BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

"Prisons are universities of crime maintained by the state." Peter A. Kropotkin.


On December 21, 1941, Robert Bliss and Clara May Simms married in Grundy Center, Iowa. They were very aware that Pearl Harbor had happened just two weeks before; the war dominated their lives for a while, Robert’s forever. But they would not have known it was also the anniversary of the birth of Peter A. Kropotkin. Born on 21 December 1842, Kropotkin would become famous as an anarchist. He was born an aristocrat who renounced his heritage at the tender age of 12 but nevertheless (children of 12 have rights of inconsistency) became a page in the Tsar’s court and then an officer in the Tsar’s army. During that time (the 1860s) he read a lot and became quite a few things, an anarchist disciple of Proudhon, a philosophical admirer of Mill, a rather good mathematician and a renowned geographical explorer. More to the point, Kropotkin read Darwin. During and between his various imprisonments and exiles (for his anarchism and activism) he developed an interesting theory about evolution, accepting Darwin’s basic scheme but questioning, indeed rejecting, the theme of competition and especially “social Darwinism” which he regarded as a perversion of Darwinism. Kropotkin’s study of evolution in icy Siberia (undertaken during one of his imprisonments) convinced him that cooperation amongst individuals and symbiosis between species was a central rule of nature. We humans could and, he believed, should, learn from nature our commonalities and our shared fates. In 1941 the world could have used his perspective.

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"Permanence of instinct must go with permanence of form." Jean Fabre on the weevil species.

Whether the day of the auto-didact is gone is good question, compounded by our (probable) overconfidence that we are in sight of “knowing it all”—and that there is too much of “it” in any one field for any one person to begin to master. These problems didn’t worry Jean-Henri Casimir Fabre, born on December 22, 1823, 190 years ago today, in southern France. His family’s extreme poverty required him to learn much on his own, although he did enter the institutional path long enough to get a primary teaching certificate. He taught youngsters in Corsica for a while before moving to Avignon, where he taught for many years. Along the way, he picked up more than smatterings of physics and chemistry, indeed taught the former subject, but his core interest was in bugs, which he studied, sketched and wrote on for most of his life. His detailed studies of parasitic wasps may have inspired Alfred Kinsey, but leaving that puzzle aside Fabre wrote stylishly about his subjects, not only in a ten-volume Souvenirs entomologiques (1879-1907) but with a host of correspondents ranging from Victor Hugo (who called him “the insects’ Homer”) to Charles Darwin (who said he was “an incomparable observer”). Some did not like his light prose style: “were I to take their word for it,” he said, he could be “profound only on condition of being obscure.” And so, quite on his own, Jean Fabre became “the father of entomology.” He’s left us two museums in Provence, celebrating his subjects and his (unobscure) style.

[I once read about Fabre and his work and late in life he was interviewed by a man who was fascinated because the main part of his field work had been done in a small croft behind his house. He asked him whether he had ever regretted using this croft and Fabre said he was quite right, he had taken far to large an area, he reckoned he should have done all the work on one square metre!
History doesn't record whether he had his tongue in his cheek.... SCG]

[Stanley]

"Arkwright has purchased an estate of £20,000. . .while thousands of women . . . must make a long day to [produce for him] 5,040 yards of cotton and earn four pence." Richard Mather, 1780.

Many leaders of Britain’s economic revolution were outsiders, religious dissenters, for instance the Quakers in banking. This shouldn’t surprise us; why would an insider want to overturn established orders? Richard Arkwright (born in Lancashire on December 23, 1732) certainly overturned things. Since his tailor father was a member of the Preston town corporation, we assume that he was not a religious dissenter, but he was certainly poor enough. Taught to read, write, and figure within the family, Arkwright apprenticed to a wig-maker and quickly made an impact there with a waterfast dye. This enabled him to put aside capital which—moving first to Nottingham—he used to invent (or improve) various machines to speed up and simplify the processes by which raw cotton was turned into yarn. In the 1760s this was a bit like getting into silicon chips, and Arkwright, by now in partnership with some outsiders (Protestant dissenters) multiplied the efficiency effect by applying horse- and then waterpower to the carding and spinning processes. He died before he could fully employ steam, but he did make use of it. Arkwright was a difficult man, anxious to control whole processes and constantly feuding with his partners and in the courts over patent rights. His impact and his burgeoning wealth remind us that the benefits of innovation are not often quickly or widely distributed. In the long run, perhaps; but as Keynes later observed (in a different context) in the long run we are all dead.

