BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

The making of a free, black, woman.

Nobody black or white who really believes in democracy can stand aside now; everybody's got to stand up and be counted.   Lena Horne, 1963, concerning the assassination of Medgar Evers.

Lena Horne, she who sang the pronoun ‘you’ like no one else, was born in Brooklyn on June 30, 1917.   She was, at her birth, at least as ‘American’ as apple pie, embodying in her person a mélange of our ethnicities, European, African, Native American.  To judge by some of her early Hollywood publicity photos she might have ‘passed’ as a “white” American.   Other Lena pictures show her as a person of color, and that’s how she was known throughout her long life.   It wasn’t always pleasant.  To be seen as “the café au lait Hedy Lamar” or “the chocolate chanteuse”  (as she was sometimes called by those who sought to profit from her talents) was too painful to bear easily, but she carried the burden well enough while she had to.   After a peripatetic childhood, she first displayed her talents at Harlem’s Cotton Club, as a dancer.  But she wanted to sing, too, and learned that craft singing jazz in various places and with different bands.   A Broadway appearance brought Horne to Hollywood, where they made her up to look almost white but still put her in minor roles and in scenes that could easily be edited out for southern showings.   There she married (secondly) a white songwriter, partly to help her negotiate that sort of problem.   She came to love him (‘he was a man,’ she said, ‘and he was kind to me’), but during their 24-year marriage she also became more race aware.   The country made her so.   Her friendships with NAACP activists, with Paul Robeson, with Joe Louis, brought her to the attention of Washington witch hunters and temporarily derailed her Hollywood ambitions, but she made a successful career out of recordings (which is how I first ‘met’ her, singing to me from a red, translucent disc) and night club appearances.  Meanwhile, Horne’s deepening involvement with the Civil Rights movement made her into a political figure, which in some ways didn’t help her film career.   But Hollywood had to grow up, too, and so in the late 60s and 70s she was welcomed back.   Her way was eased a bit by the fact that the noted director, Sidney Lumet, had married her daughter.   However it happened, Lena Horne came back to some decent ‘straight’ (non-racial and/or non-singing) roles.  She could say she was now a free black woman, and she was.   “I am me, and I am like no one else.”   Indeed.  Things have not yet changed as much as they should, but in Hollywood today Lena’s granddaughter, Jenny Lumet, can publicize her many ethnicities (most but not all of them inherited from Lena).    And Jenny has made her own life first as a successful screenwriter (Rachel Getting Married, 2008) and even as writer-producer of the very all-American (and excessively multicultural) Star Trek franchise.    I call it progress, but in Lena’s own time it was not peaceful.  ©

[Tripps]

Is it in order to ask why this thread seems to be obsessed with colour and race?

She could say she was now a free black woman, and she was. “I am me, and I am like no one else.”

Judge for yourself.

[Stanley]

David, probably because the United States is on the whole so divided by those subjects. It plays a far bigger part in normal life than is the case in this country. I can still remember the deathly hush that fell on the bar in Boone NC when I asked if there were any black people in the town..... (The eventual answer was that one man believed there might be a family living behind one of the stores in the main street....)

[Tripps]

A good response. Thank you. I guess it's still 'Heat of the Night; in some areas.

[Stanley]

Truth, sex, and consequences.

I don’t want to control anyone’s mind or anyone’s heart.   I just want to free people from the concept of sex as evil instead of a gift from God.   Mary Steichen Calderone. 
  
We may date Mary Steichen Calderone’s public career from 1926 and the dedication of the World War memorial at New York’s Pratt Institute.   She was the female model for the sculpture at the base of the flagpole, entirely appropriately for she was the sculptor’s niece, the daughter of the photographic pioneer Edward Steichen, and had only recently embarked on a theatrical career.   And it’s modest to a fault, her head only, representative of patriotic Allied womanhood.   But that was towards the end of her first career.   Mary Calderone had been born in New York on July 1, 1904, and (brought up in the Steichen household) became part of the art world of the time.   Besides her uncle the sculptor, there was her uncle the poet (Carl Sandburg), and when the family relocated to Paris its houseguests included Picasso, Cézanne, Matisse and, for good measure, Isadora Duncan.   On the other hand, when the war sent them back home, Mary did major in chemistry at Vassar College, so there was another side to her life.   And when her theatrical career (and her first marriage, to an actor) fizzled out, she went back to school and earned an MD at Rochester and an MPH at Columbia.   Her interest in ‘public health’ brought her a second husband, Frank Calderone, already a pioneer in the field, and children too, two daughters, born in 1943 and 1945.  While Frank was busy setting up the World Health Organization, Mary served as MD in residence for the public schools in Great Neck, where her energy brought her to the attention of other public health professionals.   In 1953, she took up the post of Medical Director of Planned Parenthood USA.   It was “professional suicide,” her colleagues advised, but for her a second liberation.  And she aimed to liberate others, not least medical doctors.   She used her position at Planned Parenthood to convince the American Medical Association that advice about contraception and even provision of family planning devices should be standard elements in medical practice.   In 1964, she formed her own agency, SIECUS (the Sex Education and Information Council of the US), and stepped up her campaign to reform abortion laws in the USA.   For this, Billy James Hargis and other exemplars of sexual “morality” made her Public Enemy #1.   The John Birch Society spent millions portraying her as a communist and a libertine.   Truth be told, she was (and had long been) a Quaker moralist who believed that human sexuality had, should have, its highest expression in the marriage bond.    But then facts have never been the stock in trade of the morality movement.   For Mary Calderone, it was a matter of fact that sex had consequences.   ©. 

[Stanley]

The physics of inheritance

Light brings us news of the universe.   William Bragg, Royal Institution Lecture, 1923.   

