BOB'S BITS

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We have much more work to do. Coretta Scott King, 2000.

In January 1998, Paulette found herself talking with Pat Hume just before Pat’s husband John won the Nobel Peace Prize for his campaign to bring peace and justice to Northern Ireland. Their chat went on while John Hume received a Doctor of Laws degree, honoris causa, from UMSL. Paulette came away thinking that Pat Hume deserved similar recognition for her constant courage, her love, her conquest of the loneliness and fear one inherits when one’s partner risks everything for a cause. It’s a good thought for today, because today is the birth anniversary of Coretta King, once the wife and too soon made the widow of another Nobelist, Martin Luther King, Jr. Coretta Scott she once was, born on April 27, 1927, in Marion, Alabama. The presiding midwife, her paternal great grandmother Delia, was a former slave, and both sides of her family could trace back their heritage, name by name by name, into slavery days. They were not going back, but forward, and Coretta and her siblings were given notice that education would keep them on the march. Coretta and her elder sister attended Antioch College, on scholarships, and Coretta’s wonderful soprano voice then took her to the New England Conservatory of Music. There she met a divinity student, Martin, became Coretta Scott King in 1953, and went with him back to Alabama and to destiny in the Fall of 1954. There followed fourteen years of trouble, childbirth, parenting, marching, speaking in public, staying home alone, years of courage and of keeping faith. When Paulette asked Pat Hume how she managed much the same things in Northern Island, Pat shrugged her shoulders, smiled silently, and crossed her fingers. Coretta Scott King, who died in 2006, spent a long, long, long time at the same tasks, and managed them well.©

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The physicist who shirks measurement only plays with science. Franz Karl Achard.

If you are looking for a scientist who had a measurable effect on war, peace, and economic development it might be hard to “beat” Franz Karl Achard, a descendant of Huguenot refugees who (after Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes) had settled in the Kingdom of Prussia. Karl’s father was a preacher in Berlin, perhaps to a Huguenot community, but Karl, born on April 28, 1753, was drawn to the sciences and soon became star member of the Prussian Academy. Science’s disciplinary boundaries had not yet been clearly drawn, and Achard thought of himself as a chemist, physicist, and botanist. It was just as well, for one of Achard’s discoveries was how (economically) to extract sugar from the beet: to be precise, from Beta vulgaris. Thanks to the French scientist Olivier de Serres, it had been known since 1600 that this beet contained sugar, but by the time Achard got around to it, cane sugar had become a European addiction, its production and sale a major staple of the great colonial empires. And Prussia had no empire. Thus Achard became the darling of successive Prussian kings, even then involved in the processes of state building and—soon—the Napoleonic wars. Indeed, given the trade embargoes of the wars, sugar became a weapon, with Napoleon trying to make it out of grapes and British cane sugar producers offering Karl Achard great bribes to suppress his Beta vulgaris discoveries. But he kept at it and by 1802 had a royal farm (in Silesia) to grow beets and an on-site royal factory to process them into sugar. Before Karl Achard died in 1821, peace had come to Europe, but also the vulgar beet had established itself as an economical source of dietary sugar. Alas for Hohenzollern kings and European teeth, it was no longer a Prussian monopoly. ©

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Things were done much better in my day. Alice Keppel, 1936, on hearing of the abdication of Edward VIII, Duke of Windsor.

Royal mistresses fluttered around the 17th-century courts that I study, sometimes in flocks, and several were famous enough that, much later, Thomas Paine and then Mark Twain could make jokes about them (e.g. in Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court) with complete confidence that readers would laugh. It’s not clear whether, as monarchies modernized, such birds became rarer or just more discreet. But discretion was just becoming the fashion in 1898 when the then Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) hooked up with Mrs. Alice Frederica Keppel, reputedly the most beautiful woman in London and already, at 30, an experienced amour of men not her husband. He was the Honourable George Keppel, a bit down on his luck and with a strong taste for women other than his wife. She had been Alice Edmonstone, born into the Scottish nobility at Duntreath Castle on April 29, 1868. She married Keppel in 1891 and almost immediately began affairs, perhaps to shore up the Keppel finances, first with the second Baron Grimthorpe and then with the second Baron Alington. Mrs. Keppel became a notable society hostess and came to the Prince’s notice. By the time he acceded to the throne, she was his “favorita” amongst several women, none of whom was the queen. Soon Alice Keppel was a power at court and in politics, and indeed liked by Queen Alexandra too. Edward saw to it that the Keppels were rewarded, she with imperial stocks, he with a better (but not exacting) job, and the Keppels lived in considerable comfort after Edward’s death in 1910, albeit usually abroad. Alice’s daughter Violet would become Virginia Woolf’s lover. Her great-granddaughter is Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall. If only Mark Twain could have known that!! ©

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If you can't be in athletics, at least be an athletic supporter. Miss McGee, in "Grease".

