to see both boys take up her work in black civil rights and women’s suffrage. ©

[Stanley]

If you are going to come to see me again, you've got to come to France, because I ain't coming back." Simone in concert, New York, 1974.

Eunice Kathleen Waymon was born in Tryon, North Carolina, on February 21, 1933, the daughter of a woman preacher. She died as Nina Simone in her house in rural France (Côtes du Rhone) in April 1993 after a long bout with cancer. Two days before her death, Nina was granted an honorary doctorate by the Curtis Institute of Music, Philadelphia, and thereby hangs her tale, for in 1953 Curtis had denied her admission, and she was then sure it was because of her race. That was one of the many hatchets Nina Simone buried in her later years, for in her singing career she courted and caused many controversies. These owed to her conversion to a radical “black power” stance, embodied in several songs in her 1964 album, Nina Simone in Concert, including “Mississippi Goddam” and “Old Jim Crow,” eloquent vocals protesting the Medgar Evars murder and the Birmingham church bombing. In her own words, the album’s tracks “threw ten bullets back at ‘them.’” Nina Simone had been trained as a classical pianist, and her talents were such that local black folk banded together to send her to the Allen School for Girls in Asheville, an all-black school founded in 1887 by a Methodist mission society (just the sort my grandmother taught in from 1901 to 1905). Encouraged by her Allen School teachers, she applied to the Curtis. Unsuccessful, Simone began singing for money in Atlantic City, which paid for a year or so at Julliard, but in the issue time, need, and the currents of history took Nina Simone into her idiosyncratic style, her distinctive voice (at once angry and tender), and then her self-defined political exile in England, the Netherlands, and France. Her friends scattered her ashes in several African countries, hoping in one of them to find her finally “at home.” ©

[Stanley]

There is nothing which can better deserve your patronage, than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of publick happiness. George Washington, first Annual Message to congress, January 1790.

While the New England colonies from early on devoted taxes to establish schools even in quite small towns (not to mention Harvard and Yale), further south education was catch as catch can. True, the College of William and Mary was founded to provide a safely Anglican higher education, but as for the basics, that was left to family values, always a slender reed when other necessities press, and family wealth, a better bet if you are wealthy. It soon became tradition for wealthier Virginians to educate their children privately (often bringing a live-in tutor down from the north) and then to send their young men off to England, perhaps for “finishing” or to acquire a real qualification at Oxford or Cambridge or the Inns of Court. For one such family it had become traditional to send its boys to Appleby Grammar School, in the North of England where the family had kin. But when father died, in 1743, that expensive practice had to stop. So young George Washington, aged only 11 (he was born on February 22, 1732), had to settle for the catch as catch can method of learning, under the patronage of his elder brother Lawrence. In the process, George acquired an almost superstitious veneration for men of “real” learning, but he did pretty well himself, especially in geometry, and so aged only 17 he was licensed as a surveyor by the College of William and Mary. George did good surveying, intrepid surveying, along the western frontier, acquired a considerable chunk of wilderness for himself, and when Lawrence died (of tuberculosis) George the surveyor succeeded to the family estate at Mount Vernon and also to Lawrence’s rank as major in the Fairfax County militia and his place in the Virginia House of Burgesses. And I suppose you know the rest. ©

[Stanley]

I saw the industrial scene and I was affected by it. I tried to paint it all the time. Lowry. I learned how to get laughs, and that’s all I know about comedy. Laurel.

Let us now praise two artists of the commons, for February 23 is the death date of Arthur Stanley Jefferson (1965, in Santa Monica, CA) and L. S. Lowry (1976, in Glossop, Derbyshire). Their Northern England births were nearly coincidental, too, only 90 miles and three years apart (Lowry, 1887, in Manchester, and Jefferson, 1890, in Ulverston). Still, it is unlikely that their paths ever crossed, so let’s cross them now. Mr. Jefferson became better known as Stan Laurel, who eventually fetched up in Hollywood where he teamed up with Oliver Hardy to create a comedy film series (“Laurel and Hardy”) about the misadventures of a dreamer and schemer (Hardy) and his dizzy nemesis (Laurel). Typically, the fat Hardy’s plans fell foul of the thin Laurel’s decency, for besides being dumb Stan was kind. Just so, Laurence Stephen Lowry’s paintings elevated the lives of the factory working class, those who rose above them to become clerks, and the industrial street scenes which were their theater to a kind of metaphysical simplicity and decency. His pictures have been called ‘primitive’, but they are a good deal richer than, say, Grandma Moses’s (Lowry understood perspective, for instance, well enough to let England’s “dark, Satanic mills” fade into his backgrounds) and they embody interesting social comment. Once seen, Lowrys are never forgotten, for the people in the paintings, almost always seen at a distance, most resemble the stick figures of children’s drawings. Thin Stan Laurel would have fit right in, although whether fat Oliver Hardy might have found a place in a Lowry street scene is another question entirely. So, on 23rd February 2016 we move from a straight man to stick men, and find it was not such a long journey, after all. ©

