BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

I wish . . . he . . . had a little more time for his work. I could wish the times in which he lived had been less troubled. But these things were as they were. Maxwell Anderson, Eulogy for Kurt Weill.

Since in these notes we’ve already celebrated Berthold Brecht, Lotte Lenya andThe Threepenny Opera, we should mention Kurt Weill, born in Saxony on March 2, 1900. Weill composed (with Brecht)TheThreepenny Opera, and he is the only person in the universe who married Lotte Lenya twice (in 1926 and 1937). Weill’s father was a cantor, but he did not show much interest in music until age 12. He progressed rapidly, and at 18 enrolled in a prestigious Berlin musical academy. He then studied with Ferruccio Busoni and with other leading exponents of modernism in music. By age 23 he was a teacher himself, but already in his compositions giving life to his view that music should reflect and serve social change. He wrote some sophisticated orchestral pieces but his association with left-wing groups moved him to lighter genres, particularly musical theatre, and into the partnership with Brecht that would result in The Threepenny Opera, a reworking of John Gay’s Beggars Opera. It was first performed in 1928, in Berlin, exactly 200 years after Gay’s piece had debuted in London. There followed a period of feverish creativity, but this was not a good time to be a Jewish leftist in Germany. Denounced by the Nazis, Weill and Lenya fled in 1933. In America, Weill was productive on Broadway and in Hollywood, worked with famous authors and directors, and died at only 50. He left us with many famous songs, from “Mack the Knife” to the satirical “Schickelgruber” (an anti-Hitler piece), and the Kurt Weill Foundation. ©

[Stanley]

Heat [is] a measurable quantity, which may be transferred from hotter bodies to colder ones. James Clerk Maxwell, 1871.

Pierre Prévost, born on 3rd March 1751, reminds us of two 18th-century phenomena: science marching in step with religion and the strong desire to answer the simplest (apparently) questions, like “what is matter?” Born in Protestant Geneva and the son of a clergyman, Prévost was destined to his father’s profession but got sidetracked. First he studied law, then mathematics, then classics, wherein he produced a well thought of translation of plays by Euripides. Along the way he became friends with the Enlightenment philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau and the Scots ethicist and mathematician Dugald Stewart, but then—perhaps wanting to get to the bottom of things—he turned to what we would call Physics. Prévost’s simple question was, what is heat? He found out it was complicated, and nothing at all like the traditional view of mysterious cold and hot “fluids” moving back and forth, heating and cooling otherwise neutral bodies (or gases, or liquids). Sure that there was some quantifiable energy afoot, and that cold was simply the absence of heat, Prévost moved towards what would (with a few new twists and turns) become James Clerk Maxwell’s classic Theory of Heat (1871). Prévost’s three main “heat” publications came out in 1791, 1792, and 1809. He then turned to study—with himself as the subject—the arguably parallel mystery of aging.

[Stanley]

Music by Vivaldi. Composed in five days. (Inscription on the Mss of one of Vivaldi¹s operas).

If it is indeed true that everyone knows J. S. Bach, then it must be so that almost everyone knows Antonio Vivaldi, today the second-most recorded of Baroque era composers. Vivaldi was (unusually) baptized on the day of his birth, March 4, 1678, in Venice, perhaps because of that day’s major earthquake. (Another earthquake baby was the Shawnee war leader Tecumseh but that’s another earthquake and a different story. ) Antonio Vivaldi was destined for the priesthood and was ordained, but his father had taught him violin and he became, instead, music master of an “orphanage”, the Ospedale della Pietà. I put “orphanage” in quotes because many of the children were the offspring of wealthy Venetians and their mistresses, but never mind: the position explains some of the odd combinations of instruments that characterized Vivaldi’s compositions. He wrote for the instruments that the young people—mainly or entirely female—could play. His own mistress Anna Giraud was not, apparently, one of the orphans. Vivaldi himself was a marvelous violinist, and with his burgeoning skill as a composer he and the Ospedale’s musicians began to be well known, and he enjoyed some prosperity. Vivaldi composed concerti, solos, sacred music for the Ospedale chapel, and operas (not composed for the Ospedale),. One hopes the orphans’ fathers sang along, but today the music is simply marvelous. Vivaldi’s last years were financially difficult, but he still enjoyed some commissions, and died (1741) while in Vienna composing for the Hapsburgs. ©

[Stanley]

. . . he was a pittiful preacher . . . but bent all his thoughts on the mathematiques. John Aubrey, Brief Lives

