BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

Laughter is the universal language. It is the sweetest sound in the whole world. Harold Lloyd.

April 20, 2014 is good for a laugh, as it’s the birth anniversary (20th April 1893) of Harold Clayton Lloyd, a prolific maker of (and actor in) silent films. His career had a slightly comedic start, in that it was financed by his father’s successful lawsuit (for the then princely sum of $6,000, or about $150,000 in today’s $$$) for being run over by a beer truck in Omaha, and a spectacularly comedic apogee (twelve feature films and dozens of ‘shorts’ in the 1920s, which grossed more $$ than Charlie Chaplin’s). Born in Borchard, Nebraska, of parents who soon divorced, Lloyd moved with his injured but enriched father to San Diego, where he entered the School of Dramatic Art in 1912. By 1915, Lloyd had formed a partnership with Hal Roach, and their company took off with comic features like Grandma’s Boy (1921) and Safety Last (1923). Lloyd formed his own company in 1924 and continued to make hit films, but the Depression and the Talkie together removed Lloyd from the top rank of movie comics. Chaplin’s persona seemed better suited to the new era. However, Lloyd continued to his death in 1971 as an active elder statesman of the film industry, and was important in developing the careers of many young actors, notably Jack Lemmon. In the 1990s, many of his films were digitally remastered by the British firm Thames Television, and are now often shown on Turner Classic Movies. Happy Birthday, Harold Lloyd.

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As the son of a divorce barrister, I was raised, educated, and clothed entirely on the proceeds of adultery. John Mortimer

To write well about the law is rare; to write well and funnily takes us into the hens’ teeth category. John Mortimer, born April 21, 1923, did both. He early demonstrated other eccentricities, e.g. joining the Communist Party while at a very posh private school. He had also to negotiate a blind father, and “negotiate” is the word because the family never acknowledged the old man’s blindness. This was recounted in A Voyage Around My Father (1963), not his first writing success. Meanwhile, Mortimer fashioned a successful law career, especially well known for his work in criminal law and in cases involving free speech. Among others, he won cases involving Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn (1968), the Oz “conspiracy” (1971), and the Sex Pistols’ first album (1977). His defense of Gay News’s publication of “The Love that Dares to Speak Its Name” was unsuccessful, but the decision was overturned on appeal. He is best known, however, for his TV series “Rumpole of the Bailey” (1975 et seq) in which Horace Rumpole, an irascible, aging criminal lawyer wins important points in law (usually representing petty scoundrels), important points in life (against his censorious wife Hilda, “She Who Must Be Obeyed”), and important professional points (against his fellow barristers who are embarrassed by his personal foibles). If you can’t see any Rumpole episodes, fear not, for most are available in (delightful) short-story form (18 volumes!!!), including three Rumpole Omnibuses. ©

[Stanley]

In Praise of Imperfection. The title of Rita Levi-Montalcini¹s 1988 autobiography.

St. Louis cannot claim many Nobel prizes, and at least one of them (1986, for medicine) belongs to a foreigner, Rita Levi-Montalcini. However, she did most of her Nobel work at Washington University, 1946-1962. But she had to get born first, and that happened in Turin, Italy, on April 22, 1909, into an exceptionally happy, though very patriarchal, family. Early experience seems to have made her into a questing, curious individual, an unmarried woman (“I was not cut out to be a wife”), and a thoroughgoing atheist. Despite these rebellions, her family supported her bravely through the Mussolini years, when (as a Jew) she lost her job, fled Turin, and had to carry on her research (on nerve tissues in chicken embryos) in a corner of her and her sisters’ bedroom. One thinks it must have niffed to high heaven. Despite such primitive lab conditions, it was exciting research and with the end of the war it won her an invitation to Washington University where she worked with Stanley Cohen to isolate NGF (nerve growth factor) in a particularly ingenious way (having discovered that cancer cells stimulate NGF). It was this work that won her (and Cohen) the Nobel. She returned to Italy in the 1960s, where perhaps despite her left-wing politics and irreligion she was elected to the Vatican Academy of Sciences in 1974. She was appointed to the Italian Senate in 2001, continued to work in her lab, and published her last scientific paper in 2008, aged 99. Rita Levi-Montalcini died, aged 103, in December 2012 at home, in Rome. ©

