BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

The embryology of embryology.

The qualities of her work are inseparable from those of her person. From Jane Oppenheimer’s obituary in Developmental Biology, 1996.

I am now reading Armand Leroi’s Mutants (2003), not a work of ‘horror’ fiction but, as its subtitle indicates, a serious study of recent findings in human embryology. It is not a rehashing of the early idea—or hope—that the development of the embryo was, in essence, a replay of evolutionary history. So the gills that one sees in a human embryo’s early history represent our “fish” stage. Rather Mutants treats embryology as an autonomous scientific field, operating under its own steam to explain how organisms are made whole (or, in mutations, not quite whole) in embryo. The full demonstration of embryology’s importance awaited the discovery and definition of DNA. But even before that, innovations in laboratory techniques had enabled scientists to demonstrate that some parts of the embryo played governing or scheduling roles in the transformation of fertilized egg into living organism. Much of this work was done by Jane Marion Oppenheimer, born into a medical doctor’s family, in Philadelphia, on September 19, 1911. She majored in zoology at Bryn Mawr College (where she also added to her competencies in foreign languages). After her Yale PhD she returned to Bryn Mawr and spent almost all her working life at the college. That working life was dominated by a small Atlantic coastline fish, the killifish, and its embryos. Using delicate surgical techniques, Oppenheimer moved material from one killifish embryo to another and changed the basic structures of the recipient embryo. She did something very similar by moving embryonic structures from fishes to amphibians, resulting in new ( “mutant”) developments. Such discoveries made her a leader in the field, and brought her many honors that—for her time—were not usually accorded to women, including the presidency of her professional organization. Meanwhile, the resonances of what she was doing changed the whole history of embryology, where her command of foreign languages (notably French and German) enabled her to read, and work through, the pioneer works of her predecessors, not to point out their errors but to establish the lasting value of their work. So Jane Oppenheimer became, also, a leader in the development of the history of science as a discipline in its own right, notably in a consortium of Philadelphia area colleges and universities. The full value of her discoveries in killifish embryology became more apparent as the mysteries of the genome were revealed, notably in the “hox” genes that govern, or ‘schedule,’ the development of all animal embryos. Always the historian, she lived long enough to see how this was likely to turn out, dying—in Philadelphia, of course—in 1996. ©.

[Stanley]

Editing is simply the common sense of any good reader. Robert Gottlieb.

Just get it down on paper, and then we’ll see what to do with it. Maxwell Perkins.

I’ve now read (quite a few times) that novelists no longer write well. Even “great” novelists. Those who make such charges often go on to moan about the disappearance of the ‘great literary editor,’ the genius who discovered and/or nurtured this or that raw talent, coaxing or coaching it to its Pulitzer or Booker or Nobel fruition. Or, occasionally, ruining an author’s work. For instance stories abound about how Malcolm Cowley completely misconstrued William Faulkner’s genius in producing the “compendium” The Portable Faulkner (1945), several digestible shorts torn from larger (and more impenetrable) fictions. Cowley outlived Faulkner long enough to put that to rest with a blow-by-blow account of how it all happened which Cowley published as “The Solitude of William Faulkner” in The Atlantic magazine in 1966. Faulkner’s ‘solitude’ is a rather poetic notion in itself, but there’s no doubt that, at the time, Faulkner wanted some solitude, solitude required some money, and The Portable Faulkner sold like hotcakes. It enabled Faulkner to escape Hollywood and return to restoring his estate in Yoknapatawpha County. The Portable also gave Faulkner an audience he'd never before captured and, arguably, prepared him for the thunderclap of his 1949 Nobel Prize. So, by hook or crook, Cowley may qualify as one of those mythic ‘great editors’. There are other contenders, too, notably Katherine White, the gently judgmental doyenne of short fiction at The New Yorker (not to mention the long reign there of her son Roger Angell). But without doubt the editor to cut them all was Maxwell Evarts (“Max”) Perkins, born into New York’s middle-upper crust on September 20, 1884. Perkins not only discovered Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Erskine Caldwell (a fascinating triptych). He revolutionized one of New York’s most conservative publishers, Scribners, and brought it into the forefront of modernism. He also had an eye for sales potential, notably James Jones’s From Here to Eternity (1951). And, most miraculously of all, Max Perkins tamed the wild verbosity of Thomas Wolfe, cutting his manuscripts down to about half their original length and, despite this editorial savagery, retaining Wolfe’s friendship even beyond the author’s death. (Perkins became Wolfe’s literary executor in 1938). Max Perkins had several other genius scalps to nail to his editorial walls, all to his credit, but there was not much in his youth to hint at his brilliant literary future. Indeed Max was an economics major at Harvard, not the acme of literary training, and after college he started to work for Scribners in their advertising department—writing book jacket blurbs, one imagines. Perhaps, that was the secret to Max’s success, and what aspiring novelists really need today is more marketing genius. ©.

[Stanley]

A builder of roads.

The road to success is always under construction. Modern slogan of uncertain parentage.

Though the existence of a powerful hereditary aristocracy can be a sign of stasis, a kind of arteriosclerosis of the body politic, some aristocracies showed ability to recruit from below. Thus they brought in new blood, possibly thinner but of a certain vigor. The British were particularly good at it, new peers at the top, each with his own rank (duke, earl, baron, etc.), and further down the ladder clutches of brand new baronets. They paid for the privilege, not only entry fees directly to the crown but good money to professional genealogists. Would-be dukes, for instance, had to prove some degree of cousinage to the royal family. Coats of arms needed somehow to echo a traceable past. That dark art has now acquired some of the mystique of science, as we can now trace our DNA far back in time and with some degree of geographical accuracy. But before DNA? Proverbially, it takes a lot of wisdom to know one’s father. How much more must it require to identify an ancestor 10 generations back? In the 1950s, a branch of my family waxed rich enough to hire a Scottish genealogist clever enough to discover that they were descended directly from Robert the Bruce (1274-1329). So I guess I am, too. A neat trick. But an even neater one was tried by a minor Ayrshire laird, of a cadet branch of the Clan McGregor, when he hired an Edinburgh herald to trace his family tree all the way back to the Adam of Genesis. And so it was that these particular McGregors took the surname of McAdam (‘sons of Adam’). One imagines the radical Ayrshire poet Robert Burns making something of that!! But so it was that John Loudon McAdam was born, in Ayr, on September 21, 1756. As a younger son he would have to make his own way in the world, whether or not he were really of Adam’s seed. And so he did, in New York City of all places, waxing rich on British prizes taken during the War of Independence. The British proved the losing side, but John McAdam decamped at just the right time, joining the ‘Tory’ emigration of 1783 and returning to Ayshire where he purchased his own estate and thus got involved in coal mining. He also bought into the Ayshire turnpike company. And it was through these new interests (coal, coal tar, and road building) that John McAdam became a genius inventor of a new way of building up roads, layering them up (big stones, then smaller ones, then gravels) and finally topping them off with “tarmac.” That is a nickname for “tarmacadam.” Thus, even today, our blacktop roads are in some odd way routes of a very ancient descent. A noble story, indeed. ©.

[Stanley]

A feminist or a not-feminist?

Some of us are made fat, and some of us are made thin, and that’s all there is to it. Fay Weldon, The Fat Woman’s Joke (1967).