Back in merrie olde Englande, when most lived in small towns, tended sheep, and drank only seasonal beers, the smartest guy in the parish was often its Church of England clergyman. If he snagged a good curate, the vicar probably had time on his hands although not, perhaps, enough to become Satan’s plaything. A multitudinous result of all this was a long, long, long line of clergymen-scientists, men who saw science as another way to “justify the ways of God to man,” not as important as biblical exegesis, but close enough to get good at it. Thus we had Rev’d Gilbert White, naturalist; Rev’d Thomas Malthus, demographer; Rev’d Edmund Cartwright, inventor; Rev’d William Buckland, geologist; and now that I’ve brought up Buckland’s dinosaurs I have to mention the dog-breeder Rev’d Jack Russell. They were all ordained ministers of the established church. Joseph Priestly, chemist, was a dissenting minister, and Charles Darwin, famously, thought about a vicarage and then boarded HMS Beagle instead. But our man today is the Reverend William Oughtred, born on 5 March 440 years ago, 1574, at Eton, where his father “taught to write”, was educated there and Cambridge, and became vicar of Albury south of London. There he pondered mathematics, invented the slide rule and a new kind of sun dial, coined both the “x” as a sign for multiplication and our trigonometric abbreviations (cos et al), wrote a math textbook that inspired Newton, and while thus fruitfully occupied dabbled in freemasonry and the occult, also common clerical pastimes. We call it “Olde Tyme Religion.”

[Stanley]

How can you write if you can¹t cry? Ring Lardner.

One of age’s temptations is that which whimpers in my hearing aids that “it ain’t as good as it used to be.” I resist, e.g. balancing (bad) genetically emasculated tomatoes against (good) new cars, but I must say that today’s sports journalism is a parched and barren thing. In England, the Guardian continues to write well about cricket, but here . . . Ugh!! Sports itself has become too full of hormone-altered behaviors and bodies, and those who write about it lack bottom and have no critical consistency whether on morals or tactics or skills. Besides hormones (and monopoly capitalism), I blame TV commentators and their compulsion to talk loudly through the action whether or not they have anything to say. Usually it’s “not.” A good antidote to this (although it can send me into my “decline and fall” syndrome) is to read Ring Lardner, who in a short life (48 years) wrote more memorable, artful, funny, angry, satirical, and inventive sports journalism than we’ve seen since Howard Cosell got the vapors over those black power salutes in Mexico City. Ringgold Wilmer Lardner, born rich on March 6, 1885, in Niles, Michigan, never went to college and moved from the South Bend Tribune through Chicago, St. Louis, Boston, and New York, littering the landscape with brilliant, pithy stuff that has so well stood time’s test that you can today, on Amazon, buy a large number of titles, still in print, by Lardner, on baseball, football, boxing, racing, theatre and, very tellingly, on writing itself. And if you tire of those you can start on his short fiction, and reflect that we have not lately seen his like. ©

[Stanley]

I don't particularly care about sincerity. I try to make art. Maurice Ravel.

It so often occurs that today’s avante garde becomes tomorrow’s establishment that we can’t call it ironic, but always the enfant terrible needs to live long enough. Maurice Ravel did not quite make it, dying at 62 as the music world was only beginning to regard him as standard fare. Born on March 7, 1875, into an interesting (and comfortably wealthy) Basque-Swiss family, Ravel’s talents brought him to a prestigious Parisian conservatoire, where he distinguished himself by making friends with his professors but rarely meeting their academic requirements. Expelled twice for academic failure, he composed on his own, became friends with other avant-garde musicians (like Erik Satie), and did his best to create a classical music version of French impressionist painting. He developed a knack for not coming in first in music competitions, sometimes causing scandal as he was strongly supported by some judges. By the 1920s he began to win acceptance, and then his American tour of 1928-29, if exhausting, won acclaim from critics and concertgoers, netted him nearly $150,000 in today’s dollars, and again proved his readiness to incorporate new forms (notably jazz) in his compositions. Another likely result of his American experience was his appointment to the American School of Music in Fountainebleau, but he’d already been laid low by a head injury (a 1932 traffic accident). Increasingly erratic in his behavior and in his compositions, Ravel died after experimental brain surgery in 1937.

[Stanley]

Music to murder by. David Pownall.

Carlo Gesualdo became a fine composer of classical music, but we remember him as one who inspired one of the better plays about music, David Pownall’s Music to Murder By (1976). But let’s start with Carlo Gesualdo’s birth, in Venosa, Italy, on March 8, 1560. The boy was entranced by music from an early age, and his noble family could afford the best tuition, although early on he was not known for anything but virtuoso playing of various instruments, among them the lute, an early harpsichord, and the guitar. What may have inspired him to compose music was the incident that inspired Pownall to write the play, a double murder. Gesualdo married his first cousin, Maria d’Avalos, in 1586. He was apparently suspicious of her, and had reason, for Maria almost immediately began an affair with a neighboring noble, the Duke of Andria. This went on for a couple of years when Gesualdo, surprising them in flagrante delicto, brutally murdered them and hung their bodies in front of his castle. There they rotted. The murderous act was celebrated in poetry at the time (one is reminded that morals today are not what they used to be), and Gesualdo married again (not much more happily) and then set up shop as a composer. Some say his music helped him deal with his guilt. However that may have been, in Pownall’s play Gesualdo’s ghost murders yet again, this time a rather unlikeable American PhD student (in music history) researching Gesualdo. Thus she wakens a wrong ghost, and pays the piper. Pownall’s play requires its principal actors to be accomplished musicians, and (sadly) is not often performed.

