BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

If you're too short, learn to fly.
Michael Jeffrey Jordan, b. February 16, 1963

I’ve missed more than 9000 shots. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed. Michael Jordan.

I played ‘competitive’ basketball until 1981, when my weight and my smoking beat my love for the game. I was playing for Skerton School, Lancaster, England, where it was not a varsity sport but a club, and open not only to school students but also to ‘friends’ of the school. I qualified on the latter ground. I also knew what a zone defense was, something of screening, and a smattering of other ‘American’ techniques. In the late 1970s, at Skerton, these were valuable attributes, and so Skerton took me on for two seasons. The game we played was much the same one invented by James Naismith (1861-1939), although we used nets rather than Naismith’s peach baskets: defense, defense, defense (‘zone’ or modified zone), and then (on offense) playing for the best shot, dribbling and passing, bobbing and weaving, trying to get a teammate open, close to the basket. A few things were new to me, including losing to a factory team (from Preston) with two women players, but basically it was the same game as played by my father and uncles (andby my mother, although she played only with other girls). That game is now dead, petrified, and among many who might be credited for its resurrection one player stands out, Michael Jeffrey Jordan, born in New York City on February 17, 1963. At 15, and now in Wilmington, NC, Jordan failed to make his high school team. That is something we share in common, but among the differences between us Jordan did not give up. Instead, he played JV ball (I retreated into a church league), and compensated for his short-comings (he was only 5’11”). It was at this point, perhaps, that Jordan learned to defy gravity. For most players, a jump shot was just that. One stood, jumped, shot, and came down roughly in the same place. Jordan’s jump shots traversed lateral space, often several yards, and were taken at speed. Even so, while airborne, he seemed to steady himself, take aim, and then (on the rare occasions when the shot missed) to land somewhere close to the net, ready for a rebound. His airborne talents were not missed. Jordan played for Dean Smith at North Carolina, then remade in his image the Chicago Bulls in the NBA, and became an icon. This latter transformation was noted by others, not least by Nike, but also by Jordan himself. First through endorsements, and then in his own person and own right through sports entrepreneurship, Michael Jordan became the first sports player-billionaire. For all that, and especially for “The Shot,” Jordan’s airborne winning basket against the Cavaliers in the 1989 divisional finals, he deserves a happy 60th birthday, from all who like, or love, his game. ©.

[Stanley]

My general philosophy is never to take the world too seriously—for fear of dying of boredom. Marcel Duchamp.

On February 18, 1913, Marcel Duchamp exhibited his “Nude Descending a Staircase” at the Armory Show in New York City. National Guard armories had taken out a new lease on life in the USA, not only because of the traitorous insurrection we now call the Civil War but, more immediately in the 1870s and 1880s for fear of domestic unrest from the rebellious working classes. Late 19th-century America had been strike-torn, and armories (even in Des Moines, Iowa) were erected as places of refuge and redoubt for society’s more respectable (and better-fed) elements. But in the ‘Progressive Era’ such fears had been (mostly) laid to rest, and the Armory Show (which is now, I think, annual) was designed to give citizens a dose of culture.
But for some, it was a dose too much. European art had moved on to embrace modernism, to find new ways of connecting the eyes to the brain. Duchamp’s cubist nude caused consternation. No classicist Venus she!! Former president Teddy Roosevelt didn’t much like it, but unlike some cultural conservatives he had too much poise and class to be scandalized or outraged. His verdict was that the painting looked rather more “like a staircase descending a nude.” Please judge for yourself. Speaking of outrages, it was also on this day (1885) when Mark Twain published Huckleberry Finn, a very corrupting and scandalous book which was immediately banned in Boston. In that book, Twain gave moral vision to his view that slavery had caused many evils, among them southern backwardness and the Civil War. In it, Jim makes Huckleberry feel bad for being white in a society marred by racial slavery. I’m surprised they haven’t yet banned Huck from Florida libraries. Doubtless they will get round to it, sooner or later, these guardians of armory order. ©.

[Stanley]

A frontrunner in the sadness stakes.
I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen. Carson McCullers.

A competition to name the gloomiest of southern (USA) writers would call forth a crowded field. If it were decided to include dead writers (and given the title, why not?), one would have a reading list without end. Among the favorites, though, we would find Carson McCullers. Unlike (let us say) William Faulkner, whose sadness took root in the greatest of southern tragedies and addressed grand historical themes, McCullers translated the South (And All It Stood For) into the most intimate and personal of stories. It was, so to speak, who she was. Carson McCullers was born Lulu Carson Smith, in Columbus, Georgia, on February 19, 1917. Native by birth, she was an outsider by upbringing, for both parents took some pleasure in marking the distances between themselves and the town’s prevailing provincialities. But for her own stubborn streak, she might have grown up embarrassed. Instead, influenced by Russian writers (a gloomy lot in their own right), and forsaking a promising career as a pianist, Carson went to New York to write and, she once told a school friend, to become rich and famous. She quickly published a short story (about an outsider), and then married another heart-torn southern exile, Reeves McCullers, a sort of Truman Capote type (think of Dill, in Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird) whose outsidedness was intensified by his inner sexual doubts. Carson Smith, now Carson McCullers, would live with that problem (or versions of it) for most of the rest of her life, starting with Reeves making off with her royalty checks. And there were royalties, and there were Hollywood and Broadway rights. Shortly after her marriage, McCullers gained her first fame as the author of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940), not a sunshine fiction, and she continued to probe the personal heritages of southern-ness in a string of novels and stories that impressed many. Not least among these was Richard Wright, who reviewed her first novel enthusiastically and called her the first southern white writer who articulated “in one sweep of apprehension and tenderness” what it was like to be black in the American south. It was this personal sympathy that kept Carson McCullers clear of history and politics. The mis-fittedness of her characters to their social environment might arise from their race or ethnicity, their sexuality, even their ambition, but it was for McCullers always and above all else a personal matter. This focus was sharpened still more by her own poor health, and a series of debilitating strokes, which began in her 20s and killed her at 50. Her life was as sad a ballad as was ever sung, but there was a defiance in it, too. For she kept on writing including a forever unfinished Autobiography (1999). ©.

[Stanley]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JOSEPH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Against a heart inflamed with love . . .
A Ruthless tyrant, cruelly armed,
Wages war, but all in vain. . .
Love will always triumph. Rosina, in Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville,” 1816.

