OneGuyFromBarlick

Slavery as social death.

Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. (Harvard University Press, 1982). Book authored by Orlando Patterson.

One of the challenges of teaching the history of American racial slavery is the difficulty of understanding its absoluteness. We think hierarchically, and so students tend to see slavery as one of several dependent relationships. In early modern Anglo-America there were quite a few persons rendered dependent by law or by custom (or by the market economy): apprentices, indentured servants, married females, children and adolescents of either sex and almost all classes—the list could go on. And such a comparative approach has its virtues, not least in seeing the similar ways in which (and words with which) dominant people justified their subordination of the “others.” To be in a dependent class was to be childlike, disabled, silly, stupid, uneducated and likely uneducable (females, for instance, were thought incapable of mastering Latin). Initiative was not a characteristic of the dependent classes, ambition an accident (or a disciplinary problem). All those things (and a few more) about ‘dependency’ were thought typical of enslaved persons, and such analogies make good teaching tools. But our slavery was qualitatively of a different sort, a sort of social death to use Orlando Patterson’s telling phrase. And in the early 19thcentury, while most of those other dependencies were being eroded by political revolution, economic change, and social reform movements, slaves became, legally, even lesser beings. The Supreme Court’s infamous Dred Scott decision (1856) was a full articulation of the point, placing enslaved persons (indeed any free person of color) outside of and beneath the republic’s white citizenry. A little-known adjunct of the Dred Scott decision was a law of 1858 which stated, baldly, that no slave could apply for (far less hold) a patent. So masters owned slaves right down to their toenails, but in addition owned their minds. The law may have been interpreted (as it were for good measure) to prevent any person of color from taking out a patent. There were few enough of those, two by one man, Henry Blair, whose second patent (ironically for a mechanical cotton planter that would save the work of eight men) was taken out on August 31, 1836, about two years after his first, a corn planter. Thus Henry Blair testifies to us that he was alive, that he was a mindful person, an owner of himself. But he was illiterate, and he signed his patent with an “X”. In 1871, after the extirpation of slavery by war, legislation opened patents to inventors of any skin shade. It was, perhaps, not just an afterthought. As for Blair himself, we don’t know much. He was born in Maryland in 1807, and died there in 1860, before the outbreak of the war that killed slavery. ©

I mailed Bob to tell him he had amassed over400,000 page views and he was delighted. He said that knowing that made it easier for him to maintain the discipline of writing one note every day.

Stanley wrote: ↑31 Aug 2023, 11:47 maintain the discipline of writing one note every day.

It's a considerable and surely quite onerous self imposed task ! I'm a regular appreciative reader.

It's as well to keep a sense of perspective though -as it can be a bit USA and racially - centric. I'd like to see his views, influenced of course by his vast historical knowledge, on more current American matters.

To be fair today's essay starts with

Stanley wrote: ↑31 Aug 2023, 11:45 Teaching the history of American racial slavery

but there is a lot more to it than that. I think the Romans had slaves too didn't they?

Read White Goldby Giles Milton. I doubt that the many English men captured by Barbary pirates and sold in the slave markets of North Africa had many concerns that they would not be alllowed

Stanley wrote: ↑31 Aug 2023, 11:45 that no slave could apply for (far less hold) a patent.

The people of Baltimore in Ireland saw quite a different side to the business.

So much to read - so little time. . . .

Voyages into the heart of darkness; three men in a boat.

I was for one brief spell happy and smiling once more . . . all round were primroses and wild violets and the singing of the skylarks in the air and I was back in Ireland again. Roger Casement, on his landing in Ireland on Good Friday, 1916.

Strange thoughts for a man who was in Ireland to promote (or, just possibly, postpone) the Easter Rising of 1916: bloodshed, primroses, and skylarks. Whatever Roger Casement’s end game, it didn’t work out. At first, the plan had been to land in Ireland from a U boat, with weaponry, but even that was a fizzle. The U boat discharged not an armed battalion, nor supplies for one, but three damp guys in a dinghy. “Three men in a boat,” as an Irish agent in Germany cruelly put it, ridiculing the venture by using the title of one of Victorian England’s most reassuring comic essays, Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (1889), a sequel to Jerome’s first literary hit, Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow. But Roger Casement had not been an idle fellow. Born near Dublin on September 1, 1864, the youngest son of a captain in the (Irish) dragoon guards, he’d graduated from a post as a shipping clerk in the (British) West African trade to become British Consul in Portuguese Africa, then in the Belgian Congo. There’s a bit of Joseph Conrad about Casement’s story. Indeed they met, and agreed about the horrors of Belgian imperialism in that heart of darkness. Casement’s report on the “enslavement, mutilation, and torture” of native peoples won him a promotion, further British diplomatic postings, and in 1911 a knighthood for his exposure of imperial cruelty and corruption in South America. But Sir Roger was a mixed bag, very mixed. His sympathy for native peoples was lave for very much lesser men, his racism barely concealed. His British knighthood was compromised early by his conversion to Irish nationalism (circa 1901) and his strange love affair with the Celt (not to mention Ireland’s primroses and skylarks). By 1913, as war clouds gathered over Europe, Casement was in Berlin hoping that the Kaiser would bring true civilization to the European continent, humility to the British, and peaceful independence to the green island offshore. Casement was captured, interrogated, tried, and hanged, denied the dignity of a firing squad. Someone—who remains a mystery—decided to release Casement’s private diaries, which showed him to be very mixed up about sex, too, a not-enough-closeted homosexual. This was used in 1916 to discredit him. As for the Irish, they hardly knew what to do with Casement. But as Ireland has modernized, it has become easier to place him among the hero-martyrs of the nationalist movement. That is a sort of progress, and it was celebrated in Dublin in 2016, the Rising’s centennial year, in The Dark Places, Colm Tóibín’s interpretation of the Casement-Conrad connection. A green mystery set to music. ©

A boat that is finally afloat.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. Maya Angelou.

