BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

The bad girl of the Bronx.

No woman is really humble; she is merely politic. . . . No woman delights in poverty. No woman yields when she can prevail. H. L. Mencken, 1918.

In 1918, the ‘bad boy of Baltimore,’ H. L. Mencken, published In Defense of Women. Coming at the crux of the suffrage campaign, the book sold well; but, like the idea of full citizenship for female persons, it excited contrasting reactions. One might have predicted this from the titles Mencken played around with before settling on In Defense of Women: “The Eternal Feminine,” “The Infernal Feminine,” and (best of all) “For Men Only.” So his view of women in politics was not clear, and his scabrous view of male politicians added to the uncertainty. Butthe vote came anyway, and with it came the woman as politician. Looking today at the two youngest females ever elected as US Representatives clarifies nothing, other than that both represent New York constituencies. They are Elise Stefanik and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, each in her turn the youngest ever congresswoman (Stefanik at 30 and then Ocasio-Cortez at 29). Otherwise they have their gender in common, but not much else. Before these two, the youngest-ever woman in the House was Elizabeth Holtzman, born in Brooklyn to immigrant parents on August 11, 1941. At her swearing in, January 1973, she became the (then) youngest ever congresswoman, but she’d already packed a lot into her 32 years, including a brilliant undergraduate career (in American history and literature) at Radcliffe, then the female adjunct of the still all-male Harvard College. Then came Harvard law (she was one of only fifteen women there), success in private practice, and her primary election victory over the very ancient (and, I must note, very male) Emmanuel Celler. That made her a shoo-in for her general election victory, in the very liberal 16th district. And very liberal: she was my hero (or, perhaps, heroine, for I myself was not yet fully acclimatized to the idea of female heroes). She sued Richard Nixon for his supremely cynical bombing campaign against Cambodia, and was active in the Nixon impeachment proceedings. She went much further (correctly, I still believe) in charging Gerald Ford for perjury in connection with his pardon of the disgraced president. Elizbeth Holtzman went on to a stormy career in politics, starting with three further terms in the House. In 1978 she stood unsuccessfully for the Senate. Since then, it’s been ups and downs, most recently (2022) a failed attempt to win in NY’s 10th district. But she never surrendered. I suspect Mencken would have disapproved of this particular woman in politics. But he would have defended her anyway, for she was ‘the bad girl of the Bronx.’ I wish her a happy 83rd birthday. ©

[Stanley]

A stitch in time saves nine.

‘Bridgeport?’ said I. ‘Camelot,’ said he. Hank Morgan finds his niche in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889)

When “Yankee ingenuity” became a cultural cliché is disputed. It was well established by the time Mark Twain published his saga of Hank Morgan’s devastating time trip to King Arthur’s court. Long before, there was a real Connecticut Yankee whose invention (for ginning cotton, in 1793 or 1794) transformed the American South, not entirely for the better. We can also cite Eli Whitney for his later factory, wherein interchangeable and (nearly) identical parts made gun manufacture cheap and efficient. But the two decades just preceding the American Civil War were the high water mark of Yankee ingenuity. While the South slumbered, exploiting enslaved labor to export raw cotton, the North developed vigorous internal trades wherein the relatively high cost of free labor created strong markets for ingenuity. Among my favorites was Charles Goodyear, a Connecticuter, who in 1844 patented vulcanized rubber. Then there was the safety pin, the brainchild of a New York Yankee, Walter Hunt, in 1849. But 1851 has a good claim on being THE year of Yankee genius. There was the Bliss tin can (no relation, as far as I know, but the Bliss in question was a New England Yankee and many Yankee soldiers would keep their coffee dry in Bliss tins). 1851 also saw a hand-cranked washing machine patent, a primitive one still needing refinement, for yet another Yankee genius, James King. But the favorite must be the Singer Sewing Machine, the eponymous invention patented by Isaac Singer on August 12, 1851. Singer qualifies Yankee, even though his parents were immigrants. Born in 1811 in Pittstown, NY, he was abandoned by his parents in 1822 and left to the mercies of Pittstown. A runaway and a de facto orphan, he apprenticed around, including in a troupe of traveling players, but found his niche as a very inventive lathe operator. His fascination with moving parts, mainly interchangeable, led him to dream up a digging drill (1839), which he sold for enough money to resume his Shakespearean travels. Marriage and children spurred his inventiveness on, and his sewing machine came in Boston, a city as Yankee as they come. Like most of the inventions already mentioned, Singer’s was “derivative,” not a “first”: but transforming. Singer contested with several other equally ingenious (and equally Yankee) inventors for full patent rights, but like good Yankees they decided in 1855 to bury the hatchet, or the needle, and so the sewing machine was ready to make soldiers’ clothing in America’s great Civil War, which effected triumphs for freedom, for majority rule, for national sovereignty (Lincoln’s Republican Party went to war to make freedom ‘national’)—and for Yankee ingenuity. ©

[Stanley]

Dame Justice is blind as a bat.

Our constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. From Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896.

The judge assigned to preside in the case of the USA v. Donald John Trump is a woman of color, Tanya Chutkan. Such persons are no longer rarities, but once upon a time they were unheard of. The first female federal judge came in 1918, appointed by Woodrow Wilson (to the DC juvenile courts) while he was still agonizing over female suffrage. The first woman appointed to a federal district bench didn’t appear until 1949, again in DC. The first African-American district court judge was nominated by John F. Kennedy and confirmed by the US Senate by voice vote (which gave southern senators like Richard Russell the chance to mutter quietly) on August 30, 1961. He was then 50, and had traveled a long road to his judgeship. James Benton Parsons was born on August 12, 1911, in Kansas City, Missouri. It was intended that James should be born at home, in St. Louis, but (so to speak) he interrupted their trip. Parsons began his schooling in segregated schools, first St. Louis, then in Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana (segregation being then almost national), but when he and his sister reached high school age his parents decided to settle in Decatur, Illinois, where the public schools were open to all. Their mother stayed with them, while dad served as a traveling minister for the Disciples of Christ, already an unsegregated Protestant denomination. James excelled in high school (#3 academically) and was elected class orator in 1929, the first student of “the race” (as the local paper reported it) so honored. He stayed in Milliken to major in political science at Milliken University, but began his teaching career, college level, in music and at historically black colleges, first in Missouri and then in North Carolina. In World War II, he enlisted to defend freedom and gained a musician’s rank in the still-segregated US Navy. During his navy duty, Parsons was as an appointed military judge, perhaps as a token black in a race riot case (violence between black and white marines) on Guam in 1944. Unusually, some white marines were convicted and punished, and the experience whetted Parsons’ taste for the law. He took his GI Bill money to Chicago, got his JD in 1949, and entered private practice. Then, as assistant US attorney in the Northern Illinois district, he made waves enough politically, in Chicago and Cook County, to earn his judicial appointment. After he retired, in 1981, he gave a series of interviews about his career. They can still be read online, typescript testaments to both the residual power of racism and the good-humored defiance of an eminent black lawyer who began his working career teaching band music at Lincoln University, in Jefferson City, Missouri. ©