[Stanley]

It is especially his bad language that is always good. G.K. Chesterton on Cobbett.

Just as persons are known by the company they keep, so we know a good word by its synonyms. In this context, consider “irascible.” And then consider some of its friend-words: testy, touchy, waspish, snappish, grumpy, cranky, cantankerous, peevish, prickly, and snippy. Sounds like a journalist or a porcupine? It sounds like William Cobbett, who in several senses was both. He was born on March 9, 1763, and destined during a reasonably long life to hold most available positions on the issues he wrote about, and always to hold (and then abandon) them with conviction and brio. If you want consistency, Cobbett didn’t like anybody in power (at least not for very long). His dad was a farmer-innkeeper and William did some of both, from time to time. He also served in the British army (becoming, predictably some say, a sergeant-major), met and married a patient Canadian, but mostly he wrote, most famously the Political Register, a weekly that survived to his death and (riskily in those days) reported on parliamentary proceedings. He is also credited with midwifing Hansard, now an “official” parliamentary record. Cobbett wrote forcefully enough to land in prison, then fled to the USA, 1817-1819, and wrote about that too. He found us too democratic although he enjoyed (and marveled at) our separation of church and state. He returned home, sat briefly in Parliament as a reformer, and most famously of all wrote Rural Rides, serially and then as a book, a pioneer effort in investigative journalism. ©

[Tripps]

The !832 Election in the Oldham constituency. A bit long winded, but worth a read I think. Might make a good film or TV programme? Credit to the Oldham website http://oldhamarchives.wordpress.com/



On Thursday evening Cobbett addresses the crowd from the window of the Albion Inn (Radicals HQ):

“At last you have said to the tyrants and enemies of your liberties this is the man we will have represent us.”

The final result was:
Fielden: 675 votes
Cobbett: 642 votes
Bright: 153 votes
Burge: 101 votes
Stephen: 3 votes

Oldham had elected a living legend.




William Cobbett was Oldham’s first MP. Not a local man but an adventurer, a farmer, a social reformer who confronted the establishment time and again, throughout his adult life. To many, he was a legend so how did he end up as MP for Oldham?

William Cobbett was born in Farnham in Surrey in 1763. His father was a farmer and a tavern owner and he taught William to read and write, starting Cobbett on a life of self-education. Cobbett taught himself French, mathematics, gardening, forestry and grammar, and, in the course of his life, he wrote books on all of them.

Cobbett’s adventures began in 1783 when he left home for London and found work as a clerk. Soon, on impulse, Cobbett joined the army and in 1785 sailed to Canada with his regiment. The army offered Cobbett ample opportunity for self-improvement and he was promoted to sergeant major. But in 1792, back in England with his regiment, he was cast as a troublemaker for trying to expose fraud and corruption in his regiment, demonstrating a sense of social injustice. Accused of making false accusations (an early case of whistleblowing) Cobbett was at risk of being deported to Botany Bay. He escaped to France but did not stay there for long. France was a dangerous place in 1792, in the throes of a revolution, and Cobbett soon made his way to America.

In America, Cobbett became a pamphleteer, writing under the pseudonym Peter Porcupine. He returned to England in 1800 to avoid damages of $5,000 (an unprecedented amount) awarded against him in a libel case. In 1802, he started his newspaper, Political Register, and gradually his views became more radical. In 1810, he was convicted of sedition after criticising the government over another army scandal. It was a turbulent time and the government was cracking down on radicals.

After leaving prison, Cobbett continued to confront the establishment with his campaign for reform and civil liberty. The government taxed newspapers to prevent free speech, as the tax put the price of newspapers beyond the means of most people. In 1815, Cobbett made a canny decision to publish Political Register as a pamphlet to avoid newspaper tax. Soon, Political Register had a circulation of 40,000 and it was the main periodical read by the working classes.

Following riots in 1816 and 1817, the government cracked down on protestors and authorised internment without trial and banned public meeting. As a figurehead of protest, Cobbett became aware that he was at risk of internment and, unwilling to spend another spell in prison, he left for America again in 1817. He continued to publish Political Register from America and returned to England in 1819, soon after the Peterloo Massacre.

In the period after Peterloo, Cobbett’s writing was influential in mobilising working class radicals to organise themselves and press for reform.

In the 1820s, Cobbett continued to publish controversial material in Political Register. He stood unsucessfully for Parliament twice. He continued to fight libel actions. He took up farming again and he also toured Britain on horseback. He published his observations on agrarian life in a book called Rural Rides.

Following the Great Reform Act 1832, Cobbett stood for election as MP for Oldham. Why Oldham? It was an obvious choice to stand for an industrial town because his support was in the industrial heartlands. But Cobbett hedged his bets and stood for election in Manchester too, only withdrawing when it became clear that he was unlikely to win. By contrast, there was no serious opposition in Oldham. Oldham had a strong radical tradition and, crucially, strong leadership of middle class tradesmen and men of property who were able to mobilise support for Cobbett and his running mate John Fielden.

