BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

The world is too much with us, late and soon. . .
Triton the moon, first sighted October 10, 1840.

. . . that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.
--William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act II, scene 2.

“What’s in a name?” asked Juliet, and in Shakespeare’s Verona the tragic answer was, “quite a bit,” particularly when it came to the surnames Montague and Capulet. The same question was asked at the University of Missouri-St. Louis (UMSL) when, a few years back, a student vote changed the school’s name (for its sport teams) from Rivermen (and Riverwomen) to “The Tritons.” It proved popular with students—a crucial test—but there were plaintive queries, mainly from ex-Rivermen. Some pointed out that “Triton” had become a rather pedestrian trademark, the name of a few manufactures (Tennessee boats, Wisconsin trailers, some non-descript jewelry). True, it was the legal name of a newly-consolidated school district in Massachusetts, but they had chosen to call their sports teams “The Vikings.” Still, “Tritons” had its UMSL advocates. Originally it was the name of one of the lesser Greek gods, a male mermaid (a “merman,” more a frog than a fish, so not unlike the new UMSL mascot, Louie). Triton was a minor god, but not mythologically non-descript. Triton guided Jason and the Argonauts away from peril and served as step-parent to Athena, goddess of wisdom: these legends fit the university’s mission. Triton’s gender was not at all obvious (when sculpted, Triton’s lower half was fish-like) so UMSL’s ‘Riverwomen’ did not have to be called ‘Tritonettes.’ But I especially liked the connection with Triton, that most unusual moon of Neptune’s, discovered on October 10, 1840, by William Lassell, an expert amateur astronomer in, or just outside of, 19th-century Liverpool. Lassell’s Triton is a remarkable moon. It has a retrograde orbit, running quite opposite to Neptune’s parental rotation. To this promising eccentricity it adds an active geology (nitrogen volcanoes, tectonic plates made of frozen gases, and metals) and it has an actual atmosphere. In addition, Triton is about one-third water (H2O), some of it actually liquid, and it has produced quite a bit of methane, and so may be capable of sparking life. But it’s not itself a child moon. Rather, Neptune adopted it, saving it from free-floating anonymity as a “plutino.” Is it too much of a strain to see Triton as a mature student, a transfer from the Kulper Belt (to which we have recently demoted Pluto itself). Best of all, Triton’s odd orbit forms a nearly perfect circle, around which it whirls at astonishing speed. “Go, Tritons!!!” Or, to quote the last lines of William Wordsworth’s stirring poem “The World Is Too Much with Us” (1807) be not “forlorn,” but become your best self:
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreath´d horn, ©

[Stanley]

57 Varieties
Henry John Heinz, 1844-1919

It is neither capital nor labor but management that brings success. Henry J. Heinz.

By the end of the 19th century, ‘Southside’ Pittsburgh was a hellhole for its inhabitants, mainly new immigrants whose ill-paid labors built the fortunes of the city’s steel masters. Workers’ families suffered especially high rates of infant mortality. Typhus and dysentery were the chief killers, brought on by water fouled by untreated sewage from the city’s tonier (upstream) suburbs. Southside toddlers died of dehydration. That grisly story has been told by a generation of demographic and medical historians. But when Heinrich Johann Heinz was born in the Southside, on October 11, 1844) it was still the ‘village’ of Birmingham. It was not exactly bucolic, but it was uncrowded enough that many, including the Heinz family, had kitchen gardens. So while Heinrich Johann became Henry J., his mother Anna Margarethe harvested her garden, eked out the family diet, and made its financial ends meet by selling her preserves, notably pickled horseradish. Henry helped her, and family legend has it that by the time Henry J. Heinz was 9 he had his own recipes and was making his own sales. Early in his teens he acquired a 3-acre garden, a horse and a wagon, and at 20 he was grossing (in today’s dollar values) $60,000 annually. Soon he incorporated, and when that first business bankrupted during the panic of 1873-1877, he, a brother, and a cousin founded F. & J. Heinz, a firm known for its tomato ketchup. By 1886, when he created H. J. Heinz & Co., he was making way more than “57 Varieties”, but he chose that trademark because 5 and 7 were, respectively, his and his wife’s lucky numbers. However varied Heinz’s product line, it was a big business, and Henry might have become just another robber baron. But that didn’t happen. Instead he waxed wealthy as a progressive employer, paying high wages, providing free medical care and cultural and recreational facilities to his workers and their families, and becoming a civic benefactor. When American history rolled around to Henry’s way of thinking, in the so-called “Progressive Era,” he was ready to support Teddy Roosevelt’s Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. Perhaps Henry remembered his bucolic Southside childhood. He knew that his prosperity depended on a public prosperous enough to buy premade condiments and canned soups. He understood that his well-established company could easily conform to regulatory legislation. Finally, his religious background made him a missionary of the good life. His mother was Lutheran, his father Baptist. Henry became a Methodist and then he married a Presbyterian. Out of that Southside stewpot came a pickled progressive industrialist who understood “good” in all its varieties, material and moral. ©

[Stanley]

"I don't eat colored people. Just bring me some fried chicken."
Dick Gregory, 1932-2017

The only good thing about the good old days is that they are gone. Dick Gregory.

As mayor of St. Louis, Raymond Tucker was reasonably successful. A civil engineer, he saw some technical problems and tried reasonably to set them right, notably by founding the Metropolitan Sewer District (the MSD, as we now call it) and passing the first city earnings tax. Tucker’s more ambitious attempts to bridge the widening gap between the city and its richer, whiter suburbs were not successful, but he was reelected twice, and he passed civil rights ordinances to prove that his heart was in the right place. In 1961, Mayor Tucker even proclaimed Dick Gregory Day and, at city hall, gave Gregory the keys of the city. Doubtless Dick Gregory was happy to receive the honor. After all, he’d been born here, in St. Louis, on October 12, 1932. But Mayor Tucker hadn’t informed Gregory’s hotel, and (after a day of ceremony and merry-making) Gregory was refused a room there for the simple reason that he was black. Gregory later quipped that he’d got the keys to the city but the locks had been changed, but it wasn’t quite so funny. Gregory had been born in a locked city, in the old mid-town ghetto. His mom was a cleaning lady. His dad was mostly absent and then gone. Dick Gregory didn’t unlock doors but ran away, on a track scholarship to Southern Illinois University. There they didn’t want him to graduate. They just wanted him to run, and so he did, right into the US Army. He’d already seen some humor in all this, “black” humor we might call it. As the runt of his litter, he’d been roughed up in his neighborhood, and escaped worse by making jokes. In the 1950s Army, a route up for so many, his commanding officer saw his talent and encouraged him to perform on base, and from there it was only a couple of steps to performances in Chicago nightspots, a brief sponsorship from Hugh Hefner, and fame as a guest (not just a performer) on the Tonight show. Gregory’s take on American life was pretty raw, profanities included, and cruelly funny, so Mayor Tucker must have known he was inviting trouble. Gregory went on to become a pioneer in his art and a mirror for the rest of us. He married, maintained a large family, and became more and more ‘relevant’ by engaging in the front lines of the Civil Rights movement as an acid, comic commentator on American racism. He also showed himself vulnerable to bizarre conspiracy theories and dietary fads, but taking him whole Gregory deserved the keys to his city. After all that was said and done, he could still manage to laugh at it. As for Mayor Tucker, he retired back to Washington University, but no longer in the engineering faculty; rather he became professor of urban affairs. Indeed. ©.

[Stanley]

A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.
Paul Simon, 81 Today.

The Penguins, the Moonglows
The Orioles and the Five Satins
For now and ever after as it was before . . .
==Paul Simon, from “Rene and Georgette Magritte With their Dog after the War”, ca. 1983.