[Stanley]

Anti-fascist in two incarnations.

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. Winston Churchill, PM, in the House of Commons, August 1940.

It’s a good speech, one of Churchill’s best. What we remember from it is this tribute to the pilots of the RAF, youngsters most of them, who took to the air to shield Britain from the overwhelming might of Hitler’s Luftwaffe. Read the whole thing, though, and you’ll see it as a grim report on what progress had been made in what seemed, to many, a lost cause. But Churchill found what he could to instill hope, to praise, and laid it on with skillful eloquence. Of course he praised British pilots, which most were, but there were others, even a few Yanks. And there would soon be more “others,” very other, so great the need and so high the casualty rates. Among the best of the others was an Asian Indian, Mohinder Singh Pujji, born in Shimla on August 14, 1918, as his name implied a Sikh, a turbaned one. He claimed that his pagri, or dastar, and the long hair bound up with it, made him safer. Perhaps so. He did long survive his stellar service in the Battle of Britain, the ‘liberation’ of North Africa, and the air campaign over the jungles and mountains of southeast Asia. As well-educated as the son of a senior ‘native’ civil servant could be, Mohinder first encountered flying as an amateur taking a break from his training in the civil law at Mumbai. Soon he was a better pilot than lawyer, flying Himalayan Air Line’s planes between two Hindi holy cities in Northern India’s high country. By the time WWII began, Pujji was a flying officer for Burmah Shell. He was then first in line for the Royal Indian Air Force, and then, almost a year after Churchill’s speech, joined RAF Squadron 258, flying fighter pilot escort for dangerous daytime raids over the Channel. For the record, Mohinder preferred Hurricanes to Spitfires, but otherwise he certainly qualified as one of the few, shot down over the channel and rescued from his burning wreck near the White Cliffs of Dover. From there it was North Africa and SE Asia, many missions, hairs-breadth escapes, and the RAF’s Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC) for four years of almost uninterrupted battle service. After peacetime flying work in a number of positions, and a time in the USA as a pizza restauranteur, he returned to England, where he was not so well treated as he had been in 1941. He bore it quietly until the neo-fascist National Front used an RAF Spitfire as its recruiting symbol. Mohinder let them know exactly he thought of them, and again became one of the few to whom so much was owed. He died at 92 as an honorary Freeman of the borough and as a reminder that the Few were a diverse crew. Today Squadron Leader Pujji’s bronze statue, turbaned and clothed in an RAF officer’s greatcoat, stands at Gravesend and surveys the sky. ©.

[PanBiker]

[Big Kev]

Here's Mahinder Singh Pujji's statue for anyone who'd like to see it.

1692028164430.jpg

[Stanley]

By the pricking of my thumbs.

Why should I play the Roman fool, and die
On mine own sword.
Macbeth, Act V, Scene 8 (‘The Death Scene’), in Shakespeare’s ‘Scottish Play.’

This morning I find it poetically satisfying that the ‘real’ Macbeth, not Will Shakespeare’s imaginative pastiche, died—was killed—on August 15, 1057, at the Battle of Lumphanan. Shakespeare’s character had in him just enough of nobility to be a tragic figure, a character poisoned by his ambition, but the first ‘King’ Macbeth was a genuine brigand, an adventurer who parlayed his frail claims to legitimacy into a period of power, maybe as long as seventeen years. In a real sense, this first Macbeth (to give him his Gaelic name, Macbethad Mac Findláech) was a usurper. The tribal connections which vaulted him into a throne room proved not enough to keep him there. He did not theatrically die by his own sword. Like Shakespeare’s villain, he died in battle, but symbolically he perished by his own sword. As one of the witches put it, late in Act I, “something evil this way comes.” Lo and behold, Macbeth strides onto the stage, later to die at the hands of brave Macduff. So, in 1057, Earl Siward’s army killed Macbethad, thus removing a blot on the Scottish landscape and setting in motion forces that would restore the system’s legitimacy in the person of King Malcolm III. Shakespeare’s story is undoubtedly the better one, much clearer as a moral tale if playing a little loose with the facts—such as the facts were when Shakespeare plagiarized, then edited, the ancient chroniclers. Historians, being bound by verifiable facts, have more difficulty in sorting out who really was the bad guy, who the hero. Some have even suggested that Macbethad Mac Findláech was from the very first nothing more than a poetic invention of medieval chroniclers, a bedtime horror story designed to frighten the children. This morning, however, we’ve wakened to yet another cornucopia of fact about vaunting ambition and dastardly plots. And we have a clearer judgment to make. “By the pricking of our thumbs.”

[SCG Note. I wonder if Bob's alluding to Mr Trumps latest charges?]

[Stanley]

But there were beautiful things amidst all this misery.

It is all terrible and awful, and I don't believe we can disentangle it all in our minds just now. The only thing is just to go on doing our bit. Elsie Inglis, writing to her sister from the Eastern Front, 1916.