Cobbett only had a short career as an MP. He participated energetically but the life did not suit him. He died in 1835, after a short illness.



Reform without revolution

coach and horses

The Great Reform Act 1832 was important because it gave people in Oldham the right to vote for the first time. So in December 1832, Oldham not only had its first election but it also elected a living legend as its first MP – William Cobbett. There’ll be more about William Cobbett and Oldham’s first election in posts later this week. Today’s post is about the Great Reform Act 1832.

Before the Great Reform Act 1832, the electoral system was inconsistent and open to corruption. There was no system for registering voters and there were dramatic variations in qualifications for voting, the size of constituencies and the number of electors in constituencies. The right to vote was linked to property ownership and the landed aristocracy dominated Parliament. Above all, there were great concentrations of population in industrial towns and cities that had no right to vote or be represented in Parliament.

Britain had experienced unprecedented change: it had mechanised and urbanised; the workforce had moved from agriculture to manufacture; and there had been a population explosion. Living and working conditions for many working people were wretched. Radical thinkers, including William Cobbett, argued that it was necessary to reform the electoral system so that MPs could be elected to improve conditions for working people. Cobbett was influential in mobilising radical activity in the 1810s and 1820s.

Pressure for reform had been building from as early as the English Civil War (1642-1651). The American War of Independence (1775-1782) and particularly the French Revolution (1789) inspired radicals but terrified the governing classes, making them more resistant to change.

It took until 1831 for a government to come to power that was committed to changing the electoral system. Even then, it took three parliamentary reform bills and a lot of drama to achieve change. The first two reform bills failed in 1831 and, in 1832, the House of Lords resisted a third reform bill hard.

But the mood of the country was volatile: reform was a hot debate and there had been riots in towns and cities around the country. There was a genuine prospect of revolution if the electoral system had not been reformed soon. The bill was only passed when the government threatened to create enough new pro-reform peers to swamp the House of Lords. The Lords gave in before their power was diluted.

The Great Reform Act 1832 introduced reforms to the electoral system in England and Wales. The actual changes were modest and many were disappointed in the scope of reform. Whilst it created 43 new constituencies in industrial towns and cities (including Oldham), abolished some archaic constituencies and introduced uniform qualifications for voting, it only gave the vote to middle class men. It specifically excluded women from the vote (and women who had previously had the right to vote actually lost the vote) and there was no right to a secret ballot. The government, however, was satisfied to achieve reform without revolution.

Urban, working class male householders only received the vote in 1867 and there was no secret ballot until 1872. It tool a long campaign and a world war to deliver votes for all men and some women in 1918 and universal suffrage was only achieved in 1928.

Reform did not diminish the power of the landed aristocracy in Parliament. It did break up a broad alliance between working class and middle class that had been necessary to achieve reform in the first place. After 1832, the campaign for reform continued as a predominantly working class movement.

[Stanley]

Pretentious quotations [are] the surest road to tedium. Henry Fowler.

“Language” changes. Whether it’s word usage, grammar, or style, language moves on, sweeps all before it, takes no prisoners and marks the corpses “obsolete." Efforts to hold it in check, like the Académie Française, become butts of ridicule. Just so, writers on “usage” (if they are good) tend to be greeted as liberators and then, two generations on, condemned as arbitrary academicians. So we come to Henry Fowler, born on March 10, 1858, into a clergyman-schoolmaster’s brood of seven. Most of those seven grew up to have some kind of connection with schools and schooling, but Henry, a classicist, was special. Notably, his atheism caused trouble in the tighter environment of English “public” schools, and he resigned (from Sedburgh) in 1899 to try to make a living as a writer. He and his brother Francis moved to the Isle of Guernsey and first translated the works of Lucian (in four vols.). This was well received and next they published The King’s English (1906), urging vigor, simplicity, and concision and being hailed as (yes) liberators. After that came The Concise Oxford Dictionary (1910), a classic work, and then they started on A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. Francis died before it was finished (1926), but it, too, was hugely successful. In a probably futile effort to keep up with the tongue (whose power lies in adaption), it’s since gone through two print revisions and one online, 1965, 1996, and 2004. All remain in print because they are fun to use; and, taken with salt for safety, they are full of good ideas about how to write what you mean. ©

[Stanley]

Why confine our view to colored slavery? . . . All slavery has its origin in power, and is against right. McLean¹s dissent in the Dred Scott case.

