BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

A race story.
Jane Edna Hunter, 1882-1971

With a Nickel and a Prayer. Title of Jane Edna Hunter’s 1941 autobiography.

My paternal grandmother Ethel graduated from Iowa State in 1905 with a BS degree (in English!!). Sponsored by the local YWCA, she went to teach at a school for black children in rural South Carolina. She taught for four years, had a row (in a local Methodist church) with South Carolina’s race-baiting Senator, “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, and then returned to Ames where, after a long courtship, she married my grandfather. She always felt that she’d won the spat with Tillman, and her husband and, eventually, their three sons went along with that, for she was a woman of strongly-held opinions. Now I have run across a woman who was a product of one of those South Carolina YWCA schools, Jane Edna Hunter, born near Pendleton on December 13, 1882. Hunter was not taught by my grandma, but she was encouraged by her YWCA literacy to leave South Carolina for what she believed to be the greener pastures of the north. In 1905, just as grandma was going south, Jane Edna Hunter settled in Cleveland, Ohio. There she assumed she could find lodging (and at least a modicum of help) from the local YWCA chapter. But while the Ames, Iowa, YWCA might contribute to missionary education in South Carolina, the Cleveland, Ohio, YWCA would not agree even to house a black woman from the south. Thus rebuffed, Hunter set about building her own career, pretty much on her own, in Cleveland. She was not without resource, and she was a woman of strongly held opinions. Besides her YWCA literacy, symbolized by an 8th grade school-leaving certificate, Hunter had picked up valuable experience working as a domestic servant in Charleston and, better, a nursing qualification from the Hampton Institute in Virginia. Once settled in Cleveland, she worked as a nurse and as a house rehabber. In 1925, aged 43, Hunter earned a law degree through evening college and, one thing and another, became a force to be reckoned with in local Cleveland politics and policy. But then perhaps she was always headed that way. Back in 1905, denied housing at the YWCA, she’d worked and raised money to build a residence for black migrant women. It opened in 1911 as the Phyllis Wheatley Home, offering 23 rooms. By 1930 it had grown, literally shot up, to become an eleven-story residence with its own playground (named for Booker T. Washington), and its own dining hall. It also housed the Phyllis Wheatley Association, an employment agency that also ran educational facilities and a summer camp free from the rigors of northern segregation. Today I find myself wondering what might have happened had Edna Jane Hunter settled in Ames, Iowa, and asked Ethel McKinley to help her find lodging at the college YWCA. ©.

[Stanley]

Republican Senator from the State of Maine
Margaret Chase Smith, 1897-1995

I speak as a Republican. I speak as a woman. I speak as a United States Senator. I speak as an American. Senator Margaret Chase Smith, attacking Senator Joseph McCarthy, June 17, 1950.

We honor Harry Truman for his Executive Order 9981, mandating racial integration of our military. But Truman also championed the military integration of women, making permanent the wartime WAVEs, WACs, etc. This had to be done via legislation in what was, in Truman’s pithy phrase, a “Do-Nothing” congress dominated by conservative Republicans intent on dismantling FDR’s ‘welfare state.’ So Harry chose his legislative leader wisely, a Republican representative from Maine rock-ribbed enough to be serving her fourth term, Margaret Chase Smith (whom he had already considered as Undersecretary of State). The legislation passed, and Truman signed it in the same month that he issued #9981. It worked out well for Truman, who won the 1948 election in an astounding upset. In 1948 Representative Smith did OK, too, winning election to the Senate, becoming the first woman to serve in both houses of Congress. Smith went on to three more Senate terms, achieving several other “firsts” in the process, and becoming one of the Senate’s finer profiles in courage, conscience, and good sense. In all these guises Smith outshines Susan Collins, now in her fifth term as Maine Senator, yet still unable to break decisively with her party’s delusions. But Margaret Chase Smith was always an outlier. She was born in Skowhegan on December 14, 1897, the child of an old New Englander father and a French-Canadian immigrant mother. She made her way through a hardscrabble youth, sometimes even shaving her dad’s customers (he was a barber), achieving local sporting success (girls’ basketball), and (after her high school graduation) landing a civil service job with the help of local politician Clyde Smith. He was an interesting character himself, an outspoken enemy of the Maine Ku Klux Klan and (once in Congress) a supporter of some of FDR’s New Deal legislation—and a conservative Republican. They married in 1930, and when Clyde Smith died Margaret filled his shoes, and then some, as an independent-minded downeaster, willing to support good sense when she saw it whichever side it came from. And she made her own, too. Most famously, it was Smith who first spoke out, in the Senate, against the excesses of Joe McCarthy. She campaigned for the Republican presidential nomination in 1964 and refused to withdraw (thus denying Goldwater nomination by acclamation). Margaret Chase Smith was far too conservative for me, but she knew her country and she followed her conscience. Today’s Republicans could do worse than to take her on as a role model, as a politician who proved able to marry courage with electoral success. But so far they appear to be intent on worse. ©

[Stanley]

equality as an economic problem.
William A. Hinton, 1883-1959

Race should never get mixed up in the struggle for human welfare. William A. Hinton, quoted in Ebony magazine, 1955.

William Augustus Hinton was born in Chicago on December 15, 1883. He was the son of once enslaved persons who had moved north, after the Civil War, in hopes of better lives. They finally found what they looked for as hardscrabble family farmers in Kansas. According to Hinton, they raised him to believe in the importance of education and in the American ideal of equality. Hinton’s first recorded triumph was to be the youngest-ever graduate of his high school and to gain admission to the state university at Lawrence. After two years’ study, he dropped out for financial reasons. There followed a series of triumphs and reverses during which Hinton gained academic distinction (and a baccalaureate degree) from Harvard College in 1905 and then a medical degree (also Harvard) in 1912. He was by all accounts a fine student but insisted, at every stage, on making his own way. For instance he had in 1905 refused a scholarship offer from Harvard Medical School because it was for black students only. He went to work to earn the tuition money, but came back to Harvard when he won “open” scholarships. Then, although armed with a Harvard AB and MD (both with distinction), Hinton could not obtain a hospital residency and had to take employment as a laboratory scientist. It was during this period (circa 1919) that he discovered the ‘Hinton Test’ for diagnosing syphilis. This procedure became the standard one for several decades and it won for Hinton first the directorship of his laboratory and then (in 1923) appointment at Harvard Medical as a clinical professor in immunology and preventative medicine. In that post (and a couple of others, mainly in public health) he served with such distinction that Harvard made him a full professor. But that came only in the year of Hinton’s retirement (1949-50). It was a belated recognition that this person of color had achieved professional success as a physician, scientist, and teacher. Harvard now recognized Hinton as he had always known himself: an equal among equals. William Hinton was not a stupid man; he knew that his career had been hobbled (delayed, then sidetracked) by his color. But he opposed being awarded (or even feted) for carrying that as a kind of handicap. Hinton diagnosed syphilis as a “disease of the underprivileged;” not a matter of color but one of class. Just so, he dedicated his professional life to making equality a reality by attacking inequality at its base in our great (and growing) disparities of wealth and resource. Just so, when at his death (in 1959) William Augustus Hinton bequeathed a scholarship fund to Harvard Medical School, he dedicated it to another hardscrabble Kansas farm boy, a white one, named Eisenhower. ©.