Still an acknowledged mainstay of the modern operatic repertoire, Gioachino Rossini’s The Barber of Seville was judged a disaster on its première night, February 20, 1816, at Rome’s Teatro Argentino. The crowd hissed and booed throughout. Perhaps unnerved by the crowd, more likely demoralized by the theater’s near bankruptcy, the stage crew made spectacular mistakes, and most reviewers sided with the crowd. Given the opera’s later successes (almost immediate, and certainly enduring), efforts have been made to explain this first night failure (beyond the old saw that ‘there’s no accounting for taste’). There may have been some suspicion that Rossini was a mere plagiarist. Given that this came right in the middle of his most productive span (23 operas between 1810 and 1823) he was a composer who sometimes plagiarized himself. And, certainly, there was something suspiciously un-original about basing a light opera (opera buffa) on Pierre Beaumarchais’ trilogy (staged in Paris, 1776-1778) about the comic doings of a scheming barber-servant (Figaro), a love hungry aristocrat (Count Almavivo), and a lovelorn lass (Rosina). Mozart had done it already, and one of Rossini’s contemporary rivals (the much older Giovanni Paisiello) had already produced his own The Barber of Seville!! Indeed, it seems likely that Paisiello sent his very own claque to the Teatro Argentino with orders to disrupt young Rossini’s attempt at artistic mimicry (or theft). But there was something in Rossini’s music, or his rendering of the plot, that made his opera the more lasting one. Its subtitle (“The Useless Precaution”) announced its comedic intent, aristocratic pretension was the butt of the joke, and in the reactionary aftermath of the Napoleonic wars it was a joke that the new rising bourgeoisie could especially enjoy. Successive first nights (e.g. in London, March 1818 and New York, May 1818, in Paris and elsewhere) confirmed the opera as a classic, whether performed in Italian or in local translations. (New Yorkers waited until 1825 to hear it in Italian). The Rosina part (originally for a contralto but latterly as a soprano) has been sung by almost anyone with a claim to operatic immortality, including Adelina Patti, Nellie Melba, and Maria Callas. And for those who cannot claim to any degree of operatic expertise other than ignoramus, it has proven fertile ground for mistaken attributions. I tend to think of the Barber of Seville as Mozart’s property, a confusion that may have caused young Rossini (he was only 26 at the première) most of his opening night embarrassment. He survived it, and so will you. ©.

[Stanley]

equality, fairness, justice.

Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. John Rawls.

There are many reasons for my difficulty with philosophy as an intellectual discipline, but one stands out among them. This is philosophers’ insistence upon precision. It’s a roadblock I ran into reading C. L. Stevenson’s Ethics and Language (1944) where one spends forever limning the differences between “should”, “would”, and “could” and is then drawn to the conclusion that what is really needed is a metalanguage, new-minted in order to avoid such confusions. But there is no such thing as a value-free word, let alone a value-free language. Logic and math? Possibly, but only if you want to reach a very limited audience. I’ve foolishly tried to teach the problem, in an honors college seminar on “equality,” only to conclude that “equality” must be the most value-inundated word (in any language?). Not only that, but as a concept it has constantly changed its meaning. Equal to what? To whom? In what ways? Once one gets into it, one realizes that whatever it might mean, or might have meant, it is and has been an explosive concept. The American philosopher John Rawls found it so, and yet an attractive one, and as to the problem of language tried to evade the problems of precision by adopting (like David Hume centuries before) an even fuzzier word for it, “fairness.” Among its fuzzy strengths is that every child knows exactly what it means in practice—which may give adults a good chance to figure out what it means in theory. John Rawls, the premier American political philosopher of the 20th century, was born in Baltimore on February 21, 1921. His philosophy may have sneaked up on him via an early interest in the Episcopalian priesthood, possibly from a bad war experience (a draftee himself, he was busted back to private for refusing to discipline a fellow soldier on grounds of “fairness”), but he majored in the discipline at Princeton and then won his PhD (also Princeton) in 1950. His elitist background may help to explain his belief in ‘moral worth’ as a usable, workable yardstick. The Rawls work I have found most useful, and most provocative, is his Theory of Justice (1971). He argues that a capitalist society has bought enough stock in itself to be able to come—by consensus—to reasonable conclusions on social issues. As each of us has a stake. We can recognize that others do, too. “So far,” as Jane Austen’s Lizzie Bennett defiantly says, “we are equals.” So we approach “fairness” through our regard for others. Rawls died in 2002, by which time it was easy to regard that view as naïve. Sadly, it’s even easier today. Perhaps we do need to recover the naivetes and equalities of childhood to recover what he meant and to reassume his optimism. ©.

[Tripps]

This man works at a different level to the rest of us. Well - me at least.

If - as I did - you think "limning" is a typo, think again - and get googling. Participle or Gerund?

Read this to confirm.

BobBliss.JPG

[Stanley]

Bob teaching in 1982.
You're right about him David. I thought that when I first met him........

[Stanley]

An Apple-Pie American

Memory in America suffers from amnesia. Meridel Le Sueur.

These days, there’s far too much news about the banning of children’s books from school and public libraries. “MAGA” Republicans and other unhinged elements fear that, beneath their noses, their very own children are being brainwashed (“groomed” is the word of the moment) to become foot soldiers of otherness: gays, radicals, transsexuals, or otherwise ‘normal’ kids made ashamed of their melanic deficiencies (as expressed, genetically speaking, by their white skin). It all seems far-fetched. But then consider the case of Meridel Le Sueur, whose prodigious output of children’s books about American folk heroes (e.g. Nancy Hanks and Johnny Appleseed) conceals her even greater contributions to radical literature: stories and polemics about (most notably) dispossessed native Americans, oppressed people of color, and the excluded poor. But as she herself often proclaimed, Meridel Le Sueur was as American as apple pie—and so was her concern for the poor and outcast. She was born in Murray, then (and still) a hamlet in southern Iowa, on February 22, 1900. She was brought up to family traditions of the American Midwest: the Christian fundamentalism of her grandparents, militant advocates of tee-total, alcohol-free, purity, and the populist politics of her parents, Winston and Marian Wharton, who both believed that American farmers (left behind by the march of industrial and financial capitalism) should raise less corn and more hell. When her dad died, her mom married the Socialist mayor of Minot, North Dakota (long a hotbed of dissent, its citizens held hostage by the railroads). This second marriage gave Meridel her nom de plume of Le Sueur. To this subversive background, Meridel added the romance and tragedy of American stories she heard told (in Minot) by the original Dakotans, the defeated and dejected Sioux. In a career that would include acting (as an extra) in a silent movie actually entitled The Perils of Pauline (1914, ironically a William Randolph Hearst production), Meridel gravitated towards the radical end of her American heritage, consorting with trades unionists and civil rights advocates, working on breadlines and picket lines, and getting herself blacklisted as a “communist” by the House Un-American Activities committee. Through it all, in a career that lasted into her 90s, Meridel Le Sueur wrote essays, novels, and, yes, children’s books that gave her view of what it could mean to be an American. A couple of her children’s books are still in print, and surely ripe for banning. You never know what lessons your children might learn from some “other” American’s memory. So beware!!! ©

[Stanley]

The good life as real life.