[Stanley]

There Shakespeare, on whose forehead climb The crowns o' the world; oh, eyes sublime, With tears and laughter for all time. Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Brevity in writing is always a virtue but sometimes misses the point. For instance, in the New York Times’ list of “Historic Birthdays” for April 23rd, in which you will find William Penn (1621), Vladimir Nabokov (1899), and Max Planck (1858), you can also learn that William Shakespeare (April 23, 1564) was an “English poet and dramatist.” Well, yes, but maybe they could say just a bit more, as for instance “rather good with words” or “actor, poet, and author of several notable dramas” or “surprisingly talented son of an obscure glove maker” or “nouveaux riche mcmansion owner” or “not entirely faithful husband of Anne Hathaway.” Any of these and many more would do good service in attempting to describe one of the more surprising lives in human history. The difficulty of accepting that a relatively ill-educated, humble young man could, by the age of 30, set London (and, later, the world) on its collective ear (and gain fame enough to attract scurrilous attacks from rivals of better birth) has led to a zillion theories about “who (actually) wrote Shakespeare’s plays.” Give it up!!! Poor people can learn how to write, and rather well. Will Shakespeare was one of them. Meanwhile, feast your eyes (and ears, and mind) on Sonnet 18 and then read more of the Bard of Avon. ©



Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date,
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimmed.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

[Stanley]

If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other. All the King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren.

History and fiction might seem opposites, but insofar as both attempt to construct believable, meaningful narratives they have a potentially fruitful relationship. Nowhere is that more true than in fictions and histories of the American South. Indeed, we could call Mississippi novelist William Faulkner the greatest of southern historians. And if we can do that, then surely Robert Penn Warren was another wonderfully perceptive historian of the American South. Born on April 24, 1905, in Guthrie, KY, Warren went to Vanderbilt to study engineering but fell in among the likes of John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate and whole-heartedly embraced their mission to use literature to open for us all the mysteries of the South. Before long Warren had written four fine historical novels and a long narrative poem, all on southern themes, e.g. racial conflicts, rural poverty, and white populism. Without doubt, Warren’s finest historical fiction was All the King’s Men, which won the Pulitzer in 1947, became an Academy Award movie (1949), and vaulted him into the first rank of American novelists. It was a thinly-veiled story of Huey Long, and thus quite contemporary, but it rested on an entire revision of southern history. To understand that revision, read C. Vann Woodward’s Origins of the New South (1951), in which Woodward (yet another southerner) transformed Warren’s (and Faulkner’s) literary and mythic fictions into a compelling historical analysis of what remains, for good and for ill, our most distinctive region.

[Stanley]

Did I do all right? Ella Fitzgerald.

When a poor girl from a broken home makes good, we rightly celebrate, but should not forget that it doesn’t usually happen. Ella Fitzgerald’s story is, then, an absolute wonder. Born on April 25, 1917, in Newport News, Virginia, Ella moved with her mother and step-father to Yonkers, NY. There a comfortable existence turned sour when her mom died, and Ella spent some time on the streets, in the numbers game, and in a state orphanage. But she had a voice, and when it was noticed (at the Apollo, the Savoy, and the Harlem Opera House), she began to develop her marvelous ability to interpret great songs and make them her own. But it’s good to reflect that her big break came with the success of “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” (1938), which she cowrote. In the next year she was on the college and concert circuit with “Ella and Her Famous Orchestra,” a three-year gig, and then came collaborations with, among others, Dizzy Gillespie. Her business partnership with Norman Granz, meanwhile, led to the creation of Verve Records and her most characteristic recordings, the “Songbooks” which started with Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, and George Gershwin. But albums were not as many as might have been, for Ella loved live audiences and toured most of the year, every year, until age slowed her down in 1990. She left us with enough on record to remember a fabulous range, a million tones, and a lady who loved her audiences.

[Stanley]

Olmsted wasn't creating pretty, green spaces. He was democratizing nature. An internet assessment of F. L. Olmsted.

