BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

Bob has responded and is OK. No explanation for the missing note. I shall wait for today's ration coming in.

[Stanley]

All in Good Time. Subtitle of Marian McPartland’s 1987 book, Marian McPartland’s Jazz World.

For some years Paulette and I have been doing crosswords, not every evening but often. We abjure the ‘cryptics,’ diabolical and humiliating too (for once you know the solutions the obscure, pun-ridden clues become painfully obvious). We find a satisfying mediocrity with the ‘Quick Crossword’ published by The Guardian. Sometimes we coast through so easily that we have to find another one (there are almost 20,000 of them online). Usually we struggle to success. But occasionally we are stumped, as recently with a clue that should have given us “halcyon” (easily, for we are getting elderly, and have pleasant memories) but led us astray with mention of a fishing bird (which turned out to be a kingfisher). It was certainly the idea of the ‘good old days’ that led Marian McPartland to use “Halcyon” as the label for her historic jazz piano recordings. Her series featured jazz pianists, some well-known but others drawn out of undeserved anonymity by a woman who knew talent when she heard it, for she was herself a jazz pianist of some note and was then (in the early 1970s) establishing herself as an authority on the subject. Marian McPartland was an odd bird as a jazzist. Born in England in 1918, her parents had encouraged her piano talents, and she seemed on key for a classical career when, aged 20, she absconded with a traveling music show that featured, horror of horrors, popular music. Come WWII, she volunteered for the British ENSA service, entertaining the troops (once at least under fire), living in tents, and occasionally joining with American USO performances. There she met and married American pop, in the shape of USO cornetist Jimmy McPartland, and then (in peacetime) toured the USA with him and his Dixieland band. Along the way she was converted from Dixieland to jazz, divorced Jimmy, and became a performer in her own right and in a new musical idiom. Marian also took an academic and critical interest in the subject, taught jazz and jazz history in schools and colleges, and (in 1979, a few years after she launched Halcyon Records) began NPR’s longest-running music program, a weekly one-hour called Piano Jazz. She didn’t stick to piano, but weekly she and one or two guests would offer up their jazz memories with informative chat and illustrative recordings. Along the way, in 1991, she remarried Jimmy (who’d fallen ill and needed help). In 2010, aged 92, Marian McPartland hosted her final episode of Piano Jazz. Marian McPartland died, mourned by many, on August 20, 2013. I think it likely that you could pick up an old podcast. It would be worth your hour. Hers were halcyon days, indeed, and not a kingfisher in sight. ©.



Pap for the masses.
Frank Munsey, 1854-1925

A magazine of the people and for the people, with pictures and art and good cheer and human interest throughout. Frank Munsey’s motto for Munsey’s Magazine.

One demographic trend in the 19th-century USA was the rise of literacy. This had many causes, for instance the public school movement in the northern and western states, but it also rode on improvements in printing technology, communications, and transport. And it created a mass market, eager to consume (“read”) the products of literacy. Thus arose the mass circulation magazine, of which there were all sorts. Some publishers saw these as public platforms and used them to put forward their personal manifestos. Among these, McClure’s Magazine (1893-1911) stood out, as S. S. McClure, its founder and guiding spirit gathered in a stable of writers eager to put their art and/or their politics on display. McClure himself was a bit of a radical and his magazine became known for its ‘muckraking’ (although it also published ‘serious’ works by the likes of Twain, Kipling, and Cather). Other publishers went into mass circulation to make money, impure and simple, and among these one of the most successful was Frank Munsey, born into an old New England family on August 21, 1854. Old but not prosperous. At first Frank was unlucky in his efforts to escape poverty, a failure at running a country store and then no great shakes as a messenger boy in Augusta, Maine. But Maine made pulp, and pulp made cheap paper, and an Augusta telegraph boy could get to know New York stockbrokers taking their holidays, and that unlikely combination brought still-young Frank to Manhattan where, with a cheap loan he started printing cheap fiction on cheap pulp. Except for the 1870s panic and depression, he might have made his mint on the spot, but Munsey did manage to keep his cheap magazine (Golden Argosy) going. Loan forgiveness helped him along, and as prosperity returned to the nation so it laid the foundation for Frank Munsey’s fortune. Frank overlaid on that foundation a collection of pulp magazines (notably Munsey’s Magazine) and then a clutch of newspapers (in New York, Boston, Baltimore, and Washington DC). Most were inoffensive and unmemorable. Munsey didn’t want to offend anyone, and where his publications editorialized they favored motherhood and apple pie. (Although he did support Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose breakaway in 1912). Thus they raked no muck, but raked in dollars at a good clip. By the time Munsey died he was a multimillionaire and a man of taste. As if to prove both points, he left the bulk of his fortune to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And there was a $2000 annuity to Annie Downs, back in Maine, who long ago hadn’t thought Frank a good prospect for marriage. Revenge can be sweet. ©

[Stanley]

A female virtuoso
Maud Powell, 1867-1920

In 2014, Maud Powell received a ‘Grammy’ for ‘lifetime achievement. Since she’d died in 1920 the Grammy was accepted by Rachel Barton Pine, a virtuoso violinist who had been inspired by Powell’s example and had recorded Powell’s favorite works.

Many, perhaps most of the languages we call foreign have ‘genderized’ their nouns (and normally the modifiers that accompany them). Sometimes it seems senseless. The French for “wallet,” for instance, is masculine but ‘looks’ feminine, which caused me mild embarrassment when I lost mine in Annecy. But the English language is unisex, its pesky pronouns being a prime exception, and when we import a word it ‘transes’ to do double duty. So the Italian virtuoso is used to describe genius performers of any gender. It first appeared in the 17th century. The Italian virtuosa (f.) entered English a century later but was too often used ironically (could any woman be a genius in public?) and fell from favor. So one of the USA’s first geniuses at the violin was a female virtuoso. This contradiction in terms was Maud Powell, born on August 22, 1867. That she was born in Peru, Illinois seemingly adds to her unlikelihood, but back then our small-town elites had world-class ambitions nurtured by an eagerness to explore and learn about that wider world. In Maud’s case this was made more likely because her father was Peru’s superintendent of schools and her uncle was the Civil War hero John Wesley Powell who would soon make his reputation as an explorer and scientist. So when little Maud, aged 7, showed unusual talent at the violin the Powells (and Maud’s teacher in Peru) recognized her as a prodigy (in Italian, that’s prodigio, a masculine noun) and made strenuous efforts to encourage her. First they took her to Chicago for further instruction. That wasn’t very far, but then, in 1880, they sold their house so that Maud’s mother, Wilhelmina, could take her to Europe (Leipzig, Paris, and Berlin) to study under recognized masters. Her father, interestingly named William, stayed behind in rented rooms, rather a comedown for a superintendent. If this were sacrifice, it worked. Europe loved Maud (more than it had loved ‘Nannerl’ Mozart, Wolfgang’s talented elder sister?). In 1885, aged 18, Maud debuted with the Berlin Philharmonic, in Bruch’s G Minor Concerto, and returned in triumph to a nation that loved its home-grownvirtuoso. Right away she performed with the New York Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra, then embarked on a touring career. Maud recorded too, but today it might be best to ‘hear’ her on a four-disc set of pieces written for her by leading composers of the day, for Maud herself left copious notes on how these pieces might be best rendered. Perhaps some concert-goers yelled brava at her performances (I sometimes hear that shouted at Powell Hall, which is not named after Maud) but today she’s still seen as an American virtuoso. And so she was. ©

[Stanley]

The ultimate song and dance man.
Gene Kelly, 1912-1996

If Fred Astaire is the Cary Grant of dance, I’m the Marlon Brando. Gene Kelley.