It’s unlikely that the prolific novelist Fay Weldon (who died earlier this year at 91) will be remembered as a feminist icon or pioneer. If there was a feminist ‘party line,’ Weldon never hewed to it and, on occasion, publicly dissented, notably in her 1997 comment that rape wasn’t too serious a matter as long as its victims emerged “safe and unmarked.” She also seems to have needed men. She married three of them, and would have divorced them all had she lived long enough (she’d begun divorce proceedings against her last husband when she was 89, and the divorce was still in court when she died). And, as one of her obituarists (in The Guardian, January 2023) affectionately observed, Weldon did not consistently regard gender or its oppressions as serious issues. A woman named “Fay” who entitled her autobiography Auto da Fay (2002) might be seen as one unlikely to take anything too profoundly. Fay Weldon (she took her writing surname from her second husband) was born Franklin Birkinshaw in Birmingham, England, on September 22, 1931. “Franklin” was an odd name for a girl, but her mother had wanted and expected a boy. Fairly quickly, the misnomer was dropped and ‘Franklin’ became ‘Fay,’ a little girl, rather round and rather cheerful, who adjusted to her parents’ divorce with seeming ease. She spent some time with dad in New Zealand and some with mom in England. One thinks there must have been some seasonal confusions, but the one Fay remembered was being chubby and clumpy in a family of beautiful, petite women. She later reflected that her feminism, such as it was, may have been formulated for that majority of women who didn’t quite fit prevailing definitions of female beauty. One adjustment the child Fay made was to learn how to write, an impulse that grew stronger at St. Andrews, in Scotland, where her philosophy professor never tired of telling her that women couldn’t think clearly. And write Fay did, almost compulsively. Between The Fat Woman’s Joke (1967) and Kehua! (2013) there were over 30 novels, not to mention quite a few television scripts, come criticism, that strangely-titled autobiography, and a letter of advice to a girl grandchild On First Reading Jane Austen (1984). I found that last very curious, and was also surprised to learn that Weldon wrote the script for the first BBC dramatization of Pride and Prejudice, which appeared in 1981. Before making any final judgement on Fay Weldon as a feminist (or a not-feminist), I would want to know her thoughts on Elizabeth Bennett, on the prideful Darcy, and not least on the rotund, forceful, and tactless female person who was Lizzie’s mother. ©.

[Stanley]

A triumph of Newtonian science.

NATURE and Nature’s laws lay hid in night;
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light. Alexander Pope, circa 1727.

The discovery of the planet Neptune (at the Berlin Observatory, on the night of September 23, 1846, marked a significant point in the history of astronomy: for two reasons. First, Neptune was known to exist before it was discovered. Secondly, Neptune was discovered before it was known to exist. Before we get to that conundrum, however, let’s give credit to the space explorers of 1846. Not counting the crew on hand at the Berlin observatory (itself an institutional expression of the rise of the Prussian state), there were three pioneers, one of whom was not present on the night of landfall. He was French, Urbain le Verrier (1811-1877), a mathematician turned astronomer who would later (from 1854) head up the Paris Observatory. A disciple of Isaac Newton, le Verrier believed in the regularity and stability of the universe: a self-governing entity that followed known rules of motion and gravity. Le Verrier studied seeming irregularities in the orbit of Uranus to conclude that another planet, further out from the sun, must exist. There had been a flurry of mathematical speculation on this point, including at the Greenwich observatory outside London, but le Verrier’s were completed first, and it was his calculations that were used at Berlin by Johan Gottfried Galle and Heinrich Louis d’Arrest to scan the night sky purposefully and accurately to “discover” the faintly blue image of “Neptune.” This was good going, indeed. Uranus itself had not been conclusively identified as a planet until 1781, and its 84-year orbit of the sun not yet fully observed in 1846. But enough of it was known for Galle and d’Arrest to know where to look for the ‘new’ planet that Newtonian mathematics predicted. Their discovery was a predictable miracle, and thus a sensational moment in the history of science. Then it was made more sensational by the note-taking habits of pioneer astronomers. Now that Neptune was a known planet with a known orbit, past astronomical records were examined, and it was evident that “Neptune” had been seen several times before. Galileo observed it first in 1612, then again in the next year. Joseph Lalande viewed it from Paris in 1795. In a neat coincidence, John Herschel saw it in 1830, almost on the 50th anniversary of his father’s discovery of Uranus. But Neptune’s image was so distant that all previous sightings had identified it as a star—fixed in the heavens. We’ve moved on a good deal since 1846, and now we know—or think—that nothing in the universe is fixed. But in 1846 Newton triumphed, and Neptune’s discovery, or uncovering, was a considerable achievement. ©.

[Stanley]

John Marshall and the supremacy of the Supreme Court.

It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial Department to say what the law is. John Marshall, 1803.

When the government established by the 1787 Constitution first assembled, in the summer of 1789, it had much business to conduct. Not least, the Constitution itself is very short. That has proved a strength, in the long run, but in 1789 it left unresolved many questions, even questions about dignities—for instance how to address the president and vice-president. There were more pressing disputes left over from the Constitution itself and from the often tempestuous state ratifying conventions. Several of these were resolved (or put into safe storage) by the “Bill of Rights,” as we still call the first ten amendments to the Constitution. And then came the great uncertainty created by Article III, the judiciary article, of the Constitution. It says that Congress will establish a federal judiciary, which itself would consist of “one supreme court” and such other (implicitly inferior) courts as seemed appropriate. There would also have to be a “chief justice,” to preside over the “senate”, which itself would serve as a law court in the unlikely event of an impeachment. But the exact shape of this federal judiciary remained unmapped. All this (or most of it) was laid down in the Judiciary Act that received President Washington’s signature on September 24, 1789. The act itself had a difficult passage (a process which in itself set some important precedents for what we now call “conference” bills). The very idea of a federal judiciary had aroused deep suspicions in state ratifying conventions, and the Judiciary Act of 1789 left these in place, stated but unresolved, by establishing parallel court systems, national and state, without being clear about which (if either) was to be a court of last resort, or in what kind of case. This uncertainty persisted for some time, first taking shape in the distinctions drawn about human slavery, which became “local”, and human freedom, which became “national.” This dispute became explicit with the rise of political anti-slavery and was ultimately decided not in law but in our great Civil War. Another uncertainty left untouched by the Judiciary Act was the exact extent of the power of the federal “supreme” court over (or against) the powers of the executive and legislative branches. In retrospect it was a nice irony that George Washington signed the Judiciary Act on the 44th birthday of John Marshall, born in a log cabin on the Virginia frontier. In 1799, Marshall would become “Chief Justice” of this new “Supreme Court” and in 1803, in Marbury v. Madison, his “majority opinion” established the principle of judicial review, a power that really did make the Supreme Court “supreme.” ©.

[Stanley]

The farmer's daughter who bought the farm.

I made Walter pay me a salary or I wouldn’t work. I wan’t willing to give my life’s blood and not have it properly evaluated. Olive Ann Beech.