Life is enriched by aspiration and effort rather than by acquisition and accumulation. Helen Nearing.

Among the sitcoms put out by the BBC during its most miraculous decade was The Good Life (1976-78), in which a young couple jump off the treadmill to live simply and slowly. They are the Goods: Tom (Richard Briers), and Barbara (Felicity Kendall), and they pursued their ideals in place, of all places in Surbiton, a London suburb already notorious for its conventionalities. Their neighbors, Margo and Jerry, were devoted rat-racers disturbed by the Goods’ decision (not to mention their livestock and their cropping gardens), and most episodes turned on the Leadbetters’ astonishment, amusement, or anger at the Goods’ hippy commune next door. Little did I know then that, back in the USA, there was already a cottage industry which almost made ‘the good life’ a trademarked phrase. It was not located in any suburb, but in rural Vermont, on a freehold farm (and timber plantation) owned by Scott and Helen Nearing, who were even then putting out books on “the good life” to be found through careful eating (vegetarian), environmentally sensitive farming (bees, trees, honey, and maple syrup), and (for lack of a better term) non-consumerism. This rural retreating was a new phase in Scott Nearing’s (1883-1983) strife-torn and controversial life, for he had been a fire-brand economist, journalist, pacifist, and socialist, always closer to jail time than to rural idylls. So it’s possible that the Vermont adventure was inspired by his relationship with Helen Nearing. She was born Helen Knothe, February 23, 1904, the only daughter of a non-conformist but comfortable family in suburban New Jersey. It seemed that she might become a violinist, but this was derailed by a love affair with a leading Indian Theosophist and then a much longer relationship with Scott Nearing, which began in 1928 and was finally solemnized by a formal (unconventional) wedding in 1947, when Helen was 43 and Scott already 64. Helen’s and Scott’s decision to take up ‘the good life” came soon after their first meeting, and by 1934 they were established in Vermont as homesteaders. This was as per the 1862 legislation with the additional boost of their substantial inheritances (Scott from his coal-mining grandfather and Helen from her clothes-manufacturing father). Latterly, the Nearings have come under fire for being hypocritical hippies, but their many “good life” books enjoyed high sales and encouraged emulation. And one of the oddities, or ironies, of our current environmental crises is that we are rich enough to be able to do something about them—just as we were rich enough to cause them in the first place. The Nearings’ good life is a good fable for our times. ©.

[Stanley]

Ma Kettle in Person!!

I got my first dramatic training under the guise of elocution, a term which covered a multitude of sinful things in my youth. Marjorie Main.

Back in the day, junior high students in Des Moines were treated to lunch-time movies, 15-minute episodes of some popular, uncontroversial, and yet occasionally diverting Hollywood product. We saw some spectaculars, perhaps as aids to digestion. I remember Quo Vadis?, a film designed to encourage us to consider martyrdom as a career, but for the most part we got lighter fare, including most of the ‘Ma and Pa Kettle’ films. There were ten in all, an early example of the franchise film spawned by The Egg and I (which also ran at my school). The Kettle films followed the misadventures of the eponymous Ma and Pa and their hordes of human children and farm animals (kids all, always up to mischief). One we missed was Ma and Pa Kettle at Waikiki (1955), perhaps because it featured a bikini or two, but through it all we learned to love Ma Kettle, played with countrified panache by Marjorie Main. Like our mothers at home, she could still the multitude with her gruff manner and stentorian voice, but of course she loved them all, kids and goats, and even including her fairly feckless Pa (played usually by Percy Kilbride). Beneath her skin, she was tenderness in person. It’s more than possible that Marjorie Main knew whereof she acted, for she was a country girl, born Mary Tomlinson, in darkest Indiana, on February 24, 1890. Her dad was a Disciples of Christ minister, and she was delivered by her maternal grandfather, a country doctor named Sam who, I am morally certain, drove a horse and buggy to the lying-in house. The family then moved to Goshen, not the Old Testament one that was a place of refuge for the captive Israelites, but an Indiana town on the northern edge of the bible belt but all too close to the temptations of Chicago. And there Mary migrated, and learned to act, and changed her name to Marjorie to save her father from shame. She had quite a career, in vaudeville and then on stage, playing a wide variety of parts (including a noir stage thriller with the young Bogart), but almost always in character—including, once she got into films, as Lucy, the gruff, warm-hearted landlady of a divorce ranch near Reno in Clare Booth Luce’s The Women, a slightly risqué film which had no men at all in it. Indeed Marjorie may have preferred women, for after a brief marriage to a traveling shrink, a male named Krebs, she had a long relationship with Spring Byington. But at nearly 60, Main had made herself into a “natural” for Ma Kettle’s role, and she played it well. Incidentally, the Kettle series saved Universal Studio’s financial bacon, so the farm analogy was entirely apt. Marjorie Main left behind her only fond memories, in Des Moines if not in Waikiki. ©

[Stanley]

She of the outhouse and the corncob pipe.

The only people who should be in government are those who care about people more than they care about power. Millicent Fenwick.

