OneGuyFromBarlick

[Faulkner¹s] characters have no magnitude and no meaning because they have no more reality than a mince-pie nightmare. Fadiman on Absalom! Absalom!

We are now, some optimists say, entering the post-post-modernist era. Perhaps so, but thanks to the post-moderns and a few other massive cultural shifts, it’s very hard to conceive of the day when we had a national literary establishment, and quite impossible to recall that that establishment actually had a popular following. So Happy Birthday, Clifton Fadiman, born in Brooklyn of Jewish immigrant parents on May 15, 1904, and from that poor and humble start became a popular spokesman of high literary culture. Along the way he struggled (financially) through Columbia, graduated there Phi Beta Kappa,became friends with fellow students Jacques Barzun, Lionel Trilling, and Mortimer Adler, taught high school for a bit, was chief editor at Simon & Schuster, head of The New Yorker’s famed book review section (where he made a BIG mistake on Absalom! Absalom!), but perhaps most amazingly became a popular quiz show host/panellist on radio and then, when the time came, television. His most famous shows, all of which I remember, were “This Is Show Business,” “The Name’s the Same,” and “What’s My Line?” From this eminence, if you can call it that, he created the Clifton Fadiman Lifetime Reading Plan which, Honors College students will be delighted to know, started off with “The Epic of Gilgamesh.” Fadiman lived to be an intellectually active old duffer, aged 95, and more power to him, but by the 1960s his role as a popular guru of high culture had become obsolete. ©

Most Erudite in Mathematical Science, Glory of Italy and of Her Century--from an 1899 memorial to Maria Gaetana Agnesi, placed in the wall of the Pia Trivulzi.

The Anglophone world likes to think of itself as the progenitor of women’s rights, and often ties it to the rise of democracy. But another spur to the idea that women could (and should) be competent public persons came from powerful female monarchs like Catherine of Russia and Maria Theresa of Austria. Maria Theresa’s vast realm included northern Italy, and it was in Milan that Maria Gaetana Agnesi first came to notice as a child prodigy in languages and philosophy and later would be appointed by Pope Benedict XIV to the chair of mathematics at the University of Bologna. Born on May 16, 1718, Maria Agnesi dedicated her mathematics magnum opus, the Instituzioni analatiche (1748) to the Empress of Austria. That work is on (inter alia) the analysis of infinitesimals. Before then she had set Milan on its ear with her proficiency in Philosophy and Languages (of which she had completely mastered seven, including Latin and Greek). In her household she reigned supreme as the eldest of 23 children (!!) for whom, girls and boys, she served as tutor (one younger sister, named after Empress Maria Theresa, would become an accomplished composer). Our Maria’s Instituzioni was translated into four European languages and won her awards from both Empress and Pope. Maria Gaetana Agnesi inherited much of her father’s wealth and in 1783 founded the Opera Pia Trivulzi, a Milan home for the aged indigent. Having given away all her wealth, Maria died there in 1799, poor as a churchmouse.

A man is not finished when he is defeated. He is finished when he quits. Richard M. Nixon.

If family heritage means anything to a child’s life possibilities, then Archibald Cox might have defended President Richard Nixon against impeachment charges, for he was the great-grandson of President Andrew Johnson’s defense lawyer, William B. Everts. A quite different path might have been suggested by his uncle, the famed literary editor Maxwell Perkins. But in the Watergate crisis of the early 1970s, fate trumped heritage and Cox played a critical role in Nixon’s downfall. Cox was born to the American purple, on May 17, 1912, in Plainfield, NJ. He was privately educated at the Wardle School and St. Paul’s, and then went on to Harvard College and Harvard Law. He clerked for the famous judge Learned Hand, and then joined a prominent Boston law firm. During WWII, government service sent him on a different course, then into the Harvard Law faculty, in 1960 advisor to the campaign of John Kennedy, and then Kennedy’s solicitor general where he played an important role in civil rights cases. It was, however, his reputation as a mediator that recommended him to Attorney General Elliot Richardson as the man who might be able to handle the impasse over the release of the Watergate Tapes. It was Cox’s refusal to accept Nixon’s “compromise” that led to the “Saturday Night Massacre,” Richardson’s resignation, Cox’s dismissal, the Supreme Court’s unanimous rejection of Nixon’s case, and (finally) the resignation of the President of the United States of America. ©

Modern fluvial geomorphology begins with Robert E. Horton. B. A. Kennedy, 1978.

