BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

Women are too delicate.

A League of Their Own. Title of a 1992 film starring Geena Davis. And, if you insist on it, Tom Hanks.

The current panic (strongest amongst ambitious Republicans) to protect girls’ sports from the insidious onslaught of transsexuals is an historical oddity in a culture that has for a long time concentrated its attention on keeping females out of sports entirely or, failing that, to ensure that they play some inferior role in some inferior version of a man’s game. I well remember my own discomfiture when my Lancashire basketball club came up against a Preston works (factory) team whose star players (2 of them) were women. We (100% male, as far as I know) were trounced, and a couple of times I was left flat-footed when their tall and talented female forward drove past me for an easy layup. But my embarrassment was as nothing compared to that of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig when, on April 2, 1931, in Chattanooga, TN, they were struck out by a 17-year-old girl, Jackie Mitchell. Gehrig fanned, and his response is not recorded. But the Babe was called out, and didn’t like it. Next day he delivered his judgment, but rather meanly not against the umpire, saying that “women in baseball . . . will never make good . . . they are too delicate.” Jackie Mitchell clearly wasn’t. She’d learned to pitch from her neighbor Dazzy Vance (1891-1961), who’d led the National League in strikeouts seven straight seasons and, when he coached Jackie, hadn’t yet retired. He would be elected to the Hall of Fame in 1955, but never (I think) did he strike out Babe Ruth. In April 1931, Jackie Mitchell (1913-1987) was playing pro for the Chattanooga Lookouts, a Cincinnati farm club named after a famous Civil War battle (the Yankees had won it, by the way). A little later, baseball’s commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis (oddly enough, he was named after yet another Confederate defeat) agreed with the Babe that women were too delicate for baseball and, just to make sure of that, voided Jackie’s contract with the Lookouts. I’m not sure what they were worried about. Jackie was not the first woman to turn pro, but there had been only a few, so her exploit scarcely deserved such cavalier treatment. But then when you are defending the indefensible, radical action is called for. A gender invasion pierces tender skins. When the Hall of Fame finally got round to establishing a “women in baseball” exhibit, they called it “Diamond Dreams,” a clever but mean-minded way of saying that all those girls really should have stayed home, got married to the first boy who offered them a ring, and let then him be the family’s couch potato-in-chief. That was the way things were, and (ergo) the way things always should be. ©

[Stanley]

A modern Mennonite.

I found ways of maintaining spiritual independence while adjusting myself to established policies. Katherine Esau, 1973.

The Mennonite diaspora began as soon as there were Mennonites. They rose up early in the Reformation, here and there in the Rhine valley. But their beliefs seemed outrageous enough (to Catholics and to mainline Protestants) to fit them for persecution and, in far too many cases, martyrdom. So many took to the road. Strongly communitarian, they moved in groups. Today, five centuries on, Mennonite colonies exist across the world, marked off from their neighbors by their dress, their habits, and their devotion to ‘primitive’ Christianity. Among them, one of the largest groupings was that of the so-called Russian Mennonites. Their first exile had taken them to the Vistula delta, but they managed to offend their Prussian overlords and so moved further eastwards and, under license from the Russian Tsar, settled in present-day Ukraine where they continued their peculiar ways. It was there, in Ekaterinoslav(today, Dnipro) that Katherine Esau was born, on April 3, 1898. Her Mennonite community was then making compromises beyond their traditional multilingualism. Many welcomed the religious toleration promised by the ‘Decembrist’ revolution of 1905 and participated in politics. In 1916 Katherine herself went well beyond the minimalist education of Mennonite schools to attend the Women’s Agricultural College in Moscow, hoping to bring science to bear on Mennonite farming. That ambition never waned, but in Moscow the 1917 Revolution went too far towards modernism, and Katherine and her family fled, first to Berlin. There she picked up on her studies, but Berlin in 1919 was no place for a Mennonite family, and so the Esaus picked up and moved again, to an established Mennonite community in California, USA. In that more tolerant and peaceful setting, Katherine Esau turned again to the study of scientific agriculture, for a sugar beet company and at Riverside, the agricultural campus of the University of California. That led to a PhD (1932) at Berkeley and to a distinguished career in botany, with emphases on plant anatomy and viral diseases. Esau produced many foundational studies, and her first (Plant Anatomy, 1953) is now available in a revised edition entitled Esau’s Plant Anatomy (2006 and still in print). Esau taught and researched at UC-Davis until her retirement, then moved to UC Santa Barbara for two decades’ hard labor as emerita. Her last publication came in 1992 (a revised edition of Plant Anatomy). She remained to the end modest, quiet, and self-deprecating, and in those senses still a Mennonite-in-exile. She was remembered that way, too, at her funeral in 1997. ©.

[Stanley]

Astrology and Science

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings. Cassius, in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Act I, scene 2.

To see history as a progress towards some better future has always been a strong temptation. It’s one reason why, for decades, scholars saw the 17th century as that of the “scientific revolution.” After all, it produced Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton in England and, on the continent, such luminaries as René Descartes and Gottfried Leibniz, and it’s not much of a stretch to credit the five of them with creating our modern, scientific world view. But not so fast! Recently, we’ve responded very unscientifically to such problems as global warming and epidemic disease. Those episodes raise profound doubts about “progress” as history’s engine. And in the 17th century, such geniuses as Newton and Leibniz kept a lot of unscientific company. Newton himself spent as much time and trouble calculating the date of the Second Coming than he did on inventing the calculus or devising the Third Law of Motion. “Science” as a word still meant “knowledge,” not a particular branch of knowledge, and “scientific” and “scientist” wouldn’t see the light of day until the 19th century. And then there was in the 17th century a widespread fascination with the mysteries of astrology and alchemy. It was indeed a very unsettled time, and the promises of astrology (to predict the future or name the fates) were at least as tempting as “progress.” In the British Civil Wars (or revolutions) of the 1640s and 1650s, both sides (king versus parliament or cavalier versus puritan) marshalled their own astrologers. These intellectual entrepreneurs looked at the same stars and read the same signs, and their predictions reeked of propaganda. Since King Charles I was beheaded in January 1649, his astrologers proved be the wrongest ones. Chief among them was George Wharton, born in remote Westmorland on April 4, 1617. Brought up by uncles indulgent enough to send him off to Oxford, George made friends easily, including some we now recognize as pioneer scientists or eminent scholars. George himself took the more exciting route promised by the stars and planets. In Oxford and ambitious, he easily fell in with the royal party, and soon put out almanacs predicting triumph and a rosy future for Charles I. He also attacked (vitriolically but entertainingly) various “parliamentary” seers. Given the result, he got in a lot of trouble during the Republic (1649-1660), but prospered better after the ‘Restoration’ of Charles’s son, also King Charles. His rewards included a baronetcy, a country estate, and two lucrative sinecures. So we can say that Sir George prospered at least as well as some “scientists.” ©.

[Stanley]

Scientist and carer.

The moon carries the masks of meningitis into bedrooms . . . Frederico Garcia Lorca.