[Stanley]

The origin of agricultural extension.
Seaman A. Knapp, 1833-1911

What a farmer hears, he may doubt; what he sees, he may possibly doubt; but what he does himself, he cannot doubt. Seaman Asahel Knapp.

Iowa State University has its own burial ground. Those who know it well still call it the college cemetery: fair enough for most of the people buried there knew the campus as Iowa State College. Most were also deeply involved with the college, as professors, presidents, deans, or spouses; and you’ll also find the grave of a college janitor and his dog. But one burial is of a man who was only briefly on campus, even more briefly (1883-1884) as president. He did choose to be buried there (he died in 1911, in Washington, DC), but his real fame came mainly because of his work in the American South. He was Seaman Knapp, the founding spirit (if not the sole founder) of ‘agricultural extension,’ bringing best science and best practices directly to the farm. Seaman Asahel Knapp was born on December 16, 1833, in rural New York, the son of a medical doctor. Knapp graduated (Phi Beta Kappa) from Union College, and after teaching school for a few years moved west, first to Michigan and then to Iowa, to take up farming. This may have been for his health, but he also developed scientific and entrepreneurial approaches to the problems of getting the best out of his crops and his livestock and getting the best out of his loans. Indeed, obsessed with the potentially vicious circle of agricultural credit, he even took up banking for a while. But he focused on the farm (farmers and their families), and on the institutional help needed to give practical effect to his progressive ideas. This he found through education, notably the land grant colleges. So it was that Knapp fetched up at Iowa State, first (1879) as professor of agronomy and then (1883-4) as president. For various reasons, not least the failing agricultures of the old Confederacy, Knapp then moved south. Starting in Louisiana, then Texas, then eastwards to Mississippi and Alabama, Knapp urged new methods for old crops and introduced new crops. As importantly, he tried to break the vicious cycle of debt that virtually imprisoned (‘enslaved’ was the word Knapp used) sharecroppers. In this Knapp worked with both black and white farmers and thus won the support of Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver. Knapp also drafted legislation to bring the national government into play as investor in and organizer of extension efforts, thus giving a specific mission and financial muscle to the Morrill Act, which in 1862 had founded the “land grant” colleges in the first place. Since Iowa State has a plausible claim to have been the very first of the land grant colleges, it’s appropriate that Seaman Knapp is planted there, in Ames, at the ‘college cemetery.’ ©.

[Stanley]

Renaming Mosquito Lake State Park?
Harriet Taylor Upton, 1853-1945

The case of Harriet Taylor Upton versus Donald John Trump.

In Spring 2021, Ohio’s Mosquito Lake State Park came (briefly) into national news because of a renaming proposal. The park is a useful asset for the nearby city of Warren, Ohio. It offers a campground, a fish hatchery, and it almost entirely encloses one of Ohio’s larger inland lakes. The park adjoins the slightly more extensive Mosquito Creek Wilderness Area, a swampy tract that serves both migrant and resident waterfowl. The wilderness includes the northern end of Mosquito Lake, where boating is not allowed, although parts of the wilderness are set aside for limited hunting. All very nice, but whether one would want to visit a place called Mosquito Lake is a question. Perhaps that problem was what state representative Mike Loychik had in mind when he proposed to name the park after Donald J. Trump. Also, Trump did carry Warren County, handsomely, winning 65% of the vote. But Loychik’s proposal came just after the January 6 riot, or insurrection, and some Warren residents thought the Trump name inappropriate. Perhaps they were among the 35% minority, or were horrified by the attempted coup, but certainly they held no brief for mosquitos. So they proposed, instead, that the state park should be named after a local woman, Harriet Taylor Upton. That local brouhaha has, I think, yet to be settled, but there’s much to be said for the Upton proposal. Harriet Upton was born Harriet Taylor, on December 17, 1853, in Ravenna, Ohio, near Warren and originally settled by Connecticut “Western Reserve” migrants. Shortly after her birth, her father joined the Republican Party and rose through its ranks. He was, like the new party, anti-slavery, progressive, and favoring government aid to spur economic development. In 1880, he filled the seat in the US House of Representatives vacated by the new president, James Garfield. In DC, the Taylor household became a meeting place for progressive Republicans. One was the attorney George Upton, whom Harriet married in 1884, and another was Susan B. Anthony. The marriage would last until Mr. Upton’s death in 1923. Harriet’s commitments to women’s rights and to the Republican Party would last longer and win her prominence as president of Ohio’s Women Suffrage Association and treasurer of the national NAWSA. She would also be a force one reckoned with in Warren, in her Episcopal Church, in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, in the Warren Red Cross, in the Ohio Republican Party, and in the Warren chapter of Daughters of the American Revolution. Personally, and upon these many grounds, I prefer “Upton” to “Mosquito” and to “Trump.” She had more to offer, and she gave it. She also wrote children’s books. But that’s another story. ©

[Stanley]

Or, if you prefer, Ruby Dee.
Ossie Davis, 1917-2004

I find in being black a thing of beauty, a joy, a strength, a secret cup of gladness. Ossie Davis.

Ossie Davis was born Raiford Chatman Davis in Cogdell, Georgia, December 18, 1917. “Ossie” was conferred on him by the Clinch County clerk, entering “Ossie” when his mother reported the baby’s name as “R. C.” Davis. Perhaps it was a mishearing, but if it was meant to be a malicious joke (Davis’s father was not popular with the local Ku Klux Klan) it misfired. Ossie’s long life (he died in 2004) was marked by success, both in his own right as actor, writer, and director, and in partnership (creative and political) with his wife, Ruby Dee (1922-2014) whom he met on stage, in 1946. By that time, Ossie was already set in his ways, as successful a black actor as you could find and one determined to play ‘real’ roles, not the stereotypical ones usually open to actors of color. He learned that from early colleagues like Sidney Poitier, from role models like Paul Robeson; or perhaps from his father, who as a railway construction engineer had risen much higher than black people were supposed to, and whose success (and pride) made him a marked man in the eyes of the local KKK and other upholders of “white civilization.” Ossie began by following his parents’ wishes, successful in school and then at Howard University, but his true talents lay elsewhere, and Davis was encouraged by another role model, his philosophy teacher Alaine Locke, to pursue his own “New Negro” ambitions by joining the Rose McClendon Players in Harlem. He began on stage, but soon appeared in movies, and would go on from there to take a leading (and formative) role as writer, director, and producer. Ossie Davis (and his wife Ruby) also became activists in the Civil Rights crusade, and then were sympathetic to (and knowledgeable about) the more aggressive aims of the Black Power movement. Indeed Davis worked with Muhammed Ali in one of the boxer’s more eccentric projects, and later acted in several of Spike Lee’s pioneering films, notably Do the Right Thing (1989) in which Ruby Dee also acted. That film turned on the question of violence versus non-violence and was dedicated to the memory of six recent victims of police shootings. One can imagine Ossie and Ruby playing lead roles in the more recent Black Lives Matter protests. They were people whose work was always cut out for them. One is tempted to look back to Cogdell, and that Davis family, for all of Ossie’s siblings did well, too. We should consider not only his construction engineer father, but his mother Laura, tough enough to birth them all, raise them all, and then to outlive them all, dying at 106, in 2004, a few months after the passing of her most famous child, R. C., the one who was misnamed Ossie. ©

[Stanley]

Darkness was cheap, and Scrooge liked it.
A Christmas Carol, published on December 19, 1843.