I first saw the film “Grease” (1978) during a London research trip (honestly, it was on a Sunday, the libraries were closed!!!). I loved it, but not for Olivia Neutron Bomb (as my son called the female lead), but for the coach (Sid Caesar as a totally unconvincing “Calhoun”) and above all for Miss McGee, the school principal with the gravelly voice and the paralyzing fear—kept barely in check by her sense of duty—that civilization was about to collapse right there in Rydell High. I remembered Miss McGee as “Our Miss Brooks,” first on CBS radio and then (1952-56) television. Miss Brooks was an English teacher, also constantly worried about the downfall of western civilization, but for her the threat came not so much from her students (who were more or less comparable to those Miss McGee encountered at Rydell) but from her boss, the spineless, scheming principal of Madison High School with the perfectly apt name of Osgood Conklin and who I would later meet, not very well disguised, as the real life principal of my very own high school. But Miss Brooks, “our” Miss Brooks, played by Eve Arden, was Osgood’s perfect foil, gravelly voice and all, impeccable comic timing, the mistress of the double take, loved by her students. Born Eunice Quedens, on April 30, 1908, Eve Arden had a successful career in stage, film, radio, and television, generally but not always in comic roles, ranging from the Marx brothers At the Circus (1939) to Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (1959). But it was as Miss Brooks that Ms. Arden made her mark, and in Grease she was finally promoted to principal. Embattled though she was at Rydell High, she did so very much better at principaling than Osgood Conklin could ever imagine. ©

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As the arts continue to improve, simplicity gains more admirers daily Benjamin Latrobe, letter to members of Congress, 1806

One of the best and most appropriate views of Washington D. C. is to be had from the graveside of Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the city’s first designer. L’Enfant’s body was transferred to Arlington in 1911. By the same token, Benjamin Henry Latrobe’s body should have been moved to rest near L’Enfant’s, but Latrobe lies still in New Orleans’ old Protestant burial ground, where (while designing the city’s waterworks) he succumbed to yellow fever in 1820. Latrobe, of Franco-American descent but born in Yorkshire on May 1, 1764, might have become a leading Moravian clergyman like his father and elder brother, but his talent lay in drawing and there is a hint of alienation from Moravian tradition. Still he was very well educated at Moravian schools in England and Germany and we might remember him as a pioneer geologist had he not been apprenticed to leading architects on his return to England in 1785. The death of his wife Lydia in 1793 left him with two children and a wish to move away from grief, and he was drawn to the USA by his mother’s Pennsylvania landholdings and by his ideological sympathy with the young republic. And on that republic Latrobe penciled in famous designs, notably in the Federal District (e.g. the west front of the White House, several capitol interiors, a couple of churches) but also in Richmond, Charlottesville, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. Latrobe understood his “American” design tasks well enough to put corncobs on the classical capitals in the old senate chamber. He saw architecture as a public art and would have been distressed by our Trumpist tendency to see it as a trademark. For that matter, he might have been restless laid next to L’Enfant, whose design for our capitol city Latrobe thought far too imperial. ©

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The greatness of a scientist does not rest on the fact of his having never made a mistake, but rather on his readiness to admit that he has done so. William Bayliss.

When new discoveries are made, new words are required or old words need to be recycled. In particle physics, the modern fashion has been for new coinages or exceedingly odd retreads. A recent poll (the “Extremely Dorky Poll”) that asked physicists to name their “coolest” word offers (inter alia) “boojums” and “sparticle” as coinages and “quark” as a reuse, and comes up with this sentence: “The polhode rolls without slipping in the herpolhode lying in the invariable plane.” Medics tend to be a bit more humdrum, often going back to old languages for their new words. So when (in 1902) the British physiologist William Bayliss noticed a new substance emerging in the small intestine which in turn stimulated the pancreas to do its digestive work, he named it with a coinage (“secretin”), but in searching for a generic term he hit on Greek for “hormone.” In its original form, as perhaps used by Aristotle to explain stasis and change, it meant simply “to arouse, to excite, to set in motion.” Word perfect!! William Bayliss was born on this date, May 2, in 1860, in Wolverhampton in the English Midlands. He was educated at London (BSc) and Oxford (ScD) and spent his very distinguished working life at University College London. He was famous for his ‘hormonal’ discoveries of course but more generally for his attention to scientific method, for his praise of error as essential to discovery, and for his total absorption in science. When told of the date set for him to receive his knighthood from King George V, he said he had a previous engagement at the Physiological Society. One wonders whether the king was amused, or not, but the problem was worked out and Bayliss became Sir William in 1922. ©

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I am simply the tradesman that sells your works of art. Richard D'Oyly Carte to Arthur Sullivan.

