BOB'S BITS

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Two kinds of men never amount to much: those who cannot do what they are told, and those who can do nothing else. King C. Gillette.

The westwarding of New Englanders and their culture helps to explain Abraham Lincoln’s victory in 1860. Yankees tended to settle the Old Northwest above the 40th parallel, and in 1860 that was Lincoln country, overwhelmingly enough that he became minority president. The migration also brought higher education with it, Grinnell, Oberlin, Beloit, for instance, and even the University of California were founded by migrant New Englanders. There was also a utopian strain, and all these things had their effect on King Camp Gillette, born of New England parents in Fond du Lac, WI, on January 5, 1855. The Gillettes moved to Chicago just in time for the Great Fire, which ruined them and halted King’s education, so King went to work in wholesale hardware to earn his daily bread and engaged in utopian socialist theorizing to keep his mind occupied. He was also an inveterate inventor, so after finishing his utopian socialist manifesto (The Human Drift) in 1894, he set about thinking how to make life better for people and hit upon it while shaving. “Our fortune is made,” he predicted to his wife; in 1899 he had his safety razor patent and by 1901 he had a company, but further technical advances were needed before he had his product. These tweaks came from his partner, a man named Nickerson (not a good name for a razor blade), and so we got (in 1903) the Gillette Safety Razor Company. It made a few dozen blades in 1903 and 13 million in 1904, and it made King Gillette a millionaire several times over. So in 1913 he retired and devoted the rest of his life to politicking for Upton Sinclair and utopian theorizing, his most characteristic effort (for, understandably, Gillette believed that the modern corporation had some good points to it) was The People’s Corporation (1924). ©

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The distance between free blacks and whites among us is derived from education, and does not exist in the nature of things. Charles Sumner, 1838.

St. Louis’s Charles Sumner High School was founded in 1867 “for the Negro youth of this city,” and for its first four decades offered a traditional, classical education, including Latin. There can be little doubt that this curriculum would have pleased Charles Sumner, a graduate of Boston Latin School. And he would have felt that such tuition perfectly fit the needs of students from poor backgrounds. Born on January 6, 1811, Charles Sumner knew economic hardship well because his parents (both born in real poverty) had known it better. Charles’s path through Boston Latin into Harvard College and then Harvard Law and on to the Sorbonne echoed his parents’ ascent into the middle classes and presaged his own rise to intellectual eminence and political power. But Charles Sumner did not approve of racial segregation, not in 1867 or ever in his life. His father (also Charles) was one of Boston’s early abolitionists but went further when elected to the state legislature by trying to overturn the state’s anti-“miscegenation” laws. Sumner himself would become the undoubted political leader of abolitionism in New England and, with his election (1851) to the US Senate, in the country. There he played a leading, sometimes dramatic part in bringing on the Civil War, making it into a crusade against slavery, and then leading “Radical Reconstruction.” In the longer run, however, it was as important that in 1847 Charles Sumner the lawyer appeared for the plaintiffs in a case challenging Massachusetts’ segregated black schools as inherently and irremediably inferior. Sumner’s arguments, couched in psychological and sociological thinking, would resurface in 1954, and in that guise would end Sumner School’s status as a legally segregated institution. ©

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I would prefer not. Bartleby the Scrivener.

One of the more enigmatic fictions in the Melville oeuvre is the one about Bartleby the Scrivener, a youngish man who, despite being a scrivener, “preferred not” to scriven. Indeed his ‘preference not’ extended ultimately to eating and he literally wasted away. I don’t think it’s ever been suggested that Bartleby just wanted a better pen, but it’s a possibility, especially if in his gloomy Wall Street office all he had was a pen and a well of ink. “Reservoir pens” or, as we know them fountain pens had been around for some time, but in 1853 (the publication date of the story) they were as faulty as they were rare and likely as not to spill their contents all over one’s copy page or waistcoat, either one a depressing event in a scrivener’s life. Four decades on, exactly on January 7, 1890, William B. Purvis patented the life-saver. His patent application for a leak-proof reservoir pen was approved (#419,065) that day, thus securing Purvis’s reputation as a clever man who “preferred to” solve those problems that might otherwise make misery. In a long life (1838?-1914), Purvis addressed and solved several problems and won a number of patents. My personal favorite (other than my fountain pen) among Purvis’s patents is one that made a previous invention available to all: he perfected a machine to mass produce the folded paper shopping bag. He took out that patent (#434,461) also in 1890, an annis mirabilis for him, and immediately licensed it to the Union Paper Bag Company, where his basic design is still in use. Unfortunately not much is known about William B. Purvis, other than that he was an African-American, probably an Episcopalian, that he lived and died in Philadelphia, that he invented a number of clever things, profited from some of them, and (not least) that he was no Bartleby. ©

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The Oberlin faculty did not forbid a woman to take the gentleman's course, but it did not advise it. I took a long breath and prepared for a delightful contest. Fanny Coppin. 1913.

