BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

I had a lover's quarrel with the world. Robert Frost's epitaph, from his poem The Lesson for Today.

Two typical (not universal) marks of “modern” poetry are the use of everyday language and a focus on everyday people or things. Were they the only marks of the modern, Robert Frost would be our most modern of poets. As it is, he is probably (still) the most well known of 20th-century American poets. One immediately thinks of Frost as a New England country-man, but he was born in San Francisco (on March 26, 1874) and grew up in Boston and the mill city of Lawrence. He fitfully attended college (Dartmouth and then Harvard) but never graduated and in between those two places he published his first poem (1894) for enough money ($400 in today’s $$) to think it might be a winner. But like many poets he needed a day job. He taught English (of course) but also bought and worked two New Hampshire farms at Derry, 1899-1908, and Franconia in 1915 (which would be his home until 1938). His “country” experiences, and country people, furnished much of his subject matter and, arguably, inspired his most memorable poems. He won his first (of four) Pulitzer Prizes in 1924, and his poetry together with part-time teaching at Middlebury and Amherst (and many other places) earned him enough to keep the wolf from the door and to buy more doors (a house in Cambridge and another near Miami). Most famously, perhaps, he read a poem (“The Gift Outright”) at the Kennedy inauguration in 1961. He died two years later full of years and, at long last, plenty of college degrees.

[Stanley]

Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

Of all the arts, architecture is the most public, the one that affects our lives and assaults or pleases our eyes on a daily basis. By a nice coincidence, my father ended his career working in a Mies van der Rohe building, in Des Moines, and my son is beginning his in another Mies van der Rohe building, in Chicago. Born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies on March 27, 1886, in Aachen, Germany, Mies worked in his father’s stone-carving workshop, then apprenticed to a Berlin furniture designer, then to an architect, and, age 26, turned up in Holland designing a house for a wealthy art collector. During WWI he designed bridges for the Imperial German Army. Afterwards, he took his mother’s surname, van der Rohe, and in 1930 took over the direction of the Bauhaus school at Dessau. That was just in time for the Nazis to denounce the Bauhaus as “degenerate” and for Mies to emigrate to the USA where he became dean of the School of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology. IIT boasts a clutch of Mies buildings, mostly in his classic steel and glass curtain wall style, and the overall effect is striking. His masterpiece there is the Crown Hall, which houses the School of Architecture and proves conclusively that his style does not need height to establish design integrity. Quite the contrary. It is a gorgeous workspace. But if you want height, New York’s Seagram Building will suffice. Mies is credited with other architectural innovations, the most unlikely being the ranch house, but he may have loved bridges best of all. ©

[Stanley]

All right you guys. Let me blow my stack first, then you can blow yours. Gus Busch at an A-B board meeting.

We pay our leaders so much these days (relative to their followers) that we are bound to say they are worth it. If they aren’t, think how foolish we will all look, one day, for paying such high sales taxes every time we buy their products and services. The argument about worth, and how it might be measured, needs to be more fully aired than as yet it has been. But a larger-than-life leader who had an immense impact on his firm and his industry was St. Louis’s own August Anheuser Busch, Jr., born here on March 28, 1899. Called Gussie by people who did not know him and Gus by those who did, Busch played well his minor roles in Anheuser-Busch until, in 1934, on his father’s death, he became head of the brewery division. He had already, however, displayed his trademark showmanship when, at the end of Prohibition in 1933, he had begged, borrowed or stolen a team and a large brewery wagon to deliver a case of Budweiser to “Franklin D. Roosevelt, The White House, Pennsylvania Avenue.” The Clydesdales became a logo item and the firm never looked back, so when brother Adolphus died in 1946, Gus’s 12% share of stock and his track record made him the only choice as President. When he retired in 1975 his company was on its way to leading its league, as were the St. Louis Cardinals, purchased by Gus with cash (company money, I think, in 1953) for $7.8 million. They did OK, too.

[Stanley]

It must be nice to ride through these fields upon the horse of true mathematics while the rest of us have to make our way laboriously on foot. Einstein to Levi-Civita, ca. 1917.