Having been born (in Newark, NJ) on October 13, 1941, Paul Simon is now old enough to bear the strain of never winning the literature Nobel, but like Bob Dylan he took his lyrics seriously. Simon was also sharply aware of his own musical roots, and (like Dylan, again) was always ready to experiment with new genres. He even toured with Dylan, at least once (1999). Then, perhaps for Dylan’s old times’ sake, they appeared once at Duluth’s Bayfront Park, and for poetry’s sake just after a hard rain had fallen. There were, however, some differences. Simon’s lyrics were rarely as bitter or angry as Dylan’s could be. “Mrs. Robinson,” the theme song of the film The Graduate (1967) was sharp in places but never as devastating as Dylan’s “Masters of War” (1963), and not as timely, either. One was left with the sense that Simon was trying to hop on a train that Dylan had already boarded. And while Dylan claimed musical descent from the likes of Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly, outcasts in their own time, musicians of the dispossessed. Simon was more into a dreamy kind of nostalgia for “the Penguins, the Moonglows, and the Five Satins,” middle-class to a fault and more like Don MacLean’s “American Pie” than Bob Dylan’s American Nightmares. That may be because Simon himself was brought up as “Paul Simon” in a musical performer’s family, and in a community where he needed little or no protective coloration to fit in. Dylan, né “Robert Zimmerman,” grew up a shopkeeper’s son in Duluth and then Hibbing, roughneck Iron Range places where Jewish families kept to themselves and where he got in trouble for playing loud and discordant music at his senior prom. Probably, at that Bayfront concert in 1999, in Duluth, Paul Simon felt more at home than Bob Dylan-Zimmerman could ever feel. Indeed Simon’s main boyhood ambition was to become a top basketball player. Dylan just wanted to escape. But Paul Simon never got tall enough to play top-flight basketball. Instead he drifted into popular music. So, no Nobel Prize for Paul Simon. But during his years with Art Garfunkel and then after, Paul Simon produced lyrics and tunes that for many people of my age serve as reminders of what should have been, or what might have been had the fates been kinder. Dylan reminds me of what was. ©.

[Stanley]

Harold Godwineson, RIP,
1066 and All That.

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. It certainly hath no divinity in it. Thomas Paine, in Common Sense (1776).

The peaceful transfer of power may be the defining characteristic of a democracy. If so, then the USA nearly fell at that hurdle in January 2021. In 1776, wanting to ridicule monarchy and deny its claim to power, Tom Paine struck at its root by calling King William I “a French bastard with an armed Banditti.” That was accurate, but did William the Conqueror make himself king “against the consent of the natives” when, on October 14, 1066, at the Battle of Hastings, he conquered the (mainly) Anglo-Saxon army of King Harold II? That Harold died in that battle indicated God’s consent, for trial by battle (with God as judge and jury) was an established medieval custom. But what about the “natives”? That’s a question that might have puzzled King Harold himself. He was born in about 1020, the son of a powerful Anglo-Saxon aristocrat and a Danish mother whose family had useful ties with King Canute, a Danish-Polish warlord (“Knut”) whose legitimacy or bastardy was moot but who had (by mutilation, murder and conquest) become king in 1016. There was, true, a hint of “consent” about Canute’s accession (a vote by a small council of noble warlords), but when Canute died the English throne was again up for grabs. Or “thrones” might be better, for “England” was not yet a body politic. That would take a couple of centuries and a Welshman called Henry Tudor. Meanwhile, following Canute, came the long reign of Edward the Confessor. But besides being not much of a confessor, Edward was not much of a king, having failed (he died in early 1066) to produce a male heir. Besides conquest on the battlefield, fatherhood (ideally, on the right side of the blanket) was an essential mark of kingship, power transferred genetically rather than consensually. Harold Godwineson (son of Godwine but brother-in-law to the Confessor) stepped into the vacuum, got himself elected king by a small council of noble warlords, and then marched off northwards to fight other claimants (of varying genetic identities). Back across the channel, in Normandy, William remembered that, through the embassy of Harold Godwineson, he’d been promised the throne of Edward the Confessor when Edward was just climbing into his deathbed. So “consent of the natives” was not at issue when the people were not sovereign. Harold Godwineson didn’t think that the people were sovereign. Canute didn’t. Neither did William the Bastard. Nor does Donald John Trump. Had Trump’s insurgents won the day, on January 6, 2021, we would have been brought right up to date: trial by battle, transition of power by conquest, the good old days. Very old. ©

[Stanley]

Some Pig!
Charlotte's Web, published October 15, 1952

The loss we felt was not the loss of ham but the loss of pig. He had evidently become precious to me, not that he represented a distant nourishment in a hungry time, but that he had suffered in a suffering world. E. B. White, “Death of a Pig” (1948)
.
When E. B. and Katherine White left their desks at The New Yorker in search of quieter lives (first in rural Connecticut and then coastal Maine) they took their literary talents with them. Katherine still selected and edited short fiction for the magazine, then started writing beautifully about gardening. E. B., as for The New Yorker in his classic “Talk of the Town” pieces, continued his habit of writing about daily things, concisely, wryly, humanely. At the New Yorker, he had been the gaily-serious boulevardier, his essays bringing the metropolis down to its sidewalks, its styles, its visitors famous and not. But in Brookline, Maine, he wrote about farms and fishes because, in Brookline, things of that ilk comprised the quotidien round for the Whites’ farm (and for their son Joel’s messing about in boats). Being at least a part-time farmer, E. B. White also wrote about pigs. White’s most famous pig book, Charlotte’s Web, was published on October 15, 1952. It’s about a runt pig (Wilbur), a little girl growing up (Fern Arable), and some of the most important words in it were written by a common spider (Charlotte). Her (and she was definitely a she) dew-sparkled web said “some pig” and “terrific” and “radiant” and “humble.” Thus she saved Wilbur’s bacon (literally, one might say) and, in the process, taught Fern and a few perceptive adults quite a bit about the wonders and sadnesses of life. Most critics, already accustomed to White’s elegant prose, were bowled over by his kids’ book. Eudora Welty, a brilliant word-crafter herself, called Charlotte’s Web “nearly perfect,” and she was nearly right. But it wasn’t the first time White had written about pigs. In their efforts to fit in with Brookline folk and Brookline life, they ran their smallholding to meet their material needs, milk, eggs, spinach and apples for instance, and pigs too: spring piglets whose loins could be fattened for winter feasts and bones strengthened for spring soups. White didn’t like killing pigs, but thinking of those feasts and soups enabled him to do it. But it all derailed when one of his pigs fell ill. Despite all White could do, and did, the pig died. It became a tragedy for the whole neighborhood, including for White’s dachshund, Fred, a low-slung German of canine tendencies and decent emotions. Of course White wrote about it, and his essay about it (another model of how to use words to make meaning of the daily round), “Death of a Pig,” appeared in The Atlantic in 1948. You can find it online, if you haven’t already exceeded your ‘free’ monthly allowance; and then read (or reread?) Charlotte’s Web. It will be time well spent. ©.

[Stanley]

If you've climbed one, you haven't climbed them all.
Sir Hugh Thomas Munro, 1856-1919

Wherever I wander, wherever I rove,
The hills of the Highlands for ever I love. –Robert Burns, “My Heart’s in the Highlands.”

