BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

The American cuisine of Joyce Chen
Joyce Chen, 1917-1996

If you see a door, don’t ask if you can go through it. Just open it. Stephen Chen, 2022, recalling his mother’s favorite motto.

As a kid in Grundy County, Iowa, I ate sauerkraut and kartoffelsalat, and thought them ‘American’, for Germans had arrived there at the same time as my great-grandfather (circa 1870). My first ‘foreign’ food was in the big city, Des Moines, where my parents were early patrons of Noah’s Ark Ristorante. Noah Lacona was a child of the Iowa coalfields, but his aging parents were Neapolitan-born, and it is by their raviolis, lasagnas, and (yes) pizzas that I judge ‘Italian’ cuisine, even though I now know that theirs was Americanized. Just so, waves of Chinese immigrants brought their regional cuisines to the American national diet. Their foods appealed first to California palates, so strongly that no Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) could keep them off the table. As the immigrants assimilated and moved cross-country, so did their cooking. Successive waves of immigration (and migration) sustained the process, and when Joyce Chen arrived in 1949, a refugee from the Communist revolution, there was a market. Joyce was born in Beijing on September 14, 1917 into a prosperous mercantile family, her father an important bureaucrat in the nationalist government of Sun Yat-sen. She learned her cooking in the family cook’s kitchen and was an insurance broker when she, her husband Thomas, and their children fled to the US. They settled in Cambridge, MA, where Thomas resumed his business (importing Asian art was a lot like exporting it). But what could Joyce do? More or less accidentally she hit upon cooking as her Cambridge trade. In 1958 she opened her first restaurant and jumped several hurdles by using a buffet-style ‘tasting’ menu (with notes in Chinese and in English) as cook and a cultural information approach as hostess. Cambridge was a good place for those strategies, also for good food served cheaply, and the business took off. Among Joyce’s patrons were leading Harvard and MIT academics and a mix of other interesting people, including Julia Child. While Joyce Chen was opening new restaurants (there would be three in total) she also took her wok to Boston’s educational channel, WGBH, where she used Julia Child’s set to teach Boston how to cook northern Chinese. Chen’s TV manner was less scrutable than Child’s, and her show not as popular, but it enabled her to spread out into supplying area supermarkets with Joyce Chen delectables and Joyce Chen implements, while at the same time she convinced Cambridge that northern Chinese cookery was all it needed to know. So while Cambridge identified Mandarin as Chinese, Des Moines identified Neapolitan as Italian, and our national menu was enriched and diversified. ©

[Stanley]

This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave. A. Lincoln, 1859.
Fawn M. Brodie, 1915-1981

A passion for politics stems usually from an insatiable need, either for power, or for friendship and adulation, or a combination of both. Fawn Brodie, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (1974)

The Santa Monica Mountains have been a focus of preservation efforts since the late 19th century. In 1978 the National Park service cobbled together about 250 square miles of private donations, state parks, and national forest land as the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. Among the most energetic lobbyists for the SMMNRA was Fawn Brodie, a UCLA history professor, but she didn’t join the celebrants because she was nursing her husband, Bernard, through his fatal cancer. Three years later, her ashes would join his, scattered along the route of one of their favorite walks. Now, after the disastrous Woolsey Fire of March 2019, almost all of it is ashes. As for Fawn McKay Brodie, she was born in Utah on September 15, 1915, into a family eminent in Mormon church councils but deeply in debt. Fawn McKay grew up a good church girl, religious poetry among her early accomplishments, and unaware that her mother was a closeted skeptic. Her mother would eventually ‘come out,’ but Fawn’s exit was more dramatic. First she married Bernard Brodie, a fellow grad student who was a refugee from Judaism, and then she researched and wrote a biography of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Latter Day Saints, Nobody Knows My Name (1946). It was her book that led to her excommunication or, as she came to think of it, her liberation. The biography is still controversial, and not just among Mormons. Brodie’s fame was secured by other biographies, notably of Thaddeus Stevens, the fire-eating Radical Republican; Sir Richard Burton, the surpassingly strange traveler and litterateur; and Thomas Jefferson, the intellectual hero of the American Revolution. Each made an impact, each was controversial in method, and her Intimate History of Jefferson (1974) was especially notable for arguing that Jefferson had indeed had a 28-year affair with his slave Sally Hemmings, punctuated only by his absences and her pregnancies. Brodie did it by correlating Hemmings’s live births with Jefferson’s times at Monticello. Most Jefferson scholars did not thank Brodie for her efforts (to put it mildly, their performance was miserable), but years after Brodie’s death she was proven right by Annette Gordon’s Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings (1997) and, conclusively, by DNA testing of surviving members of the Hemmings and Jefferson families. Thus Fawn Brodie, outcast from the Church of Latter Day Saints, altered forever our understanding of just what it might mean to be the “good master” over, and “responsible owner” of, many human beings. And of what it might mean to be owned by another human being. ©

[Stanley]

Finding Your Roots
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. b. 1950

If Martin Luther King came back, he’d say we need another civil rights movement, but one built on class, not race. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Among the few historians who have made themselves into public figures, my favorite is Henry Louis Gates, Jr., born in Kayser, West Virginia, on September 16, 1950. He has a scholarly record which includes several ‘popular’ books, and today he holds an endowed chair at Harvard, where he also directs a research institute. He’s best known, however, for his PBS series Finding Your Roots, which premiered in 2012 and is, I think, still running. I’ve not seen every episode, but I’d like to, and I have seen enough of them to detect in Gates a kind of double-handed bias. His subjects are persons of distinction, people who have made their mark in this or that field—or, occasionally, Gates picks a person whose close relative (a parent, for instance) gained lasting fame. But there’s a second wrinkle, for almost all of Gates’s subjects are also persons whose roots lay in troubled ground. They, or more usually their ancestors, were people among the world’s majority, sufferers from oppression, exclusion, exploitation, or poverty—and sometimes all four, for in ‘real’ history those horsemen ride together. So Gates interviews (and enlightens) people whose very presence in Finding Your Roots represents a triumph against the odds. It’s genealogy with several differences. Gates does not confine himself to the patrilineal root, rather familial with a shifting cast of fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts, siblings, ‘people like us.’ Often they arrived on American shores in chains, or as huddled masses streaming anonymously through ports of entry. Gates’s subjects, or their ancestors, were often not born free, rarely with silver spoons in their mouths, and almost never with a comfortable future laid out for them by birth or connection. Gates’s guests are rather like Gates himself. His dad, Henry Louis Gates, Sr., eked out his paper mill wages with night janitoring. His mother Pauline was a domestic. Young Gates was a star student who entered Yale as that university played at democratizing its intake, graduated summa, and got his doctorate at Cambridge University. And Gates, Jr., was black, or, as we found out on Roots, episode #20, he and his parents identified as black but had multiracial backgrounds. Watch Finding Your Roots. It’s entertaining. It’s not about DNA but about real families’ real histories, people just like us. And into the bargain, it’s a good preventative. It will strengthen your resistance to the fevers whipped up about “Critical Race Theory” by ignorant politicians and Fox News hacks. Finding Your Roots is all about how playing fields are uneven by design, and about how, sometimes and against the odds, they have been leveled. ©.

[Stanley]

a good writer, a good friend, and a good editor.
Katharine Sergeant Angell White, 1892-1977

Fragrance, whether strong or delicate, is a highly subjective matter, and one gardener’s perfume is another gardener’s stink. Katharine Sergeant Angell White.