[Stanley]

"Some talked, some wrote, and some fought to . . . establish [the American republic], but you and Mr. Jefferson thought for us all." Benjamin Rush to John Adams, 2/17/1812.


The Enlightenment was an exciting time, and those who tried to drink it all in sometimes displayed (from our perspective) strange inconsistencies. Such was Benjamin Rush, born on December 24, 1746 and destined to become a leading young man of his time. He was educated at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton), acquired a medical degree at Edinburgh (and fluency in three modern languages), and returned to Philadelphia just in time for the excitements of the American Revolution—which he wholeheartedly supported. Despite his eminent position (professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania) he joined the Sons of Liberty, befriended the radical Tom Paine, thought the 1776 Pennsylvania constitution too radical, and became surgeon-general of the Continental Army. There he effected significant advances in camp medicine (he thought cleanliness quite a good idea), clashed with General Washington and his medical superiors (he thought Washington too timid and Dr. Sam Shippen too crooked) and emerged with credit in the sunlight of a new nation. He believed Africans to be naturally equal to Europeans, though he thought dark skin was a disease. He argued that women should be highly educated, but only to a point. He pioneered in preventative and psychiatric medicine but clung to bleeding as a treatment. His bleeding may well have killed Ben Franklin, but one of his great services was to help engineer a rapprochement between his old friends John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, which led to one of the most significant correspondences in American history.
Robert M. Bliss

[Stanley]

"Acting is experience with something sweet behind it." Humphrey Bogart.


Christmas would seem an unlikely day for Hollywood tough guy Humphrey Bogart to see first light, but so it was; he was born on December 25, 1899, into a prosperous, aristocratic, and talented family. Mother Maud was a commercial illustrator, pulling down well over a million in today’s dollars, more than her physician husband’s measly $400,000. So young Humphrey dressed well and went to private school, latterly the Phillips Academy. But he rebelled and was expelled, joined the navy, acquired his scar (somehow), and returned to New York to find his family on the rocks, in more ways than one, and so he turned to acting, which he had done for fun on his family’s summer estate in the Adirondacks. He played society boy roles, aptly enough, and didn’t like them, predictably enough, but the crash of 1929 and the rise of the talkies sent him to Hollywood, where he debuted with Spencer Tracy (it was also Tracy’s first), acquired the nickname Bogey (from Tracy), and pulled down $750 a week, apparently enough to make him unhappy. Bogart’s breakthrough came on the New York stage, in 1934, in Sherwood Anderson’s The Petrified Forest. He played his part well, got admiring reviews, was cast in the screen version, and in due course became, according to the American Film Institute (and maybe me, too) the greatest male star in American cinema history. It all goes to show that being born with a silver spoon in your mouth does not need to be a permanent handicap. Merry Christmas.

[Stanley]

"A consciousness of the fallacy of our senses is one of the most important consequences of the study of nature." Mary Somerville.

We think of early childhood education as a necessity without which later development will be terribly stunted. Doubtless we are right, but there are exceptions like Mary Fairfax Greig Somerville. Born Mary Fairfax on December 26, 1780, into a wealthy Scottish-Irish family, with a sea admiral father, her childhood education was neglected. When Admiral Fairfax returned home for good, Mary was 10 and could not read, write, or figure. She was, he thought, “a savage”, and he sent her off to an expensive girls’ school to civilize her. At some point Mary became more than civilized: a voracious learner and a great beauty, too, in Edinburgh society. She married two cousins (serially), Samuel Greig and then William Somerville, inherited a good deal of money from the former and purchased a new lease on life from the latter, who encouraged Mary’s further pursuit of knowledge in science and mathematics. But it was already well known that Mary Somerville was an accomplished scientist. The astronomer-mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace said that there had been but three women who understood him, Mary Somerville, Caroline Herschel, and “a Mrs. Greig of whom I know nothing.” The “little savage” published books on math, astronomy, biology, geography, and microscopy, became a member of the Royal Astronomical Society, predicted the discovery of an eighth planet, and left her married name to one of the women’s colleges at Oxford University, an arctic island, an asteroid belt, and a crater on the moon.

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³The control of great industries should remain in the communities that created them.² Cyrus Eaton.