[Stanley]

I early conceived a liking for . . . relieving the sufferings of others. Rebecca Lee Crumpler, 1883.

Many American slaves took their surnames from their masters, a practice that eventually led to an epidemic of renaming in and after the 1960s. Why memorialize slavery in one’s surname? But well before that, Rebecca Lee was born free, in the slave state of Delaware, on February 24, 1831. And who knows? With that surname she could have been descended from slaves freed by a member of the Lee family several of whom were quite uncomfortable with their “peculiar institution.” Whichever, the orphaned Rebecca was cared for by an auntie (also free) who was well known in the neighborhood as a healer, and Rebecca was hooked. At 20 she moved to Massachusetts, then a mecca for people of color who wanted opportunities in addition to freedom, and was soon employed as a nurse (by several white doctors) in the Boston area. The New England Female Medical College had already struck a blow for gender equality by opening its doors (in 1848), and in 1860 it did the same for racial equality by admitting Rebecca to study medicine. Already adept, Rebecca steamed through and graduated in 1864. At about the same time, she married an escaped slave, Arthur Crumpler (on the road to becoming a jeweler), and so it was as Dr. Crumpler rather than Dr. Lee that Rebecca became the first African-American woman to practice medicine in the USA, at first in Boston. She also served as a doctor for the Freedman’s Bureau in Richmond, VA, but soon returned to Boston to practice there until the early 1880s. In both places, her practice had been largely (but not entirely) with black patients, and when she and Arthur moved to the “white” suburb of Hyde Park, Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler retired from medicine to write her medical memoirs. ©

[Stanley]

The artist who paints only what is in his mind must soon repeat himself. Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

In my benighted youth, I turned down a chance to accompany my flatmates on a visit to Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation, with its unrivaled collection of impressionist art. But listening to them rave about it on their return made me think ‘Impressionism’ might be worth a look, and so it has proved. Even at the Barnes, which I visited many years later when it was easier to get in. Once there, you soon realize that Albert Barnes had a special thing about Pierre-Auguste Renoir, primarily because of Renoir’s wondrous vision, but perhaps also because the artist’s humble birth, working-class youth, and rise to eminence in art mirrored Barnes’s own story in medicine. Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born in Limoges on February 25, 1841. Limoges was one of those odd places where a working-class lad might well fetch up as an artist. Indeed, it may well have been that it was young Renoir’s experience of painting on the luminescent white of Limoges porcelain where he really learned to do magic tricks with light and color. But it would be a long haul, through art school, the pain of rejection at annual Salons, and the trauma of the Paris Commune, before Renoir and several fellow spirits declared their independence by establishing, in the 1870s, their own annual “impressionist salon.” The new style proved popular enough for Renoir to live (and travel) in reasonable comfort; and, despite crippling rheumatoid arthritis, he continued to paint until his death in 1919. Better yet, he lived long enough to see his own works prominently hung in the Louvre, those at least that escaped the energetic attentions of Albert Barnes. And if you can’t get to Paris, don’t fret. The Barnes has 181 (!!!!) Renoirs. Paris or Philadelphia? Either way, be sure to take in a Renoir, or two, or 181. ©

[Stanley]

Never look at the trombones. You will only encourage them. Richard Strauss.