The New Yorker began its life in 1925 as a humor magazine. Its founder Harold Ross referred to it as his ‘comics’ weekly, and some subscribers still read it only for its cartoons. But The New Yorker became much else. A few of its classic ‘humor’ writers moved well beyond mere witticisms, notably James Thurber, E. B. “Andy” White, and S. J. Perelman. Harold Ross, too superstitious about “genius” to become one himself, was a boss whose inner contradictions encouraged variety. And then Ross hired Katharine Sergeant Angell, first as a part-time copy editor and by 1929 as his full-time editor: some would say editor-in-chief, the staffer who “made” the magazine. But her main job was to edit The New Yorker’s poetry and fiction. It was an era of legendary literary editors, notably Maxwell Perkins, who saw editing as an intervention. He was the man who ‘made’ Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Wolfe by wielding not only his pencil but (when required) a chopping block. Katharine’s approach was different. She cultivated writers, tending them as if they were in her garden patch, each of them a different plant with special requirements and needing special treatment. One of them was Andy White, whom she married in 1929 soon after divorcing her first husband, the civil rights lawyer Ernest Angell. She tended Andy, too, bringing out his best stuff, getting him hired full time (Ross hated to take on permanent ‘cost’ obligations), and then retiring with him, to their farm in Maine. After her death in 1977 Andy White returned the favor by editing for publication her own essays on (of course) gardening. Katharine Sergeant Angell White, aka Katharine White, was born in comfortable Brookline, MA, on September 17, 1892, the youngest of three sisters. She got engaged to Angell at 18, then married him at 23, birthed two kids and took several piecework jobs before landing in Harold Ross’s untidy nest. As literary editor of The New Yorker, she adopted a quiet approach. Even her rejections could be encouraging. If she saw promise, she said so, and then helped the author to make something of it. Her established stable of writers and poets could find her editorial persistence downright infuriating, notably John O’Hara, but in the end most of them could agree with Andy White that she was one hell of a gardener. White’s tradition of gentle reproof and mild encouragement continued at the magazine, for her son Roger Angell (1920-2022) served in a similar role for much of his very long life. Roger was also a good writer which, as his stepfather memorably pointed out, is a rare combination. Katharine’s son with Andy White, Joel (1930-1997) became a small-ship architect, another sort of continuation for one of our greatest editors. ©

[Stanley]

"The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it." Thomas Wolfe.

You Can't Go Home Again
You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting, but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory. George Webber muses on his losses at the end of Thomas Wolfe’s last novel.

Back in the day when legendary editors like Katharine White, Malcolm Cowley, and Maxwell Perkins had a measurable, impact on published fiction and poetry, a self-proclaimed literary genius (Thomas Wolfe of Asheville, NC) appeared on the horizon whose work desperately needed editing. Today is the anniversary of Wolfe’s last novel, You Can’t Go Home Again, published on September 18, 1940, very possibly the most-edited novel in American literary history. Wolfe had died of tuberculosis almost exactly two years before (9/15/38), leaving editor Edward Aswell, at Harper’s, a manuscript of 1.5 million words (enough for ten longish novels). Aswell set to work, perhaps out of a sense of duty to the dead but also because Maxwell Perkins had already shown that editing Thomas Wolfe (“the lone Wolfe,” Perkins had called him) was an eminently worthwhile, if Herculean, task. At Scribners, Perkins had nursed into life and clarity (and some modest degree of concision) Wolfe’s first two novels (including his best, Look Homeward, Angel, firs published in 1929). Although relentlessly autobiographical and thus self-centered (in a cornucopia of senses), they had sold well and attracted critics’ respectful attention. Ironically, Wolfe left Scribners in anger because, he felt, Perkins had over-edited his material, which begins to suggest the delicacy, as well as the immensity, of Aswell’s editorial challenge. But the author’s early death (Wolfe was only 37) removed the complicating problems of authorial and editorial egos, and Wolfe, with Aswell’s help (or, if you prefer, Aswell, with Wolfe’s help) produced another masterwork of modern American fiction. Wolfe’s genius is undeniable: reactionary, romantic, and nostalgic, yet hating the author’s southern past. But it took radical surgery to extract, or perhaps to exhume, that genius. After all, the subtitle of Look Homeward, Angel, had been A Story of the Buried Life. By the way, the ‘home’ to which one could not return was indeed Asheville. Its residents were said to be not much pleased by the novel’s autobiographical character. Goodness knows what they might have thought of it had it been published as Wolfe left it!! And we can all be grateful that Edward Aswell cut it down to only gargantuan length. ©

[Stanley]

Wall Art in America
Judy Baca, b. Sept. 20, 1946

Art should go into neighborhoods so that working and poor people who have a great appreciation of beauty could see the murals and live with them. Judy Baca
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If you want to see mural art in America, travel by train. Rail lines tend to slice through ‘extramural’ neighborhoods, often poorly policed and always full to bursting with wall space. On these spaces (vacant buildings, abandoned freight cars, etc.) are plenty of examples there for you to see, and the only prices you pay are your train ticket and your passing glance. Some are visually arresting in a technical sense, but are they “art”? In my youth the answer to that question was a resounding ‘no!’; indeed cities and property owners spent a lot of money erasing the stuff, calling it vandalism. It’s no longer so. That’s thanks to a generation of outstanding mural artists, among them Judy Baca,born in Watts, Los Angeles, on September 20, 1946. She was raised by Latinas in an all-Latina household, and in her first school she was segregated out because she couldn’t speak English. Exiled to the quiet corners of her school rooms, she painted pictures, and she got pretty good at it. As she learned English she got good at other stuff too, and is now (at 76) professor emerita at UCLA, a specialist in what she calls “public art.” That’s the paintings on walls you see through your train window; likely, each one is a process, started by one public painter but then successively added to by others. The work you see is finished so far but probably has a ways yet to go. Baca says she got the idea from the medicine practiced by her curandera grandma, a whole folk repertory that came out of centuries of struggle by poor people who—to stay healthy (or at least alive)—created an intercultural mix of herbal healing, Catholic ritual, and individual counsel or, if you like, psychotherapy. So, while quite a bit of Baca’s art is her own, especially later in her career, she began as a folk artist, doing the daubing herself but also finding help from, and providing instruction to, those who liked to ‘vandalize’ city walls and bridge abutments. A good way to get a handle on Baca is to go west and see her “Great Wall of Los Angeles” project. It’s a huge ‘canvas,’ standing tall and a half mile in length. It’s historical, from the La Brea tar pits through the first native American cultures to the suffragettes, Charlie Chaplin and Rock ‘n’ Roll. It’s about struggle, too, for instance the sacrifices of the imported Chinese laborers who built California’s railways. On several panels, ALL its artists are listed, and Baca is headlined only as ‘supervisor’ or organizer. Today, to see Judy Baca’s individual murals, one must go within the walls of California’s great museums, some of them founded by the moguls who owned those very same railways, Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker. In the history of American wall art, ironies abound. ©

[Stanley]

When Leiden was the coldest spot on earth.
Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, 1853-1926

[Supercooled], mercury has passed into a new state, which on account of its extraordinary electrical properties may be called the superconductive state. Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, 1911.