Wealthy peaceniks with distributionist economic ideas have been fairly plentiful over the years, even if (of late) the constant lure of tax cuts may be making rapacious robber barons of them all. Organisms—even capitalist ones—will respond to their environment. But so much for evolutionary theory and human politics. One of the original plutocratic peacelovers was Cyrus Eaton, born near (mark the name) Pugwash, Nova Scotia, on December 27, 1883, and destined to be a thorn in someone’s side for about 96 years. He studied philosophy at McMaster and aimed to become a Baptist minister, probably of a prophetic sort, but in 1905 he fetched up with another Baptist, John D. Rockefeller, and became a zillionaire instead. But not with Rockefeller. Eaton left Standard of Ohio in 1907 and set up for himself (in natural gas) in westernCanada before returning to Cleveland, diversifying into banking, utilities, and steel, and making about $100 million ($1.3 billion today) by 1929. He had to rebuild that fortune later, and did it so distressingly easily that he started to write tracts like Investment Banking: Competition or Decadence?, A Capitalist Looks at Labour, and Rationalism versus Rockefeller. Eaton was also a raging philanthropist, giving millions to Cleveland museums and Ohio universities, and at the end of WW II he became a peace campaigner so militant as to set up—at his own expense—the annual Pugwash Conference (1957) and in 1970 to land the Lenin Peace Prize. We don’t talk about Cyrus much, these days, in the land of the free and the home of the brave, maybe because he disturbs our categories, but he was an interesting chap. ©

[Stanley]

"One thing is certain and the rest debate. Light rays, when near the sun, do not go straight." Sir Arthur Eddington.


Arthur Stanley Eddington, Stanley to his mum but Sir Arthur to the rest, was born in Kendal, Cumbria, on December 28, 1882, into a Quaker family of strong intellectual traditions. He is memorialized a few miles away in the Quaker cemetery in the pretty village of Yealand Conyers. During his life, he conquered poverty to become (first) a gifted mathematician and (second) a leading astronomer and (third) possibly the youngest (31) holder of the Plumian Chair (in Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy) at Cambridge University. His greatest accomplishment came during WWI when he withstood anti-German bias to be bowled over by Albert Einstein’s new theories and insistent that they be taken up. Quaker rectitude doubtless helped (Arthur was a conscientious objector, and was already taking flak for that), but he also had a marvelous ability to see to the heart of scientific issues and clarify them for others. Already he was planning to prove Einstein by observing the solar eclipse of May 1919, and peace came soon enough for him to travel to South Africa to do it. It’s a long story but using simple equipment Eddington proved that light could (and did) travel a curved path. He pushed this and other scientific truths with all the zeal of a millenial preacher, and indeed Arthur Eddington did believe that “the stuff of the world is mind-stuff.” You and I needed to be awakened to the realities of the universe because it was, so to speak, us. Until his death in 1944 Eddington worked in the vanguard of science while also becoming a household name for apt, understandable popularizations of his and others’ work.

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³Invention is the mother of necessity.² Thorsten Veblen.

Sometimes inventions, even brilliant ones, need something else to make them perfect or, failing perfection, profitable. The silicon chip needed the internet to transform our lives. December 29 affords almost perfect, or perhaps only profitable, proof of the proposition, for it’s the birthdate of Charles Macintosh (Glasgow, Scotland: 1799) and Charles Goodyear (New Haven, Connecticut, 1800). Both were inventive chaps. Macintosh worked in the nascent gas industry in north Britain; Goodyear vastly improved his father’s business (manufacturing farm implements). Macintosh, troubled about waste products in his industry, started messing around to find other uses for it, and noticed that naptha dissolved rubber. From then on it was just a couple of logical steps to the Macintosh raincoat (1823): two layers of fabric bound together by dissolved rubber. Trouble was, the solution then hardened but had to be sewn and worn. Sewing caused holes; wearing caused cracks. These are not good raincoat traits. Enter Charles Goodyear, reeling from financial reverses and the decline of farming in New England, who thought rubber—could it be tamed—would make pretty good life preservers. But, see above, it was too brittle. For years, Goodyear messed around with the stuff and (in 1839) discovered how to “vulcanize” rubber, making it soft, pliable, and sewable. Eureka. So it is that our macintoshes don’t leak, and so it is that Macintosh and Goodyear met in a coat lining. Both died young, but only the Scotsman died rich: he who took out patents, chose honest partners, and wrote good contracts. Goodyear’s reward survives only in a company name.