Both sides of Millicent Fenwick’s family produced an plethora of notables. Her mother’s family, the Stevenses, had run several shows in Hoboken, New Jersey, including the Stevens Institute of Technology; then her mother married Ogden Hammond, banker and diplomat. Mom went down with the Lusitania in 1915. The banker-father survived the Lusitania. He came from a line of Kentucky Unionists (his father was General Sherman’s chief of staff). So you’d expect Millicent Hammond Fenwick (born on February 25, 1910) to be unusual, and so she was, unusual enough to become (many say) the model for Garry Trudeau’s outspoken lady politico, Lacey Davenport, in his comic strip Doonesbury. That was an odd fate for a Republican, but then Millicent Fenwick was a liberal Republican, now a vanquished and vanished species. But she had a struggle to get there, despite her family wealth. In her youth she attended a bevy of leading colleges but always dropped out. Then she had an affair with a married man, Hugh Fenwick, and after his divorce married him, which caused a rift with her family. And then Hugh began playing around (with her money and with other women). In 1945 they divorced and Millicent was left with three young kids and a pile of debts. With few professional skills and a painfully short resumé, she began at Vogue as a model, then wrote picture captions, and rose through the ranks to write Vogue’s Book of Etiquette. Then, in 1952, her children grown, she inherited a goodly pile and set off on her own, on a political career unimaginable today in the Republican party, a leading advocate for black civil rights, defender of migrant agricultural workers (for a time she was known as “Outhouse Millie” because of her insistence on adequate toilet facilities in the fields), a consumer rights agitator and administrator. And she was a Republican. Elected to the US Congress in 1974, aged 64, Millicent quickly made news, and kept making it. Walter Cronkite called her the congress’s conscience, and she was: and she was an angry supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment. After a tour as Reagan’s goodwill ambassador, “Outhouse Millie” retired from public service at 77. Her wing of the GOP was then already on life support, mortally wounded. Clearly it has not recovered, and is now dead, buried, and forgotten. But Millie’s memorial statue, a life-size bronze, arms open wide, chin up, smiling, indomitable but still welcoming, stands outside her hometown’s train station. It’s always nattily attired in someone’s colorful scarf or hat, a nice touch for Trudeau’s stylish, and sometimes waspish, heroine. And, yes, Millicent was a pipe smoker. ©

[Stanley]

Millicent Fenwick.

[Stanley]

Charity and power.

While we do our good works let us not forget that the real solution lies in a world in which charity will have become unnecessary. Chinua Achebe,

Etymologically, Chicago began its modern life as a swamp stinking of wild onions. It would become our ‘Second City,’ its rough origins polished off or perfumed away, and many members of its elite would claim descent from the Mayflower. Failing that, some found solace in tracing their line back only to the pioneer garrison at Fort Dearborn, the USA’s first outpost in the swamp, the outlines of which, in bronze, are embedded in sidewalks at the southern end of the Magnificent Mile. Among these locally-grown nobs was the remarkable Louise DeKoven Bowen, born on February 26, 1859 in (of course) Chicago. Her father, John DeKoven, compounded the family’s Fort Dearborn heritage by becoming a leading banker. Louise, an only child, inherited the whole fortune and then improved it further by marrying yet another banker, Joseph Bowen. Her wedding came rather late in life for the average Chicago millionaire maiden (1888). The Bowens belonged to all Chicago’s best clubs and produced four children (all of whom had distinctive careers). But Louise long outlasted Joseph (who died in 1911 after suffering poor health for years), and she outshone him, too, but not in banking: she became a philanthropist and reformer. She began innocently enough, in one of the best of all clubs, St. James Episcopal, where she organized the Sunday school and headed up its boys’ division. That experience seems to have set her thinking about education, advantages, and social outcomes, and Louise became in turn a leading campaigner for female equality, notably in Illinois’ women’s suffrage movement, and then fatefully the patron (patroness?) of Jane Addams’s famous Hull House project. Not only did she give Hull House plenty of money (over $30 million in today’s $$), but she worked at Hull House on several projects and became, by degrees one presumes, a political radical. Her many reform efforts enjoyed some successes (perhaps most notably in the city’s juvenile court system, which she reoriented away from punishment and towards “saving” young offenders), but she became convinced that these top-down reforms were but a form of charity. Perhaps it was her 1913 study of the plight of Chicago’s growing black population that transformed her view from reformist to radical, but well before the end of her long life (she died in 1953) Louise Bowen became a thorn in the sides of even the Hull House directors. For she came to believe, with a banker’s savvy, that what poor people most needed was power, an inheritance they could own, use, and then pass on to their children, and in turn to their children’s children. It’s a lesson. ©

[Stanley]

Political speech and history lesson.

Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it. Concluding sentence of Abraham Lincoln’s Cooper Union Address, 1860

Political speeches don’t make good historical sources. Even Winston Churchill’s wartime oratory is suspect. It conceals his own history of political failure and backbench exile. Worse, it has encouraged otherwise sane scholars to overlook the sufferings of Britain’s working class, for whom the German blitzkrieg added only drama to historic poverty and privation. Churchill’s heroic rhetoric, taken too seriously, makes it difficult to comprehend his crushing defeat in the 1945 General Election. But in American history, one speech stands out as historically significant, even as a history maker. It was also a piece of historical scholarship, which makes it even more unusual. It was delivered at the Cooper Union, in New York City, on February 27, 1860, and is called, oddly enough, the “Cooper Union Address”. It was delivered by Abraham Lincoln, then a little-known western politician seeking to make an impact on what was a large and skeptical audience. Lincoln’s oratory had been field-tested in Illinois’ 1858 senatorial campaign, but he’d lost that race. No one liked losers, especially in the crisis year of 1860, and few in the hall had ever heard Lincoln’s piping tenor voice or seen his face or his rumpled suit or his ungainly amble. But as he went on (and speeches in those days did go on and on and on), the hall came to attention, listened closely, and in the end was won over. 1860 was a crisis year. At issue was the expansion of slavery into the western territories. What the Cooper Union audience got was a historical lecture, based on Lincoln’s own research and delivered mainly from memory, showing not only that the government could prohibit slavery in the territories but that the founding fathers themselves—including the slaveholders among them—had intended that it should. To an audience that had seen the Slave Power wax rich, arrogantly overturn the Missouri Compromise of 1820, and declare even that black people were not, had not been, and could never be parties to the original compact, Lincoln’s findings, and his argument, were transformative. I found myself, one skeptical observer wrote, “yelling like a wild Indian, cheering this wonderful man.” Another remarked on Lincoln’s dry as dust approach, legalistic, logical in tone and tempered by fact, that had “irresistibly” driven conviction home to his auditory. Of course Lincoln’s speech did not make him president, not even the nominee of his new Republican party. But it made those things possible, and it convinced southern slaveowners, too, that Abe Lincoln was the blackest politician of them all. Time would show that they were correct. ©.