The poet Burns wrote in Lowland Scots, and when I first read him I needed a translation. Thus I concluded that Scots was a dialect, a bastard child of Gaelic and English. But it’s a sister language to English and, just maybe, an elder sister. So it’s no accident that old ladies in Aberdeen and Edinburgh claim that theirs is the best English spoken anywhere. Nor should we wonder that ‘Inglis’ is a Scottish surname. It appears first in medieval documents Latinized as “Anglicae”, but it means exactly what it sounds like in modern Scots, for these early “Anglicae” were incomers from the south, outlanders. Given the confused history of Scotland, some were traitors, some national heroes, but to which nation? Perhaps this clouded history of her patronymic made Elsie Maud Inglis a natural-born troublemaker. Or maybe it was her father, an anti-imperialist imperial civil servant in India, who lost his post because of his sympathies for the locals. These were not always sympathetically expressed, for he strongly disapproved of some ‘native’ customs in the highlands region of northern India, where Elsie Maud Inglis was born on August 16, 1864. He was dismissed, and Elsie was raised in her ‘native’ Edinburgh. She was well-schooled (her parents believed their daughters deserved it), she was well-connected, and her care for her ailing mother gave her an ambition to be a medical person. By Elsie’s time, that was possible (though still rare), and she trained at the pioneering Sophia Jex-Blake’s Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women. Even there Elsie rebelled (against Jex-Blake!!), sharply enough to be expelled. On achieving final qualification, Elsie Inglis set up her own hospital (for poor women), but she’s best known today for her own pioneering work as a military doctor in World War I. But not for the British! She’d volunteered at the outset of hostilities, but had been told to sit it out at home. Instead she founded the Scottish Women’s Hospitals for Foreign Service (SWH) and, by mid 1915 was a doctor at an SWH hospital in Serbia. There she tended wounded Serbian rebels until the rebels were crushed by the Austro-Hungarians. After a prisoner exchange, Elsie Inglis commanded an SWH hospital on the Eastern Front, again serving mainly Serbian units, until the Russian Revolution rendered her work moot. All this time, working with the badly wounded and dying, Dr. Elsie Inglis knew that she had bowel cancer and that it would be fatal. But she told no one. On her return to Edinburgh, she stood erect, in uniform, listening to her praises in welcoming speeches delivered by men. She died two days later, November 26, 1917. ©

[Stanley]

Some animals are more equal than others.

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which. Animal Farm (1946).

The George Orwell novel Animal Farm: A Fairy Story was first published, in London, on August 17, 1946. Its subtitle was given as Orwell wished, even though Animal Farm was a deadly accurate satire on Soviet communism. As such, it might in 1946 have been seen as controversial. The wartime alliance with the USSR had been utterly crucial in turning the tide against Hitler. Democratic socialism seemed triumphant in Britain with Labour’s smashing 1945 landslide. That may be why “George Orwell” (Eric Blair’s pen name) had encountered such difficulty in getting the manuscript published at all. But Secker & Warburg came through in the end, and rarely in publishing history can a book have been so well-timed. Animal Farm quickly became (and has remained) a best-seller, still in print, and still featured on almost every extant list of the “best” (usually “100 best”) novels. Whatever Orwell’s animating spirit, his novel became a propaganda piece. Certainly the subtitle “A Fairy Story” disappeared, almost without trace. To retain it would have been almost sinful, as if calling the Bible a ‘fairy story.’ I first encountered it as required reading in high school, where I learned how to give its main animal characters their intended human names: the head pig Napoleon as Joseph Stalin; the idealist pig Snowball was Leon Trostky, “disappeared” for his pains; “Squealer” the porcine embodiment of the Stalinist press, named for his screeching servility to power. And so on, down to the nameless barnyard beasts (some of them chickens) who mindlessly gave their all (milk, meat, and eggs included) to a regime in which, infamously, some animals were more equal than others. I don’t think, though, that in school my attention was drawn to the cynical donkey, Benjamin, who kept mainly quiet and distanced himself still further from the animals’ farm by concluding that “life will go on as it has always gone on—that is, badly.” More perceptive readers than I, indeed Orwell’s (Blair’s) own friends, took to calling him ‘Donkey George.’ Indeed, Donkey Benjamin gives us the more lasting truth of Orwell’s “Fairy Story.” The old Soviet Union is long gone, and instead of Stalin we have Putin, not a great improvement. On our own farm, a major political party is acquiring a cultish tint, its leader praised as a political being somewhat more equal than others, while its squealers put out their own fake news. Indeed, in the retrospective provided by 77 years’ experience since Animal Farm was first published, it has become something more than a fairy story. I think it’s just possible that the book will be banned in Florida, whose governor so dislikes stories about fairies. ©.

[Stanley]

War, politics, and language.

After your Highness has subjected barbarous peoples and nations of varied tongues, with conquest will come the need for them to accept the laws that the conqueror imposes on the conquered, and among them our language; with this work . . . they will be able to learn it, as we now learn Latin from the Latin Grammar. The Bishop of Avila, presenting to Isabella of Castille, August 18, 1492.

During our 28 years in Britain, our American English served us reasonably well. At least I think we were understood. But our ears never perfectly tuned in to some local accents. Sometimes our ear-tuning was worse than imperfect. Once, quite lost in the hill country to the north of the Lake District, we ran into a shepherd who gave us very detailed instructions to find our way back to civilization. We understood not a word of it. Possibly he was speaking Old Norse. On our travels elsewhere in the isles, we did encounter other languages, in north Wales and the western highlands of Scotland; otherwise, English was everywhere the conqueror. It’s not so clear in Spain where Castilian Spanish has had recently to share “official” status with six other tongues—and that’s not counting the exceedingly odd linguistic province of the Canary Islands. In mainland Spain, the ‘other’ tongues are mainly, like Spanish itself, descended from vulgar Latin. Other than the Basque of the far northeast, a linguistic mystery, they are all a cousinage, relicts of the old Roman Empire, and despite the dictator Franco’s efforts to stamp them out, cousins they remain. But Spain’s linquistic map shows them to be, in a geographic sense, fringe tongues. Spain’s central provinces, and nearly the whole of its Mediterranean littoral, are Castilian or, as we would say from the outside, “Spanish.” And that dominance is a story of conquest. Most dramatically, it was the “reconquest” of Iberia which established Castilian as the language of the future. This “Reconquista,” to write it in Castilian Spanish, was the centuries-long process by which various Christian princes stopped, then reversed, the expansion of Islam which, at its high point, had reached the Pyrenees and had even sallied northwards towards Angouleme and Paris. Its final success came in the last decades of the 15thcentury, with the union of crowns between King Ferdinand (Aragon) and Queen Isabella (Castile) and their triumph at the siege of Málaga, where their armies breached the walls on August 18. 1487. Then, as if it were icing on the cake, on August 18, 1492 (while the Genoese sailor Cristiforo Colombo was still lost at sea), scholars at Salamanca presented to Queen Isabella their Grámatica de la lengua castellana. The dedicatory, repeated at the start of this note, makes it clear that ‘castellana’ was a conquering tongue. ©

[Stanley]

The Democratic landslide certainly indicates a victory for the ruling class of this country, with the two-party system unshaken. But let no rashly pessimistic conclusions be drawn from these results. Vera Buch, writing in the journal Class Struggle, November 1932.