[Stanley]

"The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy." Alfred Emanuel Smith.

“Machine politics” has a bad name, especially when the machine is urban. It’s an expression of our culture’s veneration for the countryside, where people are of the earth and the earth is salty. But urban machines performed vital services and threw up gifted leaders. One such was Alfred E. Smith, who would have been born in the shadow of Brooklyn Bridge had it been built by his birthdate, December 30, 1873. Smith’s parents managed to get the boy a grade school education before his father’s death put him on the streets, or rather in the Fulton fish market, where he first learned the value of a connection with the Tammany machine. He found that preferable to fish, and set his sights on Albany rather than the Gracie Mansion. There he became known as a reformer, justly so, and won the admiration of the aristocratic Republican, Elihu Root. Despite his Tammany connections, he won the New York governorship first in 1918. He would serve four terms, bucking the Hearst press (which enjoyed wielding its own power, the Fox news of its day) and helping the state to reform its industrial landscape. Smith brought Franklin Roosevelt into his administration, too, and won that aristocrat’s support for Smith’s 1928 bid for the presidency, the first serious Catholic presidential candidature in American history. His Happy Warrior campaign (theme song: “The Sidewalks of New York”) was a memorable failure, and he would give way to FDR in 1932. In the wings, he would be one of Roosevelt’s severest critics, an unhappy warrior.

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"I think only amateurs have to be inspired." Jule Styne.

Among the more anonymous members of the entertainment guild are the songwriters, few of whom break the surface and float in the memory along with Crosby and Bennett and Fitzgerald. One such was Jule Styne. His parents, refugees from the Ukraine, settled first in London, where Julius Kerwin Stein was born on December 31, 1905. Almost immediately (1913) the family decamped for Chicago, where Julius was recognized as a child prodigy (at the piano), attended Chicago Musical College, and performed with three midwestern symphonies before he was 10. But a chance acquaintance lured him into writing for a film, and after a spell in the 30s leading a danceband, songwriting is where—soon known as Jule Styne—he settled. From there (about 1935) it was just a hop, step, and jump to a PBS documentary which aired in the 1990s and reminded us—we needed it—that Jule (pronounced “Joolie”) had consorted with Sinatra and Cahn, Sondheim and Streisand, and had to his credit “Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow,” “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” “Time After Time,” “Make Someone Happy,” “Three Coins in a Fountain,” and about a zillion (well, 1,500) others. He had an Oscar in there, too (“Three Coins”) so he wasn’t exactly unknown, and he died in 1994, nicely lamented but still less well known than the many artists for whom he wrote.

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³When I go more than ten miles out of [Florence], the love and loyalty of friends come to an end.² Lorenzo de' Medici.

Before the Europe of nation states, the continent was a conglomeration of principalities, monarchies waxing and waning, and (in Italy especially) city states. In this “Renaissance” Europe, the name Medici was one to conjure with. Ask what was conjured and many will say poisons, corruption, warfare, and worse. Possibly Europe’s wealthiest family, their wealth built on cloth and then banking, the Medici controlled Florence (by hook and by crook) and generally followed a policy of maintaining peace among Italian cities, keeping France out of northern Italy, keeping Popes out of Florence (unless the Pope were a Medici which he often was), and amidst statecraft and intrigue patronizing the arts and maintaining charities, big time. One of the most attractive of the line was Lorenzo de’ Medici, born on January 1, 1449 and destined (in a shortish life) to dominate his region’s politics while further advancing Florence’s reputation as a city of high artistic endeavor. He was alliance-minded, marrying an Orsini and keeping the Sforzas happy in Milan, and saw himself as a man of peace (although his revenges were swift and terrible). He wrote vernacular verse, painted, patronized great artists, and brought important Greek manuscripts from Islamic Africa into Florence’s libraries, for which Savanarola condemned him but we can be grateful. Having exhausted much (not all) of the family fortune and himself, Lorenzo died in unsuspicious (???) circumstances in 1492, the year Columbus turned Europe’s attention westward.

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"The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gives us knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom." Isaac Asimov.