Victorian Britain produced more than its fair share of eccentrics, many of them middle- or upper-class. There may have been a surplus, as better nutrition (and improved sanitation?) allowed the better-off to raise larger flocks of adult children. But not all these survivors could inherit their families’ wealth or status, so they strived for distinction in other ways. Explorers abounded, and these daily notes have featured several of them, mainly females. One male who began his adulthood in adventurous ways was Hugh Thomas Munro, born in London on October 16, 1856, to a Scottish laird and lady. Hugh spent his childhood in London and on his family’s estate at Kirriemuir, Angus. Possibly bored by privilege, Hugh went out to Africa to gain modest fame by helping to suppress the natives in the Basuto War (1880-81). But he was an eldest son, and duty called him back to Kirriemuir, first as his father’s estate agent and then as the laird. There he continued family traditions by producing an heir male (and three daughters), adopting highland dress, dancing highland reels, and standing for parliament (unsuccessfully) as a Conservative. It’s not recorded whether he tossed the caber, but Sir Hugh immersed himself in the highlands, including their mysticisms: not witchcraft (for which Kirriemuir had once been infamous) but he was a water diviner and he did claim to be able to hear the music of the mountains. He also became a mountaineer, a founder member and soon honorary president of the Scottish Mountaineering Club. In that guise, he undertook a survey of the highlands with the aim of identifying, measuring, and climbing all peaks over 3,000 feet in elevation (914.4 meters, these days). Munro himself didn’t climb them all, leaving off a couple before he died in 1919, but to this day the Scottish Mountaineering Club maintains lists of Munros (and “Munro Tops”) and validates the claims of “Munro Baggers” who have climbed them all. Munro himself constantly refined his list, and that refinement has been carried on. Today, 282 mountains are seen as “real” Munros, and as of the end of last year they’d been climbed by 7,098 Munro Baggers. For most, that is a lifetime achievement. One man has done it 16 times. A few have done the single round at speed, even in one continuous round. The record so far (set in 2020 by a man of the clan Campbell) is just short of 32 days. The ladies’ record is 76 days, set by Libby Kerr and Lisa Trollope in 2017. Thus Victorian eccentricity has survived in both male and female lines, but it has moved down the social scale. Granted, there has been a peer—but a Labour one, Baron Smith of Finsbury, and in 2010 came a Glasgow postman who’d trained on the job. Clearly he’s a social climber. ©

[Stanley]

The New-Old Journalism
Jimmy Breslin, 1928-2017

The number one rule of thieves is that nothing is too small to steal. James Earle Breslin.

Among the many books I would like to read is Jimmy Breslin’s biography of Damon Runyon (Damon Runyon: A Life, 1991). Awaiting that day, I imagine the book as Breslin’s wry tribute to a fellow chronicler of urban life, for both Breslin and Runyon gained great fame as daily columnists who wrote in urban accents about people you wouldn’t necessarily want to move into your neighborhood. Each had an unerring gift for seeing the funny side of their subject, however low it was, and both were expert at twanging their readers’ heartstrings. But there were disconnects. No one, as far as I know, refers to a writing style as “breslinesque”, but you will find “runyonesque” in good dictionaries, and you can hear it too. Just stream the film Guys and Dolls and listen to the subterranean patter of Nathan Detroit, Sky Masterson, Miss Adelaide, Big Jule, and Lieutenant Brannigan. That’s an irony. Damon Runyon was born out on the high prairies (in Manhattan, KS, of all places) and had to learn the lingo. Jimmy Breslin was New York born and bred, Queens English his native tongue, uttering his first yawp on October 17, 1928. He was brought up Irish and Catholic, in that order, and from infancy had plenty of contact with low-lifes. Breslin’s dad drank too much and soon abandoned the family. His mother made ends meet as a welfare officer during the Great Depression. Breslin’s other education, the formal one, ended when he dropped out of college owing to “chronic alcoholism”, an achievement of sorts for a 22-year-old. Drink was no bar to a budding journalist, though, as long as he could live through his hangovers, and Breslin quickly moved from copy boy to columnist, finding his best material in barroom conversations with politicians and petty crooks, intersecting professions he thought, but both speaking a native argot. Breslin’s boozing, and his bluster, took him into and then out of a number of jobs, from the top (e.g. the Herald Tribune) to lower-order publications like The National Police Gazette. Along the way Breslin became something of an institution himself, even running for office (on a secession ticket, unsuccessfully, with Norman Mailer). Breslin interviewed all sorts, using his brand of journalese to humanize them, but unlike Runyon, Jimmy never saw much to redeem in the hoodlum element, in which he included another Queens family, the Trumps. But he could laugh at crooks, too, especially in cases where the gang was too stupid to shoot straight. He won a Pulitzer in 1986 for a lifetime of work ennobling the humble, and (having broken with the boozing) lived out a long life as the elder statesman of the “New Journalism.” Which, as Breslin the biographer of Runyon knew, wasn’t as new as all that. ©

[Stanley]

A definition of "stearine."
Fannie Hurst, 1885-1968

Some people think they are worth a lot of money just because they have it. Fannie Hurst.

I first ran across the word “stearine” in a P. G. Wodehouse novel. He used it in reference to women’s writing, fiction mainly, and it was not a compliment. Stearin (the usual spelling) is a triglyceride, and although it can be artificed from vegetable stuff it was originally a hard animal fat, not good for anything really except candles and arteriosclerosis. Wodehouse wrote lightly, airily, and comically, and often declared himself averse to women’s fiction as soppy, sentimental, and (apparently) fat. In such journals as the Saturday Evening Post (where Wodehouse made much money) such soppiness was his chief competitor, and it may well be that he was directly referencing the work of Fannie Hurst, whose first Saturday Evening Post story appeared in 1912. Many more followed, and at about the same time that Wodehouse was striking Post paydirt. Taking together all her stories and novels, Hurst may be the most successful writer (certainly in terms of volume) ever to come out of St. Louis. But she wasn’t born here. Fannie Hurst was born in Hamilton, Ohio, on October 18. 1885, the only surviving child of an occasionally successful shoe manufacturer. Her father’s up-and-down career took the family to St. Louis, then a renowned center of shoemaking, where he cobbled well enough to get Fannie into Central High School and then Washington, University. During the downs, the Hursts lived in boarding houses, but they finally settled in at a then moderately fashionable address, 5641 Cates Avenue. At WashU, Fannie wrote enough to think of it as a career, and at 26 she moved to New York to make it so. A year later she made the Post, a good start, but then fell back into waitressing and clerking while she collected rejection slips. Her father’s downs, then hers, gave her a lively sympathy for the poor, or as she would put it the “little people,” and these would become her fictional meat. Her most successful novels (e.g. Lummox, 1923, and Imitation of Life, 1933) dwelt on such themes, and were, frankly, sentimental. After a brief Fannie Hurst vogue amongst the cognoscenti, it was the sentiment that stuck in people’s craws, lodged there like stearin, and she drew acid comment from the likes of Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, and of course P. G. Wodehouse. On the other hand, favorable reviews came from Lenin, Trotsky, and Eleanor Roosevelt. All in all, it was an interesting spread. Hurst herself, as a politically engaged citizen, supported little people’s causes (trades unions, civil rights, feminism, refugees) with her time and money, and meanwhile her books and stories sold well enough to give her the last laugh. At her death (1968), a lot of her estate went to such good causes, and some also to writing programs at WashU and Brandeis. ©

[Stanley]

No child deserves to be left behind.
Lois Meek Stolz, 1891-1983

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance. Derek Bok.