Perhaps Richard D’Oyly Carte was forever entranced by the romance and comedy of his parents’ elopement (of which, on May 3, 1844, he was the first issue). His mother’s respectable father did not approve of her marrying a mere flautist. But she did it anyway and made sure that Richard and his five siblings were introduced to a world full of art, music, and poems. The realities of that world had forced the flautist father into the music business, selling music rather than making it, and after a fairly brilliant though brief education (he dropped out of London University) Richard took the same route. At least, that was his day job. But he took time to compose for voice and instrument, and found his taste gravitating to musical comedy, good, wholesome English fun he might have said (for he disapproved of the risqué French model). He wrote a couple himself, but he got more involved in production, set up as his own impresario, and then, fatefully, met (or was drawn to) Helen Couper Black, W. S. Gilbert, and Arthur Sullivan. Helen was a canny Scotswoman, musically inclined, who after 1877 increasingly ran his business (and then married him, after his first wife died, in 1888). And Gilbert and Sullivan were, well, Gilbert & Sullivan. Starting with Trial by Jury (1874), the D’Oyly Carte Company put on fourteen of their light operas, most of which were runaway hits in London, then the provinces, then New York and further afield, and maybe even in Paris. On the proceeds Richard and Helen built an empire (including the Savoy Hotel) and when Richard died in 1901 the empress carried on. Then came Richard’s son, Rupert. The company folded in 1961 but was resuscitated as a charitable trust endowed in 1985 by Richard’s granddaughter, Bridget D’Oyly Carte. ©

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Albert Camus and the Civil Truce. Camus, Brother of the Sun. Titles of Robles' critical studies of Camus.

The colonial-imperial experience in what we might call the heyday of empire produced heroic fiction, tales of derring-do, in both high and popular culture (in the US, e.g., Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales and then the dime novel). As empires declined, and “colonial” peoples asserted their destinies, imperial themes became more complex in metropolitan and indigenous literatures. One thinks of the zany, absurd, and often cruel humor to come out of the African experiences of metropolitan English writers like Evelyn Waugh and Tom Sharpe (authors not usually mentioned in one breath). And as “French Algeria” became an oxymoron, creative writers emerged in both French and Maghrebi to measure the contradictions of empire. My daughter studies the Maghreb, but the “pieds noir” are worth a look too, notably Albert Camus. But there’s another French-Algerian author I had no knowledge of, one who has written very sensitively of his old colleague Camus (both worked for an Algerian French newspaper), and who was born in Oran on May 4, 1914: the prolific playwright, novelist, essayist and war hero, Emmanuel François Roblès. Like Camus an Algerian-European-Francophone of Spanish descent, Roblès also embraced existentialism not as despair but as a means of willful self-definition in the face of even irreversible fate. His heroes (including native Algerians) refuse offers of safety from their oppressors and instead rebel, making themselves autonomous actors and at least for a time arbiters of their own fates. Although his themes implicitly and often explicitly sympathized (e.g. Montserrat, 1948) with colonial liberations, Roblès himself fled the Algerian revolution and lived out the rest of his long, creative life in his adopted France. ©

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Against the Tide. The title of Adam Clayton Powell, Sr's autobiography.

Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., was a man that white supremacists loved to hate. Flamboyant and defiant, he more than occasionally hinted that he enjoyed that role. But then he had a remarkable parent. The senior Adam Clayton Powell was born a free man in Virginia on May 5, 1865, but he was not free because of the Civil War. His mother Mildred’s family had been free for generations before that, and not only free but freeholders. Mildred herself was African, native American, and European, and we don’t know who his father was. Neither did he. But Adam Clayton Powell could pass as white, and later in life he did so to avoid the segregated trains and hotels of his native land. But by then he’d moved a long way, to college in Washington, DC, then to Yale Divinity School, then to Baptist pastorates in Philadelphia, New Haven and finally and most famously at the old Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. Everywhere he went (except in the South) he identified as black and played a leading—sometimes a founding—role in civil rights organizations, including the National Urban League and the NAACP, as trustee of historically black colleges and universities, and as an active member of the Republican Party, in his lifetime a beacon of liberation for black people. But Powell’s greatest success was at his home church, which he transformed into an anchor institution in Harlem just in time to welcome the great influx of immigrants from the South. By the 1930s, the church was the largest Protestant congregation in the country, and among Powell’s more interesting disciples was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who attended Abyssinian Baptist during his time at Union Theological Seminary and would take back to Germany some of the steel that had gone into the making of Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. ©

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If we treated everyone we meet with the same affection we bestow on our favorite cat, they, too, would purr. Martin Delany.

The invisibility of black history is demonstrated by noting that the extraordinary life of Martin Delany was little known until, 25 years ago, the states of Ohio and Pennsylvania and the National Afro-American Museum belatedly raised memorials to him at his grave near Wilberforce College and where he wrote and published (a newspaper and abolitionist tracts) in Pittsburgh and Chambersburg. Martin Delany was born in Charlestown (now West Virginia) on May 6, 1812. His father was a slave, but his mother—descended from Mandika royalty—was a free person, and by Virginia law her issue was also free. Legal problems associated with teaching her children to read (!!) led her to buy her husband and move the family to Chambersburg, PA. There Martin, through apprenticeships, learned enough medicine to be admitted (with two other blacks) to Harvard medical school, but the three were quickly dismissed in the face of white student protests. Via the apprenticeship route he entered medical practice and, in Pittsburgh, behaved gallantly during a cholera epidemic when other doctors fled the city or refused to treat the infected. He also sailed to Africa to examine for himself the prospects of repatriation, but come the Civil War he returned, recruited black soldiers and joined up himself. Just before the peace, he was commissioned major, thus becoming the first black officer of the line in US military history. Afterwards he led South Carolina freedmen’s efforts to find justice economically and politically, and with some success though at great personal cost and ultimate failure in the white supremacist reaction post 1877. In 1880 Major Martin Delany moved to Ohio to resume medical practice (and pay for his children’s education at Wilberforce College). He died of tuberculosis in 1885. ©

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I made enough jack in Hollywood to do a lot of repairs on the house. William Faulkner, 1932.