The discovery of DNA cannot be explained without reference to the Braggs, father and son, who established the theoretical and technical bases for the science of x-ray crystallography.   The Braggs shared the Nobel Prize for this, in 1915, a unique father and son award made more unusual by the son’s age, for Lawrence Bragg was only 25, then and still the youngest-ever Nobelist.   In his memoir, What Mad Pursuit, Francis Crick (co-discoverer of DNA) duly praises the Braggs and, en passant, relates a charming story about Lawrence’s secret job as a part-time gardener late in his career.  Bragg’s London employer did not know who he was until a guest asked “what’s the Director of the Royal Institution doing in your garden?”   Sir Lawrence, Crick explained, missed his Cambridge garden.  No doubt.  But perhaps it was also in the blood.  The senior Bragg, ultimately Sir William Bragg, was a farmer’s son, born on the farm at Stoneraise Place, in distant Cumberland, on July 2, 1862.  There he might have rooted, but his mother’s death put the boy in the care of an uncle in Leicestershire.  At grammar school, Bragg discovered a talent in mathematics, and then in 1885 won first class honors in math at Cambridge.   This very young mathematician went out to Australia, where (at the University of Adelaide) he discovered other talents, in physics and institution-building.   Brilliant at both, he became interested in the (quite new) x-ray.   Without adequate lab facilities, Bragg speculated on the physics of the x-ray.   He also wooed and won Gwendolyn Todd.  The first of their three children was Lawrence (1890-1971) who would, once the family was back in England, work with his father to modify and mature those early speculations about what, exactly, x-rays were.   In some ways, they acted like particles (the gist of William Bragg’s early corpuscular theory); yet they also had wave-like qualities.   After his son’s success at Cambridge (where he'd also begun in mathematics), father and son sorted this problem by bombarding mineral crystals with x-rays, and reading the results on photographic plates.   By then, William Bragg held the chair of physics at London and, as president of the Royal Institution, resumed his work in institution-building.   Lawrence Bragg, once installed at Cambridge, would do the same with the Cavendish Laboratory, where, four decades after the 1915 Nobel, two brash youngsters (Francis Crick and James Watson) used x-ray crystallography to map the mysterious structure of an organic molecule, the one we call DNA.  William Bragg did not live to see his story come full circle, but it was Lawrence the gardener who nominated Crick and Watson for the Nobel Prize.   ©  

[Stanley]

Poppa Guttmann and the Paralympics.

One patient told me, ‘I’m waiting for God almighty to take me up.’   I told him, while you are waiting, you can do some work.’    Dr. Ludwig Guttmann, 1962. 
  
Ludwig Guttmann was born on July 3, 1899, in Tost, Prussian Silesia, where his father was an innkeeper.   His medical career may be said to have begun in 1917, when he was a medical orderly in a hospital for injured coal miners.  Then, after qualifying MD in 1924, he took up a post in Breslau as assistant to Professor Otfrid Foerster, neurologist and neurosurgeon.   His two spells with Foerster convinced him of the importance of hygienic care and physical therapy in the treatment of patients with serious spinal cord and brain injuries.   This may have been because Foerster, though an exacting taskmaster, was not particularly successful as a surgeon; but no matter.  Neurosurgery was still in its infancy, and most patients who survived beyond surgery died of neglect, left to lie still while their bodies collected bedsores.  Guttmann became convinced that better hygiene was one answer.  The other was purposeful physical movement.  He became so good at the treatment of paraplegics that, after Hitler took power, Guttmann was sent to Portugal to treat an injured friend of the dictator Salazar.   This despite the fact that in Germany Jewish doctors were not allowed to treat Aryan patients.   Guttmann, his wife and their two children were then allowed to travel to England where he took a post at Oxford’s Radcliffe Infirmary where, by happy chance, our son Daniel was born on July 3, 1970, Guttmann’s 71st birthday. Of course Guttmann had long since moved on.  Working in World War II Britain gave him plenty of opportunities to treat serious spinal injuries, and he’d been named head of an Emergency Medical Services hospital, really a series of huts, at Stoke Mandeville.   There Guttmann, two nurses, and eight orderlies began work on March 1, 1944.   His patients were seriously ill, many also depressed.   They needed to be moved frequently in clean beds, kept clean themselves, and this required constant supervision.   Some staff, and some patients, thought him a dictator.   More called him “Poppa”, and for Poppa patients sat up, worked at physical tasks (even knitting), and then as they progressed they hobbled on crutches or wheeled their chairs about the wards.   Some played basketball or practiced archery.   And as part (or counterpoint) of the 1948 Olympic Games in London, Stoke Mandeville hosted a wheelchair archery competition.    Through Guttmann’s continued care, that would become the Paralympics.   He didn’t live long enough to see their full fruition, but it was a nice touch that at the London Olympiad of 2012 his daughter Eva was named the mayor of the Paralympic Athletes’ Village.   “Poppa” had first drafted her into service as an attendant at Stoke Mandeville’s wheelchair archery competition in 1948.   ©      

[Stanley]

"The Fight of the Century"

Oh, my Lord
What a morning.
Oh, my Lord, 
What a feeling,
When Jack Johnson
Turned Jim Jeffries
Snow-white face
Up to the ceiling.    
         --William Waring Cuney, 1962,

Thus Waring Cuney celebrated Jack Johnson’s victory over Jim Jeffries in a ‘World Championship’ boxing match, in Reno, NV.   But the fight happened in July 4, 1910, when Cuney himself was but a toddler in Washington, DC, where his father was a government worker and his mother a teacher in a segregated grade school.   But he might have had a memory of it, for among the over 50+ “race riots” that occurred after the fight, one was in the nation’s capital.   (Another occurred in St. Louis, by the way.)   There were not many casualties, but with about a dozen fatalities the riots shed more blood than the fighters had.   So the aftermath was just as the New York Times had feared and, in a way, as the fight’s promoters and, perhaps, the two boxers, had hoped.   Their agreed purse was huge (well over $2 million in today’s $$).   The specially-built stadium accommodated 20,000 ticket holders.   Film rights were also part of the deal, and indeed you can still see the film (or much of it) on line.   In order to scare up that much money, the promoters used race as a come-on.   Jim Jeffries, once world champ, had retired from the ring unbeaten.   Born in Ohio in 1875, he was billed as the “Great White Hope.”  Against him was the reigning champion, Jack Johnson the black “Galveston Giant,” born in Texas in 1878, whose possession of the heavyweight crown was seen by many white-skinned Americans as a sort of lèse majesté.    More moderate in its own racism, the New York Times hoped that—should Johnson win—black Americans would not take it as showing anything more than a mere physical equality between two leading athletes.    But on July 4, 1910, when the nation ought to have been celebrating the Declaration of Independence’s radical assertion of equality, it was in practice completing the task of consigning African-Americans to second-class status.   Where legal apartheidproved insufficient, lynch law drove the point home to any black person who crossed the line to display “uppity” attitudes or behaviors.  And so when Jack Johnson humiliated Jeffries (whose corner “threw in the towel” in the 15th round), black people did celebrate, and white people did respond violently.   It took John L. Sullivan, Boston-born and himself once a champion heavyweight, to remind everyone that, on July 4, 1910, it was the better boxer that won.   Imagine!!  As simple as that!!  Both Jeffries and Johnson, by the way, would live long enough to see Joe Louis, the bronze bomber of Detroit, settle the argument again, and on several occasions.   ©.  

[Stanley]

The personification of tragedy.