Everything has to have a first, but Fanny Jackson Coppin gathered more than her fair share. Then again, speaking of “fairness,” Fanny was born a slave, on January 8, 1837, in our nation’s capital, so turnabout was indeed fair play. Washington’s large population of free blacks included Fanny May’s aunt, who bought Fanny (aged 12), made her a free person, moved to Providence, RI, and got Fanny a job as a philosopher’s servant (at Brown University). The philosopher was George Henry Calvert, who seems to have believed in equal opportunity, and in Calvert’s house Fanny May got a good preparatory education. It sent her to Oberlin College, the first to admit women, first to admit blacks, and thanks to Fanny May Jackson the first to graduate a black woman (in 1865). Fanny majored in Classics and Mathematics, and while in Oberlin she taught a preparatory course for white college students and evening classes for free blacks. In 1869 she became the first black female school principal, spending decades at it, at the Philadelphia Institute for Colored Children (now Cheyney University). Fanny did such a good job that, for a time, she served as the first African-American superintendent of a school system, in Philadelphia, but she returned to the Institute as Principal and probably would have lived out her life there but fell for the Rev’d Levi Coppin, an African Methodist Episcopal cleric, married him, and after a time in Philadelphia the couple went off to South Africa (in 1900) to spread the gospel of Christ and the gospel of work at the Bethel Mission. Declining health sent Fanny Coppin back to Philadelphia, where she died in 1913. She is remembered in various ways, most suitably at Coppin State University in Baltimore. ©

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There is no Lady in the Land/ is half so sweet as Sally/ She is the Darling of my Heart/ And she lives in our Alley. The Ballad of Sally in our Alley, Henry Carey. Gracie Fields' theme song.

One challenge immigrants face is to understand the heroes of a new home’s popular culture. Arriving in England in 1969, I was surprised by the veneration accorded to an old lady who herself lived in exile, possibly a tax exile but certainly in very considerable comfort, on the Isle of Capri. She was Gracie Fields, then 73 and already trailing behind her a garland of honours but yet to be made a Dame of the British Empire by a Queen whose father had been one of Gracie’s greatest fans. Gracie’s humble origins explained much. Not quite working class, she was born Grace Stansfield in Rochdale, Lancs., on January 9, 1896, above her father’s fish-and-chips shop, and her first stage appearances were in Rochdale (as Gracie Stansfield). She worked her way up, music hall revues, becoming Gracie Fields along the way, before breaking through on the London stage in the 1920s and in films in the 1930s. She was a beauty, which probably helped, but of the girl-next-door sort, which certainly helped, and she had her own very close brush with death (cervical cancer, 1939) when she carried herself gallantly (leaving her hospital bed to make a charity appeal) and, better yet, survived. During the war she left Capri to earn American dollars and, coming under fire for escaping the Blitz, returned to entertain allied troops and munitions workers just about everywhere, including under fire. Plus, Gracie Fields could sing, dance, and act, and do it well enough to claim top salaries and billing in London and Hollywood. I would like to add that Gracie Fields, aged 60, was (on film) the very first Miss Marple, Agatha Christie’s supersleuth spinster from the quiet but crime-ridden village of St. Mary Mead. So, here’s your explanation: Gracie was Gracie, and she was good at what she did. ©

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It hath pleased God of his abundant goodness to reduce the house and Mannor of the name to the name again. Sir Randolph Crewe on receiving his marriage dowry, the manor of Crewe, 1607.

English Puritans “went to America to do good and did very well.” Because New England colony and town governments ensured that nearly every family possessed the means to do well, that was a true statement. But the Puritans were an improving sort of people, and some who stayed behind did well enough. Such was Randolph Crewe, baptized in Nantwich, Cheshire, on January 10, 1559, This leather tanner’s son became a high court judge, an MP, and as Sir Randolph Crewe an advocate of parliament against the greatest power in the land. His father the tanner sent Randolph to Shrewsbury School where he did well enough to enter Cambridge, where he did well enough to enter (1577) into the law albeit at one of the lesser inns of court. He did well enough there to make an advantageous marriage to an East Anglian heiress who was also lady-in-waiting to the Countess of Shrewsbury, and to gain the patronage of the Earl of Shrewsbury. These successes brought Randolph Crewe to Lincoln’s Inn and, in 1604, into parliament. Another good marriage (in 1607: his first wife had died in childbirth) brought Randolph a large Cheshire estate, the manor of Crewe (a Cheshire town), and appointment as an assize judge. In parliament again, in the troubled 1620s, Crewe led the prosecutions of several eminent officeholders, including Lord Treasurer Lionel Cranfield, but impressed King James enough that, in the last year of James’s reign, Randolph Crewe became chief justice of the King’s Bench and sat in the House of Lords, briefly, before King Charles I (of a different liver altogether) dismissed Justice Crewe (1626) for opposing the Forced Loan. Was Crewe aware of his rise to power and wealth? It seems so. In an eloquent speech in 1625 he dared their lordships to ask “where is Bohun, where’s Mowbray? Nay, which is more, and most of all, where is Plantagenet? They are entombed in the urns and sepulchers of mortality.” If peers would retain their position, they would work to preserve their “name and Dignity . . . so long as it pleaseth God.” It pleased God to give Randolph Crewe a good father, a good mind, good marriages, and good patrons, and being an improving sort he made the best of them.©

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Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Alan Paton.