Many people boast about how busy they are, and it can be tiresome to hear about it. I won’t single out individuals, but college deans, as a genus, are rather prone to this syndrome. Any who suffer from it should take care lest someone (else) go relative on them and cite the comparison of Isaac Asimov, who fairly defines the term “busy.” Asimov was born in the Soviet Union, near Smolensk, January 2, 1920. His parents took the boy with them, to New York, and he there began to learn things, at a rate of knots. By the time his formal learning was over, he’d copped at Columbia PhD in Chemistry and, Assistant Professor at Boston University, was ready to teach others. But along the way he’d written a few science fiction stories, and he found writing more congenial. First book, oddly enough, was a biochemistry textbook, and he certainly produced a couple of good reads in my field, but mostly Asimov wrote science fiction. Lots of it, and it was good. The list of his awards is too long for this page. By the time he pegged out (1992) he’d written over 500 books in all, the first in 1950, the last in 1992. That is 11.9 books per annum. He was a busy man, “still trying to prove to my father that I am not a folyack.” “Folyack” is Yiddish for “sluggard.” Asimov learned Yiddish when he was seven.

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³Romance is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur.² J. R. R. Tolkien.


It’s said that authors’ early fictions are autobiographical. Perhapsthat is why John Ronald Reuel Tolkien’s The Hobbit and his Lord of the Rings trilogy have engendered floods of guesswork. The fiction is fantastic, and potential associations range from the sensible (an early trip to the Alps, which Tolkien himself thought might have inspired him to imagine some elements of Bilbo Baggins’ first epic journey) to the bizarre, with much in between. Tolkien’s life journey provides yet more fodder. He was born in South Africa on January 3, 1892, but his father’s death forced a return to England, where he played fantastic games with school chums and cousins (including inventing three secret languages and two secret societies). After these fantasies, he went to Oxford for a First in English, then to harrowing images of shells, lice and mines in the trenches at the Somme. Back in England, he married Edith, a childhood sweetheart, became a distinguished professor of literature at Merton, Oxford, mesmerized his students and children with dramatic recitations from “Beowulf,” and wrote his own masterpieces. One thing is sure about Tolkien’s art imitating his life. When Edith died, after 52 years of marriage, he inscribed “Lúthien” on her gravestone at Wolvercote. When he was buried beside her, two years later, his inscription read “Beren.” In Tolkien’s Middle Earth mythology, Lúthien, the most beautiful of the elven princesses, forsook her immortality to wed the mortal Beren, and "once upon a time" she brought him back from the dead.

[Stanley]

"Of course I read braille. Yes I do." Stevie Wonder.

We’re often told that innovations and inventions originally for military use have turned out to have great civilian applications, for instance microwave ovens and jeeps, but these pale in comparison to the revolution wrought by braille printing. To understand that we have to travel to the village of Coupvray, east of Paris, the birthplace (January 4, 1809) of Louis Braille, the son of respectable working folk. One day, playing with his father’s saddlemaking tools, Louis poked himself in the eye with an awl. The puncture became infected, spread to the other eye, and before he was five Louis Braille was completely blind. His rather unusual parents still insisted that their clever child attend the village school, where he did so well that, aged 10, he was transferred to the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris. There the Brailles’ clever boy learned to play the organ well enough to become the chief organist at a Paris church. But we remember Louis Braille for another feat, the invention of the coded system that would open the world of the book to unsighted people, which today the world knows as Braille. A fitting memorial, the more so as the lad had figured the basic system out at age 12, spending the next decade perfecting it. He had acquired the basic notion, however, from Captain Charles Barbier, who had used a similar system to convey military orders silently and in the dead dark of midnight. And we should not be surprised to learn that Braille also applied his system to musical notation. After all, Louis Braille had a paid job, didn’t he?

[Stanley]

"It is not well for a man to pray cream and live skimmed milk.² Henry Ward Beecher.