Gene Kelly was born in Pittsburgh on August 23, 1912, of immigrant stock: half Irish, half German, and 100% Catholic. It’s possible that his parents had ambitions to rise above their working-class origins, and this may have been why his mother enrolled Gene and his brother James in a dancing class. Twenty years on the family established a dancing studio, but at first dancing did not sit well with the boys, both of grade school age, in what was one of the city’s tougher neighborhoods. It led only to fights, useful in the sense that Gene learned to defend himself, but otherwise too much trouble, and the brothers dropped out. Gene found in baseball a safer ambition, but that got sidetracked partly because he was also good in school. He attended Penn State, then Pittsburgh, and set his sights on a law career. But there were those dancing feet, and a good musical sense, always in the background. From age 15 he’d taken to dance again, and then at Pitt became a leading light in the Cap and Gown Society, putting on revues in which song and dance played their roles. Come the Great Depression, dance seemed a good way to get cash in hand, and Gene Kelly dropped out of law school to teach dance, to act, and (back in Pittsburgh) to do some directing. The rest is history. First he was on stage, and then, once he got over the fear of seeing himself big on the silver screen, he was a ‘natural’ movie star. In Hollywood from 1941, Kelly leaped to the top, appearing as co-star with the likes of Judy Garland, Lucille Ball, and Rita Hayworth (not to mention ‘Tom and Jerry’), and dancing better than any of them. In Ziegfeld Follies (1946) he costarred with Fred Astaire. Kelly admired Astaire, in some senses had followed Astaire’s career path, and now surpassed him. He was certainly the more versatile actor, and even played to the swashbuckling side of the house, but then hit his stride and established his lasting fame in song and dance with An American in Paris (1951) and Singin’ in the Rain (1952). In the latter he also directed, and he followed this latter path for the next three decades, along with cameos in a variety of films, including a comic western. At about this time, too, in the early ‘50s, Kelly became identified with left-wing or liberal politics. Especially notable were his very public opposition to the McCarthyite hysteria and his final break with the Catholic Church over the church’s unpastoral uncaring of the poor in Latin America. In 1996 he died an agnostic and his body was disposed of without ceremony or sermon. But every time I see a rain puddle under a lamp post I think of Gene Kelly, drenched and dancing . . . ©.

[Stanley]

He who stole the Crown Jewels?
Thomas Blood, 1618?-1680

I would endeavor to deserve my life, Sire. Attr. to Thomas Blood, petitioning King Charles II for mercy, 1671.

‘Captain’ Thomas Blood died at his home in Bowling Alley, Westminster, on August 24, 1680. We know that for certain, but little else, and it’s worth pointing out that to make quite sure that it was Thomas Blood who was dead the authorities later dug up his body. Indeed he had been a man who inspired rumor-mongering, not least his theft of England’s crown jewels in early May 1671. The theft was momentarily successful, but had too much of The Lavender Hill Mob about it to qualify as drama. Blood and most of his associates were captured, the jewels recovered, but then the spectacular became legend when, not much later, Blood was pardoned by the king himself, Charles II. By 1671 people knew that Charles was as cynical as he was merry, and so the rumors already swirling around Thomas Blood multiplied rabbit-like. In his interview with the king, Blood claimed that he’d once planned to assassinate Charles, but had denied himself the honor because he (Blood) had been too awed by the king’s majesty. Since Charles was stark naked at the time (he was bathing in the Thames) that seems unlikely. Perhaps the king was amused enough to pardon Blood. It’s more likely that some of Charles’s courtiers, great ministers of state like Lord Arlington, thought that they could make good use of a daring adventurer of dubious reputation. They were involved (with the king) in various plots to circumvent parliament, make England the lackey of France, make war on the Dutch, to betray each other, and even (in Charles’s case) to bring popery back. And Blood made hay out of his legendary status, in the process probably inventing, or reinventing, parts of his life story. Blood seems to have been an Anglo-Irish Protestant, a blacksmith’s son born circa 1618, who entered public life in the maelstrom of the Civil Wars. In Ireland, there were more than two sides to this, so Blood’s claim that he had, once, fought for the royalists could be believed by those who wanted to believe. On the other side, it was known that after the Restoration of monarchy Blood had been involved in several radical plots, in league with several republican radicals (or Protestant fanatics), including the attempted kidnapping (or assassination) of the Duke of Ormonde. It was Blood’s connection with these radicals that made him of likely use to the crown, so Blood entered a nine-year career as spy, agent provocateur, and witness. His story had its seamy sides, but through it all Blood apparently believed that he was God’s messenger. If you hold that position it hardly matters which side you are on, whose money you take, whose blood you spill, or whom you betray. It’s all part of the mystery of Captain Thomas Blood. ©

[Stanley]

"The Appalachian Book of the Dead." Wright's description of his main poetry collections.
Charles Wright, 1935-?

History handles our past like spoiled fruit. Charles Wright, “Chickamauga,” 1993.

Charles Wright is one of those many poets whose works I must read. That’s not because he’s seen himself as Ezra Pound’s heir. Emphatically not, for I couldn’t take Pound when I was an undergraduate and still can’t. I’m drawn to Wright because he claims geographic and cultural rootedness, in his case in the rural South. That ‘countrified’ claim, by the way, sits oddly with Wright’s devotion to Ezra, for too much of Pound’s poetry is clouded by obscure references to (and direct borrowings from) classical and early renaissance literature. But a glance at Wright’s (extensive) bibliography suggests an answer, early homages to Pound followed by Wright’s fascination with southern ways, folkways and with the land itself. And that’s also where he began. Not only was Charles Wright born in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee (on August 25, 1935), but by the time he’d left school he’d read and absorbed into his marrow all the then-extant writings of William Faulkner. He was also named after his great grandpa, who’d taken a bullet (in the mouth!!) as he led the rebel charge at Chickamauga. All that taken together is a heavy and self-contradictory heritage. Chickamauga was itself a Confederate victory, but won at a cost (in blood and treasure) that the rural South could not afford. Pickwick Dam itself was the site of a major Tennessee Valley Authority project, just getting underway at Charles Wright’s birth, the largest federal intervention in the deep south since Grant’s Union Army had marched up the Tennessee valley in 1863. It calls to mind the industrial North’s destruction of the southern white pine forest in Faulkner’s “The Bear.” Once Wright had been through his literary training (including at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop) and his Pound devotions, he returned to these southern themes, as suggested by the titles of his award-winning collections Southern Cross (1981), Country Music (1982), and Chickamauga (1993). Even here, however, Wright retains the ‘referential’ character of Pound’s poetry, full of literary allusions (many of them obscure) and also visionary in the literal sense, “things seen,” as Wright explains it, which give rise to poetic reflection. So the title poem in Chickamauga begins with a view of the “tall grass” in the “end-of-summer glaze,” which echoes the season and place of his ancestor’s Civil War sacrifice, but after passing through “The gill net of history” the poem becomes wholly concerned with the mysteries and the mechanics of the poetic imagination.
Structure becomes an element of belief, syntax
And grammar a catechist.
William Faulkner never put it better. ©

[Stanley]

Collector of art and artists.
Peggy Guggenheim, 1896-1979

I was a liberated woman before there was a name for it. Peggy Guggenheim.