Alan Paton, novelist and anti-apartheid activist, was born in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa, on January 11, 1903. He is most famous for Cry, the Beloved Country (New York, 1948), which he wrote before the Nationalists came to power and instituted formal apartheid. So its story line, involving fathers and sons, an interracial murder, two deaths and a redemptive birth was a protest against the racial situation already in place in Paton’s “beloved country.” In its redemptive qualities, it was also a protest against Paton’s father, a colonial civil servant and family tyrant. Both rebellions were evident in Paton’s early life, his decision to teach at a black school, his affair with a married woman (whom he married in 1928 after her overbearing husband died), and particularly his conduct as Principal of a “Reformatory for Young Offenders” (1935-1948) where his permissive regime made it more a boarding school than a prison, allowing its African inmates to make home visits and facilitating their paid work outside reformatory walls. He was rewarded with a spectacular fall in recidivism rates. Indeed, he was inspired to begin Cry, the Beloved Country while undertaking a fact-finding tour of progressive prisons in Europe and the USA. Paton wrote quickly, beginning the book in Trondheim and finishing it in San Francisco where his hosts read the Ms. and got Paton in touch with the legendary Scribner’s editor, Maxwell Perkins (he who “did” Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Wolfe), who helped Paton get it through to publication in record time. Paton went on writing, agitating, and infuriating the authorities right up to his death which, sadly, occurred only just before the release of Nelson Mandela. Alan Paton would have regarded that event as a fulfillment of his own rebellion. ©

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We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities for the supply of others' necessities. John Winthrop, 1630.

The claims of Lynne Cheney and others that historians have read religion right out of American history are incomprehensible to anyone who has actually looked at scholarly books and journals or surveyed college course syllabi. General documentary collections, much used in classroom teaching, also demonstrate lively interest in religion and the religious. Probably the most often reprinted document of early American history (not counting the Declaration of Independence) is Governor John Winthrop’s lay sermon “Christian Charitie: A Modell Hereof” that he delivered (in 1630) aboard ship on his way to a New England landfall and the creation of Massachusetts’ “godly commonwealth.” Winthrop, born in East Anglia on January 12, 1588, exhorted his fellow passengers to remember that they were “knit together” as one body politic and that as Christian men and women they should practice “love, mercy, gentleness, temperance, &c” towards one another. This would include, he said, giving help “beyond our ability” in goods, service, and money to those who are poor or fallen on hard times. We must, he said, “partake of each other’s strength and infirmity, joy and sorrow, weal and woe.” If they would build a godly commonwealth, they would insure “that every man might have need of others . . . out of the same affection that makes him careful of his own.” Of course, these men and women did not go to America in order to become poor, but John Winthrop took care to remind them that the charity they would show to each other and to their fellows, rich or poor, would be “reciprocal in a most equal and sweet kind of commerce.” My history seminar will be discussing Winthrop’s “model” next week, then again at semester’s end. Perhaps Ms. Cheney will attend. ©

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These, sir, are the facts. Emile Zola to the President of France, January 13, 1898.

I’ve heard that artists shouldn’t meddle in politics, although our present crop of politicians might recommend to us a bit of meddling from somewhere. And ‘meddlesome’ artists have produced some wonderfully instructive political artifacts. Paintings for instance: two museums in Madrid hold famous statements of artistic political consciousness, Goya’s The Third of May, 1808, at the Prado, and Picasso’s Guernica, which in 1981 came home to the Museo Reina Sofia to mark the artist’s centenary and celebrate the return of democracy to his beloved Spain. During England’s Civil Wars, in 1644, a mere poet produced an eloquent, beautiful tract on freedom of expression, Areopagitica: a speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing. But perhaps the most famous artistic interruption of ‘politics as normal’ came from ‘the incomparable Zola’ (as our Mark Twain called him), Émile Zola, whose J’accuse was published on January 13, 1898 as a front page open letter (in the newspaper L’Aurore) to the “Président de la République”. In J’accuse Zola took up the cause of Lt. Colonel Alfred Dreyfus, unjustly convicted by court martial of conspiring against France in the pay of the Germans. In J’accuse, Zola revisits the facts of the matter (politicians don’t always do things this way) and France’s climate of anti-Semitism and destroyed the prosecution (and, be it said, the reputations of several generals and politicos). J’accuse caused a sensation, but politicians (and modern states) are slow to bend to the arc of justice, and it was not until 1906 that Dreyfus was exonerated, freed, and, indeed, promoted to major and awarded the Legion d’honneur for his “unparalleled martyrdom.” By then Zola was dead, but it was Zola the artist who brought a great nation to its senses.©

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There are two teams out there. One is playing cricket. The other is making no attempt to do so. Bill Woodfull, Australian Captain, 1933.