Since electricity involves flow (we plug things into an electric “current”), my common sense tells me that at absolute zero electron flow would cease and, to coin a phrase, the lights would go out. If when it gets that cold all motion slows towards stasis, where’s an electron, or a charged particle, to go? During the late 19th century, that was the conventional (though not unanimous) view amongst leading physicists, including none other than William Thomson, Lord Kelvin (1824-1907). And since he’s the one who first quantified ‘absolute zero’ (it’s called “0o Kelvin”) at -273.15oC you cannot blame my unscientific mind for leaping into error. But Lord Kelvin’s theoretical calculation was soon to be disproven (at least in that particular) by experiment and observation. First it needed to be shown that one could reach or at least approach 0oK, but once that got underway (in the 1890s) supercooled matter could be laboratory tested to discover its actual properties. The matter first tested was Helium, a gas made liquid, and the scientist was Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, born in Groningen, Netherlands, on September 21, 1853. Although Groningen is a university town, he was perhaps an unlikely candidate. His father was not academic, but owned a brickyard, and if anything his family ran to art: his brother, a nephew, and a sister-in-law were all reputable painters. Nor was he interested, at first, in supercooling anything. After obtaining his first degree at Groningen, Onnes studied in Germany under Robert Bunsen (who was more into heat than cold), then returned to Groningen for his doctorate (with a thesis on the rotation of the planet Earth!!) and then on to the Physics faculty at Leiden. There he turned to supercooling, and as chief professor was able to organize Leiden’s Physics laboratory around that task. He was in philosophical terms a Kelvin disciple (Onnes’s motto was “Knowledge through measurement”), but it was Onnes who experimentally proved that supercooled matter was indeed superconductive. His first medium was liquid Helium, and in 1908 he managed to bring it down to 1.5oK. That made his Leiden lab the coldest spot on earth, and soon he proved that supercooled metals (notably, Mercury) were superconductive. I can’t begin to explain that, for it offends my common sense, but it was explained theoretically (by, among others, Albert Einstein, in 1925). Well before that, in 1913, Onnes’s lab work with Helium and ‘quicksilver’ (our traditional name for Mercury) won him the Nobel Prize in Physics. Today, as energy itself becomes prohibitively costly (in every sense) Onnes has become a particularly important pioneer in science. ©.

[Stanley]

A "real American" story.
Elsie Allen, 1899-1990

We are but one thread within the web of life. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. Chief Seattle, of the Duwamish people.

Sarah Palin made a distinction between “real” Americans and the rest of us, but in our common usage to be an ‘American’ is simply to be “of this place.” So all Americans share a linguistic tic with many “Native Americans.” Tribal groups often identified themselves as “the people” or, more precisely, “the people of this place.” So the Pomo tribe of coastal northern California got their name from Euro-American settlers’ misunderstanding of a sentence made up of almost identical words that really meant “we are those who live at the red earth hole.” Today the Pomo have regained the numbers they had reached before the “whites” brought them smallpox, massacres, “reservations,” forced labor, and mission schools. At their nadir, in the late 19th century, the Pomo numbered about 400 individuals. Now about 10,000 call themselves Pomo. They owe their survival to several factors, starting with romantically-inclined anthropologists who recorded their language. Another savior was the Anglo painter-photographer Grace Hudson (1865-1937) who created a visual record of Pomo dress and Pomo faces. These sometimes included the hematite beads that the Pomo took from their “red earth hole.” But beside the red beads (used for trade as well as decoration), the Pomo made baskets. Pomo baskets are intricate in design and durable in quality. This traditional craft lay at the heart of Elsie Allen’s life’s work, to preserve Pomo culture. Elsie Gomachu Allen was a Pomo person, born on September 22, 1899, at about the low point of Pomo history. Her parents worked on an Anglo farm near Santa Rosa, off-reservation, but her dad soon died and she returned ‘home’ where she learned basket-making from her grandmother. She learned English well enough to work in San Francisco, where she met her husband, a “half-breed” Pomo named Arthur Allen. They returned to the Pomo reservation where she birthed their four children (all with Anglo names), continued her basket-making, and became active in documenting and reviving Pomo culture and language. But Elsie broke with the folk tradition of burying the baskets as storage vaults for food (and when they wore out to burn them ritually). Instead she sold them, all sizes and shapes and in all patterns, and they sold like hotcakes. She continued to work, and weave, almost to her death in 1990. Elsie’s baskets are museum pieces today, but I think you can see a few at the Elsie Allen High School, in Santa Rosa. Or you can learn more about the people of the red earth hole at the Grace Hudson Museum at Ukia, CA. It’s “real American” stuff, by and of the people of this place. ©

[Stanley]

Georgia on My Mind
Ray Charles, 1930-2004

Just because you can't see anything, doesn't mean you should shut your eyes. Ray Charles.

Ray Charles was born on September 23, 1930, in Albany, Georgia, in unpromising circumstances. His birth name was Ray Charles Robinson, but his biological father soon abandoned his mother, leaving the boy in the proverbial lurch, not only poor but black and soon enough to lose his sight entirely. It was the Jim Crow era, so the prospects for a blind black kid were not great. But fate had already intervened when the toddler Ray lived with his mother at the Red Wing Café, a local food and drink dive whose piano-player owner, Wylie Pitman, took a shine to Ray and taught him how to play boogie-woogie. Then, as Ray’s visual world darkened, his mother Aretha proved a lioness. She saw talent in her boy and wangled a place for him in the Florida School for the Deaf, Blind, and Dumb. That institution, in St. Augustine, had been racially integrated at its foundation (in 1884) but by the time Ray Charles got there Florida’s ruling party had followed its worst instincts and he entered the “Colored Department.” Despite that, his music education turned “white,” for his teacher took his boogie-woogie skills to Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, and for good measure taught him to read braille scores. Some of his unusual piano playing and composing comes from those days, for he learned pieces by reading braille with one hand while he traveled the keyboard with the other. And then, of course, vice-versa. Ray stayed at the school until 1945 when he moved to Jacksonville to make his life as a musician. Already a player of unusual talent, he rose in the field of black rhythm and blues, moved north to Seattle, WA, and in small combos and on his own scored some national hits. In Los Angeles, he also started arranging for other performers, notably Dizzy Gillespie, and had become a hot enough property to be signed (in 1952) to Atlantic Records. A form of racial segregation still ruled in pop music, but Ray Charles broke through many of those barriers. Perhaps here his blindness helped, just as it had forced him to learn his music by feel and ear. Even in Des Moines, I knew who Ray Charles was by the time I was in high school (he was, for instance, “Georgia on My Mind), and I liked most of what I knew. So did the big money behind the pop industry, and Ray entered “his” decade, the 1960s, at or close to the top. Besides “Take These Chains” he did the best-ever “Twist and Shout.”Some troubles followed, especially in the 1970s, but he recovered from them to return to recording and to performing as one of music’s elder statesmen, including always new compositions along with old favorites. Ray Charles died, widely mourned, in 2004. ©

[Stanley]

That girl from Akron.
Cheryl Crawford, 1902-1986

Hie thee hither that I may pour my spirits in thine ear and chastise with the valor of my tongue all that impedes thee from the golden round. Lady Macbeth, in Shakespeare’s ‘Scottish Play,’ Act 1, scene 5.

I find it difficult to imagine a 15-year-old Lady Macbeth, but that was Cheryl Crawford’s age when she played one of theater’s most daunting female parts. This was in Crawford’s hometown, Akron, Ohio, and was perhaps more illustrative of the scrapes and strains of amateur productions than an indicator of Ms. Crawford’s theatrical potential. Indeed Crawford never did become an actor of any note, but she did make herself into a pioneer Broadway producer. So one might say (poetically?) that in her life she reprised Lady Macbeth, that woman whose steely ambition ‘produced’ Macbeth’s tragedy. Cheryl Crawford was born in Akron on September 24, 1902. She took her theatrical ambitions with her to major in drama at Smith College and from there to New York’s Theater Guild, where in 1925 she started at the bottom. From there, as a leading critic once put it, her story was “one of fortitude, indomitability, and persistence against all the odds.” Within four years she was casting director at the Guild, and then (with Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg) she founded the Group Theater which aimed to bring social relevance and Stanislavsky’s “method” acting to Broadway. The playwrights she produced or co-produced included Clifford Odets and William Saroyan; directors included Strasberg and Elia Kazan; among ‘her’ actors were Franchot Tone and Lee J. Cobb. At the Group Theater, then at the American Repertory Theater, and finally at the Actors’ Studio, Crawford was a leading light, always on the production side, and usually right in her choices of director, play, and players. But not always. For instance, she put her foot wrong by firing Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn, both decisions she lived long enough to regret. On the other hand she could put things right, as in producing a 1942 revival of Porgy and Bess and making it (in New York and on the road) a great commercial success. She retained that knack throughout her career, making good runs and good money with plays by Tennessee Williams, Berthold Brecht, and of course William Shakespeare. On the other hand she turned down Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Death of a Salesman. “Who,” she asked, “would want to see a play about an unhappy traveling salesman?” In her autobiography, interestingly entitled One Naked Individual (1977), she did not shy away from confessing these misjudgments. Unflinchingly honest about her failures, modest in her successes, Cheryl Crawford deserves remembrance. Without much money of her own, she found money enough, directors and playwrights, and actors to construct an historic theatrical career. ©.