Today, 11th March 2014, is the 229th anniversary of the birth, in 1785, of John McLean, one of those figures out of our dim and distant past who should be better known. He was not, of course, as obscure as most of us. McLean was from a well-to-do New Jersey family that early joined the westward march to settle its son so well that he founded a newspaper and qualified for the law. McLean represented Ohio in Congress, served on the Ohio Supreme Court, and was in the cabinet of President James Monroe. He was nominated for the Supreme Court by Andrew Jackson, and took his seat on the bench in 1829. He served there for 32 years, a notably long tenure. Judges are above politics, the myth says, but Justice John McLean served as a bellweather of American politics, and particularly as a litmus test on the importance of slavery. His anti-slavery views moved him right across the spectrum, as time passed (1829-1856), from Jacksonian Democrat to the Republican Party. Along the way, he took his own line on several important Supreme Court cases, none more important than Dred Scott v. Sandford (1856) where his strong dissent (he saw the majority decision as a matter of “taste”—i.e. racism—rather than law) may have provoked Chief Justice Taney to take his racist and pro-slavery views to a radical extreme, outrage northern opinion, return Scott to slavery, and thus bring closer our great Civil War. Justice John McLean died just before the first battles of that war, on April 4, 1861.©

[Stanley]

All The News That Is Fit to Print

One of the enduring patterns of 19th-century immigration into the USA was the tension it produced, in most definable immigrant groups, between those who desired assimilation and those who took refuge in tradition. In several national communions, for instance, the so-called Lutheran revival of mid-century was really a battle between the revivalists (who might be called restorationists) and those who wanted to become “more American,” whatever in the world that meant in our melting pot century. As the historian Timothy Smith pointed out years ago in a brilliant article, what most defined each group’s response to the new world was what they had been doing in their old world. So it was with the families of Adolph Ochs, German intellectuals involved in the liberal ructions of the 1840s, thus assimilationist Jews in the old country. So, oddly enough, they continued to be assimilationist Jews in the USA, becoming lay leaders of Reform Judaism in Cincinnati, then Chattanooga, then New York City. Young Adolph, born on March 12, 1858, reacted to his family’s poverty by becoming, first, an apprentice printer and then, in good Ben Franklin style, buying the shop. By the time he finished buying in 1935, his shop included The Chattanooga Times and The New York Times. In each place he championed “objective journalism” with a non-party although faintly liberal editorial policy, and it proved to sell well among the middle and upper classes into which the Ochs family also migrated. As Smith suggests, this assimilationist story began in Germany and played out in the USA.

[Stanley]

College quiz night.

March 13, 2014 is a good day to bring up the often rather vexed problem of the age order of American universities, because it was on March 13, 1639 that Harvard College got its name. The institution had been founded in 1636 by the education-conscious Puritans, but it struggled, and when it heard of a bequest of money (£780) and books (320) from an English clergyman, the Puritan-inclined Rev. John Harvard, it was inevitable that it would become “Harvard College.” Before then the “College at Cambridge” had been a weak thing, a tender plant. John Harvard’s beneficence was pretty remarkable (the books were priceless but back then the £780 could have paid for them several times over). Other colleges that later changed their names included the College at Saybrook (1702), the College of Philadelphia (1740), the College of New Jersey (1749), and King’s College (1754). Of our most ancient universities, indeed, only William and Mary College (1693) continues to do business under its original name. These dates can be important, because at major academic celebrations (such as the 200th anniversary of the King’s College, in 1954) representatives of other universities paraded in date order, and those representing the College of New Jersey claimed they should precede those representing the College of Philadelphia because the latter did not really admit students until 1751. I cannot find out how that was settled, but I rather think blood was shed. Now, then, for the quiz. What are the MODERN names of those colleges??

[Stanley]

Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love. Albert Einstein.

March 14 seems to be one of those remarkable days when much has happened, which is why I’ve never ‘done’ Albert Einstein, but he, too, was born on March 14: 1879, in his case, in Ulm, Germany. His family moved about, which may explain his mediocre school career, but after a few years schoolteaching and examining patents (in Zurich), Einstein exploded with a PhD and a series of seminal papers that in 1909 vaulted him into the chair of theoretical physics at Zurich, from which he was courted by Prague, and by Berlin, and by Cambridge, and became a hot property. In his case, to say “his time had come” might be an unforgiveable pun, for among other things he was having trouble with time, which in Newton’s universe was measured (so to speak) from one place and came in absolutes. But by the time Albert Einstein flowered (there is no other word for it), the universe had expanded a good deal and time might be contemplated from different places by different observers moving at different speeds who might find different values. Giving time this plasticity helped to solve some problems that had arisen in Physics from about 1870. And so it was that Albert Einstein started a revolution. The NY Times obituary (1955) waxed poetic, noting that as Albert pushed baby Albert Jr. around Zurich, in the pram was also a “universe-in-the-making, a vast, finite-infinite four-dimensional universe . . . Dr. Einstein was then building his universe in his spare time.” To which one can only add, some baby, some pram, some time.

[Stanley]

It is a marvelous planet on which we ride. Liberty Hyde Bailey, Jr.