When in 1925 Walter Beech hired Olive Ann Mellor as his secretary in Wichita’s Travel Air Company, he told her to ‘keep her hands off’ his partners, all of whom were married. Instead of disrupting the domestic harmonies of Walter’s eleven partners, she married Walter. Evidence suggests she had other ideas, too. By 1930 she’d transformed herself from secretary to company bookkeeper. Beech was a stunt pilot, a barnstormer, full of wild ideas about what might happen to airplanes and air travel. Olive Ann watched as the firm spun off some of its bright sparks (including Walter Cessna), then convinced Walter to take a job with the new Curtiss-Wright aircraft company in New York City. Soon the couple moved back to Wichita and founded Beechcraft. Beechcraft enjoyed some early successes, notably with the unlikely “Staggerwing” biplane of 1935, which won a transcontinental race despite being piloted by an all-woman team. Ann was not one of the pilots, but she had strong views about women’s capabilities, not least her own. Ann Beech was born Olive Ann Mellors on September 25, 1903, on a farm outside of Waverly, Kansas, the youngest of four daughters in a family that seems to have been run by its women. While her dad made ends meet by combining small-hold farming with carpentry, her mother kept accounts, Following mom’s lead, Olive Ann skipped high school to attend a business college in Wichita. So she entered her secretarial job ready for greater things, and when the couple decided to found Beech Aircraft (as it was then called) she made sure she got a good salary and, with it, company stock. Come Walter’s incapacitating illness (in 1940) and World War II, she was ready to move. Ann Beech was de facto CEO until Walter’s death (in 1951) and, after that, she ran the company and owned much of its stock. She had a good eye for style, for building planes that would appeal to the self-image of ‘corporate man,’ and Beechcrafts sold very well in a Wichita full of competitors (Cessna and Lear were also offshoots of Travel Air). But Ann made sure that government, too, was a satisfied customer, from training neophyte airmen in wartime to developing sealed spacecraft for NASA. If Ann Beech made a mistake, it was holding out too long against the notion of business jets (she went for turboprops), but she remained at or near the top of the tree until she was pushed out of the chairmanship through a hostile takeover by Raytheon. Clear-eyed as ever, she commented that since Raytheon had bought the farm, the sitting tenant would have to move. So the farm girl finally retired in 1980—but as the largest single holder of Raytheon’s stock. ©

[Stanley]

An American Music

Music must repeat the thoughts and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today. George Gershwin.

George Gershwin’s outsized impact on American music may have rested in his ability to absorb it, if not all music then much of it, then synthesize what he’d taken in to produce works of genius which also pass muster as new musical idioms. George Gershwin was born Jacob Gershwine (in New York, on September 26, 1898) after his paternal grandfather, but both names had already been Americanized (from Jakov Gershowitz) by a family that in Russia had already demonstrated some talent in assimilation (through Grandpa Jakov’s status as a mechanic in the Tsar’s army). As the boy succeeded in music, he changed the name further, to the one we all know, and the rest of his family complied, including his elder brother Ira (‘Israel’, born in 1896). There’s a story that George learned his music by following the keys on a player piano, a truly absorptive feat, but however it happened it convinced the family that George should be the one to take lessons, so he displaced Ira at the bench and then went on to start his playing career as a “song plugger,” playing sheet music in a shop window in order to sell the sheet music. The still-nascent recording industry would soon render that job surplus to requirements, but George’s abilities to listen, absorb, improvise, and compose saved him from technological redundancy and made him into one of the great figures of modern American music. He’s still remembered, mainly, as the composer of great popular hits. He made these up at great speed, brother Ira contributing the lyrics (usually after the tune, rather than before it). A lot of them remained as brief sketches. George would mark the ones he thought promising (“g.t.” for ‘good tune’), file them away, then go on to another score. But many never got on to paper, and George died so young (at 38) that we can never know what he might have done. But just a few song titles remind us of what he did, from his first big hit (“Swanee,” 1919) to “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” (posthumously, 1938), they include “I’ve Got Rhythm,” “Lady Be Good,” “Fascinatin’ Rhythm,” “The Man I Love,” ed cetera (almost) ad infinitum. And that list wouldn’t even touch Gershwin’s genius for making American music classical. Here he hit his stride in the 1920s, with Rhapsody in Blue (1924), Concerto in F (1925) and An American in Paris (1928), proving grounds for the orchestral potential of American jazz and blues. And then came Porgy and Bess (1935), today regarded as an opera classic. The radicalism of this last achievement is difficult to comprehend, today. But we need to remember that in 1935 it had to be financed by Gershwin himself. ©

[Stanley]

A country for an old man

It does not take a majority to prevail . . . but rather an irate, tireless minority keen on setting brushfires of freedom . . . Sam Adams of Boston.

Earlier this year—on July 4—Business Insider revealed that many leading spirits of the American Revolution were young. The Insider list was headed by Andrew Jackson who, even though he was only 9 in 1776, managed to insult a British officer and, 50 years later, pose as a revolutionary hero when he won the presidency. And alongside the usual male suspects (young John Adams, the even younger Tom Jefferson, and the barely-weaned Light Horse Harry Lee we find the girl-heroes Sybil Ludington and Deborah Sampson. The Business Insider piece reads like a discovery, but it makes sense. As a general rule, elders don’t make revolutions. They are too creaky and too quiet to man—or in Deborah’s case ‘woman’—the barricades. But it was all old news. It was 1961 when two young historians, Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, pointed out the obvious, that the Revolution was made by men substantially younger than those they replaced. The age gap became even more evident when they looked at the Federalists who drafted the Constitution of 1787 and then drove it home through the often contentious state ratifying conventions. They averaged ten years younger than their Antifederalist opponents. There were exceptions (in history, there always are). Despite his great age (born in 1706), Ben Franklin proved lithe enough to stay atop the revolutionary crest from 1765, when he prudently changed his views on the Stamp Act, through 1787, when he cast himself the eminence grise of the Constitutional convention. The other old man of the Revolution was Sam Adams of Boston, born on September 27, 1722. By 1773, he was so creaky that he stayed home (even abed) on the night of the Tea Party, too tired (or stiff?) to dress up like an Indian and dump tons of tea into Boston Harbor. But if Boston was the cockpit of the revolution—and it was—then it was old Sam Adams who set the bloody contest in motion and made all the winning bets on the outcome. He was already on the outs with the empire-builders who ran provincial politics (and were, by the way, a lot younger than Sam) until the Stamp Act blunder, and from 1765 had felt the wind blowing his way. How early Sam decided on independence and revolution is still debated, but it was very early indeed, and first in Boston and then in Philadelphia, at the Continental Congress, he pushed, prodded, and cajoled younger men to take the dangerous leap into independence and war. Sam got a few things wrong, to be sure. Old men cannot always be right. But if I were to name a traditional Boston beer after a revolutionary hero, I’d name it for Old Sam Adams. ©.

[Stanley]

The Unhappy End of "Li'l Abner" and his Dogpatch World

I always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific. Al Capp.