In the USA, it’s a matter of faith, even among conservatives, that a rising tide floats all boats. Expand the economy, and everyone will benefit. It’s a powerful idea that undergirded the nation’s exponential growth in the 19th century. In the 20th century, it was implicit in FDR’s efforts to save capitalism from the Great Depression, and we could credit the New Deal for floating Rex Goreleigh’s boat. Goreleigh was born in Penilyn, PA, on September 2, 1902. Rex was a poor boy, with a speech impediment, and soon his mother moved into Philadelphia where she hoped Rex might obtain special help. He early showed talent in drawing, then painting, and as an “expression” painting helped him gain articulation in speech. But his work didn’t sell well, and the 1930s found him waiting tables in New York. At a banquet, Rex wangled the duty of serving the head table, where the great Mexican muralist Diego Rivera was seated. Rex the waiter convinced Rivera that he wanted to become Rex the painter, and Rivera took Rex on, inviting him to his studio (where Rivera was working on his Rockefeller Center mural) and introducing him to the possibility of working for the Works Progress Administration, as a real artist painting real canvases, teaching others to paint, and making some money. Goreleigh started with the WPA in New York, then moved to Chicago where he was salaried as a teacher-administrator. But like so many rising tides, the WPA ebbed, and Rex moved back east with his paints and brushes to settle, eventually, in Princeton, NJ. He continued to paint, of course. By then it was in his blood, and he did sell some works, though for not much money. He also established “Princeton Group Arts,” and so continued his work as art instructor, now however with a different cast of students, for Princeton was a prosperous community: housewives, older folk, possibly even a few young men from Princeton University. Rex’s works did continue to sell, and he did continue to teach, and he did establish a gallery that was sometimes open. I like his paintings, myself. They forcefully portray ordinary lives, ordinary people, cluttered households—and one shows black man standing before a timbered maze with no apparent exit. Maybe it’s a self-portrait. Rex was African American, and many of his paintings featured men and women of color. Now, with African-American art works coming into closer focus, even becoming fashionable, there are moves to make Rex a pioneer painter. Recently, a Goreleigh sold for nearly $38,000. There’s a move afoot to name a gallery after him in a local museum. So we might say that his boat is afloat. But Rex Goreleigh himself died in 1986, beached we might say, driftwood left at the tideline, in 1986. ©

He did banks, too.

What the people are within, the buildings express without. Louis Sullivan

That is not exactly a statement of architectural functionalism, although it comes very close. The trouble with it is that while a structure may have been built as a corporate flagship for, say, a railway becomes in the due course of capitalist takeovers a bank, then a hotel, and finally a forgotten ruin ready only for a spectacular obliteration, preferably by strategically placed explosives. So it ends a pile of this or that. One reason that so many of Louis Sullivan’s buildings live on is that they expressed something else. My favorite example is St. Louis’s very own Wainright Building, named for a local brewer who was not a Busch. Ellis Wainright had moved into other enterprises, and wanted the place as his very own flagship (and for renters, too), but it looks not a bit like a brewer’s ego statement, nor much like an ego statement of any sort. What the Wainright looks like is the platonic essence of a skyscraper, but (and this is a major “but”) it’s only ten stories and is faced with terra cotta. So it’s a supreme expression of the art of architecture, even though (faute de mieux) it’s now surplus to almost everyone’s requirements and is standing in as a state (of Missouri) office building. And if there’s anything the building doesn’t express, it’s “bureaucracy.” Its principal designer, Louis Henry Sullivan, was born in Boston on September 3, 1856, to an Irish immigrant father and a Francophone (Swiss) immigrant mother, but was not born poor. Apparently a willful youth, he was well schooled in Boston and entered MIT to study architecture aged only 16. He didn’t stay long, instead moving through a series of apprenticeships. The first was in Philadelphia, with Frank Furness (who designed ugly buildings as a specialty). Sullivan parted with Furness rather quickly, moving on to Chicago where mother Murphy’s dairy cow had created, in the Great Fire of 1871, a great field for architects. After a brief side trip to Paris’s Ecole des Beaux Arts, where he did not distinguish himself, he returned to Chicago where his talents were noted and he formed a partnership with another new American, Dankmar Adler. Adler, of an engineering and scientific bent, formed the technical brain of the partnership, which first expressed itself in sound-sensitive theaters. Adler and Sullivan would then move on to a whole variety of distinctive buildings, many of them in Chicago but also scattered about, not least a couple of rather attractive banks in rural places. Later, Sullivan would add to his luster by taking on Frank Lloyd Wright as an equally rebellious apprentice. They didn’t get on at first, but then genius doesn’t always love company. They reconciled later, perhaps because they had no choice. ©

The Sullivan Bank in Owatonna, Minnesota.

The Tiger Lady, the Red Angel--and Sadie Hawkins Day.

If we just let the big shots run the country, what will happen to us? Karl Yoneda, 1988.