“You are fettered," said Scrooge, trembling. "Tell me why?" "I wear the chain I forged in life," replied the Ghost. "I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.” From “A Christmas Carol,” 1843.

A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas, was published on December 19, 1843. Later that decade, Charles Dickens would produce five more Christmas tales, but none appealed like the story of Ebenezer Scrooge’s sins of greed and his redemption in generosity. Much has been written about the role the story played—helped along by Prince Albert’s trees—in reviving Christmas as a religious and cultural holiday. Anglo-Scottish Protestants (and their American progeny) had seen it as a popish invention, and in colonial Boston celebrating Christmas was a crime. It’s less well appreciated that Dickens also meant the story as an attack on his day’s economic orthodoxies. A Christmas Carol is about poverty in the midst of plenty, and its fire is leveled against those who thought poverty ‘natural’ or even essential, notably the Reverend Thomas Malthus. Malthus and the many who followed him believed poverty a useful way to keep the poor in check, even by early death, so that they could not be burdens. For Malthusians, Tiny Tim was an anomaly, certainly not the point of the story. Dickens (as novelist and journalist) had already written much about poverty, but in 1843 he was working on a tract appealing “to the people of England, on behalf of the poor man’s child.” In October of that year, he spoke about the pamphlet to a Manchester audience, and their enthusiastic reception led quickly to Dickens’ invention of Bob Cratchit, a man of the working poor, his crippled son, Tiny Tim, and crimped and crabby Ebenezer Scrooge who would finally make merry the Cratchits’ Christmas with good food, good cheer, and better pay. Dickens set to, and his story was written, typeset, bound, and published before Christmas. Good timing for the market, of course (it quickly sold out), but if today we read it in conjunction with the unorthodox economics of Thomas Picketty and Joseph Stiglitz we might realize the timeliness of Dickens’ warming tale. In the midst of our plenty, poverty grows. And whether poverty is relative or absolute (it’s both, so we must stop arguing the point), the triumphant sentimentality of A Christmas Carol must move us all to sit down together and figure out what is to be done about it. If we fail, the picture of our future has already been drawn for us by Ebenezer Scrooge’s ghostly visitors. ©

[Stanley]

The House on Mango Street
Sandra Cisneros

No, this isn’t my house I say and shake my head as if shaking could undo the year I’ve lived here. I don’t belong. I don’t ever want to come from here. Esperanza Cordero, in The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros (1984).

In Spring 1981 one of life’s odd turns found me afoot in Chicago’s near west side, in a place that looked like a bombsite, most buildings leveled but momentarily inhabited by cellar-dwellers who (it was a fine, warm morning) had emerged from their caves. They took exception at my presence (I suppose I was staring), and I was hurled from the place by their shouted curses (in Spanish) and by a few thrown stones (a language easier to translate). This was within sight of the Hancock Tower, thus very near the splendors of the ’Magnificent Mile’, so I found the experience particularly unsettling. I might have handled it better had I read The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros, had it been available. When in 1984 it did appear, it made Cisneros’ reputation. She is 74 today, having been born in Hispanic Chicago on December 20, 1954—not in “Mango Street” but close enough to give her main character, Esperanza (“Hope,” in English) all the pain of becoming enlightened as she comes of age, as she comes to see what it is to be an alien in her home town and a girl in a macho family. Sandra Cisneros did not live in such crushing poverty as my cellar dwellers, but her life was tough. The contrasts between it and the make-believe of the city’s Gold Coast were sharp, made more so by her father’s privileged youth in Mexico City and his hard maturity in Chicago. In her own growing up, Cisneros found asylum in writing, a talent encouraged by a schoolteacher and then at Loyola University. It was then refined by her years at the Iowa Writers Workshop. There she found herself even more of an alien, a woman among males and a person of color in a white world. She was also developing as a poet, and remembers the workshop as a place where novelists and poets didn’t mix well. She made space by writing prose fiction lyrically, in vignettes about being Latina in Anglo-Chicago. A lot more work, not least finding and building characters, produced The House on Mango Street. It became a classic, selling millions, adopted as a text for school literature classes. I remember my own school texts, for instance A Tale of Two Cities, then Silas Marner, and (of course) the annual Shakespeare play, and think that Mango Street might have been better preparation for my actual life—certainly for that fine, warm morning in Chicago’s wasted near west side. As for Cisneros, now “at home” in Mexico, she’s become a controversial figure, not only for her first novel and her emerging views on sex and gender, but the more so in a world where our new breed of book burners want to make her alienation at once ineradicable and unknowable. ©.

[Stanley]

Dancing to the Music.
Anthony Powell, 1905-2000

It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them. Anthony Powell.

I’ve long had a weakness for the “serial” novel, a fiction that is itself a chapter in some ongoing saga about a family, a patch of ground, or even just a cast of characters. This weakness (or strength?) began with Bliss family stories (endless, in my case), but in terms of published fiction I lay it down to the boys’ books of Joseph Altsheler (1862-1919), to which I was introduced by my well-meaning father. Altsheler was an amazingly prolific chap, not only as a reporter for the Pulitzer papers but as the author of at least 50 novels. Of these, no fewer than 32 were gathered into seven “series” wherein a shifting cast of more or less heroic figures made their way(s) through American history, circa 1756-1918 (Altsheler’s ink and his blood stopped flowing at about the same time). Part of the books’ charm was that a character one first met as a boy in colonial Pennsylvania could be followed to his end as a grizzled veteran at the Alamo. Altsheler’s heroes were always fighting for freedom, almost always of Anglo-Saxon stock, and figures of narrowed vision and pinched morals. As a reader of sagas, I awaited deeper writers with subtler minds and a fuller sense of history. Among these the master example is William Faulkner and his Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. I’m not finished with it yet, but I plan to read it all (a baker’s dozen novels and many stories). But there’s an English master of the imaginary story in real time with whom I have yet to struggle. He was Anthony Powell, born in London WC on December 21, 1905. Like Faulkner, Powell was early made very conscious of ‘history’. But while Faulkner was concerned with a whole social order, its dark beginnings, its fated collapse, and its tragicomic denouement, Powell focused his attention on family, class, slow decline, and irony. So, instead of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, we have Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time, a twelve-volume serial that everyone says I should read but that I haven’t yet cracked. Powell himself grew up on a mythic view of his Welsh warlord ancestry (an early work was a genealogy) and a posh education (Eton and then Balliol College, Oxford). He took a mediocre (“Third Class”) degree into a given stratum of London society to become a writer (reviewer and columnist) for the conservative Telegraph newspaper. He married into his class and, it seems, never did escape it. His 12-volume Dance and its single narrator look out on a changing world but (according to some critics) are able to see only themselves. The moral of that story is that you can’t look through a mirror. I know that’s too harsh a judgment on something not yet read, but until I finish Faulkner’s grand opus, I rest content with my prejudices. ©.