When our four-year old son was diagnosed with bacterial meningitis, we were offered an ambulance, but we drove him directly to Lancaster’s children’s hospital, the Beaumont. Although I knew that therapies were available, I was panic-stricken. I had been brought up on my dad’s stories about how his little brother Bill was saved from meningitis, Haemophilus influenzae, via the heroic nursing care of Ethel McKinley Bliss, the boys’ mother and, in family lore, a force of nature. Back then, the early 1920s, meningitis was almost 100% fatal, so Bill’s survival was thought miraculous. The experience left scars on my dad, who (irrationally) believed he was responsible for Bill’s illness, and so although I knew that our little Daniel was going to get good care it was still frightening. What I did not know then was that the good therapy itself was discovered by a distinguished American medic, Hattie Alexander, born into a large Baltimore family on April 5, 1901. She broke with tradition in a number of ways, by becoming a top athlete in her neighborhood, at school and then at Goucher College. But at Goucher, she (belatedly) became a good student, and with the financial help of another rarity, a leading woman lab scientist, got a public health job and then (at Johns Hopkins, in 1931) an MD. Alexander opted for pediatrics, then the most popular route for the relatively few female MDs, but with a scientific bent, working first with new treatments for childhood pneumonia at Johns Hopkins and then, continuing, at Columbia University. Her pneumonia antibiotic, based on rabbit serum, would soon be superseded by penicillin, but her successes moved her on to meningitis. Hattie Alexander is widely credited with developing an antibiotic which, on early trials, reduced the fatality rate to 20%: still terrifyingly high, of course, but a huge change. What was at first less well understood is that Dr. Alexander continued with laboratory work, not least because she realized that the bacterium quickly evolved its own immunities, and so she effected further improvements in “her” antibiotic. After a distinguished career in pediatrics and in science, Alexander died just a few years before Daniel’s “possible” diagnosis, which turned out to be a false alarm. When a few years later, our daughter got the same diagnosis, I was much less frightened. For I’d learned by then that our good Dr. Lawson had a ’thing’ about the disease, that the Beaumont was really a marvelous facility in Britain’s National Health Service, and that Dr. Hattie Alexander had been, indeed, both a caring doctor and a gifted laboratory scientist. ©

[Stanley]

Yet another foreign radical hero

Let each one of us remember what he owes to his country and resolve that he will seek his own good only in the good of all. Pasquale Paoli, in a 1762 speech to the revolutionary council of Corsica.

What do Steuben (Maine), Steubenville (Ohio), Kossuth and Elkader (Iowa), Lafayette (Missouri and too many other states to list), Wilkes-Barré (Pennsylvania) and Wilkes (Georgia), Garibaldi (Oregon), Kosciusko and Rienzi (Missouri and Mississippi), Ypsilanti (Michigan), and Pulaski (six states) have in common? Well of course they are all place names, towns and counties as it happens, but all were named after European (and one Arab: Elkader) revolutionaries and radicals. Some (e.g. von Steuben, Kosciuszko, Lafayette) came over to assist the American Revolution, but most fomented revolutions or radical unrest in their own countries. Another such place is Paoli, Pennsylvania, which was named after “General Paoli’s Tavern,” where in the years just preceding our own Revolution the Philadelphia Sons of Liberty and another foreign radical, the Englishman Tom Paine, used to gather to toast the health of “The General of the Corsicans” (by 1774, that was Paoli, not his father) and drink to the confusion of King George III (who was not a European radical).. Filippo Antonio Pasquale Paoli was born in a mountainous commune of Corsica on April 6, 1725. His father was a respected physician and a revolutionary, one of three Corsican generals elected by “the people” to win independence from Genoa. He lost, and took Pasquale with him into exile. There the teenaged Paoli was fed an Enlightenment diet, heroic tales of the Roman Republic and Athenian democracy, with a large dose of science. He would return to the island to lead rebellions the against (in order) the Genoese republic, the Austrian monarchy, and finally the Napoleonic empire, whoever claimed the right to lord it over native Corsicans. That Napoleon was himself a Corsican by birth we can regard as an historical irony. None of Paoli’s revolutions were successful in the long term. But he became a hero to enlightened Englishmen (like Joseph Priestly and Dr. Samuel Johnson) and, in due course, to American revolutionaries. So it was no accident that Tom Paine and his fellow conspirators chose to meet in the Paoli tavern. Nor that the town is now named Paoli, Pennsylvania. Paoli later became a major junction on the Pennsylvania Railroad. But in the days when our heroes were revolutionaries, Paoli was named for a hero. You will find Paolis also in Indiana, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, and Colorado, each probably a hotbed of radicalism. Incidentally, as a revolutionary general commanding against superior firepower, Paoli proved that he knew how to strike, draw blood, and then retreat into the mountains. So he was a model to revolutionary Americans in more ways than one. ©

[Stanley]

"The World Revolution Is on Columbia Records". (advertising slogan).

There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven. Ludwig von Beethoven (attributed).

Definitions of “symphony” tend to the circular (as in ‘a symphony sounds like a symphony’), and I am still not perfectly clear on the matter. But there’s no doubt that the circle was radically enlarged by Ludwig von Beethoven’s 3rd symphony, the “Eroica,” first performed in Vienna, at the Theater an der Wien, on April 7, 1805. Critics were divided on the matter. Some loved it. Others didn’t. But there was general agreement that it was something new. It was big and noisy. And it was long. Even one of the friendlier critics thought it would be much improved if Beethoven edited it down, left out a few of the horns, and brought “more light, clarity, and unity to the whole.” Or, Beethoven would be better if he returned to his earlier forms and wrote symphonies that sounded like Haydn or Mozart. But against that one might argue that the old world was, or appeared to be, crumbling away. The revolutionary armies of France had been on the march for over a decade, and revolutionary ideas had spread even further. Kings and emperors quaked in their boots, aristocrats remembered the guillotines of Paris during “The Terror” and felt their own necks for reassurance. In England (somewhat more quietly?), a whole generation of poets turned introspection into explosion. So why not in music? That seems to have been Beethoven’s intent. The “Eroica,” or the “Hero,” was almost certainly written to celebrate of the great man of the French Revolution, first consul of the Republic, Napoléon Bonaparte. To write it in Vienna, where the Hapsburgs were making themselves into the vanguard of the reaction: all that gives us a picture of Ludwig von Beethoven as Mick Jagger, or maybe even Jimi Hendrix. And Ludwig, still a youngish sort, was beginning to look the part, and play it, too. But it all went blooey, to coin a phrase. While Beethoven wrote the score (in 1804), Napoleon proclaimed himself emperor, and (the story runs) Beethoven tore up his title page and threw it on the floor, disgusted at the death of the French Republic. Instead of dedicating the work to first consul “Buonaparte,” Beethoven honored his own patron, Prince Esterhazy, possibly an enlightened despot but a despot nonetheless. My dad’s “Eroica” album (Bruno Walter conducting, on heavy 78s), repeated the story in its cover art, Napoléon’s campaign hat, black as night and on a bright red background, with Beethoven’s torn dedication page blotted out under heavy red X’s. The music remains, despite everything, with (perhaps?) the funeral march (the Eroica’s second movement) to remind us of what might have been, if only the Corsican bandit had remained true to the revolution. ©

[Stanley]

ingenue, actress, entrepreneur

I was forced to live far beyond my years when just a child, now I have reversed the order and I intend to remain young indefinitely. Mary Pickford, 1926.

