BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

A person of quality.

The story of her career should encourage freedmen to greater exertion for the betterment of their condition.   It demonstrates what the energies of even one of the weaker of their race can accomplish if applied in the right direction.    From the obituary of Elizabeth Gloucester,  Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 11, 1883.

It was unusual for a leading daily to note the passing of any person of color, especially (as the obit makes clear) a woman, but when Elizabeth Amelia Gloucester died on August 9, 1883, she was (probably) the richest black person in America, a leader of Brooklyn’s black elite, and a palimpsest from which one could decipher (if one looked hard enough) the troubled history of race in 19th-century America.  Circa 1817 she was born enslaved, in Virginia, the property of a white planter who was also her father.   She (as “Jane”) and her mother appear in censuses as “mulatto.”   When their owner-lover-master freed mother and daughter, they made their way to Philadelphia at the bottom rung of the city’s established free black population.   There Elizabeth secured a housemaid’s position in a Quaker family of anti-slavery sentiment.   Her mistress taught her the importance of literacy, numeracy, and hard work, and Elizabeth’s story can be traced through her own savings account, which she opened as “X”, a signature of her illiteracy, but within a few years was signing her name (and retaining her bank book).   In Philadelphia’s black community, she got to know the Forten family.   It’s probable that James Forten, a wealthy sailmaker, purchased the freedom of Elizabeth Amelia’s husband-to-be, James Gloucester, but certain that she and James married in 1836.  They moved to New York where he became a leading black minister and Elizabeth Amelia began her career as entrepreneur.   Her life story brings us additional knowledge about James McCune Smith, America’s first black doctor, radical black abolitionist Henry Garnet, radical white abolitionist John Brown (who wished Elizabeth had been a man, for he would have recruited her for his raid on Harper’s Ferry), and Henry Ward Beecher the anti-slavery preacher who welcomed Elizabeth into his Brooklyn congregation when the family was burned out of Manhattan during the ‘Draft Riots’ of 1863.   Reestablished in Brooklyn, Elizabeth Gloucester continued her businesses, but now legally as her own person, feme sol was the old legal term, not estranged from her husband but liberated to buy, sell, and sue as if she were male.   So she had freed herself several times over, from slavery, from ignorance, from poverty, but also from the legal disabilities that went with being a woman.   As she waxed wealthy as one of Brooklyn’s leading hoteliers, Elizabeth Amelia Gloucester continued her lifelong philanthropies, giving money and time to the cause which was her life’s signature: citizenship equality.   She was a person of extraordinary talents.   ©   

[Stanley]

A Librarian as Librarian of Congress

Libraries are a cornerstone of democracy—where information is free and equally available to everyone. People . . . don't realize what is at stake when that is put at risk.    Carla Hayden, 2003.

Among the many reasons to be concerned about the 2024 elections is that the next president will (with the advice and consent of the next Senate) appoint the next Librarian of Congress.   >From the Library’s establishment (in 1800) that position had been the prerogative of the sitting president.   And, as the directorship was until 2015 a lifetime appointment, there had been only 12 Librarians of Congress.   Most were ‘political’ appointees, horses out of the president’s stable, but most had at least some scholarly or literary interests.   So Franklin Roosevelt appointed the liberal poet-scholar Archibald MacLeish, whose term was the shortest of all (1939-1944).   And Abraham Lincoln appointed Ainsworth Spofford, abolitionist editor and amateur literati, whose very long tenure (1864-1897) was spiced by his scholarship on Benjamin Franklin.   But partisanship came increasingly to rule with President Ford’s appointment of Daniel Boorstin (1975) and then Reagan’s appointment of James Billington (1987).   Both were eminent scholars and also eminent conservatives.   And with Billington’s retirement, congress did not want to give Barack Obama a free hand, nor a lifetime appointment.   So Obama nominated, the Senate consented, to a ten year term to Carla Hayden.   And 18 senators voted against her nomination, an unusually heavy dissent.   The main reason was that conservatives did not like her politics, for she had strongly opposed some of the more repressive elements of the so-called Patriots Act of 2003.    But there were some other things that made Ms. Hayden an unusual Librarian of Congress.    Among the “firsts”—she was a she, a person of color and, not least,  actually a professional librarian, with a distinguished record including a doctorate from the University of Chicago and years of experience during which she transformed two major public library systems (first Chicago’s, then Baltimore’s), served a groundbreaking and controversial term as president of the American Library Association.   Carla Hayden’s CV is too deep to recount fully, but this very revolutionary Librarian of Congress, friend of Barack and Michelle Obama, and occasional tutor to the Obama girls, was born in Tallahassee on August 10, 1952.   Inspired by her parents (a professor and a social worker) to seek her higher education outside of Florida, Carla was also inspired to think of free and equal public access as the key to modern librarianship, and fictions and facts as a library’s main stocks in trade.   Sadly, we have confused fiction and fact, but I still wish Dr. Hayden a very happy 72nd birthday, and express my hope that our next president will nominate an equally well-qualified successor.   ©.   