It’s not clear when the Guggenheim family became obsessed with art. Their money came from mining, starting with silver and then alchemically reverting to baser metals. Meyer Guggenheim, the dynasty’s founder, was charitable enough, mainly in public health matters (e.g. the Mount Sinai Hospital), and his two eldest sons kept pretty much to smelting, then reinvesting the profits. Young Solomon Guggenheim (1861-1949) focused on finer things, mainly art but also humanities scholarship. But the most famous of the artistic Guggenheims was Solomon’s niece, Marguerite (‘Peggy’) Guggenheim. Old Meyer had many grandchildren by the time Peggy was born (on August 26, 1896), and it’s possible she was never his favorite. Her father had made a good marriage (into the Seligman fortune) but failed to settle down to it, partly because of his many mistresses but also because he sank with the Titanic in 1912. He died gallantly, and Peggy never forgot that even though her biographers have seen in her frenetic life a constant search for a stable relationship. But she kept looking and by the 1930s boasted that she had slept with over 1,000 men. Maybe so; however great (or small) the ‘real’ total, it’s clear that she was attracted to artists. And their art. Her father’s death, then her grandfather’s, left her rich, and so she collected art as well as artists. She wasn’t as rich as today’s mega-wealthy, ‘only’ $39 million in today’s $$s, but she husbanded her money more wisely than she husbanded her lovers, and before World War II had gone into the gallery business. But Peggy sold less than she bought, and she made her first galleries (in London, Paris, and Venice) into public exhibition spaces. The war put a temporary halt to that (she did marry, 1941-46, the Surrealist Max Ernst, partly to shield him from the perils of living German in Allied spaces), but then she chose Venice as her main residence and as the site of her main museum, the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni. The publicity that she generated made hers, definitively, the Guggenheim collection. Her uncle Benjamin had given his collection the painfully modest title of The Museum of Non-Objective Painting. Both uncle and niece concentrated on “non-objective” art; Peggy’s distinctive contribution was to push and publicize American art. From his death in 1952 Solomon's museum has been called the ‘Guggenheim’ and, since Peggy’s death in 1979, that Guggenheim has than occasionally featured works borrowed from her Venice collection. So to our benefit, peace reigns among the Guggenheims. In that the Guggenheims tracked the Rockefellers, for old John D.’s grandsons Nelson and David were the moving spirits and the deep pockets behind MoMA, just downtown from the Guggenheim. ©.

[Stanley]

the genealogy of the trench coat
Thomas Burberry, 1835-1926.

It is RAINPROOF WINDPROOF DRIZZLEPROOF DUSTPROOF and what is more important it is HEALTHFUL because it ventilates naturally. ‘Burberry’ advertising copy, 1889.

In the summer of 1961, I was anxious that I would look the part of an Ivy League freshman, and one necessity (besides sport jacket, button-down shirt and penny loafers) was a “trench coat.” In that, a “Burberry” (the Ur of trench coats and sold in only one Des Moines clothing store) was out of the question. This pinnacle of the stylish young man’s rainwear, this “Burberry,” was the brainchild of Thomas Burberry, born (on August 27, 1835) into a devoutly Baptist home in rural Surrey, just south of a rapidly-expanding London. Thomas was a younger son in a not-rich farm family, and it was decided that his future lay in trade. So, aged 12, he was apprenticed to a local draper’s shop to learn the rudiments of draping his customers. He learned quickly, and at 21 opened his own business in Basingstoke, then a small market town in rural Hampshire. He specialized in selling practical stuff, farmers’ clothing, and soon turned to design. If you’re looking for the genealogy of the “Burberry,” it began life in the 1870s as an improved farmers’ smock, a sort of half-cape, fashioned by Thomas Burberry out of an improved, tightly-woven cotton (waterproofed before it was woven). This cape and other items like it were made well and sold well, and Burberry began to think that the style, craftmanship and material might find a broader market in the expanding middle class of Victorian London. If not many fashionable Londoners could actually “be” landed gentry, they could afford to “look the part” and to buy their gear from Burberry’s Haymarket shop. But your Victorian urban-country gent, even in a Burberry, didn’t yet look like an Ivy League freshman. He looked frumpy, more interested in keeping dry than in attracting attention. An 1889 ad for the ‘Burberry’ shows the gent in a calf-length smock, tightly collared, fully protected from the pouring rain, double-barreled shotgun at the ready, but neither belted nor double-breasted. That took a new line, pioneered by Thomas Burberry in outfitting prominent officers in the Boer War (including the future Lord Kitchener). So dashing were they that in 1906 Burberry & Son won a government contract to clothe all line officers. That led to the design of the buttoned, double-breasted, and belted coat that I wanted in the summer of 1961. It took World War I to win for it the name of ‘trench coat,’ rather sinister really if you think of the casualty rates at the Somme and Ypres, but in 1961 I had in mind only the style of the day and my model was Humphrey Bogart (or perhaps Lauren Bacall?). Nor did I have the $$ to buy a real Burberry, so I bought a “London Fog.” It looked like a Burberry, and I called it a trench coat. I lost mine in a Greyhound bus, in November 1965, on my way home to tell my parents that I’d found my Lauren Bacall. ©

[Stanley]

Nothing is more terrible than to see ignorance in action.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749-1832

All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own. Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born in the ‘free city’ of Frankfurt on August 28, 1749. He was the eldest child of parents who’d rattled against the glass ceiling then in effect for the German haute bourgeoisie. In 1742 Goethe’s father did buy the title of imperial councilor from the emperor Karl VII, but Karl’s death in 1745 proved that purchase premature. So young Johann and his sister Cornelia (1750-1777) grew up in comfortable circumstances. They became intimate friends, and it may be that Cornelia’s frustrations with the limitations imposed by her gender turned Johann Wolfgang’s attentions to the inner self. For him, as eldest son and heir, there were wider possibilities, and early on he pursued these with some vigor. After intensive home tutoring (some of it with Cornelia) he turned to the law and looked likely to follow in his father’s footsteps, but he was to break through that glass ceiling in quite different ways. Instead of the law, of imperial civil service, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was to become one of the greatest men of his age, and in a variety of fields. Drawn away from legal studies by his taste for the low-life society of artists and thespians, he fell into love (more than once) and, his love being unrequited, suffered all its pangs. He first expressed this pain in anonymous poems and then in what would be called today a blockbuster novel (for it sold, everywhere, like hotcakes), The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). It is epistolary in form, letters written by the eponymous hero to a close friend, and it has all the intimacy one could wish for, detailing Werther’s hopes and the ways in which, seriatim, they were dashed. Werther wanted love and friendship, maybe power and riches, but from the start he hadn’t enough of the latter two to win through to full acceptance. If it wasn’t autobiographical (first novels often are) it was certainly self-referential, and it holds up to us a mirror Goethe’s own youthful disappointments, a couple of his father’s, and possibly also some heartfelt sympathy for his sister Cornelia. Many see Werther as the opening salvo in the ’Romantic Revolution’ in its concern with the individual’s secular soul, and it was certainly followed in this by William Wordsworth’s long, free-verse The Prelude or Growth of a Poet’s Mind (1799 et seq.). As for Werther himself, he suicides, nobly indeed, which did not endear the novel to the authorities. Goethe later professed some embarrassment about the novel, and he himself went on to establish very different landmarks in philosophy, poetry, criticism, and natural science, but Young Werther’s adolescent honesty lives on in many undergraduate curricula. As it should. ©.

[Stanley]

"There is a light in this world that will emerge through the lives of ordinary people who hear a call and answer in extraordinary ways."
Richard Attenborough, 1930-2014

I came from a family who believed in “the rights of Man” and who believed that to justify the sort of luxurious life that the majority of us have—related to the rest of the world—that you had to do something. Richard Attenborough.