Had I paid attention to my math professor, the eccentric, kindly Smbat Abian, I might better understand the relationship between advances in mathematics and in the sciences. As it is, I am never sure whether scientific necessity calls forth “new” math or mathematical advance allows scientific breakthroughs. Sometimes, as with Isaac Newton, it is all tied up in one mind (in his case, calculus, gravity, and mass in motion), which makes the problem even knottier. Tullio Levi-Civita, born in Padua on March 29, 1873, did me a conceptual favor by doing the math for a big scientific breakthrough to be engineered 15 years later by someone else. Of a prominent Jewish family, Levi-Civita was the pupil and protégé of the intensely Catholic Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro who had invented tensor calculus. Levi-Civita later worked with Ricci-Curbastro to produce an important text (in French) on various applications of differential calculus, and this in turn was used by Albert Einstein to develop his theory of relativity. A cordial correspondence followed, and Levi-Civita later worked with Einstein in Princeton. Well-liked and widely respected in his lifetime as a brilliant mind and a generous colleague, Levi-Civita was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1930 and of the Royal Society of Scotland in the same year. The Italian race laws (1938) barred him from further work in his own country, and he died alone in Rome in 1941. As for me, I got Ds from Professor Abian, unparalleled acts of mathematical charity in successive semesters. ©

[Stanley]

The self . . . is unique . . . I am I and you are you [and] no one, however similar, can take the place of you or me.² Mary Calkins

We forget our past struggles for equality so readily that one almost thinks we no longer want to achieve it. Today it’s incredible that Harvard would not grant PhDs to women until well into my lifetime, and that as recently as 1970 a Harvard dean (opposing admitting more women to Radcliffe) spoke of “well educated, but relatively dull housewives [who] are not . . . going to stop getting married or having children. They will fail in their role as women if they do.” Of course there was Radcliffe, but that was where Mary Calkins refused to land. Born on March 30, 1863, Calkins studied the classics brilliantly at Smith and Wellesley and then knocked on Harvard’s door (to study psychology) only to find it securely locked. With the support of William James and the philosopher Josiah Royce she was allowed to join James’s seminar but not as a registered student. Though unregistered, Mary made many advances in James’s lab and in psychological thought, finally in 1895 finishing the requirements for the PhD with (in James’s words) “the most brilliant examination for the PhD we have had at Harvard.” But the Harvard Corporation and President Eliot overruled the departments of Philosophy and Psychology. In 1902, when Radcliffe was finally allowed to offer the PhD, Calkins was offered one but refused it. So a huzzah for Ms. Mary Whiton Calkins, distinguished scholar, first woman president of the American Psychological Association AND of the American Philosophical Association, and failed Harvard PhD. Or, rather, “foiled.”©

[Stanley]

The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them. Sir Lawrence Bragg.

In science progress often requires scientists to cross disciplinary boundaries, whether to gain perspective on their own problem or sometimes just to poach from elsewhere that critical bit of information, that one experimental result, that unlocks a mystery in their own field. That brings up Lawrence Bragg, whose pioneer work in physics in due course unlocked one of the great mysteries of biology. Born in Adelaide, Australia, on March 31, 1890, Bragg was an early beneficiary of x-ray technology. He broke his arm in a tricycling accident (he was only 5) and his father used x-rays to map the break and recommend the therapy. Later, Lawrence and his father, William, would both move on to Cambridge University in England where their pioneering work in x-ray crystallography would bring them both the Nobel Prize in 1915, making them (still) the only father-son team to win the prize and Lawrence (still) the youngest-ever Nobelist. But his story wasn’t over yet, for Lawrence would win citations and a knighthood for applying his x-ray knowledge to military matters in both World Wars, and then (in 1946) be asked to head up Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratories, where his avuncular and open leadership encouraged two young Turks, Francis Crick and Jim Watson, to apply crystallography techniques to mapping the “genetic material”, the incredibly complex but still crystalline protein we know now as DNA. Another Nobel resulted, but this time in Biology, and Bragg did not share this one.

[Stanley]

Lord, what fools these mortals be. Puck, in A Midsummer-Night's Dream.