So wrote Vera Weisbord, using her maiden name, about the general elections of 1932. She had used other noms de plume before, and she would invent still more in a long life of working-class activism. I suspect that she would rather have called them noms de guerre; for most of her life she saw modern American society as a battlefield, and politics as a war between ‘the great working class’ and ‘the bosses.’ She called herself a communist, but she was not much enamored of the ‘official’ Communist Party USA. It was fatally flawed in several ways, notably its blind adherence to ‘Uncle Joe’ Stalin and its pusillanimous leadership. So Vera belonged to other, purer groups, in 1932 the “Communist League of Struggle.” She didn’t begin that way. Born Vera Wilhelmina Buch in rural Connecticut on August 19, 1895, she was a poor but upwardly-mobile second-generation American who did well in school (in New York City), then at Hunter College, and in a variety of academic subjects—plus painting. It was tuberculosis that derailed her. Already a radical suffragist when stricken by the disease, she learned about socialism as a patient, and emerged healthy enough to find an equally socialist husband, Albert Weisbrod. Together, they embarked on a career of radical organization, agitation, and writing, sometimes putting their lives on the line. Their first big push came in the famous lockout-strike in the textile mills of Passaic, New Jersey. You can actually see the desperate condition of Passaic workers and their families on YouTube, one surviving reel of a joint propaganda effort. Just as the employers (nine mills were involved) had used a favorite tactic of hiring workers from different ethnic and cultural groups, so the strikers had to build solidarity, and the Passaic strike (more than 13 months, ending in March 1927) did weave together various threads: socialists, communists, anarchists, and even, for a time, the American Federation of Labor. In 1926-27, Ruth and her husband were members of the International Workers of the World. They went on from Passaic to the even more famous strike (1929) at Gastonia, in North Carolina, where Ruth was actually charged with murdering the local police chief. Someone did kill him, and given the lynch-law mentality of the local authorities, that might have ended Ruth then and there. She was expelled from the CPUSA for her pains, but after a mistrial was declared she and Albert moved on to Chicago, where they continued to agitate, analyze, and write (and Ruth to paint) until their deaths in 1977 (Albert) and 1989 (Ruth). So they lived long enough for Ruth to see some of her 1932 predictions come to pass. ©.

[Stanley]

Build a better mousetrap . . .

Science and marketing can be learned, but inventiveness comes from within. Jerome L. Murray.

Wikipedia’s editorial methods (“open,” but not universal) provide a reasonable route to accuracy. I tell seminar students that, if they haven’t done the day’s reading assignments, Wikipedia is certainly better than nothing. As regular readers of these ‘anniversary notes’ must know, I use Wikipedia myself. But it’s accuracy of a peculiar sort, not so much ‘truth’ as a statistical consensus and, again speaking statistically, errors are certain to creep in. Still, it’s odd that Wikipedia has no entry for (and commits no errors about) Jerome L. Murray, born in New York City on August 20, 1912. He was not a prolific inventor, and his 75 or so US patents don’t come close to the top tier (a couple of obsessives have clocked over 10,000 patents). But I am pretty sure that everyone in the USA (and many worldwide) has encountered at least one Murray patent at least once. Murray was a bright lad (that goes almost without saying it) who steamed through high school and then fetched up at MIT, majoring in aeronautical engineering. Somewhere along that line, he fell prey to the inventing virus, and at only 15 created a windmill-driven generator. Murray sold that one to Crosby Radio, a firm not so much interested in lighting up the landscape as it was in news, entertainment, and advertising. After MIT, his first employer (an aeronautics firm in Cleveland) gave a $1 bonus for each invention. After collecting about $15 in short order, Murray founded his own Murwood Laboratories. His progress as corporate inventor was interrupted by a wartime spent as a test pilot, but soon it resumed. The list of Jerome Murray’s patented inventions is short, but it had reach. Among the least pleasant was a high speed dental drill. One now rendered obsolete was his television antenna rotator (we had one, briefly, so we could tune in Channel 17). He invented that at home, to avoid climbing out on his roof, then sold about $40 million worth of them. Another early success was a motor-driven hinged frame for raising (and lowering?) convertible tops. Murray’s electric carving knife was a passing fad, but my mom bought one for Sunday roasts and Thanksgiving turkeys. And then there’s the enclosed ramp, which protects us all from wind, weather, and stairs when we board (or leave) an airplane. Murray was proudest of his peristaltic pump, now widely used in open heart surgery and (for instance) in kidney dialysis. I hope you never have need of one, but if you do, you’ll be thankful for the life and works of Jerome L. Murray. And maybe Wikipedia will get its act together and produce an ersatz biography of the man himself. ©

[Stanley]

Grand old lady.

I am proud—no, thankful—to be part of a generation of young people who took a stand so bold to fight for their civil rights in this country. We were out in front. We were courageous. Esther Cooper Jackson, 2016.