The “talkie” torpedoed the careers of many a glamor puss from the silent era. Men who spoke falsetto and squeaky-voiced women could not be love interests (let alone heroes or heroines). How many stars (or how many more Hollywood hopefuls) sank beneath the sound waves is unknown, but the trope became legend in the 1952 blockbuster Singin’ in the Rain, wherein pretty Kathy Seldin (Debbie Reynolds, then only 19) had to do the voice over for the horrid Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen, not much older at 29). If you don’t yet know the film, please accept my condolences, but it ends inevitably with Kathy getting her role and her man (Don Lockwood, played by Gene Kelly), while Lina flees in humiliation, never to be seen (or heard) again. Another silent star who didn’t survive the transition was the truly legendary Mary Pickford, but not because of her voice. ­­More likely it was her age. She’d made silent history as the little “girl with the curls,” and indeed she was rather small (at just under 5 feet), but the birth of the talkie found her almost 40 years old, and having to find a different persona. Mary Pickford lied about her age all her life. Even her memorial (at her birthplace in Toronto, Canada) has her born in 1893, but in fact she was born on April 8, 1892. Her sensitivity on this point became itself a legend, and she played to it. Once in court, under oath, she testified that she was “21, going on 20”). But the reason Mary Pickford was in court at all (this was in 1959, on her 67thbirthday) was that she had made the transition to talkies by becoming a major Hollywood entrepreneur and producer. That was a role she’d begun acting in well before the advent of sound, and indeed shortly after she’d broken into the big time as a silent star. She’d begun in Toronto as Gladys Smith, a pretty girl with a plain name. After her Methodist father died of drink, she, her siblings and her mother made ends meet by acting on stage—little Gladys at the very tender age of 7. After years of struggle things began to look up in New York City when Gladys met the de Mille brothers, D. W. Griffiths, and a host of other legends. She changed her name to Mary “Pickford” (her mother’s maiden name), and adopted the visual role for which she was best suited. She was a sensation, married Douglas Fairbanks, started up a couple of production companies, and with Douglas held court (and conducted the businesses) at the couple’s new mansion, “Pickfair.” She played those business parts after the flunked sound test, after her first marriage foundered, and she played them to perfection almost to the end, in 1979, when Mary Pickford (née Gladys Smith) died aged (really) 87. ©

[Stanley]

what it is to be protean.

In this country, all a man needs to do is to attain a little eminence and immediately he begins to talk. I don’t blame the rich for talking. The fault is with those who listen. Charles Proteus Steinmetz.

Ancient Greece had a long history, and so its theology (which we in our wisdom call a ‘mythology’) shifted and changed even before it was adopted by the conquering Romans. In that sense, Proteus was a perfect divinity. Though subject to Poseidon (so we might call Proteus an “immortal” rather than a deity), Proteus knew all things past, present, and future. So he was much sought after by humans who wanted a peek into their fate. But Proteus was hard to pin down, for (among his other tricks) he changed his shape at will, even to slip, liquid-like, between one’s fingers. But at rest he was a sort of dwarf, odd and even horrific. So when professors at the University of Breslau (Prussia), ran into a student who was fiendishly clever and (yet) rather misshapen, just over a meter tall and with an outsize head, they called him “Proteus.” It was (probably) meant affectionately, for Proteus the Immortal could be read as having a sense of humor. So, later in his life, this brilliant, witty, self-deprecating and very short person adopted Proteus as his middle name. Along the way, protean-like, he changed our world. Charles Proteus Steinmetz was born Karl Auguste Rudolf Steinmetz, in Breslau, on April 9, 1865, into a family in which dwarfism was not an unusual trait. Baptized into the Evangelical Church, he added socialism to his psyche, and thus mutated into a very visible object of enquiry for the Prussian police, ever fearful of socialist dissent. For this and other reasons, he emigrated to the USA. Aboard ship, he impressed fellow travelers with his intelligence and character, and when at Ellis Island an immigration officer was turning him away (because he was a dwarf, after all) at Ellis Island, one passenger spoke up for Steinmetz, who was then allowed to come through the golden door. And he thought America was golden; so full of innocence (and innocents!!!) that good scientific engineering (rather than social engineering) could bring prosperity to all. Evangelical in that faith, he became a popular figure at Union College, where he taught, in Schenectady, where he lived, and though he remained in touch with radicals he preached and practiced the gospel of progress. Among other things, we owe to “Proteus” Steinmetz our alternating current electrical system and at least a little of our childlike faith in progress. As for Steinmetz himself, he read his Darwin, may have read his Mendel, and, in the certain knowledge that his human shape was genetic and thus heritable, decided never to marry or to propagate. He left us, instead, with our very protean electrical system and his name all over our maps. ©

[Stanley]

"I can but feel how little has been said when compared with all that remains unsaid."

Often the most thrifty persons are the most generous, because they can afford to be so. Phebe Lankester, in The National Thrift Reader, 1881.

Victorian girls, even perhaps the great queen herself, were preened for a constrained future. Educated by steely maiden governesses, kept at home or within the cousinly confines of an extended family, they were not trained to be ciphers (it was OK to be ‘lively’ as well as ‘lovely’), but to be maidenly, and in due course maternal. But many members of this intended female flock broke free of their corsetings (usually metaphorically): enough to think that there might have been pattern to it, a secret thread woven into the fabric of society that could lead to an unraveling and a liberation. One proper ladies’ skill, for instance, was to draw and do watercolors. Young Beatrix Potter traveled this route to freedom, starting with fungi she found in nature before breaking out into books about bunny rabbits and saving the Lake District. Potter rendered mushrooms so well as to become a recognized expert and to free herself from conventional expectations. For Phebe Lankester, it was also drawings and watercolors, but in her case of ferns, another primitive life form. Born a generation before Miss Potter, on April 10, 1825, Phebe Lankester (née Pope) made herself into a home industry, eventually publishing works (beautifully illustrated by herself) first on botany and then, as time went on, essays on diet, good habits, social responsibility, and the virtues of curiosity. Like Beatrix, Phebe was the daughter of wealth, cotton mills and banking, and privately educated before being sent off to a posh girls’ school in London. In her case, liberation may have begun with marriage, to a forward-thinking medical man, London’s official coroner, Dr. Edwin Lankester, who welcomed her lively intellect and drawing skills into his own vocation and avocations. So along with bearing eleven children, Phebe drew, wrote, and did watercolors with Edwin, on a lot of subjects but mainly science. On her own or in collaboration with Edwin she produced illustrated books on British ferns, then on wildflowers (their beauties and their uses), as well as hundreds of encyclopedia articles on like subjects. Along the way she advocated good, useful, scientific education (for girls as well as boys), and so when Edwin died (in 1874) she was ready to fly. Writing as herself or, in syndicated newspaper columns as “Penelope,” she produced yet more botanical studies but, increasingly, wrote about how people (not least, female people) ought best to negotiate the challenges of life. And she lived, of course, in Wimpole Street. Her eldest son, Sir Ray Lankester, would grow up to become the director of the British Museum (Natural History). And I suppose Phebe deserves some credit for that, too. ©

[Stanley]

Sorry for the break in service. No note received from Bob for yesterday and no reply to my email querying why. I'll post as soon as I learn anything.

[Stanley]

Against all the odds. . . .

I’d rather see if I can help a child than settle an argument between adults over money. Jane Bolin, on her career as a family court judge.