April Fools’ Day always calls to mind an ill-judged trick I played on my father in about 1954, filling the sugar bowl with salt. It worked in the limited sense that dad put salt on his cereal and then started eating, whereupon it became obvious that mine had not been a good idea. However, most cultures have some sort of Fools’ Day. In France it’s called “April Fish,” something to do with Gallic humor, and in Scotland it’s Gowkie (“Cuckoo”) Day. It used to be thought that Chaucer’s “Nun’s Priest’s Tale” was an extended April Fool’s joke but that was based on a misreading of Chaucer’s English, which he didn’t know how to write anyway, more fool he. Some think April Fools goes all the way back to “misrule” days in the Middle Ages, and I can testify that at Greenwood Grade School, Des Moines, Iowa, we had a “Backwards Day” in which “misrule” played a part, but apparently April Fools’ has a more recent origin, sometime in the early modern period. It was mentioned by John Aubrey, circa 1690, as a “new” custom, and since he was an antiquary he must have known what was new. English newspapers and broadcasters have made quite a thing of it since about 1950. The normally sober BBC reported a “Record Spaghetti Harvest” on April 1, 1957, in Switzerland no less, and the occasionally playful Guardian newspaper did a great ‘front page’ spoof on postmodernism on April 1, 1987, in which my favorite headline was “Reagan Tax Plan at Odds with Divine Spirit Alleges William Blake.” And so say all of us April fools!! ©

[Stanley]

When the artist finds himself he is lost. Max Ernst.

Europe in the period from about 1880 to 1930 saw an amazing eruption of intellectual and artistic vigor, wonderfully chronicled by William Everdell’s The First Moderns (Chicago, 1997) and, before that, by H. Stuart Hughes’s Consciousness and Society (Cambridge, 1958). In psychology (and psychoanalysis), mathematics, physics, and chemistry, new worlds scarce dreamed of came swimming fully formed into our field of vision, and for those artists who tried (so to speak) to get it all down on canvas it was an overpowering experience. New trends in art rose up quickly and sometimes faded faster, the whole business punctuated (and in some ways intensified) by the continental bloodbath that was World War I. Trying to classify these modernist paintings today can be a strain, for between Dadaism, Surrealism, Expressionism, and Abstract Expressionism it is hard to distinguish. Among the most fertile (some might say febrile) artists of this creative explosion was Max Ernst, born near Cologne on April 2, 1891, and destined against the odds to live a very long life, to master several styles, to escape Hitler, and (briefly) to marry Peggy Guggenheim. Perhaps at the center of his art was his discovery of the unconscious, thanks both to Freud and some youthful attempts to paint portraits of the insane. His works are everywhere, and you can see one of the odder pieces in the St. Louis Art Museum, “Long Live Love or Charming Country” (1923). When you figure which school it belongs to, let me know. ©

[Stanley]

The 20th century must be to a significant degree the American century. Henry Luce.

In a more optimistic time, the 20th century was called “The American Century.” By a quirk of circumstance, today is the birth anniversary of the coiner of that phrase and of the mid-century diplomatic coup that almost made it come true. Henry R. Luce was born on April 3, 1898, in Tengchow, China, where pa was a Presbyterian missionary who possessed a reasonable amount of private wealth and a wealthy benefactor named Mrs. Cyrus McCormick. Between them they sent Henry to Hotchkiss and then to Yale, where he was a brilliant student and developed a taste for journalism. After an interval of cub reporting, Henry and a Yale friend announced a newsmag, Time, which promised to “give both sides but clearly indicate which side it believes to have the stronger position.” Elsewhere, they pledged a “prejudice against the rising cost of government; faith in the things which money cannot buy; [and] a respect for the old.” They sold $86,000 in stock (about $1.2 million today), launched Time in 1923, and it prospered despite a prose style that drew hilarious satires and drove my dad to distraction. Then, on April 3, 1948, President Harry Truman signed into law the Marshall Plan, a hard-headed stroke of genius that revived European democracies, resurrected the German economy, and firmly established American hegemony in the west. All for only $148 billion in today’s $$$. Doing the same after the collapse of communism in 1989 would have saved us a whole lot of trouble, but we needed to prove that countries, like people, can’t be smart all the time. ©

[Stanley]

I proceed, gentlemen, to call your attention to the present state of Insane Persons confined within this Commonwealth. Dorothea Dix, 1841.