Americans are confused about cricket. This owes partly to its merely superficial similarities to baseball (so we look for the wrong things), but even more to its image as a gentlemanly game (so we can’t see the right things). I blame the classic scene, cricket on the village green, tea around the boundaries, players dressed in immaculate “whites,” and the occasional clatter of polite applause. But a tough, gladiatorial contest is going on out there. The ball, harder than a baseball, is propelled at the batsman at great speed (or with impossibly deceptive spinning loops) and then, worse, it bounces on the way. And the only gloved fielder is the wicket keeper. Close fielders (e.g. “silly mid-on”) catch right off the bat, bare handed and bare headed, and I have seen it done with my own eyes. But the most brutal tactic in this brutal sport is the “bouncer,” a ball launched by “fast bowlers” that hits the wicket a few feet in front of the batsman and then steams right towards his parietal bone. In a famous Ashes contest, on January 14, 1933, in an effort to still the amazing bat of Don Bradman, the English captain (a “gentleman” named Douglas Jardine) unveiled this murderous “pitch,” made it central to his bowling arsenal and fielding placement, and the Aussies called it “bodyline” bowling. It would be fair to say that its use caused an international incident (and it did cause a fractured skull). True, bodyline bowling has since been outlawed, but only when used in tandem with particularly aggressive fielding placements. The “bouncer,” quite apparently aimed at the batsman’s head or upper body, is still an acceptable tactic, and if it hits him there is no penalty. So if baseball has its dusters and beanballs, cricket has worse. The only civilized things about it are the tea and the “whites," and the “whites" are disappearing.©

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Only in Russia is poetry respected. It gets people killed. Osip Mandelstam.

Osip Mandelstam, possibly Russia’s greatest poet and with the additional distinction of being betrayed by Pasternak (according to his wife, Nedezhda), was born on January 15, 1891, into bourgeois wealth in Warsaw, Poland, then part of the Russian empire. They soon moved to the seat of Tsarist power, St. Petersburg, where Osip soon began writing poetry, populist stuff and, after the failed 1905 revolution, anti-Tsarist as well. Educated at the Sorbonne and Heidelburg, Osip converted, thus completing his family’s assimilationist trajectory, but to Methodism rather than to Orthodoxy, thus retaining his cultural independence. A Romantic figure (à la Byron), he also developed a way with women, a habit continued after his marriage to Nedezhda. His enthusiasm for the October Revolution turned to opposition as Josef Stalin continued the shift towards totalitarian dictatorship. Stalin tolerated him for a time, fascinated by his poetry and perhaps by his reckless courage, but in due course he was cried out against (by other poets, of course) and sentenced to five years in a gulag. He soon died there of “unknown causes,” a common malady in Siberian prison camps. Perhaps it was his poem on Stalin that killed him:

The ten thick worms his fingers,

His words like measures of weight,

The huge laughing cockroaches on top of his lip . . .

Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses.

Nadezhda, whose name means “Hope”, kept his memory (and his manuscripts) and was able to publish her memoirs (Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned) in 1970. Mandelstam was exonerated by Khrushchev in 1956 and, more fully, by Gorbachev in 1987. One wonders what Vladimir Putin makes of him. ©

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The man who kills the animals today is the man who kills the people who get in his way tomorrow. Dian Fossey.

Parental advisories are useful guides for students just setting their own goals, but issued as commands they have a few failings: chiefly, they wreak damage and they don’t work. Students faced with such parental diktats usually survive, having on their side the resilience of youth and the resource of self-knowledge. One such was Dian Fossey, born in San Francisco on January 16, 1932. Her mother and stepfather combined distant coldness with close manipulation, and their efforts to force Dian into secretarial school (which included cutting off her financial support when she dissented) ran aground. After a spell in pre-vet, Dian majored in occupational therapy. There she shone as a successful therapist for crippled children. Then, in 1963, she borrowed the stupendous sum of $8000 (about $50K today) to take that once-in-a-lifetime trip to Africa. You could say she never came back. Instead, she broke her ankle at Olduvai Gorge while visiting the Leakeys’ famous paleontological site. During her convalescence, Louis Leakey and others followed a different strategy, which was to help Dian figure out what she really wanted to do. First, of course, something about that ankle, but secondly she really wanted to work with animals, her main comfort as a little girl. Leakey, who had already recruited Jane Goodall to “do” the chimpanzees at Gombé Stream, helped Dian get started on the gorillas of the Rwandan highlands. There she found her métier, became famous, and in her films of her and other homo sapiens’ interactions with her subjects produced some of the most moving footage I have yet seen. Tragically, Dian Fossey was murdered, probably by gorilla or ivory poachers, in late December 1985. To be sure, hers was not a secretary’s fate. But hers was a fulfilled life. ©

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My mother would not like it. Glenn L. Martin.