In 1937, cartoonist Al Capp created “Sadie Hawkins Day” for his Dogpatch, USA. On that day, the ladies of Dogpatch, some of them petite and maidenly, others not so much, roamed the hills in pursuit of a man to marry. L’il Abner, Dogpatch’s star male, was eventually caught by Daisy Mae, maidenly but not petite. A few years before, in 1931, an unusual Sadie Hawkins day had played out in a Los Angeles jail. Elaine Black had been sent out by the Longshoremen’s Union to bail out some strikers. One of them was Karl Yoneda. Elaine put down the bail money, Karl walked free—for two years. Their marriage lasted 55 years and was full of political adventure and trades union activism. On their 55th anniversary, in April 1988, Karl and Elaine attended a campaign rally for Jesse Jackson rainbow coalition. Elaine died the very next day: a fitting end, Karl thought, and so it was. Elaine Black Yoneda was born in New York City on September 4, 1906. Her birthname was Rose Elaine Buchman, and her parents were Jewish immigrants from Ukraine, where they’d been radicalized as sweated labor in a match factory. They fled the Tsar’s police for the land of freedom, and in New York had continued their class crusade. The family moved to Los Angeles and into the lower middle class, but there’s evidence that Elaine remained true to her parents’ radical roots. So when she saw violent repression of a workers’ protest by LA’s notorious “Red Squad,” she knew what to do: join the Communist Party and go to work for the Longshoremen’s Union. That lost Elaine her first husband, but (as above) gained her a second one, Karl Yoneda, a very acculturated immigrant who felt it unwise to let the bosses run the country. When, after Pearl Harbor, it was decided to intern almost all Japanese residents, citizens or otherwise, Karl was a natural target. He was duly interned, and probable scheduled for American-style reeducation, but Elaine insisted on staying with him. So they parked their little girl with Elaine’s parents and went to the Manzanar concentration camp. They had never wavered from their belief that their immediate duty was to fight Axis fascism, so soon they were released. Karl went to work for American military intelligence as a Japanese language specialist. Elaine continued her career as the “Red Angel” of the California waterfront, campaigning for better pay and child care facilities for women workers. The couple ended up as radical owners of a chicken farm, active in the movement for black civil rights, and, as above, in Jesse Jackson’s campaign for the White House. An American story. ©.

When on digs, she ate Spam sandwiches.

An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have. The older she gets, the more interested he is in her. Agatha Christie.

Among American hypersensitivities lies the “toilet problem,” recently (re)discovered by some politicians as a way of stirring furies against transexual adolescents who wish to use their restroom of choice. Toilets have rarely been a ‘real’ issue, but were, historically, one of the reasons for keeping women away from archaeological digs. Towards the middle of her distinguished career, Hannah Wormington solved this problem by leading digs teams made up largely of females. Often, on these expeditions, she took her husband George along. As a petroleum engineer, George Volk had a practical bent which was useful in devising on-site solutions to technical problems, and he washed dishes and camp cookware on the site. And apparently he could take care of his own toilet issues. But when Hannah had started out as an archaeologist it hadn’t been so easy. Hannah Marie Wormington was born in Denver, Colorado, on September 5, 1914. In college (University of Denver) she had dithered between music and zoology, but fell victim to archaeology when she volunteered—possibly to wash dishes—for a dig in western Colorado. So she became a rarity as an undergraduate and stayed a rarity at Radcliffe, where in 1937 she became the first female to win a Harvard PhD in archaeology. Even at that level, one professor had required her to take notes from outside the lecture hall. And she signed her early publications as “H. M.” Wormington, perhaps in camouflage. Then she went to Europe where her command of French (her mother was French) helped, and where her chosen mentor, Dorothy Garrod, was already making waves for women at Cambridge. So “H. M.” went back to Denver and a 30-year appointment at the Denver Museum of Natural History. While there, and on the Denver faculty, Wormington made many important discoveries about ancient Amerindian cultures, drew their timeline much further back, and became a well-known international authority on flint technologies. Gender still stalked her, though, and in 1968 (the same year she became the first female president of the American Archaeological Society) she was fired from the museum, in a surprise move by the (male) director. It wasn’t a toilet issue but did have something to do with gender. Wormington went on digging, writing, and teaching—and making important discoveries even after George Volk died in 1980. But she fell prey to one of her very own bad habits, smoking, dying in an apartment fire in 1994. Her own ashes are buried in a Denver cemetery, in an Paleoindian ceramic bowl. If anyone ever digs it up, it will be a real puzzle. But no one will mistake it for a toilet. ©

Aristocrats in the Republic.

Humanity has won its battle. Liberty now has a country. Marquis de La Fayette, circa 1783.

The people of the young American republic, the USA, eventually became enamored enough of the common man to raise a couple of them (Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln) to the presidency. But there was also a tendency to venerate aristocracy. In the late 19th century, this decayed into an unseemly marriage market in which raw American money unfused itself into rarified (if impoverished) European bloodlines, but during the American Revolution special affection was reserved for European aristocrats who sailed to serve in battle alongside General George Washington and his “Continental” Army. And you didn’t have to be a “real” noble to qualify. The 6th Earl of Stirling, of Washington’s very mobile general staff, may not have been a genuine Scottish lord, but his comrades were eager to call him one. “Baron” von Steuben, famous for disciplining unruly Yanks at Valley Forge, possessed only a fake genealogy and a dubious Bavarian knighthood. Johann de Kalb’s baronial pedigree was also shaky, although that didn’t stop Illinois, Mississippi, Missouri, New York, and Texas from naming places after him, decades after the fact. But the all-time champion namesake among these upper-class imports was the Marquis de Lafayette, credited today with 17 American counties, even more towns and townships, and heaven knows how many streets, parks, and city squares. And he was the genuine article, too, with a baptismal name as long as your arm. But today we’ll call him Gilbert du Motier de la Fayette, born on September 6, 1757, in the Auvergne, into a lordship wealthy enough that he was able to buy the ship he sailed to America in, aged only 19, to plight his troth to the American republic. Whether he deserved to be made a Major-General is open to question, but the Continental Congress rushed to do so, and he saw battle in several places, from the defeat at Brandywine to the final victory at Yorktown in 1781. His American service was interrupted by a French sabbatical, during which he fathered a son, George Washington de La Fayette (1779-1849), and looked after his Auvergne acreages. The radical Marquis does have a number of places in France named after him too, and he did play a signal role early in France’s own revolution. But he fell from favor and only narrowly escaped the guillotine (which took several of his relatives), and those French placenames came along much later than the American ones. But the Marquis and his family (notably his son ‘George Washington’) continued republicans in theory at least, throughout Europe’s romantic era and its revolutionary upsets of 1830 and 1848. ©.