Talent—or the lack of it—does often seem to run in families. I don’t think that this settles the debate over whether ‘intelligence’ owes to nature or nurture. Rather the debate becomes more interesting and more intricate as one focuses more sharply on any single family. What was it, after all, that explains the extraordinary successes of the three Attenborough boys, in order of birth Richard, David, and John? David survives as the most famous of the three, but today we’re concerned with the eldest brother, Richard Attenborough, born in Cambridge, England, on August 29, 1923. He had talented parents. His mother Mary (née Clegg) was a very public person, a cofounder of England’s Marriage Guidance Council and a strong advocate of female equality. Father Frederick was a legal scholar at Cambridge and then chosen to shepherd University College Leicester through to independent status as the newest of England’s “civic” universities. Like both his brothers, Richard was well-educated at Leicester’s grammar school, but then WWII caught him in late adolescence and sent him into the RAF. There, instead of becoming a bomber pilot, Richard was trained in film production. This wasn’t entirely surprising, for he’d already been bitten by the acting bug. Nor was it lack of courage. Richard did go on bombing missions, filming raids over Europe from the tail gunner’s bubble (an uncomfortable seat, if ringside). Rather it was a special talent, honed to professional level by Richard’s RAF commander, who just happened to be one of the legendary Boulting brothers. Come the peace, Richard Attenborough followed the Boultings in modernizing the British cinema, first as an actor. He’d already played in the heroic war film In Which We Serve (1942), but he broke through to stardom as the mostly despicable Pinkie Brown in John Boulting’s production of Brighton Rock (1947). Interestingly, when it comes to the origins of talent and success, Pinkie is fated to failure by both nature and nurture—but tries to escape it. As for Richard Attenborough, he went on in acting, directing, and producing to become a leading light in the British cinema, and in Hollywood, and on stage. He and his wife (he married actress Sheila Sim in 1945) were productive, too, as charity campaigners, art collectors, philanthropists, and public figures, until their deaths (both in their 90s, in 2014 and 2016). ‘Dickie’ Attenborough’s successes would have pleased his parents and his brothers, too, but taking the Attenboroughs all together their lives suggest that “talent” is a plural thing, diverse and varied, and that “success” depends at partly on the rolls of the dice. ©.

[Stanley]

What is a 'real' American?
Luisa Moreno, 1907-1992

These people are not aliens. They have contributed their endurance, sacrifices, youth and labor to the United States. From Luisa Moreno’s ‘Caravan of Sorrow’ speech, 1940.

In the US, those discomfited by immigration have too often played the race card. Thus as “real” Americans they urge us to believe that “our” country is being “invaded” by alien “others.” It’s a sad spectacle for a nation of immigrants, which is what we are. But it’s an old one, witness Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback,” a name that was a more than Freudian slip. Its aim was to rid the country of Hispanics, and its moving spirit was Ike’s Attorney General Herbert Brownell. After winning a fortune by helping Aristotle Onassis (a Greek national) help himself to American war surplus, Brownell turned to rid the USA of its ‘war surplus’ of Hispanic workers. But it wasn’t only Republicans. And it wasn’t only workers. Before Operation Wetback, the Truman administration had been deporting Hispanics as fast as it indecently could, including (in 1950) a woman married to a “real” American (like Brownell, he was a ‘native’ Nebraskan), and a woman prominent in the defense of US Latinos’ rights and a cofounder of El Congreso de Pueblos de Habla Española (1939). Better yet, she traveled under a nom de guerre, Luisa Moreno. She “really” was Bianca Rosa López Rodriguez, born in Guatemala on August 30, 1907. Hers was a wealthy family, but she refused to conform to traditional expectations for girls from aristocratic families. Bianca’s heroine was a Chilean writer, who herself had adopted a new name, and who would (as Gabriela Mistral, in 1945) become the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Unable to fulfil herself in Guatemala, Bianca Rosa moved first to Mexico, then completed her education in Oakland, CA (at a Catholic women’s college), before (1929) moving to New York City (Spanish Harlem) and involving herself in the liberation of poor Hispanic workers, mainly female, in the garment trade. Bianca became so involved, and so public, that she changed her name and her politics, joining up with a couple of left-wing political parties. She became even more alien when she moved to California to help organize Hispanic field workers in that state’s industrializing farms. Along the way Luisa Moreno got involved in two spectacular murder cases (including the police killing of a Hispanic striker) and she became too well known for her own safety. She was deported, without her husband, in 1950, saving Herbert Brownell the trouble of doing so with his Operation Wetback (which, notoriously, deported many US citizens as well as “aliens”). She has told her story to many historians, however, and so she has lived beyond her death (which occurred in 1992) to remind us all of what it means to be a wetback. But in our bones, we already knew that. It’s who we are. .©

[Stanley]

Finding a place for women.
Elizabeth Knight, 1869-1933

Then Minerva bethought herself of another matter. From Homer, The Odyssey.

When in London on research, I stayed in the Cartwright Gardens area, a pleasant hodge-podge architecturally including the institutional (like the hall where I stayed), a whiff of the past with Georgian crescents, and the strikingly modern. Among the latter was the Brunswick Square project. I liked it. Rather like a football stadium, it was cantilevered out to give every resident a large terrace on which to enjoy the sun, when it shone, and on the ground floor were shops and a promisingly-named cinema, the Renoir. But mine was a minority view. Many critics bemoaned the Georgian terraces demolished by the Brunswick Centre. Some preferred aged terraces to post-modern monstrosities. Others lamented the loss of historic context, including the demolition of the Minerva Club. Minerva was a Greco-Roman goddess, and the club was a redoubt for suffragette veterans, women and their male friends who aimed to improve on the vote through female engagement with all the arts (and some sciences) that Minerva had cared for. The club’s founder was Elizabeth Knight. She fit the Minerva mold: ideally, one might say, for besides wanting a place for like-minded women to gather she was rich, a pioneer woman doctor, a public health advocate, and a militant suffragette who had gone to prison for the cause and then, adding public insult to her private injury, wrote a book on The Social and Sanitary Conditions of Prison Life—which she had found wanting and wished to bring to the home secretary’s attention. Elizabeth Knight was born on August 31, 1869, the youngest child (of 3) and only daughter of a cement baron. He died in 1880, and being a Quaker made sure that Elizabeth would benefit from partible inheritance (her own fair share, despite her sex) and from a good education. At the time, that meant private school and then Newnham College, Cambridge, where Elizabeth read classics (and doubtless learned about Minerva’s mischievous tendencies). She then went on to London’s pioneer School of Medicine for Women, qualified, added a diploma in public health, and began to campaign for that and for the vote. After three prison terms and winning the vote, Knight founded the Minerva Club, close enough to Bloomsbury, paid out its long lease, furnished it, and continued in her struggles until she died, in a motoring accident, in 1933. One hopes that somewhere in the Brunswick project there is a blue plaque indicating that, once upon a time, in a nearby Georgian terrace, Elizabeth Knight plotted with her friends and fellow Minervas to improve the lot of women in modern Britain. As for the Brunswick project, it’s now listed as a Grade II building, thus fit for preservation and, perhaps, its own blue plaque. ©

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Missouri native wins Olympic Bronze, 1904
George Coleman Poage, 1880-1962

To say that the government cannot protect the negro . . . is to admit it cannot protect its citizens . . . and that the USA is not a nation. >From George Poage’s salutatorian speech, La Crosse, WI. 1899.