If water does indeed become the oil of this century, water conservation, runoff, retention and pollution will assume greater importance, and soon more people will know the name of Robert Elmer Horton, who was born on this day, May 18, in 1875, in Parma, Michigan. Born to a prosperous Congregationalist family, Horton graduated from Albion College and immediately apprenticed himself to his uncle, an eminent civil engineer. Horton’s first big assignment was a weir analysis (look it up), and he never looked back. Moving on to a real job in the New York district of the US Geological survey, Horton virtually invented the concept of (and the algebraic techniques to measure and model) the soil’s “infiltration capacity.” In long, he told us how much rainwater would run off, evaporate, transpire through plant life, and so on, and therefore how much would stay and sink into the aquifer. He also did pioneer work in the effects and persistence of water pollution, and was the originator of “stream chemistry modeling,” which PLHC students in the “CHERP” project learn about. Horton studied these things all his life, but his most important paper, summarizing his knowledge and suggesting new approaches to using it, was published only one month before his death, in April 1945. He is memorialized by the technical term “Horton overland flow” and by the Robert E. Horton Medal, given for distinguished work in the scientific fields he pioneered. ©

I have had many talents given to me and I feel they are in trust. I shall not bury them. Johns Hopkins.

In 19th-century America, many more millionaires claimed to be self-made than actually were, but Johns Hopkins made no such claim. Born into a Maryland plantation family on May 19, 1795, Hopkins certainly improved on his father's wealth, but not before the Quaker Hopkinses freed (and provided for) their slaves in 1807. Johns (named after his grandmother’s family) and his brothers then turned to commercial and industrial investment and entrepreneurship, at which he was astoundingly successful, particularly in railroads. But he never forgot his Quaker roots and his obligation to use private gain for public good. It is not well known that Hopkins helped finance Baltimore's water and sewage projects (in the face of the cholera and yellow fever epidemics of the 1830s and 40s), but he is famous for endowing the first true research university in the United States with what was then (1873) the largest single philanthropic gift in US history, 70% of his fortune (~$150 million in today’s $$$). Both the university and its hospital still bear his name. Most of the rest of the Hopkins estate went to scholarships, schools, orphanages, and institutions for the care of the elderly (most of them racially integrated). He made a separate bequest for his cousin Elizabeth whom he loved but never married. A noted abolitionist in a slave state, Johns Hopkins made his country estate HQ of the Union effort in Maryland and had from his youth worked to ensure that in his American republic all citizens would have an economic basis for their freedom. ©

Go west, young man, and grow up with the country. Attr. to Horace Greeley, 1865, but more likely John Soule, editor of an Indiana newspaper, circa 1852.

Circa 1915-1950, the dominant interpretation of our Civil War was that it shouldn’t have happened. Instead, issues that ought to have been resolved, and issues that would have died anyway (slavery, oddly, was thought one of these), were transformed into war by “a blundering generation” of politicians. It was a curious school of thought, and some of today’s odder politicians are thinking of resurrecting it. Before they do they should contemplate the deep roots of the Homestead Act, signed into law by President Lincoln on May 20, 1862. The idea that public land should be made freely or cheaply available to bona fide settlers was as old as European settlement. But by the 1840s “free soil” aroused controversy between northerners (who wanted to expand the idea) and the dominant southern planter class that had discovered an interest in an “expensive” land policy that would preserve public lands for the future expansion of the slave system and its handmaiden, plantation agriculture. Just so, to protect their slave system, southerners opposed protective tariffs, public support for transportation infrastructure, a national bank, and proposals for land-grant universities to expand public higher education. The secession of southerners from the congress allowed all these things to pass, in a rush, in 1861-2, after which the Union could pay attention to actually winning that war. The Homestead Act itself underlined how deep the regional conflict had become by making “free soil” available to women and freed slaves. ©

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Pope, An Essay on Criticism, 1711.