I vividly recall my excitement as (in 1963) I first read Absalom! Absalom!, William Faulkner’s brilliant novel that I would later (1980s) use (along with stories from Go Down, Moses) as the guiding theme of my Lancaster University lectures on southern history. Indeed, Faulkner’s vision was part of the major recasting of southern history led by C. Vann Woodward, an Arkansas boy translated into a Yale University professor. But Faulkner’s greatest novels are also his most difficult ones. This was so with his earliest masterpieces, especially The Sound and the Fury (1929). Several critics recognized that we had a genius on our hands, but the book-buying public did not, nor did his Mississippi neighbors, and Faulkner, a man who cultivated expensive habits, fell on hard times. When a $3 check from “that Faulkner boy” bounced, the Oxford store owner cut off his credit, and this may have been the last straw that led to the first of Faulkner’s long, punctuated, and tempestuous relationships with Hollywood. Lured west by a $500 per week contract (for 6 weeks) at MGM, Faulkner arrived on May 7, 1932, at LA’s Union Station. He was drunk and bleeding (from a fall in New Orleans, he claimed) and it went downhill from there. This first encounter lasted six weeks and had some highly comic aspects to it, but not a lot of work was done. Faulkner collected his money (a very considerable sum in 1932) and went back home to read the proofs for Light in August. Later Hollywood sojourns, undertaken for similar reasons, produced better results, including screenplays for The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not, but in the summer of 1932 there is no doubt that William Faulkner’s time was better spent on Light in August than on the Wallace Beery film (Flesh) he was assigned to by MGM. ©

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History . . . is indeed little more than the register of crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind. Edward Gibbon (on the reign of Antoninus).

Of my bought, shelved, but unread books I cannot boast, but among them the one I must read (sometime) is Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (6 vols., 1776-1778). It’s not only its status as a classic in history (one of the first ‘modern’ histories written in English); it is said also to shed much light on the values and ideas of the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment. And make no mistake: this English scholar’s life’s work won warm praise from his Scots readers, from David Hume (who waxed eloquent over the first volume) to Adam Smith (who impatiently awaited the last three, and was not disappointed). Gibbon was born on April 27, 1737, but since the British cleared up their calendar confusions in the 1750s we can call that May 8. Those lost days don’t seem to have adversely affected Gibbon’s education, most of which was private (before he became educated he wasted some time at Westminster and Oxford). He was a bit of a religious quester as a youth, converting to Catholicism at Oxford and then jumping back to the Anglican communion. But in short order he arrived at a disbelief in revelation and a dislike of organized religion that critically informed his great History and also help to explain why his work was so strongly admired by both Hume and Smith. Comfortably situated financially, Gibbon’s writing brought him further wealth, fame, and political patronage. While he wrote, he also served in parliament (1774-1784) and (briefly, 1781-1784) held ministerial office. Edward Gibbon’s irreligion is sufficiently notorious, but he might also have applied such skepticism to his doctors. In 1794 he became one of the many of his time who were killed by their treatments rather than by their diseases. ©

[SCG quote....

"Another damned thick book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh, Mr. Gibbon?"
Attributed to Prince William Henry, Duke of Gloucester and Edinburgh, 1781, upon receiving the second (or third, or possibly both) volume(s) of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire from the author. quoted by Sir Leslie Stephen in the Dictionary of National Biography, (1921), vol. 21, p. 1133.]

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The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it. Lytton Strachey, in Eminent Victorians.

I have had it in for General Charles George Gordon (aka Gordon Pasha) ever since I learned of his role in the corrupt selling off (at pennies per acre) and clear cutting of vast tracts of southern US white pine forests, according to C. Vann Woodward the greatest deforestation in modern history (before we started in on the Amazon). It was, then, some comfort to to learn that Gordon met his Waterloo at Khartoum (in 1885, before he could personally reap much profit from his US ventures), and even more that Gordon was also disliked by Lytton Strachey, whose treatment of Gordon in Eminent Victorians caused Bertrand Russell to “laugh out loud.” (Russell, in Brixton prison for pacifism, was then reminded by his warder that he was in solitary confinement for punishment, not reward). Strachey’s Eminent Victorians was published on May 9, 1918, during a late imperial folly we call World War I, and its sometimes irreverent and mocking tone touched critical nerves at a time when the national heritage was thought to be at stake. Strachey took deliberate aim at Victorian frailties by selecting four icons of Victorian rectitude (Gordon, Florence Nightingale, Cardinal Henry Manning, and Thomas Arnold), and then treating them with a lightness of touch that suggested good-humored disdain rather than an aggressive debunking. However Eminent Victorians was received in wartime, it helped to set the intellectual tone of the 1920s and made Strachey a leading spirit and elder statesperson of the Bloomsbury Group. Something of the changes that the peace brought is suggested by the fact that Strachey’s next biography, of Queen Victoria herself (1921), though rather similar in tone, won Britain’s most prestigious prize for biography. ©

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That portion of happiness which consists in agreeable sensations is commonly called pleasure. Charles Knowlton, The Fruits of Philosophy, 1832.