Her portrait hangs in a Denver museum and tells her tale.

I was born the 7 of September on a Sunday 1523, turned from that I was unto what ye see Anno Domini 1557. Trompe l’oeil inscription above Alice Barnham’s head in a family portrait of 1557.

Tudor Englishwomen are not well known to historians. The first Elizabeth is an obvious exception, as are other women of aristocratic birth, but further down the ladder even literate women were the creatures of their fathers, husbands, brothers, even their sons. We know who Alice Barnham was because she established her own identity. She it was who commissioned the 1557 portrait of herself and her two (surviving) sons, and who directed the artist to paint in ‘signs’ of the subjects’ names and birth dates. Alice Barnham was born in Chichester, Sussex, one of the youngest of 14 children in the family of a prominent dealer in fine cloths and in aldermanic politics—indeed serving three terms as mayor. He and a couple of Alice’s elder brothers were well enough connected to marry her off (in her early 20s) to a prosperous London merchant and freeman, Francis Barnham. She bore him way fewer than 14 children, a big change, and she became his active partner in the cloth trade, in lending money (even to the crown), and in buying up the lands that would make her sons into gentlemen. In London, she attained legal status as femme sole, able to do business in her own name as well as in partnership with Francis. And she continued just so after Francis died in 1576, by which time the Barnhams’ income totaled well over £1,000 annually, from trade, from money lent at interest, from land and house rents. In the 1550s they were wealthy enough to lend money to Queen Mary, but it was only £50. They would be much more generous (over £1,500 in one year alone) to the Protestant Queen, Elizabeth I. Indeed Alice and her husband were keen Puritans, even in the 1550s, but (as the small loan to Mary suggests) they were capable of prudence in politics. As Francis’s business connections grew (he became freeman in several of London’s great chartered companies), so did Alice’s. She ran a silk shop, worked in it herself, and ensured that some of her work appeared in that 1557 portrait. Meanwhile her sales (in silks and other fine cloths) helped to conceal Francis’s moneylending. Usury—lending money at interest—was still frowned upon and could be downright hazardous. Alice went on, indomitably by all reports (including her own) until 1604, a long life for a Tudor woman of any class (and longer than Queen Elizabeth’s). She was an industrious sort of person. Literate too, for among the artifacts shown in the Barnham portrait was a book, The Proverbs of Solomon (1549), and Alice’s own note improving on the text, both readable in the painting. Clearly Alice Barnham made her artist work hard for his commission. Today the artist is unknown—unlike his subject. ©.

A man of many parts.

If you ask me to play myself, I wouldn’t know what to do. I do not know who or what I am. Peter Sellers.

In several prose works, Mark Twain visited the theme of divided identities, partly for its comic potentials. It was also a favorite routine in his evening lectures. There he told audiences that his was a twin birth, that one of the boys had died, paused, and then said that he was the dead one. People went to Twain’s lectures to be amused, but one imagines that his brought only hesitant laughter. Arguably, just such a dubious joke defined the life of one Richard Henry Sellers, born in the south of England on September 8, 1925. Very soon, his parents started calling him “Peter,” in memory of an earlier son, who had died at birth. And it was as Peter Sellers that he would make his mark. His earliest fame came as part of BBC Radio’s Goon Show (1951-1960), wherein he played many different roles, most memorably as Bluebottle, Henry Crun, Hercules Gryptype-Thynne, and Major Bloodnok. Each role required its own voice, accent, pitch, tone, and its own tenor (pathos to hysteria), and Sellers mastered each. Perhaps he’d been born to it. He was descended from a successful 19th-century prizefighter of Portuguese-Jewish ancestry, and his own parents were strolling vaudevillians. Sellers might have become a war hero for the RAF, but he couldn’t see well enough to pilot a plane and ended up a groundling, entertaining his comrades and, doubtless, getting plenty of laughs. After the war he continued in bit parts. But then came the spectacular success of the Goon Show, followed avidly by the future Charles III and by several unruly youths who would, later, become the backbone of British comedy (including the Monte Pythons and their Flying Circus). And it wasn’t long before the cinema beckoned. Indeed Sellers began while still a Goon, in the classic Ladykillers (1955). Many other roles came along, some in drama (for instance in Lolita, 1962), but he’s best remembered as the physically-, verbally-, and intellectually-challenged Inspector Clouseau in what became known as the Pink Panther movies. Once critic praised him for his “flawless mistiming,” a delicate fault indeed and one that needs to be seen, not heard. But Sellers’s masterwork came in Kubric’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). There Sellers was indeed a split personality, playing to perfection the different roles of an RAF pilot (his nearsightedness no longer mattered), Captain Mandrake; the President of the US, Merkin Muffley; and the ex-Nazi and ever present fanatic, Dr. Strangelove himself. Sadly, Sellers’s split personalities spilled over into a tempestuous private life, rendered public by his fame. He died young, of his excesses, in 1980. ©

Paul Robeson's great-grandaunt.

The prayer ascended from my heart to God, that He would in His own time take away our reproach; and oh! most firmly do I believe He will. This belief alone is sufficient to keep me in the path of duty. Sarah Mapps Douglass to William Lloyd Garrison, 1831.