April 26, 2014 is the 192nd anniversary of the birth of Frederick Law Olmsted, born in Hartford, CT, on this day in 1822 and destined to become one of the founders of the American (and European) green spaces movement. But before that he won fame as a young journalist who traveled through the American south and gave an astute and damning account of its slave society in several volumes which helped to galvanize northern opinion at the start of the Civil War about slavery’s immorality and inefficiency, and about the surprising (given the wealth of the planter class) backwardness of the southern states. Olmsted then became an important leader of relief efforts (for wounded soldiers and freed slaves) during the war. Not content with that, he helped to found The Nation magazine in 1865 and became a noted political reformer. But Olmsted is best remembered today as a visionary landscape architect who touted the then radical notion that parks should be public, free, open to the people, and provided for the people’s rest, relaxation, even their ennoblement. He is most famously associated with Prospect Park (Brooklyn), Central Park (Manhattan), Riverside Park (Chicago), and the Niagara Falls reservation, but he also played a role in designing the campuses of the University of Chicago, Stanford University, and Washington University in St. Louis (and about fifteen other campuses). And he stuck his green thumb in at St. Louis’s Forest Park, still the people’s park. Thank you, Fred Olmsted, for our parks.

[Stanley]

If you see the President, tell him from me that whatever happens there will be no turning back. Ulysses S. Grant.

In early 19th-century America, there occurred a cultural change of some importance: naming practices. In the Bliss family, in the 1830s, after a generations-long string of OT names, my great-grandfather (Horace) and most of his siblings (including a Leonora and a William Henry Harrison Bliss) were named after classical or American heroes. And not too far away in distance or time, at Point Pleasant, Ohio, one Hiram Grant was born on April 27, 1822, his first given name from an earlier age (his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were also mostly of Biblical nomenclature, including a Noah, a Solomon, a Hannah, and a Jesse. But just in case, Hiram’s parents slipped in the middle name of Ulysses, after the fated, mythic Greek traveler, and when in 1839 the West Point Military Academy rechristened the 17 year old, he became Ulysses S. Grant, plain and simple. And plain and simple he was, too. His Memoirs, published in 1885, have been praised by critics and scholars as diverse as Mark Twain, Gore Vidal, and Eric Foner as models of plain, crisp, clear writing, unassumingly modest and utterly phlegmatic. His first sentence was “Man proposes and God disposes,” and he went on from there to describe his life, unsuccessful in its earlier stages, full of the drama of our great Civil War in its middle years, unhappily clouded by scandal during his presidency, and heroic again as he struggled to finish his great book before his cancer killed him. Eloquent in his understatements, Ulysses he was. ©

[Stanley]

She was one of the Warrior Princesses we were taught to emulate as children. From Brownie Ledbetter¹s funeral book, Little Rock, 2010.

You may not have heard of Mary Brown Williams Ledbetter, which makes her into an ersatz majority of humanity (that is, the people we have not yet heard of), but today is her day. Born into a dairy farming family on April 28, 1932, in Little Rock, Arkansas, and blessed with beautiful brown eyes, Brownie Ledbetter was stirred to action by the conflict over the 1956 racial integration of Little Rock’s Central High School (of which she was an alumna). Human decency was, very possibly, her first response and her abiding aim, but whatever her motives they were good enough, and in 1956 she helped to found the Women’s Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools, a racially integrated, if single-sex, advocacy group. From that operational base, Brownie moved on to set up training programs for teachers coping with the strains of deseg, and then branched out to embrace gender, environmental, corporate accountability, and economic class issues. When husband Calvin became a state senator, she set about reforming that organization, too. Then in 1981 Brownie (remember those eyes) became Executive Director of the Arkansas Public Policy Panel whose broad remit promised a social justice reconstruction of the state of Arkansas. If it hasn’t worked yet, don’t blame Brownie, who beavered away on multiple fronts and in many organizations and in whatever capacity she was granted to make her place (Arkansas) better than she had found it. Brownie Ledbetter was the neighbor you needed when you needed a neighbor, and she would wish to be remembered that way. ©

[Stanley]

Decent executions keep the world in awe; for that reason the majority of mankind ought to be hanged every year. John Artbuthnot