[Stanley]

How primitive can "culture" be?

We are the only species (so far) with a richly cumulative culture. Daniel Dennett.

Anatomically and intellectually “modern” humans (a species named—by itself—homo sapiens) have been around for a long while, at least 70,000 years. This fact has been difficult to digest for many religious people, including modern monotheists. The sheer historicity of their sacred texts is part of the problem. Why did God (or YHWH, or Allah) wait until we could transcribe, read, and write to deliver these vital messages? But for some modern religionists, deep faith made it easier to understand human evolution and offer to the rest of us important interpretations of how ‘culture’ evolved along with our bipedalism, our big brains, and our upright postures. Among these was the Catholic priest Abbé Breuil. Henri Edouard Prosper Breuil was born in Normandy, not quite within sight of Mont St. Michel, on February 28, 1877. Of good family (papa was a magistrate) he was educated in Catholic schools and then at the Sorbonne. Feeling a. vocation, he entered the Sulpician seminary and gained ordination there in 1900. It’s not clear that he ever had a parish. Rather he continued his scholarly interests in paleoanthropology, and made his first mark with his 1904 interpretation of two prehistoric bone carvings (which, he argued, shared a common cultural origin and even a common artist) in the collection of the British Museum. But Breuil is most famed for his interpretations of prehistoric cave paintings. This interest would eventually take him across the world, notably to Asia and Africa, but began with the spectacular cave paintings to be found (still) in southwestern France (notably Lascaux) and in Spain (Altamira). A fine draughtsman himself, Breuil’s expressive copies of these ‘primitive’ pictures, helped him to interpret them as art, cultural expressions of a high order. Through his own religiosity he saw the cave paintings as things of the spirit. “Sympathetic magic” was the term he used, and although that interpretation has since been challenged, we should see truth in it, and in the cave paintings themselves a form of religious iconography. But like the rest of our odd species, Breuil suffered from his own cultural limitations, but not “religious” ones. Rather he was unable to shed his belief that “modern” humans (and their paintings) must have evolved in Europe. So the sympathetic magic he found in Namibian cave art must have been later imports from the higher civilizations which had emerged on the European continent, where they had produced superior observers like Abbé Brueil, Eurocentric to a fault. And “Europe” as a cultural concept is of decidedly modern origins, one too full of sympathetic magic. ©

[Stanley]

Writing poetry is talking to oneself.

As embarrassing as that word is — ‘inspiration’ — I do think it corresponds to my experience. Richard Wilbur.

A popular aphorism has it that you will find no atheists in foxholes. It’s much beloved by military chaplains, and was endorsed by my father who never saw the inside of a foxhole but experienced an immediate increase in spirituality when he had a stone barn blown out from under him in Germany, Spring 1945. For Richard Wilbur, in the same army and at the same time, foxholes were places for poetry, not prayer. He didn’t write reams (that sort of paper isn’t that plentiful in foxholes), but he found enough solace in verse to become, in peacetime, one of 20th-century America’s foremost poets. Richard Wilbur was born in New York City on March 1, 1921. He tried a bit of poetry as a youngster and then as editor of student newspapers in high school and college (Amherst, class of ’42). With his country at war, Wilbur thought to improve on his way with words into a behind-the-lines assignment as a codebreaker, and trained for it until the US Army, always a little slow on the uptake (it made my dad a forward observer in the artillery because of his MSc degree, without noticing that it was in agricultural journalism) discovered that editor Wilbur had, in college especially, written and published some stuff about socialism. Having few historians in its personnel sections, the army deemed Richard Wilbur as un-American, redefined him as cannon-fodder, and trained him, instead, for foxhole fighting. Along the way, Wilbur sent those poems to his wife, Mary. They were commonplace poems, not so much about the war as about the weather, the vistas, love, and loneliness, and he intended them as comfort and consolation. No doubt they provided both, but Mary also had a literary mind (her father had published Frost), and after the war, with Richard back home and studying for a PhD, she sent a sheaf to a publisher friend, and, hey presto, Richard Wilbur was redefined yet again, this time as a poet. And so he remained, although he also became a distinguished translator and playwright. In college, I was introduced to him as “the coming thing” in American poetry. That advice proved prescient, and among Wilbur’s awards would be two poetry Pulitzers (1957 and 1989). He would also be appointed U.S. Poet Laureate (now “Poetry Consultant”) during the presidency of a different World War warrior, George Herbert Walker Bush, a Yale man and not a poet. Mary Wilbur died in 2007; after 65 years of marriage, she could congratulate herself on her good judgment, literary and otherwise. Richard Wilbur died in 2017, his loyalty unquestioned and his poetry still, as they say, on the books. ©.

[Stanley]

The pursuit of trigger-happiness.

The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. James Madison, et al, 1789.

In the 17th century, English colonial investors had a problem: encouraging people to cross the ocean to risk their lives in “America”: then more a place than it was an idea, a place of suffering and death, even in the better-organized colonizing ventures of the Puritans. So incentives were offered. Those who shipped out as servants were offered shorter indentures than those who stayed at home, and at the end of their indenture a “headright.” The most important headright was freehold title to a small tract (in Virginia, 50 acres), an unimaginable boon for England’s landless poor. The mystique of freehold farming has waned (today arable land is crushingly expensive, not to mention the tools and chemicals used to farm it), but we still venerate other ‘original’ rights which began as advertising pitches, not least the rights to “free fishing and fowling.” An attraction indeed, for poor folk to whom that sounded a lot like ‘poaching.’ Also within it, often made explicit, was the right to bear arms, not to shoot fish but to shoot fowl, and (into the bargain) the right to shoot bears, wolves, catamounts, and other prowling vermin like skulking natives, wandering French Jesuits, and restive African slaves. This “right to bear arms” has today grown into a fevered obsession, a right which for some carries no countervailing responsibilities but is an absolute, even a God-given license. This confusion has several origins, one of which was the creation, on March 2, 1484, of the Royal College of Arms. Its progenitor was King Richard III, the insecure monarch who in 1485 would lose his kingdom (and his head) at Bosworth Field. According to Shakespeare, Richard’s loss was for want of a horse, but what he really lacked was an unimpeachable right to the crown. His creation of the College of Arms was one way he could clear his Yorkist claims to the throne, by sealed and certified “proof” of legitimate descent, as it were from time out of mind, from previous holders of “rightful” power. His aristocratic allies found the idea attractive for their own reasons. In 1485 Henry Tudor, an errant Welshman with sketchy ties to Lancastrian claimants, would see Richard die at Bosworth and become, himself, the “rightful” King Henry VII, the founder of the Tudor dynasty. Henry used the College of Arms to back up his own and his friends’ “de jure” claims. In 1776, Tom Paine would blow the whole aristocratic idea up with the savage satire of Common Sense. But the damage had been done. To be armigerous had become a sacred thing, and what was once no more than a coat of arms has by now become an AK-47 in the closet. We have become, to our cost, an armigerous people. ©

[Stanley]

All about the grooming of children.