On February 26, 1946, the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra gave a premiere performance of an oboe concerto by Richard Strauss, then 82 years old. It was dedicated to a Swiss oboist, Marcel Saillat, who was indeed the soloist on that day. It was a nice postwar gesture by the composer and by the orchestra, but it was something more than that. In April 1945, as American soldiers occupied his estate in the Bavarian Alps, Strauss had made himself known to them as a composer and the officer in charge, music-lover Lt. Milton Weiss, obligingly placed “off limits” signs around the property. Among Weiss’s men was John DeLancie, in peacetime principal oboist for the Pittsburgh Symphony (conductor Fritz Reiner). Meeting Strauss, DeLancie asked him if he had ever composed an oboe concerto. “Nein,” said Strauss. End of story, thought DeLancie, until Strauss wrote to him saying that he was composing one and that, furthermore, he would assign rights to perform the American premiere to DeLancie. By then, however, DeLancie (in civvy street) had transferred to the Philadelphia Orchestra where (as a junior) he could not solo the premiere. So (with Strauss’s approval) DeLancie assigned the rights to a friend who was the principal oboist at the CBS Symphony Orchestra, a youngish chap called Mitch Miller. DeLancie went on to fame as principal oboist at Philadelphia, under Ormandy, and then as Director of the Curtis Institute, where (this is really a rather wonderful story!!) he commissioned his own oboe concerto (L’horloge de flore, a perfect title for the instrument, by the French composer Jean Françaix). One hopes it was dedicated to Strauss. As to Mitch Miller, he would forsake the oboe to gain fame and fortune in a different musical genre entirely. ©

A bonus document, from the New York Times online, December 4 2009.



C. Alexander Brown. Mannheim, GER.

. . . . The house was a large villa, and Strauss and Frau Strauss were somewhat better off than their neighbours living in the difficult aftermath of the war. Strauss’ meeting with the GIs was NOT initially cordial. He was enraged and told them, essentially — I am Richard Strauss, great composer (and he named one of his compositions, which one I do not recall). Fortunately, one of the soldiers, indeed perhaps the commander of the group was conversant with classical music and knew who Richard Strauss was. They fell into conversation, which became cordial and there might even have been some piano playing. Thus the house was not requisitioned by the American army.
Indeed if I recall correctly, the account is that in fact a details of soldiers were assigned to guard the house for the duration of the occupation.
Some of the accusations of Nazi sympathies made against conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler ( who is buried in the Hauptfriedhof cemetery in Mannheim) were also made against Richard Strauss. In fact both men, without heroics and with inner courage protected and saved the lives of Jews.

It would be truly wonderful if a movie or docudrama was made about Richard Strauss.

[Stanley]

I forgave the DAR many years ago. You lose a lot of time, hating people. Marian Anderson.

Marian Anderson made several appearances at Constitution Hall, the Washington HQ of the Daughters of the American Revolution. The first one was in January 1943, a wartime benefit performance for the American Red Cross. In 1953 she was back, her performance a highlight of that year’s American University Concert Series. And then she began her national farewell tour at the Hall on October 24, 1964. She was invited back in 1992 to receive the DAR’s “Centennial Award” (for “distinguished service to the nation”). Since she was infirm (Marian Anderson was born on February 27, 1897), the award was made in absentia, and the medal and citation were delivered to her, at home, personally, by officers of the DAR. But what sticks in the memory is that Anderson’s first Constitution Hall concert, in 1939, did not take place, for she was black and the DAR was lily white. So the country’s first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, incensed, did two things. She quit the DAR and she arranged for Marian Anderson to sing at the Lincoln Memorial. It was a nice touch, and in a still-segregated town it drew a massive crowd, 75,000 human beings of all colors, on Easter Sunday, 1939. Anderson began with “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” and finished with “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” Appropriately. The DAR soon saw error in its ways, but the audience for the Red Cross concert of 1943 was segregated, and for that matter the Red Cross segregated its blood supplies (it kept on doing so until 1951). And it took the Catholics and the Civil Rights movement to truly desegregate Constitution Hall. Now the DAR, too, accepts the proposition that black women can indeed be “Daughters” of the American Revolution. It is often and truly better late than never. ©

[Stanley]

There is nothing in the universe that I fear, but that I shall not know all my duty, or shall fail to do it. Mary Lyon.