The separation of church and state effected in Virginia in 1786 and then in the 1787 US Constitution was not as complete as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison wished. Elements of establishment still littered several state constitutions, for instance in prohibitions against Catholics or Jews holding office, and in three New England states Congregationalism was still, in effect, an official religion. Indeed, the last person in the US to be jailed for blasphemy was Abner Kneeland, tried in Boston in 1838 for being (in the words of his trial judge) “a cantankerous and inflexible heretic.” Among the charges levied against Kneeland was that in 1832 he had published a book on birth control, Dr. Charles Knowlton’s The Fruits of Philosophy: or, the Private Companion of Young Married People. In that book, Knowlton explained human reproduction, advised on how to deal with impotence and infertility, and described four methods of contraception. Knowlton, born on May 10, 1800, was a popular doctor in Ashfield, MA, partly because he freely lent copies of his book to young married people. But it caused a stir, and a campaign led by the local Congregationalist minister issued eventually in Knowlton’s trial and imprisonment (3 months at hard labor). His basic crime was to view sexual intercourse as a physiological rather than a moral act, but the fact that he was a well-known “free-thinker” undoubtedly added to the fervor of the prosecution. His book, a pioneering work in every sense, was not only lead evidence in the Kneeland trial of 1838 but also in the 1877 trial, in London, of Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant. Both trials greatly increased the book’s sales, a reminder that sex has for a long time been a popular subject. ©

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Occupation forces will take no steps looking toward the economic rehabilitation of Germany. Occupation Directive JCS 1067, 1945.

In WWII, as the US army moved towards Berlin, it marched with the Colorado potato beetle. Come the peace, my father was reassigned from the artillery to become agricultural officer for Hessen, where his chief duty was beetle eradication. Dad thought the army had made unwarranted assumptions about his MSc degree (in “agricultural journalism”) from Iowa State. Perhaps so, but he was also a small cog in the wheel of the Morgenthau Plan, by which Germany was to be an agricultural society, its warmaking capacity stilled by deliberate de-industrialization. The plan’s author was Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Franklin Roosevelt’s neighbor in the Hudson River valley whom he had appointed (in 1934) as Secretary of the Treasury. Morgenthau, born on May 11, 1891, studied agriculture at Cornell and had made his career in farming, but along the way he imbibed “classical” economics and opposed the Keynesian tendencies of the New Deal. Roosevelt, accustomed to orchestrating discord in his ‘New Deal Coalition,’ found Morgenthau politically useful and financially adept, and kept him on. The Morgenthau Plan was similarly compromised; opposed by the military, shot through with loopholes and exceptions, its real influence may indeed have been limited to Kartoffelkäfer killing. Economically, the loss of East Prussian farmlands (to Poland) made Morgenthau's plan unworkable, and strategically the onset of the Cold War made the full economic recovery of West Germany central to American thinking. And so “Occupation Directive JCS 1067” (1945) became “Occupation Directive JCS 1779” (1947) and the Morgenthau Plan became the Marshall Plan. But by that time Henry Morgenthau had resigned and my dad was back home, press officer of the American Dairy Cattle Congress. ©

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I remember . . . telling Bernal that we had solved the structure of penicillin. He said 'you will get the Nobel prize for this.' Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin

In 1985, while I was in Oxford on a Lancaster University research fellowship, Oxford broke with tradition to deny an honorary doctorate to a prime minister (Margaret Thatcher) who was an Oxford graduate. This ‘embarrassment' has been credited to left-wing humanities and social science dons, but the convocation vote was so overwhelming (738-319) that another explanation seems warranted. According to Oxford friends, opposition was led by scientists and engineers, alarmed by Thatcher’s views on government funding of science education and research. And Oxford’s science and engineering fellows were not known for their left-wing views. But there were some lefties. One of the most eminent of them was the chemist Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, peace campaigner and winner of the Lenin Peace Prize. Born in Egypt to a pair of archaeologists on May 12, 1910, Dorothy Crowfoot graduated from Oxford with a first-class degree in 1932, and then returned to Somerville as chemistry tutor after her Cambridge PhD. At Cambridge, she worked with John Bernal and may have imbibed his politics but certainly learned his crystallography. Indeed, her research into the structures of various compounds, including pepsin, penicillin, insulin, and vitamin B12, would win Hodgkin the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1964, but before that she taught Margaret Hilda Roberts, who read Chemistry at Somerville and graduated (second-class) in 1947. When Margaret Hilda was installed as Prime Minister, she hung Hodgkin’s portrait at 10 Downing Street. The friendship between the two survived the brouhaha over the honorary degree and in 2014 (the 20th anniversary of Hodgkin’s death and the 50th of her Nobel) was the subject of a BBC radio play, The Chemistry between Them. ©

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This day relenting God/ Hath placed with my hand/ A wondrous thing, and God/ Be praised. Ronald Ross, 1897.