My old Lancaster colleague Keith Devlin is celebrated for being both a good writer and a good mathematician (q.v. The Math Gene), as if those two attributes paired were (pardon the pun) a statistical anomaly. But John Arbuthnot proved long ago that good math and good writing can march together. Baptized on April 29, 1667 by his father, an Episcopal cleric in Scotland, John went to Marischal College, Aberdeen, where unlike his brothers he avoided the Jacobite folly of supporting the deposed Catholic James II and prudently plighted his troth to Protestant monarchs William and Mary. No doubt he thought his chances were better that way, for John had learned statistics, a talent he honed further in a spell at University College Oxford (with help from Isaac Newton). Then it was back to Scotland where, at St. Andrews, he copped a medical degree in 1696, only one day after he registered (as with statistics, we assume Arbuthnot was picking these things up on the side). He returned to London, became a socially prominent physician (e.g. to Queen Anne), continued to write (wittily) on mathematics, was elected to the Royal Society, and joined with Jonathan Swift in the “Scriblerus Club” to become a publicist for the Tory ministry of Robert Harley and Henry St. John. His memorable pamphlets, satirical and comic, lampooned the Whigs with the iconic figure of “John Bull” who later, in an irony that Arbuthnot might have appreciated, became the very model of the faithful (and very very very British) Tory.©

[Stanley]

I have had my results for a long time, but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them. Carl Friedrich Gauss.

As the sheer quantity of our knowledge increases, not to mention the number of techniques used to further expand knowledge, the figure of the polymath recedes into the dim past and becomes almost legendary. One such was Carl Friedrich Gauss, born in Brunswick, Lower Saxony, on April 30, 1777. His illiterate parents never recorded the birth but they remembered how many days after Easter it happened, and later Gauss—working on a formula to determine the date of every Easter—came up with April 30. Somehow it was discovered that this poor baby was a genius, and local schoolmasters and eventually the Duke of Brunswick pushed and pulled him along to the University of Gottingen where, as a 19 year old, he became famous for solving an ancient geometrical riddle and establishing several other theorems. This astounding success moved the young man away from philology and into math, a field he would revolutionize through theoretical and practical work in (inter alia) algebra, number theory, statistics, and non-Euclidian geometry. Moreover, to him (as it should be to all of us) math was a language, or perhaps a series of dialects, which he used to describe and analyse (among other things) geography, physics, electricity, optics, and astronomy. Among his minor but more elegant accomplishments was to map the orbit of the asteroid Ceres. When Gauss died, colleagues were disappointed to find that his brain was of only average volume, but they preserved it anyway, just in case. ©

[Stanley]

Passengers will please refrain from flushing toilets while the train is waiting in the station I love you . . . . Songs my father used to sing.

For those of us of a certain age, Amtrak is still a new creation, for we remember our travels on the Pennsy, the Rock Island Line (“the road to ride”), the Katy, the Soo, the Great Northern, and the New York Central, among many, many others. But Amtrak is 43 years old today, born on 1st May 1971. It is a government corporation. Thus Richard Nixon (a bit unwillingly, we learn) extended the American tradition of state involvement in the financing, construction, regulation, and operation of railroad transport begun by Abraham Lincoln and U. S. Grant. Back to your roots, Republicans!!!! Happy Birthday, Amtrak!!! Let’s hope your 300+ trains are all on time today at their 500+ station stops. Or nearly on time.

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My mum would like to see me on the cover of Good Housekeeping demonstrating children's toys with some nice lipstick on. Tracey Ullman.

May 2, 2014, is the 129th birthday of one of America’s most successful magazines, perhaps the most widely familiar one, Good Housekeeping, the first issue of which appeared on this day in 1885, published by Clark Bryan in the somewhat out-of-the way town of Holyoke, Massachusetts. Soon the magazine moved to Springfield, MA, where larger offices and printing presses made circulation growth possible, and in 1911 the magazine was sold to Hearst Publishing and moved to New York. At that time its paid circulation was 300,000. Today, Good Housekeeping is still a Hearst publication and has a paid circulation of nearly five million. While the magazine is primarily, and rightly, known as a magazine for the consumer conscious housekeeper, it is less well known that, especially in the period 1920-1950, its pages contained essays and stories by famous writers, including Edna St. Vincent Millay, Virginia Woolf, Francis Parkinson Keyes, Somerset Maugham, and Evelyn Waugh. It also showed some progressive attitudes, for instance leading the campaign for the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1905-1906 and banning tobacco advertisements in (and since) 1952. Some historians of American culture regard the magazine as a prime source for understanding trends in American design, especially ca. 1930-1955. Like any publication that’s survived, and prospered, for so long, Good Housekeeping has an interesting history and a presumed right to be wished a happy birthday. ©

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One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being. May Sarton.