[Stanley]

Time, tides, and measurement.
Stephen Borough, Master of Trinity House

There is a tide in the affairs of men . . . and we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures. William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act IV, scene 3.

In the 6th grade, encouraged by the miraculously patient Mrs. Lindbergh, I was into lists, and among them was my map of the 48 states showing, among other data, their highest and lowest points. These were always given to the nearest foot, rounded upwards, and I accepted them as accurate and absolute. But their base line was “mean sea level” (MSL), which is not a constant. It never has been, but as the vogue for accuracy waxed, efforts increased to find an agreed measure. For a long while, the most widely accepted MSL was determined by Trinity House, London. Like Greenwich Mean Time, this was a spot-on measure of British power, and arbitrarily local. After several weeks’ observation, circa 1800, Trinity set a large granite stone in London docks at average high tide level (Trinity High Water, or THW) and announced that the low tide mark was exactly 17 feet 10 inches down. Trinity House was a corporate body chartered by Henry VIII in 1514. Henry gave Trinity some royal estates and tax revenues, and charged its Master and Fellows to use these incomes to regulate English navigation and render it safe. Measurement was but one of its duties, but it’s fitting that the most influential Master in Trinity’s first century was Stephen Borough, born in Devon on September 25, 1525. It was coastal Devon, and his was a seafaring family, but he began as a surveyor, setting metes and bounds for local landowners. He then learned the sea, under the guidance of an uncle involved in the Levant trades. In the process, Borough demonstrated his depths in accurately recording his voyages and becoming fluent in Castilian and Portuguese. Then he altered course radically to become a pioneer in the Muscovy trades, where he helped to discover—and make safe—the hazardous northern route, around Scandinavia to Archangel. Among many accomplishments, he learned Russian and headed an embassy to the Tsar, taking along a gift pipe of finest Spanish sherry. As Master of Trinity House (1572-1584) Borough proved just as thorough. He mapped and oversaw the construction of new docks, placed them to take fullest advantage of the Thames and its tides, undertook Trinity’s historic role in setting navigational buoys and lighthouses to make safe England’s sea approaches, and he began to tussle with measuring the tides. Today the Master of Trinity is the Princess Royal, Anne, and the measuring of tides is now done daily, world-wide, by the NASA satellite Jason–3. Its name derives from Greek mythology. It could as aptly be called the “Borough”, but new empires are rarely so generous to their immediate predecessors. ©.

[Stanley]

Hostelry and hosting in the Edwardian Age.
Rosa Lewis, 1867-1952

You treat my house like a hotel. Rosa Lewis, chastising a gentleman guest at the Cavendish.

The UK’s Conservative Party (can we call it a government?) has put the £ sterling on the skids, but tourists with dollars may still find it a pinch to stay at the Cavendish London. They’ll pay about $600 nightly even for one of its ordinary rooms. The Mayfair location, at the corner of Jermyn and Duke streets opposite Fortnum & Mason’s, may be compensation, and if that’s not enough there’s the pleasure of staying on the site of Edwardian London’s most famous hostelry, the “old” Cavendish, a grand place whose final demolition was begun by the Luftwaffe. The owner and mistress of that Cavendish, Rosa Lewis, survived a direct hit in the Blitz, but along with her hotel Rosa rapidly declined. She died midway between George VI’s death and Elizabeth II’s coronation, and would not have enjoyed the changes in style represented by either monarch. Rosa and her hotel were attuned to the tastes of King Edward VII. Indeed it’s said that she had an affair with Edward in the 1890s, before his accession and before she took over the Cavendish. That she would rise so far (or fall so low) could not have been predicted at her birth. Rosa Lewis was born on September 26, 1867, in Leyton, now in London but then a not-too-leafy eastern suburb. Her dad was a watchmaker (he would rise to undertaker before he passed), and she left school at 12 and could have stayed a domestic servant. Instead, at 16, she apprenticed across London in the kitchens of Sheen House, then the residence of the Comte de Paris. She was a quick study, and moved from house to house always learning French cuisine and at least something à la mode française. Nor were all her employers French. She cooked for the Churchills, for the Asquiths, and for the Saviles, partly because her cookery way back at Sheen had won the approval of the future Edward VII, who liked something other than her chops and soufflés (she was a good looker, and Edward enjoyed her ability to play at raffishness), Soon Rosa was running a stylish house of resort in Eaton Square, where city gents or landed gentry could take their mistresses and, into the bargain, enjoy a fine meal. From there to the corner of Jermyn and Duke was but a short step, one which Rosa took in 1902. Soon she was sole proprietor at the Cavendish, which she enlarged but always ran as if it were an elegant private house. There Rosa became the “Duchess of Duke Street,” much later portrayed as such by Gemma Jones in a popular BBC serial. There’s also a memorial plaque near the new Cavendish but not, I think, affixed to it. Her style was of another age and even at $600 a night you won’t find it at the new Cavendish. ©

[Stanley]

"Always Look for the Union Label." Theme song of the ILGWU
Jennie Matyas, 1895-1988

Some may talk in the sing-song of Old China, but the language of workers is the same the world over. It comes from the heart. Jennie Matyas, 1938.

The International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) became one of the success stories in US labor history by unionizing the unorganizable. Most of its recruits were isolated near the bottom of the wage labor pool, and most were new immigrants further fractured by language and culture. Furthermore, they worked in a trade notoriously split into hundreds of small sweatshops and, being largely female, were often earning money at their families’ narrow margin between disaster and survival. Employers were not slow to take advantage of them in terms of low pay and atrocious working conditions, as was exposed by the notorious Triangle Shirtwaist Fire (1911) in New York. That disaster provided 147 martyrs and proved a turning point, raising public sympathy (not least among upper-class women like Eleanor Roosevelt) and class consciousness in garment workers themselves. By the 1920s the ILGWU was a power to be reckoned with. But New York was not the world. Union leaders looked across the country and found new challenges, notably in the San Francisco Bay area. There 1/3 of workers in the garment trades were Chinese, mainly female and inclined by culture and bitter American experience to work hard, keep their heads down and not rock any boats in the workplace or at home. After a brief attempt in 1934 with Rose Pesotta (1896-1965), a Ukrainian anarchist, the ILGWU turned to another immigrant woman, Jennie Matyas, and she turned the trick. Jennie Matyas was born into a Hungarian minority in what is now Romania on September 27, 1895, and emigrated to the US with her family in 1908. Perhaps Pesotta’s anarchism was not what San Francisco’s Chinese workers needed. But Matyas had other advantages, including a carefully cultivated sympathy for a minority culture, but she certainly had the 1935 Wagner Act which provided protection for union organizers and set out legal avenues for their activities. Soon after her arrival in San Francisco, she also had the advantages conferred (fatally, grimly) by the Japanese invasion of China. This did as much as anything to incline the local Chinese community towards corporate activism. Jennie Matyas went to work, got herself known by Chinese leaders, and learned what she could about Chinese-American culture and cuisine. She also ensured critical support from existing local unions, notably the Department Store Employees’ Union, and against local police harassment (and a huge employers’ lawsuit in the civil courts) Jennie and her Chinese strikers won the day, recognition, and a place at the table to negotiate better wages and more humane conditions. Jennie’s was an American triumph won by immigrants. ©.