They'll tell you you're too loud, that you need to wait your turn and ask the right people for permission. Do it anyway. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez.

These days, some politicians have so many obsessions that one wonders how they have time to learn anything about advancing the common welfare. But some sinister thing they call “grooming” seems to be on the cutting edge for many of them. The world as they see it is awash with bad actors (and worse books) intent on transforming the nation’s children from some ill-defined “normal” state into a frightening new world of bent genders, undefined sex roles, and prurient promiscuity. If these folks would just take a little time to look in the mirror they might see that they were themselves “groomed”, partly because that is what education (whether it’s done via parenting or teaching or peer pressure) is all about. As far as I know, for instance, every grade school child in Des Moines, Iowa, learned how to read via the “Dick and Jane” books, books which all children lived in detached houses on leafy streets, had a mommy at home and a daddy at work, had family picnics on weekends, and vacationed long distances to see natural wonders or smiling relatives. At Greenwood Grade School, we didn’t know we were being groomed, because we lived in a prosperous neighborhood and were good little Dicks and Janes, just like in the books, but then along came some social scientists to tell us about our grooming and how it had (in effect) cut us off from a true picturing of American life, in all its multicultural and economic diversities. One of the most influential of these truth-tellers was Myra Pollack Sadker, born in Maine on March 3, 1943. So she was our contemporary. Cleverer than most of us, she went on to Boston University (BA), Harvard (MA) and then UMass Amherst (PhD), where she developed a burning curiosity about the grooming process she’d experienced. Along with her husband David Sadker, she used observational research (in classrooms, labs, playgrounds and sports fields) to discover (among other things) that there were pronounced gender patterns to our grooming processes. Boys were encouraged to be boys, active, questioning, even disputatious. In contrast, girls who raised their hands too often in class (like Barbara, a Greek girl in my 3rd grade) were not called on, and if they didn’t get the message were then encouraged to be less “pushy,” to let “others” have a chance. Myra and David became famous, for a time, for their findings and for their advocacy of what we might call today, if we’d take the time to look in some mirror or other, gender-free grooming. Sounds like a pretty good idea to me, because I don’t particularly want my grandchild to grow up just like me. With any luck, her world will be different from mine, and she needs to be prepared for that. ©

[Stanley]

Fear as a political property.

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, March 4, 1933.

Since all my subscribers are resident in the northern hemisphere, I can say without too much fear of dissent that on March 4 one begins to sniff Spring in the air. Of course, March (by tradition) still has some bad weather to send us, ice, snow, wind, and slush, if it is to go out like a lion, but here in Chicago it’s a sunny morning, our son Daniel is well settled in his recuperation from open heart surgery, and it’s (therefore) a day for optimists. It was so for a motley crowd of fur trappers, land sharks, and entrepreneurs gathered in what was then a swamp, who on March 4, 1837, took out a charter of incorporation for a city they chose to call Chicago, in honor I suppose of the swamp but in hopes of better things and oodles of cash profits. They did pretty well, too, a Great Fire to the contrary notwithstanding. They or their successors drained much of the swamp, extended the dry land into Lake Michigan, and created a brawling, bawling giant of a city, according to some the most “American” of our metropolises. And that’s meant, usually, as a compliment. Another optimist addressed the American people on another matter, and on another day, March 4, 1933, in the midst of an economic crisis that threatened the destruction of much of Chicago. There was spiraling unemployment, a bear of a stock market, banks were closing faster than ever, and bread lines were already customary even in the Windy City, but it was March 4, Spring was in the air, or Franklin Roosevelt claimed it was, and the people listened. Better yet, the Congress listened and, although there was significant foot-dragging here and there (not least in the Supreme Court), the idea that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself began to catch on, and government (at most levels) began the hard, and surprisingly intricate task of rebuilding the American economy—and Chicago, too. It’s a sad irony, then, that today one of our two major parties has made “fear” its main selling point, and never loses an opportunity to find something else for us to fear. We should be quaking in our boots about space lasers (sometimes Italian, sometimes Jewish, now apparently non-sectarian). We should lock our doors and turn our backs on the latest wave of immigrants (even though most of us are of immigrant stock, ourselves), lest we be mugged (or worse) in our sleep. And right now, I guess, our most potent source of fear is the drag queen on the one hand and the adolescent suddenly unsure of his, or her, gender identity. But it’s Spring, and a good time therefore to lay our fears to rest and think of how we might improve things. Heart surgery for some. Gender therapy for some. But I’m not yet sure about an effective cure for the rest of us. ©.

[Stanley]

A self-made legend.

When the ranch is at peace, no other life is more perfect. Charlie Goodnight.

Back when the west was wild, and men were really men, few names were better known than that of Charles “Charlie” Goodnight, born on March 5, 1836, and destined to live a very long life—he died in 1929. Given the risks he took, his 93 years were against the odds, and there were quite a few other surprising things about him. On the Texas frontier, he was for years the scourge of the Comanches, an early “ranger” who in 1860 guided the raid that “rescued” Cynthia Ann Parker from her Comanche captors. That story eventually found its way onto the silver screen as The Searchers (1956), a John Wayne vehicle that failed to highlight the fact that “Cynthia” did not want to be rescued. By 1860, she was “Narua” (in Comanche, ‘someone found’), a fully-adopted member of the tribe who did not want to be ‘white,’ and whose son Quanah would become the last fully independent Comanche chief. Charlie Goodnight would then turn up again as Quanah’s patron and protector, a white rancher whose carefully-bred buffalo herd provided food and sport for Quanah and the remnants of his band. Charlie Goodnight was like that, consistently inconsistent. A high plains pioneer, he was born tame just across from St. Louis, in Macoupin County, Illinois. After his farmer father died, he moved with his mother and her second husband to the Republic of Texas. After Texas joined the union, then left it, Parker fought for the rebels in a ragtag bunch of raiders, learning much about high plains geography which he later used to drive cattle up from the Pecos to Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado rail heads. The Parker facts from his droving years are too many and too various to recount, but you can get their flavor by reading Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. Charlie put his name on the landscape in the “Goodnight-Loving Trail,” running from San Antonio to Cheyenne, perhaps further. After that it was ranching, beginning small and waxing huge (over a million acres, some say), which gave Charlie space to experiment with cattle and buffalo breeding and to make game attempts to preserve high plains wildlife (and ‘longhorns’ too, like his legendary lead steer, “Old Blue”). Charlie Goodnight married twice, once for over 50 years. He and his brides had no children, but they ‘adopted’ many promising young folk as summer help (or apprentices) and supplied them with scholarship money to attend this or that state university. Charlie himself never did learn to read or write, but he could sign his name, and we can find it on many land deeds as well as on one of the most famous drover trails of the high plains. He was, perhaps, our most famous cowpoke. ©.