Alexander Pope was born on May 21, 1688, on the eve of the ‘glorious’ revolution that rid England of its Catholic monarch, James II. Born into a Catholic family, Pope thus suffered the restrictions that went with ‘recusancy,’ including residential prohibitions and ‘speakeasy’ schools (Pope’s Catholic schools were illegal). Add to that a rare form of tuberculosis, contracted age 12, which attacked his bones and brought other painful problems, and we have a stunted (4’6”) hunchback papist with rheumy, red eyes, short breath, and constant abdominal pain. Nevertheless the boy made progress, mastering several ancient and modern languages, becoming entranced with poetry, and gathering friends from among London’s literati, who saw and admired his great talent. He also met the woman who may have been his mistress and muse, Martha Blount. His first publication appeared when he was 19. He then embarked on a new translation of The Iliad, which was so successful as to give him a significant income and a rather fantastic house, full of odd wonders, in what was then a leafy suburb of London. He became friends with Jonathan Swift, and like Swift published a satire (The Dunciad, 1728) that won him no friends. He remains today the best-loved poet of his age, still famous for (inter alia) An Essay on Criticism (1711), The Rape of the Lock (1712),An Essay on Man (1734) and his still remarkable translations of Homer (The Iliad circa 1717 and The Odyssey circa 1726), which I purchased only last year. And have yet to read.

Come, Watson, come! The game is afoot! Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarl

It’s interesting that obituary writers often stress aspects of the dead person’s life that, later, seem less characteristic. Thus the New York Times’ 1930 obit on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle begins with and keeps returning to his deep interest in psychic phenomena. Sherlock Holmes gets much less space and poor old Dr. Watson and the supernaturally malevolent Moriarty rate no mention whatsoever. So much for obituarists, one might well conclude. Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the world’s most famous detective (Holmes) and the world’s most consummate villain (Moriarty) was born on May 22, 1859, in Edinburgh. His father and grandfather encouraged him in artistic pursuits, which eventually won out although a passel of rich uncles tried to educate him into a medical career at Stonyhurst and the University of Edinburgh. And indeed Doyle did doctor, but in the intervals between patients sketched out mystery stories. His first big success (£25!!!) was published in 1888, and very shortly thereafter Holmes, Watson, and Moriarty (and speckled bands and silent hounds) started to disturb the slumbers of the reading public in Britain, America, and beyond. There are interesting aspects to the Holmes-Doyle saga, but spiritualism and psychic research? These became Doyle’s obsessions after his son, Kingsley, died (pneumonia) in 1918. Doyle spent the rest of his life and much of his fortune promoting psychic research and psychic stories. It worked in the limited sense that after his death his family expected to hear from him momentarily. ©

The River will always have its own way. Mark Twain.

In Life on the Mississippi (1883), Mark Twain unforgettably summarized the character and standing of steamboat pilots, dwelling long and lovingly (for he had been one himself) on their intimate knowledge of the great river. They could read the muddy surface like a book, seeing instantly the snags, bars, and shoals that lurked beneath. James B. Eads knew the river just as well, but he saw it from the bottom up. Born in Indiana on May 23, 1820, and named after his cousin James Buchanan (who would one day be president), Eads was fascinated by—and taught himself—engineering, physics, and mechanics. Once in St Louis, Eads designed and operated a diving bell with which he could plumb the river’s depths and snatch salvage (or remove notorious snags). He prospered mightily and was known up and down the river as “Captain” Eads, running not only his diving bell but a fleet of salvage and snag boats. During the Civil War, he devised ways (including the first Union ironclads) of attacking Confederate strongholds along the river, and then of defending Union gains. So with the peace he was ready for his masterpiece, the Eads Bridge (1867-1874), at the time the longest arch bridge in the world, the first to be built using the cantilever system, and the first big bridge to use mainly steel construction. It’s still a beautiful piece of engineering, spanning a mighty tide right here in our own fair city and a fitting counterpart to Saarinen’s great arch. ©

WE are not amused. Alexandrina Victoria, Empress of India.