On July 22, 1939, Fiorello LaGuardia, the crusading Republican mayor of New York City invited a young lawyer, Jane Bolin, to join him at the World’s Fair at Flushing Meadow. She was surprised by the invitation and even more surprised when—at the fair—LaGuardia swore her in as a judge of the city’s Family Court. So was the nation, and the world, for thus Jane Bolin made headlines: she became the first black woman judge in US history. Jane Matilda Bolin was born on April 11, 1908, in Poughkeepsie, NY. Her dad, Gaius Bolin, was the son of a Native American woman and a black man. He was the first black graduate of Williams College and became a successful lawyer in Poughkeepsie (serving as president of his county bar association). Her mom, Matilda Emery, was a white Englishwoman of—let me guess here—interesting character. This “protected child” would later remember incidents in Poughkeepsie where she was denied service or otherwise treated badly because of her color, but she steamed through high school, graduating at 15, and then applied to Vassar. Vassar told her they did not like to take in students of color, and so she applied, instead, to Wellesley. She was accepted there (in 1925) but had to live off campus with Wellesley’s one other black student. Jane Bolin never forgot her resentments (she recalled Poughkeepsie’s “fascist” tendencies) but graduated near the top of her Wellesley class, and then against all advice went to Yale Law where she was one of only three women students and the first black woman to attend (and to graduate). After graduation, she first worked with her father but then moved to New York where she married a black fellow attorney, then after his death another. Both husbands were connected to Franklin Roosevelt’s unofficial “black cabinet,” and so Jane Bolin got to know FDR and, as much to the point, Eleanor Roosevelt. All this helped, no doubt, to bring her to the mayor’s attention, After the Republican LaGuardia elevated her to the bench, Bolin had a distinguished career as a judge, where she is said to have displayed “a broad sympathy for human suffering.” Perhaps we need her in St. Louis. No doubt she could accomplish wonders in Tennessee, too. Alas, even valuable careers last only so long. Jane Bolin retired at 70 (“they kicked me out” is how she put it). But you can’t keep a good woman down. After spending another three decades crusading for women’s rights and teaching math and reading to disadvantaged grade school children, Jane Bolin died at the ripe old age of 98.©

Judas is not at the bottom of my Inferno. Mary White Ovington.

Memorably, Ralph Waldo Emerson renounced his ministry and his church, accusing New England Unitarians of being “corpse-cold” Christians who cared about social reform only when it was safely distant. But in Emerson’s time there were Unitarians who burned hot (and bled red) for reform. Among them were the parents of Mary White Ovington, born in Brooklyn, NY, on April 11, 1865. They were Connecticut Yankees who’d moved to Brooklyn, NY, helped form its leading Unitarian congregation and, while they waxed rich and influential, campaigned for the abolition of southern slavery, against northern racism, and for the emancipation of women of all colors. It was perhaps inevitable that Mary followed in their stead. Educated at the Harvard women’s “Annex”, Mary chose career over marriage and over caring for her aging parents. But what a career!! She began with settlement house work in Brooklyn (then a separate city) before moving into Manhattan. It was not inevitable, given the temper of her times, that Mary Ovington would became a leader in the movement for racial equality. That can be partly explained by the ‘great depression’ of 1893-97, which jarred her loose from much of her inheritance and inclined her towards socialism. More important were her meetings with leading advocates of black equality. She was inspired by one of the last speeches of Frederick Douglass. Then she encountered the very real sufferings of the black poor of New York. In 1894, delivering Christmas presents to a poor family in upper Manhattan, Ovington met Ida B. Wells, the children’s aunt and already a notable black journalist. As her social circle expanded, Ovington moved to an in-depth study of black poverty in New York, work which introduced her to other African-Americans, including W. E. B. Dubois and a very young leader of the future, A. Philip Randolph. Spurred on by the Republican party’s abandonment of southern blacks (to Lynch Law and Jim Crow) but also by the anti-black race riots of 1908 in Springfield, IL, Ovington became a founder-member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She stayed on with the NAACP, usually in executive positions, until old age forced her retirement in 1947. She continued to write on such issues, including children’s books that are now probably banned in Florida. Her work went largely unremarked until, in 2009, Barack Obama’s Post Office introduced a stamp honoring—in white and black, so to speak—Ovington and her very old friend, Mary Church Terrell, a sister pioneer for equality. I’ve already ‘done’ Terrell in these notes; please take my word for it that this was an appropriate pairing. ©.

[Stanley]

The other Elizabeth?

The truth is, not one of us is innocent. We all have sins to confess. Attributed to Catherine de’ Medici.

Anglophone historiography had, for generations, made Queen Elizabeth I into early modern Europe’s greatest royal heroine. It helped that she secured Protestantism as her state religion, was queen when English sea captains (and a providential storm) made matchsticks of the Spanish Armada of 1588, and oversaw the gestation of England’s American empire. So we call Shakespeare an “Elizabethan” poet and playwright, though he could as easily be called Jacobean—perhaps justly, for his greatest plays date from the reign of Elizabeth’s shirt-tail relative, James I. But Anglophone pride aside, the title ‘royal heroine’ is better accorded to Catherine de’ Medici. Her surname handicapped her in the reputational stakes, for the Medicis are famed for ruthlessnesses, hypocrisies, and poisonings. Catherine was capable of all these failings, but over the last half century historians have been excusing her lapses and finding in her career evidence of underlying virtue, even a touch of modernity. Catherine de’ Medici was born (in Florence) on April 13, 1519. Her father Lorenzo was he to whom Machiavelli dedicated his realpolitik advices in The Prince. Catherine was given the chance to follow Niccolo’s suggestions with her marriage (1533) to the Duc d’Orléans, who would became Henry II, King of France. By then (1547), Catherine had begun to fill the essential role of a queen, producing children (eventually, 10 of them, of whom 7 survived). Three of her sons (and then her son-in-law) would be Kings of France, so one thinks she might have had some steel to her. Even before Henry II became king, she had established herself as more than a queen consort. She was a consummate courtier, witty, highly educated, multi-talented. She was also a Medici, and knew how to play the power game, and had been queen regent during Henry’s absence at war (with Spain). Henry II’s death in 1659 brought her another regency, for her eldest son was not yet adult enough to rule. And thereafter, through the reigns of three sons and into the rule of her son-in-law Henry of Navarre she played a central role. During the French wars of religion, Catherine attempted moderation between Protestants and Catholics, viewing ‘faith’ and ‘allegiance’ as essentially distinctive, and for that (as well as for her magnificent palaces and art collections), she deserves praise. Perhaps the best tribute to her came when in 1589 that son-in-law, the protestant Henry of Navarre, became king (and convert) under the realpolitik notion that Paris was (after all) “worth a mass.” That may have been what Catherine told him in Blois, just before her death. Catherine did fail, though, to marry her younger son to Elizabeth of England who remained, to the end, Europe’s most virginal of queens. ©

[Stanley]

tough kid makes good.

We come. We go. And in between we try to understand. Rod Steiger.