It is true that women die in approximately equal numbers to men, but in 2018 the New York Times discovered that, since its founding (1851), it had accorded <15% of its obituaries to females. Well, we had been a patriarchal society since forever, but . . . So the Times launched its post facto obits called, at first, “Overlooked.” It was intended for women who should have had a Times obituary, but since 2018 it’s moved on to be called “Overlooked No More” and to include other underrepresented groups, men and women, people of color, a few trades unionists and others who lived their lives in service not to themselves but to a cause. NYT’s obit policies for current deaths shifted also, so when in August 2022 Esther Jackson died, she was not to be “overlooked” as she qualified on every count: female, black, radical feminist and trades unionist, a life lived in service to an ideal. Plus she had just turned 105, so her passing was newsworthy on yet another account. Esther Cooper Jackson was born in (then) rural Arlington, VA, on August 21, 1917. Her father had been a ‘buffalo soldier,’ an officer no less, and in 1917 held a government job in the Bureau of Printing and Engraving. Probably he felt the sting of Woodrow Wilson’s (re)segregating of the US Civil Service. Esther would have none of that. She worked her way through Arlington’s segregated schools to win a place in Dunbar High School, DC’s flagship for ‘colored’ education. Then it was on to an Oberlin BA and a Master’s at Fisk. At Fisk she married James Jackson, a researcher for Gunnar Myrdal’s America Dilemma who had his own ideas about how to attack the ‘dilemma.’ After his four years’ service in the American army (in Burma), the couple settled down to fight for freedom in the USA. Both joined the Communist Party in 1947, and both lived lives of activism and scholarship. James went underground in the 1950s, convicted under the Smith Act, and Esther turned to history and biography and the editorship of a literary quarterly. She published Baldwin and wrote serial biographies of Robeson and Dubois, all the while continuing to sit in at lunch counters and man (or woman) picket lines with the Southern Negro Youth Conference, a forerunner of the SNCC, which she and James had founded in the late 1930s. James died in 1992. Esther lived long after that, long enough to become one of the civil rights movement’s many grand old ladies, proud, undaunted, full of cheer, still looking forward. Esther Cooper Jackson, whose mother had helped to found the Arlington NAACP, was a woman not to be overlooked. She deserved her Times obituary, and she got it. ©

[Stanley]

And it is that word 'hummy,' my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up.

There's a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words. Dorothy Parker, 1956, in The Paris Review.

Today I start my umpteenth Honors College seminar, on “The Problem of Equality in the Era of the American Revolution,” where we’ll be discussing how much trouble “equality” causes—and the critical importance of good writing. So it’s a good day to celebrate the memory of a good writer and critic whose crusades for equality got her into all sorts of stink. She was Dorothy Parker, born Dorothy Rothschild on August 22, 1893, at her parents’ summer cottage on the Jersey shore. She was already an odd birth, with a Jewish father (not one of the Rothschilds) and a Scottish Presbyterian mother. When Dorothy’s mother died in 1898, her dad married yet another Scottish Presbyterian, who became perhaps the first object of Dottie’s acid wit, “the housekeeper.” A rebel against parental (or housekeeper) discipline, the child was sent to a Catholic primary school, from which she was expelled. Parker later said it was because she referred to the Immaculate Conception as ‘spontaneous combustion.’ So she never graduated from anywhere. But she wrote, poetry at first. It may have been a way to cope with her angers, but it did provide income and a sort of fame. She first published in Vanity Fair. But she found her real niche later, after her first (of three) marriages, when as a published critic and widely-known wit she became associated with the so-called “Algonquin Circle.” This was an exclusive but amorphous collection of men-about-Town, and women too, which met (sometimes daily) for lunch and liquids at the Algonquin Hotel. Most of the women were, so to speak, their own women, (Dorothy herself, Tallulah Bankhead, Jane Grant, Edna Ferber, Ruth Hale) who could take banter and dish it out. Perhaps because Grant co-founded The New Yorker, Parker became an irregular contributor, first as theater critic and then as “Constant Reader,” the magazine’s coruscating book reviewer. Her review of A. A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner stands as a dire warning to all who would infantilize children. At the magazine and the lunch table, Parker made friends, enemies, and lovers, most of them famous, most notably her “work spouse” Robert Benchley. She went on to two more marriages, both stormy, a productive career as a Hollywood screenwriter, and constant support of political causes. For these she was labeled a communist and made a member in good standing of the Hollywood Blacklist. She also drank way too much booze. But her lasting commitment was to black civil rights, and when she died in 1967, the greatest grumbler of the Algonquin Round Table left her entire estate to Martin Luther King, Jr., and after his death to the NAACP. It was her punch line. ©

[Stanley]

The Police and the Person

The law may be likened to a whimsical lady. It is an advantage to have knowledge of her character, but her embraces are to be avoided. C. H. Rolph [Cecil Rolph Hewitt].

London has been the home, or the stomping ground, of legions of successful writers, and of all sorts. But as a hatchery of scribblers, London’s most unusual accomplishment was the transition of C. H. Rolph from Chief Inspector to political journalist—not to mention essayist, biographer, and sometime sociologist, for he became all those things, too. But his was a career built by indirection. And his name wasn’t really C. H. Rolph, anyway. His nom de plume became one of the worst-kept secrets in the history of writing, for he was really Cecil Rolph Hewitt, born in London on August 23, 1901. His dad was a policeman, but his was not a case of chipping off the old block. A rebel, Rolph (we’ll call him that, this morning) left school early and tried several jobs, which he performed unpromisingly. One reason for his ill success was his scribbling habit. One employer fired him for it. Finally he decided on accountancy, but the fee for an apprenticeship was more than he or his family could afford, so (faute de mieux) he became a policeman. He wasn’t fit enough to join the Met, but the City of London police had lower standards (at least in terms of running down pickpockets), and that’s where Rolph started. (His father, an over-fastidious Chief Inspector, then resigned from the Met, not wishing to be accused of nepotism, even though the two forces were separate.). Our Rolph, the scribbler-cop, rose through the ranks but kept on writing, using the pen-name because of police rules against public expression, particularly of opinion, and “C. D. Rolph” was becoming more and more opinionated. His politics drove him ever leftwards, unusual for a cop, while his policing made him more and more concerned about the intersections between the law and the person. While he was still on the force, his superiors hid behind his pen-name (who he?) and relied on him as a speechwriter. After he retired as Chief Inspector, he joined the New Statesman, then identified with the intellectual left of the Labour Party, and became a crusading journalist, particularly concerned with the fate of the person as prisoner, the person as homosexual, and the person as the writer or reader of “obscene” publications. He was thus active in some great victories of the mid-20th century, including homosexual law reform and the successful defense of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. When Labour was in power, Rolph-Hewitt wrote People in Prison (advocating penal reform) for the then Home Secretary. He also wrote about people, not least himself (Living Twice, 1974) and his favorite political editor (of the New Statesman), Kingsley Martin (Kingsley, 1973). Rolph-Hewitt continued scribbling almost to the end, which came in 1994. ©

[Stanley]

Unitarian heretic.