The social, economic, and intellectual benefits of early childhood education have long been evident, witness the nearly universal successes of Friedrich Froebel’s kindergarten movement. Froebel (1782-1852) was German, his ‘movement’ a foreign import, but it came when German education was in vogue. It took root in New England, thanks to pioneers like Elizabeth Peabody (1804-1894), romantically (Transcendentally?) inclined to take seriously the notion that ‘genius’ must reside in every child. Kate Douglas Wiggin (1856-1923) took it with her from Philadelphia to San Francisco, where she (a Peabody disciple) established the first free Kindergarten in 1878. By the early 20th century, most American school systems began at age 5. There the public system, tax-supported and free at the point of use, has stalled, despite various government efforts (e.g. “Head Start”) to take up the baton and run with it. One person who did run with it, though, was Lois Meek Stolz, born Lois Meek in Washington, DC, on October 19, 1891. Educated in DC (through to BA at George Washington University), she then earned a PhD at Columbia, in psychology, where she concentrated on early childhood development, notably among children whose fathers had been away at war (World War I, which for Americans lasted only 18 months). Her very successful career at Columbia (she was promoted to full professor with almost indecent haste) was interrupted by marriage (1938) to another psychologist, Herbert Stolz, but only briefly for they moved westwards to take their work first to Berkeley and then to Stanford. Then came another war, and Lois Meek Stolz’s astonishing real-life research project, undertaken at the behest of Kaiser Shipyards, now dependent upon female labor to meet its Liberty Ship targets. Before she finished, Stolz’s workplace schools had involved thousands of mothers and their kids, families without fathers embroiled in a much longer war. Her findings, and those of her research students, made unanswerable the case that early childhood education (broadly conceived to include social as well as academic learning) can—and does—play a vital, positive role in a child’s development, and especially for those children whose home life is disrupted in some other way. Our failure to take up this lesson is evident. True, today in St. Louis there are upwards of 30 ‘educational’ pre-schools, but they are not universal and (for the most part) they are not free. Some, indeed, are very expensive. The great mass of our children do not begin school until age 5. As a society we pay dearly for our failure to act upon the lessons taught by Lois Meek Stolz. ©

[Stanley]

A writer's writer.
A. J. Liebling, 1904-1963

I can write faster than anyone who can write better, and I can write better than anyone who can write faster. A. J. Liebling.

If ever looks were deceptive, they were so in the case of A. J. Liebling, whose adult pictures remind one of an overindulged toddler. But he wielded his pen like a stiletto, or his typewriter like a bludgeon, and his humor was so devastating that Chicagoans still hate him for his 1952 book on the city, enduringly subtitled The Second City. He lived there only between jobs in the late 1940s, but long enough to decide that it was “second” by about a million miles and not worth betting on: “plopped down by the lakeside like a piece of waterlogged fruit.” So much, then, for Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago” (1914):
Stormy, husky brawling
City of the Big shoulders.
But then Liebling didn’t like Sandburg, either. Anthony Joseph Liebling was a New Yorker, born and bred, first appearing there on October 20, 1904, the son of an immigrant furrier who reversed the American dream by going from riches to rags. That may explain some of Joe’s acidity, but his dad was rich enough for long enough to send the boy to Dartmouth, where he wrote for the campus’s humor mag but dropped out because he went AWOL from chapel, then on to Columbia’s elite School of Journalism. He stayed there long enough to decide that it offered good training for grocery clerks but not for journalists, then via a kind Providence (the one in Rhode Island) he entered on to a long career as a perceptive journalist reporting on all and sundry. He may be best remembered for his pieces on boxing and on World War II, both from ringside. Indeed he stayed in Paris until the Nazis arrived (a foolhardy adventure for a Jewish boy from New York) but was then pleased to return to the City of Light (which he genuinely loved) via the allied landings in North Africa and then the Normandy beaches. Liebling landed on the latter on D-Day, and his reporting on that crackles like a machine gun. Liebling is famed for his New Yorker pieces, sometimes wildly funny, and for his acerbic attacks on the Commie chasers of the McCarthy era and the unsavory ex-reds who sought salvation by turning on their erstwhile comrades. Liebling saved his bitterest barbs, though, for the press, most of which cowered before it all or, worse, egged on the hysteria to make a war hero of the drunken senator from Wisconsin. His best piece, though, was for The New Yorker, about the heir apparent of Huey Long’s Louisiana machine, “The Earl of Louisiana.” It’s now enshrined (not “entombed” if you read it) in the Library of America series, along with Liebling’s “The Sweet Science” which is, of course, about boxing. ©

[Stanley]

diet, cookery, and health.
Elsie May Widdowson, 1906-2000.

A fair share for all. The motto of Britain’s wartime and postwar food rationing, 1940 et seq.

When Robert McCance died (in 1993, aged 94) died, his ‘professional’ obituary was entrusted to Elsie May Widdowson. In it, Widdowson detailed McCance’s pioneering work in nutritional science and praised his unstinting generosity to his students and colleagues. But she never once mentioned herself and her 60-year scientific partnership with McCance. It began when (in the early 1930s) Widdowson, a postgraduate student at Imperial College, London, published a paper pointing out serious flaws in McCance’s work. Impressed rather than insulted, McCance asked Widdowson to join his team at Cambridge, and together they embarked on researches that would rewrite the nutritional rulebook. The first fruit of their labors was published (in 1940) under McCance’s name but has since become known as McCance and Widdowson’s Chemical Composition of Foods. It corrected traditional errors but also altered perspectives, for instance by detailing the differences between raw and cooked foods and by examining how diet changed the chemistry of human (and animal) bodies. Elsie May Widdowson was born on October 21, 1906, the elder of two daughters. Hers was not a rich family, but it was an unusual one, for both daughters earned science PhDs (Elsie in Chemistry and Ethel in Physics) in an era when such birds were very rare. Elsie felt that her achievements rested on Robert McCance’s generosity. Perhaps so; but she added an aggressive inquisitiveness: her eagerness to alter traditional frames of reference, and in particular to pursue the chemistry of foodstuffs along its whole dietary path, from raw material to cooked menu to and through the feeding body. Or even the absorbing body, for some of her early work was on how well or badly foetuses were nourished in maternal wombs. Together McCance and Widdowson helped to reconstruct the British diet through wartime and postwar rationing. Never was Britain better fed, including the oddly-named ‘National Loaf,’ a new recipe for building strong bodies in more than eight ways (to paraphrase a misleading ad for an American bread). Widdowson’s own researches led her to far fields: Uganda, for instance, to study exactly how people became malnourished, or even to Newfoundland to learn how baby seals got so fat so fast on mere mothers’ milk. After McCance fell ill (from falling off his bicycle) Widdowson would peddle out to his country cottage to keep him informed of the latest developments in what we can now call (thanks to them both) ‘food science.’ Elsie pedaled on until 2000, also aged 94, to gain fuller tributes in her own obituaries. ©

[Stanley]

The Sentiments of an American Woman
Esther Reed, 1746-1780

Certainly, my dear brother, [the cause] is a glorious one. Virtue, honour, unanimity, bravery, all conspire to carry it on, and sure it has at least a chance to be victorious. Esther de Berdt Reed, 1775.

In 1776, the members of the Continental Congress declared it a “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal.” Whatever they meant by it, ‘equality’ is an explosive concept, and Esther Reed had already bought into it heart and soul. She may have been born to it (in London, on October 22, 1746) for she was descended from Huguenot (Calvinist) refugees from the continent,and her father, a prosperous London merchant, served as parliamentary agent for Massachusetts and Delaware in the controversy over the Stamp Act of 1765. Esther was brought up, and educated, in the dissenting tradition. She would eventually give voice to that by citing biblical heroines in her support of the American Revolution. More immediately, it helped her to fall in love with a colonial youth, Joseph Reed, in in London studying law, and marry him in 1770. He took Esther back to Philadelphia where she birthed six children (the youngest, b. 1780, being named George Washington Reed) but still found the energy to serve as Pennsylvania’s first ‘first lady’ (Joseph was elected the state’s revolutionary governor), a leader of the Daughters of Liberty (the ‘distaff’ side of the Sons of Liberty), and when it came to battle an indefatigable supporter of the infant nation’s Continental Army, raising its funds, sewing its clothes, and making dressings for its wounds. She and her sister revolutionaries made explicit their contributions by stitching their names into the shirts they made. As a young gentlewoman in London, Esther de Berdt read sentimental novels and attended theatre performances, and as a revolutionary matron she would make her literacies public in Philadelphia and beyond, for instance in letter-writing campaigns to raise friends and funds for the American cause. She got Lafayette’s wife to donate £120, a very considerable sum, but among the monies Esther raised was the very much smaller contribution (7 shillings and 6 pence) that came from “an African woman” in Boston, possibly the pioneer poet Phillis Wheatley. Another donor to Esther Reed’s revolutionary sewing circle was Martha Jefferson, the wife of the patriarch and slaveowner who (nevertheless?) put to paper the notion that all men were created equal. Did he mean to include women? Did he include the enslaved Africans at Monticello? In her own brave way, Esther Reed showed that it didn’t matter. Once that particular genie is let out of the lamp, there’s no telling where it will go or whether it can be stopped. ©.