To experience as a child both grinding poverty and the comforts of wealth could give a person cause for reflection. Dorothea Dix, born on April 4, 1802, moved quickly from reflection to action to become a notable pioneer of social reform. Her father Joseph seems to have been a rebel without a cause, and though of good family became an intinerant laborer and an abusive, drunken parent. Dorothea stood it for 12 years (what else can a child do?) and then ran off to her wealthy grandmother’s home in Boston. There she acquired a good education which included a sense of the strengths a life of comfort could bring a person, began writing (her Conversations on Common Things went through 60 editions between 1822 and 1860), founded a school, and began to take in children whose parents could not pay. A sojourn with English Quakers, in Liverpool, brought her into contact with English social reform and gave her an abiding interest in the treatment of the indigent insane. She returned to Boston to take up the cudgels and beat reform out of the state legislature. By 1860, Miss Dix had visited nearly every state in the land (the North Carolina hospital for the insane, 1853, was named for her) and at least forced them to explain their treatment of the insane. A constitutional rebuff from President Franklin Pierce made her a devoted Republican and in 1861 Abe Lincoln appointed Dorothea Dix as Superintendant of Army Nurses. Her reform efforts continued after the war. In 1887 Dorothea Dix joined a host of other famous New Englanders in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge. ©

[Stanley]

Cast down your buckets where you are. Booker T. Washington's Atlanta Compromise Speech, 1895.

In 2015, we have a president of African descent. In October 1901 tens of thousands of white Americans, north and south, expressed outrage when they learned that on the night of October 16, Dr. Booker T. Washington has been an honored guest, at dinner, in President Theodore Roosevelt’s White House. The incident was played up in Washington’s obit in the New York Times (November 15, 1916), which noted that most of the criticism fell on Roosevelt, but the “incident served also to injure Dr. Washington’s work in some parts of the South.” So on Booker Washington’s “official” birthday, we can reflect that at least some progress has been made, but that some hasn’t. Washington had an official birthday because he was born a slave, in April 1858, on the Burrows plantation in Virginia, and no one recorded the date for the little black boy. After the Civil War, Washington was befriended by a northern woman, Viola Ruffner, who saw in him a lad ready to learn, and so he did learn, very quickly. In 1871, aged 13, he began attending the Hampton Institute, and by 1881 he had founded the Tuskegee Institute, in Alabama, with a state grant of $2000 per year, a paltry sum we might say. Yet at its 25th anniversary, Tuskegee boasted 25000 acres of land (granted by the US Congress), 83 buildings, and $1.25 million in endowment funds. Of course Dr. Washington accomplished a great deal more than that, including that dinner at the White House, but for a little boy born a slave the Tuskegee Institute was, indeed, a good work. ©

[Stanley]

Either we shall be free or we shall be nothing. Pasquale di Paoli, 1768.

What do Steuben (Maine), Steubenville (Ohio), Kossuth County and Elkader (Iowa), Lafayette (Missouri and too many other states to list), Wilkes-Barré (Pennsylvania) and Wilkes County (Georgia), Garibaldi (Oregon), Kosciusko and Rienzi (Mississippi), Ypsilanti (Michigan), and Pulaski (six states) have in common? Well of course they are all place names, but all these places were named after European (and one Arab: Elkader) revolutionaries and radicals. Some (e.g. Baron von Steuben) came over to assist the American Revolution, but most fomented revolutionary unrest in their own countries. Another such place is Paoli, Pennsylvania, which is not directly named after Filippo Antonio Pasquale di Paoli (born April 6, 1725) but was named after “General Paoli’s Tavern,” where before our own Revolution the Sons of Liberty and another foreign radical, Tom Paine, used to gather to toast both the health of “The General of the Corsicans” (that was Paoli) and the confusion of George III (who was not a European radical). Paquale di Paoli, whose father had earlier commanded Corsican rebels against Genoese rule, led the Corsican revolution against the French annexation of 1768 and would later cause Napoléon (another Corsican) a good deal of trouble over the same issue. In the USA, in the days when our heroes were revolutionaries, Paoli was therefore a hero. You will find Paolis also in Indiana, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, and Colorado, each probably a hotbed of radicalism. ©

[Stanley]

I will invest my money in people. W. K. Kellogg.