Hollywood musicals of the traditional sort were required to have happy endings and to be overpopulated with happy people. So it’s difficult to remember anything other than their rosy glow. But some of them did have villains. Even Oklahoma! had one, the sinister farmhand Jud Fry. His shallow intellect intensifies his menace. He wants the girl (Laurey), and broods on revenge when he doesn’t get her. Laurey falls for the right sort of guy (“Curley” of course), Jud gets his just desserts (death by gunfire) Curley is judged innocent (self-defense), and Laurey and Curley ride off into the sunrise. Rod Steiger played the Jud Fry character, and though he was then only 30, we might say he was typecast, not only for his looks (he makes Gordon MacRae’s Curley seem especially virginal) but for most of his previous roles, and in some sense for the life he’d led. Rod Steiger was born in rural Long Island on April 14, 1925. His father, a smoothie vaudevillian with a taste for booze, flew the coop early, leaving his mother to pick up the pieces, one of which was baby Rod. She did OK in the circumstances, which were pretty dire, and later Steiger would remember her fondly, but during his peripatetic childhood her main fuel was drink, and not a little of Steiger’s chip-on-shoulder persona came from defending his mom against the jibes of his classmates in a succession of city schools—not to mention his burley physique and ‘natural’ fighting stance. His aggressive self-sufficiency was developed further by battle service (navy) during WWII (he enlisted at 17). Afterwards, the GI Bill helped him acquire enough schooling to land him in a series of dull jobs, from which he rescued himself by attending drama classes. There he discovered a talent, which blossomed into a host of successful roles, often as “heavies”, on stage, in TV, and eventually in film. He hadn’t the looks for a leading man (no Gordon MacRae he), a blocky face decorated with a scar or two, and there really wasn’t much of a happy glow about him. His best TV came as “Marty” (a performance which Ernest Borgnine translated into a Hollywood Oscar). He was “natural” for the Jud Fry role, but that did not come close to his full potential, which was explored most fully in films like Al Capone (as ‘Scarface,’ no less!!), The Pawnbroker, and then In the Heat of the Night. There, as Sheriff Bill Gillespie, Steiger reprised his own life. His die-hard, life-long Dixie bigot is transfixed and transformed by Sidney Poitier’s sensitive and courageous “Mister Tibbs.” There was much more to come, but that one was Steiger’s best, and it won him the best actor Oscar for 1967. It’s how I want to remember him. ©

[Stanley]

My problem is that while other people are reading fifty books I'm reading one book fifty times.

It wants to be read by the fire in a gentleman's leather easy chair -- not on a secondhand studio couch in a one-room hovel in a broken-down brownstone front. Helene Hanff to Frank Doel, 1950, on a collector’s edition of Cardinal Newman’s The Idea of a University(1852).

Taxes are, as Mr. Justice Holmes said, “what we pay for civilized society.” It wasn’t an original thought, but it is a modern one, for it reflects the expanding role of governments in providing for our “general Welfare” (as the US Constitution (1787) puts it. Today is (and has been since the mid-1950s) ‘Tax Day,’ and I hope that Holmes’s formulation makes you feel better about the checks you’ve written. And as you settle down to another year reaping the rewards of citizenship, I can think of no better consolation than to read Helene Hanff’s wonderfully eccentric 84, Charing Cross Road. It’s a book first published in 1970, since revised and then (1987) made into a movie. Helene Hanff’s extremely civilized life began (in Philadelphia) on April 15, 1916, when Tax Day fell in March. It seems unlikely that her parents were heavily taxed. They certainly weren’t rich (her dad sold shirts), and when it came time for their bookish daughter to attend college, she could do so (at Temple University) only with scholarship aid. There she did well enough that it all went to her head, but was not rich enough to graduate. So after only a year of deepening her addiction to books Helene went off to New York to be, or become, a writer. A writer of books, she hoped, but in depression New York (and as a young woman) reality required her to write quicker and shorter, including I suspect advertising copy. What she soon became was a “journeywoman writer” (her own phrase) best known for patching up and filling out the short plays of other writers, usually better-known and better-paid. But she earned enough money to rent a small apartment, to fill it up with books, and to read her way to a civilized life. And not just any old (or new) book. She had a yen for rarities. In her search for rarities that she could afford, she settled on a London used and antiquarian bookseller, Marks & Co. of 84 Charing Cross Road, and on its chief buyer, Frank Doel. Her twenty-year correspondence (from 1949) with Doel forms the basis of 84, Charing Cross Road, and though it all ends very sadly, with Doel’s death in 1969 and then Ms. Hanff’s first physical visit to Marks & Co., it is weighted up with the civilizing pleasures one can find as an active reader. Helene Hanff lived on, never paying very much in taxes, rooting for the Dodgers and then, after their Los Angeles apostasy, for the Mets, founding a local Democratic Party Club, and writing decent journeywoman stuff (including two more memoirs). Full of years, cigarette smoke, and gin (the latter taken steadily though in moderation), Helene Hanff died on April 11, 1997, leaving behind her a lot of books, a few of them her own, and just missing Tax Day. ©.

[Stanley]

Modernity triumphant.

Unfed and unmarshalled, outworn and outnumbered,
All hopeless and fearless, as fiercely they fought.
--From the poem “Culloden,” by Andrew Lang (1844-1912).

One of my favorite college textbooks, Junior year, was The British Common People, 1746-1938, authored by G. D. H. Cole (1889-1959) and Raymond Postgate (1896-1971). I’ve lost it, or left it, and can no longer tell you much of it, but I do remember that this massive book sets off with an almost poetic riff on the Battle of Culloden, April 16, 1746. Cole and Postgate were an odd pair, brothers-in-law with long pedigrees and high-class socialists of a nostalgic temper. Neither much liked socialism as it came to exist in Soviet Russia, and both thought Hitler’s “National Socialism” utterly horrid. Cole, a classicist by training and a medievalist at heart, professed what he called “guild socialism,” a softish anarchy wherein each workplace would be managed (and owned) by its workforce. In his old age, Postgate enjoyed a mild notoriety by insisting on the virtues of British cookery and evangelizing for wines that were cheap enough for the common pocketbook and yet good enough to educate the common palate. So I should not have been surprised that these authors cast a romantic haze over the appalling bloodshed of Culloden. In terms of military confrontation it was the last pitched battle fought on British soil (a marshy moorland just to the east of Inverness). It’s characterized as a British victory, but both armies were ‘British,’ Scots highlanders versus ‘the rest,’ and the fight was dreadfully short. The highland clans suffered 50% casualties, mostly deaths, and the rest fled the field. Their cause was ‘Jacobitism,’ the decades-old effort to restore the Stuart line to the British throne, and their Stuart hero—Bonnie Prince Charlie—fled before them, eventually back to France. Culloden, indeed, could be seen as a chapter in Britain’s long war with France. Scots nationalists tend to see it as an English victory over Scotland (and thus a chapter in a much longer war, still in progress). Because of the residual strength of Catholicism amongst highland folk, Culloden can also be an old-style religious war. But for Cole and Postgate Culloden was, and it symbolized, the victory of modernity over tradition. Their highlanders fought as clansmen and by clan. The Brits (English, lowland Scots, mercenaries) fought by division and with modern weaponry (artillery cannisters, cavalry charges, massed musketry). And the British followed up their victory by making highland traditions illegal (although kilts, cabers, clans and claymores would be resurrected in the Victorians’ ‘invention of tradition’). For Cole and Postgate, Culloden as symbol destroyed the “clan” and created the “class.” Right or wrong, it’s worth a read. ©.

[Stanley]

Citizen, scholar, free man.