[Stanley]

Diesel engine or lace handkerchief?
Martha Rountree, 1911-1999

If you don’t hire this young woman, you will have only yourself to blame. My father, in a letter of recommendation to the editor of the Kansas City Star, circa 1955.

When dad wrote that very short letter women journalists were, pardon the expression, as rare as hen’s teeth. The student in question did get her job, but she was a rare bird. There had been pioneer specimens, Nellie Bly (1862-1922) for one, and Dorothy Thompson (1893-1961), Ida B. Wells (1862-1931), and the equally intrepid Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998). Another who broke into what was really a protected natural (male) reserve was Martha Rountree, born in Gainesville, Florida, on October 23, 1911. She was the daughter of a Willy Loman type, and getting into college, then through it, was a struggle. She never did get a degree (until some honorary ones came her way), but she did make tuition payments with term-time and summer jobs for the Columbia [SC] Record and the Tampa Bay Tribune. Getting nowhere fast, Martha moved to New York City to make a life as a professional journalist. It was a long shot, a brave one, and later something of her steel was perceived by Mrs. William Randolph Hearst, Jr., who called Martha “a diesel engine under a lace handkerchief.” Rountree should be better known to us as the cofounder with Lawrence Spivak (1900-1994) of the long-running program Meet the Press. Or more accurately the founder. In New York, despairing of breaking through her own glass ceiling, Martha Rountree had with her sister started a radio production company. Their main success was a frothy series (on the Mutual network) called “Leave It to the Girls” and featuring interviews with female celebrities. But that diesel engine still burned, and one of her freelance pieces was picked up by Spivak’s American Mercury magazine (once the vehicle of H. L. Mencken). Impressed, Spivak asked Martha to critique his American Mercury radio program, and she came up with the idea for Meet the Press. It first ran on Mutual in 1945, then (1947) was bought up by NBC, radio and television, where it has remained ever since. At first, Martha was the moderator, Spivak the male eminence, but later they fell out and in 1954 she sold the franchise to Spivak for a cool $125,000 (about $1.4 million today). As the active agent on Meet the Press she was conservative, giving too much air to the likes of Whitaker Chambers, but still a tough interviewer who invited all sorts (including Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry Truman) to be grilled and served up. Later, she ran her own radio station (in suburban DC) and served as elder stateswoman of a younger tribe of journalistic females. During these years she moved towards a more liberal stance and a working relationship with Lady Bird Johnson. But when she died, wouldn’t you know it, Martha Rountree’s obituaries were much shorter than Lawrence Spivak’s. ©

[Stanley]

Opened October 24, 1935.
Mulatto: A Play and a Poem
I am your son, white man! . . .
A little yellow
Bastard boy. First and closing lines of the poem “Mulatto” by Langston Hughes (1925).

The word “mulatto” defines a person born of one black and one white parent: literally a “half-breed.” Around New Orleans, where race consciousness became a fine art, it was joined by subtler gradations, e.g. “quadroon” and “octoroon.” But in American law “mulatto” had a wider meaning, generic, anyone who appeared to have an African in their family tree. Before the Civil War, northern states abolished slavery (some very gradually), but most had “black laws” which imposed varying civil and/or political disabilities on any person judged to be black; the word for any such person was “Mulatto.” In Illinois, any free African “or Mulatto” was barred even from entering the state; nor could they make contracts with, sue, or testify in court against any “white” person. “Mulatto” was also the title chosen by Langston Hughes for his first Broadway. In full, it was Mulatto: A Tragedy of the Deep South, and it opened at the Vanderbilt Theatre on October 24, 1935. But Hughes knew “mulatto” as an all-American tragedy, and he knew it better than most for he was himself a mulatto born of mulatto parents. Socially he was a “Negro;” he insisted on it, and he was so identified in reviews of the play, for instance in Brook Atkinson’s review in the New York Times. Atkinson’s review was sympathetic, not gushing, in some ways perceptive. Atkinson didn’t predict that the play would run for eleven months and 373 performances (then a unique success for a black playwright), but he saw real qualities in Hughes’ drama and in several of the players. The play is about a white planter, “Colonel” Thomas Norwood, his black housekeeper Cora Lewis, and their five “mulatto” children, one of whom goes north and returns in no mood to truck to his dad. He is (to quote Atkinson) “so cocky and impudent that he seems more like an ungrateful son than a martyr to race prejudice.” Atkinson praised Hughes for seeing beyond race, especially for his sensitive portrayal of the real virtues of Colonel Norwood, who is killed by that ungrateful son, who is then lynched by a race (white) mob. In the end, Atkinson was more bemused than enthused. He expected militancy but found that “the sympathies evoked by Mr. Hughes’ story are muddled.” Indeed so. It has since been discovered that Hughes’ intentions were “muddled” by the producer, who altered the plot to make it more sensational, more successful, and, ironically, more “black,” than Hughes had intended. The ‘real’ Langston Hughes is to be found elsewhere, for instance in his short poem, also titled “Mulatto” (1925) a plainer-spoken indictment of white America’s race consciousness. ©.

[Stanley]

artist and collector
Marjorie Acker Phillips, 1894-1985

I decided to paint in celebration of the wonder of the world. Marjorie Acker Phillips.

Marjorie Acker Phillips was born in Bourbon, Indiana, on October 25, 1894. Despite this, she grew up a very modern girl: rebelling against her engineer father to make a as an artist. She studied at Manhattan’s Art Students League and became a well-known figure in the city’s Bohemian circles. Marjorie painted up to her death in 1985, and her last big personal shows took place in 1971, in London, and then in 1975, in Washington, DC. There’s no reason to doubt her success, nor her dedication. Her works were hung at the Corcoran Gallery, the Whitney Museum, and Yale University, and when at home she painted for several hours every morning, in her studio. But at her death she was remembered principally as a collector and as a co-founder of the country’s first museum of modern art. In 1921, aged 26, Marjorie Acker married Duncan Phillips, nine years her senior and already an art critic and art patron of decidedly, even aggressively, modern tendencies. For both, it was the “modern” that stuck, but their lives were made by Duncan’s wealth, which came out of industrial Pittsburgh where his grandfather James Laughlin was a pioneer steel master and banker and his father an innovative maker of plate glass. The Phillips Collection began on Marjorie and Duncan’s European honeymoon, during which they bought new works by the likes of Cézanne and Manet but ‘old masters’ too. Their theory (which may in origin have been Marjorie’s) was that there were real links in art history between past and present genius, and they bought accordingly. Returning home (to Washington’s then fashionable DuPont Circle neighborhood) they hung their paintings not by period or by artist, but rather to illustrate lineages which Duncan called chains of creativity. Soon (by 1929) their collection threatened to outgrow their mansion. The solution was to make a new home, further northwest in DC, and to remodel the DuPont Circle building as an art museum. That process never really finished (there have been major additions), and today the extended Phillips Collection still stands, its late Victorian core extended by two new wings (which, architecturally speaking, are ‘modern’ yet entirely compatible with the first building). So the museum building’s life imitates the art within. What with Andrew Mellon’s role in founding the National Gallery (and the National Portrait Gallery) it’s fair to say that Washington DC’s art museums were financed in Pittsburgh. As members of the exclusive South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club, the Mellons and the Phillipses also had a hand in the 1889 Johnstown Flood disaster, but that is another story. ©

[Stanley]

October 26, 1825
The Erie Canal and the Commonwealth

The overflowing blessings from this fountain of public good and national abundance will be as extensive as our own country and as durable as time. DeWitt Clinton, Governor of New York.