. . . we can conceive of nothing grander … it seemed almost as if a being of a superior order had dropped from a higher sphere to awe the world with the majesty of her appearance. Power was seated on her brow, passion emanated from her breast as from a shrine; she was tragedy personified.     William Hazlitt on Sarah Siddons’ many portrayals of Lady Macbeth, 1817.

Hazlitt, one of the most influential essayists of his day, was by no means the first to see Sarah Siddons render Lady Macbeth heroic.   He’d seen her play the role only once; for him “it was enough.”   In Siddons’ most famous portrait (ca. 1784), Sir Joshua Reynolds put her dramatic figure, beautiful and vulnerable, in the canvas’s lightened center; behind her, sinister and darkly red, are the figures of Pity and Terror.    And there’s every evidence that Sarah Siddons herself knew this role in her bones, and knew, too, that she was at the very top of her profession.   She excited envy in her rivals, awe in her audiences, and (accepted into society), she played her part in the real life transition by which acting became a respected occupation, a profession.   It was a dramatic outcome, for Sarah Siddons was born in Brecon, mid Wales, in the Shoulder-of-Mutton Inn, on July 5, 1755.   Hers was a theatrical family, the Kembles, and her impresario father was on tour, a hard life at its worst.   But her beginning was made more auspicious, ex post facto, by the fact that seven of her eleven younger siblings (she was the eldest) would themselves become successful ‘theatricals’ whether on stage or behind it.   And her niece, Frances (Fanny) Kemble would desert the stage to become a plantation wife in South Carolina, where she left us her devastating assessment of the true human costs of human slavery.   After Sarah Kemble married William Siddons, in 1773, she herself would experience the human costs of being a female actress on the road, and played her hurts into prowess as an interpreter of tragedy.   Not only would she outlive five of her seven children (her “babies”, she called them) but it could be said that her breakthrough came when David Garrick’s agent saw her play Rosalind (in As You Like It) while heavily pregnant with her second.   Her labor began while she was still on stage, but she carried it off, and her beauty brought her back to Garrick’s Drury Lane company for another (she’d been there before, briefly) shot at the top.   In her starring roles, Siddons would prepare herself by leaving her dressing room door open so she could hear the gathering force of the tragedy that would soon befall her.   So when she came on, Siddons was Desdemona, Ophelia, Lady Macbeth.   Whatever had been Shakespeare’s intent, Sarah Siddons remade these roles.  On the side, she also made herself into a lady of high repute, loved, respected, and awed by those who, in earlier times, might have thought her a low-born, one who had drawn her first breaths in an unfortunate place called the Shoulder-of-Mutton.   ©.  

[Stanley]

He built the Constitution.

Old Ironsides.   The nickname, won in battle with HMS Guerrière, of the USS Constitution. 
  
In Boston, on July 4, 2024, the USS Constitution again took part in celebrating  the nation’s birthday.   The ship is ancient, nearly as old as the country, and was on active service from its launch in 1797 until 1881.   Since then it has been a patriotic symbol, indeed was designated a “Museum Ship” in 1907.   It was refitted for that purpose in the early 1930s, and it cruised into 90 US ports in a voyage that took three years and would include calls at Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle and two transits of the Panama Canal: nothing even dreamed of in 1797.   It’s still an official US Navy vessel, crewed by navy ratings and captained by Commander Crystal Schaefer: an eventuality equally undreamed in 1797.   Obviously, although the 1931 refitting was extensive, the ship was well-built.   So praise is due to the master shipwright who supervised the construction: George Claghorn, born on July 6, 1748.   The birthplace was (probably) Chilmark, on Cape Cod, and Claghorn family connections with New Bedford and Martha’s Vineyard suggest that the baby may have had salt water running in his veins.   He did apprentice as a shipwright with a cousin, but George Claghorn entered American military history as a landlubber militiaman at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill in 1775.   He was grievously wounded there, but he served, off and on, throughout the Revolutionary War.   But by 1775, in his civilian life, he was already a shipbuilder on his own.   In 1774, he and his wife Deborah were together listed as purchasers of a seafront property at New Bedford.   Having a wife as a business partner was unusual (though not unique), and may suggest something of Claghorn’s politics, as does his involvement in a Quaker school in New Bedford (and with Quaker investors in building the famous New Bedford whaler Rebecca).   But George and Deborah were members of the orthodox Congregational Church and all their children were baptized there.  The commission for the Constitution came in 1794.   It was to be one of six American frigates, designed partly to save the young republic from the non sequitur of having a standing army, but mainly to counter Barbary pirates and the threat of war with France.   As became common with American ‘pork barrel’ legislation, the contracts were spread up and down the seaboard, and Boston’s contract fell to Claghorn as shipwright.   He took it proudly, even organizing the celebrations surrounding the launch (the public invitation was issued in his name).   He also took to calling himself a “gentleman”, still an important distinction.  And a divisive one.  Indeed, some thought that building the Constitution had ruined him.   But few deny that he built well.   Today, the USS Constitution may be in better shape than the US Constitution.  ©. 

[Stanley]

Native Daughter

For my people everywhere singing their slave songs
         repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues
         and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an 
         unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an
         unseen power.    
From “For My People,” 1937, by Margaret Walker.

Margaret Walker, who in a later poem, “Sorrow South,” called herself more southern “than John Brown or Nat Turner or Robert Lee,” was southern enough, born in Birmingham, Alabama, on July 7, 1915.   And on her mother’s side she was as southern as they come.   Her one novel, Jubilee (1966) is a fictional-historical treatment of the enslaved life of her grandmother.   The novel struck one critic as a surrender to the Margaret Mitchell myth, that warm southland Gone With the Wind.   I’ll have to read Jubilee to find out for myself; but it seems doubtful, and Margaret Walker’s life and poetry tell a different story.   Margaret’s father was a Methodist minister from Jamaica (educated at Northwestern University) who taught his kids to love (and read) the classics of world literature, and later became a professor himself, at an historically black college in New Orleans.   There her pianist mother played ragtime and jazz and blues.   All that built them a daughter who expressed herself in poetry.   Some people liked it, including Langston Hughes, and Margaret went north to study literature at her dad’s alma mater.   There she got involved with Chicago’s version of the Harlem Renaissance, worked with the likes of Gwendolyn Brooks and Richard Wright, and then went to Iowa City to earn a Master’s degree from the Writers’ Workshop.   But Margaret Walker was no Margaret Mitchell.   She’d already helped Richard Wright put together the character, and the case, of Bigger Thomas in Wright’s classic Native Son (1940), and in 1942 her expressive “For My People”, now the title poem in a published collection, won her a prestigious award from Yale.   So Margaret could have stayed north.   Instead, she married Firnist Alexander, and went back home to “Sorrow South” to teach (literature) at Mississippi’s Jackson State College.   She continued to write and publish poetry and expanded her interests to include broader studies of black history and culture while working, for decades, on that historical novel about her enslaved grandmother.   I reckon that critics who welcomed Jubilee as an antidote to Gone With the Wind have got it right.   When Firnist Alexander died, she buried her “monkey-wrench man” and “sweet patootie” (the quotations are from her 1979 “Love Song for Alex”) in a lovely, racially-segregated cemetery and moved back to Chicago to continue her own complicated reflections.  There Margaret Walker died in 1998, having willed her letters, papers, and manuscripts to the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State, back home.   ©

[Stanley]

"The Sepia Sinatra"

That picture was my favorite, because it told just what the world should be like.   Martha Holmes, ca. 1980, recalling her career as a photographer.