On September 1, 1904, in St. Louis, George Poage, competing for the USA, won the second of his two Olympic medals (in the 200- and 400-metre races). Even though Poage was a Missouri native, his achievement was not newsworthy. Then, the Olympics were a small-bore event, and in St. Louis they played second fiddle to the 1904 World’s Fair. The leader of the Olympic movement had expected a “mediocre” games in a “mediocre” city. And Poage’s medals were both bronze only. But he was the first African-American to win any Olympics medal, and in his youth he enjoyed a promising life. In freedom after 1865 his parents moved into Hannibal, where his father worked in a tannery and his mother in domestic service. In 1880 George was born, the youngest of their three children. Five years later the family moved upriver, to La Crosse, where both parents served in a rich man’s mansion. There George had a very different experience from that which might have awaited him in Hannibal. He attended public schools, excelled academically, and in 1899 when he graduated as salutatorian he gave a stirring speech on being a “negro” in America. He carried his talents on to Madison, where he majored in history and was advised by Frederick Jackson Turner. Poage’s BA thesis was on the unkind fates of blacks on the southern frontier, which did not endear him to Turner (he got a barely-passing 71% from a scholar who thought the frontier the cradle of American democracy). But Poage found release in track and field and in singing, too, for he was possessed of a fine tenor voice. After Madison, Poage found a place at the Milwaukee Athletics Club and he wore that club’s colors when he was selected for the Olympics. Taken together with the World’s Fair (in part a celebration of the supremacy of the ‘white races’) and the Jim Crow segregation of the city itself, it’s not surprising that his Olympic performances did not get much publicity, but he did attract the attention of black leaders (here and in East St. Louis) and was appointed to teach (history but also English) in Charles Sumner High School. He made influential friends in the black community, including James Vashon and Homer Phillips, but his teaching career ended in 1914, possibly on grounds of his less salubrious friendships with several of St. Louis’s black musicians. He lived the rest of his life in Chicago, as a mailman, and died in obscurity in 1962. But George Coleman Poage has been rediscovered. There’s a public park named after him in La Crosse, and copious biographical material is posted online. It’s well worth a read, and he’s well worth a thought. ©

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The 'Greek Revival' and its German base.
Ernst Curtius, 1814-1896

Fair Greece! Sad relic of departed worth! Immortal, though no more! Though fallen, great! Lord Byron, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” c. 1812-1818 .

The influence of classical Greece on modern western culture reached its apogee in the early 19th century, inspiring even an ill-educated farmer’s son like Abraham Lincoln to model himself on Pericles, the plain-spoken hero of the Athenian republic. Frontier Iowans named one of their towns after the lawgiver Solon, and our ‘founding fathers’ judged Solon a hero precisely because he had laid down the law to Athenian oligarchs. The leading English Romantic poets thought ‘virtue’ a Greek discovery; Percy Bysshe Shelley studied Greek and wrote in it daily (and his wife Mary complained about it). For various reasons this modern vogue had its birth in 18th-century Germany, beginning with philologists who invented the modern art of accurate (therefore contextual) translation. Their rich understanding laid the basis for 19th-century Germany becoming the main center of modern Greek studies. Not only the words but also the flesh, for these language studies made Germany the place to study Greek history and archaeology. Almost as soon as modern Greeks won independence from the Ottoman Turks, German scholars followed with their spades, notebooks, and sketchpads. The Elgin marbles (and John Keats’ ‘Grecian Urn’) may have gone to London but much more went to Berlin, Frankfurt, and Heidelberg. This owed to a number of German ‘diggers,’ among whom the longest-lived and most influential was Ernst Curtius, born in Lübeck of devout Lutheran parents on September 2, 1814. While his brother Georg became a leading philologist, Ernst was whisked away to Greece on archaeological expeditions. Along the way he became fascinated with the legends of Olympus, a fascination he passed on to the Prussian royal family as tutor (from 1844) to the then Crown Prince. That in turn brought him a Berlin professorship, and when (in 1870-71) the German states were united under Prussian leadership Curtius was well-placed to undertake, for imperial Germany and royal Greece, the exclusive business of excavating the original site of Olympus, not only the seat of the gods (Zeus et als.) but also a center for ancient Greek ceremony, where Greece’s warring states could practice the arts, rites, and amusements of ritual neutrality. Full excavations began in 1875, and startling discoveries soon followed, not only the original sports stadium but major religious temples and many artifacts, including a rare original statue sculpted by Praxiteles. All this made Curtius an international figure, and if you want to find one person to credit with (or blame for) the modern Olympics movement, Professor Ernst Curtius is a good bet. ©

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"Her voice is a miracle."
Dorothy Maynor, 1910-1996

We’ve made them believe that everything beautiful is outside the community. We would like them to make beauty in our community. Dorothy Maynor, explaining her involvement in Harlem’s community choir programs.

Everyone remembers, even in Florida, that Marian Anderson was barred from singing in our nation’s capital because she was black. President Franklin Roosevelt put that right by giving Anderson the Lincoln Memorial. A fitting place: and from it, on April 9, 1939, Anderson gave one of the more famous recitals in US history. What is less well-remembered is that 14 years later another African-American sang at the inauguration of President Dwight David Eisenhower. She was Dorothy Maynor, born in Virginia on September 3, 1910. Her ‘Africanness’ came from her father, pastor of the AME church in Norfolk. Dorothy’s Native American heritage descended through her mother Alice. Dorothy cultivated her voice at home, then in her father’s church. During her childhood she was “unaware” of any racial prejudice. But her schoolteachers knew that to explore her talent fully she would have to escape Norfolk’s apartheid. So Dorothy’s concert career began at the historically black Hampton Institute, first as a very young soloist in the Institute Choir. She attracted notice during the Choir’s northern and European tours in 1929 and then won a scholarship to the Westminster Choir College, a Presbyterian institution, where she graduated BA (Music) in 1935. Dorothy’s professional career took off when she soloed for conductor Serge Koussevitzky at the Berkshire Summer Festival. Reluctant to accept a solo performance by an amateur, Koussevitzky was bowled over. “She must be heard,” he said, and so she was, first at Carnegie Hall and then around the world in orchestral concerts and recitals. Dorothy’s performances followed a pattern which can be seen online in her solo program at the University of Michigan in 1946. Classic soprano pieces (from Bach to Mahler) led to a finale of “Negro Spirituals.” These last were modified into ‘classical’ style, which caused some anger in Civil Rights circles, but made her more than acceptable to the black public, and to many other audiences. In 1951, Dorothy Maynor performed in DC, in Constitution Hall, the very place that had barred Marian Anderson in 1939. There were “only two or three dissenting voices” from the Daughters of the American Revolution board of directors, faintly heard against Maynor’s superb soprano. So Dorothy Maynor was more than ready to open the 1953 inauguration with the Star Spangled Banner. And Dwight Eisenhower, who’d won the 1952 Republican nomination with southern black votes, was more than ready to listen. After further touring, Maynor spent the rest of her life organizing community choirs for her husband’s church in Harlem. She died in 1996. ©

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Our native son.
Richard Wright, 1908-1960.

Because my environment was bare and bleak I endowed it with unlimited potentialities, redeemed it for the sake of my own hungry and cloudy yearning. Richard Wright.