The period 1830 to 1860 was our “age of reform” during which many Americans decided that the world—human society in particular—needed to be changed, for the better, and set about doing it. Abolition of slavery became the most important of these movements, so reform never took off in the South, but abolitionism’s stark morality should not hide the luxuriant variety of reform. Often impelled by religious motives, reformers aimed to eradicate illiteracy, alcohol, crime, bank fraud, poverty, and (while all this destruction was going on) to build clean water and sewage systems. Some went further and designed perfect societies, as at Brook Farm, New Harmony and, arguably, Nauvoo and Salt Lake. One of the more interesting reforms was dietary. The Rev’d Sylvester Graham’s (1794-1851) Graham flour would make you into a better human being and lives on as Graham Crackers. The most successful, though, was a late-comer, Will Keith Kellogg, born April 7, 1860, a Seventh-Day Adventist whose reform (a combination spa and religious retreat) included heavy ingestion of rolled and baked flakes of whole grain. They probably looked a lot like Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, albeit without the sugar. The flakes would cure whatever ailed you, and the Kellogg Sanatarium flourished. An idealist, Kellogg didn’t take out a patent until one C. W. Post, a patient of his, stole the idea. (Even during the Age of Reform there were serpents in the garden.) Kellogg lived a very long life and, ever the idealist, gave away most of his fortune to establish one of our billion-dollar foundations.©

[Stanley]

Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One¹s Own, 1929.

It is interesting to note that of the 23 Pulitzer Prizes for fiction awarded before I was born, over half (12) went to women writers. (The last 23, as of 2013, have gone to 7 women and 16 men.) No Pulitzer winner necessarily becomes a household name, but those 12 pioneers included Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Edna Ferber, Pearl Buck, Margaret Mitchell, and Ellen Glasgow. One of the lesser-known female Pulitzers was Margaret Ayer Barnes, who won in 1931 with Years of Grace, her first novel. She also wrote plays, one (Dishonored Lady) never staged and still tied up in a lawsuit with MGM (who pirated it for a finished but also never-yet-seen movie). But Margaret Ayer Barnes is even more interesting than that. Born on April 8, 1886, into a prosperous, liberal Chicago family, she graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1907 and married a Chicago boy, Cecil Barnes, an “incense-swinging Episcopalian” lawyer who got her with 3 children (one would become a famous architect) but also encouraged her to strike out on her own, first as Bryn Mawr’s alumnae director and then as the head of the college’s Summer School for Women Workers in Industry, which did exactly what its title said. Severe injuries (a car accident in France) in 1926 cut that life short and she turned to writing, first a Broadway adaptation of Wharton’s Age of Innocence and then her own plays, short fiction and novels. Margaret Barnes, who died in 1967, was someone we should perhaps know better. ©

[Stanley]

Be prepared to hold your liquor pretty well, don't write naughty words on walls if you can't spell. A couplet from ³Be Prepared, ² by Tom Lehrer.

I deprecate our culture’s fascination with ranking everything (as in our “5 Most Savage Annelid Worms”), but if we were to list, say, the 100 funniest Americans. Mr. Tom Lehrer would have to come somewhere in my top half. He didn’t start out that way, another funny thing about him, but rather as a bright Jewish kid from Manhattan, born on April 9, 1928, and destined for the Horace Mann School, Harvard College, California-Santa Cruz, and a frequently-interrupted career as a mathematician. He graduated from Harvard Phi Beta Kappa in math, and an MA at an alarmingly early age (19). But he had already started writing, and playing, comic songs, for instance (1945) the classic “Fight Fiercely, Harvard” which carried the immortal line “demonstrate to them our skill.” He knocked around Cambridge, in Harvard’s PhD program and teaching there and at MIT, then an undistinguished stint in the army, and back to Harvard, but all this while songs, songs, songs. It’s hard to convey their flavor, but best titles included “The Vatican Rag,” “Pollution,” “National Brotherhood Week,” “So Long, Mom (I’m Off to Drop the Bomb),” and the gruesome “I Hold Your Hand in Mine.” My personal favorite came just as I dropped out of the Boy Scouts (forever), “Be Prepared,” a rollicking send-up of all things scouting. Lehrer is rediscovered every 15 years and might just be due for another comeback. Catch him if you can; he keeps rolling along, oblivious to bad reviews, loyal to his fans, angry at yet amused by his world. ©

[Stanley]

Our conscience declared against the honest workman¹s becoming a pauper, but our eyes told us that he very often did. Frances Perkins.