Wealth and Want equally harden the human heart. Theodore Parker.

Among the great transitions experienced by the young republic was the decline of New England. Politically it was signaled by the election of 1800, which historians used to call the second American Revolution, as the optimistic Virginian Thomas Jefferson shooed his alter ego John Adams back to Braintree. A sharper contrast came 28 years later when Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, who couldn’t even parse Latin, sent Adams’s son John Quincy back to his books. Beneath the froth of politics, the Erie Canal vaulted New York City above Boston as the beating heart of the economy, and New Yorkers like Irving, Bryant, and Cooper (not to mention a couple of upstart publishers) dared to challenge New England’s cultural supremacy. But the New England brain was still abubble with ideas. And then it boiled over with the rise of Unitarianism and Transcendentalism. These had in common a skepticism about ‘revealed’ religion as per the Bible, helped along by German scholars who had begun to see both testaments as mortal texts written by mortal men. A strong New England statement in this regard came from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who could not tolerate even the mild restraints of Unitarian theology, left his Concord ministry, and dismayed even ‘liberal’ Harvard with his unfaithful ‘Divinity School Address’ (1838). But Emerson preferred private thought to public agitation, and the title of the most radical Transcendentalist must go to Theodore Parker. Born in Lexington MA on August 24, 1810, Parker had much better claim than Emerson to be a child of the New England purple. His grandfather might have fired the shot heard round the world at Concord bridge, 1775, and even further back Parkers were among the first founders of the Puritan theocracy. But Theodore was not one to rest on his family’s laurels. He scarcely rested on anything. He seems to have learned Hebrew on his own, and a couple of other languages, then stormed through Harvard College in one year. Thoroughly versed in German scholarship, his History of the Jews outlined his skepticism about ‘sacred’ scripture, and he graduated from the Divinity School a couple of years before Emerson’s shocking dismissal of ‘miracle’ as ‘monster.’ Ready to roll as a Unitarian pastor, Parker took a largely working class congregation to the edges of orthodoxy while, in politics, he was among the most radical of all abolitionists, embracing violence as the best way to overthrow slavery and the “Slave Power.” Parker (who managed to get himself tried for ‘heresy’ by the Unitarians) lived long enough to defend John Brown and attack Abraham Lincoln, but not to see northern victory in the Civil War and the destruction of legal slavery. ©.

[Stanley]

The chronicler of Roaring Camp and Poker Flat.

[The short story] was concise and condense, yet suggestive. It was delightfully extravagant—or a miracle of understatement. Bret Harte.

When young Sam Clemens was still dreaming about taking on the glamor and salary that came with captaining steamers on the Mississippi, young Bret Harte decided to light out for the territories (California, to be exact). Thereafter their lives would intersect, first as friends and collaborators. Their collaboration was not a great success, and perhaps could not have been, for they were both mining the same rich vein, broadly called frontier humor. Soon, collaboration became enmity, and Sam—as “Mark Twain”—would loose some of his best lightning against Harte: “a liar, a thief, a swindler, a snob, a sot, a sponge, a coward.” Harte never responded in kind, but perhaps not because he was the kindlier of the two. He was certainly no westerner. Bret Harte was born on August 25, 1836, about a year younger and a thousand miles further east than Twain, in Albany, NY. He was in a sense the child of a gold rush, this one set off by the opening of the Erie Canal, and his father’s family, Bavarian Jewish immigrants, had profited much from it. His mother, on the other hand, was Dutch Calvinist, and brought Bret up in that tradition. Perhaps that’s why Bret thought himself such an outsider. He joined the California Gold Rush a little late, and instead of striking it rich on gold he took up the pen, and as reporter, editor, story-teller, playwright, and memoirist he made the tall tale and gold camp life the stuff of American legend, and besides that made it respectable, or at least interesting, for those who claimed cultural and intellectual supremacy, the writers and publishers of Boston and New York City. Mark Twain went west later, hunting for Nevada silver rather than California gold, but also found it easier to write about it than to dig it, and that’s where their collaboration began, Harte having risen to the eminence of editor, Twain still a cub writer. Along the way, as Twain would later reflect in kinder mode, Harte had learned to use western language to make music. Still an outsider, Harte could be a courageous critic, biting the hands that fed him with angry reports and editorials on a massacre of peaceable Indians and a poem on ‘the heathen Chinee’ that was too subtle (some readers, whose skulls were thicker than their skins, thought it showed Harte sharing anti-Asian western prejudices). It was Harte’s short fictions about gold camp life that made his reputation, and found him a regular contributor to The Atlantic and other high-brow journals. Friends in the West, at least sometimes, Twain and Harte became rivals in the East, and although Harte relocated even further east, in London, Twain never could let bygones be bygones. He did, though, offer kindly remarks when Harte died, in 1902. ©

[Stanley]

Maker of Motown

‘Cause, baby, there ain’t no mountain high enough . . . From “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” 1967, Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell. Lyrics by Ashford & Simpson.