In these latter days we are told by politicians that we should ban (from libraries and school curricula) anything that might make ‘our’ children feel bad. If we are indeed so brittle, so fragile, so close to shattering, then ‘our’ children might profit from some tougher love. There can be few better ways of doing that than to tell them the life story of Richard Wright, born black near Natchez, Mississippi on September 4, 1908. True, he lived only 52 years, dying an exile, in Paris, France, in 1960. But for Wright, even surviving childhood was something of a miracle, and a self-wrought one. He added to that by becoming one of our best writers (of autobiography, fiction, and political polemic) and an independent thinker. Abandoned by his sharecropper father, sometimes physically abused by his mother, and every day battered by the brutalities of southern apartheid, Wright led a peripatetic existence as a child. Likely, until he was 12, he never had a complete year of schooling, and when despite all that he was named valedictorian of a Jackson, MS, middle school his reward was to be told by his school principal that if he did not deliver a speech written for him then he would not graduate. Wright spoke anyway, and in his own voice too, and he kept on doing that for the rest of his life. Although Wright did get his high school diploma, he was largely self-taught, an auto-didact. Working nights in a whites-only “public” library, he cadged books on his own, and devoured them: everything from Seventh-Day Adventist spiritualism to the anti-southern diatribes of H. L. Mencken. Come to think of it, Mencken will probably be banned in Florida, too, even though he was a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, but Richard Wright’s mature writings are even more dangerous, notably his best-selling novel Native Son (1947), its title dripping with irony and its text written in anger. This and his previous political writings made Wright a hot property, and bids came in from all quarters, e.g. the Communist Party, the government of the newly-independent Ghana, and the US State Department (specifically, the CIA). It’s not clear that Wright refused all such offers (indeed he may have played them off against each other) but he stayed his own man, in his Paris exile, immersing himself in existentialism. One can understand that, for if ever a person willed himself into being, and did so in spite of an absurdly hostile world, it was Richard Wright, our native son and our perfect stranger. His life story, well told and made freely available in our schools and libraries, might do wonders for our children’s mental health. And might stiffen some of our politicians’ backbones. ©

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Citoyen or citoyenne?
Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne, 1791.

A woman has the right to mount the scaffold. She must possess equally the right to mount the speaker's platform. Olympe de Gouges, September 5, 1791.

On September 5, 1791, in Paris, Olympe de Gouges put the finishing touches on her “Déclaration des Droits de la Femme et de la Citoyenne.” She published it broadside nine days later. In conception and rhetoric it mirrored the National Assembly’s 1789 “Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen,” arguably the foundation document of the French Revolution, and (one would have thought) de Gouges’ addition of femme and citoyenne should have been welcomed by all revolutionaries. But it brought de Gouges only a sea of troubles and suggests that the gendered language of the 1789 declaration of the rights of man was gender-specific rather than species-wide. Of course it was not quite that simple. History rarely is simple, and Olympe de Gouges was herself a complex character whose contributions to French culture and then to the revolution itself would set her apart from first one and then another political faction. She was a provincial, possibly of illegitimate birth (1748), who after an unhappy marriage (1765) made a better connection with a Lyon merchant, moved to Paris, and there made a name for herself as a playwright, essayist, and saloniste. In tune with the temper of the times, she advocated not only a better deal for French women but also freedom and equality for French slaves (as in her 1788 Reflexions sur les hommes nègres). The Revolution, which began in 1789, made possible the realization of her ideas, and she proved eager for the task. Olympe de Gouges kept writing, and agitating, for her radical view of the revolution, for instance taking part (perhaps a leading part) in the famous “women’s march” on Versailles, which she thought was about much more than the price of bread. But as the revolutionary movement gathered force her moderating temperament got the better of her. Notably, she opposed the January 1793 execution of the king, in part on humane grounds (she opposed capital punishment in principle) but in part because she hoped for a constitutional monarchy. She had already addressed her women’s rights declaration to Marie Antoinette. So her political stance may had been a contributing cause for her own execution, by guillotine, on November 3, 1793. But there’s no reason to doubt that she’d also run afoul of the essential maleness of Robespierre’s “Montagnard” faction, which sealed her fate. Her words remained and echoed down the decades, used by Mary Wollstonecraft in 1792 and then later, in the USA, by the Seneca Falls declaration of 1848. We are, perhaps, forced to accept that in 1789 “citoyen” (noun, m.) meant exactly what it said. ©.

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From slavery to personhood.
John Brown Russwurm, 1799-1851

Our time is short in this transitory world, and it therefore becomes us to labor with all our might, lest the darkness overtake us before we are aware of it. John Brown Russwurm, 1830.

Early on, Bowdoin College commencements were intimate affairs, for each graduate had to give an address on a topic of his choice. At the September 6, 1826 ceremony, time allowed but four graduates. One oration (called a “conference” on the program) was on the “genius” of the Scottish poets Robert Burns and James Thomson. One wonders whether this included comments on Burns’s earthier verses, but premier place in the ceremony went to a “treatise” on “The Conditions and Prospects of Hayti,” delivered by John Brown Russwurm, perhaps the first person of African descent to graduate from any American college. Russwurm was born in Jamaica in 1799. His father was a Virginia gentleman, his mother (whose name is not known) an enslaved woman. What the elder Russwurm thought of slavery is not known, but when he returned to the USA he took his natural son with him, calling the boy “John Brown.” It was perhaps a descriptive surname, certainly not one openly acknowledging parenthood, and it stuck until the father married a Maine woman, Susan Blanchard. Susan accepted “John Brown” as her stepson and, into the bargain, insisted he be acknowledged as John Brown Russwurm. She was also instrumental in his schooling (at home and at Hebron Academy), and perhaps in the young man’s going to Bowdoin. There his classmates (including Nathaniel Hawthorne, who visited Russwurm “several times”) thought him something of a recluse (he lived alone, off campus), but liked him well enough to elect him to the prestigious Athenaean Society. From Bowdoin, John Russwurm moved to New York City where he taught in an ’African’ school, Primus Hall. In 1827 Russwurm was founder-editor of the Freeman’s Journal, an early abolitionist newspaper. But (interestingly in view of his undergraduate interest in Haiti) he turned it towards advocacy of African colonization. When the paper failed, Russwurm went to Liberia where he married the daughter of the then Lieutenant Governor, and settled down as the leader of a settlement, at Cape Palmas, founded by the Maryland Colonization Society. It was there that Russwurm and his family entertained American naval officers (coasting the African continent to discourage the slave trade) in fine style. Russwurm’s hospitality was made all the warmer because one of the officers was an old Bowdoin classmate, the evocatively-named Horatio Bridge. Apparently that old college tie could, in 1846, transcend the racial divisions that had made John Brown Russwurm an alien in his father’s country, a student of the Haitian revolution, and then a willing exile in Liberia. There he died a free person, his own master and the father of his acknowledged children, in 1851. ©

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Separate but equal??
John Merrick, 1859-1919

[Separate but equal] is our honest and determined purpose and . . . the assured path toward racial harmony and progress . . . in all America. Governor Broughton (D., NC), speaking at the launch of the USS John Merrick, July 11, 1943.

J. Melville Broughton of North Carolina was one of the more liberal southern governors during the apartheid era. Reaching political maturity during the Great Depression, he spoke often of the limits of free enterprise economics and the need for government intervention, particularly in the cause of public education. He was also a ‘progressive’ on the race issue. So it wasn’t odd that he was the lead speaker in Wilmington at the launching of the USS John Merrick, christened in honor of one of the South’s most successful black businessmen. John Merrick was born enslaved, on September 7, 1859, the son of an enslaved woman and, perhaps, her white ‘owner.’ Mother and son were freed de facto by General Sherman’s Union troops and de jure by the 13th amendment. Off the plantation and in Raleigh, John Merrick learned to read and write at a freedman’s school, and found work where he could, as a bootblack in a barbershop. There he learned the art of service and the science of southern racial etiquette, and he carried both with him to Durham to set up his own barbering business. This grew to five shops, three serving a black clientele. In the white shops, Merrick became known to Durham’s new (and lily white) economic elite. Among them were the Dukes, father and sons, then in the process of making their tobacco fortune, and with their support (and his profits) Merrick went into business on a grand scale, but not in tobacco. Most notable was North Carolina Mutual Insurance, soon the nation’s largest black-owned company, but there was also a bank and a chain of pharmacies. However much or little Merrick depended financially on his white friends, his businesses served a largely African-American market, and served them well. While local legends grew of Merrick’s magical abilities to wean money from rich whites, his businesses prospered, and he plowed his profits back into the black community, especially in education and in Durham’s “colored public library.” Like Booker T. Washington, Merrick urged blacks to ‘cast down their buckets where they were.’ So Merrick did not challenge white supremacy, at least not openly, and so it was that Governor Broughton, in 1943 and at the Wilmington shipyards could memorialize Merrick as a champion of “his race” and proof positive that in the arsenal of democracy, separate could really be equal. The USS John Merrick floated, and sailed, until 1969. These same years showed “separate but equal” to be a sinking ship, a contradiction in terms. Merrick and Broughton must both have known this. But neither of them could say so openly. ©.