The British nationalisms that today threaten—or promise—the rending of the UK are supersensitive to the tendency to see the whole political nation, and its history, as “English.” We will leave the Irish nationalists out, because they want to be omitted, and the Cornish because there aren’t any, but the Welsh and the Scots know all too well that Americans, in particular, suffer from the habit of seeing (especially) the good parts of the island’s history as English, but have no doubts about which “evil empire” they gained their independence from, the “British.” Queen Victoria did as much as anyone to try to bridge these gulfs, but at her death in 1901 the New York Times had no doubt about her identity as the then longest-reigning English monarch, over 63 years, eclipsing even the flighty George III as England’s longest reigning, and longest lived, king or queen. Victoria, or Princess Drina as she was first known, was born in Kensington Palace on May 24, 1819. At her birth she was fifth in line to succeed, not a great position, but just to make sure her dad and mom moved to London for the birth, and so it was that after the deaths of sundry males of the House of Hanover, including of course William IV, Victoria peacefully ascended to the British throne on June 20, 1837, thus at 18 avoiding a regency, to the disappointment of her unpleasant mother. Like the first Elizabeth (who was an English queen), Victoria named her age, for good and ill. ©

Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Self Reliance.

Fate plays funny tricks on all of us, no doubt, but Ralph Waldo Emerson might have more cause than most to complain about it. A radical thinker in the classic sense (of getting to the root of things), quite irreligious by the standards of his own day (utterly rejecting, e.g., the divinity of Jesus and the Christian notion of a personal god), unabashed critic of creeping materialism, and constantly urging the young to kick over their traces and dance, before he died Emerson was celebrated as the high priest of American individualism, the prophet of profit. A lot of it boils down to careless (or, alternatively, deviously clever) readings of his famous 1841 essay, “Self Reliance,” first delivered, praise be, to a workingman’s club. His aunt (with greater accuracy) called “Self Reliance” “a strange medley of atheism and false independence.” Born on May 25, 1803, into a Unitarian minister’s family, Emerson predictably went to Harvard and predictably became a Unitarian minister and predictably married well (twice), but he quit the clergy and after that all bets were off. His declarations of independence were several, but try “Nature” (1836), “The American Scholar” (1837), and “The Harvard Divinity School Address” (1838) for starters. As new and fresh as a daisy he was, and daring, too, and yet the chattering classes (in the north) loved him. Beside the private income from his marriages, Emerson was a hero of the lecture circuit and his “Essays” sold like hotcakes. A century on, my father read him until the pages were dog-eared. ©

I needed a gimmick. So I dreamed up the drawl, the squint, and a way of moving. . . I practiced in front of a mirror. John Wayne.

John Wayne gets a tribute in this week’s Huffington Post, where it’s noted that his politics mellowed at the end of his life and he actually attended Jimmy Carter’s inauguration and (the Post failed to note, supporting the Panama Canal Treaty. So be it. “The Duke” will be longer remembered for his conservatism, his support of the Hollywood Black List (by which many writers, actors, and technicians were barred from film production because of their “communist” affiliations), and his openly-avowed racism (see his Playboy interview of May 1971) which, famously, did not extend to Hispanics. Born in Winterset, Iowa, on May 26, 1907, Marion Robert Morrison moved with his family to Glendale, California, lost his middle name to his baby brother, and then acquired the nickname ‘Duke’ from his dog (an Airedale Terrier). It probably fit him better than Marion. A football hero in high school, his first starring role was with the Southern Cal Trojans. But a surfing accident cut that career short and he turned to bit parts in the movies to make ends meet, essentially playing himself (silent films with a college sports theme). On the lot, he was discovered by Raoul Walsh, who changed his name to John Wayne, raised his pay to $105 weekly ($100,000 annually in today’s $$$$), and gave him his first starring role. The rest is history and Hollywood, including several great films (Stagecoach, 1939, for example) and quite a few potboilers, still playing himself. ©

What do I care about the law? Ain't I got the power? Cornelius Vanderbilt.

American economic history is full of ironies. Not the least of these is embedded in the life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, who owed his big break to (Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824) where the US Supreme Court voided a monopoly, and then later employed all the tactics of monopoly capitalism to become one of America’s richest men. Born on May 27, 1794, into a prosperous ferryman’s family, Vanderbilt bought his own boat and then became Thomas Gibbons’ business manager when Gibbons was involved in a legal battle to break the ferry monopoly that had been legally chartered by the state of New York. In a landmark decision, the US Supreme Court voided the monopoly, concluding that the US Constitution’s interstate commerce clause prohibited states from regulating interstate commerce. But young Vanderbilt listened and learned, and in his rise to eminence in shipping and then railroading employed monopoly power to destroy or absorb rivals, for instance by purchasing their stock, buying control of their suppliers, or in bribing a state legislature. In yet another irony, Vanderbilt’s great rival, railroad magnate Jay Gould (also a specialist in bribing legislatures), shared the same May 27 birthday. Their ill-tempered battles enlivened 19th-century journalism and remind us that great capitalists don’t always conspire together. Sometimes they conspire apart. Vanderbilt died, apparently of exhaustion, leaving us Vanderbilt University and the New York Central Railroad and a fortune ($143 billion in today’s $$$) to his heirs. ©