[Stanley]

The 'Discovery' of San Diego
The 'discovery' of San Diego, September 28, 1542

America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up. Oscar Wilde.

Once a college professor, and perhaps always one, President Woodrow Wilson was an enthusiast for the ‘presidential proclamation.’ Not only did he give us the Proclamation of Neutrality (in 1914, at the start of WWI), but also the “Fourteen Points” which he hoped (vainly, as it turned out) would guide the combatants as they negotiated an end to the war to end all wars. For America’s war proclamation of April 1917 Wilson needed congress’s approval, but most needed only his own imprimatur and many reflect his own values. One instance came when he nationalized Mothers’ Day (in 1914), institutionalizing a sentiment he shared with many. Even before that, in September 1913, Wilson proclaimed “Cabrillo Day” and set aside a small tract on Point Loma, across San Diego Bay from the naval yard, as the Cabrillo National Monument. I could not find the original text, but I imagine it encapsulated some of Wilson’s racial prejudices by celebrating Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo (1499-1543) as the “discoverer” of California. And so he was, in that on September 28, 1542 Cabrillo’s 3 ships, including the flagship San Salvador, anchored off Point Loma, the first landfall of their voyages along the California coast. Cabrillo voyaged in the service of the King of Spain and he’d been a hero in Cortez’s conquest of the Aztecs. He’d been rewarded with a huge encomienda in present-day Guatemala (which he worked with enslaved labor) and a goodly share of Aztec gold. With a yen for further conquests, more gold, and perhaps drier pastures, he was commissioned to “explore” the western coast of Spanish America from Navidad northward. In Cabrillo’s voyage of discovery, he “found” three natural harborages, two large islands, and may have gone as far north as the Columbia, but he died on the return voyage and completely missed San Francisco Bay (fog?). He might have been forgotten, but in the vogue for Europeanizing American history he was himself rediscovered, and since 1913 Cabrillo Day (in San Diego, Cabrillo Week) has been celebrated. Since then, it’s changed. Cabrillo was Portuguese, so California’s Portuguese community has rechristened ‘Juan’ as ‘Joao’ and made him a focus of Porto-American consciousness. California’s Native Americans have reminded others that Joao “discovered” nothing at all, and now the celebrations include Native American dance and dress. In 2021 the governing committee canceled the celebrations in honor of Covid-19. All of this could be seen as exercises in “political correctness”, a battle slogan for those who like to ‘own the liberals,’ but I see it as part of the process by which we make our history more accurate. It's “political” for those who wish it so. ©

[Stanley]

A black captain and a rainbow crew.
The launching of the USS Booker T. Washington

They that go down to the sea in ships. ‘The Navy Hymn’ from the Book of Psalms, 107:23.

On September 29, 1942, the USS Booker T. Washington was launched at Los Angeles, the first of 17 Liberty Ships named for leading African Americans. To mark the occasion Mary McLeod Bethune (1875-1955) made a speech and Marian Anderson (1897-1993) broke a bottle of bubbly over the ship’s bow. Behind the scenes, Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) had had something to do with this new naming practice, so the ship sailed under the blessing of a constellation of important women. Over the years, these ‘anniversary notes’ have featured the ship itself, its namesake, and mesdames Bethune, Anderson, and Roosevelt, but there was more to it than that. For—deliberately—the ship’s crew was a rainbow representing 17 nationalities, and they knew they were making history. They banded together to buy their captain a gold watch before they sailed, and the captain himself was a man of some note. Captain Hugh Mulzac (1886-1971) was an immigrant West Indian and a man of African descent, the very first black person to hold a Master certificate. It had been granted him in 1918, but because of his race Mulzac waited until 1942 for his command. His race and a couple of other things: Mulzac had been involved with Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association and then, disenchanted with identity politics, he’d joined the National Maritime Union where he’d become a leader of its communist wing. But during wartime these blemishes (and his skin color and the skin colors of his polyglot crew) were overlooked. The Booker T. sailed several seas carrying men and materiel to various fronts, but come the peace the black communist Mulzac was removed from command and then, thanks to McCarthyite legislation against leftist sailors, barred from the merchant marine. Mulzac tried several other careers, including as a pretty fair artist (painter) and as a candidate for several elective offices in New York (city and state). But he fought back, too, against his peacetime exclusion. Finally, in 1961, in an important court case, he won back his merchant marine certificate. He actually set sail again, though never as captain. And more than that. It was at a ceremony remembering Captain Mulzac that an AFL-CIO committee was formed to finance New York City’s Merchant Mariners’ Memorial. That sculpture, dedicated in 1991 to the 7,000 civilian sailors killed during WWII, looks seaward at Battery Park, Manhattan. It is the work of the Venezuelan feminist Marisol Escobar (1930-2016), yet another immigrant. One figure in the sculpture is drowned, daily, at every high tide, lest we forget. ©

[Stanley]

How to charm the birds right off the trees,
The Magic Flute. Premiere on September 30, 1791

I speak in fluent ‘pigeonese’// And charm the birds right off the trees. Papageno, in Mozart’s The Magic Flute, 1791.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died in December 1791. He was not quite 36, and at the height of his powers. He was so young, and his previous output so prolific and so brilliant, that many have speculated on what he might have accomplished had he lived even to, say, 57 (like Beethoven). In 1791, the European world teetered on the brink, still absorbing the shock of the American Revolution. Beethoven, Goethe, and Wordsworth were ready to experience, and reflect upon, the radicalism of the French Revolution. And Mozart himself seemed likely to stop spending money before he earned it and so to achieve a kind of personal independence. Some have found clues to Mozart’s never-to-be realized future in his last works, among them his opera The Magic Flute (k. 620 out of a total of 626). It was first performed on September 30, 1791, in Vienna, just three months before he died. The opera’s form, singspiel, put spoken dialogue along with song and thus enabled composers and librettists to be more explicit about message, if they wished to be. CertainlyThe Magic Flute (Die Zauberflöte) showed Mozart’s interest in freemasonry (he was a leader in his lodge), which many thought a dangerously secular, and revolutionary, movement. Freemasons abounded amongst America’s founding fathers, and also in revolutionary Paris. Mozart had already toyed with such themes in his The Philosopher’s Stone (shades of Harry Potter?), and so had his main collaborators in The Magic Flute, Emmanuel Shikaneder and Benedikt Schack, both of them singer-librettists. Shikaneder had previously worked on The Marriage of Figaro, a singspiel offensive enough (in plot and dialogue) to the ultra-traditional Hapsburg aristocracy to be closed down by the emperor. And the whole company and its Theater auf de Wieden (known, suspiciously, as the Freihaus) were financed by a leading Mason, the very bourgeois arriviste Joseph von Bauernfeld. Some even thought that the villainess of the opera, the evil Queen of the Night, was modeled after the Empress Maria Theresa. And one of the opera’s heroes was the black slave Monostatos. So perhaps the still-young Mozart, just then finding his financial feet, teetered on the edge of becoming a political radical? But then again, perhaps not. A man whose income still depended on patronage was an unlikely revolutionary, and at the same time Mozart was working on his brilliant Requiem Mass in D Minor (k. 626). He never did complete the Requiem, but it was hardly a call to the barricades. And neither was Die Zauberflöte. It was more like a fantasy. ©

[Stanley]

Self-evident truths
Peter Salem, 1750-1816

We hold these truths to be self-evident . . . Thomas Jefferson, et al, 1776.