[Stanley]

Formerly First Lady, latterly herself.
Lady Bird Johnson, 1912-2007

Every politician should be born an orphan and remain a bachelor. Lady Bird Johnson

Lady Bird Johnson outlived her husband, Lyndon, by 34 years, a long span indeed, almost as long as she’d been married to him. During 35 years of married life, she’d played second fiddle to him, at least in public. Given his Texas-sized persona (not to mention his political eminences as Senate majority leader, vice-president, and finally as president) there was no other possibility. During her long widowhood, Lady Bird did persist in that supportive capacity, often using the LBJ Presidential Library and Museum as a public platform from which to remind us of Lyndon’s accomplishments and even his virtues But over the same span of years Lady Bird Johnson also established an identity all her own: as supporter #1 of her own Good Causes, as a philanthropist (and organizer of other philanthropists), and as prime creator of a new role in American public life, that of ‘former First Lady.’ She was, one must conclude, made of strong stuff. “Lady Bird” Johnson was born Claudia Alta Taylor on December 22, 1912, in an old plantation mansion just outside of Karnack, Texas. But she was not a child of the old slaver elite. Her dad was a former sharecropper who made himself into a millionaire, owner of thousands of acres and landlord to many tenants, white and black. He sounds like the personification of William Faulkner’s Snopes clan, self-made men with self-made morals, but his only daughter would turn out differently. Conscious of her privileged position, she excelled in school and college, but moderated her own grades in order to avoid the public role of valedictorian. Pretty as a picture, she at first hated the nickname “Lady Bird” (conferred upon baby Claudia by a nursemaid) but eventually accepted it. Indeed, she signed her wedding certificate as “Bird,” which is what Lyndon called her in courtship and in marriage. And she saw something in him something worthy of investment: her life and—when she became an heiress—her money too. While Lyndon won elections (one notoriously narrowly) Lady Bird waxed richer in land and then in broadcasting, her fortune becoming his good luck (and being augmenting, in turn). So she put out for him. She also put up with him. The latter was not an easy task. Whatever the comforts of her Taylor childhood, Lady Bird Johnson’s public and private lives were tempering experiences. One of her daughters (a person with yet another “LBJ” name) once noted that it was a good thing Lyndon Baines died before Lady Bird. He could not have survived without her. But without Lyndon, from 1973, she survived and prospered. Lady Bird died in 2007, honored for being who she was, herself. ©

[Stanley]

What's in a name?
Samuel Smiles, 1812-1904

Hope is like the sun, which, as we journey towards it, casts our burdens behind us. Samuel Smiles, 1859.

When you run across a writer whose major works were entitled Self-Help (1859), Character (1871), Thrift (1875), and Duty (1880), you might easily pigeon-hole him as a defender of the conventional morality and a pillar of the status quo. That his name is given as “Samuel Smiles” only adds to the joke, whether as a painfully obvious nom de plume or some sort of pathetic fallacy. Indeed Samuel Smiles (and his preachments) have been used in such ways, in dismissive summaries of Victorian morality, in social satires, in revolutionary pamphlets. But ‘Samuel Smiles’ was a real name, of a real person, and his real story is not quite so simple. He was born on December 23, 1812, in a small Midlothian town, a shopkeeper’s son and yet ambitious enough to get himself apprenticed to an Edinburgh physician, earn an Edinburgh MD, and set himself up in private practice. But in his youth he was of the mind that it was the world, and not his patients, that needed curing. Even as a student in Edinburgh Smiles had drifted into political radicalism, a strident supporter of the Chartists. So instead of rising up by his own bootstraps as a budding doctor he became a radical, fetching up in northern England (Leeds), as editor of a reformist rag, secretary of the local Parliamentary Reform Association, and advocate of (among many possible panaceas) universal manhood suffrage and cheaper bread. During these two decades (from the mid 1830s) Sam Smiles also toyed (at least) with Owenite socialism and the cooperative movement. Individual depravity was a problem, of course (Leeds beer-halls made that clear enough), but it arose from social deprivation. Meanwhile, though, Smiles was pulling away from social causes. Marriage and a family, not to mention his own prudent behaviors, gained rewards and fostered upwards mobility; clearly self-help, thrift, and character had something to do with it, and so Sam Smiles aged into a kind of conformity. Through his later writings, he became a cheerleader for just those qualities that made Britain great and made him into a publicist for the prevailing moralities. Even so, you can still find in Smiles’ most famous (and, latterly, most lampooned) titles some traces of the young radical who left his parents’ shop, abandoned their religion, and sacrificed a promising professional career in order to reform his Victorian world. Smiles argued that for the individual virtues to secure their just rewards, we still needed to see to the health of the whole social order. But that name, “Samuel Smiles,” made it all too easy for later critics to misread his writings and satirize his values. He might have done better to have written as “Frederick Foresight.” ©.

[SCG note: Samuel Smiles also wrote 'Lives of the Engineers' and gave us biographies of men who would have largely sunk into obscurity but who were the bedrock of the Industrial Revolution. For many years Smiles was dismissed as lightweight and of no account but as other evidence surfaced it became evident that he was a perceptive and accurate biographer and had the advantage of being a contemporary of many of his subjects. We give him more of his due today.]

[Tripps]

Thanks for the note. He rang a bell, and its nice to have that reminder.

Later I learn - concerning his book "Thrift" (1875)

Samuel Smiles was a Scottish author and government reformer. His primary work, Self-Help (1859), promoted thrift and claimed that poverty was caused largely by irresponsible habits, while also attacking materialism and laissez-faire government. "Thrift" was intended as a sequel to "Self-Help" and "Character".

Not due to the Tory austerity then?

PS. Despite being a fully paid up member of the 'Kuripot Tendency' - I have squandered £2.80 on a copy of "Thrift". Almost poetic - I might pick up a few hints and tips.

[Stanley]

I've always regarded his 'Improving' books as the lightweights. Lives of the Engineers is a foundation history for me in terms of Industrial Archaeology.

[Stanley]

How 'new' is the New South?
Mary Bingham, 1904-1995

The best thing would be for a big pink cloud to come down and take me away. Mary Bingham, responding to a toast in her honor, April 19, 1995. She died mid-speech.