The Bustill family struck down its American roots with the birth of Cyrus Bustill (1732-1806). He was the natural son of his master Samuel Bustill and Parthenia, Samuel’s slave. The name “Parthenia” derives from the Greek for “virgin” or “chaste,” so we might class it among the cruelly ironic slave names like Prince and Caesar. Perhaps Samuel, being a Quaker, was a kindly master, and Cyrus, once freed, did join a Quaker meeting, as did many of his descendants. But Cyrus was not freed by his father. When Samuel died, his widow (not Parthenia) sold Cyrus away, with the understanding that his new master would allow Cyrus to buy freedom. It’s a long story, but Cyrus Bustill became one of Philadelphia’s richest merchants and landowners. And Cyrus Bustill, freedman, married Elizabeth, a woman of mixed Lenape and English parentage, and they produced a family line that survived and prospered down to our own time and included successful entrepreneurs in various fields, campaigners for freedom and then civil rights, and not at all least artists and writers. One of them was Paul Robeson (1898-1976) who, after distinguishing himself as an All-American footballer and legal scholar (at Rutgers) became one of the best actor-singers of the 20th century and a political activist. But today’s essay is about another Bustill descendant (Robeson’s great-grandaunt), Sarah Mapps Douglass. Granddaughter of Cyrus Bustill, Grace was born free in Philadelphia on September 9, 1806. Her father had married into the Bustill clan and had taken over Cyrus’s bakery. Next door, Sarah’s mother ran a successful millinery business. Besides being busy and successful, Sarah’s parents caused a lot of good trouble, agitating for full civil rights in Pennsylvania and for the abolition of slavery in the young republic. Sarah soon followed the same route, and as a young adult became a leading schoolteacher and, in the 1830s, headmistress of the Free African School for Girls (now Cheney State University). Besides that, she made herself into a natural historian and a distinguished painter and watercolorist (her butterflies and flowers are viewable online). But of course a Bustill could not rest content with success. Sarah Mapps Douglass also became one of Philadelphia’s leading abolitionists, and well-known nationally too. She was a friend of William Lloyd Garrison and a financial supporter of his Liberator newspaper and a founder of the bi-racial Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. She was also a crusading feminist, friend of Lucretia Mott and the Grimké sisters, and interested (and expert) in women’s health issues. Busy, and a Bustill to boot, Sarah Douglass didn’t lay down to rest until she died, in 1882, one day short of her 76th birthday. ©

September 10, 1981
Today we celebrate the homecoming (to Madrid’s Prado) of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, a political painting if ever there was one, in which he attacked fascism and memorialized the people of the Spanish Republican stronghold of Guernica, destroyed by Nationalist bombers in one of the first, but alas not the last, examples of the deliberate aerial bombing of civilian populations, on April 26, 1937. The bombs were supplied by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. The Spanish Republic commissioned the painting, and it first appeared that year in the Paris International Exposition. The Republic fell to fascist Francisco Franco, still in power when Picasso died in 1973, and in his will Picasso directed that Guernica should be returned to Spain only when democracy returned, which happened after Franco’s death in 1976. And after the usual complications and formalities involved with valuable works of art, the painting came “home” to Madrid on 10th September 1981.

Broadcast news as it should be read.

Here is the news, and cracking good news it is too. Alvar Lidell, on BBC Radio, November 11, 1942, announcing the Allied victory at the second battle of El Alamein.

I first heard of Alvar Lidell in a Beyond the Fringe routine, a satire aiming to puncture some of the mythic balloons of World War II, notably the stiff upper lip. As the Fringe team had it, in the perfect English accent required of BBC newsreaders, “This is Alvar Lidell bringing you news of fresh disasters.” In those days, BBC radio not only required the stiff upper lip, but also that newsreaders dressed formally for their radio presentations. It must have been quite a sight, and I imagined Alvar Lidell as a perfect English gentleman. He didn’t begin that way, though, for he was born of Swedish parents on September 11, 1908. The birth was in a toney London suburb, though, for his father was an importer of Swedish timber and long established in London. Alvar became more and more English as he attended school and then Oxford. He studied classics with a fair proficiency but seemed more likely to be bound for the theater, or perhaps as a singer, but he fetched up with the BBC and by 1937 he was established in London as “Deputy Chief Announcer.” He it was who read some of the most important news announcement of the era, including the abdication of Edward VIII. Then came the announcement (September 3, 1939) that a state of war existed between Germany and the United Kingdom. Lidell didn’t make that announcement, of course. But he did introduce the man who did, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, and Lidell remembered ever afterwards the experience of “sitting there, behind this figure of terrible grief.” After that, Lidell returned to the daily routine of newsreading, three years of mostly bad news, hence the Beyond the Fringe spoof. What Lidell usually said was “here is the news, and this is Alvar Lidell reading it.” We can assume this was his introduction to news of the first Battle of El Alamein, in July 1942, which was a standoff, which still left the African theater in suspense. But with victory in November (and then a few weeks later the allied landings in west Africa) things began to look up, and there were fewer fresh disasters to report. Even so, Lidell the Swede became the very vision of Englishness, though behind the scenes (this was, remember, radio), with his perfect diction and faultless grammar. After the war, in 1946, he transferred to the “Third Programme”, BBC’s hymn to the finer arts, and did not retire until 1969, years after being first lampooned by Beyond the Fringe, and the year I arrived in England to learn who Alvar Lidell actually was. ©.
[I remember him well. In those dark days the announcers reading the news always gave their names as it was thought this made them harder ti impersonate by a fake broadcast like the ones Lord Haw Haw used to declaim.]

A moral tale of fuzzy meaning

People say it was degrading for an Olympic champion to run against a horse, but what was I supposed to do? I had four gold medals, but you can't eat four gold medals. Jesse Owens.