I keep being told, even by NPR, that 2023 marks the 50thanniversary of hip hop. Well, I didn’t much like the genre 50 years ago, and although I gather it’s much improved since (in terms of content, moral weight, and gender equality) my hearing was not good enough to be offended by it in 1973, and now I can’t follow it at all, even with hearing aids. But today is the 77th anniversary (birthday) of Valerie Simpson, born in the Bronx on August 26, 1946, and destined to become the better half of the musical duo still known as Ashford & Simpson. And they wrote music I could listen to. Before hip hop, this pair (lyricists, composers, vocalists) helped to make black Motown a giant in the recording industry. After early and astounding successes with “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and “Your Precious Love” (both 1967) the pair married in 1974, then moved to Warner Records where they continued to make music news, not only writing for others but making their own albums. They also made two children, Nicole and Ashley, who remember their parents fondly and I think continue to run Ashford & Simpson’s stylish Manhattan restaurant and nightspot, The Sugar Bar. Nickolas Ashford, the male half of the partnership, was born in South Carolina but migrated, with his family, to Michigan. He met Ms. Simpson in New York, where both were studying music composition, and perhaps more to the point were both in the choir at Harlem’s White Rock Baptist Church. So, in the language of their own lyrics, they hooked up. As performers they were not at first great successes but as composers and lyricists it was a different story almost from the get-go, starting with a piece for Ray Charles (no less), “Let’s Go Get Stoned” (1966). Then it was Motown, and a whole string of hits, not all of them chart-toppers but many spending some considerable time amongst the “top 50” lists, which was more than enough to keep money coming in and to encourage the pair to carry on. Besides Gaye and Charles, they wrote for Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross & the Supremes, Gladys Knight, and some others I don’t remember so well, like the Marvelettes. But even I could follow their lyrics, and so could a great many other people. The list of their ‘charted’ songs is longer than your arm, and in due course the pair won all sorts of music industry awards, many coming after they retired from writing. Nickolas Ashford (who also spent some time as an actor) died in 2011, aged 70, but as far as I know Valerie Simpson still prospers. I hope so, anyway, and that her hearing stays strong enough to follow hip hop, if she wants to, and that she has a great 77th birthday. ©

[Stanley]

A maker of modern India.

Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds: A Book of Tata Quotes. Published in 2019 by the Tata Group, Mumbai, India.

The Tata conglomerate (aka “Tata Group”) is the largest corporate player in India today. Recently, it bought Air India, and it has flown even higher as a chief corporate partner in the Indian space program, not slow to take credit for the recent moon shot. “Today, we see the moon in a new light” was the Tata Group’s immodest boast. It's an old company, founded in 1858, still dominated by the Tata family, and it has prospered through strategic investments in the modernization of the sub-continent—and worldwide. All along, it has survived by changing its political color to match existing power structures and invest in new political movements. Today Tata is the main corporate donor of the BJP. A century ago, Tata bet on the Congress Party, soon to become the main vehicle of Indian independence. In the generation before that, several Tata siblings received knighthoods from the British crown. One might wax cynical about this chameleon-like flexibility, and one should disapprove of Tata’s support of the BJP’s racialist and religionist definition of ‘real’ Indians. On the other hand, remember that the family origins were Parsi; they were newcomers, always conscious of their outsider status, and it always made sense for them to bend to the prevailing winds. Good ‘public relations’ has always been a leading Tata product. The Tata who showed the way, in finance, in industry, and in PR was Dorabshi Jamshed Tata, born in Mumbai on August 27, 1859. His father, the founder of Tata, took great care to insure that Dorabshi would be welcome in a British India, not only rich in his own right (Tata had prospered in the boom in Indian cotton production) but rich in British cultural traditions. Well schooled in Mumbai (then, of course, “Bombay”), Durabshi took his acquired Englishness to a private tutor near London, then on to Cambridge where he again excelled in cricket and soccer. He returned to India and assumed a leadership role in Tata, becoming its chair upon his father’s death in 1904. There Dorabshi expanded Tata’s reach, into banking first, and then in 1911 Tata produced its first iron and steel at Jamshedpur, a planned industrial city he had named in his father’s honor in 1908. Knighted in 1910, Dorabshi became a prominent figure in Indian sports, not least in cricket. He was also a leading, perhaps the leading, native Indian philanthropist, giving especially generously to scientific research and linguistic studies. Ill and failing in 1932, Sir Dorabshi Tata left his entire personal fortune to Indian institutes, and went to Europe to take the waters in Bavaria. He died there but, true to his personal past, was buried in Parsi cemetery in Woking, Surrey. ©

[Tripps]

I once googled Tata Steel and saw the full extent of the company. Quite impressive - or scary?

Parsis are very interesting people - Freddy Mercury and Lord Karan Bilimoria (Cobra Beer) for instance. He is probably the only Indian origin person that I don't mind being in the House of Lords. I've always thought of them (roughly) as the Quakers of Indian society. Work hard and be kind and generous.

There's a chapter in "The Jewel in the Crown" called "The Towers of Silence". Parsi burial rite calls for bodies to be left on the towers where wild buzzards dispose of them. All very exotic until you see photographs (not recommended) - then not so much. Seems there are not as many buzzards (owing to the use of pesticides) as there used to be as well. Similar problem with wild turtles which do a similar job in the Ganges.

Remind me again who landed a spaceship on the dark side of the moon last week. . . .

[Stanley]

The travelogue's favourite phrase was always 'a land of contrasts'. More accurate now than ever.....

[Stanley]

The faithful daughter.

Their Lord responded . . . ‘I never fail to reward any worker among you for any work you do . . .be you male or female—you are equal to one another. From the Qur’an, 3:195.

Fatima, the daughter of the prophet Muhammad, died on August 28, 632ce. Today she is highly regarded throughout Islam, her name commonly used for (especially) first daughters. One might inquire if there are as many Muslim Fatimas as there are Christian Marys: an interesting problem but probably pointless. During her life, or thereafter, Fatima acquired other names, all implying veneration. For instance, Fatima al-Zahrā is ‘the one that shines.’ Fatima al-Tahira is ‘the pure.’ Other honorifics make her the recipient of angelic messages and the senior woman (wife, sister or mother) in heaven. These are not competing claims, but indicate universal admiration. It is, however, quite certain that the circumstances and causes of her death have been, since 632 or very soon thereafter, matters of dispute. Fatima was born to the Prophet’s first wife at about the time of Muhammad’s first revelations. There were other daughters, but Fatima alone survived her father (by a few months), and during his life it’s clear that she was the most supportive of them. In this she was alone, for her mother died when Fatima was just a girl, and she grew to adulthood during the years when her father was scorned and persecuted for his religious beliefs. As if in prophecy of her adult role, the Angel Gabriel had appeared to Muhammad and told him to comfort Fatima in her grief at the loss of her mother. In short, this was a father-daughter relationship made in heaven. Still young, Fatima consented to her marriage to Muhammad’s cousin Alī ibn Abī Tālib. Hers was a silent consent, but willful, and the woman’s free consent has ever since been sacred in Islamic marriage. But the causes and circumstances of Fatima’s death have forever been contested matters, contrasting narratives told, most notably, by Shia and Sunni. The argument is fundamental in some literal senses. Was Fatima’s husband the first Caliph, or was he not? Did Muhammad will some of his property to Fatima, or did he not? Most crucially, did Fatima die of grief after her father’s passing, or was her death caused when Abu Bakr (the other claimant to the role of first Caliph) raided her house, sent her husband into the wilderness, and caused her fatal miscarriage? Just as with so many historical/theological issues in Christianity, these contrasting narratives seem to have been invented (or made more fundamental) after the facts—whatever the facts were. Was Fatima’s husband Islam’s first Caliph, or was it Abu Bakr? Was the disciple Peter the rock upon which Christ wanted to build his church, or was Christ speaking poetically only? Sadly, a lot of blood has been spilled over just such unanswerable questions. ©.