The picture in question was of Billy Eckstine.   It showed “Mr. B”, being mobbed by young women after his show at New York’s Bop City.  Earlier that week Eckstine outdrew Frank Sinatra at Manhattan’s Paramount, and there was no doubt that he was at the top of his profession, singer, bandleader, musical innovator.    You can easily find the photo online.   Holmes took it for Life magazine, and chose it as the signature picture for a Life feature on Eckstine’s New York tour.   It gave the editors pause.   They submitted it to Henry Luce himself, who said, “run it.”    And it caused outrage.   It didn’t ‘derail’ Eckstine’s career, for he sang his way to immortality for another four decades, but he would never again play the pop icon.   The women were young, pretty, and white.   One embraces Eckstine and lays her head on his shoulder.   The others are star-struck.   And Billy Eckstine is laughing, triumphant, and black.  It may well have shown the world as it should be, but outrage over the picture showed the way America was in 1950.    Part of the irony is that Billy Eckstine was not very black at all.   He was born in Pittsburgh on July 8, 1914, the son of a chauffeur and a seamstress who spelled their surname “Eckstein”, had lived and worked in Europe, and were, each of them, of “mixed” racial origins.   Indeed one could use them, and their son, as evidence of the idiocy of our ‘racial’ categories.  But Billy was brought up “black,” in D.C., and at 19 he dropped out of Howard University to take up a musical career as a jazzman, horn and voice.   By 1939 he was a headliner for Earl “Fatha” Hines, and in 1944 he started his own “Billy Eckstine Orchestra.”   There he became famous, not only as a performer, but as an innovative composer, arranger, and mentor.   Listen to any jazz program today, and you are likely to hear of his impact, as employer and mentor, on the likes of Art Blakey, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan, even Miles Davis.   He and his band won gold disks aplenty in the late 1940s, and in 1950 his New York tour was intended to be a sort of coronation.   But the “Sepia Sinatra,” as one paper labeled him, stepped over too many lines with his draw on (white) teeny boppers (then not yet a notorious category).   He performed all over the place for another 42 years, deepened his reputation as a musical innovator (“progressive jazz,” he called his music), but “that picture” (as Harry Belafonte put it) would deny him pop star status.   In 1992 Billy Eckstine was felled by a stroke when performing in Salinas, Kansas.  He went back to Pittsburgh to die.   The last word he uttered, in that lovely baritone, was “Basie.”    ©.   

[Stanley]

Bob's Tuesday contribution never arrived. I have mailed him and will post as soon as I have a reply.....

[Stanley]

The origin of the "Clerihew"

Pun, n. A form of wit to which wise men stoop and fools aspire.    Ambrose Bierce.  
 
According to a recent piece in the New York Times, the pun is back in style, but we shall have to pull up our socks if we are to challenge the Victorians as punsters.  Indeed it was an age in which the play on words was an art form, which accounts for the legend of the Spoonerism, involuntary (and bizarre) malapropisms attributed to the Oxford don William Spooner (1844-1930), who grew “tired of addressing beery wenches.”   Of a different class were the “clerihews,” carefully constructed four-liners which were more a play on proper names (and on real characters) than on words per se.    They were originally the creation of Edmund Clerihew Bentley, aka E. C. Bentley, born in London on July 10, 1875.   The ‘clerihew’ qualifies as Victorian, for Bentley devised his very first in 1890 as a bored scholar at St. Paul’s School, where his cricket-playing father (in life a senior civil servant) had sent Edmund in hopes that he would learn something useful.   As with quite a number of students, that fatherly ambition failed.   Bentley did do well enough at St. Paul’s to go on to Oxford, but while studying to pass the bar he decided instead to become a writer.   Most of his output was as a journalist and essayist, of a rather conservative bent, his work much loved by his old school chum G. K. Chesterton.   But the daily grind produces too much that is literally ephemeral, and Bentley is today more remembered for his side-lines than for his by-line.    Inter alia, he is said to have produced the first ‘modern’ whodunit.   His Trent’s Last Case (1913) was originally intended as a satire on Arthur Conan Doyle but has (ironically?) had a more lasting influence.   And then there was Bentley’s light verse, a great lot of it, of which the clerihew is the most enduring.    A clerihew is a short poem of irregular meter but rigid rhyming pattern (AABB) and is always a play on the fame or character of some notable, for instance Adolf Hitler, whose moustache “could hardly be littler” or Dante Alighieri who “wrote the Inferno// on a bottle of Pernod.”   The clerihew became a favored art form of English schoolboys (for whom irreverence was dogma) and Bentley produced three whole volumes of the things, which sold like hot cross buns at Eastertide.   Rather like Lewis Carroll, perhaps?  
Lewis Carroll
Bought sumptuous apparel
And built an enormous palace 
Out of the profits of Alice.     ©. 

[Stanley]

Bob has responded to my mail but so far has not sent the Anniversary Note for the 9th.

[Stanley]

When the department store was 'cutting edge.'

Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted.   The trouble is, I don’t know which half.   John Wanamaker

This amusing quote, so true to be trite, is John Wanamaker’s.  He was born in Philadelphia on July 11, 1838.   One of the most successful retailers of his era, he founded one of our first ‘department stores,’ called “Wanamaker’s” of course.  And he did advertise.   Wanamaker used annual “sales” as gimmicks, whether in celebration of an event or season or to push a particular line of goods.   Of these, his annual “White Sale” (sheets and such) was a Wanamaker innovation.   It made a special thing out of an ordinary item.   It helped move inventory.   And it got people to come into the store where they just might buy something besides a pillowcase.   And what a store it was.  He started selling men’s clothing in an abandoned Pennsylvania Railroad terminal.   As he expanded into new trades, he built a real palace for them, at 1300 Market Street, now designated a National Historic Landmark.  It was itself an ad, a place people wanted to see or be seen in.   But Wanamaker really marketed himself.  An earnest evangelical Presbyterian, occasionally a Sunday-School superintendent, he thought advertising should be truthful.   His goods were on display and could be unfolded, tried on, sat in, and they all had price tags. But in his market, all were equal on a level playing field, and for decades customers haggled with sales staff.   Staff got free medical care, profit sharing, and free study to gain promotion.  When promoted, they were required to treat “staff” with respect.   Technical innovations also abounded.  Pneumatic tubes whizzed cash and receipts to and from the counting house.   There was entertainment, too.  The organ at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair was bought, shipped to Philadelphia in multiple rail cars, and reinstalled in Wanamaker’s “Grand Court” (along with an organ workshop).  It’s still there.  In 1922, the year of his death, John Wanamaker installed a radio station at the top of his building—to encourage customers to buy his brand-new radio receivers on one of the lower floors.   And in my four years in John Wanamaker’s town, 1961-1965, I never once entered his emporium, though I walked by the front door many times.   So much for ads.   ©.      