In 1981, President Ronald Reagan began his inaugural with praise for the American tradition of peaceful transitions of power and with thanks to his defeated opponent, the former president, for aiding in that process. In 2022, as we approach the mid-terms, Reagan’s party has forgotten all that. But they all pay homage to what Reagan said in his eighth paragraph, that “government is not the solution . . . government is the problem.” Exactly what Reagan meant is hard to sort out even from his speech, let alone from his actions, but it has become sacred text. It’s also ahistorical, an inanity, and today is a good time to correct it. For on October 26, 1825, in Buffalo, New York, Governor DeWitt Clinton pulled a plug to let water flow between the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean. More prosaically, he made a speech and then sailed from Erie (lake) into Erie (canal). This brief journey was not as dramatic as the July 1863 battles at Gettysburg or Vicksburg, but it helps to explain why the triumphant Union forces at both were strengthened or dominated by soldiers from the upper Midwest. The Erie reoriented the Midwest to the east and to the Atlantic and transformed its natural fertility into huge agricultural surpluses. The Erie spurred the growth of our capital markets. It secured New York’s place as our largest port city and set it up to become the world’s creditor. Along the way, as many scholars have shown, the Erie transformed our culture, making us an enterprising people who could reasonably expect that hard work and careful thought would be rewarded. And besides the labor of the navvies (most of them immigrants) who sweated and died to create the Water Level Route, the Erie Canal was born of public enterprise: almost a decade of bond issues and the imposition of taxes enough to meet interest payments and then, in the long run, to pay the bonds off. The Erie led other states into a rash of capital improvements and strengthened demands that the national government get into the act. Such ideas were opposed by the slaveholding South, but southern secession in 1861 fixed that problem by removing southern delegates from Congress. Almost immediately, while it raised arms and men to defeat secession, Congress used its public power to build railways and roads, to create land-grant universities, to fund freehold family farming, to improve harbors, to make our great rivers into highways of trade, to lay telegraph lines, to explore new methods of taxation, to print paper money by the bushel, and, not incidentally, to win the Civil War. In the real history of American politics and government, it’s known as problem-solving. ©

[Stanley]

The origins of the New York Herald Tribune
Whitelaw Reid, 1837-1912

Of all the puerile follies . . . the most childish has been the idea that the editor could vindicate his independence only by sitting on the fence and throwing stones with impartial vigor alike at friend and foe. Whitelaw Reid.

One of the bloodiest battles in US history, Shiloh produced 24,000 casualties in about 24 hours, April 6-7, 1862. My great-grandfather missed it, having only just joined the 117th Illinois Volunteers, but had he been there—and survived—he would have filed a report with the Alton, Illinois, Telegraph, because that is what Lt. Daniel Kerr did once he caught up with the Union Army in northern Mississippi. Another soldier-correspondent who missed Shiloh was Whitelaw Reid, aide-de-camp to Union General William Rosecrans and (writing as “Agate”) a reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer. But absence didn’t stop “Agate” from sending his eye-witness story of the battle to the Enquirer. “Agate’s” report, if second-hand, was imaginatively direct in its depiction of the gore and maelstrom of battle. It impressed the Enquirer, which when Reid’s enlistment was over sent the young reporter to Washington, DC, to cover the war’s other end. Whitelaw Reid was born outside Xenia, Ohio, on October 27, 1837, to a smallholder father and a Scottish immigrant mother. Poor and ambitious, he entered Miami University of Ohio where he became a leader of the nascent fraternity movement, an excellent student, and a noted campus orator. After his war reporting (from Shiloh and DC) he took a job with Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune where he became a real war correspondent (on the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71), one who so impressed Greeley that, when Horace ran for the presidency in 1872, Reid leapfrogged into the editor’s chair. For good measure, he was able to organize the purchase of the Tribune. As publisher, Reid introduced cost cutting production techniques and made the daily edition the mass-circulation core of the operation. As editor, he eschewed the sensationalism of other press pioneers such as Pulitzer and Hearst, invested in good reporting, and made the Tribune the respectable voice of the Republican Party. His reward was to become rich enough to maintain a mansion outside of Xenia while, as a New York editor-publisher, he became a leader in high society, Republican vice-presidential nominee in the failed 1892 campaign, one of the Peace Commissioners who negotiated an end to the Spanish-American War of 1898, and (the pinnacle of his political and social ambitions) US Ambassador at the Court of St. James (1905-1912). His family’s connections to the Tribune continued (until 1955) through his son Ogden (who in 1924 made it into the Herald-Tribune) and his grandson, also named Whitelaw Reid. Under the Reids, as its rival (the New York Times) put it, it had become “the newspaperman’s newspaper.” So in 1958 the Times bought it. End of story. ©

[Stanley]

From County Tyrone to Calcutta
Sister Nivedita, 1867-1911

Hinduism would not be eternal were it not constantly growing and spreading, and taking in new areas of experience. Sister Nivedita, circa 1904.

Mahatma Gandhi designed the Indian national flag to represent a fruitful union (the central white band) of Islam (the lower green band) and Hinduism (the orange band, at the top). 80 years on, after civil war, partition, and national wars between India and Pakistan, that seems naïve at best, but the tricolor persists. With the recent rise of an extreme Hindu nationalism, the very first effort (1904) at an Indian national flag seems more appropriate. It was almost perfectly square and, on a field of red, displayed a vajra (a ritual Hindi weapon) and a line from a popular Hindi poem, vande Mataram, roughly translated as “worship the mother goddess.” That flag was designed in Calcutta (Kolkata), by Margaret Elizabeth Noble, who was born in County Tyrone, Ireland, on October 28, 1867. In Calcutta, in 1904, she was Sister Nivedita, “the dedicated,” and she was by then perhaps most famous western-born disciple of the Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902), whom she’d first met, in London, in 1895. Looking back from her vantage point as a Hindu missionary and Indian nationalist, she saw her whole life as a spiritual quest, beginning with her childhood experiences as the daughter of a dissenting (Calvinist) minister who followed her father on his pastoral duties, preaching, praying, and consoling with those sick in body or soul. After his death (in 1879) she migrated into teaching and towards high church Anglicanism, mesmerized perhaps by its “catholic” ritualism. As a teacher, she converted to progressivism and, as a disciple of Pestalozzi and Froebel, worked to the idea that through play and kindness she could bring out the ‘real’ child, one devoted to learning with others, in concert. In London she’d become quite well known, a member of the pioneering Sesame Club, a very public supporter of Irish Home Rule and women’s suffrage, and a devotee of the likes of Bernard Shaw and Thomas Huxley. So when Swami Vivekananda arrived in London she was ready to hear him on and to be instructed by him in the teachings of the Buddha and in classic Hindu texts. In 1898 she followed him to India, converted to Brachmacharya (lifelong celibacy) and became Sister Nivedita. At first her interest was mainly religious, but she became increasingly political and after the Swami’s death devoted herself to Indian nationalism. Some say that this owed to her Irishness, but her letters to western friends (in Britain and the USA) suggest that it was an expression of her new-found faith, an “aggressive Hinduism.” And that—despite her view that Indian Muslims were full partners in the subcontinent’s ancient culture—is why she’s remembered, and revered, in today’s India. ©.