The journalist Henry Watterson, of the Louisville Courier-Journal, is often seen as a prophet of the “New South,” tolerant, diverse, forward-looking, but I have my doubts. After all, his chosen pen-name was ‘Marse Henry’; he took great pleasure in his exploits as a Confederate officer; and towards the end of his career he bought into imperialism, big-time, as a new ideology which might unite northern and southern (white) elites. When in 1919 he sold the paper to Robert Worth Bingham, the paper began to move in a genuinely ‘new’ direction. Robert Bingham still sported the honorific title of “Colonel,” but signaled his desire to break with the fried chicken past by sending his son, Barry, to Harvard, a proven cure for a certain sort of southern provincialism. There, in college dramatics, Barry met Mary Caperton, and their alliance in marriage completed the treatment. Mary Caperton, latterly Mary Bingham, was herself a southern belle of rebellious tendencies. Born into Richmond, Virginia, high society on December 24, 1904, she’d made a name for herself in local amateur dramatics before treading the boards at Radcliffe College (where she majored in classics). Together, the young Binghams returned to Louisville and set about doing what they could to remake the place, and more especially the Courier-Journal, into a progressive bastion. Mary early became book editor, and then during WWII (with Barry himself winning two bronze stars for his US Navy exploits) Mary took the reins. Together, they built the paper into a journalistic powerhouse, progressive on every issue one could think of, and distinguished as well (several Pulitzer prizes later) for its intrepid reporters, photographers, and editorialists. Meanwhile, in Louisville itself, the Binghams invested in a transforming cultural revival—with special attention, of course, to theater, making the city an important stop on the road to (or from) Broadway. Perhaps they were, in many ways, too progressive for Kentucky, notably in their criticisms of the environmental and social degradations associated with coal mining. But they were savvy enough (and wealthy enough) to serve just the right kind of juleps at Derby time and to become social pillars in (almost) a traditional sense. It all came to an end in the early 1980s in a family feud (with Barry’s sisters), the sale of the Bingham empire to the Gannet combine, and Barry’s death in 1988. But not quite “all”: Mary Caperton Bingham survived as a reforming philanthropist until, appropriately (and a few months after her 90th birthday), she collapsed and died while responding to a toast honoring her at a dinner raising funds for the Louisville Free Library. So she played her role right to the end. ©

[Stanley]

"We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.". Isaac Newton, 1642-1727.

Nature, and nature’s laws, lay hid in night;
God said, let Newton be! And all was light.
Alexander Pope, lines intended for Isaac Newton’s epitaph, circa 1727.

My habit of dabbling in the sciences (more accurately, reading about them) began in my undergraduate years. I read then that Isaac Newton’s world had been exploded by Albert Einstein, and (being but a dabbler) I believed what I read. But it’s not so easy. We are all of us, necessarily, mere humans; so we are rooted in place and fixed in time, and in that ‘real’ world Newton’s perceptions still rule. He remains our presiding genius. It’s not a trifling achievement for a yeoman farmer’s son, one Isaac Newton, born after his father’s death on December 25, 1642. He was such a sickly babe that his mother waited a week to baptize him. She waited a little longer to remarry, but Isaac never made peace with his stepfather and was brought up expediently, by an uncle, a neighbor, and a tutor or two. His oddities were finally recognized and he went up to Cambridge as a relatively aged undergraduate, still isolated from others, still odd. There he broke with traditional learning and, in his early 20s, composed “Some Questions” (Questiones Quaedam) about things beyond Cambridge’s ken. One could say he spent the rest of his life answering them, to astonishing effect and, mainly, to our benefit. But his magnum opus, the Principia, came out in 1687, a revolutionary tract in a revolutionary era, when Newton was only 44. He spent the rest of what was, for his time, a very long life (he died in 1727) administering (clarifying, systematizing) his own discoveries and a few other things, too. Inter alia, he played a part in England’s Glorious Revolution (a political one), he led the Royal Mint through the Great Recoinage of the 1690s, he thought creatively (if clandestinely) on theology, and he defended his reputation and good faith against all detractors (and against a few who might have been his friends). He was, in short, a kind of a miracle. In our time, he might have been diagnosed as autistic. In his own time, he was lucky to find a few friends who found Newton a place (a new Cambridge professorship) wherein he could ask right questions and puzzle out right answers. Newton did not anticipate Einstein’s curvatures of space, time, and light. He did not forecast the destruction of matter or the phenomenon of radioactive decay. But he did think that his world was a real one and that it could be measured and, through a new mathematics, quantified almost exactly. Our world is full of proofs that he was right. So he deserved Pope’s poetic epitaph. As for us, rooted as we are, we should heed the one actually carved into his Westminster Abbey memorial: “Let Mortals rejoice That there has existed such and so great an Ornament to the Human Race.” ©

[Stanley]

The first "scientist"
Mary Somerville, 1780-1872

I was intensely ambitious to excel in something, for I felt in my own breast that women were capable of taking a higher place in creation than that assigned to them in my earliest days. Mary Somerville.

Mary Somerville was born Mary Fairfax in Jedburgh, Scotland, on December 26, 1780. She was well-connected (and pretty) enough to be called “the Rose of Jedburgh” in her coming-out season, but otherwise there wasn’t much about her that was conventional. Indeed it was for her that the word “scientist” was coined. Her thirst for knowledge was early provoked by wandering about her mother’s kitchen garden and later by collecting seaside shells and fossils. Such behaviors can upset a patriarchal social order, and they brought disapproval from several of Mary’s closest relations. Some lamented her inabilities to sew, others her inattention to drawing room niceties or her immersion in family libraries. Luckily a few encouraged these oddities, including an uncle who helped her with Latin. But at first convention ruled. There was that coming-out season. Then there was a marriage to a cousin, childbirth, and motherhood. Her first husband’s disapproval of her thirst for knowing brought out secret resentments, so his early death (in 1807) provided a breath of freedom. It also left her an income and the leisure to study mathematics, survey the sciences, and to begin her correspondences with leading intellectuals (live ones in Britain and France and dead ones in libraries). At 30, Mary married another cousin, a medical doctor, William Somerville. He had some conventional views on marriage, but he encouraged her avocations too, whether at home (in Edinburgh and then London) or on their travels in Europe. Now Mary’s knowingness impressed everyone she met, and she began experiments on her own, in laboratories or observatories, and in mathematical problems and solutions. In math, she became informal tutor to Ada Lovelace; more importantly Mary began to write and publish in her own name. This ‘hobby’ (if such it ever was) became a financial lifeline for the Somervilles because Mary produced best sellers. She wrote about her own work (for instance predicting the discovery of the planet Neptune), she synthesized (an important book on physical geography), and she popularized. On her income and his reviving fortunes, the Somervilles retired to Naples, where William died in 1860 and she in 1872. Among her honors is Somerville College in Oxford, named in 1879. (Somerville reprised Mary’s own struggles for self-education, for it was not until 1920 that Oxford University admitted women to earn Oxford degrees.) It is also appropriate that from 2017 the Bank of Scotland’s £10 note is a “Somerville” carrying her likeness (remember ‘the Rose of Jedburgh’?) but also some of her astronomical calculations. ©

[Stanley]

December 27, 1841
Lisztomania

Liszt played, quite alone, or rather, accompanied solely by his genius. And yet, how convulsively his mere appearance affected them! How boisterous was the applause which rang to meet him!...[W]hat acclaim it was! A veritable insanity, one unheard of in the annals of furore. Heinrich Heine, reflecting on Franz Liszt’s performances in Paris, 1844.