Eleanore Marie Sarton was born on May 3, 1912, near Ghent, Belgium, into an academic family. They would flee Belgium at the start of WWI and eventually find their way to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where father George would continue his distinguished career (at Harvard) and Eleanore Marie would in due course become May Sarton, a prolific writer. First, however, she had to graduate high school (Cambridge HS and Boston Latin), decide not to pursue a college education, latch on to a theater company in New York City (which soon failed), and begin a lifetime of travel, in Europe and America, that would bring her contact—sometimes happy—with many leading intellectuals of the time and with the loves of her life, the Belgian writer Marie Closset, her first mentor and idol, Julian and Juliette Huxley, and Judith Matlack. May Sarton’s early and some say her best poetry and novels appeared between 1938 and 1958, the year of her father’s death. After that she settled down in the northern New England countryside, became recognized as a leading feminist author, and turned increasingly to memoirs and poetry, although there were three strong novels in the 1980s. For decades more highly regarded by her readership than by critics or the academy, her reputation strengthened in her last years and has continued to do so after her death in 1995. ©

[Stanley]

If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is he who has so much as to be out of danger? Thomas Henry Huxley.

Among other geographies, Thomas Henry Huxley’s life maps the passage of biology to intellectual respectability and inclusion in university syllabi and structures. Born ‘poor but respectable’ on May 4, 1825, Huxley had only two years of formal schooling but voracious reading and an apprentice-like course in anatomy gained him admittance to study medicine at University College London (aged 17). He did not get a degree but he did pass muster (aged 20) as assistant ship’s surgeon on the four-year scientific voyage of HMS Rattlesnake, during which his observations of (among other organisms) marine invertebrates established him as a first-rank comparative anatomist. He made such a stir that (upon his return to Britain) he was elected to the Royal Society (aged 25) and from then on held a variety of senior positions in what was becoming the British scientific establishment. Huxley shaped that establishment not least by distributing his students into senior science chairs at, inter alia Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, and London. And, yes, Huxley was on deck in 1859 when another naval voyager, Charles Darwin, announced his theory On the Origin of Species. “How extremely stupid,” Huxley famously said, “not to have thought of that,” and immediately tore into Darwin’s opponents, most famously Bishop ‘Soapy Sam’ Wilberforce. And thus today T. H. Huxley is more famous as “Darwin’s Bulldog” than—in his own right—as the man who made our biology an integral part of our history and of our intellectual universe. ©

[Stanley]

It was only after graduation (from Yale) that I began to be conscious of how little I knew. Frederick A. P. Barnard, Memoirs.

If you’ve heard at all of Frederick A. P. Barnard, it may have been in connection with the advent of higher education for women, a step he long advocated and now enshrined in the name of Columbia University’s women’s college. But he had a quite extraordinary life in other ways. Born on May 5, 1809, Barnard attended Yale College, but began to lose his hearing and in the 1830s taught at Connecticut’s and New York’s state schools for the deaf. He then taught at the University of Alabama and in 1856 became president of the University of Mississippi, a delicate position for an anti-slavery man who was known also to be pro-unionist. In 1861 he resigned, moved north, and after some odd jobs in Washington became president (1864) of what was then a sleepy school for New York’s young gentlemen, Columbia College. A man of many talents, one of which seems to have been his deafness, classicist, mathematician, chemist, theologian, geographer, and philosopher, Barnard transformed Columbia, bringing science and math into the curriculum as essential elements (he argued) of a modern liberal education. He also agitated to move the USA to the metric system. His efforts to open Columbia to women were equally unsuccessful during his life, but the trustees—perhaps in remorse?—created Barnard College in 1889, one year after his death. Barnard maintains its identity and thrives today as one of the “seven sisters” institutions. ©

[Stanley]

Interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind. Freud.