[Stanley]

He had them in stitches.

It is not enough to be busy.   So are the ants.   Henry David Thoreau. 
  
Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Club is approaching its 230th birthday.   The club has had five future presidents as members.  These were the Adamses  father and son (the father as an honorary), the Roosevelt cousins, and J. F. Kennedy—whose kid brother Teddy did join but only ever thought about being president.   Besides this galaxy of political talent, there was Owen Wister, Teddy Roosevelt’s apostle of masculinity, at least one J. P. Morgan, and the excessively serious Robert Todd Lincoln, inducted in 1864.   There is also a stately procession of Cabots, Lowells, and Lodges (including two Cabot Lodges).   In such company, one almost expects God to turn up, speaking to few, but I found no mention of the Divinity in the club’s publicity pages.    Serious business has never been the club’s main theme.  Almost from the first, what we today call the “roast” was a Hasty Pudding art form.   And along with the gray eminences listed above, there were others: Jack Lemmon and Robert Benchley were Puddings as undergraduates, and closer to our own time we find Andy Borowitz and Mo Rocca.   Then, yet further back, there was Henry David Thoreau, inducted circa 1835.   Henry was not one of the New England elite, having been born poor in Concord on July 12, 1817.  Maybe the Hasties let him in because he lived in Hollis Hall, which for a time included Hasty Pudding’s quarters, too.   And he certainly never became president.   During his short lifetime he never really became famous, either.    Some of his scribblings were bought, and passed around.   But was Henry Thoreau a humorist?   I’ve assigned this or that Thoreau in my classes, and I don’t remember any student highlighting Henry’s humor.   He’s admired for his poetic appreciations of nature (eg. in Walden) or his moral courage  (in his essay now usually called “Civil Disobedience”) or his self-denial (a young man of real talent, Thoreau chose to live poor, not as a pre-occupation for he died that way, too).   But read Walden for its funny bits, and unless you are one of nature’s blockheads you’ll find yourself smiling, perhaps chuckling, and sometimes chortling.   He really can be funny, often in a sobering way.   Some of his earliest gags had to do with Harvard, where he was made familiar with all the branches of knowledge but “none of the roots.”   And he refused to pay the niggling fee for his MA.  Perhaps to save money: but he said it was to “let the sheep keep its skin.”   I think that members of the Hasty Pudding welcomed Thoreau for his jokes.  Nathaniel Hawthorne would agree, later, that Thoreau was a funny man, but Hawthorne was a Bowdoin grad (Phi Beta Kappa, 1824) and took life far too seriously.   ©. 

[Stanley]

(The missing post from July 9th.)
A courtship of several decades? A ,marriage made in heaven?

Tennyson [née Sellwood], Emily Sarah, Lady Tennyson (1813–1896), secretary and manager for her husband, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, was born on 9 July 1813 in Market Place, Horncastle, Lincolnshire, the eldest of the three daughters of Henry Sellwood (1782–1867) and his wife, Sarah, néeFranklin (1788–1816), a younger sister of Sir John Franklin, the sailor and explorer. Sellwood himself was born in Berkshire and had come to Horncastle before 1808. He married in 1812 into the remarkable family of a Spilsby grocer. Their connections and his own energy helped him to become prominent in Horncastle, where he practised as a solicitor for forty years. Her uncle John Franklin's two strong wives, Eleanor Porden and Jane Griffin, influenced Emily's idea of what women could be and do. Her own particular talent was for music and she composed and played all her life. But it was her marriage to Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892), poet laureate, which gave her the chance to make use of all her skills and virtues. Benjamin Jowett wrote to her son that Julia Margaret Cameron used to say that, though unknown, Emily Tennyson was as 'great' as her husband and that 'the poet himself was aware that these words were truly spoken'. Jowett wrote, 'It was a wonderful life—an effaced life, like that of so many women … He could never have been what he was without her'.
Emily Sellwood first saw Tennyson when she was nine years old and he was a boy, outside her house while their two fathers discussed business. Somersby, where the Revd George Clayton Tennyson was vicar, was only 7 miles from Horncastle. Emily described the Tennysons as 'among our neighbours we had as friends'. Only three when her mother died, Emily was extremely close to her father. The girls were educated first by 'some ladies' in Horncastle, and it is likely that it was when they were with the Misses Bousfield of Far Street that they made friends with Alfred Tennyson's sisters: Mary, Emily, Matilda, and Cecilia. Emily Sellwood later attended boarding-schools in Brighton and London.
It was soon after Emily left school that she stayed overnight at Somersby for the first time in April 1830. Six years later Tennyson's elder brother Charles married Emily'syoungest sister, Louisa; Tennyson's poem 'The Bridesmaid' celebrates his feelings. This first Tennyson–Sellwood marriage was full of stress and was one of many reasons why Henry Sellwood did not encourage Alfred and Emily to marry in the late 1830s, although they were informally engaged. The poet's gloomy material prospects and worrying heredity, his despair following the death of his friend Arthur Hallam, and his religious doubts made Tennyson write to Emily: 'I fly thee for my good, perhaps for thine'. There was no contact for seven years until they met in Kent in 1847 at the home of Tennyson's sister Cecilia and her husband, Edmund Lushington. Tennyson's poems The Princess and In Memoriam and the reconciliation of Charles and Louisa all had a good deal to do with Emily's eventual agreement to marry.
Emily Sellwood married Alfred Tennyson on 13 June 1850 at Shiplake, near Henley-on-Thames. The ceremony was performed by the Revd Drummond Rawnsley, the husband of Emily's cousin Catherine (née Franklin). Emily was nearly thirty-seven and Alfrednearly forty-one. Tennyson said the peace of God came into his life when he married. Emily's devotion, faith, tolerance, flexibility, and managerial skills transformed his life.
There was a first, stillborn, son in 1851. Then, in 1852 and 1854, the two boys, Hallam Tennyson (1852–1928) and Lionel, were born. Emily taught them herself until they went to school in 1865 but Tennyson was also actively involved in their upbringing. Emily said that those days when the boys were young were the happiest period of her life. It was also the healthiest period. So often portrayed (for example by Virginia Woolfand Thomas Hardy) as a woman who spent her entire life on a sofa, she was able to scramble over rocks and give the boys rides on her back. She had been delicate as a girl and her ill health in later life (after some sort of breakdown in 1874) may have been caused by gynaecological problems as well as overwork.
The family settled at Farringford, Freshwater, on the Isle of Wight, in 1853. In 1868 they built a house, Aldworth, near Haslemere (but just in Sussex), and came to divide their time between the two houses, with some travel in the summers. Emily's full powers came into play with her marriage. She devoted the rest of her life to her poet and his work. She answered his letters (sometimes for six or seven hours a day), protected him from criticism, corrected his proofs, set his poems (more than twenty of them) to music, ran the households and their farm, and lent a sympathetic ear to his constant fussing and grumblings as well as his reading aloud. She herself read French, German, and Italian but had no Greek or Latin. One of her greatest pleasures was to listen to Tennyson's viva voce translations of Homer.
Some observers (notably Anne Gilchrist) thought Emily's attitude ill-conceived. 'Mrs Tennyson, watching him with anxious, affectionate solicitude … surrounds him ever closer and closer with the sultry perfumed atmosphere of luxury and homage in which his great soul droops'. But most people, including Tennyson himself, felt she was his perfect partner. Her faith in God ('as clear as the heights of the June-blue heaven') sustained them both and enabled them to cope with the death of Lionel in 1886 on the way home from India. (It had been Emily's idea that he should go.)
Lady Tennyson (as she became in 1883) spent her remaining years, after the poet's death in 1892, helping their son Hallam to write the two-volume Memoir of Tennyson'slife. Much of it was written by Emily herself, based closely on her journals. She died of 'congestion of the lungs' on 10 August 1896 at Aldworth and was buried four days later in Freshwater church on the Isle of Wight. The best-known portrait of her was painted by G. F. Watts. It is in the Usher Gallery in Lincoln. An earlier (apparently more accurate) portrait by Millais remains in the family. Both show her physical delicacy, which her strong character so triumphantly overcame.
Sources
• A. Thwaite, Emily Tennyson: the poet's wife (1996)