The New England Renaissance, that wondrous reformulation of Puritan culture, produced remarkable females, e.g. Margaret Fuller, Sophia Ripley, the (3) Peabody sisters of Salem, Lydia Child, even arguably Julia Ward Howe. But all these women were born into wealthy families, or married well, or both. Another New Englander, Mary Lyon, had a harder youth and, though she sipped at some Transcendental fountains, remained sternly Calvinist, sternly practical, and sternly single. Mary was born on February 28, 1797, into hardscrabble farming and the Baptist church. Virtually orphaned at 13, she became housekeeper for her older brother, who inherited the family farm. She had a thirst for learning, and attended several schools. By 1814 she was teaching in one of them, and came to the attention of a Congregationalist minister and his female assistant (Zilpah Grant), who had been making headway in providing higher education for females. Mary converted to Congregationalism, became a devotee of Jonathan Edwards’s theology and his idea of “disinterested benevolence,” and then benevolently founded “female seminaries” at Wheaton (1834) and Mount Holyoke (1837). Whatever else they became, these famous colleges were not in their origins schools for rich girls. Lyon insisted on low tuition because she wanted to provide useful higher education for “all classes” of young women, as long as they were mature, smart, and morally and physically fit. All students exercised. All students did “work study.” All students studied the arts, languages, math, and sciences. Among them (in 1847) was yet another girl-child of the Transcendentalists, Emily Dickinson, who while at Mount Holyoke cleaned the cutlery for her keep. After she left Mary Lyons’ college, Emily cleaved words clean and sharp. ©

[Stanley]

It was a true love affair from the beginning even to the end, and not one word could ever be said against Mrs. Garrick. From Elizabeth Montague, The Queen of the Blue Stockings: Her Correspondence, by John Murray.

There is a lovely River Thames property a long stone’s throw upstream from Hampton Court Palace. It had its origins in a courtier wanting to be close to Henry VIII, but today the main house looks for all the world like a neoclassical 18th-century mansion, complete with Thameside gazebo. Indeed it was remodeled at that time, as several fine artists came together to make it stylish à la mode and a center of culture away from London. The house is called Garrick’s Villa, for the famous actor and impresario David Garrick purchased it for his wife, an Austrian, Eva Marie Veigel, renamed Eva Marie Violetti by the Hapsburg Empress Maria Theresa who was for a time her greatest fan. Eva Marie was born on February 29, 1724, of uncertain parentage, perhaps aristocratic on her father’s side. Well educated, Eva Marie became a principal dancer in the Viennese Opera, but mysteriously was sent away to London in 1746 where she fell for the great actor. It was a love match in an era known for more casual couplings. The pair married (a Protestant ceremony followed by a Catholic one) in 1749, and in 1754 Garrick bought the Thames property for his bride. The couple brought in some of the era’s best tastes to remake the house and gardens, not least architect Robert Adam and gardener Capability Brown, and after Garrick’s death (1779) Eva Marie resided there almost until she died in 1822. After a succession of owners, Garrick’s Villa was taken over by a charitable consortium planning to use UK Lottery funds to make it into a museum for the Borough of Richmond, but a disastrous fire in 2008 has forced the consortium to resell parts of the house as luxury flats. But the façade remains intact, and so we can say that Eva Marie’s great work is still in transition. ©

[Stanley]

By heaven's will, my Rome shall be capital of the world. Let Romans learn to be soldiers. Romulus,as quoted by Livy.

In ancient Rome, March 1 was celebrated as the birthday of Romulus, Rome’s founder, in 752 BC. As you probably know, Romulus was a twin, his other half being Remus, but in a dispute over the hill (there were seven to choose from) on which to center the city of Rome, Romulus killed his twin and thus Rome was built on the Palatine Hill (Remus had favored the Aventine Hill). This political murder (or, if you prefer, fratricide) set the tone for much of subsequent Roman politics, republican and imperial. So sometimes it’s said that the founders of Rome were Romulus and Remus, but more often Romulus gets the credit (the victors tell the tale). The twins’ birth was shrouded in mystery, and the tale varied greatly through the ages of telling it. Some confusion emerged, for instance, over whether their father was the god Mars or the demi-god Hercules. It’s a wise man who knows his father, of course, so there was no similar confusion over their mother, who was Rhea, daughter of King Numitor, himself descended from Aeneas of Troy. Anyway, Rhea was immediately sent off to become a Vestal Virgin, a task she flubbed, and the boys’ uncle (Amulus) arranged for their execution, not wanting to clutter up the succession to his usurped throne. Got it so far? Uncle Amulus should, of course, have knocked them off himself, but (anticipating King Herod) he left the task to lazy servants who dropped the ball. So these babes in the woods were first found and suckled by a she-wolf, then raised by a shepherd. Under such care, their noble qualities inevitably surfaced. They became leaders, killed Uncle Amulus, restored Grandpa Numitor to his throne, and went off into the sunset to argue about hills. The rest is history. ©

[Stanley]

Love laughs at locksmiths. Anon.