By the time Franz Liszt (1811-1886) got to Berlin, at Christmastime in 1841, he had long been a European phenomenon. If anyone qualifies, and the few who do were all friends of his, he was a musical child of the Romantic Revolution, all storm and stress and genius. And Liszt was not loth to fulfill the role. As a player, he pounded his pianos mercilessly, passionately. Their broken strings became keepsakes, made into bracelets for lovelorn ladies and, maybe, a few young men: as did, even, his discarded cigar butts. As a young male himself, his very public affair with the Countess Marie D’Agoult had already (1833) broken her marriage of convenience and produced three love-children (one of whom, Cosima, would later wed Richard Wagner). It also gave the countess’s fiction (she wrote as “Daniel Stern”) a certain frissonand a sure market. By 1841, their affair had cooled, but not died. Besides Liszt’s love life and his dramatic concerts, there were his own compositions, stirring composites of classical forms and Magyar (he was, after all, a wild Hungarian) spirits. These were his best years, we see in retrospect, but Romantic Berlin (in 1841 this was no oxymoron) hoped he might go on forever and welcomed him with open arms. A crowd outside Liszt’s lodgings serenaded its hero with his very own Rheinweinlied (Rhine-wine-song). Liszt’s Berlin performance took place on December 27, 1841, at the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin, a small hall whose neo-classical lines must have shivered that night. And not only from Liszt’s suffering piano (a word that once meant “quiet”!!), but from the crowd’s response, which could be summed up as hysteria. Later, taking reports from Liszt’s Berlin concert, the poet Henrich Heine (1797-1856) coined a new word for it, “Lisztomania.” Heine, another Romantic (and a political exile and, by the way, another of Liszt’s friends), was also a German, and so the run-on word was a native expression, but it has lived on far beyond Liszt or Heine (or, for that matter, Cosima Wagner) to be applied to many other pop culture phenomena. I can still remember, myself, succumbing to Beatlemania when the Fab Four’s American tour took the nation unaware. In west Philadelphia, in our palatial third-floor apartment (laughingly called “The Rittenhouse”) my flatmate Paul Cohen and I would leave on our bedroom radio until we heard one last Beatle’s song. That was our sturm und drang, a needed prelude to restful sleep. We might have done better with Franz Liszt, for whom sturm und drang could have been a coinage. It wasn't: and our particular lisztomania belonged to the Beatles. ©

[Stanley]

The stuff of the world is mind-stuff.
Arthur Stanley Eddington, 1882-1944

The mind is not content to leave scientific Truth in a dry husk of mathematical symbols, and demands that it shall be alloyed with familiar images. Arthur Stanley Eddington, 1920.

Nowadays, Arthur Stanley Eddington’s chief claim to fame is that he was the first person to prove experimentally the validity of Einstein’s theory of relativity. That was no small achievement. Light—whether it was particles or waves or Something Else—was physical enough that its course could be affected by gravity. To make that discovery Eddington needed the universe to arrange itself sufficiently to produce a total eclipse of the sun, and then to travel quite a long ways, in terrestrial terms, to put himself and his instruments within the eclipse’s path. But to a man who’d made his way out of provincial poverty into the highest ranks of mathematical physics, these were but trifling problems. Not only that, but (Quaker that he was) Eddington withstood the war fever of 1914-1918 as a conscientious objector, and was only able to make his Einstein expedition (to the island of Principe) because the war ended before the authorities had a chance to decide his case. It all started in Kendal, on the fringe of the Lake District, on Arthur Stanley Eddington’s birth day, December 28, 1882. It’s Quaker country, and Eddington’s father was then headmaster of Kendal’s Quaker School. But his father died (in 1884), leaving Stanley (as his family knew him) in genteel poverty. Quakers do look after their own (as well as others), so Eddington could develop his talents at Manchester University and then at Cambridge, where his brilliance won him many friends and quick advancement. It’s an interesting story, and it all made Eddington the most likely person to test Einstein’s insight. But it misses the fact that Arthur Eddington was also inclined to philosophy, to humor, and to expressing his ideas as plainly as pudding to the less gifted. So besides his own real accomplishments in physics, astronomy, and mathematics, his efforts to translate all this for the many-headed also encouraged him to make theoretical leaps. He can, for instance, be seen to have anticipated quantum mechanics by seeing an atom’s attendant electrons not as individual particles whirling about a nucleus but as a kind of mist or fog. Electrons could be almost anywhere at any time. To me Eddington’s picture of the uncertainty principle is far clearer than Erwin Schrodinger’s cat, dead and/or alive and/or neither. Eddington also perceived (well before any ‘proof’) how stars made their heat and light. He apparently could be a prickly sort, but my guess is that his humor was occasionally too sharp for his colleagues to see the point. He deserves to be remembered for his wit and his gift of the common tongue, as well as for his scientific brilliance. ©

[Stanley]

The Reference Room
Earl Gregg Swem, 1870-1965

It’s easier to go to the internet than to go to the library, undoubtedly. But . . . Noam Chomsky.

I use digital search engines each day to find subjects (and information about them) for these ‘Anniversary Notes.’ Were it not for ‘Google’ and several more focused versions, I would have to trek daily to a good library’s “reference room” and weary my way through mountains of published indexes, bibliographies, and specialized dictionaries. My research career began in just such a place, Fall semester 1964, looking for materials for my senior seminar research (on “The Land Problem in Kenya, 1890-1950”). Back then, the Reference Room was a large place, its shelves lined (from floor to ceiling) by hundreds of hefty volumes, some of them dusty. On that day, A kindly librarian helped me to find more than I could use, from British ‘white papers’ on colonial policy to original pamphlets by Jomo Kenyatta attacking those policies. I needed her help, desperately, but what I did not then appreciate was that each one of the tomes in that large room was, in itself, a labor-saving device, a manualcompilation of sources on this, that, or some other subject in the humanities, the social sciences, the arts, and the sciences. They were, in themselves, works of scholarship, physical evidences of heroic toil. Later, embarked on a PhD in early American history, I ran across one of the more useful reference works, the ‘Swem Index,’ listing (by name, by date, and by theme) sources for early Virginia history: scholarly articles, statute books, individual documents, even some artifacts. But who was this ‘Swem’ who saved me so many months of hard labor? He was Earl Gregg Swem, born on December 29, 1870, in the small Iowa town of Belle Plaine. He was not a son of Virginia, nor descended from southern ‘Cavalier’ stock, but of Quaker parentage, and his father ran an art and antiques gallery (really!!?? In 1870??!!) in nearby Cedar Rapids. Swem caught his academic disease as a volunteer worker in Cedar Rapids’ Masonic Library, increased his exposure at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, and then made his career at the National Archives in DC, the Virginia State Library, and finally (1920-1944) as chief librarian at the College of William & Mary. Along the way, he advanced library science, invented new ways for libraries to serve their constituencies (including “open stacks,” a truly revolutionary innovation), and (oh, by the way) spent all his spare time in compiling his Virginia Historical Index (1936: 2 vols., 2333 pages). Compared to Swem, Google is a pygmy. For all that, the current W&M library is named for Earl Gregg Swem, a fitting memorial (it opened in the year of his death, 1965) to a pioneering reference librarian. ©

[Stanley]

Sunshine sketcher
Stephen Leacock, 1869-1944

If we all try hard, we can all lift ourselves up high above the average. It looks a little difficult mathematically, but that’s nothing. Stephen Leacock, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912).