One movie star who found it hard to kiss his leading lady was Glenn Luther Martin. When (in 1915) required to kiss Frances Marion, he demurred. “My mother would not like it,” he said. He was talked into it by Adolph Zukor. Anyway, Martin was only in the movies to sell his Model TT biplane. Born in rural Iowa on January 17, 1886, Martin grew up poor. His dad (and disapproving mom, Minta) soon moved to Kansas where prairie winds recommended kite flying as a pastime. Reading up on the subject, Glenn decided that box kites would work better, and when his home-made model outflew anyone else’s he turned himself into a kite maker and Minta’s kitchen into a kite factory. Years later, in 1909, there was Minta again, helping her boy build his first airplane. He got good enough at it by 1912 to rent an old Methodist church and turn it into an airplane factory, deliver newspapers by air to Catalina Island, and try his hand at kissing pretty girls in silent movies. When Hollywood ran out of pilot roles (or perhaps Minta really did disapprove), Martin moved his factory to Cleveland and then, in 1928, to Middle River, Maryland. There he became an apostle of the airplane and a major player in readying the Army Air Corps for World War II. He also designed the “Clipper” line of passenger planes. In the process, Martin became a major philanthropist (especially regarding the engineering program at the University of Maryland) and, it has to be said, a bit of an eccentric, for instance developing some bizarre ideas about nuclear warfare. Minta was with him almost all the way, dying in 1953, and Glenn (who never did marry) followed her only two years later. His company survived them both and is now a constituent division of the Lockheed Martin corporation. ©

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Girls, betwixt silly Fathers and ignorant Mothers, are generally brought up to traditionary Opinions . . . instead of Reason." Damaris Masham, 1705.

One reward of these notes is that I constantly learn ‘new stuff,’ which is one of my hobbies and humbling too: offering constant proofs that there is an awful lot of ‘new stuff’ still out there. It’s especially humbling when the new stuff is in my field, the 17th century. So here’s another 17th-century female philosopher, John Locke’s friend, student, colleague and possibly lover, about whom I knew exactly nothing. Lady Damaris Masham was born in Cambridge, January 18, 1659, the daughter of the Platonist philosopher (and Master of Christ’s College) Ralph Cudworth. She clearly learned a lot from his library although how much she learned from him is unknown. He didn’t think she was up to Latin or Greek (she proved him wrong as an adult), so it may be that she learned her Platonism from reading his books or listening in to his conversations with other ‘Cambridge Platonists’. Latin she picked up after reading Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), after she’d known Locke just over a decade, the most exciting and dangerous decade of his life, and by which time he was more or less permanently resident at her Essex country home. Along with their philosophical exchanges (direct and by post) they exchanged love poems and flirtatious letters. Certainly they were intimate friends. Another thing I didn’t know: Lady Masham was Locke’s first biographer and she also enjoyed an extensive (and much soberer) correspondence with Gottfried Leibniz. Saved by Locke from her father’s Platonism (and, perhaps, from her husband’s coldness), Lady Damaris Masham had also learned empirically that she had quite a good mind of her own. Her Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian Life (1705) is today read as both Lockean and feminist. But back then she did have to publish it anonymously. ©

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The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution. Paul Cézanne

‘In the beginning there was Cézanne’ is a sentiment echoed by several leading moderns including Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin, and Pablo Picasso, themselves constituting a trio that helps us to understand that Paul Cézanne spanned (and his art helped to usher in) several artistic styles. He experimented in life, too, born into the haute bourgeoisie of Aix-en-Provence (his father was a banker) on January 19, 1839, he had his period of art school and the low life before gaining a mild bourgeois prosperity of his own and then, some years before his death in 1906, reaffirming his family’s devout Catholicism. Even so, at this later period, he managed to enrage traditionalist critics, partly because of his political sympathy for Lt. Col. Dreyfus but partly because as an artist he failed to conform to establishment expectations. The St. Louis Art Museum has but three Cézannes, recto-verso portraits of his sister (in one style) and his mother (on the other side, in another style) and one of his “Bathers” paintings, this one of six male nudes on a riverbank, the backdrop being the impressionistic sky and hills of Cézanne’s youth. (Interestingly, it was purchased by Claude Monet during Cézanne’s lifetime and then owned by Monet’s son). He is indeed difficult to pigeonhole, and museum notes solve the problem by conceding the point made by Gauguin, Matisse, and Picasso. Throughout a long painting life (he died of a pneumonia contracted while painting out of doors in bad weather) Cézanne constantly experimented with palette knife and shadow, brush and light, color and underlying form. Never quite fully accepted by, or into, any school, Paul Cézanne schooled us all into our modern acceptance of art as perception, not representation. ©

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Flair , , , is what we need if we are to lead imaginative and interesting lives. Fleur Cowles.