“Liberty” is an interesting name for a boy-child born in Michigan in 1858 (March 15 to be exact), so we would assume into an anti-slavery family except he was Liberty H. Bailey, Jr. His dad, another Liberty, was born before anti-slavery flowered and wanted to make the west bloom. Liberty Sr. walked from Vermont to Michigan planting fruit trees wherever he stepped. Liberty, Jr., oddly enough, became a famous botanist, a professor and dean of agriculture at Cornell, traveled farther than his father (a quarter of a million miles) and collected a quarter of a million plants for the (guess what) Bailey Hortorium which he bequeathed to Cornell in 1935 when he was only 77 years old. Liberty graduated from Michigan State in 1882 and collected doctorates in different disciplines at three other universities, became an assistant to the famous Asa Gray at Harvard, and then migrated to his chair at Ithaca. When he retired he filled his life with further expeditions, the last one (1949) to collect palms in the Caribbean. A popular academic when academics were popular, Liberty was a progressive Republican (remember them?) and nearly ran for governor of New York in 1912 but satisfied himself with a book on the subject, What is Democracy? He conveyed his deep feelings on politics to his friend Teddy Roosevelt, who won elections. Widely mourned, Liberty Hyde Bailey, Jr., died in 1954, aged 94, leaving behind a spinster daughter, Ethel Zoe, and thousands and thousands of rare and beautiful plants.©

[Stanley]

Liberty is to faction what air is to fire. Madison, The Federalist, No.10

March 16th 2014 is the 263rd anniversary of the birth of James Madison, fourth President of the USA. However, that was not his most memorable accomplishment. Madison was also midwife of the Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom (1785), the guiding spirit of the American Constitutional Convention (1787), and could also be credited with parentage of the discipline of Political Science, as the principal author of the Federalist Papers (also 1787). Federalist #10, in particular, brilliantly analyzes politics as process, identifies parties (“factions”) as inevitable and probably essential vehicles of that process, and locates the best safeguard of public morality in the balance-wheel structures and institutions of state and society, and not in the motives of politicians or people who will (inevitably, Madison wrote) seek their own best interests. As a freshman student of mine once brilliantly stated the matter, it was a “thoroughly modern political analysis. . . . James Madison believed there was a real world out there, one that could be understood, analyzed, and deliberately changed.” We might be somewhat better off today if our current politicians would accept this credo. James Madison was born near Port Conway, Virginia, on March 16, 1751, and graduated from the College of New Jersey on 1771, just in time for the Revolution in which he used his education to such good effect.

[Stanley]

To be afraid is to behave as if the truth were not true. Bayard Rustin.

Of Bayard Rustin it must be said that he was born to his task. His birthing-day was March 17, 1912, in West Chester, PA. He was raised by his maternal grandparents (one a Quaker and the other a leader in the African Methodist Episcopal Church) and among regular visitors were such as W. E. B. Dubois and James Weldon Johnson. So what else could the young man do but join the NAACP, the American Friends Service Committee, and the Young Communist League, all after graduating from college and moving to New York City? And Bayard was also, by the way, an accomplished tenor, and earned his living at that. For a variety of reasons, most of them good, Bayard Rustin left the CPUSA in 1941 and worked with A. Philip Randolph and Norman Thomas to convince President Roosevelt that the war against Nazi racism needed some home front action. The result was the famous Executive Order 8802, banning racial discrimination in government agencies and companies working on government contracts. Rustin’s homosexuality and his former communist associations caused him to take a back seat in the civil rights movement of the 50s, but he was active in CORE, learned much in India from Gandhi’s passive resistance campaign, and helped establish Martin Luther King, Jr., in the SCLC leadership. After we were (partly) cured of our obsessions with sex and communism, Bayard Rustin gently assumed the role of elder statesman of civil rights. He died in 1987 (while on a mission to Haiti), and in 2013 he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

[Stanley]

When you can measure what you are talking about and express it in numbers, you know something about it. Lord Kelvin, 1883.

It is difficult for the laity to understand how much mathematicians enjoy just messing about with numbers. The cognoscenti are as likely to say “number”, singular, rather than “numbers”, for number is not just 1, 2, 3, 4, ∞, a plural series ad infinitum but it’s a concept. My view is that this “messing about” really got underway when people began to think that counting things could also be a way to describe and analyze them. This desire intensified in the early modern period (ca. 1500-1750) when old categories were breaking down so rapidly that reducing things to simple units promised if not to end confusion then at least to explain it. One by-product, in 1637, was Fermat’s Conjecture—now finally (1995) proven as a theorem—which I won’t even try to explain. About a century passed, during which not much happened except that Newton or Leibniz or both invented the Calculus, and then in June 1742 Christian Goldbach conjectured that every even positive number (integer) greater than two can be expressed as the sum of two prime numbers. Thus four can equal 3 + 1, 12 can equal 7 + 5, and so on. It seems simple enough, and has been tested to destruction (so far it works for all positive even numbers up to 4x1018, which is, take my word for it, a BIG collection of positive even numbers), but it has yet to be “proven.” Thus we are back where we started. Goldbach, who was born on March 18,1690, first proposed this “conjecture” to a mathematics friend, Leonhard Euler, who quickly replied that it works but cannot be proven. Eureka.©

[Stanley]

Cherish your land. There is no afterlife for a place that started out as heaven. Charles Marion Russell.