In Canada, there is a charitable foundation whose main business is to choose the year’s best humor book—written by a Canadian. For those of us brought up on Canada jokes (“How do you get Canadians to leave the swimming pool?” “You say, will everyone please get out of the pool?”), this may seem a daunting mission (or outdoor relief for the feeble-minded), but as a matter of fact the foundation has made its award every year since 1947. Granted, there are multiple winners. Will Ferguson has won the prize three times, most recently (2005) for his immortal Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw, a title that gives one a sense of the possibilities for north-of-the-border laughs. But hold on just a minute. The foundation was set up by a bequest from Stephen Leacock, a truly funny writer who inspired (inter alia) Groucho Marx, J. B. Priestley, and Jack Benny, a literary entrepreneur whose patronage helps to explain why Robert Benchley first broke into print. (Benchley called it “nagging,” but that’s another story.). It all seems very strange: a funny man from the frozen north. But then Leacock was not a true Canadian. He had too long a name, for one thing. Stephen Peter H. Butler Leacock (I never have found out what the ’H’ stands for) was born in England on December 30, 1869. His father and mother were of prosperous stock, but proved unable to prosper in England and so took refuge in the colonies, finally in Ontario. His father failed there, too, leaving Stephen, his mother, and a brother to farm and fend for themselves. But a generous grandpapa financed Stephen’s education, first at Toronto and then at Chicago where Stephen obtained his PhD under the tutelage of Thorsten Veblen. So far, then, not a lot of laughs (Veblen was a sardonic Norwegian, a Groucho rather than a Karl). But while teaching political economy at McGill, and in between several foundational social science texts, Leacock began to remember the funny bits about growing up in provincial Canada. His best writings (short tales gathered into books) remind one of James Thurber’s Ohio childhood reminiscences but without the slapstick comedy. They are more (to coin an adjective) “Canadian” in nature. And they sold like maple syrup. Before his McGill career was half over, Leacock was making more (in Canadian dollars, be it said) from humor than from social science, and he amassed enough $Can to found the Stephen Leacock Associates and thus to fund the annual Leacock Award. When Stephen P. H. B. Leacock died, his fellow Canadians rushed to name a mountain after him, in the Yukon. But as far as I know, no one has climbed it yet. Now that’s funny. ©

[Stanley]

"I saw a little girl, eyes closed, holding to her breast the old kind world . . . she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go." Ishiguro.

Umeko Tsuda, 1864-1929
In writing of the simplest experiences of daily life we stop to think half despairingly “How shall I make them understand?” Anna Hartshorne, Japan and Her People (1902).

It’s often said that Japan’s ‘Meiji Restoration’ (1868-1912) was successful in bringing western technology and economic structures to the country, but not western social or political values. But to some enthusiastic reformers these were not at first mutually exclusive goals. In politics, the new blueprint of 1889 seemed to fulfill early Meiji promises of deliberative assemblies to debate and decide important matters under a written constitution. But reform might have gone much further than politics. At the beginning of Meiji rule, it was thought necessary to review traditional family structures, in particular the role of women. So in 1870 a small group of girls was selected and sent out to the USA to become knowledgeable about what females might contribute to Japanese modernization. Among them was Umeko Tsuda, then only six years old. Born on December 31, 1864, into the family of a progressive Samurai (not necessarily a contradiction in terms) family, Umeko became the foster child of a Washington, DC, family. There began her long love affair with western culture, first (1872-1884) as a pupil in some of DC’s best private schools, then (on a second visit, 1889-1893) as an undergraduate (majoring in Biology) at Bryn Mawr College. She later (1908-1909) visited women’s colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. From today’s perspective it seems faintly ironic that Umeko would find feminist inspiration from Britain and the US (women could not yet vote in either country), but “equality” is a relative matter, and inspired she was. However, on both her returns to Japan Umeko encountered conservative resistance to changing familial habits, let alone revolutionizing the role of women in the wider society. After two decades of grappling with the split personality of the Meiji Restoration, Umeko resigned her post in a public ‘vocational’ school for women to found a private “Women’s Institute for English Studies.” This experiment in female higher education proved popular with ‘progressive’ families. The school grew so quickly that in 1904 it received government certification and, from the west, private funds and ‘missionary’ faculty, notably Alice Bacon (1858-1918) and the Quaker Anna Hartshorne (1860-1957) who had met Umeko at Bryn Mawr. Umeko died in 1929. Hartshorne left only on the eve of World War II. Hartshorne never returned. After WWII, Umeko’s campus was renamed Tsuda University. Long rated as Japan’s best private university, it continues to prosper, is still open to women only, and in several ways reminds us that technology is easier to export than culture. Tsuda students are reminded of the university’s founding spirits by Umeka’s tomb (her ashes are buried there) and by its main building, now called Hartshorne Hall. ©.

[Stanley]

Brief lives and long biographies.
Katherine Phillips, 1632-1664

If soules no sexes have, for men t’exclude
Women from friendship’s vast capacity,
Is a design imperious and rude.
Onely maintain’d by partial tyranny. Katherine Phillips, “A Friend” (1663).

Modern biographies, not least best-sellers, tend to length. Often overlong, in my view: five years on, I still struggle with Ron Chernow’s Grant (2017). One reviewer, Ta-Nehisi Coates, referred to it as “thick” and likened it to a Mack truck. Coates thus meant to compliment Chernow, which goes to show that one man’s meat can be another’s poison. Chernow’s attention to detail certainly fills pages and makes his prose much heavier than Grant’s own writing, best seen in his succinct battle orders (often sent by telegraph, a medium that discouraged adjectival constipation). To Chernow, the details matter, even how Grant’s mud-spattered uniform (at Appomattox) got spattered with mud. This use of gossip to fill out portraits in words has many sources, one of them said to be John Aubrey (1626-1697), the 17th-century antiquarian, landowner, and gadabout who set the modern, gossipy style through his (ironically entitled?) Brief Lives. His sketches were indeed brief but what has ensured their survival (there have been countless editions) is Aubrey’s use of the telling detail, the gossipy, private, bits that gave his subjects life and breath, even though many were public figures, kings. courtiers, politicians. So, of course, most of them were male. Women appear, but usually as the gossipy bits, the shrewish wife or the seductive courtesan. But one woman who gets her own “brief life” was Katherine Phillips, born Katherine Fowler, in London, on January 1, 1632. She’s known today as a poet, and so she was. Her work, notably her poems and letters about female friendship, is now being reevaluated in ways that may free her from being classed as a “minor” poet, but to men of Aubrey’s time “woman poet” (minor or not) was an oxymoron. Indeed Katherine apologized with womanly modesty about her one volume of published poetry (published in 1663 just before her death). Nor does Aubrey include her because of scandal. Far from it: she was a faithful wife who praised her husband for his “friendship” (she spent her married life in mid-Wales, far from the excesses of Aubrey’s courtier acquaintances). She was known to Aubrey because one of her most faithful female friends was Mary Aubrey, one of John’s relations, to whom (in her poetry) Katherine gave the name “Rosania.” In these poems about friends and friendships Katherine Phillips was herself “Orinda.” That these female friends might have been lovers was a gossipy detail that John Aubrey missed, but one that engages several modern critics. So it is that each age finds its own biographies and their most telling details. ©

[Stanley]

To secure the rights I wish for myself, I must respect the rights of others. Sadie Alexander, 1947.
Sadie Alexander, 1898-1989

I knew well that the only way I could get that door open was to knock it down; because I knocked all of them down. Don't let anything stop you. Sadie Alexander, 1977.