[Stanley]

The dark art of early modern science.

There is (gentle reader) nothing (the works of God only set apart) which so much beautifies and adorns the soul and mind of man as does knowledge of the good arts and sciences.    John Dee, 1570.
    
Late in his life, John Dee became known as ‘Doctor’ Dee, and the adjective has stuck.   It first arose because Dee did receive (or obtain) a medical doctorate from Prague (circa 1580), but the persistence of the usage points to something else, a quality, for he was also seen as a master of the darker arts: astrologer, diviner, alchemist, conjurer.  This John Dee is someone you might find at Harry Potter’s Hogwarts, visiting faculty perhaps, possibly even sent there (undercover?) by Voldemort himself.    Indeed he was tried for witchcraft during the reign of ‘bloody’ Queen Mary.   That was bad enough.   But then he was found innocent and came under the patronage of Mary’s Cardinal-Archbishop, Edmund Bonner.   So extreme Protestants saw Dee as an adept in the even blacker arts of the Roman church.   And there is no doubt at all that Dee was, very publicly, an astrologer and alchemist.    Dee even turned the neat trick of seeing his first son, Henry, born on his own birthday.   That was only a twelvemonth into Dee’s second marriage, the first having proven childless, and Dee himself was getting on a bit.  Henry Dee came along on July 13, 1579.   John Dee had been born (in London) on July 13, 1522.   His father, probably of Welsh ancestry, was a freeman of the Mercers Company, his mother (likely) from a landed family based west of London at Mortlake.   So John Dee grew up in comfortable circumstances.  A clever lad, he went up to Cambridge in 1542, where he did well enough to be elected a fellow (in Greek) at Trinity College.  But he also became known as a mathematician—and a bit of a trickster, too, for devising an unusual bit of stagecraft for a college play.   It was the mathematics that stuck with him, but perhaps with an aura of trickery.   He picked up more math in his early travels in Belgium and France, adept (and open-minded) enough to welcome Copernicus’s new ideas about the universe, and it seems also that Dee came convinced that mathematics would be the key to knowledge and power.   Exactly which doors it would open, and into what rooms, was less certain.   Like many of his time (and many much later, including ‘modern’ pioneers as Isaac Newton) John Dee kept his options open on those points.   Astrology and alchemy, which today are ranked among the darker arts, seemed no less important than experimental “science.”  And since they were thought to offer more dramatic answers, more power, and more quickly, it was on these that Dee concentrated.   In the issue, ‘science’ as we know it would open different doors.   But even Isaac Newton can be seen as one of Dee’s disciples.   And we should take him more seriously.    ©. 

[Stanley]

Buffalo soldiers in Boston

We decided long ago we weren't going anywhere, and we were going to stay here ... This is a commitment.   Muriel Snowden, 1977, concerning her “Freedom House” settlement in Boston.  
 
Muriel Sutherland Snowden was born in New Jersey on July 14, 1916.   Her dentist father, William, was a Howard graduate.   Her mother, Reiter, was the daughter of a ‘buffalo soldier,’ John Ira Thomas, who’d served in the high plains wars against the Comanche and the Sioux.  Born in slavery, he’d retired from the US Army and needed somewhere to stay.  But he wouldn’t come to live with his daughter until she’d produced a boy.   That didn’t happen until after Muriel’s birth.   Three decades later the old man, 95 years old and still ramrod straight, was living in Boston with Muriel and her husband, and she was pregnant with her second child.   He hoped to live long enough to see the baby, but didn’t make it.   Perhaps it was a mercy, for the baby was a girl.  More likely, the old man’s “chauvinism” (as Muriel called it) had softened somewhat.  He’d become a source of strength for the whole family, male and female, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.  Muriel Snowden, who fondly remembered the old soldier in a 1977 interview for Radcliffe College’s alumni magazine, attributed some of her backbone, two or three vertebrae at least, to John Ira.  The rest she put together for herself.  School valedictorian in her lily-white New Jersey town of Glen Ridge, she was one of a very few black students at Radcliffe in the 1930s.  From there she went New York to qualify in social work.   While a volunteer at a Newark settlement house, she met and married Otto Snowden (a Howard graduate whose father was one of the then highest-ranked black officers in the US Army), and the two moved back to Boston.   There, in Roxbury, in 1949, they established Freedom House not only as a ‘settlement house’ but as an engine of reform.   Not without resources, they were able to take over an old building (which once housed the Hebrew Teachers College) and make it into what many locals called ‘the Black Pentagon’ in tribute to Freedom House’s multivariant approach to Roxbury’s problems.   Along with that, Muriel helped establish a community studies program at nearby Simmons College.    She and Otto, and Freedom House, survived the Boston school integration crisis of the 1970s, during which time she took a fair amount of flak owing to her work with the Boston public school board.   It’s fitting, then, that one of her monuments is the Muriel Snowden International School, one of Boston’s ‘magnets,’ which is nestled in behind the Old South Church, in ‘Back Bay’ Boston.   In 1987, Muriel herself was recognized with a Macarthur ‘Genius’ Grant, but sadly she did not live to fulfil its promise.   Freedom House, however, still prospers.   Old John Ira Thomas, I think, would have approved.   ©