A century and more ago, Americans realized that something called ‘the frontier experience’ was passing. Just so, a sort of nostalgia industry surfaced and prospered. Some of it was cheap and tawdry, like the dime novels that started things off, but if not high art some of it was memorable. Teddy Roosevelt’s (cultivated) persona was part of it. Owen Wister’s novel The Virginian (1902) was another, and indeed was dedicated to TR. Neither of them could claim to be real westerners, though, and for that we turn to Charles M. Russell, who (even though born, March 19, 1864, in St. Louis) became a real cowboy. In 1880, in an early version of the Teddy Roosevelt story, the young man went west to toughen up, but unlike TR he stayed west, worked the ponies, punched cattle, trapped, hunted, and was adopted into the Blackfoot nation. But mostly he was a cowboy, and down in the bunkhouse, on the Judith Basin ranch of Jake Hoover, Russell must have attracted some attention with his art work. Do real cowboys do watercolors? Russell did, and by 1892 he was a full-time artist, just in time for the nostalgia boom. Even so, he might not have “made” it but in 1895 he married young Nancy Cooper, who managed his business, modeled for him too, and encouraged him to expand into short fiction, sculpture, and book illustration. Russell’s works, high art or not, now sell for millions, and in Great Falls, MT, there stands a 70,000 square foot museum devoted mainly to his watercolors, oils, and sculptures. ©

[Stanley]

I did not direct my life. I didn't design it. I never made decisions. B. F. Skinner.

It’s nothing to brag of, but my undergraduate roommate and I enjoyed a custom, at semester’s end, of burning the textbook we most disliked. It took some time, page by page in a roller brush tray, on a fire escape, and as a “custom” I don’t think it lasted more than three semesters, but it started with a programmed learning book by the psychologist B. F. Skinner. The book took one through all the basic principles of Psych I, page by page, serried ranks of simple statements, simple questions, and simple answers, arranged in different shaded ribbons across the pages. Follow the ribbons, turn the pages, answer the simple questions, and by the time you got to page 193 (or whatever, for it was a short book) you knew all you needed to know about the principles of Psychology. That, at least, was the theory. I really did hope that learning was more meaningful than that, but just in case Skinner was right I burned his book, a kind of ritual-ironic act to prove behaviorism wrong. Skinner, born on March 20, 1904, deserved better treatment. A brilliant scientist, precociously serious (at Hamilton) even as an undergraduate, he burned no books and wrote many. But his own life is a better refutation of his behaviorism (better than, for instance, burning his book), for he made many odd, seemingly existential choices, took many abrupt turns, and (another non sequitur) is buried somewhere near Longfellow in Mt. Auburn Cemetery. I still find his behaviorism repugnant, but I do wish I had that blasted book. ©

[Stanley]

The single greatest mind that has ever engaged itself in the ... morphology of stellar spectra. William Wilson Morgan, writing of Antonia Maury.

In 19th-century America, you could keep a good woman down but only for so long. Antonia Coetana de Paiva Pereira Maury was one of these. She owed her name to a Portuguese noble family that fled Napoleon to settle in New York. But it was more to the point of her life that her uncle and granddfather were important early American astronomers and gentleman-scientists, Henry Draper and John William Draper (the latter already featured in these notes). Antonia Maury, born in Cold Spring, New York, on March 21, 1866, took to their favorite science eagerly and attended Vassar so she could study with the pioneer astronomer Maria Mitchell. But it was still no open field for a female. Antonia majored in Physics, Astronomy, and Philosophy, then went on to Harvard but not as a graduate student. Instead she became one of the “Harvard Computers”, talented women who catalogued night sky data for Harvard astronomer Edward Pickering. Antonia developed a star classification system that Pickering scorned but was picked up and used to great effect by European astronomers. Unhappy with Pickering (and he with her), she left for a time (perhaps to finish cataloguing her grandpa’s observations and photographs) but returned to Harvard (her uncle had endowed the observatory) in 1908 to become a famed astronomer in her own right, specializing in stellar morphology. Antonia Maury retired in 1935, but continued to work on astronomy, ornithology, and the Draper House museum until her death in 1952.

[Stanley]

I have read your book with more pain than pleasure. Adam Sedgwick to Charles Darwin.

The complications and convolutions of the relationships between religion and science in the age of Darwin can hardly be better shown than in the life of Adam Sedgwick. Born on March 22 1785 in Dent, England, Sedgwick studied math and theology at Cambridge. But perhaps because his youth was spent amid the beauties and mysteries of the West Yorkshire Dales, he became Woodwardian Professor of Geology at Cambridge, a post he held from 1818 to 1873. Certainly he clarified the jumbled geography of the Dales—limestones, millstone grit, shales, and sandstones—but he spread his canvas across Europe to refine our understanding of the layering of the earth’s surface and its geologic periods. He named the Cambrian and Devonian ages, and his work helped to birth notions (not least about time itself) that helped Darwin (who studied under Sedgwick) to conceive of evolution by natural selection. But for Sedgwick himself the geologic strata and their varied biota—living and fossilized—had resulted from successive acts of divine destruction and creation, especially but not only great floods. His strong evangelicalism could not accept Darwin’s thoroughgoing naturalism or Lyell’s unimaginably ancient earth; in his opposition to the arguments of both his old friends, Sedgwick remained a vicar’s son to the end. And yet Sedgwick constantly defended free scientific inquiry against the attacks of conservative churchmen, and his life and work together caution us against simple stories of scientific rationalism versus religious obscurantism. ©

[Stanley]

I have sent a couple of Bull frogs . . . with Colocasia roots for the King. I wish thay may come safe. John Bartram to Ben Franklin, 1769.