A family legend, passed on by my grandmother Lillian Kerr Simms (1875-1950), has it that one of her Estabrook ancestors owned a slave and that master and slave fought together at the Battle of Concord (April 19, 1775). On the right side, of course: so the story is shot through with irony, for it is about the beginning of a war that, we are told. was fought for the “self-evident” principle that all men are created equal. Early in my teaching career I passed the irony on, though I doubted the particulars; but it has turned out to be probably true. Prince Estabrook, enslaved militiaman, was ‘owned’ by Benjamin Estabrook, free militiaman, and both fought shoulder to shoulder at Concord Bridge. Prince was one of several (at the very least 20) enslaved militiamen of New England who fought in 1775 for their masters’ freedom. Several of them, including “Prince”, bore names that underlined the irony (there were at least three Caesars—but no Brutus). Little else is known of them, though Prince Estabrook lived in freedom to age 90. More is known about Peter Salem, born in slavery in Framingham, MA, on October 1, 1750. His mother’s ‘owner’ was Jeremiah Belknap, who may have named the baby boy after Belknap’s hometown, Salem, MA. But it’s also suggested that Peter’s surname comes from the Arabic word for ‘peace,’ and that he was named by his mother. By 1775, Peter had been sold, to Lawson Buckminster, and together with his ‘owner’ he and the Framingham militia joined the battle at Concord Bridge and then harassed the British all the way back to Boston. There, at the Battle of Bunker Hill, Peter Salem joined the ranks of the immortal by shooting and killing the British Commander, Major John Pitcairn. It was, a participant later testified, a crucial moment. Pitcairn had mounted a barricade and, bravely if rashly, had commanded the ragtag and bobtail militia to disband. There was silence, perhaps surprise, and to some it seemed likely that the militia would stand back. And then a shot. Pitcairn fell mortally wounded, and the battle commenced. There may have been several shots, but the fatal one was probably fired by Peter Salem of the Framingham militia. Bunker Hill proved finally to be a British victory, but with casualties so heavy as to be almost unaffordable. The USA won its freedom, as did Peter Salem. Salem died in poverty, if free, in 1816. As a footnote to Prince Estabrook’s similar story, when in 1864 my immigrant ancestor Daniel Kerr married Clara Estabrook (Benjamin’s granddaughter), they spent their too brief honeymoon at a farm they called Bunker Hill. Daniel was on leave from the 117th Illinois Volunteers, and would return to duty in a war that, as the couple hoped, end racial slavery. ©

Mea Culpa
Notes on The Magic Flute
Faithful readers have called me on several errors in my note on Mozart's The Magic Flute, which premiered in Vienna on September 30, 1 791. I got the date right but not a lot else. I quote from Elisabeth Price's letter on the subject.

"I feel it necessary to say that The Marriage of Figaro is not a Singspiel since it's in Italian and all dialogue is in recitative - probably just a glitch on your part anyway. More serious is the notion that Monostatos was a hero of any kind - he is the blackest rapist-villain no matter which version of the text is used, and despite any ambiguity concerning which of Sarastro and his glamorous wife, the Queen of the Night, is evil and which good. There is quite a bit of ambiguity in The Magic Flute altogether, not least whether women are incapable of moral leadership, or whether man has to be led to the heights of human morality by woman alone."

Elisabeth kindly calls all this (and another error) my "glitch." It was more serious than that, and owes to my too quick reading and my too ready prejudgements (e.g. on the Enlightenment and freemasonry).

While I am at it, please also forgive my conflating, earlier this week, of an oratorio by Henry Purcell with 'The Navy Hymn' by Henry Whiting. That was plain carelessness. Both pieces deserve better treatment than I gave them.

I thank my editors for their care.

Bob Bliss

[Stanley]

"Having discovered to be great, I must appear to be so,"
Nat Turner, 1800-1831

Gen. Nat Turner . . . was at the bottom of this infernal brigandage. He was artful, impudent and vindicative, after having witnessed the atrocities committed against slaves and himself. From The Richmond Enquirer, August 30, 1831.

The myth of the “good slave” became a lasting feature of American culture. ‘Critical Race Theory’ might provide our all our children with the tools they need to rethink the matter (and without hurting anyone’s feelings), but in the absence of CRT let’s look at the myth’s 18th-century origins and its most severe test, “Turner’s Rebellion” of 1831. Nat Turner himself, born on October 2, 1800, was an archetypal “good slave.” The diversification of Virginia’s economy (from about 1710) created a need for good slaves, who could sow and harvest many crops and undertake other skilled work (sawyer, miller, carpenter, etc.). That required acculturation, as did the rise of a planter class wealthy enough to want liveried house servants, wet nurses, even mistresses. So the “good slave” acquired skills (and literacy), often adopted the dominant European religion, and became ‘Exhibit A’ for those who hoped that slavery was or could be a blessing for both owner and owned. This ‘good slave’ was happiest when dependent upon and loyal to a good master and to the planter family. But modern studies of early Virginia slavery explode the myth and expose the (white) self-interest that underpinned it. In Gerald Mullins’ Flight and Rebellion (1972) it was this well-acculturated, valuable slave who was most likely to undertake and accomplish purposeful, goal oriented, rebellion. “New” African slaves, directly imported, didn’t like slavery. After all, they were only human. But they didn’t know much about Virginia. They were the rebels who fled in groups, then set up camp a few miles out in the woods and were easily recaptured. Or they starved themselves or suicided or took up ruinous habits. But to be a ‘real’ rebel, for instance to escape successfully, required planning, the skills and confidence needed to pass from place to place, and the geographical knowledge to know where those steps might gain safety or even freedom. Such persons found it easiest to fly to the British in 1776. Gabriel Prosser, the leader of Gabriel’s Rebellion (1800) had learned enough about his society to direct his followers to kill all whites except Frenchmen, Quakers, and Methodists. Nat Turner was another Gabriel, but he blew his own horn. Skilled and literate, he had his own Bible and learned from it that he should be free. He knew enough about slavery to think that it could only be destroyed. Nat directed his troops to kill all whites, and they managed 55 before they were captured and hanged. The brutal treatment of other “suspected” rebels was often carried out against those suspected of being “good slaves.” Sometimes it didn’t pay to be skillful and literate. ©.

[Stanley]

MacMillan publishing and the journal Nature
Alexander MacMillan, 1818-1896

It is intended, FIRST, to place before the general public the grand results of Scientific Work and Scientific Discovery; . . . and, SECONDLY, to aid Scientific men [sic] themselves, by giving early information of all advances made in any branch of Natural knowledge throughout the world . . From the initial statement of purpose, in Nature, 1869.

Science has transformed our lives, beneficially mainly but often enough not. So it would seem prudent for a wider public to know more about science. It was just such a thought that led Alexander MacMillan to join in founding the journal Nature, in 1869. Alexander MacMillan, or in his native Gaelic Alasdair MacMhaolain, was born on October 3, 1818, probably at the family croft on the Isle of Arran. He had with his brother Daniel moved to Cambridge, England, where they worked in a bookshop and then struck out on their own, first as booksellers and then, more famously, as publishers. That business began in 1844. Daniel’s grandson Harold would become British Prime Minister a century later, but from Daniel’s death in 1857 Alexander ran the publishing house until his own death in 1896. It was then not clear that Nature would be among his successes. It ran mostly at a loss but it established editorial practices that would in time make it the gold standard in scientific publishing, but with a difference. Alexander and his first editor, Norman Lockyer, were infected with the Victorian enthusiasm for science and aimed to spread its popularity, but they were not just populizers. But nor did they intend to displace established scientific publications like those of the Royal Society. Already aware that “science” was becoming multidisciplinary, they intended to keep scientists informed about what was going on, and of note, in this or that special field. And not only that, but in Britain or elsewhere. So the format became short reports, more or less in layman’s language, about really promising lines of inquiry, especially those arising out of experiment but, sometimes, speculative theory. They took their simple title from a Wordsworth poem, and their motto, too: “To the solid ground of nature trusts the mind that builds for aye.” The journal survived and has become a gold standard in world science. Hence the very short paper, in Nature for April 1953, by J. D. Watson and F. H. C. Crick, which began with almost comic modesty, “We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (D. N. A.). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest.” To which one can only add, “indeed.” It came to fewer than 1,000 words. Other pioneer Nature pieces abound, in every scientific field. The journal has made some missteps, reminding us perhaps of the warnings implicit in the myth of Icarus, but it survives and it has certainly fulfilled the hopes of the Scots crofter who, in 1833, aged 15, took the high road to England. ©.