Alfred Gerald Caplin and Walter Crawford Kelly both grew up in Bridgeport, Connecticut, a working-class city of small factories and great poverty. They would become famous cartoonists (inventors of memorable strips, creators of unforgettable characters, mappers of mythical places), and would become great friends. But it was coincidence and not the old school tie that brought them together in the 1950s. Kelly did well in high school, for one thing, and Al Capp (as Caplin became known) never did graduate—though he claimed the all-Connecticut record for failing geometry nine times in nine straight semesters. Kelly was also Irish Catholic, Capp Lithuanian Jewish, which might have kept them from being best pals at Bridgeport High, where they were, anyway, a couple of years apart. Alfred Caplin (or Al Capp) was born on September 28, 1909, of parents who were so delighted that in America it was not a crime to be Jewish that they almost forgot how poor they were. Poverty came home to the family when young Al, only 9 years old, was run over by a trolley, nearly died, and woke up without very much of his left leg. He never got over that, or the poverty of his Bridgeport childhood, but it did give Al’s father a chance to make drawing, sketching, and cartoons part of Al’s physical and psychological therapy. Al also read a lot, and his parents indulged him in the habit, especially funny stuff by the likes of Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and contemporary humorists like Robert Benchley and S. J. Perelman. So by the time Al left home to make his own way in the world, left-legless so to speak, he had a particular bent on life which would, eventually, come out full blown in his mythical world of Dogpatch, USA. The strip, entitled “Li’l Abner,” first appeared in 1934, and by the end of World War II had made Al Capp so famous that he changed his name. I knew every character, not only Abner, musclebound from top knot to toes, but his voluptuous yet virtuous Daisy Mae, his crotchety Mammy, and a host of bit players including the doom-laden Joe Btfsplk and Fearless Fosdick (a satire on Dick Tracy). Al Capp’s later life was blighted by incidents involving young women (which makes one wonder about Daisy Mae), by smoking-related and debilitating illnesses, and by politics. In several headliner incidents, he made himself into a right winger and a self-appointed scourge of youth culture. All this made Capp a friend of Richard Nixon’s crime-ridden White House and lost him the friendship of Walt Kelly, whose “Pogo” strip remained a daily therapy for lefties. “Li’l Abner” limped to its bitter end in 1977. Al Capp followed in 1979. ©

[Tripps]

Interestingly (to me anyway) Al Capp was responsible for the phrase "Double Whammy".

The expression "double whammy" first appeared in a cartoon strip, which was quite popular in America in the 1920s. Al Capp, the author of the comic strip "Li'l Abner" used this expression to refer to an intense stare, which had a withering effect on its victims. It's meaning has undergone a considerable amount of change since then. This is how slang dictionaries define "double whammy" — "double the portion of something, especially something troublesome." When you get a "double whammy" of something, it is usually something really bad. Here is an example:

"We thought he'd come alone, but he gave us a double whammy by bringing his wife and children."

Not a lot of people know that. . . .

[Stanley]

A national church, if we want one?

The nation with the soul of a church. Saying about the USA.

The older Protestant denominations have been eclipsed many times in American religious history. The evangelical fevers of the 19thcentury saw the numerical triumph of Methodists and Baptists, and this continues today with new ‘parking lot’ churches (often eschewing any denominational identity) springing up in suburban shopping centers or near enough to commuting freeways to advertise their presence cheaply and—sometimes—"gaudily.” Perhaps reflecting a decline in theological identity, the largest single religious grouping in today’s congress (senators and representatives) is that of “unspecified Protestant.” This unhelpful typology takes in all sorts, from liberals like Maxine Walters and rock-ribbed conservatives like Ken Buck to trumpeting prophets like Marjorie Taylor Greene. So God only knows what ‘religion in politics’ means, or if it means anything. Given that we claim some sort of separation of church and state, this confusion may be a good thing. But it makes more surprising the historic importance, in politics, of two of the “traditional” Protestant denominations, Presbyterians and Episcopalians, who between them claim the loyalties of no fewer than nineteen of our 46 presidents. Granted, of the 11 Episcopalian presidents, only three came in the 20th century, the last one being the first Bush. And Presbyterians claim only Eisenhower and Reagan, so the tide may be turning. Obama and Trump identified themselves as “Christians,” which suggests a becoming reticence or a vast uncertainty. But the idea of a national church remains, and there’s a grand building (standing atop one of DC’s few hills) that has sought to embody that idea, the so-called “National Cathedral.” It’s known more formally as the Episcopalian Cathedral Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, and its cornerstone was laid on September 29, 1907—by the man who was then our second (and so far last) Dutch Reform president, Theodore Roosevelt. In a nice symmetry, the National Cathedral was topped off by our 11th (and so far last) Episcopalian chief Executive, the elder George Bush, on September 29, 1990. The idea of a ‘national’ cathedral was explicit in the earliest plans for the national district, possibly at the insistence of George Washington, also an Episcopalian, who had tried (unsuccessfully) a similar idea in Virginia. It was, thus, a long time coming, and it has cost the Episcopalians dearly, for it is indeed a grand edifice. It has hosted some major national mournings, and celebrations. And it’s worth a visit. About 250,000 Americans do so, every year. I think most of them have not stated their denominational loyalties. ©

[Stanley]

A chip off the old block.

The best protection a woman can have is courage. Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

In 2018,The New York Times updated its obituary section to look at the lives of people whose deaths the paper had originally ignored. Apologetically, the Times noted that its obits had been devoted mainly to “dead white men.” Of course obituaries are about the dead, which made for a slightly odd apology, but the real problem was the concentration on white men. So the Times began to produce a series of ex post facto obituaries that it called “Overlooked.” My impression was that the Times had already been doing better at noting the passing of women, people of color, and non-Americans of many sorts, but the “Overlooked” series is dominated by women, dead women of course. It’s further limited to those who died after the paper’s founding date, but the series has been enlightening and surprisingly inclusive. The Times obits had, for example, never marked the passings of the radical journalist Ida B. Wells (1862-1931), the feminist poet Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), or the woman who learned enough about engineering and financing from her husband to complete the Brooklyn Bridge when he had been incapacitated by illness, Emily Roebling (1843-1903). But a thorough search of the Times obituaries will reveal that the newspaper had already been bending to a feminist wind. Just as American history was being rewritten to include women (and as more than engines of demography), so the Times obituaries were taking more notice. Not enough, for some of these early women’s obituaries were painfully short. Take for instance the newspaper’s notice of the death (in 1971) of the 88-year old Nora Blatch Barney: four short paragraphs, fewer than 200 words, for a woman pioneer in several fields, not to mention a radical feminist leader. Nora Blatch Barney was born in Basingstoke, England, on September 30, 1882, to an English father and an American mother. The family moved to New York in 1902, whereupon Nora earned a degree in Civl Engineering at Cornell (1905), became the first female member of the American Society of Civil Engineers, and became the first woman engineer at the New York City water works. She went to work for the American Bridge Company. She then married the inventor of the radio tube but resigned him when he wouldn’t let her into his factory or out of her kitchen, and instead married a marine engineer who admitted that women and boats might make a good fit. She even sued the ASCE for removing her from its ranks, an interesting story in itself. Not only that, but Nora Barney was the granddaughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton—who, by the way, did get a long Times obit, on September 24, 1922, as a woman who would not be overlooked. ©

[Stanley]

To tell the truth . . . .

‘Story-truth’ is sometimes truer than ‘happening-truth’. Tim O’Brien, from The Things They Carried (1990).