Frances Perkins was (until 2011) claimed by the state of Maine (her parents’ home), but she was born in Boston on April 10, 1880. She was Fannie at first but she became an Episcopalian in 1905 and switched to Frances, perhaps owing to Anglican sensitivities. Frances studied Physics at Mount Holyoke (BA, 1902), Political Science at Columbia (MA, 1912) and Economics at Penn, and meanwhile was radicalized by witnessing the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911. She became active in drafting regulatory and protective legislation for workers and consumers, and eventually came to the notice of New York’s new (1929) Governor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who created the state Department of Labor and put Frances Perkins in charge of it. When FDR moved to DC in 1933, he took Frances with him and made her the first female cabinet secretary (of Labor of course) in American history, where she conducted herself with dignity, passion, and effect for over 12 years, especially noted for her part in establishing workers’ rights to organize in unions and in creating Social Security and the Civilian Conservation Corps. In 2011, Maine’s Republican governor (Paul LePage) ordered a mural depicting Frances’s role removed from the Maine Department of Labor and also changed the name of the Frances Perkins Conference Room. These were cited as reminiscent of communist propaganda and North Korean brainwashing, in view of which one is forced to conclude that in today’s political climate it isn’t easy to be eccentric. ©

[Stanley]

If this boy passes . . . he will be admitted; and if the white students choose to withdraw, all the income of the college will be devoted to his education. Everett on admitting Harvard's first black student.

On 11th April 2014 we remember the other guy at Gettysburg, born this day in 1794, Edward Everett. He made the big speech, the main address at the dedication of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg. Everett researched the Gettysburg fight and the history of every unit in it, wrote his speech according to every known rule of rhetoric, spoke eloquently for over two hours without notes, and then sat down to be upstaged by Abraham Lincoln who composed his “few appropriate remarks” on the back of an (apocryphal) envelope and spoke for two minutes. It was as symbolic a moment for American culture as the battle had been the climacteric of the American Civil War. Everett was an aristocrat: born to the Boston purple, valedictorian of his class at Harvard (at 17!), married to a Mayflower descendant, Massachusetts governor, representative and senator, Harvard professor, ambassador to Britain, then Harvard President, and the most famous orator of the time. Lincoln cut a contrasting figure on almost every point: born poor and self-educated, a man of little polish and famously (and self-deprecatingly) homely. Yet, and rightly, it is Lincoln’s speech we remember and now call “the Gettysburg Address.” Everett himself had the good sense to understand what happened. The next day he wrote Lincoln to say he would be “glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes.” Merely polite? Yes, but remember that good judgment is one of the fruits of a good education. ©

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The time will come when Winter will ask you what you were doing all Summer. Henry Clay.

Historians always warn that current categories of “liberal” and “conservative” are dangerous to transpose into the past. An almost perfect example is found in Henry Clay. Born in Virginia during the Revolution (April 12, 1777), Clay may have imbibed anti-slavery views from his cousin Cassius M. Clay and his legal mentor George Wythe. In any case, Clay was admitted to the bar in 1797, moved to Lexington, KY, established a plantation (with 60 slaves), and settled down to a career that would bring him every political reward except the presidency.. He became the youngest-ever US Senator in 1806 (illegally young) and would later return to Washington as Speaker of the House, four times presidential candidate (1824, 1832, 1840, and 1844), and (from 1831) one of our great senators. No successful politician is consistent over such a long career (democracy thrives on flip-floppers), but in general Clay advocated government development of the economy through taxation, public investment, and control of banking and currency; opposed rapid western expansion (and the war with Mexico); and worked for the gradual end of slavery (he helped to found the Colonization Society in 1816). He also favored the establishment of a national university. Yet if one were forced to pigeonhole the man, one would call him a “conservative”. Probably Senator Rand Paul (R., KY) would not. Quite apart from anything else, Clay came to stand for compromise, not a leading value among today’s “conservatives.” ©

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[This play will] securely lodge in a corner of your mind for as long as you live. From a review of Godot¹s first London performance, 1955.