Nor Virtue’s self, nor prudence are confin’d
To colour; none imbues the honest heart,
To science none belongs and none to art.
--lines “From a Jamaican portfolio”, by Francis Williams.

On April 17, 1758, a London bookseller put on sale a book of Latin poems by a Jamaican who had been made a British citizen in 1723 and was then (in 1758) making a living as a schoolmaster in Jamaica. It was not an unusual thing. Many colonists wrote in Latin and published in London. However, this book was written by a man of African descent, a black man who, moreover, was born free, in about 1700. His name was Francis Williams. Francis’s father, John Williams, had been freed (in 1699) and left property by the will of his ‘owner,’ a Jamaican planter. John Williams thereupon married Dorothy, a freedwoman. Francis was the eldest of their several children. All these kids were pretty black, so theirs is not a story of the Jamaican ‘colored’ aristocracy. John and Dorothy used John’s inheritance to become planters and slaveowners themselves, and to see to the education of their children. They sent Francis to England, where he was attached to the household of the Duke of Montagu, whose experience as a colonial royal governor (and his eccentricities?) led him to think that the enslaved Africans of British America were badly treated people who might, if enabled, accomplish much. Some of Montagu’s “experiments” worked well, including Job Ben Solomon, Ignatius Sancho, and Francis Williams (whose oil-on-canvas portraits all hang today in leading British museums). Francis Williams learned good manners as an apprentice butler in the Montagu household, by sailing through the local grammar school, and by becoming a subject of discussion in Lord Montagu’s local learned society. Williams may have attended Cambridge, and may (like Ben Solomon) have become acquainted with General James Oglethorpe, a a governor of the Royal African Company and who would become the founder of a colony (Georgia) where slavery was to be prohibited. As for Francis Williams, after becoming a British citizen, he returned to Jamaica to found a grammar school for black children and to become an object of fear and suspicion. A society based on racial slavery found his both his presence and his persona to be dangerous. Williams once (ca. 1725) had the temerity to defend himself against an attack by an enraged white man, first in fisticuffs but then (with equal success) in court. In response, the Jamaican assembly made a law which explicitly prohibited persons of color (free or enslaved) to defend themselves against any white person for any reason. Thus we learn that Lord Montagu’s beneficent paternalism could not mitigate, let alone end, the slave systems of British America. Nor could Francis Williams’s learning, nor his courage. ©

[Stanley]

Heart and brain are the two lords of life.

Instead, therefore, of saying that Man is the creature of Circumstance, it would be nearer the mark to say that Man is the architect of Circumstance. It is Character which builds an existence out of Circumstance. George Henry Lewes, 1855, in his study of Goethe.

One has to concede that there are not too many men best known to history for their relationship to a woman, but one such was George Henry Lewes, born in London on April 18, 1817. In the eyes of 19th-century English society, he started badly by being illegitimate, the product of a minor poet’s brief fling. Lewes’s mother then married a sea captain, which brought him a rather peripatetic education. Indeed, it’s better to see him as self-taught, very possibly the most accomplished autodidact of his age, and like many autodidacts he regarded himself as superior to more ‘established’ figures in intellect and in the breadth of his interests in literature, philosophy, and science. His first notoriety, however, came with his “open marriage” with Agnes Jarvis, an unconventional arrangement that made it impossible for Lewes to divorce her when she bore another man’s child (he could scarcely complain of her dalliances). But in 1854 Lewes left Agnes for yet another woman. With her he found lasting happiness and, more to the point of this essay, lasting fame, for his new companion, his ‘wife’ as he defiantly called her, was Mary Ann Evans, soon to be better known as “George Eliot,” the author of seven novels, several of them, including Middlemarch (1872), which quickly became classics. Affairs were not as uncommon in Victorian England as Victorian moralists may have wished, but it was unusual for an illicit relationship to be publicly and proudly flaunted, as both Evans and Lewes clearly did. And Lewes himself was no slouch as a writer, in several fields now regarded as widely separate. George Eliot appreciated his genius in all of them, and who are we to say otherwise? In private letters and in public print, she defended Lewes’ scientific work against attack from such as Thomas Henry Huxley. During their lives together (her time with him included her most productive period as a writer) she worked him and his challenges into her novels, especially Middlemarch (1872). And then after Lewes’ early death in 1878, Eliot spent two years completing (and editing) his multivolume Problems of Life and Mind, essays in which he attempted a union of science and philosophy, and more than that it is said that (at the very beginning) she picked her pen name as an homage to her common-law companion. Lewes, despite his lack of formal education and family status, made a name for himself as a writer and critic in several disciplines, and, besides his long (24 years) partnership with George Eliot/Mary Ann Evans, he counted himself friend and equal of John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle and a leading disciple of Auguste Comte. After Lewes took up with Eliot, he wrote a still well-regarded “life and works” biography of Goethe and seems to have beavered away, constantly, on Life and Mind. But her gifts were superior, and today it is George Eliot we remember before we think of George Lewes. ©

[Stanley]

From farm to mill.

I feel as though my labors for the public good are nearly ended. It takes time and that is my only means. Sarah Bagley, 1848, on her decision to leave millwork behind her for more skilled work as a telegraph operator.

By the time of the American Revolution, and certainly before 1800, rural New England was overcrowded. Overpopulation, wasteful farming methods, and the Puritan tradition of partible inheritance meant that the coming generation would not—could not—inherit enough land to feed a family. The persistence of high birth rates became a subject of satire for some, notably the Knickerbocker novelist Washington Irving (who for lack of better evidence or for the sake of making a joke wrote that Connecticut ‘bundling boards’ must have been riddled with knotholes). The opening of new and fertile farming lands in the ‘old northwest’ provided a solution for some, including several of my ancestors, one of whom walked from Concord, MA, to Madison County, IL. That solution, however, was open especially to young men with or without wives. Unmarried females stayed behind, where they formed the bulk of the labor force for New England’s cotton mills, a longer-term solution to the region’s productivity problems. Among these female relicts was Sarah George Bagley, born in rural New Hampshire on April 19, 1806. Her family was at first entrepreneurial enough to stay on the land, but in the 1830s Sarah and her aged parents moved to Lowell where she (and perhaps a couple of siblings) found work in the Hamilton Mills. At first the family operated as a labor commune, but an economic downturn brought about a reduction in wages, deteriorating work conditions, and a larger pay gap between male and female operatives. So in 1844 Sarah Bagley became a leader of a nascent trades union movement. Meeting first, appropriately enough, at Lowell’s Anti-Slavery Hall, the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association demanded better pay, a ten-hour workday, and other improvements in their lives. Sarah, who’d already made a local reputation as a writer, moved easily into literary advocacy. At that time, direct strike action was legally risky, and the Association tried the political route, petitioning the state legislature and making common cause with other reform movements. But the ten-hour day would not be law in Massachusetts until 1874. By then, Sarah Bagley herself had moved, to Philadelphia, where she continued her agitating, reforming ways, now with Quaker help. For her the best solution was marriage, in 1850, to an immigrant homeopathic physician, James Durno. The couple moved to New York, set up a family practice ($1 for the rich, gratis for the poor), and became successful manufacturers of homeopathic remedies, another solution, perhaps, to rural “overpopulation.” We’re still working at it, though not yet very well. ©.