[Stanley]

March 6, 1869

I saw in a dream where all elements fell into place as required. Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper. Dmitri Mendeleev.

As a sophomore, and a casualty of freshman mathematics, I was advised to take the easier of Penn’s physical science requirements, but for reasons now forgotten but probably irrational I elected to take the first-year chemistry course required of chemistry majors. The professor, Alan Macdiarmid, was a young New Zealander of burning ambition and a huge enthusiasm for teaching blockheads. Macdiarmid would go on to a Nobel (in Chemistry, 2000, for something about polymers). He’d said in lecture that he had grown up next to the Rutherford farm, and he hoped that there was something in the water that had helped Ernest Rutherford to the 1908 Nobel Prize (also in chemistry), but in 1962-63 Macdiarmid convinced me that there was a poetry, a magic, in Dmitri Mendeleev’s “periodic table,” first put forward on March 6, 1869. Mendeleev’s mixed, often interrupted education included Orthodox theology and the new technology, and moved him from his Siberian birthplace (in Siberia, 1834) to St. Petersburg University and, in 1865, a tenured post in inorganic chemistry. At that time, only about 56 atomic elements had been identified. New ones were coming along at a good pace. In the process, full of fascinating stories, some scientists had recently noticed a ‘periodicity’ in the elements’ chemical qualities (such as their interactivity with other elements). Mendeleev was compiling a reference work on the qualities of the known elements when he dreamed up (literally) his “periodic table.” Awakening, he feverishly filled out the details of his dream and presented the whole thing as a scientific paper to the Russian Chemical Society, “The Dependence between the Properties of the Atomic Weights of the Elements.” Among its revolutionary qualities, the paper predicted (with some inaccuracies of course) how the table would be filled out and what qualities these ‘new’ elements were likely to have. Mendeleev also accurately (and daringly) predicted two specific ‘new’ elements, which would in 1875 and 1876 be called Gallium and Germanium, discovered (of course) by a French and then by a German scientist. For a non-scientist like me, the whole thing made sense (I was untroubled by the Table’s several irregularities), enough sense that Professor Macdiarmid awarded me a B+ in the Fall semester and then another one in Spring, and that despite making a fatal error on the second step of my laboratory final in qualitative analysis. Both grades were gifts, especially in the Spring semester when Macdiarmid served as my lab instructor. I have since remained grateful for Dmitri Mendeleev’s dream and for Alan Macdiarmid’s enthusiasm (and for that Rutherford water, too, I suppose). ©

[Stanley]

Good play makes good people?

Play under the right leadership and governed by the right tradition is the great teacher of moral conduct. Joseph Lee, 1927.

Joseph Lee was born in Brookline, MA, on March 7, 1862, one of the most Brahmin of all Bostonians. Brookline had long shed its original name of Muddy River and was assuming its role as one of the “Hub’s” leafier suburbs. By blood and marriage Joseph was allied to a cousinage made up not only of the Lees but also of Cabots, Eliots, Lowells, Perkinses, et cetera, a veritable pantheon of Puritan purple. But few, if any, were still ‘Puritans,’ for Unitarianism had triumphed among them, and with it they had assumed a great deal of responsibility to, and for, a society they considered to be theirs. Joseph became purpler still as he gained an education (at Exeter, then Harvard), qualified A.B., A.M., and Ll.B., and set about doing good works with his large inheritance. To aid in this, he married a not-too-distant cousin, a Cabot, and they extended their reach by engendering four children. Joseph Lee is indeed identified with children, for among his many reforms he particularly championed the provision of playgrounds. He’s known today as the father of the playground movement, became deeply interested (and expert) in their design, and advocated their construction by private charity and public authorities. His enthusiasm for playgrounds for kids owed to several factors, not least that he was of a time in which we learned to think of the child as a potential genius, the embodiment of our hopes. Lee’s wife (Margaret Cabot) was a leader of the American kindergarten movement, an easily naturalized German invention, and both were enthusiasts for developmental psychology, another new invention. So far, so good, and Lee kept up his good works (and his philanthropy) until his death in 1937—and then two of his children carried on after him. But like all of history’s moral lessons, he sends us mixed messages. Brahmin to the core, he aimed to preserve and strengthen his social order. A demon sportsman and athlete, he saw social salvation in ‘manhood,’ and his playgrounds were built for boys and intended to instill manly virtues. He chose his closest friends and allies from among society’s best elements, and found them to be White, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant. At times he intended his playgrounds to be open entry and to ‘whitewash’ the children who used them. But most of the time he was a national leader of the immigration restriction movement who came to conclude that prohibition was a better idea than restriction, because he feared it was politically impossible to restrict immigration to Saxons and Teutons only. So today his internet biographies read differently, depending on who wrote them and from which moral perspective. ©

[Stanley]

On the sanctity of life in Tennessee, 1945.

If I don’t worry about that today, I will have to worry about it tomorrow. Lilia Ann Abron, 2012.