For Harry Soref, born of Jewish immigrants on March 2, 1887, America provided a modest opportunity to “do OK.” While his younger brother Bernard grew up smart, went to law school, and opened a prosperous practice, Harry sidled into his Milwaukee school’s metal shop and became a locksmith. In the nature of locksmithery, then, Harry lugged his tool case from house to house, all over the western states and into Mexico, by train first and then jalopy Fords, doing what locksmiths do. He could pick any lock, and grew particularly contemptuous of then what passed for padlocks. In 1919 Harry developed a better padlock, cheaply made (layers of laminated, pressed steel concealing a proper, keyed lock), but he could not sell the idea to any existing maker. So in 1921 Harry set up his own firm, hired five workers, began to build “MasterLocks,” and the world beat a path to his door. Always good at PR, he taught Harry Houdini some escape tricks and then in 1928 he engineered a great coup by sending nearly 150,000 padlocks to Prohibition agents, so they could lock up the speakeasies they raided. What made it a better tale of Prohibition ingenuity was that the padlocks were made in the disused Pabst brewery, into which Harry's “OK" business had expanded. Harry died in 1957, his son Milton in 1964. Then brother Bernard took over and in 1970 sold the firm to Fortune Brands. Bernard devoted the rest of his long life to “joyous giving.” MasterLock today, a worldwide operation, has good history pages on their various websites. The American division’s history webpage features a native-born American, Barack Obama, who has also done OK and who in his 2012 State of the Union praised MasterLock for bringing 100 workplace jobs back from China. ©

[Stanley]

A St. Trinians girl would be sadistic, cunning, dissolute, crooked, sordid . . . polite, sardonic, witty and very amusing, and, despite everything, endearing. Ronald Searle.

As we might expect, the art work on display at the Bibliothèque Nationale normally features French artists. But in 1972 it was decided to feature an English artist, Ronald Searle. Such surprise as this might have caused was doubtless intensified by the fact that Searle was ‘only’ a cartoonist. But then again, what a cartoonist he was! He was born in Cambridge on March 3, 1920. Solidly working class (his dad was a porter at Cambridge’s LNER station), the university was not for him, but he did make head prefect at his school and, working part-time as a parcel packer, commenced his art training at a local tech. His cartoons drew attention and he won a scholarship to go further, but the war came. Searle volunteered, and learned his art to perfection as a prisoner of the Japanese, first in Singapore’s Changi camp and then on the infamous ‘River Kwai’ railway. After that, he said, everything else came pretty easily. Searle has had his emulators, but his cartoons and caricatures are unmistakable, wispy and yet quite sharp. He’s perhaps most famous for his St. Trinians saga, set in a girls’ school of dubious merit, the meat of several classic 1950s British comedies. But you can find Searle everywhere if you know where to look: film graphics including Disney, cartoons and editorial drawings (Searle “did” the Eichmann trial) in Le Figaro, Punch, The New Yorker, Fortune, Der Spiegel, Time, Le monde, The Tatler, Le canarde enchainé, and a series of books some of them his own but also collaborations with authors from Groucho Marx to D. B. Wyndham Lewis. After a messy divorce Searle and his new wife, Monica Stirling, exiled themselves to France in 1967 where Ron Searle finally put down his pens and brushes in 2011. ©

[Stanley]

Then come hither, and lay my book, thy head, and heart together. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress.

It’s one of the milder ironies of religious history that John Bunyan has a place in the liturgical calendar of the Church of England and its various colonial offshoots, including the Episcopal Church USA. When he was alive (1628-1688), Anglicans gave him a rough ride including several prison terms. He was a dissenter, a Baptist lay preacher, a pebble in their pudding, and when the restoration of monarchy also restored the national church, Anglicans set their faces against ever letting the genie of toleration out of its bag. Bunyan’s imprisonments proved a good thing for the religiously minded, over the centuries, for it was during jail time that he wrote several spiritual classics, beginning with Grace Abounding which he (as Chief of Sinners) wrote during a 12-year stay in Bedford jail. At Bedford, he also began his triumphant best seller (in Anglophone printing history, it may be second only to the Bible), The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That which is to come. Bunyan finished it during another extended stay, in another prison, which began on March 4, 1676, for “perniciously and maliciously” refusing to attend his parish church. As he might have put it, its prayers were not his prayers, a conundrum those favoring school prayers might consider. Bunyan’s sources were the Bible, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, and his understanding of his own spiritual “progress” through the pitfalls of life and the temptations presented to his alter ego, “Christian” by the likes of Obstinate, Worldly-Wise, and Ready-to-Halt. Christian’s journey to salvation through the Valley of Humiliation and over Lucre-Hill has inspired generations of travelers including, apparently, modern-day Anglicans, who annually celebrate Bunyan’s life on the anniversary of his death. ©