Religion. Yes, that¹s behind all my books. Patrick White.

A prophet is not without honor but in his own “country.” So the King James Bible has Jesus saying. Later translations render it weakly as “hometown,” missing the point entirely. In James I’s England, “country” meant county or region or (sometimes) nation, and reflected the fact that however widely prophetic voices are heard, they find few who enjoy hearing home truths. Novelists (the great ones, anyway) often write prophetically and suffer a like fate. Thus William Faulkner’ works were not much admired by southerners, and thus Patrick White’s first novels were labeled as “unAustralian.” Somehow that seems an even curioser concept than “unAmerican,” but indeed the literature Nobelist of 1973 was an Australian, even though born in London on May 28, 1912. His dad was an Aussie and the family moved to Sydney when baby Patrick was but 6 months old. He traveled a good deal in his youth, saw WWII through in the eastern Mediterranean theatre, but returned to Sydney in 1947 with his partner, Manoly Lascaris, a former Greek army officer. There followed White’s period of greatest productivity. His early novels were received more enthusiastically in the USA and Britain than in his own country, but by the 60s Australia (or at least its chattering classes) decided they had a genius on their hands, accorded him two major literary prizes, and after his Nobel made him Australian of the Year, 1974, which left the prophet in him bemused and mildly disappointed. ©

Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete. G. K. Chesterton.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton’s 1909 picture portrait has him quizzically regarding us through his pince-nez, his moustached face surmounted by an unruly mop of hair, the whole pose inviting us to (please) say something a bit more interesting than what we just uttered. His huge frame (6’4” and nearly 300 lbs) might sound imposing, but a number of friendly witnesses (G.B. Shaw, P. G. Wodehouse, H. Belloc) thought him more an overgrown imp. Born on May 29, 1874, into comfortable middle-class circumstances, his parents occasional Unitarians, G. K. (as he became better known) would be a critic, a biographer, a prolific ‘human interest’ journalist, a theologian-philosopher, an eminent convert to Catholicism, and (as I first knew him, in my youth) the creator of the marvelous Father Brown detective stories. These were moral tales in which a rather dumpy (though surpassingly pleasant) Catholic parish priest confronts a (usually) terrible puzzle and, using just a little bit more than his moral sense and his acute understanding of good and evil, solves it. Where Sherlock Holmes deduced, Father Brown intuits. Either way, the criminal is exposed, but there is in some odd way something more realistic about the Father Brown stories. And where Holmes had his Watson, a straight man if ever there was one, Father Brown had (or, rather, acquired) his Hercule Flambeau, who knew evil well because he was a reformed master criminal. The good priest has recently been revived by the BBC and you can see him cleverly at work on your local PBS station, but he’s better when read. ©

The movie medium will eventually take its place as art. Irving Thalberg.

In November 1944, in Baltimore, Dr. Alfred Blalock performed the first successful surgery to repair the birth defect that caused “blue baby syndrome.” The technique was invented by his black lab assistant, Vivien Thomas. It has since saved the lives of many children, but not that of Irving Thalberg, born a “blue baby” in Brooklyn’s immigrant Jewish community on May 30, 1899. Perhaps it was knowing his diagnosis that drove Thalberg to the heights of Hollywood and a brilliant career as a movie producer. It certainly led his parents to take special care of him, and it worked out well. In Hollywood, Thalberg gave life to his view that movies were more than glamorous stars and great directors. He assembled whole teams, cameramen, screenwriters, playwrights, novelists, stage and sound crews, and (yes) directors and actors, and saw to it that the team worked the film from concept to distribution, to a schedule and to a budget. His impact was quick, dramatic, and unexpected. At only 23, Thalberg fired Erich von Stroheim for inattention to production details. By the time the talkies came along, a bit to his surprise, this pale, slight young man was top guy at MGM (a conglomerate he helped to create) and the mastermind behind, inter alia, Grand Hotel and Mutiny on the Bounty, and the maker of (inter alia) stars Chaney,Crawford, Gable,Hayes, Harlow, and Garbo. And, oh yes, Norma Shearer, who was also his wife. Irving Thalberg died young, as he expected to, in 1936, eight years short of Blalock and Thomas’s equally brilliant collaboration. ©