[Stanley]

Medicine as science and medicine as art
John Elliotson, 1791-1868

I have closely watched Dr. Elliotson’s experiments [in mesmerism] . . . and I am a believer and I became so against my preconceived opinions. Charles Dickens, 1842.

The 19th century accelerated the process by which medicine became both science and profession. It’s not yet complete, not among many patients who refuse to see themselves as animate mechanisms, place a very high value on ‘bedside manner,’ and gravitate towards ‘sympathetic’ medics: artists, so to speak, rather than scientists. Nor did the medical ‘profession’ adapt easily to the new. Conflict abounded. Some were expelled from the profession. And many we might see as pioneers of the new order were (in hindsight) inconsistent modernizers. So Robert Liston (1794-1847) used his sound knowledge of anatomy to advocate speedy, simple surgeries (in London, he was known as “the fastest knife in the West End”), but he regarded cleanliness as no more than a modern ‘fashion.’ Liston was not above using fisticuffs against medical ‘heretics,’ and there is some reason to think that he came to advocate anesthetics in surgery to get back at the mesmerists (hypnotists) who, he thought, were merely modern quacks. Here one of Liston’s chief targets was John Elliotson, born in London on October 29, 1791. Elliotson had taken the scientifically appropriate route of medical training (an Edinburgh MD) and, back in London, had worked his way up the professional ladder at University College Hospital (UCH), where he obtained status but also acquired the enmity of Robert Liston. There were doubtless several reasons for this, among them Elliotson’s love of gadgetry. He was an early advocate of the stethoscope and refined its use to diagnose heart and lung problems. He may be seen as an early acupuncturist, and he evangelized the use of “Peruvian bark” in treating fevers and chills. Both stethoscope and quinine became staples of modern medicine, but where Elliotson went wrong (in Robert Liston’s view) was in his use of hypnotism (mesmerism). Most spectacularly he used it in treatment of two epileptic teens, Elizabeth (17) and Jane (15) Okey. Worse, he treated them in public, not only probing its effectiveness in treating epilepsy but demonstrating also the hypnotist’s powers over young girls’ minds and bodies. It was this latter that excited (‘excited’ is exactly the right word) the opposition of many medics, including Liston. Scandal ensued. Elliotson was dismissed from UCH but continued to make hypnotic waves. And what really burned Liston was Elliotson’s ‘proof’ of the usefulness of hypnosis in calming surgical patients. It was for this reason, as much personal as professional, that Liston performed one of Europe’s first anesthetic surgeries, in 1847. As he put it, very unscientifically, “This Yankee dodge beats mesmerism hollow.” ©

[Stanley]

That man who hath no music in himself . . . is fit [[only?] for treasons, stratagems, and spoils.
Stanley Sadie, 1930-2005
.
I’ll play it first and tell you what it’s called later. Miles Davis.

Sir George Grove (1820-1900) began his fruitful adult life as a promising civil engineer. Aged only 30, Grove was appointed (by the providentially-named William Cubitt) secretary to the planning committee of the Crystal Palace, the rambling plate glass and cast iron structure built for London’s “Great Exhibition” of 1851. ‘Palace’ and exhibition celebrated ‘progress,’ and birthed a series of “world’s fairs” in many cities, notably (in the USA) in Philadelphia (1876), Chicago (1893), and St. Louis (1904). I suppose George Grove could have made a career out of that, but instead he stuck around the Crystal Palace and got involved in music. Once the Great Exhibition was over, there was the structure, a great place for (among other things) music, and Grove was important in establishing the Crystal Palace Concerts. Then, as his musical interests deepened, he began what became known as The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. The first edition (1879) wasn’t as rambling as the Crystal Palace, but at 3 volumes it was big enough, and it survived longer than the Palace, which fell victim to disuse, fire, and then dismemberment. “The Grove” grew too, infectious in its enthusiasms and helpful to lay readers who wanted to know something useful about classical music. It grew to five volumes (by 1940) but maintained a focus on western classics. But it then took a quantum leap with a sixth edition (1980), self-consciously called The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. It ran to 20 (!!!) volumes and widened to include major contributions on non-western music, various modes of ‘popular’ music, ethnomusicology, and learned essays on the history of musical instruments. The guiding spirit of The New Grove was Stanley John Sadie, born in London on October 30, 1930, who early developed a fascination with making music and then earned music degrees (1953 AB and 1958 PhD) at Cambridge. Sadie was performer (woodwinds) as well as a scholar, But in 1964 he became music critic of The Times and developed much wider interests. Thus qualified, he was selected as general editor for the New Grove, and would have been editor of its 7th edition (now 29 volumes) but for a dispute over publication schedules and his own death in 2005. He also published various spin-offs including a “concise” edition and a Dictionary of Women Composers. Sadie’s extensions of the Grove could be read as a rejection of insularities, but like Sir George himself Sadie retained his focus on his 18th-century idols, notably George Friedrich Handel, and in 1993 founded the Handel House Trust. A much smaller affair than the Crystal Palace, it’s to be found in Handel’s old London house, 25 Brook Street, London, just next door to Jimi Hendrix’s last residence. Both musicians are also to be found in the New Grove Dictionary. ©

[Stanley]

It is a beautiful game of football with the negro as the football. William Henry Lewis on American racism, 1902.
William Henry Lewis, 1868-1949

As He died to make men holy let us die to make men free. Julia Ward Howe, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” 1861.

When Julia Ward Howe died (1910), Boston honored her with burial in Mount Auburn Cemetery, the final home of so many of our great and good. As the finale of her memorial service the (more than) 4,000 celebrants sang Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” That was after three chosen speakers had paid their own tributes. They were former governor (of Massachusetts) Curtis Guild; Mary Wooley, president of Wellesley College; and the lawyer William Henry Lewis. Each in their way reflected Howe’s life and values. Guild was notorious for welcoming new immigrants, defending labor unions, and raising taxes on inheritances and incomes to pay for public medical services. Wooley, a biblical scholar of Unitarian persuasion, was a lesbian, a suffragette, and a cofounder of the NAACP. Lewis, a graduate of Amherst College and Harvard law, had been a state assemblyman, a prolific essayist, like Wooley an early member of the ACLU, and was (also in 1910) named Assistant Attorney General of the United States by President Taft. And all three were eminent Republicans, a fascinating coincidence in light of that party’s current trajectories, but one that made them appropriate memorialists for Julia Ward Howe. But among the three William Henry Lewis stood out. He was not a native New Englander, for one thing, but he stood out visibly, too, for he was black. He had also been named as an “All-American” footballer, on October 31, 1893. It was only the fourth “All-American” roster, and Lewis was the very first of African descent to make the team. His football career began at Amherst, where he had been captain (and Class Orator). Eligibility rules being different back then, he continued to tear up the turf at Harvard, where (besides excelling in the law school) he was football captain, then coach. His Harvard coaching record (114-15-5) has not been equaled, and was a factor in Walter Camp’s decision (in 1900) to name Lewis to Camp’s “all-time All-American” team. Lewis, born of freed slaves in Virginia, in 1868, introduced important new elements to football play. As Harvard captain and coach, he became friends with Teddy Roosevelt, which helps to explain his later successes as a Republican party activist and office-holder, but there was more than football in his armory. After all, he was chosen to speak at Julia Ward Howe’s memorial service. In the same year, 1910, Lewis was the speaker at Tuskegee Institute’s commencement. He lived on as a fighter for full equality, but there would not be another black “All-American” footballer until the late 1940s. It was about then (1949, to be exact) that William Henry Lewis was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery. For Lewis, as for Howe, it was native soil. ©.