It is said (distressingly often?) that all creative art is a protest against death, and if the case is to be made that that is indeed so then Samuel Beckett must be in Exhibit A. His plays and novels (which won him the Nobel in 1969) return repeatedly to the puzzle implicit in such statements (“why bother?,” and offer a kind of solution. The most famous of all these, and perhaps the most characteristic, was the play Waiting for Godot (1953), which consists mainly of two low-lifes waiting for a salvation (which never comes) while they exchange stories and more or less idle thoughts and encounter two even odder characters, neither of which is Godot. When asked by one of his directors “who is Godot?” Beckett answered “If I knew I would have said so.” But he seems to me strikingly positive, in a sort of existentialist way, telling us to face the music and get on with it. As indeed Beckett got on with his life. Born in Ireland on Friday, April 13, 1906, Beckett majored in French and Italian at Trinity, and though he returned to Trinity to teach for a time, he soon moved permanently to France where among other things he worked for Joyce, got stabbed, married his savior (a pianist named Suzanne found him bleeding in an alley), and with Suzanne fought bravely in La Résistance against the German occupation. He then turned to drama and with Godot and other plays effected a revolution in the theatre that has been celebrated again and again. See it when you can, then see it again. ©

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I AM A VERY LUCKY PERSON, AND THE HARDER I WORK THE LUCKIER I SEEM TO BE. ALAN MACDIARMID.

Pardon me while I remember my chemistry prof, Alan MacDiarmid, born on April 14, 1927 in New Zealand. That island nation hasn’t had many Nobelists, a fact MacDiarmid referred to in his lectures. Only Ernest Rutherford had won one (1908, in Physics), and MacDiarmid hoped it had to do with the water, as he had been brought up near the Rutherford farm. Alan MacDiarmid was educated at Victoria University in NZ, then Wisconsin (on a Fulbright), then Cambridge, earning PhDs (two of them!!) in 1953 and 1955. He taught briefly in Scotland and then in 1957, aged 30, took a job at Penn where he had the misfortune to teach me (in 1962-63 just before his promotion to full professor). We all thought he was a brilliant chemist, but we knew he was a hugely entertaining teacher for whom lectures were command performances, for instance setting off spectacular reactions at speed, all the while challenging his audience to explain (from the color, the smell, the heat, or the smoke) what was happening. His assistants were marvels of endurance. More than that: in the second semester his grad student instructor fell ill, and so the student would get the assistantship money, MacDiarmid himself taught my lab section. My lab final was a disaster, but he read my whole report, figured out that I had made “only” one mistake, and awarded me a B+ for the course. Meanwhile, MacDiarmid worked much more productively on conductive polymers, for which (with two collaborators) he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2000. It must have been the water.©

[Stanley]

Art is not life, nor a reproduction of life, but a representation carried out within the specific terms . . . and limitations of the particular art used. Thomas Hart Benton.

Today (and in the same breath!!) we celebrate Missouri and Art by noting the birthday anniversary (the 125th) of Thomas Hart Benton, born in Neosho on 15th April 1889, and destined to become as closely associated with this state as his famous great uncle, Senator Thomas Hart (“Old Bullion”) Benton. Our Benton, the artist, was one of the more important regionalists who, like Grant Wood in Iowa, created a place for the ordinary and the everyday in our national artistic consciousness. Benton’s most famous works are the murals at the state capitol in Jefferson City completed during the 1930s, which eloquently convey his regionalist and “primitive” style. But do not see Benton as an artistic hayseed. He was also a noted teacher, and among his more unlikely students were the abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock and the film-maker Dennis Hopper. I give you Benton’s “Plowing It Under” (1939) as a fine example of his vision. ©

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And let thy feet/millenniums hence/be set in midst of knowledge. From Tennyson's The Two Voices, inscribed in the floor of the British Museum

One of the curious things about Hans Sloane was his given name, unusual for Scots-Irishmen of his time, but it’s not as important as his curiosities, for he became the greatest collector of his age. Born on April 16, 1660, in County Down, Sloane began collecting early and continued it as a medical student in London and Holland and then as Secretary to the Duke of Albemarle, royal governor of Jamaica. Besides collecting (and cataloging) 800 Jamaican plants, Sloane acquired a well-placed wife (widow of a Jamaica planter and daughter of a London alderman). He parleyed her, his Dutch medical degree, his collections, and his elections to the Royal Society and the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons into a fashionable medical practice (his patients included three English sovereigns), astute investments in London real estate, and a baronetcy. Soon he was rich enough to buy scientific and manuscript collections as well as collect himself, and he devoted his life to it. Having married off his daughters advantageously, his last will and testament concentrated on gifts to the nation. If the nation would cough up £20,000 for his daughters, he would donate all his collections and one of his best properties to the public. So in 1753, for this bargain-basement sum of about £4 million, in today’s £££, Britain got the basic collections of the British Museum and the Chelsea Physick Garden, the two quite wonderfully magnificent bequests of Sir Hans Sloane, FRS.©

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A man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason. J. P. Morgan.