One could say that Lilia Ann Abron had a head start in her education, for both parents had attended college (at LeMoyne in Memphis, TN), and though they hadn’t graduated they had ambitions for all four of their daughters. And for themselves. Dad was a Pullman porter and would later qualify as a teacher. Mom worked in a lawyer’s office and would later type briefs for the lead attorney in the case of the Little Rock Nine (1957). But to get a start in life itself Lilia Abron needed a boost, for she was born at home, March 8, 1945, in Memphis, and born prematurely, in peril. And in Memphis, TN, in 1945, black people (even preemies close to death) could not take ambulances. Since some lives were not yet sacred, an aunt called a cab and rushed Lilia to a hospital that would accept black folk. After that, things improved a good deal. Lilia Abron did well in school and just about everywhere else. Only 78 today, she’s a poster child for progress: a deacon in her Baptist Church, in Washington, DC, grandmother to six kids, a choir master, and (by the way) a distinguished environmental engineer festooned with professional awards and the founder of a successful engineering firm that specializes in designing low-energy houses and neighborhoods, not only in the USA (it has regional offices in Maryland, Massachusetts, and Florida) but in Mali, Uganda, Nigeria, and post-apartheid South Africa. In 1978 she decided to call her firm PEER, an acronym of course (for Pollution, Environment, Energy, and Resources) but also an old English word signifying equality, as in “peer of the realm.” And she’s anyone’s peer. Lilia Abron started out wanting to be a doctor, and had done very well at Memphis High School, but at her parents’ college she found biology a struggle and switched to chemistry. She graduated B.S. in 1966. From there she went on to study engineering at Washington University in St. Louis (M.Sc., 1968). Then it was on to the University of Massachusetts and then University of Iowa (PhD, Chemical Engineering, 1972). At all three institutions she stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb, not only black but female into the bargain, and she was the first African-American to earn an Engineering PhD in the USA (and only the third woman to do so at Iowa). She then fulfilled her ambition to teach engineering at university (in order, Tennessee State, Vanderbilt, and Howard) before moving over to the entrepreneurial and environmental side of her field, specializing in affordable, sustainable environmental engineering solutions. Lilia Abron cites Rachel Carson as her inspiration. In her lifetime, she’s advanced from that cab ride in Memphis to become an inspiration herself. ©

[Stanley]

Saving American Capitalism.

I can assure you that it is safer to keep your money in a reopened bank than under the mattress. Franklin D, Roosevelt, in his “Fireside Chat” of March 12, 1933.

Time was, US presidents weren’t inaugurated until the March following the November elections. Had that been the case in our latest interregnum, 2020-21, heaven (or hell?) knows what Trump might have got up to, but things were even worse in 1932-33. In retrospect, we know that the Great Depression had almost reached its nadir with unemployment careening towards 25.2%, the stock market dead, commodity prices so low that Iowa farmers burned their corn for heat. As usual, working-class folk and tenant farmers were worst off, but a rash of bank failures put the middle class at risk. Luckily, there was no disputed election. But the landslide winner, Franklin Roosevelt, was an unknown quantity, so uncertainty about what FDR might do added to the agonizing problem of what possibly could be done to avert total collapse. The answer came with the famous “100 Days”, which in new legislation and executive action saw a revolution in the way Americans looked at government and its responsibilities. And the tocsin was first rung by the Emergency Banking Act. Congress passed it almost as soon as it sat, and FDR signed it on March 9, 1933. It would lead quickly to a second law (June 16), the Glass-Steagall Act, and the creation of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. It also radically increased the president’s power over banks, transformed the Federal Reserve from watchdog to cash supply manager, and authorized the printing of “fake” money. Or at least that’s the way that the lunatic fringe of today’s politics would see it. It’s also called, from the same perspective, a dictatorial exercise by the executive power, and it did (ex post facto) justify FDR’s decision, two days after his inauguration, to close the nation’s banks. That, too, can look like dictatorship at work. But we should remember that FDR was merely following up on what the states (all 48 of them) had done in early 1933, declared “Bank Holidays” in the face of a nationwide run on banks, as depositors (mostly middle- and upper-class citizens) had rushed to secure their savings. Not only that, but Wall Street itself had, on March 2, voluntarily closed to halt any further collapse in stock prices. And the markets, freed from fear, responded. Citizens stopped running on banks (unless to make deposits!). Banks used their fake money to reassure creditors, even to make new loans, which made the money real. And when on March 15 Wall Street found the courage to resume business, it experienced what is still its biggest ever one-day gain, 15.34%. In 1933, American capitalism needed help, demanded it, and help came. Ninety years on, it is a lesson some have still to learn. ©

[Stanley]

Educator, orator, troublemaker.

There are as great possibilities in women as there are in men. … we want a grand and noble womanhood, scattered all over the land. Hallie Quinn Brown, 1889.

Hallie Quinn Brown was born in Pittsburgh, PA, on March 10, 1850. Her parents had been enslaved, but on securing freedom moved to Pittsburgh. Soon, finding the city no place to bring up black children, the family moved to Canada, but Hallie returned to the USA to secure her higher education at Wilberforce, in Ohio. Born too late to become a noted abolitionist, she came along at just the right time to become a noted advocate and educator of freed people in the American South, and then she lived long enough (99 years, in fact) to take up feminism (equal rights in voting, employment, and family life) as a cause she thought particularly appropriate to the problems faced by women of color in a racist society. In her feminist phase, she wrote and spoke of the problems faced by women with even “a drop or two of Negro blood,” not only denied opportunities as females but still subject (as under slavery) to the indignities and importunities visited on women of color by white men. After graduating from Wilberforce Brown went South as an educational missionary. Elder freed people, she thought, needed to learn to read the Bible for themselves, younger ones needed literacy to be able to cope with, profit from, their personal freedom. She taught in various places, from rural schools in South Carolina to Mississippi, but her own ill health and white violence forced her return north. There she armed herself further with instruction (and formal certification) in elocution. She already had a remarkable voice. Now, better trained, she returned to the fray, not only in the South but in fund- and friend-raising tours through the northern states and into western Europe. She even sang, and declaimed, for Queen Victoria. Today Hallie is remembered as a pioneer in speech training, but she never forgot that it was all in honor of equality. As a faculty member (Wilberforce, Hampton Institute, Tuskegee), as a public speaker, and even as a humorist Hallie Brown continued to roil the waters. She founded or played leading roles in local and national women’s groups, and in Washington DC led a successful fight against the erection of a monument—designed by the Daughters of the Confederacy—to the memory of the ‘Lost Cause’ of slavery and racism. That was one that we don’t have to demolish today. In 1926 Hallie Quinn Brown published a book about black women “role models” (not a phrase she would use; she called them Homespun Heroines), and settled down to another two decades of being an elder stateswoman in the movements for racial and gender equality. ©