[Stanley]

An American Infidel--and a Republican, too.

This is my doctrine: Give every other human being every right you claim for yourself. Keep your mind open  . . .   Let us advance.    Robert G. Ingersoll, ca. 1877. 
   
In her 2013 biography of Robert Ingersoll, Susan Jacoby called him The Great Agnostic.   And so he was.   But he was probably not the greatest one.   His 19th-century America was not overrun by agnosticism.  It was, after all, the century of “Great Awakenings”, starting with the reformist revivalism of the antebellum North and then concluding with the scarier “fundamentalism” of Billy Sunday (1862-1935).   But there were many who stood apart from the religious enthusiasms of their time.   Among them were Ethan Allen and Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, and the Unitarian heretic (if such can be imagined) Theodore Parker.   Few qualified as “atheists” but it’s no strain to call them doubters, skeptics, or freethinkers.   Matthew Herndon was another, and when he wrote a biography of his old law partner, Abraham Lincoln, he counted Honest Abe as a “Theist and Rationalist, denying all extraordinary-supernatural inspiration or revelation.”   When Herndon published his Lincoln biography, in 1889, it caused outrage.  For by that time Lincoln’s martyrdom had made him an American saint, and American saints must needs be religious.   And by 1889, Robert Green Ingersoll had made it very clear to Americans what agnosticism was.   He was a best selling author (my great-grandfather’s library included several of Ingersoll’s works).   He was one of the most popular lecturers when the public lecture was a leading form of entertainment.   And Ingersoll could not stop mocking the Bible.   In one sense that’s an irony, for Ingersoll  was the offspring of a devout and devoted Congregationalist minister-missionary, the Reverend John Ingersoll.   Robert Ingersoll was born on August 11, 1832, in Dresden, NY, where his father ministered to the local Congregationalist church.   But only for the time being, for John Ingersoll mixed a fairly orthodox, Calvinist theology with enthusiasms (evangelical ones, perhaps) for radical reforms such as the abolition of slavery.   Perhaps Robert’s agnosticism grew out of the persecutions (church trials) which drove his dad out of several pulpits.  Robert’s sympathies for the oppressed in American society (he married a free-thinking feminist in 1862, having already volunteered for service in the Union army) made him a minority of one in his southern Illinois town, and that was a political identity that he pursued for the rest of his life.  His agnosticism was performative as well as substantial, and his good nature and ready wit made him into the sort of outrageous person that even the pious could admire—and buy tickets to his lectures.  The Great Agnostic was still evangelizing at full throttle when he died in 1899.   ©     

[Stanley]

Look, look. See, see. Run, run. See Spot run.

Jane said, "Look, look. I see a big yellow car. See the yellow car go."   From See It Go, a ‘Dick and Jane’ reader. 
   