Americans like their heroes folksy and mythic; thus we learn too much about the wrong people, e.g. Johnny Appleseed. Now, there’s nothing wrong with Johnny Appleseed (aka John Chapman, 1774-1845), but if you want someone who crisscrossed America, gathered millions of seeds, and planted thousands of them, you’d prefer John Bartram, born into a Quaker family on March 23, 1699. Bartram had a passion for plants. He read books about them, devoted a small part of his small farm to “interesting” ones, studied them, and sent letters about them to the people who’d written all those books he’d read and to Sir Hans Sloane at the Royal Society. Sloane encouraged him, as did Benjamin Franklin, and soon Bartram had walked or ridden horseback to Ontario, the Mississippi valley, the Florida and Georgia swamps, and places between, drawing specimens, collecting them, classifying them in the new Linnaean way, and publishing his journals. Meanwhile his little garden grew to 8 acres and was chock-a-block with odd plants from all over everywhere. That garden still exists, our first “Botanical Garden”. Because he sent “Bartram’s Boxes” (as they became known) to many eminent Europeans you can also find Bartram’s plants at Kew Gardens, at the Chelsea Physick Garden, and the stately homes of the Howards, the Gordons, the Argylls, and probably the Windsors. For this John Bartram was (in 1765) named the King’s Botanist for America, at £50/annum, just in time for the American Revolution. Bartram died before George III could cancel his salary.©

[Stanley]

You are piling up a heritage of conflict . . . for there is not enough water to supply the land. John Wesley Powell, 1883.

The men who dominated late 19th-century exploration were both easterners by birth. Clarence King of the famous Fortieth Parallel Survey was born in Newport, RI, and John Wesley Powell was a New Yorker. Powell, born on March 24, 1834, moved west to be educated in Greek and Latin at Illinois College and Oberlin, but he was already afflicted with wanderlust, navigating (by rowboat) the entire Mississippi and its main tributaries. He was also an ardent abolitionist, and joined the Union Army in the spring of 1861. He served in the Mississippi River campaign and the Army of the Potomac, lost his right arm at Shiloh but stayed on active duty and finished as a much-decorated major. He returned to Illinois College as professor of geology, but only as a prelude to his Colorado River expeditions of 1867, 1869, and 1871-1872. Each was a spectacular adventure, and by the end Powell had proved that wild stories of a “grand canyon” of the Colorado were wildly understated. The river and its main tributaries were then, of course, untroubled by dams and reservoirs, so his journeys were wild rides on the spring floods. Powell’s fame brought him the directorships of the US Geological Survey and the Smithsonian’s Bureau of Ethnology. In these roles he urged caution in developing the west and circumspection in dealing with its inhabitants, thinking it best to preserve wild nature and protect its tribal cultures. In his own time, he lost these arguments, but his ideas are now seen as prescient and progressive, as befits a classics scholar. ©

[Stanley]

I must see, think, and feel in Thor¹s dimension. Gutzon Borglum.

There is nothing that requires artists to be eccentric, but it’s not a rare quality among our artists. A standout eccentric was John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum, aka Gutzon Borglum, born into a polygamous Mormon family (of Danish immigrants) in the Idaho Territory on March 25, 1867. His father Jens soon left the Latter Day Saints and took his first wife, the sister of Gutzon’s mother, with him to Omaha, and then St. Louis, where Jens acquired medical certification at the then College of Homeopathy. Gutzon and his brother, meanwhile, had joined their aunt and father and had become promising artists (in Omaha!!). Gutzon traveled from there to Paris where he was bowled over by Auguste Rodin and acquired a formal qualification at the Académie Julian. Somewhere along the line, he also acquired a strongly nationalistic (and anti-immigrant!!) set of values, along with a preference for really, really, really monumental sculptures. Americans must be born of American parents (“flesh of our flesh”), he said, somewhat inconsistently given his own immigrant background, and sculptures of national heroes must be accordingly dramatic. Witness his six-ton head of Lincoln which, though Teddy Roosevelt liked it, is today buried in the capitol basement and rarely sees the light. But Borglum is better known for his Stone Mountain monstrosity, in Georgia, a memorial to the Confederacy, which itself trained him up for his truly monumental work at Mount Rushmore, an homage to presidents Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and that old art critic Teddy Roosevelt. ©