The founding mother of a dynasty, two colleges, a church, and a grammar school.

In his truly revolutionary Common Sense (1776), Tom Paine devoted a whole chapter to proving that monarchy was bad in principle and worse in practice, and he poured much of his scorn on the 15th-century dynastic struggle we know as the Wars of the Roses, that “laid . . . the world in blood and ashes.” But even Paine might have admired the woman whose life spanned nearly the whole sorry story, who birthed the Tudor dynasty, and who lived long enough (and married well enough) to become a power in the land and to endow two of Cambridge’s richest colleges, Christ’s (1505) and St. John’s (1511). She was Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby, and in due course “My Lady the King’s Mother.” Born on May 31, 1443, Lady Margaret first married in 1444 [sic!!], clearly a dynastic match, but it didn’t stick and she was then fixed up with Edmund Tudor by whom she had her first and only child, Henry, when she was but 13 years old. After that, things got complicated and violent, as it were proving Tom Paine’s point, but through it all Margaret Beaufort protected herself and her son by marrying well, and fairly frequently, until the Battle of Bosworth Field (1485) made her Henry the King of England, Henry VII. It was Margaret’s fourth husband, Thomas Stanley, Earl of Derby, who placed the crown on Henry’s head. Some years afterwards, Lady Margaret took vows of chastity and, from 1499, lived alone and made her endowments, of which there were several in addition to those colleges. ©

There is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. John Marshall Harlan, dissenting in Plessy v. Ferguson.

When you think there is a hostile majority in the US Supreme Court, it may be better to look to the dissenters than to despair. “Minority” justices often expend considerable effort in articulating their view in hopes that today’s dissent will become tomorrow’s precedent. This has not always been so, but one justice whose dissents eloquently made the point was Associate Justice John Marshall Harlan whose Supreme Court tenure lasted from 1877 to 1911. Born into a Kentucky slaveholding family on June 1, 1833, Harlan played an important role in preventing Kentucky’s secession in 1860-61. He served in the Union Army and, eventually, joined the Republican Party, and in 1877 was nominated to the Court by President Hayes. Harlan’s role as “The Great Dissenter” is particularly interesting in view of his slaveholder background, for it was he who, alone, opposed the Court majority as it moved to subvert the Reconstruction amendments and return African-Americans to a disenfranchised, menial status. His lone dissents in the Civil Rights cases of 1883 and Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, forecast Hugo Black’s role in the Warren Court majority, notably by arguing that the 14th Amendment did indeed extend the Federal Bill of Rights to all the citizens of all the states. Ironically his grandson, John Marshall Harlan II, a justice on that “liberal” court, issued dissents that would in our day move the court in an opposite direction. Between them, the two Justices Harlan suggest that politics and law do indeed mix. Eventually. ©

I would say that the major thing [in my Mitchelville schooling was that] there was no retribution for being outspoken or a dissident. Clair Cameron Patterson.

It’s a leap from lead poisoning to the age of the earth, but science is like that, as the career of Clair Cameron Patterson demonstrates. Born in rural Iowa on June 2, 1922, and educated at Grinnell College, Patterson moved to the University of Chicago, and after working on the A-Bomb made great refinements in geologic dating processes in his 1951 PhD (using meteoritic fragments from Meteor Crater, AZ). By then Archbishop Ussher’s Bible-based estimates for the earth’s age (~6000 years) had been extended many times over by Lyell, Darwin, and Lord Kelvin, but Patterson nailed it at 4.550 billion years. He stated his margin of error at 70 billion years, but his research was so good that we still accept his base figure but insist on a lower margin of error at 20 billion years give or take. His lead dating techniques then took him in a new direction, as he discovered in the polar ice sheets compelling evidence that lead additives in car fuels had produced new and (given lead’s characteristics) dangerous concentrations of lead in the environment. His findings, published in 1965, brought forth the usual denials from corporate America, “research” financed by the Ethyl Corporation, which even succeeded in excluding Patterson from the National Research Council research team of 1971. But Patterson’s data won through despite the lobbying, and the resulting prohibition of lead in gasoline (1973) has led to an 80% reduction of lead contamination in American adults. Well done, Clair Patterson!!! ©

So much of our energy is spent in overcoming the constricting environment in which we live that little energy is left for creating new ideas or things. Charles Richard Drew.