Sigmund Freud was born (on May 6, 1856) into a family that had known better days and, so to speak, another mother. Trying to find its economic niche, the Freud family moved about a great deal, then scattered (the older boys from an earlier marriage migrating to England). This pattern of insecurity and loss may have influenced his later theorizing about neuroses, but if so it didn’t show early. Instead, he seemed well-adjusted. Once in Vienna, the boy Sigmund proved a brilliant student, proficient in five modern and three ancient languages before leaving school to study law. He then transferred to the medical faculty where, it’s curious to note, he spent a good deal of time dissecting male seals in search of their genitalia. Whatever the psychic harvest of this experience, Freud began his professional career in a conventional, if brilliant, way, with a number of scientific papers on a variety of medical subjects, but it’s clear he was drawn to study the mind and its abnormalities and, increasingly, towards a rational, clinical, and historical mode of inquiry in which a chief mode of gathering information was the close interview (including, at first, hypnosis) and a pressing concern with (for lack of a better phrase) patterned neuroses. Before century’s end, Freud called his methodology “psychoanalysis,” and as its founder—and a man of undoubted brilliance and energy—he was to have a huge influence on 20th-century culture (literature and philosophy as well a science), rivaling and in some ways surpassing that of Einstein and Darwin. ©

[Stanley]

What is more important to a Library than anything else‹than everything else‹is that it exists. Archibald Macleish

Archibald Macleish was one of the more underrated poets of the last century, perhaps because he early decided to work for Henry Luce, at Fortune magazine, partly because he himself thought his public service of more moment than his verse. He was born (on May 7, 1892) and spent a comfortable childhood on his family’s large estate north of Chicago before being shipped off to Hotchkiss School, then Yale, then Harvard Law, and then World War I where he served as captain in the field artillery and lost his brother, killed in action. This latter became the subject of one of his more striking poems, “Memorial Rain,” in which he reflected upon (among other things) the oddity of being an American. He and his wife settled in Paris after the war, and he became a leading member of the “lost generation,” although, arguably, he quite failed to get “lost.” An ardent supporter of FDR’s New Deal, Macleish was made Librarian of Congress in 1939, a controversial step on several grounds, including inexperience. Republicans thought him a dangerous radical, ironic given the patriotic flavor of much of his poetry, but then politicians make lousy literary critics. Rising above his critics, Macleish transformed the Library of Congress, making it the information engine it is today, while serving during wartime in the precursor of the CIA and other government agencies. He retired from all that in 1949 and spent most of the rest of his life in the academy, although he won his second poetry Pulitzer in 1959 for the verse play, J.B. ©

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It is amazing what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit. Harry Truman.

May 8, 2014 is the 130th anniversary of the birth—in Lamar, Missouri—of Harry S. Truman, at his very birth the child of compromise (the “S” stands for itself and for the family’s inability to choose between Shippe and Solomon, two kin-names). The family soon moved to Independence, where his father would continue farming, Harry would find his sweetheart (Bess, the “girl with the golden curls”), get his schooling, take his first few jobs, and join the army for battle service in WWI (as a captain in the field artillery). From there it was several hops, a couple of skips, and a “mighty leap” to the United States Senate (1934), the Vice-Presidency (1944), and upon FDR’s death in April 1945, the Presidency of the United States of America. While his mother and aunt famously worried he might not now be able to attend to spring planting, Truman himself felt underprepared and underqualified, which was pretty much the consensus view. But he was a fast learner, one of the most voracious readers to inhabit that house on Pennsylvania Avenue, and (it would turn out) a rather good politician. His signal accomplishments were the Marshall Plan, the GI Bill, the Civil Rights Commission of 1947, and winning the unwinnable election of 1948. He did fail in his effort to extend Social Security principles to (universal) medical care, but “Give ‘em Hell Harry” lived long enough to see Medicare signed into law, in his own Missouri living room, in 1967.©

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That new saint . . . who will make the gallows glorious like the cross. Ralph Waldo Emerson, on John Brown.