I am one alum of Greenwood School, Des Moines, who remembers the ‘Dick and Jane’ readers with some affection.   My personal favorite was a story intended for the upper grades in which Dick and Jane travel cross country for a family visit, one way by sleeper train, the other by a double-decker airplane.   I had never traveled in such comfort, but some schoolmates had (and they told about it, in class, while we read the book).   We could all imagine doing such things because we were familiar with Dick and Jane’s world: almost all of us were from prosperous families, fathers in good jobs, mothers at home (when they weren’t at a ladies’ club).  We lived in detached houses on quiet streets, and in my six years at Greenwood we were certainly all white.   The books presented familiar entertainments, family outings in family cars, boating and swimming, a dog (Spot), a cat (Puff), and a kid sister (Sally) who began as a baby and became an surprisingly pleasant toddler.   The whole Dick and Jane series was the work of Zerna Sharp, born in Hillisburg, Indiana on August 12, 1889.   By the time she landed at Scott, Foresman and Co. in Chicago, she had considerable experience teaching in the lower grades and as a primary school principal.   She was hired to help create a line of reading primers that would reflect the ideas of William Gray, Dean of Education at the University of Chicago.   Sharp and Gray believed reading was a visual art, and they wanted to replace William McGuffey’s stress on phonics with their own ideas of ‘word recognition.’   Each story introduced a new word, or two or three, repeated it often, and backed it up with appropriate illustrations.   It all worked well for me, and although I preferred the books my parents gifted me, my visual ‘Dick and Jane’ vocabulary served me well enough to go on reading.  Zerna Sharp’s success was nearly complete by the time I entered Greenwood, and stayed that way until new reading theories (some of them, like phonics, new-old) challenged them.   But the more important challenge came from the growing recognition that Dick and Jane’s (and Sally’s) world was really a limited one.   Later editions of the series introduced children (and adults) of different hues and different backgrounds, just as teachers (and theorists) realized that learners of all colors and every class needed to see themselves in their books.     Zerna Sharp herself never married.  She died in rural Indiana in 1981, but not as a childless old cat lady.   Her children, she always insisted, were all the Dicks, Janes, and Sallys who learned reading by recognizing new words and then seeing them in familiar surroundings.   I guess I was also one of Zerna’s offspring.  ©.    

[Tizer]

Zerna Sharp herself never married. She died in rural Indiana in 1981, but not as a childless old cat lady. Her children, she always insisted, were all the Dicks, Janes, and Sallys who learned reading by recognizing new words and then seeing them in familiar surroundings. I guess I was also one of Zerna’s offspring.

Good to see a dig at JD Vance creep into Bob's Bits!

[Stanley]

He's not got a lot of time for Trump or his running mates Peter!

Living against the odds.

Her modesty, simplicity, loyalty to family and friends; gratitude to all who have helped her climb the arduous ladder to success; charity to all and malice to none make this self-revelation a thing of beauty.    Eva Dykes, in her 1957 review of Marian Anderson’s My Lord, What a Morning. 
  
The question arises, was Eva Dykes writing about Anderson’s autobiography, or summarizing her own life?   Eva Beatrice Dykes was born into the black elite of America’s capital city on August 13, 1893, arguably in better circumstances than Ms. Anderson’s childhood in black Philadelphia.   Dyke’s family was full to bursting with Howard University graduates, including her father, and was well educated at home and in church by family and friends.   Some added polish came from the famed “M Street School,” all-black of course, that later became Dunbar High School.   From all that it was not too far for her to get into Howard, where (socially) she joined the best sorority and (academically) graduated summa in 1914.   Dykes excelled in several disciplines but wanted to go on in English.   It was not, she recalled many years later, a very practical choice but it was a liberating one.   Family and friends agreed, and clubbed together to send young Eva to Harvard for advanced study.   Harvard, however, did not recognize Howard degrees, even ones summa cum laude, and required Eva to step back into Radcliffe College, its divisional concession to women, for another baccalaureate.   Radcliffe did accept black women but didn’t allow them to live on campus.   Eva overcame that difficulty, graduating (again in English) magna cum laude (and Phi Beta Kappa) in 1917.   Only then was she thought capable of doctoral work, and in 1921 became one of the first three black women to achieve an American PhD.   Her dissertation was on Alexander Pope, yet another outsider, which probably gave her strength, but it was also important to her that she found fellowship in her new conversion-membership at a Boston Seventh-Day Adventist congregation.   Her subsequent scholarship (back at Dunbar High, then Howard, and finally Oakwood College in Alabama) focused on writers whose works were (or could be made) relevant to the American experiences of black people: for instance The Negro in English Romantic Thought: A Study in Sympathy for the Oppressed (1942).   Troubled by Walt Whitman’s early racism, she found much to hope for in his radical, leveling democracy.  Back at Howard she was voted one of the most popular teachers.   There, and later (1944-1975) at Oakwood Dykes was a leader in helping these historically black institutions to gain full accreditation.   But in her post-retirement interviews for Radcliffe’s alumnae magazine, Dr. Sykes recalled her struggles there with charity and without malice.    Her life, like Marian Anderson’s, was a lesson in itself.   ©. 