For British and then American gentry, Rome was long a required stop on the Grand Tour despite the dangers of picking up malaria or Catholicism (or, indeed, both), and it was known that malaria was best contracted in certain parts of the city. That knowledge made for good subplots in fiction (for, among others, Henry James and Nathaniel Hawthorne) but also informed attempts to find the cause of what remains the world’s most intractable health problem. By the late 19th century, doctors in Algiers, Hong Kong, Rome, and Havana had identified malarial neighborhoods and malaria sufferers with the presence of the Anopheles mosquito, but it remained for an egocentric British doctor, Ronald Ross, to identify exactly the the connection. Ross, born into the Indian army in the year of the Sepoy Rebellion (May 13, 1857), was educated widely and deeply in music, math, languages, and literature, and he would author several novels and plays, compose classical and popular music, and dabble in poetry, but before all that he trained in London as a doctor, in the course of which he studied bacteriology and became hooked on the science of it. On medical duty in India he himself came down with malaria but engaged in lab study of the blood of malaria sufferers and the digestive juices of mosquitoes, and discovered in both “an almost perfectly circular” cell that he correctly identified as the parasite that caused the disease. He published his first results in a medical journal, in 1897, but not before he had written a poem about his discovery of the “million-murdering Death.” Further research (and quite a bit of fairly graceless politicking) secured the Nobel Prize (in 1902) and medical professorships in Liverpool and London. Ross, an unpleasant man of remarkable and varied talents, died of an asthma attack in 1932.©

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It is a sad comment on our civilization that while we can measure the temperature of the atmosphere of Venus, we don't know what goes on inside our souffles. Nicholas Kurti.

The online “Physics Forum” recently discussed the question of whether musicians should be good at physics. The question was put by a musician who wasn’t, but it’s usually asked the other way around: is it true that physicists (and mathematicians) are often or always good at music? The answers are inconclusive but legion, starting with Einstein and his fiddle and including Brian Cox, the telegenic physicist who began his performing career at the keyboard. One notes also Brian May, in 1970 founder of the rock band Queen, who was first incarnated as a mathematician but who didn’t finish his astrophysics PhD until 2007. But today let’s talk about physics in the kitchen, for it’s the birth anniversary of Nicholas Kurti, born in Budapest on May 14, 1908, a low-temperature magician extraordinaire (in 1960 achieving a millionth of a degree above absolute zero) who authored/edited the first (and only?) cookbook published by the Royal Society, But the Crackling is Superb (London, 1988), and using a primitive microwave created Baked Florida (a dessert hot on the inside). Along the way Kurti got his doctorate in Berlin, fled the Nazis, was taken in at Oxford, joined the Manhattan project in WWII (he was good at making recipe ingredients out of the varied isotopes of uranium), became Professor of Physics at Oxford in 1967, and retired to the kitchen in 1975. Kurti also held a passel of visiting chairs, as universities were attracted by his scientific brilliance, his abilities as a lecturer and mentor, and (no doubt) his appealing brand of self-deprecating humor, including slapstick narratives about an exploding solenoid and his willful destruction of British Rail property at Oxford (a parking lot gate that wouldn’t open). And, inevitably(?), Nicholas Kurti was also an accomplished pianist. ©

[Stanley]

Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, 1900.

If you are a spindly, weakly child in mid 19th-century New York and you develop a knack for writing poetry, what happens to you? If your father is a stern, moralistic Methodist, perhaps you are sent to a military academy to toughen up, where you bring your two miserable years to an end with a heart attack. But if your father is a rich, indulgent industrialist perhaps he will buy you your own printing press so you can apply your yen for writing to the production of a family newspaper, complete with advertisements and even guest columnists. Or if you live on a country estate overlooking Lake Onondaga, perhaps your parents will set you up as a breeder of fancy poultry, and why not? After all, you can print ads for the hens and cocks on your very own printing press. L. Frank Baum had indeed tried all these routes (plus home fireworks manufacturing) before he got out of his teens (he was born on May 15, 1856), so perhaps it’s no wonder that when he finally hit his stride, much later in an otherwise difficult adult life, he would write fantasy books for children, many under pen names, and then dream about setting up a fantasy park in California where children would come to act out the stories of his most famous books, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) and its several sequels. There they would visit Oz’s castle, ride a tornado, talk to a scarecrow, play with a tin man, watch the Woggle-Bug grow big and, if the child’s name was Dorothy, perhaps she could play a part in the Court of Queen Ozma. But as well as the books sold, the “Disneyland” fantasy park was indeed a dream. The island on which it was to be built didn’t even exist, nor did the financing, and L. Frank Baum was finally ready to “cross the Shifting Sands” (his last words) on May 6, 1919. ©

[Stanley]

The tigers in the panels that she made/ Will go on dancing, proud and unafraid. Adrienne Rich, 'Aunt Jennifer's Tigers,' 1951.