Are you known by the friends you keep or by the enemies you make? By the second test, late 19th-century America had few better-known men than John Pierpont Morgan. Born—like most 19th-century titans of industry—into comfortable circumstances on April 17, 1837, Morgan attended private schools in Connecticut and Switzerland before obtaining a degree in Art History from Göttingen in Germany. He then entered one of his father’s partnerships in London before returning to New York banking where, among other Civil War triumphs, he bought defective rifles from an army arsenal and sold them, at a 700% profit, to another army unit. After his father’s death in 1890, J. P. stood at the center of a series of interlocking directorates that controlled enough liquid capital that, in the depression of 1893, he could engineer a coup which enabled the US to stay on the gold standard while he made nice profits selling gold to the government. Later, in 1907, he may have saved the country from another depression by buying stocks at crucial moments. He’s most famous for engineering corporate mergers, though, 42 of them between 1890 and 1913, especially the massive US Steel merger of 1900. These brought economies of scale along with market control. Morgan was an unapologetic defender of consolidation for capital and (usually) an opponent of workers’ rights to organize. As a bogeyman, Morgan helped to shape the Progressive Movement, but he was never defeated by it. ©

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Now I am ready to move on to the next big idea. Maurice Goldhaber, circa 1938.

Foundational physics experiments often seem fiendishly expensive, e.g. at the 27-kilometer CERN accelerator ring in Switzerland. Others are just fiendishly clever. One of the latter was devised by Maurice Goldhaber who, puzzling over some odd data concerning neutrinos, decided to settle the question of which way the little devils rotate. Possibly because he had helped discover and weigh them, at Cambridge, in 1938, he was able (at Brookhaven, Long Island, twenty years later) to devise a table-top contraption that used Gamma rays to infer what the neutrinos were doing, and in which direction they were doing it. Since he’d done so much basic research on particle physics one would have thought the Nobel would be his, sooner or later, but Maurice Goldhaber had to content himself with leading a laboratory team (at Brookhaven) that copped three Nobels, marrying an eminent nuclear physicist (Gertrude Scharff), producing a son who was a big cheese in Physics at Stony Brook, and a grandson who is a Physics professor at Stanford. His great-grandchildren have yet to decide which way they are going to rotate. And, oh yes, Maurice Goldhaber worked in his lab well into his 90s and lived to be 100. So he also put one over on Adolf Hitler. Born in Lemberg, Austria on April 18, 1911, and coming of age in the Third Reich, Maurice Goldhaber died at peace in East Setauket, NY, on May 16, 2011.

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When composition is impossible and reading is not enough, dictionaries are excellent for distraction. Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

April 19, 2014 is a great day for learning new words and their old meanings, for it is the 86th birthday of the Oxford English Dictionary, a lexicon (look it up) which gives you the etymology (look it up) of English words excluding only words that had become “Obs.” (look it up) by 1150 AD. It also provides usages through the ages, so you can learn that common words like “wonderful” (look it up) likely meant something different to Shakespeare and, for that matter, to the writers/ translators of the King James Bible. The Oxford English Dictionary was first conceived in the 1850s at meetings of the Philological (look it up) Society of London among three men who formed themselves into an “Unregistered Words Committee.” Soon they had a massive project on their hands, one that engaged many eccentrics (none more eccentric than the lunatic murderer W. C. Minor, a Yale graduate then serving a life sentence in England’s notorious Broadmoor Hospital for the Criminally Insane). It soon became apparent that it would be too big to publish all at once and so it came out in fascicles (look it up), the first of which was published in 1884 (by the Oxford University Press) and the last of which, as I say, came out on this day in 1928. Since then the “OED” has gone through several editions and many, many “supplements.” It is now an institution. If you are a member of the St. Louis County Library you can access it on the internet, or the Honors College has the full 17 volume “OED” in the College Library. Start today. It will provide you with a lifetime of enlightenment and/or entertainment, if only you let your motto ever be: “Look It Up.”