[Stanley]

Lobo, King of the Corrumpaw

My sincerest wish has been to impress upon people that each of our native wild creatures is in itself a precious heritage that we have no right to destroy or put beyond the reach of our children.   Ernest Thompson Seton.

Among the endangered species of our desert southwest, the Mexican gray wolf stands out.   Once nearly extinct, there are now ~300 running wild in Arizona, New Mexico, and Chihuahua.   Even more (~380) are in captivity, in a breeding program created jointly by the United States and Mexico.   In itself, that represents a huge success in cross border cooperation.   When the international recovery program began (in Mexico, in 1976) there were fewer than 10 surviving members of the species, including—as luck would have it—one pregnant female.  Then, over the protests of ranchers on both sides of the border, lobo mexicano was reintroduced into the wild in 1998.    Two odd facts about this small wolf (a subspecies) as that its near extinction, and then its recovery, both owe much to the work of one man, Ernest Thompson Seton.   Seton first encountered lobo mexicano in the 1890s when he was a bounty hunter eager to collect the $1000 reward put out by New Mexico ranchers to destroy a particularly adept pack leader.   Seton’s success led to remorse, first expressed in an 1898 short story “Lobo the King of the Corrumpaw” and then, in the 1930s, joining in attempts to save the species.   Seton’s own life story is pretty odd, too.   Ernest Thompson Seton was born as Ernest Evan Thompson in England on August 14, 1860.   He rejected his birth name later as an act of revenge against his distant, abusive father.    The family emigrated to Canada and, when Ernest turned 21, his dad presented him with a bill for the expense (including the midwife’s fee!!) of raising him.   Instead of paying, Ernest lit out for the territories (first to Manitoba) where he began his long love affair with nature.   The affair had its ups and downs (killing Mexican gray wolves qualifies as a ‘down’); on the other hand it was characterized by a tendency to sentimentalize nature.   So, in “King of the Corrumpaw,” Lobo is captured but dies of a broken heart, for his mate, a white wolf named Bianca (!!!) had been poisoned.   It was one of my favorite stories.   I read it many times in my misspent youth, in my dad’s old, mouldering edition of Seton’s Wild Animals I Have Known (1898).   Armed with a new name, and a new mission, Ernest Thompson Seton crossed the northern border to become an early a leader of the Boy Scout movement in the USA, a best-selling author, a naturalized US citizen, and a leading exponent of (as he saw it) Native American “nature craft”.   Ridiculed by many (including John Burroughs and Teddy Roosevelt) for his anthropomorphic animal heroes, his books and stories taught many kids (including me) to think of nature, and the ‘natural,’ as worthy of preservation.   ©  

[Stanley]

A colonial writer in an imperial capital.

I stretched a rope across the ocean, 
Became the tight-rope walker of my dreams. 
Searching for antipodeal experience, to round 
The small circumference of a sesame-seed.    From “My Country, My Village” by Meary James Tambimuttu, ca. 1940.