Punning nicknames are a specialty of the English, who might (for instance) call a school friend “Teddy” if his last name were Bayer. But in St. Louis we have our very own Aaron Lapin, born on January 5, 1914, 99 years ago today, and very early—maybe before he got out of knee britches—known to friends and family as “Bunny.” But he became famous for something else. After graduating from Mizzou and spending a while at Wash U law, “Bunny” Lapin turned his attention to dairy, thought of ways to mix full cream and air, and (in 1946 quickly seeing the potential of the Crown Cork & Seal Company’s new aerosol can), invented an apt valve and, hey presto, by 1948 St. Louis milkmen were selling Bunny Lapin’s Reddi-Whip on their routes. Like hotcakes. By 1951, the Post-Dispatch called him “The Whipped Cream King” and Bunny, well on his way to becoming a zillionaire, bought Gloria Swanson’s mansion in Hollywood (and homes in New York and Miami). He maintained St. Louis ties through the Clayton Corporation (which he founded, sold, and then reacquired), and when he finally hung up his can in 1999 his Reddi-Whip had been named—by Time Magazine—one of the 20th century’s 100 greatest consumer items. In that year, ~50% of all aerosol whipped cream sold in the country was Bunny’s. At last report, Reddi-Whip was owned by Con-Agra and Crown’s HQ has moved to New York, but the Clayton Corp. still makes valves in Fenton.

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"William next invented a system according to which everybody had to belong to someone else, and everybody else to the King. This was called the Feutile System." from 1066 and All That.

On January 6 we think of “1066 and all that”, the title of a famous 1930 spoof on English history, for on this day in 1066 Harold Godwinson—Harold, son of Godwin—was crowned king of the English. Harold was more Dane than English, but when English itself was only a casserole of north German dialects it would have been hard to tell. Anyway, Harold’s reign was short. As Earl of Wessex and Hereford, he was England’s most powerful noble, and under King Edward the Confessor was the focus of anti-Norman feeling in England. The Normans, French by geography but Danish and Norse by ethnicity, were much given to raiding, slaughter, and other medieval sports, and had had their eye on the Green and Pleasant Land for some time. Indeed, the Duke of Normandy, aka William the Bastard, had concocted a storyline that Harold had promised him (the Bastard) the English throne on Edward’s death. When, instead, Harold copped the crown, the Bastard got up his longboats and masterminded one of the few successful invasions of what we now know as England, but that’s only because Norman French (the language of the victors) never quite caught on in their new territories, thanks to Geoffrey Chaucer, et al. And Harold? Well, in November 1066 he fought William at Hastings, but was shot in the eye (by an archer, of course), and expired on the field of battle. In 1776 Tom Paine made much of this when educating revolutionary Americans on the dubious pedigree (bastardy, invasion, murder, and usurpation) of the English royal line.

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“My sense of humor will always stand in the way of my seeing myself, my family, my race or my nation as the whole intent of the universe.” ― Zora Neale Hurston,

Zora Neale Hurston was born on January 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama, her father a sharecropper and preacher, her mother a school teacher. The family had roots there stretching back into the slavery past, but was tempted away to Eatonville, Florida, an all-black town where, she would later say, it felt good to be “colored me.” She was educated at Morgan State, Howard, and finally Columbia (Barnard College, where in 1924 she was the only black student). Along the way, she became a writer and an anthropologist, and those were the professions she followed for the rest of her life. Inspired by Franz Boas, and by the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston pioneered the study of African culture and folklore in the Americas, not only in the USA (Mules and Men, 1935) but also in the West Indies (Tell My Horse, 1938). All along, she also produced novels, short stories, poetry, journalism, and in collaboration with Langston Hughes, a play. In a curious incident that may have been racially inspired, in 1948, she was (falsely) accused of molesting a small child. The charge was easily dismissed (Hurston was researching in Honduras at the time of the alleged incident) but it may have provoked a decline in her work rate, her health, and her income. Zora Neale Hurston died poor and unmourned in 1960. Interest in her work revived in the 1970s, thanks partly to Alice Walker, and Hurston is now regarded as one of the premier writers of the 20th century.

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²Singapore is rich in beetles.² Alfred Russell Wallace to his mother, 1854.

One interesting thing about Alfred Russell Wallace, the great protagonist of Charles Darwin, is the extent to which the Christian press mourned his passing (in November 1913). The Christian Commonwealth, for instance, praised him as “the last of the Victorians.” A spiritualist rather than, specifically, a Christian, Wallace showed one way in which religion and evolution were, in his own time for sure, reconcilable. Australians loved him, too, for in an evolutionary way he put the island continent on the map (today the “Wallace Line” refers to sharp species differentiations between the Antipodes—including New Guinea—and the rest). Wallace was born in Wales, of a Scots father and an English mother, on January 7, 1823. The family suffered financial reverses and he apprenticed as a surveyor, but he was alive to many intellectual currents of his time and was quite taken with Tom Paine, Robert Owen, and other political radicals, but more especially with Darwin and Charles Lyell who taught him something about mutability and that the world might be unimaginably old. Inspired, off Wallace went to the Amazon and then the East Indies, to collect and observe, and by 1858 he’d pretty well figured “natural selection,” and sent his findings (ready for publication) to Darwin. Darwin, who’d figured it out well before but hung back from publication, decided that the hour had come, and together (1859) the two published their intellectual revolution and changed our world forever. ©

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At a time when professional opportunities for women were rigidly delimited, Elizabeth Britton seems all the more outstanding through her leadership . . . and indomitable will." Bibliographical note, New York Botanical Garden Library.