May 9 is a good day to remember that words have plastic meanings, usages change, and people are known by different characters as time and tides pass. For May 9 2014 is the 214th anniversary of the birth of John Brown, who started life as the fourth (of 8) child of Owen and Ruth Brown, born in Torrington, Connecticut. The family soon moved to the “Western Reserve” of Ohio, dominated by evangelical Congregationalists, and became associated with Oberlin College, a hotbed of perfectionism and abolitionism. John toyed with becoming a Congregationalist minister but settled for farming, fathered 20 children, suffered in the Panic of 1837 and became a successful businessman back in Massachusetts. More importantly, he was radicalized by the 1837 lynching, in Alton, Illinois, of the abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy, and dedicated his life “to the destruction of slavery.” From there his was still a long story, but of course John Brown, farmer, father, husband, inventor, and business entrepreneur, became John Brown the radical abolitionist, the community organizer, the Christian preacher of the Second Coming, and John Brown the terrorist or John Brown the Freedom Fighter, playing a lead role in the Pottawatomie Massacre in Kansas and then most famously in the raid at Harper’s Ferry, then part of Virginia. So you can take your pick of the characters of John Brown. Meanwhile, whoever he was, John Brown was certainly hanged in Virginia and buried near North Elba, New York, on the farm he intended as a community of freed slaves. The North Elba farm is now a national historical monument. ©

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I find myself cast in the unlikely role of a thin wedge. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, at her retirement celebration.

Perhaps we can now see that exclusionary practices were not meant to benefit those excluded, but it was not so long ago that women—for instance—were kept out of higher education and (especially) the scientific fields because such mental challenges were too much for them and might keep them from their “natural” roles. So Cecilia Helena Payne, having read physics and chemistry at Newnham College, Cambridge (not for a degree as Cambridge granted no full degrees to women until 1948!!!), jumped ship and in 1923 went to Harvard’s Observatory, which had only just (in 1922!!!) begun to admit women to its PhD program. The studies were such a severe challenge to her frail, female mind that Cecilia got her (Radcliffe) PhD in TWO YEARS. Some 40 years later, the noted astronomer Otto Struve called it “the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy,” even though Payne omitted (on her male professor’s advice) its more controversial findings. (These--having to do with the composition of the universe!!!--were later proved correct, by the way.) Payne taught at Harvard for years but had to do so unofficially because (you guessed it) she was a she. Her salary in the department budget was listed as “equipment." Harvard finally made her a professor in 1956 (!!!!) and she became Harvard’s first female department chair just in time for her retirement in 1968. Born in England on May 10, 1900, Cecelia Payne traced a long journey across oceans of prejudice, made many original discoveries in science, and nevertheless (by the way) was able to marry and to raise three children. “Naturally,” as far as I know. ©

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No artist is pleased . . . [there is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest . . . . Martha Graham.

Martha Graham was born 120 years ago today, May 11, 1894, in a Pittsburgh suburb and, unlikely fate for the child of a strict Presbyterian alienist, she would dance her way to fame in ballet and “modern dance.” Graham’s dancing career was miraculously long, extending to 1970 when, aged 76, she appeared in “Cortege of Eagles.” Given she forced herself to dance that late, it’s not surprising that retirement drove her to drink, drugs, and an attempted suicide (at 78). But she recovered, resumed work as a choreographer, and staged her last ballet in 1990. And indeed it was as a choreographer and impresario that she is most famous today. Her Martha Graham Dance Company (now better known as the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance), which she founded in 1925, still continues her “tradition of innovation” and emulates her ability to gather round her the best dance talents of the time and put them through extended periods of intense creativity. In 1929, for instance, her company put on nine new ballets using seven different composers. Among the living composers she worked with were Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, and Gian Carlo Menotti. In 1958, aged 64, she was principal (and choreographer) in a full-length ballet, Clytemnestra, which had her on stage and dancing nearly the whole performance. Among her most highly regarded works, Clytemnestra is said to be typical of her modernist flair for integrating drama, narrative, music and, to be very sure, The Dance. ©

[Stanley]

To understand God's thoughts, we must study statistics, for they are the measure of his purpose. Florence Nightingale.