[Stanley]

A century of struggle
Eleanor Flexner, 1908-1995

The women of today are the thoughts of their mothers and grandmothers, embodied and made alive. Matilda Jocelyn Gage, 1880.

Senator Josh Hawley reviews the state of gender interplay and expresses deep concerns about sperm counts and kitchen duties. He is a glass-half-empty man. The rise of women in my own profession convinces me that the glass is still filling up. As undergraduate and graduate (1961-1969) I took courses from just three female professors, none a historian, and my first job was in a rapidly-growing department (to 25+ tenured faculty) that, until the mid 1980s, had only one woman member. When in 2019 I told students these things (in a seminar on “equality in American history”), they could not believe it, and indeed their academic world was very different. In my world, women were outsiders. In theirs, women are central, even if (to judge by salary levels) not yet “insiders.” One of the pioneers of this geologic shift was Eleanor Flexner, born in Georgetown, Kentucky, on October 4, 1908. In some senses it’s impossible to see her as an “outsider.” Her parents were intellectuals who achieved high status: Anne (1874-1955) as a playwright and Abraham (1866-1959) as an academic. Her parents were activists in the women’s suffrage movement, and they set their daughters on similar paths. Eleanor went to Swarthmore College, where she caused good trouble, and then to Somerville College, Oxford. Back in New York, she established herself as a theater critic and historian. But her concerns broadened. In particular, the Great Depression and membership in the Communist Party (from 1936) led her to think in class terms about society and its discontents. Perhaps in honor of her parents’ involvement, Eleanor began a history of the suffrage movement, but she felt a need to ground it within a broader conceptual framework and through a longer time span. The book, which came out in 1959, reflected the project’s origins in its title: A Century of Struggle: The Women’s Rights Movement in the United States. But it was set within a background of women’s oppression and exclusion, not just at the ballot box or in court, but at the kitchen sink, on the plantation, and in the factory. Flexner’s study begins way before the Seneca Falls “Declaration of Sentiments” (July 4, 1848) and is concerned with much more than women’s political rights. The book was a conceptual triumph, but Flexner remained an outsider. Sustained by an inheritance from her mother and income from royalties and fees, Flexner never took a university position. She wrote a biography of Mary Wollstonecraft (1972) and produced two expanded editions of A Century of Struggle, but until 2020, in the series “Forgotten No More,” she never even rated a New York Times obituary. ©

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An early advocate of sexual reform.
John Addington Symonds, 1840-1893

No seed shall perish which the soul hath sown. John Addington Symonds.

Given this term’s Supreme Court docket, which includes a case concerning the public rights of homosexuals, it’s appropriate to remember the life of John Addington Symonds, advocate of sexual reform, who was born in Bristol, England, on October 5, 1840. His family’s long history had resolved itself into a knot of prominent physicians, including his father, also John Addington Symonds. But Symonds, Sr., was an amateur scholar of the classics, art, and music, and he brought his son up to follow those interests. This the younger Symonds did, first at Harrow, then at Oxford, and throughout his life. Before his death in 1893. John Addington Symonds achieved fame and status as historian, biographer, critic and poet. He also married, in 1864, and fathered four children, a devoted family man. He asked Edward Lear to write a piece for his youngest daughter, Katharine, which became Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat” who “went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat
They took some honey and plenty of money . . .
To the land where the Bong-Tree grows
Before he married, Symonds had discovered his homosexuality, the hard way one might say, because it included Symonds’ report to his father of an affair between the Harrow headmaster and one of Symonds’ friends. Because homosexuality was seen as abnormal and criminal, his report led to the dismissal of the headmaster. This ‘betrayal’ tortured Symonds, and may have been the factor that led him into the closet and into a conventional (and affectionate) marriage. It was also troubled, and in 1869 (the year of Katharine’s birth) Symonds and his wife decided to continue platonically while he would take male companions. This was a double standard with a vengeance. Mrs. Symonds bore it with “singular fortitude” while John Addington Symonds took up homosexual affairs (most of some years’ duration) and indulged in an orgy of literary and historical achievement. This led to his being considered for the poetry professorship at Oxford, but he also reconsidered homosexuality per se, its history and its connections with the classics of western art. Along the way, he became an advocate of sexual reform in Britain. In keeping with his character, his advocacy was quiet and polite, much of it carried on from his exile (in Venice, then in Switzerland) and through his friends, many of them eminent Victorians. Symonds died in 1893, his reforms unrealized. Today he’s seen as a pioneer reformer whose outlook came from sound understandings of human history and human psychology, sounder perhaps than those of some Supreme Court justices. ©

[Stanley]

Innovation, safety, and management.
George Westinghouse, 1846-1914

If you want to be remembered, shoot a president. If you prefer to have a legacy, leave the world a better place than you found it. George Westinghouse.

The organizing committee for St. Louis’s World’s Fair (1904) wanted to outshine all previous efforts, not least Chicago’s in 1893. So they invited George Westinghouse to anchor a showcase for American industry. Westinghouse and his workforce were too busy. But he did send to St. Louis 29 short films. You can access 21 of these at the Library of Congress website. They show men and women at work, forging modernity—and being forged by it. The 1904 films are themselves a technological marvel; as was George Westinghouse. He was born on October 6, 1846, near Schenectady, NY, the youngest child of a prosperous manufacturer. He was well schooled, and did attend college, but experience was his chief teacher. First he worked in his father’s factory, then he fought for the Union in the Civil War (volunteering as soon as he turned 17), then after a very brief sojourn at college he returned to the shop floor with an insatiable curiosity about how things worked and a burning ambition to make them work better. Over his life, Westinghouse produced 361 industrial patents. An early patent (1873) was for the air brake, a revolutionary device that enabled one member of a train crew to brake a whole train. The cost was great (about $2,000 per car in today’s $$) but so were the savings. George used the air brake to set up his first company, but it soon became one of many. A typical venture was his Union Switch and Signal (1881) which used several of Westinghouse inventions to speed switchyard operations, make them safer, and extend some of the most important of them to mainline track. The established railroad magnates of his day (a motley crew of dubious moral fiber) bridled at the cost of Westinghouse’s new technologies, so George learned the value of politics in general and legislation in particular. Safety sold ell, and Westinghouse’s profits soared as congress learned to use the interstate commerce clause of the constitution to extend public authority over private capital. George innovated in management, too. A tiger for efficiency (and its savings), he still understood the moral and financial value of good will and thought the Golden Rule a useful management maxim. Westinghouse can be credited with inventing the two-day weekend. He also, in an occasionally very odd competition with Thomas Edison, used salesmanship to convince everyone that his alternating current (AC) was safer and cheaper and more flexible than Edison’s DC. Although he lost control of his companies in the 1907 Wall Street panic, Westinghouse continue to invent. His last patent came in 1918, four years after his death. ©.