As we age, the stories we have about our lives get re-sorted in varied ways. Some of them, maybe most, disappear. The others, retained and retold, are constantly edited. This is not because they are “stories;” it arises from the facts of story-telling. Stories are made of words, sentences, paragraphs, and they are told to different audiences at different times; we even tell them to ourselves, in our waking hours and, sometimes, in our dreams. Our stories are inherently mutable. Whether our ‘editorial’ changes lead us into playing loose with the ‘truth’ is another question. Take for instance two places somewhere in Minnesota, one of them ‘real’ (it’s still there; you can visit it off I-90 any time you like). That is Lake Okabena, at Worthington, MN. It’s not a great lake, shallow and, these days, often algae-choked, but it’s one of the “things” that Tim O’Brien carried with him to Viet Nam, in 1969. The other is Lake Wobegon, another undistinguished prairie pond; but it’s entirely an imagined place, the invented setting for an invented town (also ‘Lake Wobegon’), and thus for a remarkably storied novel and a long series of NPR monologues delivered by Lake Wobegon’s self-appointed chronicler, Garrison Keillor. And the puzzle is, that both of these storied places (where else, really, do they exist, but in stories?) seem to me to be about equally true. Worthington, MN, and it’s shallow lake (originally a watering-place for Chicago & North Western steam engines) became the remembered childhood of Tim O’Brien, novelist, who’d been born a bit east (still on the C&NW mainline) at Austin, MN, on October 1, 1947. His was a pretty ordinary Worthington childhood, made distinctive by his intelligence and bonhomie, qualities which made him class president at Macalester College, in the Twin Cities (at about the same time that Keillor was making himself a misfit at the University of Minnesota). Who knows what might have happened to O’Brien’s stories had he stopped there? But instead O’Brien went on to Viet Nam, 3rd Platoon, Company A, assigned to the local My Lai sector, a fateful place for story-telling, and for editing. “Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war? I think not. He can tell war stories.” Large audiences have declared O’Brien’s war stories to be “true.” This reediting began with If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me up and Ship Me Home (1973), and has continued through The Things They Carried (1990) right down to the present day when, as far as I know, O’Brien is still telling stories to his semi-annual writing class at San Marcos State, which (ironically) is Lyndon Johnson’s alma mater. Now there’s another “story-truth”, just waiting to be told. ©.

[Stanley]

The utility of Occam's razor.

The study of an idea is, necessarily, the story of many things. Willy Ley.

Conspiracy theories are in the air, notably in the fevered ranks of election deniers. They should have run out of oxygen by now, but they keep going, in defiance of known facts and of the good-sense “razor” proposed in the 1300s by a renegade English Franciscan, William of Occam. Were I a conspiracist myself, I might suggest that some sinister chemical has been added to the nation’s water supply. Besides the stolen election, my current favorite among conspiracy theories is that the Apollo moon landings were “really” just set pieces staged in the Chilean desert. Even in its own terms, this legend requires an absurd narrative. But it has sources, as do all good conspiracies, among them the flowering of modern space fiction, or science fiction set in interplanetary (and intergalactic) space. This appeared not only in print, but in lavish illustrations and in ‘real’ movie and TV sets, not unlike those Chilean desert studios. For generations brought up on Buck Rogers, Captain Video and His Video Rangers, and then E.T., 2000, and Close Encounters of the Nth Kind (not to mention Star Trek) that Chilean fraud becomes almost “reasonable”. One of the prime sources of this popular mindset was Willy Ley, born in “Imperial” Germany (Berlin) on October 2, 1906. It’s an unfair attribution, of course, not least because Ley died just before the first Apollo landings, but also because Ley’s imagination was bounded by his good knowledge of scientific fact and theory, which he used as a kind of Occam’s Razor to cut away the fantastical elements of what was, for most of his life, just a dream. Ley was a gadfly polymath, and at the University of Berlin he learned a lot of science but could never decide between astronomy, physics, paleontology, or zoology. Nevertheless, he did get a degree, and was not bitten by the space travel bug until the mid-1920s, when he read a dreamwork about it. Almost immediately, Ley set himself up as a science-based prophet, and we find him at the heart of rocketry experiments in Germany (and a publicist for them) until, horrified by Hitler, Ley fled to Britain, then to the US. Once established in Manhattan he set himself up as a very popular scientist, knowledgeable about the practicalities of lift-off and orbit and thus able to to envisage how it would actually happen—if it happened. For instance, Ley got his rockets right as to size, weight, and fuel capacity. He also served as consultant on Hollywood space fictions, wrote for Popular Science, and he could have set up a studio in a Chilean desert to fool us all into thinking that Neil Armstrong actually jumped around in moon dust. But Willy Ley didn’t do that. Neil Armstrong did. ©.

[Stanley]

A cycling story.

.
[Tell the children] where I am so they can send their loving thoughts to me. They need not think that I am shut up because I have done wrong. Myra Sadd Brown, letter to her husband from prison. 1912.

Many leaders of the British suffragette movement were of genteel stock, women who easily assumed public roles and who would have felt quite comfortable attending private meetings at the Pankhursts’ posh town house in Russell Square. And then there was the Countess Constance Markievicz who, before she acquired a Polish count (and his surname), had been born into the Anglo-Irish aristocracy as a Gore-Booth. But there were others, like Myra Eleanor Sadd Brown, born into a timber merchant’s family in Maldon, Essex, on October 3, 1872. Not poor, but not polished either: her father was an entrepreneur, a pioneer in steam traction (at his timber yard) and in steam-powered electricity (he built a power station for his timber yard and later expanded it to light the whole town). Myra was well educated, for her class and gender, but didn’t marry up. Rather she was attracted to another entrepreneur, a local manufacturer of bicycles and bicycle parts who later went into electrical appliances and airplanes. They met, unconventionally, in a cycling club, and Myra chose purple and green as her wedding colors. These would later be the colors of the suffragette movement, in which Myra proved as much a pioneer as her father had been in electricity. Mr. and Mrs. Sadd Brown (Myra retained her surname, and Mr. Sadd Brown incorporated hers) waxed prosperous enough to move to London and settle in Hampstead, even then on the posh side of suburbia, where both were activist sorts. Myra, for her part, was not only a suffragette (she was among those arrested and force-fed), but (with her husband) kept a literary salon which included, inter alia, George Bernard Shaw. The Sadd Browns also kept in touch with leading religious dissenters (she had been raised a Congregationalist) and eventually became Christian Scientists. They traveled a lot, to sunnier climes chosen because of Ernest Sadd Brown’s rheumatic heart, and this may have been a reason for Myra’s becoming active—concerned to extend women’s rights, imperially—in the early development of the British Commonwealth of Nations. Her eldest daughter (also Myra) followed her into a life of activism and travel, and after Ernest’s death in 1931 Myra went on a world tour timed perfectly for her to be present at her granddaughter’s birth in British Malaysia. After the birth, Myra extended her tour, intending to go home via China and the Trans-Siberian railway. But she fell ill in Hong Kong, died, and was cremated there (1938) in a Hindu ceremony. It was a fiery end to an energetic and entrepreneurial life. ©

[Stanley]

A Century of Struggle

I’m in the labor movement and I speak my own piece. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, aged 16.

Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis is not our only book-banner. Way north, New Hampshire’s Chris Sununu is playing the same censor’s game. Earlier this year, he led the movement to remove a plaque in Concord, NH, which memorialized the birthplace of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (1890-1964). Flynn was balladeer Joe Hill’s “only and thoroughbred Lady . . . precious pearl.” “The Rebel Girl” she was: labor organizer, strike leader, a founder-member of the American Civil Liberties Union, advocate of women’s rights to plan their own parenthood. In short, just the sort of lass fated to be unloved by the likes of Chris Sununu. Worse, she was from 1936 to 1956 a member of the Communist Party USA. And so Sununu had that plaque removed from Concord’s main street, hoping to erase the town’s most famous daughter from its history. But you can’t keep a good person down, even a woman and a communist. For it was Elizabeth Gurley Flynn who inspired Eleanor Flexner to write A Century of Struggle: The Women’s Rights Movement in the United States. Flexner’s work was to provide a historical context for pioneer ‘new feminists’ like Betty Frieden. Better yet, A Century of Struggle presaged a flood of scholarly works on women’s history. Eleanor Flexner was born in Georgetown, KY, on October 4, 1908. Her mother was a successful writer, her father an educational reformer who would, one day, help to found Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies. One of Eleanor’s earliest memories was watching her parents dressing all in white for New York’s great suffrage parade of 1915. So it was no great surprise that Eleanor would produce A Century of Struggle. But first there was her education at Swarthmore College, where she majored in English and raised hell about sororities. Then came a scholarship at Oxford. The onset of the Great Depression found Eleanor back in the USA as a drama critic and theater historian, but also as a volunteer in soup kitchens and welfare hostels. Economically secure, she felt out of place, a doyenne of good works, but membership in the Communist Party gave her an intellectual basis for her moral outrage at the mass suffering brought on by the panic of 1929. Flexner had begun working on a history of women in the labor movement when, in the late 1940s, she heard Elizabeth Gurley Flynn speak on the political context of women’s labor struggles. So Flexner’s research focused on the history of the women’s suffrage movement and more broadly on women’s struggle to enter the public sphere as citizens and activists. Flexner’s first publisher (Harpers) objected to the amount of space she’d given to black women reformers. Other publishers found her work too leftist. Luckily, she found her way to the Harvard University Press, which put out the first edition in 1959. It proved a book whose time had come. There have been two subsequent editions, and I suspect that you might find a copy in the Concord (NH) Public Library. Unless Governor Sununu has banned it. ©.

[Stanley]

Not a chip off the old block.

God forbid that his being my son should be his allowance to live not pleasingly. Oliver Cromwell on his son Richard (1651).

Shortly after Elizabeth II’s death, London’s Guardian carried a book review which contrasted the late queen’s conduct with that of several of her direct descendants, including one grandchild. Elizabeth was judged “supernaturally” competent at her job, the very model of a humble public servant. The reviewer named no names, but a British readership needed no such listing. Not only had several of Elizabeth’s own progeny proved supernaturally useless; too often they hadn’t even married well. The point of the review was not the silly domestic dramas of the modern Windsors, but a book entitled Unruly: A History of England’s Kings and Queens, a light-hearted history of the more spectacular failures of “a [royal] succession of brutes and fools” during centuries when monarchs possessed enough power to do real damage. Unruly sounds OK, but you can get the gist of its argument from Tom Paine’s Common Sense, a January 1776 best-seller which helped America’s founders to decide that, when it came to kingship, enough was enough. The hereditary principle was, Paine pithily argued, bad in logic and worse in history. He viewed the whole lot as tainted (usurpers, tyrants, banditti were the terms he used). His focus on monarchy as bad in principle was understandable, but he could have used England’s one case of a non-royal hereditary successor as yet another argument on favor of republicanism. This was Richard Cromwell, who inherited his father’s role as Lord Protector in 1658. Richard made a mess of it, but was so manifestly incompetent that, when the Protectorate dissolved in 1660, the restored monarchy thought Richard such a nebbish that he was allowed to escape. He spent the next 20 years living anonymously (and quietly) on the continent, and then returned to England where he lived quietly (almost anonymously) on a rentier pension from his wife’s estate. The pension was not much, but enough to keep one servant and learn how to paint landscapes and still lifes. He died, almost unknown, in 1712. Clearly Richard Cromwell did not inherit his father’s competence gene. But as a younger son (born on October 5, 1626) he had never been expected to inherit very much. As his father led parliamentary armies to victory in the Civil War, Richard took little if any part, but by the time Oliver rose to full power as Lord Protector, Richard was his eldest surviving son and, as Oliver’s health waned and gave out, he became Oliver’s heir. There’s no evidence he wanted the job, but plenty of evidence that he was unfit for it. So hereditary power has proven a bad principle for republics, as well as for monarchies. ©.

[Stanley]

"For war billions more but no more for the poor." From Lowery's funeral sermon.

Joseph Lowery: I’d like a hamburger and a coke, please. Waitress: We don’t serve Negroes here. Lowery: Ma’am, I don’t eat Negroes. I’d like a hamburger and a coke. [a remembered conversation from the 1950s.].

When Coretta Scott King (1927-2006) died, her funeral was held not at her husband’s old church in Atlanta but in a new black ‘mega church’ in suburban Livonia. It was because they expected a crowd. The mourners included former presidents (Carter, Bush I, and Clinton), the current one (Bush II), a future president (Obama), and someone who expected to be elected president (Hillary Clinton). They also got a long funeral (7 hours) and a political dustup. Remembering Coretta’s bitterness about FBI surveillance of her husband (and herself), Jimmy Carter slammed J. Edgar Hoover (long dead) then went on to reflect unkindly on George W. Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina. Perhaps more embarrassingly, as things turned out, Bill Clinton’s tongue slipped (Freud-like?) to introduce Hillary as a future president. All this was replayed on MSNBC and Fox, each reacting as one might expect. MSNBC even dragged presidential hopeful John McCain into the fray, who returned the compliment by slamming Senator Obama. As far as I can remember, Obama had been silent at the funeral, but perhaps McCain’s remarks were not entirely gratuitous. So politics intruded, and mourning forgotten. That theme may have been kicked off by the remarks of one of the officiating ministers, the Rev’d Joseph Lowery, an old friend of the Kings and a co-founder (with Coretta’s husband) of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Born in Alabama on October 6, 1921, Lowery had gone north to study theology. He also found a northern wife, Evelyn Gibson, who returned south with him and, it is said, introduced a political perspective into his old-time religion. However that might have been, Lowery as pastor (first in Mobile) couldn’t avoid politics in the apartheid south. And not just in Mobile: Lowery drove to Montgomery to help organize that city’s famous bus boycott, then founded the Alabama Civic Affairs Association to make the movement statewide. In 1957, he joined with Martin Luther King, Jr., Fred Shuttleworth, and others to found the SCLC, and for 20 years (after King’s assassination) had been its president. So he came to Livonia to mourn the dead, to preach the gospel, and to speak to power. With George W. Bush sitting front and center, Lowery contrasted the needless invasion of Iraq with the needfulness of the American poor. Lowery’s words helped to fuel conservative outrage over his, and others’, politicization of religion. But it was, after all, the funeral of a very political woman. ©

[Stanley]

Stationmaster, Underground Railway

Like millions of my race, my mother and father were born slaves, but were not contented to live and die so. First sentence of William Still’s The Underground Railroad.