[Stanley]

"The concern is now with the process of evolution itself."

If I have seen further than others, it is because I was looking in the right direction.   Carl Woese. 
  
The DNA molecule has been said (more often than I would care to count) to contain “the secret of life.”  Since 1951, when its oddly helical structure was first outlined (by Francis Crick, James Watson, and others) that’s been enough for much of what we call ‘the scientific community.’   And not just scientists, either.   Think Jurassic Park, for instance, Spielberg’s nightmare vision of what you might be able to do with a dinosaurian DNA time capsule suspended in amber.   Most of the rest of us are content with “better” beans and faster-maturing corn.  But in 1969, a not-very-young scientist, recently hired at the University of Illinois, wrote to Francis Crick to say, in effect, that he thought DNA might hide life’s secret.   He was Carl Woese, born to German immigrant parents in Syracuse, NY, on July 15, 1928.   In 2014, shortly after Woese’s death (in 2012), PBS’s “Nova” ran a feature on Woese calling him “the greatest scientist you’ve never heard of,” and I imagine that is still the case.   Woese rewrote the history of life, creating (or, more accurately, discovering) a third ‘domain’ of living, cellular things, to go along with the eukaryotes (plants, animals, fungi) and the bacteria.    All three arose from some ‘last universal common ancestor’ (LUCA) a surprisingly long time ago, quite early in earth’s 4.5 billion-year history.   Such a startling discovery (first delivered in a 1977 paper) rattled scientific dovecotes and caused much controversy.   It led some to see Woese as a controversialist, a difficult cuss, possibly monomaniacal.   And the Woese quotation at the top of this note suggests as much.   It’s a deliberate muddling of Newton’s famous remark, but without any flavor of self-deprecation.   In this respect, it may be worth noting that Woese’s birth surname was actually Wösenkraft, which translates roughly as “divine power;” but many testimonials insist that this great scientist was really quite a complex character, moody and a little over-industrious but personally likable, one who enjoyed joking in the lab and was as likely to spring a pun as to launch a scientific revolution.  And he certainly came to his work by a roundabout route.   Carl Woese né Wösenkraft majored in physics and math at Amherst, continued in physics for a Yale PhD, and then, at loose ends, embarked on an MD at Rochester.   There it was the pediatrics rotation that put him off medicine.  Instead, he went into basic research where, first in corporate laboratories and then at Illinois, he started messing around with the question of how DNA itself could have happened, a surprising turnout for a man who had only ever taken one course in biology.   And what he found surprised the world. ©.  

[Stanley]

The keeper of "The Red Record."

Our country’s national crime is lynching.  It is not the creature of an hour, the sudden outburst of uncontrolled fury or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob.   It represents the cool, calculating deliberation of intelligent people.   Ida B. Wells, 1900.

Ida Bell Wells was born enslaved (July 16, 1862) on the Bolling farm, Holly Springs, Mississippi.   Had the South won the Civil War, she’d have stayed enslaved, for Holly Springs was just at the northern edge of the infamous “Delta”, the heartland of the racial republic.   The town’s cemetery was once called the ‘Arlington of the South,’ the final resting place of many (including five generals) who fought in the rebel cause, and a sampling of Bollings (and a few Bolings, too).   None were black.   Now the Bolling house, with its pretentious Greek Revival portico, houses the Ida B. Wells Museum.  This is not because, as Florida’s governor would have it even today, slavery provided Ida with opportunities for advancement.  It was because the violent end of slavery enabled her to become a woman of means.  Courageous and talented, she set herself the task of chronicling American racism.   Most notably, she faithfully kept score (literally) of the number of freedmen who fell victim to “lynch law” during the worst decades of Jim Crow.   In one sense, however, baby Ida was well-placed to take advantage of her liberation.  Her mother was a house slave.   Her enslaved dad, a master carpenter, was the product of a sexual liaison between an enslaved woman and her owner’s son.   He was named, perhaps as a cruel joke, James Madison Wells.  Come freedom, Ida’s parents got her an education, first at a freedman’s school and then one of the first all-black colleges.   Barely out of her teens, Ida took to writing for black papers in Memphis, just north of her birthplace.   She actually became part owner of two of them.  Being free and black andpropertied and female in post-war Memphis was unsafe, but Ida made it more dangerous through her writing.   More directly, in 1884, she legally challenged the emerging apartheid system. winning $500 damages against a railroad for refusing to honor her first-class ticket and forcing her into the “colored” car.  Ida even bit the conductor!   But it was the 1889 lynching of three of her friends that set her on her life’s path.  Not only did she keep and publish a record of lynching’s victims.   She also analyzed lynching, explaining how it was as American as apple pie, understanding it as an extralegal but inherent element of the campaign to roll back the verdict of history and force the once-enslaved to become a new underclass, a racially-defined “mudsill” of American society.   Because of her efforts, Ida Wells was warned against returning to Memphis.   Married, settled in Chicago, she continued her crusade until her death (1931).   Her Google Doodle (2015) has her pounding away at her typewriter.   But her carpetbag is packed, and she’s ready to travel.   And that’s how we should see her today.  ©

[Stanley]

A gentleman AND a player.

I should like to say that good batsmen are born and not made, but my long experience tells me that it is not so.    William Gilbert Grace.  
 