That some of our pioneer 19th-century scientists were women might be seen as a minor miracle, for science was one of the pursuits “public” opinion had marked out as peculiarly unsuitable for females. Another woman pioneer was Elizabeth Gertrude Knight, born January 9, 1857, to a prosperous New York family with investments in Cuba. One of five sisters (there were no sons), Elizabeth was educated at the Normal School of Columbia University (the forerunner of Barnard College) and developed a strong interest and expertise in botany and bryology. After graduation and as an independent woman, she tutored in science at the Normal School, helped found a botanical club, and edited the club’s scientific journal. In 1885 she married a fellow club member, Nathaniel Britton, and they would spend the rest of their lives together studying (and promoting the study of) plants and mosses. Their wealth enabled Elizabeth to travel widely, collect mosses, and write important scientific papers on them, but her gender barred her from a formal academic position (although at Columbia she supervised the doctoral research of leading bryologists like Abel Grout). Elizabeth is best remembered today as a founder of the New York Botanical Garden and the person who shaped its approaches to the preservation and presentation of the mosses. Her extensive scientific papers, drawings, photos, and field reports occupy 22.5 linear feet of shelving in the Garden’s research library.

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"In the following pages I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense." Thomas Paine, 1776.

1776 was, all things considered, a big year, not least in publications history. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations first saw light, in London of all places, but in terms of sales success Smith’s blockbuster was far eclipsed by Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (it hit the Philadelphia streets on January 10, 1776). A modern publisher would be surprised. Both books were unorthodox, radical, running contrary to prevailing moralities, not usually good sales points. Moreover, the better seller, Common Sense, was published in a much smaller market. But Common Sense exhausts our publishing superlatives and our publishing clichés. It sold like a house afire, and indeed burned the house down. About 100,000 copies, or so, in the first year, or so. The total colonial population was about 2.5 million, so about one out of every 25 would be the sales ratio (assuming universal literacy). A proportional US sale today would be about 13 million copies. But it’s likely it was “read” by even more than 100,000, as (for instance in Philadelphia, New York, and Newport) it was read aloud in taverns and coffee houses, not perhaps to slaves (although Paine himself was anti-slavery) and maybe not to children, either. Its secrets? Extreme timeliness. Clarity and concision. Wit. Apt, transparent metaphor. Yet more wit. It named and—SPLAT!!—hit its targets. Racy. A certain casualness about copyright helped, too. It spread faster than Facebook and left ###s in the dust. Paine’s polemic did not cause a revolution, but in several common sense ways it was one.

[Stanley]

"It is better . . . to have a small, united group than an immense debating society." Alice Paul.

One might think that movements for equal rights would always make common cause, but it has not been so. The tension between women’s movements and the aspirations of African-Americans has risen to the surfaceseveral times in US history, notably when feminism split the abolitionist movement in the 1830s but also in the life and career of Alice Paul. Born to Quakerism and wealth on January 11, 1885, Paul’s sense of her own worth was demonstrated by her academic attainments at Swarthmore (BA Biology), Penn (PhD Sociology), and American (PhD Law). But she was not converted into a women’s rights agitator until she traveled to England, where she became friends with the Pankhursts, learned militancy, and did some jail time. Returning to the US she injected militancy (and her forceful persona) into our women’s rights movement, did some more jail time, mounted a hunger strike (she was force-fed), and led a breakaway group into electoral politics. There is no doubt that the women’s suffrage amendment owed much to her, and she also organized the first introduction of the Equal Rights Amendment (in 1923!!). But she was impatient with those who would lose focus on female equality per se and take on other causes, for instance birth control or abortion or black civil rights. Her single-mindedness strengthened American femininism, and shattered it, and kept on doing both until her death in 1977. Perhaps the most important achievement of her later activism was to be present at the birth of Title IX.