It is very American to remember fondly one’s home town, so I look askance at anyone who didn’t like Des Moines. They have to be odd birds, and Fleur Cowles was odd in spades. Born Florence Freidman of New York on January 20, 1908, she first acquired a burning ambition and then collected husbands and surnames. She enjoyed quite a bit of personal success, too, but she flowered when in 1946 she married Gardner Cowles, media prince of Des Moines and founder of the Look magazine empire. Indeed she became “Fleur” Cowles, associate editor of Look, and overhauled its design while moving it upmarket and towards a more gender-balanced readership (it had been, Cowles conceded, a ‘barbershop’ mag). She also became a bigwig in American society and enjoyed being Eisenhower’s “Special Envoy” at the coronation of Elizabeth II. It was before then that Fleur talked Cowles into moving Look’s editorial offices to New York (circulation and printing stayed in Des Moines) and in 1949 talked him into financing her launch of Flair magazine, still famed as America’s most lavish general circulation magazine. Too lavish. Never mind its artwork (e.g. Salvador Dali, Saul Steinberg, Lucian Freud), its editorial staff included W. H. Auden, Simone de Beauvoir, Angus Wilson, and Tennessee Williams. Its 12-issue run incurred losses of about $10 per copy in 2016 dollars. At which point Cowles’s Flair also cost him his Fleur. She kept his name but ran off to England (rather than to Des Moines) with a timber baron named Meyer and set up shop in a Sussex country mansion (and in winter a Spanish castle). There she energetically presided over charity galas, society weddings, exclusive art shows, and fashion launches until her death in 2009. Tom Meyer, miraculously, survived her.©

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When I have a headache, I take two aspirin and keep away from children, just like the bottle says. Anonymous.

The first recorded prescription of aspirin (for an ancient headache) was made by the Greek physician-philosopher Hippocrates. Of course Hippocrates didn’t say “take two aspirin and lie down.” His advice was to chew on some willow bark. Clearly willow bark was the location of a useful substance, but it wasn’t until 1753 that Edward Stone, an Anglican vicar of scientific leanings, isolated salicylic acid, put on to the idea not by Hippocrates but by Peruvian Indians (who used a similar bark to treat malaria) and a medical principle first articulated by Galen, the “doctrine of signatures.” But knowing what it was and making wider use of it required the artificial synthesis of salicylic acid, and that was left to Felix Hoffmann, a professional chemist. Born in Bavaria on January 21, 1868, the son of an industrialist, Hoffmann went to work for Bayer & Co. soon after earning his doctorate (in 1894). There, either on his own or under the close instruction of his boss (this important matter is still in dispute) he figured out how to make the stuff in a pure, stable form, basically (pun intended) by combining acetic acid with salicylic acid. And so we have acetylsalicylic acid, when you get right down to it a simple stuff, a.k.a. aspirin, industrially produced, expensive only when taken in hospitals, that is really one of the great wonder drugs of modern medicine with a number of proven uses, prophylactic and therapeutic, and several still hopeful applications. Hoffmann went on to figure out how to “buffer” the acid, a useful idea for those of us whose stomach linings are not what they used to be. Whether he profited from the invention is in some doubt, but Bayer promoted him and, on the company’s English-language website, makes much of his contribution to our health. Rightly so. ©

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Nature still obstinately refuses to make the rich innately superior to the poor. Beatrice Potter Webb.

What’s in a name? Here’s Beatrix Potter, author and reformer, and here’s Beatrice Potter, author and reformer. Beatrice Potter, born on January 22, 1858, was like Beatrix born into wealth and brought up to Protestant rectitude, but one big difference was that Beatrice Potter had a father who believed that women (and therefore his nine daughters) should be up and doing, learning the classics and much more, and even possibly neglecting things thought womanly. Much later, during WWII, when Beatrice Potter had become Beatrice Webb, Lady Passfield, and the dearth of servants forced her into housewifery, she lamented “if only I had been brought up to know how to cook and clean.” But by then this was humor at her own expense, for Beatrice had become one of the great social scientists and social reformers of modern Britain. A traitor to her class, some thought, for with her husband Sidney Webb (and others) she had helped to build the moral and economic theory of the welfare state, supported energetic trades unionism, and helped the Labour Party to achieve governing status. And it’s true that she abandoned (and rejected) her father’s rather strident capitalism. A more nuanced view might be that the Webbs, both Beatrice and Sidney, represented a remarkable strain of upper-middle class radicalism that also shot arrows into the very heart of the Liberal Party and made it love social reform, too. With her husband a co-founder of the London School of Economics and The New Statesman magazine, naïve defender of Soviet communism, diarist of some note (it’s on line at the LSE), and yes, a writer too (though not of children’s stories) Beatrice Potter Webb died on my birthing-day and now lies quiet in Westminster Abbey. ©

[Tripps]

Very interesting. I've had a quick wiki search. I'd heard of this lady, but apart from the fact that she was a well known socialist, I know little of her. Some contradictions here surely? Her husband was said to have been 'raised to the peerage' in 1929 as the first Baron Passfield, and served as Colonial Secretary in Ramsey McDonald's Government. I guess that puts him up there with John Prescott and others, as socialist Barons. That's a category which I find quite incongruous. His enthusiasm for Joseph Stalin is said to be 'naive'.