‘Club members enter Lord’s through the Grace Gates.’    Sounds like a theology, and in a way it is, but “Lord’s” is the home ground of English cricket and of the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC).  The Cricket Ground is named after Thomas Lord (1755-1832), a cricketer himself, and the Grace Gates entrance at Lord’s is named after one of the greatest heroes of English cricket, William Gilbert Grace.   W. G. Grace (as you’ll find his name in cricketing almanacs) was born outside Bristol on July 17, 1848.   His was a large and sporting family, not least his mother Martha.  Whatever Martha’s sports, she once flew across the River Avon in a chair suspended under a box kite (sent off by her father, who besides being a Methodist preacher was an inventor).   Martha took a lively interest in the sporting activities of all her sons, three of whom played for the first English “Test” side in 1880 (the match that gave rise to the legend of the “Ashes”) but Martha always fancied the chances of her fourth boy, W. G., whose “back play” outshone all the rest.  Battling off the back foot is a recognized defensive stratagem against fast bowling, but W. G. turned it into an offense.  He first appeared in the men’s game aged 9, and in his early 20s was widely recognized in club cricket as a first-class practitioner.   His last first class match came in 1906 when, on his 56th birthday, he scored 74 (not at Lord’s but at the “Oval”), captaining a side of “gentleman” against the paid “players” of the Sussex club.   That division between the amateur “gent” and the paid player, seems as quintessentially English as cricket itself, but if it was a boundary and a barrier W. G. Grace passed over it many times.   He had followed his father’s profession as a medical doctor, but he also hankered after his maternal grandfather’s reputation as a Methodist preacher to the multitudes, and W. G.’s practice was in a working class district.   He didn’t make a lot of money, and the financial distance between him and true “gentleman” status (as a cricketer) was shortened by a series of expedients: annual ‘retainers,’ testimonial matches, coaching fees, exhibitions, and the like.   This caused occasional comment, but the potential for sports snobbery was defeated by W. G.’s prowess on the pitch.   Or prowesses, one should say, for Grace triumphed as bowler as well as batsman.   He scored runs and took wickets in numbers that few cricketers have since equaled, fewer still surpassed.   A hero in his lifetime (if perhaps not in Australia), he has since become a mythic figure.   Appropriately, the Grace Gates have been raised to the status of a “listed” building, worthy of preservation.   Like W. G. himself, they belong to the ages.   ©. 

[Stanley]

The structure of scientific revolutions

Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none.    Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).
    
Thomas Kuhn, historian and philosopher of science, was born in Cincinnati on July 18, 1922.   His schooling took place in and near New York City, mainly in private schools of ‘progressive’ reputation, and in 1939 he went on to Harvard where, in 1943, he graduated summa as a physics major.  He went on to earn a Harvard doctorate in physics, but in the course of that study he experienced something of a revolution himself when he was asked to teach “science” to undergraduates majoring in the humanities.    His approach was to focus on major scientific discoveries as historical case studies, and he found that the history of science was not so much a study of patient and persistent progress towards “truth” but of radical shifts, lurches even, between quite different world views.   Sweating blood and tears, as Kuhn himself would put it later, he shifted from physics to the history and philosophy of science in general, and science as a human activity operating within a human realm of what was thought possible (by scientists) and what was thought desirable (by the wider community).   Kuhn’s first full academic appointment (at Harvard) was to teach science as a humanity.   He then moved on to California (Berkeley) as a professor in the history of science, and he was at Berkeley when, in 1962, he published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.   I wasn’t made aware of it in 1962, but when I began my own doctoral studies (in 1965, in early American history) Kuhn’s book was of major interest to many people—a must read if one were a really serious PhD student in almost any discipline.    And this was Kuhn’s lasting contribution.  He had viewed science as just another human activity, an intellectual enterprise undertaken by a specific professional group in pursuit of generally-agreed aims using generally-agreed means.   “Normal science” was not so much progress as it was a process, and the “structural” model proposed by Kuhn was applicable to other intellectual disciplines.   All of us, scientists, historians, literary critics, sociologists, operated under or within what Kuhn called “paradigms,” our particular ways of seeing the world.    For the most part, we applied what was already known to what we thought we would discover.   We solved puzzles.   We filled in gaps.   We completed pictures.   We did not ask fundamental questions until we encountered real uncertainties.   Only then might we begin to construct new paradigms.   The idea of a “paradigm shift” (which for Kuhn himself had been a throwaway line) thus became part of the language.   You can read it today in your daily newspaper’s political reports, if you still subscribe and if you’re still interested in politics.   But then there have been paradigm shifts in journalism and politics, too.   ©

[Stanley]

Architect for an era.

Your buildings must faithfully adapt themselves to those for whom you build: must embody their requirements, and give what they want, in the most direct way possible.   Alfred Waterhouse, presidential address to the Royal Institute of British Architects, 1890. 
  
In 1969-70, newly arrived in England and armed with the Oxfordshire volume of  Nikolaus Pevsner’s ‘monumental’ The Buildings of England,  I made myself an expert on architectural history.   Ersatz only: early on, without Pevsner in hand, I misidentified the parish church in Wheatley, Oxfordshire, as ‘basically early Norman, with some later Gothic modifications.’  I was quickly corrected by friends who lived next door to the Church of St. Mary the Virgin and knew that it was, in fact, designed by the eminent Victorian architect George Edmund Street and built in the 1850s in a style known as ‘Gothic Revival.’   Thus I learned it was best to maintain modest silence on matters architectural.   The ‘Gothic’ style swept British architects (and their clients) quite off their feet through almost the whole of the 19th century.   Probably the most eminent (and prolific) practitioner of the art was Alfred Waterhouse, who was born in Liverpool on July 19, 1830 and spent his childhood in a ‘Tudor revival’ villa in a posh suburb.   So the Waterhouse family had already migrated away from its Quaker simplicities towards the more elaborate life style made possible by his father’s position as an eminent cotton broker.   While his younger brother Edwin was becoming a famous accountant, Alfred Waterhouse toured Europe and became quite enamored of almost all ancient architectural styles.   His sketchbooks survive, and are full of excellent drawings of all sorts of classical buildings, excluding only the “beastly” Renaissance.  Already an architect’s apprentice, he was in search of a style but in fact found several.   Returning to Lancashire, Waterhouse designed a portfolio of buildings and built up a reputation that enabled him to move to London where he became the architect of his era.   Many of his works survive intact, especially his public buildings.   Of these probably the most notable are London’s Natural History Museum and Manchester’s Town Hall.  But in Manchester there are also the Assize Courts and Strangeways Prison, the latter of which is done in “streaky bacon” mode, with horizontal bands of different colored masonry.   Taking them all together, they represent a complicated mixture of ‘revival’ styles.   One could look for days at the Natural History building and fail to come up with a single descriptor (other than ‘elaborate’).   In Waterhouse’s hands (and George Street’s) the “gothic” revival was a vastly eclectic art, containing “quotations” of all sorts.   So, in retrospect, my misidentification of the Wheatley parish church was not so wrong.   It was Norman.   It was Gothic.  It is simpler just to call it “Victorian.”   ©.