Her early pictures look more like Emily Dickinson than anyone, but Florence Nightingale was not a recluse, not shy, was not at all homely or unhappy, not retiring, and she proved decidedly unlikely to take instruction from significant males in her life. Certainly she had difficulty understanding the precise meaning of the word “no.” Born in Florence, Italy, to wealthy, aristocratic parents, on May 12, 1820, Florence was brought up on the family’s English estates in Hampshire and Derbyshire. She early became convinced she was called by God to be a nurse, and a long visit to (and incisive study of) a Garman Lutheran nursing community in 1851 further convinced her of her calling. She intensively trained there, published her findings anonymously, and was appointed to a London nursing post in 1853. This was just in time for the Crimean War, where her nursing exploits (as “the lady with the lamp”) made her the very image of a caring, feminine, nurse, a “ministering angel”. And so she no doubt was. But she was also a scientist, a much more than passable statistician, and her lasting contributions to nursing came after the peace as she dissected nursing practices, assessed their bases in science and evaluated their statistical effectiveness in practice. During the American Civil War, Nightingale advised the northern government on medical care on the battlefield, helped to set up the US Sanitary Commission, and gave practical effect to her inquiring mind, her passion for nursing, and her abolitionist beliefs. Miss Florence Nightingale died, greatly mourned, in 1910. ©

[Stanley]

I have not yet got over the shock of seeing our names coupled ... in hostile antagonism over a few miserable pounds Sullivan to Gilbert. 1890.

May 13 is the birth anniversary of Sir Arthur Sullivan, the melodic half of the Gilbert & Sullivan who gave us the operettas HMS Pinafore(1878), The Pirates of Penzance (1879), Iolanthe (1882), and The Mikado (1885). Especially popular in England, these Gilbert & Sullivan operas (there were nine in all) have given pleasure to many across the world. Arthur Sullivan composed the music, and in some sense brought the partnership to a close, in a dispute between him, W. S. Gilbert, and their famous impresario partner, Richard D’Oyley Carte. Oddly enough, it was all about a carpet which, had they kept their cool, they might have made a song about. Arthur Sullivan was born on May 13 1842 to an English bandmaster father, Thomas, and an Italo-Irish mother, Clementina. Privately educated, he early showed musical talent, and was a chorister in the Chapel Royal. Thence he went to the Royal Academy (on a scholarship) and then to the Leipzig Conservatoire (on another scholarship). Especially influenced by Felix Mendelssohn, Sullivan returned to England as one of the country’s most promising classical composers, and his early works were all “straight” classical pieces. But as successful as he was, and as highly regarded, he could not make ends meet, and he turned to popular songs and Christian hymns (“Onward Christian Soldiers” and “Nearer My God to Thee” were his) to increase his income. But his partnership with Gilbert made him rich, brought him a knighthood, and endeared his music to millions. Happy Birthday, Arthur Sullivan, and next time around don’t sweat the small stuff. ©

[Stanley]

All the world is queer save thee and me, and even thou art a little queer. Robert Owen to William Allen, after the failure of New Harmony.

Early 19th-century Britain and America spawned a variety of reform movements, the most notable the movement for the abolition of slavery, but there were many more, taking in schools, prisons, hospitals, asylums, marriage, churches, alcoholic drink, even diet. Many reformers on both sides of the water knew each other, and indeed visited each other, to help, to learn, or to export their particular reform to the other nation. The most famous of these exporters of reform was Robert Owen, born in mid-Wales on May 14, 1771. Not rich, Owen taught himself the basics of the emerging machine age, acted with great acumen and entrepreneurial spirit in Manchester, and then in Scotland married the boss’s daughter (Caroline Dale) after beginning work at her dad’s Lanark Mills. Now he began to apply both his moral principles and business sense to the workplace and became wildly successful. “New Lanark” soon became famous as an industrial utopia. Visitors came from afar to learn how it was done, including the Tsar, and this may have fueled Owen’s ambitions and encouraged further refinement of his moral notions. In short order, he became a utopian socialist with increasingly complex plans and looked for a blank slate on which to design such a “total society,” finding it (1825) in New Harmony, Indiana. But New Harmony soon became unharmonious, and Owen returned to Britain where he found solace in spiritualism, best thought of as yet another reform movement. His son Robert Dale Owen stayed in Indiana to push specific reforms, notably women’s rights, and had far greater success.©