[Stanley]

A blacksmith's daughter and the history of art
Rose Valland, 1898-1980

Theater, art, literature, cinema, press, posters, and window displays must be cleansed of all manifestations of our rotting world and placed in the service of a moral, political, and cultural idea. Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf.

In 1944, the liberation of Paris brought celebrations but also problems, for la Résistance itself had been divided between left- and right-wing factions, and then there were the Collaborators. One who fell under suspicion was the acting curator at the Jeu de Paume museum, which had become the HQ of the Einsatztab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), headed by the eponymous Nazi culture warrior Alfred Rosenberg. He’d been tasked with looting artworks. They were to go to the Führermuseum in Hitler’s hometown, to other German museums, and some to the private collections of Hitler’s leading henchmen. The transport hub for France was the Jeu de Paume museum, and so it was that the acting curator, Rose Antonia Maria Valland, fell under particular suspicion. Curator was a strange place for her to be, a mere blacksmith’s daughter, born in the Isère (in southern France) on November 1, 1898. She’d performed well in school and then taken the only route ‘up’ for girls like her, teacher training. Along the way she discovered a special talent for art history, further honed through fellowships at the Ecoles des Beaux Arts in Lyon and Paris, then further graduate study at the Louvre, but even so, a blacksmith’s daughter?!! The only work she could find was as an unpaid volunteer at the Jeu de Paume, and she was there when the Germans marched in. The then curator, Jacques Jaujard, saw what the ERR was doing, and he asked the blacksmith’s daughter to keep tabs on it all. Rose Valland did better, recording each piece but also its origin, its date of shipment and its destination. So she was ready to turn her records over to the ‘Monuments Men’ who’d accompanied the Allies into Paris. But she’d done her wartime job so well, so efficiently, that she herself was under suspicion, and not until she’d satisfied herself of the honor and good intentions of US Captain James Rorimer (once a curator at the Metropolitan in New York) did she turn her records over. Almost all “Rose’s art” was found and returned to its proper place or owner. It’s a good adventure yarn, and well before it ended Rose Valland was recognized as a real hero of a real culture war. Honors showered upon her from all quarters, including of course the Légion d'honneur but also (from President Harry Truman) the US Medal of Freedom. And there was a paying job, too. Rose Valland, the blacksmith’s daughter who couldn’t find paid work in 1939, continued as Chef du Service in art rediscovery, restoration, and reparation until she retired in 1968. She died in 1980 and was buried back in her home village in the Isère. And that Führermuseum never did get built. ©

[Stanley]

If God did create the world by a word, the word would have been hydrogen.
Harlow Shapley, 1885-1972

The words ‘chaos,’ ‘accidental,’ ‘chance,’ ‘unpredictable’ are conveniences behind which we hide our ignorance. Harlow Shapley.

‘Contempt of Congress’ is a charge difficult of proof. It centers on actions that obstruct congress from carrying out its legitimate functions. Whether one shows contempt for congress in the more general sense is not directly at issue. So when astronomer Harlow Shapley said that the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was full of advanced but genetically flawed primates who used “Gestapo methods” to make moral cowards of otherwise decent citizens one can understand why the HUAC chairman thought it showed brazen ‘contempt.’ But because Shapley had shown up and had testified under oath he could not be charged with ‘contempt of congress.’ Given the shape of Harlow Shapley’s career, his behavior it not surprising. He was a Missouri farm boy, born just outside of Nashville, a stone’s throw from Kansas, on November 2, 1885. He left school at age 12 and bummed around local newspaper offices, writing some copy, before he decided on journalism as a professional career. So he returned to high school and in 18 months graduated top of his class. In 1907 he intended to study journalism at the University of Missouri but found that the program was full. So he ran down the list of possibilities, rejected “Archaeology” because he wasn’t sure he could pronounce the word, and stopped at “Astronomy.” It was not quite a random choice but it proved a good one. After the Missouri BSc came a Princeton PhD and a meteoric rise to become (in 1921) the director of the Harvard College Observatory. His specialty was variable luminosity, and he used it to show that our solar system was not even at the center of our galaxy, nor unique, but a non-descript conglomeration in a non-descript location. Time would prove that to be accurate, and it (allied to his gift of the gab) won Shapley the sobriquet of being our modern Copernicus. He also engaged in the “Great Debate” of 1920 over whether our Milky Way was the universe or merely one of many galaxies. Here he was on the wrong (that is, mistaken) side, but he quickly saw his error and, better yet, apologized for it. He was a pioneer in his field, a publicist for science, and a reformer, too. Incidentally, he supervised the first Astronomy PhD by a woman, but he was better known as a leftist radical, which is what landed him in front of HUAC. There. Harlow Shapley showed HUAC the contempt it deserved, as a ‘show-me’ farm boy should, but for the same reason he could not be charged for contempt of congress. As he had throughout his career, he testified for the truth. His wife Martha was also a Mizzou graduate and an astronomer. One of their children later won a Nobel in Economics, probably because he couldn’t pronounce ‘astronomy.’ ©

[Stanley]

Indian Shops Gay Head Massachusetts Wins a Prize
Lois Mailou Jones, 1905-1992

It’s been a pretty hard road, but I haven’t allowed it to make me bitter. I’ve tried to live above that. Lois Mailou Jones, 1988.

Before Andrew Mellon’s National Gallery, Washington DC’s art showplace was the Corcoran Gallery, founded in 1869 by another banker, William Corcoran, and “dedicated . . . solely for the purpose of encouraging the American genius.” Sounds good, but for the gallery’s narrow definition of ‘American.’ In its “annual competition” (which began in 1899) it did not accept art works by Americans of African descent. So in 1941, Lois Mailou Jones was black enough that she entered her oil Indian Shops Gay Head Massachusetts under the name of Howard University professor Céline Tabary, Paris-born and white enough to be in the Corcoran. The whole thing is shot through with ironies. Jones had already exhibited in Paris’s ‘Salon de Printemps’ (after which the Corcoran modeled its own spring competition), and while in Paris she had helped transition the theme of Négritude from literature to a wider realm of art. In 1941, the Gay Head painting won, but the prize money had to be forwarded to Ms. Jones, whose “genius” was not “American” enough. But Lois Mailou Jones was born in Boston, MA, on November 3, 1905, of American parents. Her father was a pioneer lawyer (the first African-American to earn a law degree at the Suffolk Law School) who prospered enough to buy a place in Martha’s Vineyard (at Oak Bluff, the Vineyard’s black ghetto). And he prospered enough to send Lois to a succession of art schools, at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, then the Design Art School, then Howard University. Lois gained skills and confidence enough to move from design to painting and in 1937 to a paid fellowship at the Académie Julian in Paris. Along the way, Lois began to integrate African themes into her own art, notably fabrics and masks, but her Gay Head painting is as American as pumpkin pie and turkey, for it shows the summer fair put on by the Vineyard’s native Wampanoag community at the Gay Head beach and lighthouse. Lois Mailou Jones went on to teach art, first in segregated schools in North Carolina, and produce paintings (oils and watercolors), fabrics, and small wooden sculptures. Jones lived long enough to get an apology from the Corcoran and to donate Indian Shops Gay Head to the Corcoran’s permanent collection. At about the time of her death (in 1992) the Corcoran itself fell victim to the finer arts of Senator Jesse Helms and Representative Dick Armey, who thought its new definition of “American” far too wide for their taste (such as it was). Bankrupted, the Corcoran donated its two billion dollar collection to the Smithsonian and the National Gallery, including Lois Mailou Jones’s Indian Shops Gay Head Massachusetts. The Corcoran’s building now houses George Washington University’s school of fine arts. As for Helms and Armey, enough said. ©.