[Tripps]

.be you male or female—you are equal to one another.

Almost beyond comment -

Here's an example of the reality Bradford Telegraph and Argus quite recently

Besides - everyone knows that the Angel Gabriel was a Catholic, and very busy, since only six hundred years earlier - when he wasn't dancing on the head of a pin -

In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin's name was Mary. And he came to her and said 'Greetings, favoured one! The Lord is with you.



Has Uncle Bob been hacked?

[Stanley]

Racism and the souls of white folk.

When the lunatic is met with ideas incompatible with his delusion he distorts facts by rationalization to preserve the inner consistency of his delusions. E. Franklin Frazier, 1927.

In 1927, a young sociologist published “The Pathology of Race Prejudice.” In it, he sharply distinguished between the antipathies that flourished amongst animals, beginning with the slaughters that warrior ants visited on their neighbors—other ants included. These could be seen as “natural,” inborn, instinctive. But race prejudice amongst humans, he argued, was a psychosis. It was learned behavior, but in the USA, and particularly in the southern states, it could better be understood as a mental illness. He chose to headline his essay with a quote from Walter Hines Page, a North Carolinian whose reform instincts had vaulted him into the top rank of American public intellectuals: “The Negro-in-America, therefore, is a form of insanity that overtakes White men,” Page had written in his book The Southerner. Beginning with Page was, for the young sociologist, a good move. Page was no integrationist, a white southerner, but he was a reformer who hoped for racial peace, and Page had helped found (and was an early editor of) Forum, the magazine which published “The Pathology of Race Prejudice.” The essay made a stir at the time, and has since acquired almost mythic status, and the author intended it that way. He was Edward Franklin Frazier, born in Baltimore on August 29, 1894. As a boy he’d whipped through Baltimore’s segregated schools, then gone to Howard Washington, where he’d excelled in the classics, joined the NAACP, and become a socialist. He pursued sociology in graduate school in Massachusetts and New York City, then taken a post at Morehouse College, an historically black institution in Atlanta, Georgia, in the heart of what Mark Twain had called “the United States of Lyncherdom.” Already in trouble with the accommodationist administrators at Morehouse, Frazier saw his essay in a leading intellectual journal as a ticket to elsewhere and as a personal declaration of independence. It helped him to win his way as a pioneering social scientist, one with a focus on race, its social construction, and its devastating social, economic, and political effects. There Frazier would rise to the top of the tree, first black president of the American Sociological Association (1948), and the author of several standard studies on the sociology of race in the USA and elsewhere. These works, and Frazier’s connections with UNESCO, brought him under the watchful eye of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI (and a huge FBI dossier), but given recent events Florida and elsewhere we have better reasons to take seriously Frazier’s notion that racism is pathological. If it is, it might be curable. And that was Frazier’s point in 1927. ©

[Stanley]

A most capable gardener.

Gardening and Place-making when rightly understood will supply all the comforts which Mankind wants in the Country and (I will add) if right be exactly fit for the owner, the Poet, and the Painter. Capability Brown, 1775.

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) is a study of character wherein Lizzie Bennet’s prejudices are eroded away while she teaches Fitzwilliam Darcy a thing or two about pride. Or the other way around. But ‘character’ is not exclusively human. Landscapes, gardens, and the settings of houses play their parts. The Bennets’ modest manor, Longbourne, has a “pretty little wilderness” which becomes the scene of a dramatic (in some ways climacteric) confrontation between Lizzie and Darcy’s imperious aunt, Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Lady Catherine’s grand house, Rosings, is predictably far too formal for Lizzie’s taste, and so it its garden. But the most dramatic, transforming role is played by Darcy’s own estate at Pemberley, in Derbyshire. Its grand yet domestic setting (a natural wood, a pleasing park, and a perfectly engineered watercourse) almost bowls her over. So when the man himself unexpectedly appears and respects her and her companions, the deal is done. Some drama and uncertainty remain, for the novel isn’t nearly over. Later, Lizzie teases us when she says she began to fall in love when she saw Pemberley, but it’s a serious tease. Well before Lizzie Bennet fell for Pemberley, England itself had fallen for just such garden settings, abandoning the formal French style so beloved by the Stuarts to find more pleasure in a style that integrated a fine house into its natural landscape. It would be but a mild exaggeration to credit this to one man, Lancelot Brown, born into prosperous yeoman stock in Northumberland and baptized on August 30, 1716. Two of his elder siblings would marry into gentry families, but Lancelot (the fifth of six children) would find his own way to fortune as a master gardener, really a landscape architect. Many of his greatest works still survive, notably at Chatsworth, the seat of the dukes of Devonshire. It’s also, by the way, in Derbyshire, like Austen’s imagined Pemberley. But you don’t need to go so far north to see a Brown landscape: Blenheim, for instance, just north of Oxford, or at Hampton Court, or the “Backs” along the river at Cambridge, well over 100 in all, quite a few of them within easy reach from London. By the 1760s, Brown was gentry, with a gardening income of over £5000 yearly, but his surviving portraits show him as just the sort of truly gentle man who would have been pleasing company to the (mutually reformed) Fitzwilliam Darcys at Pemberley. That’s also indicated by his nickname, for he was known far and wide as Capability Brown, a man who could improve the capabilities of a natural landscape and of those who inhabited it. ©