[Stanley]

A sane view of life is, after all, elaborated mainly in the kitchen. Joseph Conrad, Last Essays.

One consequence of WWI was the fall of the German monarchies, and movements abubble in the prewar years, collectively called modernist, boiled over in both Austria and Germany. Artists of all sorts (musicians, painters, playwrights) flourished in what, in the retrospect provided by rise of National Socialism, can seem an artificial hothouse growth. Among the oddities of the inter-war world was the 1919 entry into the Kunstgewerbeschule Wien of its first woman student, Margarete Lihotzky (she was nominated by Gustav Klimt). Born on January 23, 1897, ‘Grete’ (as she became known) imbibed radicalism from her pacifist parents and more in the Applied Arts school. “No one,” she later wrote, “would then have conceived of a woman being commissioned to design a house.” But moving into Germany, she became a leading designer, a member of Ernst May’s team working with the Frankfurt city council to create modern, humane, and affordable housing for the working class. Grete designed, among other things, the famed “Frankfurt Kitchen” (look it up: it had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010 and there is a Frankfurt Kitchen in the V&A, in London). Grete also joined the Communist Party, went into opposition as Naziism rose to power, and then fled to Russia. In 1938 she moved to Turkey where she designed Montessori classrooms and decided, in 1941, to return to Vienna to join the resistance. Captured by the Gestapo in 1943, she survived, but in peacetime found that her communism disqualified her from most employments in free world Vienna. But Grete Lihotzky survived all that, too, and lived to enjoy fame for her courage and for her art, culminating in Austria’s highest civilian honor, awarded to her on her 100th birthday, in 1997. You can, almost certainly, celebrate her memory by using your ‘built in’ kitchen today. ©

[Stanley]

Music hath charms to sooth a savage breast,/ to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak. William Congreve, The Mourning Bride, 1697.

Historical and literary studies make natural partners, but occasionally there is a minor falling out. For instance most historians date the “Restoration Period” in England from the actual restoration of Charles II (1660) to the Glorious Revolution (1688) that overthrew his brother James. In literature, however, “Restoration” runs on to at least 1710. It makes sense. After the entre’acte of the Puritan revolution, some gaiety was called for, and especially on the stage “gaiety” was on public display. Even women took to acting and (gasp!) wrote their own plays (Aphra Behn and Susanna Centlivre). Comedies seemed more popular and have been more lasting: “Restoration Comedy” is a recognized genre. A male playwright whose fine comedies all fall outside of the historians’ “Restoration” was William Congreve, born in Yorkshire on January 24, 1670 and reared in Ireland, where he was educated (at Trinity College Dublin) and where his wit made a friend of Jonathan Swift despite Swift’s detestation of his Whig politics (“Thus prostitute my Congreve’s name is grown to ev’ry lewd pretender of the town” was Dean Swift’s politically loaded comment). For all that, Congreve only wrote a few plays, all over a seven-year span (1693-1700). They included some unusual parts for very eminent women, including the sue jure second Duchess of Marlborough (with whom he had a daughter). Congreve also produced some of the more memorable yet misquoted lines in English literature (e.g. “Nor Hell hath a fury like a woman scorned”), In 1700 he retired from writing to enjoy his royalties, his private income, and a succession of undemanding but profitable political appointments. He died in 1729 leaving his entire estate to trickle upwards to the Duchess of Marlborough.©

[Stanley]

Men are so accustomed to judge of things by their senses that, because the air is indivisible, they , , , think it but one remove from nothing. Robert Boyle.

Last year I left my comfort zone to create three presentations on the impact of science on modern life (part of a consortial course on science for undergraduate non-science majors). I first wanted to talk about the “scientific revolution” of the early modern period (ca. 1550-1750), and was lucky to have a nodding familiarity with Robert Boyle, the pioneering Anglo-Irish philosopher-scientist-alchemist-theologian. Boyle, a younger son of an Irish peer, was born on January 25, 1627, and he had done some important work on air (among other things). Air was a dirt common subject, of course, but Boyle demonstrated how little was known about it when, in about 1657, he began his New Experiments Physico-Mechanical, Touching the Spring of the Air. I stumbled on Boyle’s papers on-line (mostly at the Birkbeck College website) and found in them, especially in Boyle’s 1660 report, an astonishingly limpid and logical presentation of what today we rather imprecisely call the “scientific method.” Using only primitive equipment, Boyle demonstrated that air had measurable substance and weight, that its weight altered with altitude, that the air had constituent parts that seemed quite distinctive, and that this very material air could be manipulated to produce predictable, describable, and replicable results. He stripped away assumptions to ask the simplest possible questions, devised rigorously empirical experiments that would (or would not) produce simple, clear answers, and understood the whole business as a step-by-step process. Robert Boyle thus helped to create fundamental knowledge that would one day enable others to build steam engines and airships. As importantly, he revealed to his contemporaries simple truths the existence of which they could before only have guessed. ©

[Stanley]

A man of engaging impatience. Alexander King obituary, London Telegraph, February 2007.