Our national obsession with race has led us into a number of spectacular absurdities. Among them my favorites are the widespread segregation of cemeteries, the resegregation (!!!!) of the South Carolina State School for the Blind (in the 1870s) and the official Louisiana definition of being “Negro” (until the 1970s) of having ONE great-great-great grandparent of African descent. Given this distinctive record, the racial segregation of blood and blood plasma supplies, despite mounting scientific evidence that we are all of one blood, should hardly surprise us. Among the people who brought this nonsense to an end were Adolf Hitler and Hideki Tojo (the war they did so much to bring about, World War II, created such a compelling need for blood that such “niceties” as black and white blood became crippling luxuries). More instrumental was Dr. Charles Richard Drew whose pioneering work in the preservation of human blood for medical purposes was used by both the USA and Great Britain to build up blood supplies in military and civilian hospitals. Drew was born in Washington, D. C, on June 3, 1904 to a carpet layer father and a school teacher mother. He won a scholarship to Amherst College in 1922, graduated with honors in 1926, graduated second in his medical school class (1933) at McGill University in Montreal, then earned a doctorate in Medical Science at Columbia. And, oh, I forgot to mention, Dr. Drew was African-American, certainly by the preposterous definition then current in Lousiana. ©

Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things. Marcus Tullius Cicero.

Although we are (still) a young country, we’ve long since passed the point where we expected politicians to be consistent. Still, even though we are an egalitarian democracy, some minimal standards might be imposed. For instance, we might require that politicians who wear “conservatism” on their sleeves have an accurate memory of conservative accomplishments. So let’s remember that it was a Republican governor (George Romney) who advocated (and signed into law) the nation’s first public health insurance law. That was, however, not an exacting memory test. So today we recall that a Republican state legislature that passed, and a Republican Governor (Eugene Foss) signed, our first minimum wage law. That would be a bit more challenging, as it happened on June 4, 1912, but conservatives ought to have really good memories for such precedents even when they are 102 years old. It is also worth recalling the rationale for the Massachusetts law. Whenever a worker’s wage came to less than the worker’s “cost of living and the reasonable provision for keeping the worker in health, the industry employing her is in receipt of the working energy of a human being at less than its cost.” Such a practice, it said, was “parasitic.” True, the Massachusetts law covered only women and children and was only voluntary (at the time the Supreme Court was hostile to such legislation), but that concept of “parasitic” employers is worth remembering if, of course, we want to reverence our nation’s past. ©

[The Versailles Treaty is the] child of the least worthy attributes of each of its parents, without nobility, without morality, without intellect. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 1919.

It is one of the nicer coincidences of history that Adam Smith (b. 1723) and John Maynard Keynes (b. 1883) share the same birth date, June 5. It’s “nice" because so many today mistakenly view them as men of antithetical views, with Smith’s “invisible hand” and Keynes’s insistence on the centrality of government policy, but the NYT obituary of Keynes (1946) understood that they should be forever linked. Their moral view on the true ends of economic life is one we could do with today. Keynes’s “moral” political economy first came to notice with his lucidly written, damning study of the negotiations that ended WWI and did so much to plant the seeds of WWII. Produced at white-hot speed in 1919, The Economic Consequences of the Peace condemned the punitive, greedy and short-sighted Versailles Treaty. It had a huge impact, and (unlike many polemical works on political economy) proved eerily prophetic. Thus, when WWII did come around, Keynes (by the way one of the first to see the need for standing up to Hitler) became a key player in the thinking and the diplomacy behind the next peace, a chief architect of the post war international monetary system and the inspiration behind the US’s famous, and immensely successful, Marshall Plan. His labors in economic diplomacy, as he struggled to help the world avoid another Versailles, exhausted him and he died aged only 63. ©

I believe in Michael Angelo, Velazquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of color, the redemption of all things George Bernard Shaw.