As V. S. Naipaul would discover, two decades later, it’s hard to be a ‘colonial’ writer in one of the world’s great imperial capitals.    But while Naipaul would produce (out of this metropolitan tension) the tragicomic A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) and go on to a Nobel Prize (2001), Meary James Tambimuttu never made the big time.   Never as a writer, anyway.   Born in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) on August 15, 1915, he arrived in London on the eve of World War II, and as the Luftwaffe’s incendiaries rained down on London town his poetry failed to catch fire.   What I have been able to find of it is not to my taste.   Not quite rhythmic and rarely rhyming, it’s not free verse either, but exists in some no man’s land.    But he did write poetry, and he was an exotic.   Perhaps that was why he made so much of his ancestral connections with the last of the Tamil kings, overthrown by the Portuguese in 1618.   “Tambi” (as he became known) was schooled in a Colombo convent and seems to have taken a Catholic name (he was first ‘Mary James’).   As the son of a well-known Columbo journalist, he learned well enough to navigate the literary waters of a colonial capital, and in London the erstwhile poet did become better known as a navigator, a pioneering editor, even a publisher.   He found patrons amongst established writers, notably the expatriate Yank T. S. Eliot, and allies amongst other literary provincials on the make like the Welsh rebel Dylan Thomas and other young (or youngish) men who thought themselves without a country like Louis MacNeice, Lawrence Durrell, and W. H. Auden.  Tambi’s pioneering journal Poetry—London featured works by these yet unestablished voices, also some “new” criticism.   And there were mold-breaking issues that might best be called “happenings,” making ersatz connections between the visual arts and this or that poet.   These are now collectors’ items, notably issues featuring sculptures by Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore.   After the war, Tambi took his talents to a new literary capital, New York, where he published a short series of Poetry London-New York and became known as a translator of ancient South Asian poetry.   His Indian Love Poetry, handsomely bound, sold well.   But failure was also in the air.   His first two marriages (there were three in all) collapsed, and Tambi returned to London to recapture his life.   He was never again so successful in transcending the circumferences of a sesame seed.  When he died in 1982 his ashes were returned to Colombo for burial in his family plot.   ©.      

[Stanley]

Colonel Cameron and the Ladies from Hell

Ladies from Hell.    Saying, apparently German, dating from WWI and referencing Scots battalions wearing kilts into battle on the Western Front.   

My dad, a veteran of the ‘Timberwolf’ (American 104th) division’s European tour in 1944-45, once told me that the Germans complained about the bagpipe as an inhumane weapon.   I never checked that story, but it is true that in British law the bagpipe was classified as a weapon.   Drums and bugles were not.  This anomaly, arising from the hanging (for treason) of a piper captured at Culloden in 1746, wasn’t cleared up until 1996.  As for the kilt, the last time it was worn into battle was in May 1940, when the Cameron Highlanders (ladies from hell indeed) mounted a bayonet charge at Escaut to help cover the Dunkirk evacuation.   Their heroism has become the stuff of legend.   The ‘Clan Cameron’ did fight at Culloden, on the losing side, and it wasn’t until the wars of the French Revolution (1793) that the Cameron Highlanders were called into existence as a unit of the British army.   In the same year, the unit took into its ranks one John Cameron.   He was a younger son of the clan’s acting chief, Ewen Cameron, and was born (in the highlands) on August 16, 1771.   A young man of rank, he purchased a commission and served with great distinction throughout what became the Napoleonic Wars, but not always with the Camerons.   Rather he soon transferred to the Gordon Highlanders in their campaigns in Egypt, Corsica, at Gibraltar, and throughout the so-called Peninsular War, harrying the French out of Iberia.   Courage in battle and his rigors when the Gordons were in camp enabled Cameron’s quick rise to a colonelcy.    Along the way he made the bagpipe and the tartan into regimental badges,  thus paving the way for the 19th-century romances of the highlands and highland culture.   So what had been regarded as icons of treason and savagery became symbols of heroism, and not just among highlanders.     Even lowland Scots, like my Ayrshire ancestors, discovered their ‘clannishness’ (or invented it) and then found tartans to go with it.   Of course all this owed to more than the heroism of one Scots colonel, John Cameron.   But he was a hero, a strict disciplinarian who was loved by men in his command (“I so love these fellows, that I cannot leave them”) and shared with them the hazards of front line battle.   Leading the initial charge at the Battle of Vitoria (1813) he ordered the regimental piper to play “The Camerons’ Gathering.” John Cameron was killed by a French sniper at Waterloo, in 1815.   His batman (not a Cameron but a MacMillan) marked his grave (beside the Ghent Road), and soon after the peace Cameron’s remains were returned his Highland birthplace.  They rest there today under a massive obelisk inscribed by the master of Highlands romance, Sir Walter Scott.  © 

[Stanley]

You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.

Never out think me, just mink me
Polar bear rug me, don't bug me
New Thunderbird me, you heard me
I'm getting hungry, peel me a grape.    Lyric from “Peel Me a Grape,” by Dave Frishberg.   
 