Adrienne Rich (born on May 16, 1929) once observed that she had learned poetry from men, those poets whose editions her father collected. It may have been as much to the point that from them she learned, very young, to be mistress of form, of rhyme and meter. Her first volume, published in 1951, won a Yale prize and critical praise for its technical command. But it was an augury that it was entitled A Change of World, for Rich would do that too, in her life becoming a leading feminist and in her poetry breaking conventions to create brilliant, free-ranging verse that could be meditative or liberating. Or both, as in the title poem of her Diving into the Wreck (1973), where she or he or we or I or you (this poem realizes and activates all the personal pronouns) are exploring a wreck in deep water

carrying a knife, a camera

a book of myths

in which

our names do not appear.

That volume won a prize, too, but the critical reception was not quite so unanimous for a poet who was now, publicly, a radical feminist and lesbian and whose verse could be as angry and strident as it was innovative. But she went on, luckily for us, poet and professor, critic and activist, MacArthur Genius and grandmother (to Julia and Charles), and late in life winner of yet another award from Yale, the Bollingen Prize (2002). The awarding committee rightly cited Rich’s “honesty at once ferocious and humane and her continuous poetic exploration and awareness of multiple selves.” ©

[Stanley]

The three sexes are men, women, and professors. Joel Elias Spingarn.

The life of Joel Elias Spingarn helps us to measure the transformations of the modern Republican Party. Born on May 17, 1875, into a prosperous Jewish family, Spingarn did brilliantly at Columbia and joined the literature faculty there in 1899. His pioneering publications on literary criticism won him an endowed chair at the tender age of 29, but he ran afoul of Columbia’s dictatorial president, Nicholas Murray Butler, and was fired in 1911 for his support of another Butler critic, the eminent classicist Harry Peck (other Butler victims included the historians Charles Beard, George Woodberry, and James Robinson). Butler’s infamous depredations moved our universities towards tenure, but Joel Spingarn had already found other causes and other careers, for (besides founding Harcourt, Brace and being an innovative publisher) he was an activist in the Republican Party (drawn to it by the dashing Teddy Roosevelt) and in the crusade for civil rights. He ran for congress twice as a Republican and joined the NAACP shortly after its founding, serving as chairman (1913-1919), treasurer (1919-1930), and president (1930-1939). As an Army major in WWI, he campaigned for integration and, failing that, saw to it that black soldiers were trained up for command, establishing an Officer Command School for blacks at Fort Des Moines. Spingarn died in 1939, far too soon to see any dramatic fruits of his NAACP labors (he did endow the Spingarn Medal), but his kid brother Arthur (a Republican lawyer) lived long enough to have his eulogy delivered (in 1971) by Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall, his former colleague in the NAACP’s legal division. So today’s quiz question is, what would the Spingarn brothers have thought of Donald Trump as the leader of their Republican Party? ©

[Not a lot!! SG]

[Stanley]

A Jug of Wine, A Loaf of Bread, and Thou beside me . . . . Omar Khayyam.

At the far fringes of Islamophobia, a new nation yet to take its UN seat, an odd mixture of scholars and crackpots has been hard at work proving that nothing good has ever come from Islam. The titles of a couple of their websites, ‘The Gates of Vienna” and “Think-Israel,” suggest their tone. Among other things, they attack the notion that (during Europe’s so-called “dark ages”) Muslim scholars preserved (and advanced) classical Greek discourses on philosophy and science. One of their more challenging targets has been Omar Khayyam, born in Persia on May 18, 1048. Khayyam, a tent-maker’s son who became courtier-advisor to sultans (and to their wives), is, after all, a rather appealing character, familiar to my generation (at least) as a humanist poet. He was also an astronomer (we know the date of his birth because of his revisions of the Greek calendar) and a mathematician (important extensions of Greek algebra and geometry), and a teacher of renown (when he left court life he went back home to Nishapur to set up a Greek-style academy where he discoursed with students on medicine, astronomy, philosophy, algebra, and poetry). And on theology (he went on pilgrimage to Mecca and wrote several tracts on the Prophet). Unable to deny his science, the authors of Islamophobe websites have done their best to purge the poet of his religion. They discover that Omar Khayyam was not a true Muslim but “unorthodox.” Christopher Hitchens finds him a “skeptic.” But so what? Let us first reflect on the religious unorthodoxies of (e.g.) Descartes, Spinoza, Darwin, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Rosalind Franklin, Stephen Hawking (the list goes on, and on, not ad infinitum but quite long enough for us to agree that the “rediscovery” of Omar Khayyam’s “jug of wine” is of no great interest), ©

[Stanley]

If something is not impossible, there must be a way to do it. Nicholas Winton.