Art, like literature, music, and movies, is full of ‘quotations’ as each creative generation honors its predecessors. One of the most quoted of early modern painters was Diego Velázquez, the most favored (and most prolific) of the court painters of Spain’s King Philip IV. Baptized on June 6, 1599, Velázquez would paint no fewer than forty finished portraits of his king, but not until he threw over his literary and professional training for a life in art. He was trained by two painters who preferred “realism” to the then-fashionable Platonic style of Raphael. Velázquez’s early works, then, were notable for their ordinariness, certainly in terms of many of his subjects, everyday people (“Old Woman Frying Eggs”) or direct, pictorial representations of biblical events. He came to the attention of the Spanish Court and, after a brief sitting, painted a portrait of Philip that won the young painter (he was only 24) a large commission and appointment as court painter. Philip’s was still a rich and powerful court, and the patronage vaulted Velázquez to the top rank of European artists. He was visited by Peter Paul Rubens, went to Rome to study the works of Titian, and painted a famous portrait of Pope Innocent X. If his influence spread far and wide during his lifetime, it continued for centuries after his death, and modern painters of the rank of Manet, Picasso, Dali, and Bacon have, in their own art, “quoted” Velásquez, who died in 1660. ©

Life is the leaves which shape and nourish a plant, but art is the flower which embodies its meaning. Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

We are now so inured to “progress” that we buy computer art and digital music, but early in the age of industrial capitalism there was a spirit of revolt against the machine and machine-made culture. You can see it in almost every major European city (from Prague to Paris) and here and there in St. Louis and other North American cities. Probably no urb was so transformed by industry, so fully integrated into the new order of things, as Glasgow, Scotland, and yet it was in Glasgow where Charles Rennie Mackintosh raised a standard of craftsmanship and design that refused to acknowledge the age. Depending on where and when you sat, in 1875-1920, this new standard might be “arts and crafts” or “art nouveau.” Mackintosh owed much to both, but it will be best to say he was a genius of art nouveau craftsmanship and design. Born in Glasgow on June 7, 1868, Mackintosh (and his wife Margaret MacDonald) were alive to other artistic possibilities than the heavily Victorian or the efficiently mechanistic, and turned to Asian precedent and the organic beauty of nature to produce lasting landmarks of architecture and domestic crafts. Many of their most appealing and enduring works are still viewable on line or in the flesh. Try the Willow Tea Rooms or the Queen’s Cross Church in Glasgow for starters, and then see if you can break the habit. These are emphatically places for human beings, right down to their door handles and drawer pulls, and they continue to entrance, inspire, and invite emulation. ©

A doctor can bury his mistakes. An architect can only advise his clients to plant vines. Frank Lloyd Wright.

It is very tempting to apply the cliché “fame went to his head” to Frank Lloyd Wright, for the man was (many say) insufferably egotistical. But he could joke about it himself. In 1953, accepting a prestigious award, he said, "a shadow falls; I feel coming on me a strange disease--humility.” The other problem in applying the cliché to Wright is that it seems he was always that way, from an early age wilful, sure of his genius (Emerson would have liked him), determined to make his mark. Whatever went to his head did so before people knew of his fame. So, what was he known for, when he became known for something? He was, he believed, America’s greatest living architect. And since he lived for 90 years, Americans had to get used to him saying so. Born on June 8, 1869, in Wisconsin, Wright apprenticed himself to Louis Sullivan, in Chicago, and learned enough from the great man to leave him quickly, set up on his own, and go about becoming our greatest living architect. He eschewed Sullivan’s skyscrapers and was most famous for buildings that hugged the ground, grew out of it, complemented its flatness, its rises and falls: in a phrase, “prairie architecture.” Americans didn’t much like his ego or his several marital flip-flops, and he was at first more admired in Europe. But he lived long enough to become a prophet with honor in his own country, and midwesterners can see his best work without traveling too far. It will be worth your journey to do so. To find them, look Wright up on-line or, better, read a book. As befit his fame, or his ego, he wrote many, and many were written about him. ©