[Stanley]

When a man is in despair, it means he still believes in something. Shostakovich, Testimony, 1979 (posthumous).

Kuibyshev (now Samara), on the Volga, was on March 5, 1942 the unlikely site of the world premiere of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, C Major, Op. 60, entitled “The Leningrad” by the composer. There were reasons for the title, the premiere, and the place. In the late winter of 1942, Kuibyushev was the Soviet capital in exile, the Wehrmacht still stormed eastward inflicting murderous casualties on soldiers and citizens alike, Leningrad was under siege and, it was feared, would fall along with Moscow. And at the beginning of hostilities Shostakovich had already been commissioned to write a patriotic symphony, to do a composer’s part in the Great Patriotic War. The Seventh Symphony was both more and less than a great patriotic hymn. Its lyrical passages portray the Russian countryside and Leningrad’s cityscape at peace, its marches the invasion and the defense, its massive discordances the sounds of battle, and its finale the hoped-for peace and triumph, all well and good and it became popular in the Soviet Union and amongst her allies, with premieres quickly performed in the siege city itself (under dreadful conditions) and in London and New York. But it was a dirge, too, a memorial to the USSR’s 25 million war dead. Perhaps as significantly, the composer, his friends, and contemporary critics later said it was meant to be a comment on Stalin’s rule. Can we believe them, their ideas expressed after they became safe (even profitable)? The weight of musical opinion says yes. It might be as well to agree with another dissident who wrote of the Seventh, “real music is never literally tied to a theme. . . this is music about terror, slavery, and oppression of the spirit.” And, she might have added, it is also about liberation. ©

[Stanley]

Once to every man and nation, comes the moment to decide, in the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side. J. R. Lowell, 1845.

On 6th March 1836, the army of the Republic of Mexico recaptured the mission fortress of the Alamo in San Antonio, which had been taken by rebels and terrorists in December 1835. The rebels, recent settlers from the United States of America, had settled in Mexico under licence from the Republic of Mexico, but had grown restive of a number of restrictions, among them the abolition of slavery through all of Mexico. The North Americans wanted the liberty to enslave others, and were willing to fight to secure this liberty for themselves and their posterity. It seems strange that they should call this a “liberty,” but then history is full of ironies. Two months later, at San Jacinto, the rebels defeated the Mexican army and thus secured their liberties. But when they applied to join the USA, they found that many of their former countrymen did not want anything to do with slavery, and so they had to form their own slave nation, the Republic of Texas. The ultimate incorporation of Texas into the USA, in 1845, was seen by many in the United States as a victory for slavery. It led to the Mexican-American war and to widespread protests, including a memorably “unpatriotic” speech in Congress by Abraham Lincoln of Illinois. Earlier,James Russell Lowell had dashed off a poem, now a favorite Protestant hymn, “Once to Every Man and Nation” (Boston Courier, December 11, 1845), to protest annexation. Henry David Thoreau went to jail to avoid paying taxes for an unjust war fought for an unjust cause. So it was that a rebellion fought to secure slavery brought forth an eloquent essay written on “Resistance to Civil Government” (sometimes called “Civil Disobedience”). The motto for today, then, is Remember the Alamo!! It’ll do you good. ©

[Tizer]

When I was at school in the 1950s we were taught very little about the history of the Americas other than Columbus, the Pilgrims, War of Independence and the Civil War. Now I find myself intrigued by the genesis of the USA and its interactions with Mexico and Spain, such as the events mentioned in Bob's post above and the later Spanish-American Wars. I once thought that the only time American soldiers fought in the Philippines was in WW2 but then I learnt otherwise. It's a confusing business, trying to understand how what we now know as the USA developed in the 1800s; and it's made worse by the use of the words America and American to mean different things to different people!