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Facts and frauds
Joaquin Miller, 1837-1913

That man who lives for self alone
Lives for the meanest mortal known. Joaquin Miller, 1905.

When Joaquin Miller died he was mourned as “the last of the great American poets.” That would have pleased him, for Miller paraded himself as the “western Walt Whitman” (though “without the coarseness”). Whether Whitman can be read without the coarseness is a question, but Miller was a clear case of self-creation. For a start, he changed his birth date, birth place, and birth name. Joaquin Miller was in fact born Cincinnatus Hiner Miller on September 8, 1837 in rural Indiana. Later he changed his middle name to Heine, later still his given name to Joaquin, and claimed to have been born in Millersville IN, in 1841, to that town’s founding family. These alterations in identity may have been a function of moving west, or of his burgeoning literary ambitions (“Heine” memorialized the great German poet Heinrich Heine), or of his weakness for the tall tale (the “Joaquin” was allegedly conferred on him by the Miami Indians). In any case he moved west with his birth family, grew up in Oregon, briefly ran a pro-Secession newspaper there, and then migrated again, south to San Francisco, where after spells of horse-thievery, Pony Express riding, and residing (as captive?) with the Wintu tribe, he established himself as a self-confessed literary giant. Among his titles, he was the “Poet of the Sierras.” His tall tales truly soared, and in that sense were typical of the new breed of western writers, but they gushed Romance. Too much of it, according to Mark Twain, who thought him a fraud. Miller’s autobiographical essays are today seen as undependably heroic, but they sold well. His poetry sold even better. Whether he was a successor to Longfellow or a partner to Whitman, his poems became the stuff of school recitals, and he was able to build an eccentrically utopian home estate above Oakland. Having divorced three wives, Miller lived there with his mother. I ran across him in two letters in my family’s collection, written by young women back to their childhood governess (my great-great aunt Mary Kerr) back in Illinois. They were excited by their visit but also charmed by Miller’s and his mother’s courtesies. They did not mention the massive funeral pyre he’d built on the estate’s highest point, but in the end (1913) his funeral was conventional except for the hundreds of onlookers who’d climbed his hill, perhaps to make sure that he’d really died. Such as Miller was (which is a mystery) he’s memorialized in place names and school names across California, and in the sole surviving log cabin in Washington, D. C., in Rock Creek Park. So Miller’s created self remains with us to this day, for better and for worse. ©

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How to learn French without tears.
Florence, Lady Bell, 1851-1929

Français sans larmes? Not bloody likely.

French without Tears (1936) was the playwright Terence Rattigan’s first hit. He was then only 25, and the play’s soon-to-be-distinguished cast (inter alia Rex Harrison, Trevor Howard, Kay Hammond, and Jessica Handy) were about the same age, as befit a satire-comedy (with some slapstick) about the perils of learning a new language too shallowly. The play’s inherently comic title has been used since, of course, but it was not Rattigan’s invention. That honor belongs to a three-volume teach-yourself-French series (1895-1897) by Lady Florence Eveleen Eleanor Bell. She came into it naturally, having spent her first 19 years in Paris, and she’d already written several books in French, most of them designed to encourage young English folk to learn French by doing it. These weren’t her only accomplishments. Lady Florence was, for instance, the step-mother of Gertrude Bell (1868-1926) the intrepid archaeologist, explorer, anti-suffragette, and spy-diplomat. Lady Bell was born Florence Oliffe, in Paris, on September 9, 1851. Her father was physician to the British embassy, her mother heiress to the Cubitt building fortune, and until the Franco-Prussian war and the rise of the Paris Commune she lived a comfortable life, well-educated and au courant with French and English high culture. Fleeing Paris in 1870, and settled in fashionable Knightsbridge, London, she soon (1876) became the second wife of the English iron master and coal baron Sir Hugh Bell, step-mothering his two children and birthing three of her own. Their wealth was considerable and their politics were Liberal, and when Florence began to write she really spread herself, not only French primers but also novels, political allegories, and her investigations into the lives and fortunes of the English working classes, most notably those men (and their wives, sisters, and daughters) who worked in her husband’s foundries, factories, and mines in the northeast of England, in and around Tyneside. Her At the Works (1907) was dedicated to Charles Booth, a wealthy London shipowner who shared her human interest in the poor, so she was no radical, far less a socialist, but we can charitably class her as a social reformer—if only by reforming the poor. Later on she was shattered by the deaths of her son Hugo (an adventurous medical doctor) and her step-daughter Gertrude. Lady Bell’s last major literary venture was to transcribe and edit the Letters of Gertrude Bell (2 vols., 1927). And then, possibly, to inspire the young Terence Rattigan to take on the impossible task of learning French without Tears. ©

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Pragmaticism or Pragmatism? It's all about probabilities.
Charles Peirce, 1839-1914

All human affairs rest on probabilities. Charles Sanders Peirce.

If you would understand the historical roots of pragmatism (that most ‘American’ strain of philosophy) you could do no better than read Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club, which won the history Pulitzer in 2002. On one level, it’s a collective biography of several influential thinkers, notably Charles Peirce, William James, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and of their influence, in turn, on John Dewey and his educational and social philosophies. When I read Menand, Charles Peirce was to me unknown. So much the worse for me, for Peirce may have been the most fruitful thinker of them all, and certainly was the most broadly-gauged. He was also the oddest, the very definition of ‘eccentric.’ Charles Peirce was born on September 10, 1839, the son of Harvard mathematician Benjamin Peirce. Beside his formal schooling, and perhaps subverting it, Charles was home schooled via a problem-solving pedagogy. “Here’s the problem. You go out and solve it.” This nurtured an astonishing breadth of mind and a kind of intellectual fearlessness, both of which would contribute to Charles’s lone wolf approach to the life of the mind—and, perhaps, to life in general. After he was fired from Johns Hopkins (for what might be called marital irregularities), Peirce and his second wife (Juliette, a woman of uncertain but possibly Gypsy origin) settled on his rambling estate in Pennsylvania, rebuilt its farmhouse in an irregular manner, and lived just at the edge of their means. Besides his inheritance, Charles kept money trickling in by writing for this or that journal, and for himself, copiously and on a cornucopia of subjects. If you printed it all, it would fill a library section, and eight volumes have been printed, so far, by the University of Indiana’s Peirce Edition Project. Taking it all together, Peirce made original (even foundational) studies in statistics, linguistics, criticism, geographical mapping, and several branches of philosophy, notably logic. Some credit him with the invention of pragmatism, but Peirce thought his own brand unique enough to call it “pragmaticism,” partly to distinguish it from the versions advanced by James and Dewey. John Dewey, by the way, was one of Peirce’s students at Johns Hopkins, but then so was the iconoclast Thorsten Veblen, a juxtaposition warning us not to attempt to pigeonhole Charles Peirce in any one school of thought. It can’t be done and, anyway, he thought that most branches of knowledge were interstitial. But Peirce did invent ‘The Metaphysical Club’, the name of several discussion groups he set up while still an undergraduate at Harvard—for then and always Charles Peirce was precocious to a fault. ©