Jesse Owens became one of my heroes when (1959) he was named the top athlete of the first 50 years of the Drake Relays and also (I believe) the grand marshal of that year’s Relays Parade. He’d run at Drake (for Ohio State) early in 1936, on his way to a stellar performance at that year’s Berlin Olympics. There he’d won four gold medals, set a couple of records, and disappointed Adolf Hitler’s hopes of making the 1936 Games into a blond Aryan triumph. In Des Moines, 23 years later, the press was full of stories about how Hitler had snubbed Owens, how Owens had humbled Hitler, and thus (implicitly at least) how Owens’ spectacular triumphs demonstrated the superiority of the American way of life. I was ready for all of that. Black athletes were among my chief heroes. Johnny Bright, who should have been the first black to win the Heisman award, was a student of my dad’s (at Drake) and had actually consented to attend my cub scout troop as guest of honor. Jack Trice—another sports martyr to American racism—was an animal husbandry major at Iowa State, and had been a student of my grandfather’s. And there were plenty of others, headed up by Jackie Robinson of Flatbush fame. But of course it wasn’t quite so simple as all that. It’s not only that in 1959 legal Apartheid was still part of the American Way of Life. It’s that Jesse Owens’s own story was full of contradictions, not least those swirling around the 1936 Olympics. Jesse Owens was born James Cleveland Owens on a sharecropper’s acreage in Alabama on September 12, 1913. His parents, themselves children of former slaves, had enough of ambition in them—and care for their kids—to move out and up to the north, where life was better enough to enable them to find cash wages for themselves, good schools for their children, and for Jesse (an Ohio teacher’s mishearing of “J. C.’s” preferred moniker) to get training good enough to turn his own joy at running into superfine sports status. Jesse was also superaware of American race prejudice, and at the urging of the NAACP had agreed NOT to represent the racist USA at the temple of European racism. But when Avery Brundage (no mean racist himself) attacked such athletes as un-American “agitators,” Jesse knuckled under. His sporting triumphs at Berlin are not disputed; exactly what happened between Jesse and Adolf remains uncertain. But when Jesse returned in triumph to the land of the free and the home of the brave, he was definitely snubbed by Brundage, the Olympic Committee, and Franklin Roosevelt (and he was even refused entry at the Waldorf Astoria, except by the service elevator). Jesse’s was certainly a moral tale, but it is not certain where the moral lies. ©.

What day is Chocolate Day?

Caramels are only a fad. Chocolate is a permanent thing. Milton Snavely Hershey.

Among the still unsolved international disputes is the proper dating of a “Chocolate Day.” This seems odd, since we have a day for almost everything else. One would not be overly surprised to learn of a “Dead Dog Day.” But chocolate is a great deal more popular than dead canines, and so there are several competitors. Ghana, a major producer of the raw material, has its own. But then so does Latvia, which is a puzzle. Even within the USA there are several competitors, but today we will go with the one called “International Chocolate Day,” chosen because September 13, 1857, was the birthday of Milton Snavely Hershey. He was born in humble but comfortable circumstances in rural Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, ‘Dutch’ country it’s called because many of its residents spoke “Dutch” (Deutsch) as their first language. That seems to have been Milton’s case, but he soon learned English and, indeed, apprenticed to a local printer who produced a German-English newspaper. Milton didn’t like the work and got himself fired, not a promising beginning, but his Mennonite family was ever-forgiving and ever-hopeful—and they needed the money. So Milton moved sideways into a candy-making apprenticeship, still in Lancaster, PA. This was more to his taste, and he moved around the country (Denver, Chicago, New Orleans, New York) to learn more about it. It wasn’t chocolate, at first. Instead, Milton developed a new way of making caramel, and when he returned home to Lancaster was able (in 1883) to float a loan to begin his Lancaster Caramel Company. It was a huge success, and may explain why, when Milton developed his chocolate habit, he specialized in milk chocolate. He sold the caramel business and founded Hershey Chocolate in 1900, and by the time I was growing up in rural Iowa Hershey and Chocolate were as perfectly synonymous as Hoover and Vacuum Cleaner. As a child, I didn’t even know there was a “dark” chocolate. A what??!! Milton’s milk chocolate was a rags to riches story that made him dear to American hearts, made sweeter by his reputation as a kindly employer and the founder (1903) of one of the country’s best company towns, Hershey, PA. It is still, I believe, an unincorporated community in its legal form, and still full of “Hershey” institutions. Milton Hershey paid well and established all sorts of educational, welfare, and cultural benefits for workers and their families. It all turned ugly during the violent sit-down strike of 1937, which divided families, set workers against suppliers (local dairy farmers, of course), and is still a matter of dispute. But they still make milk chocolate in Hershey, PA. One cannot imagine any other outcome. ©.

Stanley wrote: ↑14 Sep 2023, 03:46 But they still make milk chocolate in Hershey, PA. One cannot imagine any other outcome.

If you wonder why they are not widely available here -

I was refuelling at Morrisons a few years ago, when I saw them on the shelf near the till. Having heard of the brand all my life - I had to try one. I won't be repeating the action. If that's what Americans think chocolate tastes like - I have news for them. . .

Go to England or Switzerland orBelgium.

I made the same discovery when I went to the US David. It applies to what they describe as 'candy' as well. Insipid stuff!

Letters from Olivia: a story of journalistic pioneering.

Susan has a way of saying the word ‘male’ so that it sounds like the snapping of small arms. “Olivia” [Emily Briggs], reporting on Susan B. Anthony’s testimony before Congress on women’s suffrage, 1870.