The anti-slavery movement took a radical turn in 1838 with the founding of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society. Founders included the white reformers James and Lucretia Mott, but equally prominent was Robert Purvis, a successful entrepreneur who ‘looked’ white but who identified as black in honor of his grandmother Badareka, a freedwoman of color who had lived in common-law marriage (“interracial” marriages being illegal in South Carolina) with Purvis’s grandpa, a Jewish immigrant. Among the employees of the Society was its clerk, William Still, who became a full member and who was (in 1850) named chairman of the Society’s Vigilance Committee. Still was born in New Jersey on October 7, 1821, son of Levin and Charity Still. Levin had purchased his freedom but then aided Charity’s escape from slavery. So Charity remained, legally, a fugitive for the rest of her life. So all of their children, from the two eldest (left behind when Charity escaped) to their youngest, William, were considered enslaved persons. Their freedom became more fragile with the new federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. So we may assume that William Still took his Vigilance Committee duties seriously. Indeed he did, and even more seriously when one of the first fugitives he helped turned out to be his long-lost, enslaved elder brother. William Still and his wife, Letitia, not only sheltered escapees in their home, but William as chair of the Vigilance Committee organized legal help for ‘recaptured’ fugitives. William knew many of them, for he was also Philadelphia ‘stationmaster’ for the Underground Railway. It was reckoned that, one way or another, he helped over 800 enslaved persons to secure their freedom in the north. Probably the most famous case was that of Jane Johnson. She came to Philadelphia as the slave of North Carolinian John Hill Wheeler. She escaped, and in 1855, Wheeler had her arrested; whereupon Jane took advantage of the Pennsylvania ‘personal freedom’ legislation to claim liberation. William Still helped to organize her legal defense. It was a fascinating case, for Wheeler himself, by all accounts a “good” slaveowner, kept a private library, which included anti-slavery tracts written by escapees. Not only that, but Wheeler taught at least some of his slaves (including Jane Johnson) to read and allowed them free access to his books. So Wheeler was himself a lawbreaker. At any event, William Still’s defense of Jane Johnson was successful. She went free, and Still returned to his own brand of lawbreaking. He targeted southern slavery, of course, but also northern segregation. Still went on to an important civilian post in the Union Army, and then after the war to a successful career as a Philadelphia entrepreneur in coal and real estate. He wrote an early history of the Underground Railway, highlighting many individual stories of escape and freedom. He continued to agitate for integration, for instance in his Presbyterian Church, but where equality proved unattainable he urged people of color to go their own way, organizing a black branch of the local YMCA. Still also founded Philadelphia’s black cemetery, on land he owned in suburban Collingdale, and he was buried there in 1902 after his creditable and courageous life. ©.

[Stanley]

A malted milk, a tuna fish sandwich, and a rum chaser.

Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days and days on nothing but food and water. W. C. Fields.

During my high school years, I earned spending money by working evenings and weekends (mainly behind the lunch counter) at a Des Moines drug store. The pay was $.60 an hour plus tips. One of the owners, on discovering that my middle name was McKinley, took to identifying me as his “Jew of the North” which, since I thought he was Jewish, I took as a joke. It was an interesting place, not least because of an odd lock-up in the cellar which, employee legend said, had been used for bootleg liquor during the bad old days of Prohibition. My bosses (two middle-aged pharmacists) were not implicated in this mythic criminality, but the pharmacy’s massive home delivery business gave it some credence—an artifact, perhaps, of an earlier and more exciting mobile trade. And we did deliver to some very posh addresses. Maybe the legend was true. Even during Prohibition, certain registered pharmacies, across the country, had been licensed to deliver alcoholic drink to people whose doctors had prescribed it as medicine. And rumors abounded that some of these licensed dispensaries did seize the opportunity to deliver the genuine libations—maybe even in bulk—to their thirstier, or more respectable, clientele. In Chicago, a burgeoning chain of drug stores known as “Walgreens” was so licensed, and rumor had it that Walgreens’ success owed something to delivering the real stuff along with the 100-proof ‘medicines’ prescribed by the 5 ml. spoonful. The chain’s founder was Charles Walgreen, born in rural Illinois on October 9, 1873, the son of Swedish immigrants who’d changed their surname from Olloffson to sound more “American.” Having learned the benefits of assimilation, Charles went further as a trainee pharmacist and then as a volunteer in the Spanish-American war. Laid low by Cuban mosquitoes (malaria), he returned to Chicago to purchase the pharmacy at which he’d apprenticed. He opened a second store in 1909, and by the start of Prohibition owned at least a dozen. His drug stores were new, shiny places, and they sold a lot of stuff besides specifics, tonics, and prescriptions. They even had lunch counters selling sandwiches, sodas, and shakes. So it’s not beyond imagination to think that Walgreen might have added good liquor to his lines. During Prohibition the chain saw massive growth (there were 525 Walgreens by 1929). But as a former soda jerk myself, I like to think that this miraculous success owed to Walgreens’ malts (made with its own ice cream) and tuna salad sandwiches, served over sparkling marble countertops to teetotaling customers who left surprisingly generous tips. ©

[Stanley]

This is the missing post from yesterday, it never arrived so I mailed Bob....

One the automobile appeared, you could have predicted it would kill as many people as it did. Ray Bradbury.

The first American car race (from South Chicago to Evanston, then back, 54 miles) was a bust, weather being the culprit. Sponsor Herman Kohlstaadt named November 28, 1895 as the date and advanced generous prize money (almost $200,000 in today’s $$$). A second-generation Danish-American, he could afford it. He’d begun helping his dad run a rural Illinois station on the Underground Railway but by 1895 was a baker and banker, advisor to ambitious Republican politicos, and he had just bought the Chicago Times-Herald. It was his newspaper that hyped the race, hoping to gain circulation and advertising. No fewer than 89 competitors signed up. It was 1895, and I’m not sure that all 89 of them actually had motor cars to race in, but the race day dawned on a Chicago paralyzed by a Thanksgiving blizzard, so only six cars raced: 2 electrics, three German Benzes with advanced Daimler motors, and a gasoline-powered buggy designed and built by the Duryea brothers, then based in Springfield, MA. Given that Kohlstaadt had reserved second prize ($1,500 in 1895 $$) to an American-built car, the Duryea had only to finish the race, but just over 10 hours later it chugged across the finish line in undisputed first place. (Two other competitors had crashed, and the driver of one of them almost froze to death in a snowdrift). The Duryea “Buggyaut” (I’m guessing that the name contained a classical allusion) was a four-wheeler, with large tires at each corner, each looking like a refugee from a bicycle works—which they probably were, as the Duryea brothers were mainly bike manufacturers. But Frank had seen a combustion engine on display at a Connecticut county fair, and had gone home to make one himself, then built a wagon around it: a wagon, it must be added, with a leather-belt transmission, an ignition, and a wooden box to muffle its motor’s awful sound. Frank Duryea was the younger of the two Duryea brothers, was an Illinois native, born near Peoria on October 8, 1869. He was a toolmaker by trade, his brother a bicycle maker, and once he got that motor-wagon up and running (in 1894) the brothers raised a substantial amount of stock, more than enough to take the thing to Chicago and enter the race. The victory went to the brothers’ heads, and by 1906, in Reading, PA, they were building about 160 cars per year. But their cars never really caught on, and in the early 1920s brothers retired to other pursuits. As for Herman Kohlstaadt, he soon got out of journalism and went back to banking, baking, and grooming Republican politicians. It’s us who have yet to learn how to live with the automobile. ©.