[Stanley]

That man hanging on the clock face.

The more trouble you get a man into, the more comedy you get out of him. Harold Lloyd.

When Harold Lloyd was born there, on April 20, 1893, Burchard, Nebraska was a thriving place, and one with high hopes, too, for the CB&Q Railroad had just completed a branch line to the village. But Lloyd’s father, a man whose high hopes almost always let him down, found it too constraining and took his family west, to San Diego, CA, another railway terminus that would do better than Burchard. Mr. Lloyd didn’t, and although young Harold did finish high school he’d had to work a good deal of the time, often in a local theatre and in all sorts of roles, often (with the aid of makeup) in adult parts. That proved his passport to wealth, fame, and power, but first just got him a ticket to LA and the embryonic film industry. There his childlike appearance and persona brought him (with lighter makeup) steady parts in the Keystone Cops franchise and a quick training in silent comedy, visual gags, and breathtaking chases or, if the script demanded, breathtaking escapes. Better yet, Lloyd caught the eye of a young man with some money and more ambition, Hal Roach (1892-1992). At Roach’s new studio, in Culver City, Lloyd would begin his climb to become Hollywood’s best paid comic star, taking in even more than Charlie Chaplin. In 1929, the perceptive Lillian Gish would write (in an essay arguing that films were, if not the highest, then the most universal, art form), in 1921, that “the world laughs with Chaplin and Lloyd.” Indeed it did. His career at the top lasted about 15 years, until the advent of the talkie. He developed two stock characters, first “Lonesome Luke” and then the pale boy with black spectacles, plugging them into different plots (and differing social strata) with great success. He became famous, too, for his death defying stunts, on film, most memorably hanging on a clock face in Safety Last! (1923). Audiences especially appreciated him for doing his own stunts, and that was mostly true. But as his own producer (in the Harold Lloyd Film Corporation, starting in 1921) he also mastered the use of camera angle to make his stunts look especially dangerous. Lloyd also paid himself a great salary. He kept on making films after the advent of sound, but never again reached the heights, although he remained a respected elder statesman of the industry until his death in 1971. As for Burchard, NE, its population is today about 75, and sinking. That CB&Q rail line has been ripped up, and its premier (though not, it is claimed, sole) tourist attraction is the small, tidy, white house where Harold Lloyd was born, a cathedral of comedy. You’ll find it just a few miles north of the Kansas border, in Pawnee County. ©

[Stanley]

The countess of charity

What is the use of my means but to try to do some good with them? Angela Burdett-Coutts

At her death in 1906, Angela Burdett-Coutts was eulogized by King Edward VII as “after my mother the most remarkable woman in the country.” To merit such a high valuation, the lady had needed a fortune, which she received in two portions, the larger from her grandfather, Thomas Coutts, whose second wife Harriot made Angela the residuary legatee of the Coutts banking fortune. It was very irregular, Harriott being an actress and all, and preferring Angela over a tribe of other grandchildren. Perhaps Harriot saw in Angela a shade of old Thomas’s philanthropic spirit. At any rate, after her own parents’ deaths (in 1844) Angela’s inheritances totaled almost £250,000,000 in today’s UK £ values, most of it from Thomas Coutts. And she turned it right round to become the leading female philanthropist of her age. Angela Burdett-Coutts was born Angela Burdett, in London, on April 21, 1814, her mother a Coutts and her father Sir Francis Burdett: a radical MP who favored parliamentary reform, universal (male) suffrage, and further blotted his copybook by paying off the debts of the old, radical Tom Paine and then pensioning him off to the USA. In her life as Britain’s greatest (private) heiress, Angela generally eschewed her father’s political radicalism, but took up a legion of social causes and opened her several households (she spent some money on herself, too) to crowds of the reform-minded, including both Disraeli and Gladstone, John Stuart Mill, Hans Christian Andersen, and (perhaps most consequentially of all) Charles Dickens. Both Dickens and Disraeli used Angela Burdett-Coutts as model for fictional heroines. More to the point, Dickens piloted her philanthropy in particular directions, notably the slum communities of London’s vast and teeming East End, and particular channels, self-help projects (like her so-called “ragged schools”) designed to help the poor lift themselves out of poverty. Thanks to Wellington’s early financial advice, though, her fortune kept growing, and spilled over to the great benefit of the Church of England (or its evangelical, reformist wing) in terms of church buildings and bishoprics and—of course—funded self-help projects of churchly utility like sewing schools and bible classes. In 1871 Angela became suo jure Baroness Burdett-Coutts and a heroine even to the great Victoria. Her 1881 marriage to an American actor 37 years younger than she cost her (in reputation and wealth, for her Coutts estate had depended upon her marrying an English person), she kept on giving, and by the time she’d finished, in 1906, she was worth only £79,000. In that department, ‘giving it all away,’ Angela Burdett-Coutts (rhymes with ‘boots’) did rather better than Andrew Carnegie. ©.

[Stanley]

Becoming American? Or not?

When the quarrel had finally worn itself out they had found themselves at opposite ends of the earth, though lying side by side in the same bed. O. E. Rolvaag, Giants of the Earth (1927)

The historian Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932) was not the first to see the western frontier as (among other things) an effective theater of ‘Americanization’. Not only did the frontier shape American values, but it shaped Americans, making ‘new’ people out of those same immigrants amongst whom Turner himself grew up, in Portage, Wisconsin: by the 1860s, that forest frontier had soaked up many Germans and Scandinavians. In 1913, only 20 years after Turner articulated his ‘frontier thesis,’ the budding novelist Willa Cather (1873-1947) made literary hay with similar themes in her marvelous O Pioneers! Her main characters were Swedish, French, or Bohemian, all of them transformed into something else by the great, empty, high prairies of Nebraska. But both Turner and Cather were of traditional white-American ‘Anglo-Saxon’ stock. A real immigrant who explored similar themes was Ole Edvart Rølvåg, born in a remote fishing village in far northern Norway on April 22, 1876. Like most of his family’s menfolk, Ole took to the seas, and might have stayed a fisherman but for an uncle who had already emigrated and, when Ole was 20, sent him a passage ticket which translated him from fisherman in arctic Norway to farm laborer in Elk Point, South Dakota. There Rølvåg became Rolvaag, and through good fortune and his native intelligence he acquired a command of American English and bachelors (1905) and masters (1910) degrees from St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. Well aware of its own roots (Olaf was Norway’s patron saint) the college operated as an Americanization agent for its immigrant student body and also as a focus for cultural memory. Ole Rolvaag fit in well, not only as head of the college’s Department of Norwegian but also as a novelist and historian of the (Norwegian) immigrant experience. He wrote in Norwegian and drew many themes and much knowledge from earlier efforts, by Norwegians, to explain in words (letters, stories, poetry) what it was like to become American (or not) in woodland Minnesota or the Dakota prairies. Rolvaag’s most famous work, three Nørske stories published together in English as Giants of the Earth (1927), details an intrafamilial tension between looking forward (the husband) and dreaming backwards (the wife) that was familiar to generations of immigrants It sold like pannekaken, was made into a movie and then, in 1951, into a prize-winning opera. Meanwhile, Ole and his immigrant-American wife brought forth four children, one of whom, Karl Fritjof Rolvaag, would become Minnesota’s 31st governor, as a leader of the radical Farmer-Labor Party. I think he may also have been, like his father, a fisherman. ©.