Born in Massachusetts in 1822, John Briggs became an apprentice printer, then a newspaperman. In the 1840s he followed Horace Greeley’s advice to move west and grow up with the country. Settled in Wisconsin, Briggs made pressman into politician and sat a term in the state senate. He then moved to Iowa to found his own paper and infuse it with his strong anti-slavery views. He joined the nascent Republican party at an early date and, covering Illinois’ Lincoln-Douglass debates for Keokuk’s Daily Gate City, became friends with Honest Abe himself: close enough that when Lincoln won the presidency, Briggs moved to DC with the new president and, through him, won appointment as clerk of the House of Representatives. There he served until his death in 1872. His was a modestly Emersonian story, but it was significant because of the young woman he married in 1854, who moved east with him and became the first woman journalist to be accredited to the White House—and this amidst the tumults of America’s Civil War. Emily Briggs (née Edson) was born in Ohio on September 14, 1830, when her own parents were on their way west to grow up with the country. They did well enough in Chicago to give Emily an education, set her off on a teaching career, and to provide her with enough self-confidence for a battalion of women reporters—had there been a battalion to lead. But as a journalist she was alone, her first introduction to the White House through the family friendship and political loyalty of her husband. She began to write early on, an angry letter to the editor of the Washington Chronicle, damning those who opposed hiring women clerks for government departments. The letter so impressed the editor that he took Emily on as a correspondent, and her reports began to appear in the Chronicle and its sister paper in Philadelphia. She used a nom de plume of course, but not a man’s name. She was, and continued as, “Olivia,” and her reports were cast as letters. “Olivia” was particularly concerned with the unkind fate of the freedmen, which alarmed her. She was displeased (to say the least) at the reappearance of former Confederates in the nation’s councils. We learn through Olivia of the reappearance—in a bookshop window display—of the worst traitor of all, Robert E. Lee. “Olivia” continued for years, publishing a compilation, The Olivia Letters, in 1906. And she had an eye out, always, for pioneers of the women’s rights movement. Sadly for her feminist friends, of whom there were many, “Olivia” passed in 1910, less than a decade before the final passage of the women’s suffrage amendment. ©

A man stuck to his last.

Cobbler, stick to your last. Proverb.

Proverbs are supposed to be hoary with age, and this one about lasts fits. As the Roman writer Pliny the Elder had it, ne supra crepidam sutor iudicare (“let the cobbler not not judge beyond the crepida”) the ‘crepida’ being a sandal. The saying and the sandal were both borrowed from the Greeks, but the proverb has generally been used to keep amateurs from inserting their two-bit wisdom into high-priced, professional, discussions. It was not advice that Pliny the Elder followed, for he wrote about almost everything, but since the crepida in question were for one-size-fits-all General Issue footwear for Greek and then Roman soldiery it was utterly dismissive in tone. By the modern era, shoemaking had evolved to fit, or try to fit, feet of all sorts, and so more crepida, or “lasts”, were required, but sticking to your last still meant keeping out of conversations into which you couldn’t fit. And cobbling remained a highly-skilled trade in which leather pieces were cut to shape and sewn around a last of this or that size. What should have rendered the proverb obsolete was the invention of the mechanical last, which in 1883 won US Patent #204207. The patent then traveled (as a valuable asset) to fall under the ownership of the United Shoe Machinery Corporation, and in the end became the subject of several anti-trust suits (or “shoes”) against the USMC, mainly during the 1940s. The inventor didn’t profit as much, perhaps, as he should, for instead of sticking to his last he died (of TB, in 1889) young, single, and a major stockholder in a company purchased lock, stock, barrel, and last by the USMC. He was Jan Ernst Matzeliger, born in what was then Dutch Guinea (on the Caribbean coast of South America) on September 15, 1852. That was a decade before the end of slavery in Suriname, and Jan Ernst’s mother was a house slave on his Dutch father’s plantation. Jan Ernst may have been freed on Emancipation Day. It’s still celebrated in Suriname as Ketikoti “The chain is broken”—and in Amsterdam too, though more prosaically as Dag der Vrijheden (“Freedom Day”). But in his teens Jan Ernst was already a mechanic’s mate in the Dutch coasting trade, and in the 1870s he settled in Philadelphia as a skilled mechanic in a shoe works. He was valuable enough to move from company to company, and he did his patent tinkering at a shoe factory in Lynn, Massachusetts, where he was smart enough to make the mechanical last, patent it in his name, and convert the last into a large shareholding in a new company that had been formed to stick to Jan Ernst’s last. Unfortunately, his last came too soon. Otherwise, he might have been our first black industrialist millionaire. ©

Yet another self-made man.

They built the Great Wall of China, didn’t they? Charles Crocker, 1865, justifying his importation of Chinese laborers to build the transcontinental railroad.

One might think that the American West is littered with golden and silver spikes driven at the completions of pioneer rail lines. After the most famous of them, THE ‘golden spike,’ at Promontory Point, Utah (1869), marked the completion of the Union Pacific, came another golden one (1876) at the point uniting Los Angeles to the UP (via the San Joaquin RR, later the Central Pacific), and then in 1881 a silver spike (at Deming, New Mexico) which gave Los Angeles a more direct connection east via the Southern Pacific. Truly there was gold and silver in them thar hills, and these “Pacific” railroads made the fortunes of California’s “Big Four,” Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker. They were more into steel rails than precious metal spikes, and we remember them today for that, and for the spectacular success of some of their philanthropies, notably Stanford University and the Huntington Library and Museum. Were it not for the mercies of the 1906 earthquake and fire, we might remember them all for the grossly elaborate Italianate mansions they perched atop Nob Hill, but all that is left there is the luxurious Mark Hopkins Hotel, which in turn hosts the Mark Hopkins Club, an even more exclusive joint. In part, their wealth came from watered stock and insider trading (by which they bankrupted ‘their’ railroads), but on the plus side they were all abolitionists whose patriotism (disinterested, of course) had helped to keep California in the Union. The philanthropy came later, too late to fully involve Charles Crocker, who died in 1888, just a few years after he drove the ceremonial silver at Deming, NM. Crocker was born in the east, at Troy, NY, on September 16, 1822. His moves westward are stories in iron entrepreneurship, gradually accumulating enough capital to move to the Golden State and invest in steel rails. He could, of course, have given it all away. He had already named Deming after his wife, Emily Deming Reed, and given time he might have left a museum there too. But the only ‘Crocker’ museum is in Sacramento, and that was established by Crocker’s elder brother Edwin, corporation counsel for the various “Pacific” railroads and the legal brain behind the subcontracting schemes of the Big Four. Edwin also built an Italianate mansion, but in Sacramento, not atop Nob Hill, and it and his art collection form the core of today’s “Crocker Museum.” The Crocker wasn’t called that until 1981, though, perhaps owing to some reluctances in Sacramento. It’s interesting that among Edwin’s descendants we find the liberal Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse who spends most of his time fighting against dark money, big banks, and their corrupting influences. I suppose it’s in his blood. ©