Alexander King took Dr. Johnson’s “high road to England” but remained proud of his Scots birth throughout a long life in science. He was born in Glasgow on January 27, 1909 but moved to London when his father took an executive position in Imperial Chemical Industries, so Alexander was educated at the Highgate School and then (in chemistry) at Imperial College, London. There his professional life as a chemist was cut short and indeed redirected by government service, first in wartime as director of research at the Ministry of Supply and, come the peace, as the head of various think tanks (British and then international) devoted to the application of scientific principles to industrial processes and industrial organizations. He retired in 1974 as director of science at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. While in that post, King became convinced that real progress required serious attention to the environment, not least to issues of social cost (we all pay for pollution, for lead poisoning, for technologically-driven disemployment), but also to such matters as distribution of wealth. It was King as OECD Director who co-commissioned the famous report Limits to Growth (1972 and still a best-seller). This may have made him a bit of an outsider in his own organization, and after his retirement he struck out on his own (and as founder of the Club of Rome) to make the case for those (scientists, economists, industrialists) who believed that economic growth of itself could not address, let alone solve, our most pressing problems. Indeed, of itself, it would almost certainly intensify them. King kept at it until the day he died, in 2007, having just published Let the Cat Turn Round, his intriguingly-titled autobiography. ©

[Stanley]

The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women. Learned Hand, 1944

If ever a person’s name ordained his career it was that of Learned Hand, probably the most famed and certainly the most-quoted lower court judge in American legal history. Born on January 27, 1872 in Albany, NY, he acquired the name Learned from the old colonial custom of passing on a mother’s family name as a given name. Into the bargain both sides of his family were already peppered with lawyers. So at 17, off he went to Harvard, where he changed majors (from mathematics) to impress his impressive philosophy professors (William James, George Santayana, and Josiah Royce), graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and delivered the Class Day oration. Learned’s social life was constricted, which bothered him, but he gave enough time to his studies to do brilliantly also at Harvard Law. As a practicing lawyer, he found theory more satisfying than practice and spent too much time writing scholarly studies. Teddy Roosevelt’s progressive brand of Republicanism led Hand to abandon his family’s traditional ties to the Democracy and to collaborate intellectually with the high priest of progressive politics, Herbert Croly. Perhaps inevitably, Hand became a federal judge in 1909. From the bench, he delivered some of the most important opinions that have ever been issued regarding our freedoms of speech, of the press, and of political association. By no means always in the majority, or always upheld, his opinions still percolated up to the Supreme Court where they helped make judicial history. Hand himself never made that journey, retiring finally from the Second Circuit in 1951. He spent his last decade issuing impassioned counterblasts against McCarthyism and considered opinions on American public law and public morals, some of which were required reading in my first year political science course.©

[Stanley]

I'm a bit of a deconstructionist myself. It's the last intellectual thrill left. Like sawing through the branch you're sitting on. David Lodge.

It is said that first novels are often autobiographical. In the case of the astonishingly prolific David Lodge, it’s hard to find a novel (among his 15 or so) that isn’t. Born a working class Catholic (in London, January 28, 1935) and coming of age during a time of great change in the church, his first fictions (notably The British Museum is Falling Down, 1965) were exactly that, and it’s a theme he returned to several times, movingly in Therapy (1995), where a middle-aged doubter reeling from a failed marriage seeks out an old (Catholic) flame who’s on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. A leading academic and literary critic, Lodge brilliantly limned Henry James’s creative processes in Author, Author (2004) at about the same time he was finishing two important critical works, notably The Year of Henry James: The Story of a Novel (2008). Indeed the academic novel (“academic” in one guise or another) has been Lodge’s mainstay. Given what’s happened to the academy over his lifetime, Lodge faced a stark choice between tragedy and comedy, and we are fortunate that he chose the latter mode. His classic comedy was Changing Places (1975), as timid Philip Swallow of Rummidge (=Brummagem=Lodge’s own Birmingham) goes to Euphoria University (California at Berkeley, Berkeley being named after the idealist philosopher) while the not-quite-so-awful Morris Zapp revolutionizes Rummidge in exchange. Perhaps inevitably, Zapp and Swallow exchange wives, too, both women exquisitely drawn (if minor) characters who bring out the good sides of both their men. Now David Lodge has done a “real” autobiography, however (Quite a Good Time To Be Born, 2015), so perhaps we should suspend judgment on the real roots of his fiction. ©