In December 1946, Harry Truman faced a hostile Republican congress. He was thought to be a lame duck president, in power only because of Franklin Roosevelt’s death in 1945. And with postwar inflation breaking into a gallop it seemed certain that, in the election of 1948, the lame duck would become a dead one. Instead of cowering in the trenches, Truman issued executive order 9808, establishing the President’s Committee on Civil Rights. Its report, To Secure These Rights, was published one year later, December 1947, and set the agenda for two decades of progress in civil rights. Much of that agenda could be fulfilled only by national legislation (highly unlikely in 1947), but Truman did what he could, again through executive order, desegregating the armed force and the federal civil services. Truman also advanced African-Americans in various executive departments, including two of ambassadorial rank (Ralph Bunche at the UN and Edward Dudley in Liberia). Truman was criticized for appointing so few people of color to the committee itself, but he was a Democratic party politician and he followed the established “liberal” habit of depending upon great and good people to secure great and good ends. But among the white faces (mainly male) there was a great and good black woman, Sadie Alexander (née Mossell), born in Philadelphia on January 2, 1898. She was of middle-class origin, even upper class, but as a black woman she had had to earn her greatness. She got into the University of Pennsylvania (her father was an alumnus) but as a minority of one she found it hard going despite special scholarship help. White students accused her of advancing only because of her race. White professors accused her of plagiarism, and (later) the law school dean tried to reverse her election as editor of the Law Review. She was the first black to hold that position, and along the way scored several other firsts (first black woman PhD in the USA—in economics, first black woman to graduate from the Penn law school, first black woman admitted to the state bar, etc.). As a lawyer (partnering with her husband) she was successful, too, notably in labor law. But she had remained (like her parents) a loyal Republican. Ironically, that may be why Truman appointed her. Harry Truman was courageous. But old Harry was no fool, either. Sadie Alexander was exactly the great and good (black) person that Harry needed, and we are all lucky that she accepted his invitation. She would later become a Democrat, and she lived long enough to serve on Jimmy Carter’s presidential committee on ageing, but that’s another story. ©

[Stanley]

Call me Ishmael.
The Acushnet Sets Sail

What a book Melville has written! Nathaniel Hawthorne, in a letter to a friend, late 1851.

On January 3, 1841, the whaler Acushnet, three masts and only a bit over 100 feet in length, set sail from Nantucket. The ship had two owners, who of course stayed ashore, a captain, two mates, and 20 seamen. On it sailed young Herman Melville, a 22-year-old New Yorker of no fixed abode and, as yet, no fixed ambition. He was no landlubber, having clocked a transatlantic voyage in 1839; and, having read Charles Dana’s Two Years before the Mast, he was eager for adventure. He may also have been eager for his 1/175th share of the Acushnet’s profits (expected to come principally from whale oil). Indeed the voyage went well. The Acushnet had harvested hundreds of barrels by the end of the year, offloading them for shipment home. I doubt, though, that any real money found its way into Herman’s kit. He would cash in back at Nantucket, if he ever got there. But in the South Pacific things turned sour. Whales proved hard to find. Shipboard life could grate on a young man of spirit. And as for the flesh, the Polynesians who flocked aboard ship at each stop seemed fleshly enough, easier to find than the average whale, and a whole lot more accommodating than the Acushnet’s master, Valentine Pease. That stark contrast between the straitened shipboard experience and the freedom of the shore would stick with Melville for the rest of his life and inform his greatest novel, Moby Dick, and his most haunting story (the one about the innocent Billy Budd). Meanwhile, though, in the summer of 1842, Melville and a friend jumped ship at Nuka Hiva. Herman Melville would then beachcomb his way across the Pacific (Tahiti, Mo’orea, and finally Maui, Hawaiian islands, before he signed on as a common seaman aboard an American navy vessel, redundantly named the USS United States. He arrived back in New England (Boston this time) in October 1845, presumably tanned and lean, and certainly full to the brim with tales to tell. Luckily for all of us, and for legions of scholars, he put these tales in print, as travel narratives masquerading as fiction, as collections of short stories, and finally (in 1851, after learning something about writing from Nathaniel Hawthorne) in his great masterpiece, Moby-Dick: or, The Whale, with its demonic Ahab, its strangely diverse crew (certainly strange to its initial readership), its revengeful white whale, and its laconic narrator, Ishmael. It could so easily have turned out very differently, but Herman Melville survived his adventures (in an occupation known for its high death rates) and, better, he learned from them. Best of all, he wrote about them. So January 3, 1841, otherwise inauspicious in so many ways, becomes an important date in American history. ©

[Stanley]

The Protestant Primate of All Ireland
James Ussher, 1581-1656

If good people would but make goodness agreeable, and smile instead of frowning in their virtue, how many they would win to the good cause. James Ussher.

The ‘Church of Ireland’ is still today a province of the Anglican Church, Protestant in its theology but episcopal in its structure. But Ireland was, and still is, a Catholic country. So the ‘Church of Ireland’ has always had its work cut out for it, and in terms of missionary conversion has never been very successful. But being an alien corn has some benefits, and the C of I has throughout history produced interesting people, not least Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), longtime Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, one who at once could despise the downtrodden (and overwhelmingly Catholic) peasantry and yet mercilessly condemn Britain’s political and economic supremacy in the island. Swift’s “Modest Proposal” (1729: in which he apparently advocates eating Irish babies to salve the island’s overpopulation) remains a great way to introduce undergraduate readers to the savagery of satire. Before Swift, one of the most important denizens of the Church of Ireland’s “middle ground” was James Ussher, from 1625 Archbishop of Armagh and thus the primate of all Ireland. Ussher was born in Dublin on January 4, 1581, into a prominent (and Protestant) family. But though his father was Protestant, his mother was (almost certainly) of the Romish persuasion, and this may symbolize Ussher’s lifelong role as a moderator in the religious and political strife of his age. He tried first to moderate between King Charles I and Charles’s unruly English parliaments. Along the way, although Calvinist to the very core of his theology, Ussher offered support to the king’s ‘Arminian’ allies, then scolded Charles for abandoning those same allies to the executioner’s axe. Later, in the early 1640s and in the midst of civil war, Ussher tried to make peace with parliament’s radical Protestants by proposing a middle way in which England’s national church could be both episcopal and presbyterian. Today Ussher is better known for his Annals of the World (1650), in which he used biblical texts to prove that all creation began, at God’s command, on October 22. 4004 BC. Ussher did not specify the time of day, but thought sunset most likely. Most people today regard that task as pointless or foolish (and thus not unlike Ussher’s episcopal presbyters) but it was a central concern of many contemporaries, Isaac Newton for one, and (like Newton) Ussher used the best evidence he had available, principally the timelines laid down in biblical genealogies. For James Ussher was a serious scholar who hoped that the truth, once found, would bring agreement between all of good will and sound mind. He was, after all, the Protestant Primate of Ireland, a post for which naivete may have been a job requirement. ©