A portrait in three?

Two Restoration artists: John Michael Wright paints a portrait of the actor John Lacy.

In an era which saw the likes of Holbein, Van Dyck, and Lely enshrined as England’s court painters, John Michael Wright (1617-1694) stands out as a successful (and sought after) British artist. Probably born in London, he trained in Edinburgh and picked up enough of a burr there to be mis-identified as a Scot. It was there also that Wright became a Catholic convert, which helps to explain both his period of greatest success (under Charles II and James II) and its end in the “glorious” Protestant revolution of 1688-89. Wright’s first success came on the continent, as resident portraitist (and art agent) for the Hapsburg Archduke Leopold of Brussels. Traveling to England on a shopping expedition for the archduke, Wright stopped off in London where, despite his Catholicism, he picked up some leading commissions, including one for a portrait of Cromwell’s daughter. Wright was thus on hand for the Restoration (1660) and well-placed to become court painter to Charles II, second only to Peter Lely, and today especially well-regarded for his lifelike renderings of several courtiers and of the ‘merrie monarch’ himself. One of Wright’s most arresting studies, however, is of an actor, John Lacy. Or, rather, one canvas of John Lacy in three of his best-known roles. Exactly which three has been disputed, but pretty clearly Lacy appears on Wright’s canvas as a dour non-conformist, a French dandy, and a simpering Irish rustic, tweed-bedecked and exchanging glances with the (disapproving) dissenter. There are a number of Lacy’s roles that might qualify here, but the rustic is Lacy as an Irish footman in a 1662 play in which his comic turn was much praised by none other than the diarist Samuel Pepys. One can safely say that the other two Lacy personaes were not females, an important point since some of Lacy’s best parts were as women (King Charles’s laxer standards did not require women’s roles to be played by women). Lacy was also a successful playwright, both original works by him and adaptations of Shakespeare and Molière. Of course Molière required translation, but so did making the terrifying ‘Kate’ Minola into a “saucy” Scottish shrew. The fact that Lacy had actually fought for King Charles I increased his cachet in the 1660s, but in one of his own works (The Old Troop, 1664) he dared to criticize the behavior of “Cavalier” soldiers towards the civilian population. John Lacy died on September 17, 1681, and was buried at St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, already very much London’s “artists’ church.” In 1694, his painter, John Michael Wright, was also buried there. The painting is still in the royal collection, still worth a look. Perhaps King Charles III will give it to the nation, from whence, one might say, it came. ©.

Taking the high road to London

Do not suffer life to stagnate; it will grow muddy for want of motion: commit yourself again to the current of the world. Samuel Johnson.

In all of Anglophone history there is but one “Doctor Johnson,” Samuel Johnson that is, and he didn’t attain that title until he was already famous enough to win honorary doctorates, first from Trinity, Dublin, in 1765, and then the University of Oxford, in 1775. Johnson took pride and pleasure in these gongs, but we know him as ‘Doctor Johnson’ because that is what James Boswell called him, repeatedly, in his Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D (1791). Boswell idolized Johnson from the time they first met, in 1763, when Boswell was a young man (22), just starting out, and Johnson was reaching the height of his fame as a literary critic, a novelist, a man about Town (London town, that is), a raconteur, and above all as a lexicographer. For Samuel Johnson it was who created A Dictionary of the English Language (1755). It wasn’t the first such dictionary, but it was the best so far. It was expensive, and in that sense exclusive, and besides compiling words it had compiled an impressive subscription list. When it came out, England’s educated classes had enjoyed just a few decades of gathering together, for “seasons” in ‘Town’, at health spas, and even at a couple of seaside “resorts.” They were learning a “received” accent and were beginning to think it a good idea to use uniform spelling and consistent grammar. And in the century of Britain’s rise to world power, it suited them to think that “their” tongue, English, was at least as respectable as French. And if the French had their Académie Française, then by heavens the English could now have their Doctor Johnson. Samuel Johnson was a remarkable man of unremarkable beginnings: a late-life child born unhealthy above his father’s bookshop in Lichfield, Staffordshire, on September 18, 1709. He stayed unhealthy for most of his life. Some accidental patronage got him into good schools, then Oxford, but he made little progress in any of them, becoming instead a peripatetic hawker of knowing about things. He also learned to make the best of a handicap, a syndrome of verbal and physical tics now known as Tourette’s Syndrome. Along the way he married a patron’s widow, “Tetty” Porter, 22 years Johnson’s senior, then (seeing the noble prospect of a high road to London) decamped there with his prized private tutee, a not-yet-famous actor called David Garrick. It was in London that both would make their names and their fames, Johnson as London’s most sought after public intellectual, a man of infinite words, not to mention thousands of aphorisms. Dr. Johnson, a man so well studied as to defy summary treatment, died in 1784, aged and agued, still pursued by the “black dog” of depression, awaiting only his biographer to ensure his immortality. ©