[Tripps]

You're right - there's a lot more than you think here. keep looking but you'll never know everything.

From the shores of Montezuma. . .


Good cartoon in this week's Spectator. Two Mexicans at the border - "Do you think a ten foot wall will be enough to keep Trump out?"

[Stanley]

Nice posts. Here's today's Bit....

Women should have the opportunity to develop themselves in research work in applied chemistry, applied economics, or applied sociology in connection with the rural farm. Abby Lillian Marlatt.

The first women admitted to an American college (at Oberlin, in the 1830s) were, condescendingly, offered an alternative curriculum. Most refused it, but the idea lingered on in private colleges and took root in public universities. The University of Wisconsin opened its doors in 1850 to both sexes, and it would be at there that the major in “domestic science” blossomed. But it wasn’t easy. It took the ministrations of Abby Lillian Marlatt to make Domestic Science into a proper academic department and then into an integral part of the College of Agriculture. Born in Manhattan, KS, on March 7, 1869, into a family that believed that girls could learn, Abby learned at Kansas State (MSc in 1890) and then went to Utah where, aged 22, she founded “Domestic Economy” at Utah State and then led a similar program at the technical high school in Providence, RI. There her innovations and publications created a national reputation, and in 1909 the Ag dean at Wisconsin, Harry Russell, lured her to Madison and to a mission. Abby Marlatt undertook it with gusto, style, and success. Tall and a bit angular, Marlatt could intimidate younger faculty, but her dedication to the task ultimately exposed her as a font of generosity, if with a steel core: “a warm-hearted, crabby person” one of her colleagues later reflected. Under her leadership Wisconsin’s department became the national Gold Standard in domestic science or, as my mother would call her major field (at Iowa State), “Home Economics.” But Marlatt, chair from 1909 to 1939, never did succeed in achieving research degree status for her department, or her discipline. It was her greatest disappointment. In the guise of Domestic Science, “women’s work” remained a kind of academic condescension. ©

[Tizer]

I like your caption from the Trump cartoon, Tripps, although I think the best way they could keep him out would be to tell him that Mexico is full of Mexicans!

The Montezuma marine's hymn reminds me of how `Waltzing Matilda' is said to have the same tune as the Duke of Marlborough's recruiting song:
Who'll be a soldier, who'll be a soldier
Who'll be a soldier for Marlborough with me,
And he sang as he marched through the crowded streets of Rochester,
Who'll be a soldier for Marlborough with me.

[Stanley]

I think a worthier man never lived. Ben Franklin, 1780, on hearing of John Fothergill's death.

The swamplands of our southeast, principally the Okefenokee in Georgia and the Great Dismal in North Carolina, are home to the witch alder family, which comes in three species and provides beauty year round with feathery white flowers in Spring and spectacular Fall foliage ranging from brilliant red to brilliant orange. All three members of the family are named Fothergilla in honor of the 18th-century English physician John Fothergill, a collector of plant species whose private botanical garden (now a suburban London park) specialized in plants from terrae incognitae. Born on March 8, 1712, Fothergill was better known as a social reformer and pioneering physician. A Quaker impatient of the religious restrictions in English education, Fothergill took his medical degree at Edinburgh and settled in London, where he was the first to describe mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and trigeminal neuralgia, a painful dysfunction of the main facial nerve now known as Fothergill’s Disease. And he was one of the first to offer a complete clinical description of diphtheria. These and other papers won him election to the Royal Society, while his extremely busy medical practice (he was one of the first of several 18th-century physicians to question traditional dosages, and those who didn’t wish to be killed by their doctors flocked to him) enabled him to patronize scientists, including the famous American botanist John Bartram (who first collected and named Fothergilla). Fothergill also helped to publicize (and indeed to publish) the electrical experiments of a Philadelphia printer named Benjamin Franklin, financed the translation and printing of a Quaker bible, and endowed a school at Pontefract in his native Yorkshire where Quaker boys and girls were welcome. ©

[Tizer]

The London park is now West Ham Park: LINK

[Stanley]

All the best sitcom characters are relentlessly horrible. John Howard Davies of the BBC.