[Stanley]

If I can't work with you, I'll work around you.

I think of the poem, "Mother to Son." "Life for me ain't been no crystal stair” but you got to keep struggling. You keep going because you want to. Annie Easley, quoting Langston Hughes, 2001.

In 2001, Annie Easley was interviewed about her 34-year career in NASA. The interview, was part of NASA’s ‘herstory’ project, so the interviewer questioned Easley specifically about her experience as a female employee, and that focus spilled easily into questions about what it had been like to be both black and female in an organization that was (when Easley was first hired, in 1954, at the agency’s Cleveland site) heavily male and overwhelmingly white. Indeed, in 1954, Easley was the fourth African-American woman in the then workforce of 2,500. It’s a long interview (over 60 pages of typescript), and in it Annie Easley was not focused on her ‘double minority’ status. She did remember a hurt, early on, when she saw that her image had been ‘removed’ from a job recruitment poster, and she also recalled a day in 1970 when she and a colleague decided to wear pantsuits to work, but her tone is neutral, laconic, these episodes recounted as slices of life. When talking about the 1970s, NASA’s ‘pink slip’ decade (known in governmentese as ‘reductions in force’), she mentions dismissals but without reference to sex or race, but recalls her embarrassment about the rudeness of the pink-slip dismissal of a young white male college graduate. But Annie Easley was born black and female in Birmingham, Alabama, on April 23, 1933, the nadir of the Great Depression, and she was raised in a single-parent family (by her mother), and she was no fool. Mom had seen to it that Annie had the best education possible for a black girl in Birmingham, and then Annie had gone to Xavier in New Orleans to study pharmacology. Along the way she’d shown good talent in mathematics and so, married and then divorced in Cleveland, Ohio, she applied for a job as ‘computer’ at NACA’s jet propulsion lab. She got the job, and then was retained as a mathematician when NASA moved to “real” computers. Her (relative) silences on gender and race do not conceal her self-awareness. She dressed stylishly (her pantsuit set off a relaxation of the agency’s dress code), she worked in agency-based community theater, she went back to college for a mathematics degree. She was angered that it didn’t lead to the right raise in pay grade, but then as the lab’s first Equal Opportunities Officer she traveled widely to recruit new talent. She tutored local kids in mathematics, and to top it all off she was founding president of the lab’s ski club and was, she announced in the interview, taking up snowboarding. I suspect that she succeeded at it, sometime before her death in 2011. Annie Easley was that sort of person. ©.

[PanBiker]

Hidden Figures

Recommended watch

[Stanley]

Historian of the American South

Soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time. Robert Penn Warren, from All the King’s Men, 1947.

The best American fiction is historical, and in two different ways. A good novel can be used as a historical document or vantage point, offering a window on the world into which it was published. So Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) nicely starts one’s study of the so-called “Lost Generation” of the interwar years. There is also a special class that are themselves histories, as in William Faulkner’s whole ‘Yoknapatawpha’ saga which (through a dozen-plus novels and more short stories) offers a history (circa1820-1950) of a fictional Mississippi county, and (underneath that) an interpretative framework for the history of the whole American South. The American South has produced quite a lot of ‘historical’ literature in both senses, not surprisingly perhaps. For, as Arnold Toynbee once noted, the South is a region to which history has happened. It’s not a happy history, which may be why, today, quite a few southern politicians seem so anxious to bury it. But they will have difficulty hiding the literature and those who created it. It’s too brilliant. No author equals Faulkner, at least not yet, but one especially worthy of mention is Robert Penn Warren, born in Guthrie, Kentucky, on April 24, 1905. His family, like Faulkner’s, was very conscious of its southern past, but Warren learned about it in a more scholarly way, all the way through Yale and then Oxford (England, not Mississippi, on a Rhodes scholarship). Perhaps that’s why Warren proved the more prolific of the two, and published more widely, with great success not only in fiction but poetry and criticism. He remains (I think) the only author to win Pulitzer Prizes in both fiction and poetry, and if they gave one for criticism he’d probably have three. His most famed historical fiction was All the King’s Men (1946), which one the Pulitzer for 1947, and it was very current history, centered on Willie Stark, a fictional stand-in for the very real Huey Long (1893-1935), a hick politician of gargantuan character who (but for his assassination in 1935) might have run for president. Warren’s Stark bears similarities to Faulkner’s Flem Snopes, rising poor white trash, but Stark has one or two redeeming virtues. Warren began with a more roseate vision of the South than Faulkner’s, stressing its agrarianism and, while not ignoring slavery, certainly not seeing it (as Faulkner did, from the first) as an inescapable Original Sin, a Calvinistic burden bearing heavily on the region and all its people. Warren would, eventually, come round, but in these two writers we have two equally profound interpreters of southern history. ‘Separate but (almost) equal’, one might say, a subtle distinction quite beyond the ken of our present generation of book banners. ©

[Stanley]

A poet of a practical sort.

By writing poetry, even those poems that fail and fail miserably, we honor and affirm life. We say ‘We loved the earth but could not stay’. Ted Kooser, 2005.

When (1958) Ted Kooser went across town from Ames High to enter Iowa State it was still a “college,” offering higher education in agriculture and the mechanical arts, and not a lot else. It was proud about it, too. The 14 names inscribed on the college library’s facades underlined the point. Most were scientists or agriculturalists (Darwin, Faraday, Knapp), and only two could be deemed ‘literary’ (Emerson, Shakespeare). But Ted Kooser had already been bit by the writing bug (in high school), and despite all the campus symbols of land-grant practicality he majored in English. At Iowa State, back then, the only way to commit that solecism was to take a Bachelor of Science in English Education. This Ted did, and became a pretty passable high school English teacher. But just as Iowa State College became Iowa State University (where you can now get BA degrees even in painting, let alone in English), Ted Kooser became a poet. Theodore ‘Ted’ Kooser was born in Ames on April 25, 1939, into a family bristling with ISC graduates. After graduating BSc in 1962, he taught for a while, then failed out of a writing MFA at Nebraska (!!!???) before succumbing to practicality by taking work in the insurance industry. But he had been a writer in high school, he did work on a student literary magazine at Iowa State, and he kept on writing even while selling life insurance (which he did until 1999). Since then, he’s lived on pensions, poetry, and smallholding surpluses. Writing, poetry, was at first very much an avocation, and his first volume (1971) was privately printed. His verse found an audience, though, and by degrees Kooser became popular. Popular enough to be named Poet Laureate (2004-2005) and to have a nationally-syndicated ‘poetry’ column. He’s also gained literary recognition, a passel of awards including the Pulitzer prize for 2005, and for years has taught creative writing (poetry) in the Nebraska program which failed him out in the late 1960s. There he is now Presidential Professor (of poetry?). As might befit a graduate of Iowa State College, he's produced poetry of a practical sort. It’s not technical, nor should he be called a regional poet (although some have done so). His poems are about daily things, ordinary lives, some ordinary deaths, the sorts of encounters we all have with weathers or with others like us. And he tells us how to do it, too. The Kooser volume I have is The Poetry Home Repair Manual (2005), a good place to start if you want a practical DIY for writing, or for reading, passable poetry. Today Ted Kooser is 84, and I hope he is well enough to look forward to tomorrow. ©