[Stanley]

A very rascally original
Archbishop Ealdred of York, d. September 11, 1069

A French bastard landing with an armed banditti and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives is, in plain terms, a very paltry rascally original. Thomas Paine, in Common Sense (1776)

Almost all of today’s news, at least on TV, is about one royal death and a consequent royal coronation, which brings to mind other (maybe more consequential) English coronations. Two of these occurred in close succession, indeed in the same year, 1066. “England” then was not yet a reality, but it was a prize, fought over by a succession of brigands of more or less noble birth and often at the mercy of invaders. Out of the carnage came first Harold Godwinson (who was, so to speak, Godwin’s son), crowned King Harold II on January 6. His rights were contested by (inter alia) William, duke of Normandy. William invaded England, killing Harold in the process, and was crowned king on Christmas day. He ruled for two decades, long enough to fasten the “Norman Yoke” on the Anglo-Saxons, but what may be even more interesting is that both Harold and William were crowned by the same man, Ealdred, the Anglo-Saxon archbishop of York. Ealdred died soon, perhaps exhausted by his own legerdemain, on September 11, 1069. We don’t know Ealdred’s birth date, but he was probably well-born and almost certainly related to leading churchmen of his day, including one abbot and one bishop. If this was a ‘good’ beginning, he rose quickly from it to become an abbot himself, then bishop (at Hereford, Worcester, then Gloucester), and finally (in 1061) archbishop of York. He was a man of varied talents. A builder, Ealdred was responsible for large construction projects in the cathedrals at Gloucester and York and lesser churches. He was a military man who commanded the English forces in a war against, then as diplomat concluded an uneasy peace with, the Welsh rebel Gruffydd ap Llywelyn. Ealdred was a traveler too, making separate pilgrimages to Jerusalem and Rome. And, appropriately as it turned out, Ealdred thought of himself as a kingmaker. His trek to the Holy Land included a stay in Hungary where he tried to find legitimate (or at least plausible) successors to Edward the Confessor. Failure in that task led Ealdred to pitch his tent with Harold Godwinson, so it was not too great a wrench to shift his loyalties from the dead Harold to the living William, especially given William’s show of force at and after the Battle of Hastings. At William’s coronation, a precedent was set when Ealdred asked (in Anglo-Saxon) the assembled earls and knights to accept their new king. The nobles were then asked, in Norman French, to make the same declaration, and duke William the Bastard became king William the Conqueror. What we are seeing now, nearly 1,000 years on, will be less dramatic, less rascally—and less consequential. ©.

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The alchemical dream made real.
Irène Joliot-Curie, 1897-1956

That one must do some work seriously and must be independent and not merely amuse oneself in life—this our mother has told us always, but never that science was the only career worth following. Irene Joliot-Curie

Irène Curie was born in Paris on September 12, 1897, the elder daughter of Pierre and Marie Curie. Her parents won the Physics Nobel in 1903. Then mother Marie was the Chemistry Nobelist in 1911, and it’s often said that Irène was ‘fated’ to win the same prize in 1935, but that conceals her own remarkable life. In 1906, aged 9, she joined ‘The Cooperative,’ where she and other children supplemented their public schooling in the homes of leading academics in disciplines including science and math, but also art and literature, and where the emphasis was on play and self-expression. Irène’s sister Eve (1902-2004), who got the same indulgent ‘treatment,’ would turn to writing as a war correspondent (along several fronts, in WWII) and then as a prize-winning biographer. Irène’s scientific career was interrupted by war service as a nurse, helping to locate shrapnel in soldiers’ wounds, for instance at Ypres and Amiens. She used x-rays, of course, then at the 1918 peace returned to her university studies in math and physics. During her doctoral work she became involved with Fréderic Joliot. They married in 1926 and embarked on new work, using x-rays and alpha rays to unlock the secrets of atomic nuclei. Electron bombardment and fiendishly clever mind-games: these enabled the Joliot-Curies to ‘see’ and even to weigh positrons and neutrons and thus (along with Maxwell’s electrons) to fill out our modern vision of the atom as a kind of solar system in miniature. So the atom was not quite stable, a physical uncertainty at the very heart of the universe, and in 1934 Fréderic and Irène exploited this to use electron bombardment to transform one element (aluminum) into another (phosphorous). They won the 1935 Nobel for this truly revolutionary discovery. In their public lives they were as active, thus following in the wake of Pierre and Marie Curie. Militant left-wingers, they were leaders in the fight against fascism at home and abroad. During WWII, Fréderic was active in the Resistance (appropriately enough, he helped in the liberation of Paris by manufacturing Molotov cocktails). At the war’s outset, to ensure that their work could not be exploited by Hitler, they had also spirited their research notes away to Britain (or hid them deep in the bowels of the National Archive). After the war, they returned to their ‘real’ work, and Irène returned to her agitation for women’s rights. Like her mother a militant feminist, she would also die of radiation poisoning, in 1956. The Joliot-Curie children, Hélène and Pierre, both became leading scientists, and troublemakers too. It seems to have been a family tradition. ©.

[Stanley]

Brain trauma and recovery.
The brain trauma of Phineas P. Gage

Doctor, here is business enough for you. Phineas Gage to Dr. Edward Williams, September 13, 1848.

On September 13, 1848, near Cavendish, Vermont, Phineas P. Gage suffered an injury that (with immodest exaggeration) could be said to have birthed modern brain science. Gage was the foreman of a crew blasting a cut (through granite) for the Rutland & Burlington Railroad. By all accounts Gage was a handsome young man, and clever into the bargain. He’d even invented (and fashioned) a new, improved tamping iron for his work. An accidental blast, set off by a stray spark, sent this very iron skywards, into Gage’s head. Indeed it lodged there, the core of a grotesque and horrifying wound from entry under the left cheekbone to exit at the top of the skull. But to everyone’s astonishment, it did not kill Gage. He retained consciousness, most of the time, and even spoke with the attending doctor, Edward Williams. Williams, who must have been a very cool hand, did some grisly repair work, cleaned and then cauterized the parts of the wound that were reachable, and tended Gage through a month of fever and delirium. At the end of all this, Phineas Gage returned to his parents’ New Hampshire farm and by the spring was engaged in feeding livestock, gathering eggs, even doing a bit of field work. His fame spread, and he was invited to Harvard Medical School, where his injury was studied and his behavior observed, scientifically one hopes, but later he became a different sort of attraction at P. T. Barnum’s American Museum in New York City. Gage was certainly paid for these activities, but he also took ‘normal’ work, much of it—he was good with horses—as a stagecoach driver in Chile. There began what may have been an inevitable decline. He returned to the USA, met his mother and sister in San Francisco, and was cared for by them until he died in May 1860, aged 47. He was by then a legend, and his case has been used to prove all manner of things. The least kind of these is that he was so stupid, so bestial, that the injury made hardly any difference. This was an especially popular notion for those who believed that the poor were at fault for being poor. In the late 19th century there was a surplus of such people. We still have them amongst us, but latterly Gage’s well-documented case and other examples of horrid trauma followed by significant rehabilitation have been used to probe the complexities of the brain and to extend the horizons of others who, through injury or illness, suffer brain trauma. People like me, for instance. I fell off a ladder onto my head, and I still have my wits about me. Just like Phineas P. Gage? But one difference is that I didn’t invent the ladder. ©