Parents occasionally do the right thing, as John Howard Davies’s parents when they decided that his education was more important than his brief, meteoric success as a child actor. Born on March 9, 1939, in St. Mary’s, Paddington, Davies was “discovered” by a film producer at a social gathering and thus cut short a national search for the lead role in David Lean’s classic treatment of Oliver Twist. He had a couple of other good roles but mom and dad hoicked him out of films and back to school (in a minor English “public” and then in France). For a time he may have thought the folks were mistaken, for his career as a salesman was not going well when he took a job as production assistant at the BBC and immediately showed a knack for new ideas, discovering or inventing them and then, usually as producer, bringing them to vacuum tube reality on the tellie. His first coup was a brilliant adaptation of A. P. Herbert’s bizarre legal stories, Misleading Cases (1968), and Davies followed that with a religious sitcom, All Gas and Gaiters (1969-71) and the unclassifiable Beachcomber (by Spike Milligan, in 1969). His next triumph was a bit tense, for his business-suit persona didn’t go down very well with all of the Monty Python company, but he brought the boys to prominence and successfully fought off head office’s desire to silence them or at least tone them down. Davies did make friends with the besuited John Cleese, though, and out of that came the incomparable Fawlty Towers (1975, 1979). And Davies went on and on, as producer, director, or scriptwriter, with The Goodies (1970-72) Steptoe and Son (1975), and The Good Life (1975-78). Later productions included the classic (and very different) Only Fools and Horses and Yes, Minister. Davies retired, lugging his prizes with him, in 1996. ©

[Stanley]

TELEPHONE. n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance. Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary.

Some inventions we celebrate for their ease of use and, to be a bit redundant, their utility of use. Generations of parents, for instance, celebrated and even venerated the safety pin, using it (or so it often seemed) hourly throughout the day and night. It was invented in 1849, along with another undeniably useful gadget, the vacuum-packed tin can (which arguably won the Civil War for the Union). Other innovations we are not so sure about. Too many ‘modern inconveniences’ litter our lives, even while they may expand our horizons. A good example is the telephone which despite its intrusive and authoritarian nature we now even carry with us in our pockets and purses. So let us at once celebrate and mourn the invention of this diabolical device by Alexander Graham Bell, whose first successful experiment with the tyrant of the modern age took place on March 10, 1876, just a week after the inventor’s 29th birthday. On that fateful day, Bell telephoned next door, to his laboratory assistant, Thomas Watson, with the immortal words, “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you.” We may perhaps deduce from this the Bliss rule of communications, that there is an inverse proportionality between their relevance and their convenience. This inane message became so iconic that it was repeated word for word in 1915, when Bell (in New York) opened the first transcontinental phone line by calling up Watson, in San Francisco. Watson’s reply (that it would take him at least a week to get there) was meant to amuse. It also provides an ironic comment on this particular modern inconvenience. Watson should really have said: “can’t talk now. I’m busy.” ©

[Stanley]

The freedom of the press . . . cannot be limited without being lost. Thomas Jefferson.

My dad liked to tell his journalism students that the big problem with press freedom was that those who owned the press had a lot more of it than did their readers. It’s a problem that has deepened as the owners have become fewer. Some of its nature can be traced through the history of the New York Post, now owned by News International. Today’s headline is “Another Pack of Lies from Hillary Clinton.” When the Post had a different owner, it trumpeted a different line, for its owner and publisher for four decades was the heiress and social reformer Dorothy Schiff, a liberal lady who wore her heart on her sleeve and expected her editors and writers to follow suit. Schiff (born on March 11, 1903) was the grand-daughter of Jacob Schiff, a banker of the Gilded Age and a major leader in the capital consolidation that characterized the rise of the “Robber Barons.” He was also a major philanthropist, which may have shaped Dorothy Schiff’s values, but in her youth it didn’t show much: “Dolly” Schiff was just another wealthy debutante who “flunked every single course” she took at Bryn Mawr before dropping out to go on the marriage market. A divorce or two later, she took up with a liberal Democrat, George Backer, converted to Episcopalianism, learned liberalism from the Algonquin Round Table, and bought the Post. Of course in Dorothy’s day, being a liberal did not necessarily mean that you backed a Democrat, and under her guidance the Post endorsed Dewey against Truman and Rockefeller against Harriman, but until she sold the paper to Rupert Murdoch (in 1976, to straighten out her estate plans) it was a consistent supporter of liberalism and liberal causes. Rupert Murdoch has exercised his press freedom in a very different direction if in an only modestly more strident style. ©