[Stanley]

³The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.² Psalm 118: 22.

“Separate but equal,” the doctrine handed down by the US Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), was a cruel nonsense. Those who supported it had no intention of making separate facilities equal. But it took decades to break down. An important decision along the way was Sipuel v. Board of Regents of the U. of Oklahoma, on January 12, 1948. Ms. Ada Lois Sipuel, of Chickasaw, OK, was an honors graduate of a black college who applied to the only public law school in her home state, and was turned down because of her “color.” So in Oklahoma, in 1948, there were no “separate but equal” facilities for law school. Even so, the state courts refused to hear her case, and so she petitioned the US Supreme Court. Ms. Sipuel’s lawyer was Thurgood Marshall, by then chief counsel of the NAACP. A brilliant lawyer, Marshall had high hopes of victory (a similar 1938 case, having to do with Missouri’s segregated law school, offered some precedent), and indeed Marshall’s argument overwhelmed the Oklahoma defense. Unanimously, the Supreme Court ruled in Ms. Sipuel’s favor, requiring her state’s law school to admit her. After further, disgraceful (if comic) delaying tactics, Ada attended, receiving her Master’s in Law in 1951. Her successful professional career was crowned by her appointment, in 1992, to the state Board of Regents. Today, a monument stone in the Sipuel memorial garden at the law school uses Psalm 118 to remind us of Sipuel v. Oklahoma and that rigid racial segregation was, not so very long ago, the law of our land.

[Stanley]

³We played it and sang it the way we felt it, and there's a lot to be said for that.² Johnny Cash.

Johnny Cash made music history on January 13, 1968 by giving two concerts to the inmates of Folsom State Prison in California. The Folsom sessions were also of some potential political importance, and might have led to a subsequent--if brief--partnership between the king of country, Cash, and the king of folkrock, Bob Dylan. But let's take Folsom first. Cash had a long-standing interest in the place. A film noir set largely in Folsom set Cash to writing (ca. 1953) "Folsom Prison Blues." It was finally released in 1957 in Cash’s debut album. Its lyrics (“I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die”) caused controversy, but another result was a vogue for Cash music among prison inmates and requests for Cash to do prison concerts, the first of which came in Alabama, in 1958. But I don't think there is a Huntsville Prison Blues in the Cash repertoire, and it wasn't until January 11, 1968 that Johnny and June (Carter) and the boys checked in to the El Rancho motel near Folsom to rehearse, including practicing an inmate’s song, "Greystone Chapel." Two sessions were recorded at Folsom on the 13th, and the resulting album was a hot seller left, right, and center in the chaotic pop politics of 1968. One had hopes of a union between the two popular music streams, and those hopes were strengthened by the 1969 Dylan-Cash album, "Nashville Skyline." Both “Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison” and “Nashville Skyline” are great albums, and if you ain't heard them yet you are indeed missing something. ©

[Stanley]

³The business of a novelist . . . is to create characters . . . and then to set them in the snarl of the human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of history.² John Dos Passos.

Of all the novelists of the “Lost Generation,” John Dos Passos was the most loved by historians. It’s not because of his political move (later in life) from left to right to libertarian, but because in his greatest work, the so-called USA Trilogy, he took history so seriously that we had to enjoy it. Born in Chicago, January 14, 1896, on the wrong side of the blanket and not acknowledged by his father until he was 16, it may have been for him an identity issue. Certainly biographers have speculated that Dos Passos’ early leftist enthusiasms owed something to his father’s profession (corporate lawyer) and his refusal to name his son his own. So until he was a student at Choate he was John Roderigo Madison, clearly a rich man’s boy but which rich man’s? At Choate John became Dos Passos. After Choate it was Harvard, after Harvard it was WWI (he served with e e cummings [sic] in the ambulance corps}, and after cummings it was literature. The great trilogy came much later, in a rush, with The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936). Taken all together, it’s a great read, an unstoppable experience, a tidal wave: a collage of plot and newsreel takes and deadpan, dead on biographies and obiter dicta about money and morality and “camera eye” stream of consciousness, and it ends unforgettably. A starving migrant stares up at a silvery DC-3 also on its way west. Far above, an airsick passenger coughs up his Harvey’s lunch. Read it this minute!!! There is no time to spare. ©