[Stanley]

Words are small shapes in the gorgeous chaos of the world.
Diane Ackerman, b. October 7, 1948

Words are the passkeys to our souls. Without them, we can't really share the enormity of our lives. Diane Ackerman, 2011.

Science writing has become its own genre, and it is not one restricted to scholarly works intended only for other scientists and (thus?) impenetrable to the curious layperson.    I, for instance, have become an amateur addict of science writing, which would likely surprise all those who’ve attempted to teach me ‘proper’ science. Widespread interest in evolution, medicine, climate change, even in the more abstruse areas of physics, has created a market, and many writers have rushed to meet the demand arising from people like me.    Quite a few of these word and sentence missionaries trained as scientists and regard “science” as their day job (e.g. the neuroscientist David Linden or the physicist Stephen Hawking).   Others came to science through their interest in writing, and among these Diane Ackerman excels.  Born Diane Fink, in Waukegan, IL, on  October 7, 1948, Ackerman now describes herself as “poet, essayist, and naturalist,” but she could add playwright, memoirist, and biographer and still not cover her prolific output.    Her PhD was in English, at Cornell, but it was a writing PhD and her examining committee included Carl Sagan (another writing scientist), and since then, in both her poetry and her prose, she has made science—understanding the natural world and then making sense of it—her main interest.    Sometimes it’s a personal matter, as in Cultivating Delight (2002), a scientific tour of her garden, or in One Hundred Names for Love (2011) a subjective account of her husband’s (the novelist Paul West’s) never-quite-complete recovery from a stroke.    Some of her output is issue-oriented (endangered species make up much of her subject matter), but more often it’s been nothing more ( or less) than a deep interest and growing expertise in explaining how things work or (especially in her poetry) to celebrate the wonders that come with scientific exploration and scientific discovery, for instance in her first published volume of poetry, The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral (1976).   For her talents, and her industry, she’s won a number of awards. But amongst Diane Ackerman’s proudest ‘possessions’ is a crocodilian sex pheromone, dianeackerone, a reward (so to speak) for her writings on crocodiles.   Of all things. I think it’s fair to say that she’s never attracted the attention of crocodiles in that way—nor vice versa. As far as I know, Ackerman is still well and still writing, so birthday greetings to her on her 74th.   ©  

[Stanley]

"The Affair."
Alfred Dreyfus, 1859-1935.

I swear that I am innocent. I remain worthy of serving in the Army. Long live France! Long live the Army! Alfred Dreyfus, protesting, at the military ceremony stripping him of his rank, 1896.

In the army of France’s Third Republic, the way to the top was through the École Supérieure de Guerre, open to those who had already made a good start to their military career. One such was Alfred Dreyfus, who’d sailed through his military education, won his lieutenancy and then a promotion to captain. Dreyfus fit the bill in other ways. Born in Alsace on October 8, 1859, Dreyfus and his prosperous family were exiled by the German triumph of 1870, and he could be expected to share the French army’s desire for revenge. He did well, too, at the École Superieure, ninth in his class. His fellows expected him to do better, but a senior officer on the examining board felt that Captain Dreyfus lacked cote d'amour. Luckily, that’s untranslatable, but for le Générale Bonnefond there was something “unlikeable” about Dreyfus. Alfred Dreyfus was a Jew, and if that weren’t enough he was an arriviste, for his father had been a mere peddler before he’d risen to the top of the Alsatian clothing industry. There were protests (from Dreyfus’s comrades) and an admission of wrongdoing from the War College’s CO, but that black mark traveled with Dreyfus when he joined the General Staff as its only Jew. When it was discovered that army secrets had been leaked to the Germans (in 1894-95), antisemites felt that Alfred Dreyfus the Jew must have been the guilty party and after a secret court martial he was cashiered, publicly humiliated, and sentenced to life on Devil’s Island. Trouble was, Alfred Dreyfus was innocent, and he had friends. Among them one must mention his wife, Lucie Eugénie, partly because she deserves it but also because Dreyfus’s other friends came to include such monumental figures as Émile Zola, Marcel Proust, and Anatole France (not to mention Mark Twain). The Dreyfusards included the newspaper publisher Georges Clemenceau and, in London, the pioneering female editor Rachel Beer. She it was who discovered the real traitor, the safely Christian Major Ferdinand Esterhazy. But militaries are slow to admit their fatal errors, and this case was further complicated (or soiled) by France’s endemic antisemitism. Dreyfus was not finally acquitted until 1906. He was showered with honors (the Legion d’honneur conferred with blushes. one hopes). He survived an assassination attempt to serve in the war that regained Alsace for France, a war in which his son Pierre won the Croix de guerre. Gallant Eugénie lived on until 1951, having hidden in a convent during the Nazi occupation. The Dreyfus affair defined the Third Republic and still echoes down the dusty corridors of modern France. ©

[Stanley]

"Be like a tree in pursuit of your cause. Stand firm, grip hard, thrust upward, bend to the winds of heaven, and learn tranquility."
Richard St. Barbe Baker, 1889-1982

They called me Bwana M’Kubwa, meaning ‘Big Master,’ but I said. “I am your M’Tumwe” (slave). Richard St. Barbe Baker, 1936, recalling his adoption as a Kikuyu, in Kenya, ca. 1922.

The UK census of 1901 lists Richard St. Barbe Baker as the eldest son of “John R. St. B. Baker, 40, m Living on own means Evangelist and Tree Grower.” Richard was then nearly 12, having been born on October 9, 1889, and his own life made that terse census report on his father a poetic prophecy. His father was indeed a horticulturalist (at ‘The Firs,’ near Southampton, England) and a breeder of fruit trees. When young Richard learned that his father was selling off land to finance Richard’s schooling, he dropped out and emigrated to Canada where he became a logger. Alarmed by clear-cutting, he enrolled in Saskatoon at the infant provincial university to study divinity and forestry, then continued to study both at Cambridge. WWI intervened. Richard won battlefield honors (the Military Cross), and in 1918 might have been interred alive had not the burial detail noticed that his “corpse” was still bleeding. After his ‘recovery,’ he joined the colonial service in Kenya, where he was entranced by Kikuyu culture and distressed by the Kikuyus’ agriculture. Shoved onto marginal lands by white settlement, the Kikuyu had adopted a slash and burn approach to farming, thus denuding the landscape and fostering destructive mini-climates. Besides being adopted into the tribe, Richard (with the aid of a chief) formed Watu wa Miti (“men of the trees”). Conforming with aspects of Kikuyu ritual, the ‘men of the trees’ engaged in conservation and reforestation. These twin themes would dominate the rest of Richard St. Barbe Baker’s long life. Known to his many friends as ‘St. Barbe,’ he was an evangelist for forests and for their benefices for the rest of nature, including humans. Forests regenerated wastelands and could remodel climates, retaining water in the soil and drawing rain from the heavens. Wherever St. Barbe went, he left forests behind him, or at least woodlands, including in New Zealand’s south island but also in Palestine (where his reforestations won the cooperation of Muslim and Jew) and even at the edges of the Sahara. In the USA St. Barbe is said to have converted FDR to tree planting (by the Civilian Conservation Corps) on the high prairies. Along the way (circa 1925), he converted to Bahá’í and evangelized for that faith, too. Richard St. Barbe Baker planted his last tree, at the University of Saskatchewan, in 1982, aged 93. He’s buried in Saskatoon, at Woodlawn Cemetery, and nearby, on what was once prairie, you can find the St. Barbe Baker Afforestation Area. And the Watu wa Miti is now the International Tree Foundation. Fitting memorials, all of them (more can be found, including among California’s redwood groves), for the son of an evangelist and tree grower. ©.