“Don’t bother to bring your skis,” he was told, so in December 1938 Nicholas Winton cancelled his Swiss holiday and flew to Prague, where he and several friends (including Martin Blake and Beatrice Wellington) began the process of moving Jewish kinder from what was left of Czechoslovakia to new homes in Britain. They worked fast and carefully, Forms had to be properly filled, German agents had to be jollied along or bribed, and back home Winton and his crew (working through churches and synagogues) had to find a family for each child. Thus it was that Winton and his City friends brought 669 young Czech Jews into the orbit of Britain’s Kindertransport. Each child carried a £50 return ticket, symbolizing hopes of reunion that, for most, would not happen. Winton’s first train (Trevor Chadwick conducting) left on March 14, 1939; his last was stopped on September 1, 1939. None of its passengers survived. Born George Wertheim on May 19, 1909, into a family that soon converted to Anglicanism, Winton became an “ardent socialist,” a leading amateur fencer, and a successful stockbroker. He was also, come the war, a conscientious objector who, in 1940, relented and enlisted in the RAF. Afterwards, he and his Kindertransport friends settled down to quiet lives in civvy street. But in 1988 Winton’s Danish wife Grete Gjelstrup found documents in their attic, and suddenly the old stockbroker was a hero. His surviving comrades and many of “Winton’s Children,” including film director Karel Reisz, joined in the celebrations. But Sir Nicholas Winton outlasted most of them, dying on July 1, 2015, the 76th anniversary of the day his largest single train left Prague, carrying over 200 children to the Hook of Holland, the channel ferries, and safety. ©

[Stanley]

Rome was chiefly valuable to him as a sort of poetic or fairy precinct, where actualities would not be so terribly insisted on, as they are, and must needs be, in America. Nathaniel Hawthorne, preface to The Marble Faun.

I’ve heard it said that none were more Protestant than the Transcendentalists, notably Ralph Waldo Emerson, but there’s no doubt that several of them (e.g. Isaac Hecker and Orestes Brownson) ultimately found the spiritualism they wanted in Roman Catholicism. Nathaniel Hawthorne (if we can trust his last, best novel, The Marble Faun) was also entranced by Rome, but what I didn’t know was that his daughter Rose became a convert to Catholicism and is now being considered for sainthood. Born on May 20, 1851, Rose Hawthorne’s early childhood was spent in Europe as her father became US consul in Liverpool (1853-57) and then toured the continent, fetching up finally in Florence and Rome. That Roman holiday produced The Marble Faun and may also have affected Rose, but probably her conversion owed more to her marriage to George Lathrop, the death of their only child, Lathrop’s alcoholism, and his death soon after their separation in 1895. She was also distressed by her siblings’ quarrels over Hawthorne’s literary legacy. She found relief and solace in her connections with the Sisters of Charity (and with Emma Lazarus), and by the mid 1890s Rose had found her vocation as nurse to the poor and incurably ill. Impelled by what her brother Julian called (unkindly but perhaps accurately) her “thirst for self-sacrifice” Rose worked in a settlement house she founded on New York’s lower east side and in 1900 became Mother Mary Alphonsa and the foundress of a Dominican order, ‘The Servants of Relief for Incurable Cancer.’ Well before Mother Mary’s death, in 1926, the order moved to the Westchester countryside to found a new community with the same mission, and Rose called it ‘Hawthorne.’ One guesses that that might have pleased the old tale-spinner himse

[Stanley]

The man who dies rich, dies disgraced. Andrew Carnegie.

When the great American philanthropist Grace Hoadly Dodge died in 1914 she left an estate of almost $7 million (worth about $170 million in today’s $$$). Born on May 21, 1856, into an already wealthy family, her fortune (mostly in shares in Phelps Dodge, and thus in mining and railways) grew steadily through her life, during which she made a reputation as an energetic and creative benefactor. A spinster, she was particularly interested in helping young working women in New York City and elsewhere, and indeed in the throes of our great industrial revolution working women of all sorts needed help.. Among Grace Dodge’s achievements, one would rank highest The Association of Working Girls’ Societies which she founded in 1884 and then led into the Young Women’s Christian Association (she was president of the YWCA from 1905 to 1914). She also founded and/or funded the Travelers’ Aid Society (now international) and the Teachers College of Columbia University, and gave generously to the Presbyterian Church and its Board of Foreign Missions. Good for her, I say, and I like to think that Grace was a model for Gerty Farish, the gallant if rather plain do-gooder who is one of the few bright spots in Edith Wharton’s sardonic morality tale about New York’s idle rich, The House of Mirth. Except that Gertie was no longer rich, and the little she had she gave away. In this context it might be remembered that the great bulk of Grace Dodge’s estate (besides the whole of her $5 million in Phelps Dodge stock, her art collection and her Manhattan mansion) went to her surviving siblings. Twenty-one of her employees got testamentary gifts ranging from $200 to $1600. Her 18 nieces and nephews got $10,000 each. The rest, about $1.5 million, went to charities and churches. ©