[Stanley]

"For the Union Dead"

Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle. –from “For the Union Dead” (1964), by Robert Lowell

The colonel memorialized by Lowell was Robert Gould Shaw, who led his black troops to death in their charge at Fort Wagner, July 1863, just outside of Charleston, South Carolina. Doubtless Lowell could have said more about Wagner’s soldiers, but he said a lot and whatever he left unsaid was taken care of by the 1989 film Glory. But their bravery had already been celebrated. Shaw saw to it that they got equal pay (with white soldiers), and then their sacrifice encouraged thousands more men of color to enlist in the war to extirpate racial slavery. And anyway Lowell wanted to pierce Boston’s throat with Shaw’s physical courage
When he leads his black soldiers to death
He cannot bend his back.
and with Shaw’s moral outrage. One could say Robert Gould Shaw was born with both, on October 10, 1837, the only son of wealthy parents who had decided to reform Boston, and the country if possible. They even toyed with utopian socialism (they took the boy to Brook Farm when he was only 7), but the Shaws were more interested in anti-slavery, women’s rights, and religious experiment. They left “corpse-cold” Unitarianism early on, embraced Swedenborg’s “New Jerusalem” movement, and even were proud of their cousins’ conversions to Roman Catholicism. Robert Gould Shaw was sent off to Europe to see things from a different perspective and for himself. He returned to Harvard, joined the right clubs (Hasty Pudding and Porcellian), but continued to show an independent streak. He never did graduate, but the outbreak of war found in him a ready volunteer, for the Union cause of course, fought bravely in a string of battles, was wounded twice and survived. When his father asked Captain Robert Gould Shaw to command a black regiment, he agreed when assured that the unit would see battle and not be confined to camp duties or communications. Shaw and his 54th Massachusetts would march into history at Fort Wagner. Too many of them died that day, July 18, and the Confederates followed practice by throwing them all, officers and men, in a common ditch, unmarked. We should not be surprised that
Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
But they got one anyway, in bas relief bronze. The next time you’re at Boston Common, you should stop a while to watch it move. ©

[Stanley]

The making of Heinz 57

Make all you can honestly; save all you can prudently; give all you can wisely. Henry John Heinz.

Break out the condiments, for today is the 189th anniversary of the birth (in a German neighborhood located on Pittsburgh's immigrant "South Side", on October 11, 1844) of Henry John Heinz. He was christened ‘Heinrich Johann’, but his German-born parents soon Americanized his and his siblings’ names, just as by hard work they carved out a place for themselves in the new economy. Henry’s father became a contract brick maker, and the growing family had their own house with a small kitchen garden adjoining. That doubtless helped fill out the family diet, but Henry’s mother went further, using garden produce to make various ‘pickles,’ notably horseradish and sauerkraut, which found a ready local market. Theirs was, after all, a German-speaking enclave in a Pittsburgh already characterized by small, ethnically selective neighborhoods. These fractured ethnicities would later be used, deliberately, by big Pittsburgh employers to fracture their workforces, but for the moment Anna (later, “Ann”) Heinz made it an important part of her family’s well-being. Two of her sons, including John Henry, made a bigger business out of it, first as partners. Come the panic of 1873 and the following depression, the partnership failed, then reorganized, and in 1888 Henry Heinz bought his partners out and formed a new company, called simply H. J. Heinz. The company broadened its product lines and, in 1896, boasted that it offered “57 varieties”. Actually there were already more, but 5 was Henry’s lucky number, 7 his wife’s, and “57” stuck so well that it became a trademark. His enterprise went public in 1905, but Henry kept the lion’s share of the stock and served as CEO until his death in 1919. He’d begun with a horse and wagon, delivering various pickled products (and, of course, vinegar) into Pittsburgh’s diverse neighborhoods, so it’s almost poetic that “57 varieties” became American slang for our melting pot of ethnicities (and for ‘mongrel’ dogs), but some things remained constant. For instance Henry continued his parents’ quest for a satisfying evangelical faith. They had moved from their separate Palatinate protestantisms (Calvinist and Lutheran) into an evangelical Presbyterian church. Henry’s evangelicalism (he might have said Presbyterianism with a strong condiment of Methodism, with added Baptist spice) helps us to understand why he adopted progressive policies towards unionization at his plants, along with profit sharing and good pay. Politically, H. J. Heinz was a disciple of Rooseveltian (Teddy) progressivism, and strongly supported the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. His establishment of the H. J. Heinz Foundation was, then, entirely in character, as was the progressive Republican ideology of his progeny, notably his grandson Senator John Heinz. It’s a curiosity of the Heinz family’s ethnic heritage that Henry John Heinz was second cousin to Friedrich Heinrich Trump (they shared a German great grandmother). But Friedrich began to put the Trump family fortune together by selling booze and sex, first in Seattle and then to the Klondike gold rushers of 1898-1901. I was not able to find out whether Heinrich actually knew his second cousin Friedrich. If he did, it is safe to say that he would not have approved of those product lines. ©.

[Stanley]

Yet another rediscovered writer.

All life goes in a circle, around and around. You started at one place and then came right back to it again. Ann Petry.

Over the past 50 years our literary canon has been transformed. This has dismayed some and delighted me. In modern anthologies American literature looks more like the country than it did when my sophomore lecture course in ‘the modern American novel’ covered Fitzgerald and Hemingway, albeit with a side trip south to sample the sad verbosity of Wolfe. In grad school my perspective was enlarged in a PhD seminar on ‘radical literature of the 1930s’ wherein I learned that working class authors could write good fiction. Then the floodgates opened, and white, middle-class males (dead or living) had to jostle with all sorts (women, people of color, native Americans) to retain or achieve canonical status. Diverse authors profited from this new openness, but others have had to be “rediscovered.” They had been published, sometimes successfully, but with the ‘new’ civil rights movement and the ‘new’ feminism, their works were taken off the shelves, dusted off, and used to build more inclusive libraries of American literature. Among these was the black woman writer Ann Petry, who in 2019 (two decades after her death) was accorded the stamp of approval by the Library of America project’s republication of Petry’s novels The Street (1946) and The Narrows (1953), along with some short fiction and the kind of writing we now call op-eds. Ann Petry was born Anna Lane, on October 12, 1908, in Old Saybrook, CT. She died there, too, in 1997, and that’s an important part of her story. There weren’t many black people in Old Saybrook (the was the only one in her graduating class), and while she felt some sting from white neighbors and classmates, Petry profited from her parents’ successes. Her father was the town’s pharmacist, Ann’s first career choice. Meanwhile, Ann’s mother’s success as a ’main street’ entrepreneur taught her (and her sisters) that their gender was no handicap. But Petry had to go to Harlem to learn more about how American racism could blight her life as a person of color. Luckily, she carried with her a talent for writing, first noted by an Old Saybrook high school teacher, and that bore fruit in her journalism and her fiction. In its year, The Street was a best seller, but soon Petry returned to Old Saybrook (with some forays out to teach creative writing). There she became obscure enough to be rediscovered as an old black lady living in a picturesque New England town—but one who could also write like the wind. If you’re a rediscoverer, you might want to read Petry’s American Library volume. It’s still in print and has now been judged worthy of your attention. ©