“Peel Me a Grape” (1962) was Frishberg’s first published jazz song.   Dave Frishberg (1933-2021) would compose enough good stuff, and live long enough, to become one of the jazz world’s most beloved elder statesmen.   Also, for a short time in high school, I dated Frishberg’s niece.   So, some day, I will do an ‘Anniversary Note’ on him, but today I want to commemorate  the originator of his lyric’s punch line, Miss Mae West.   It was her pet monkey, really, who insisted on having his grapes peeled, but Ms. West (before, during, and after her ‘prime’) could turn the most innocent phrase into the most suggestive double entendre.   Among her most famous (besides the one about the grape):        
                      Come up and see me some time
                      Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?
                      I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.  
                      I believe in censorship.   I’ve made a fortune out of it.
And we now know that many, maybe most, of these lines were indeed hers.   In a varied and vigorous life she was also a playwright, and when she hit the really big time in Hollywood films (in the 1930s) Mae West couldn’t resist editing her lines to her liking, and her directors and producers couldn’t resist letting her do it.  Bold, brassy, and (usually) blonde, Mae West made a lot of money as a film star, and the ticket-buying public loved her art and her skill at making sin seem like it might possibly be fun.    Mae West was born in Brooklyn on August 17, 1893, the daughter of John West, a prize fighter, and his immigrant wife Matilda (“Tillie”), who modeled corsets.   They baptized her as Mary Jane, and as a Presbyterian. Presbyterian she remained all her life but in her last hours her latest boyfriend called in a Roman Catholic priest to read last rites.   This may have been her final double entendre, but then Mae’s adored mom was a Catholic.   And there was in Mae West’s life a streak of consistency.   She admired the unorthodox, and she could be brave about it, too.   Some of her early appearances were in vaudeville “drag” shows, and her consistent view on the matter of gender identities was to live and let live.    Later, when she was the highest-paid woman in the USA, and her landlord objected to her having a black boyfriend, she bought the apartment building to settle the matter.   And there, in the Ravenswood Apartments, she held court until her death in 1980.   There were, along the way, a number of beaus, but Mae West was always the belle of the ball.   And that is how she would like to be remembered. ©    

[Stanley]

An American aristocrat?

If there be one quality in [George Washington’s] character which may exercise a useful control over the men of the present hour, it is the total disregard of self when in the most elevated positions . . .     Charles Francis Adams. 
   
Among the oddest documents in American religious history were the Egyptian papyri purchased by Joseph Smith.  It was odd that he was able to buy them in Kirtland, Ohio, in 1835, odder still that he translated them as sacred texts.   His translation was in progress when, in 1844 (now in Nauvoo, Illinois) Smith had a distinguished young visitor, Charles Francis Adams, the youngest (soon to be the only) surviving son of President John Quincy Adams (and thus the grandson of the second US president, John Adams).   So Smith pulled out the red carpet, showing Adams not only the papyri but also four mummies that he’d bought in the same job lot.   Smith already saw the papyri as sacred signs for his new Church of Latter Day Saints, and when finished he called the translations the Book of Abraham and the Book of Joseph.   Charles Francis Adams was unimpressed, took Smith to be one of the “mountebanks” that were too plentiful, and too likely to succeed, in the young, brash, and materialistic republic.    Adams would pass on his cynicism to at least two of his sons, Henry and Brooks Adams.  But when all is said and done, there is much to admire in the life and character of Charles Francis Adams, born in Boston on August 18, 1807.   Of course his grandpa had in 1800 just been turfed out of the White House by the Jeffersonians.   Then his father would be similarly (and analogously) humiliated by the Jacksonians in 1832.   But Charles Francis went on building his own life.   He restored the family fortunes by marrying Abigail Brooks, the daughter of one of Boston’s richest men, and then built up his own reputation as a scholar, essayist, writer, and the first man to make a really serious effort to collect and catalog his family’s papers (the Adams papers, now a national treasure).   He was, it’s true, skeptical about revelation in religion, and about American voters too, who he thought could be too credulous by half.  But when confronted by the Slave Power,  Adams took a stand as the “Free Soil” nominee for Vice President in 1848, and then as an old “Conscience” Whig he served the Union well as Abe Lincoln’s representative in Great Britain.  There he helped to keep Victoria and her ministers neutral and to keep large slices of the British political nation pro-Union.   After the war, he again claimed the mantle of ‘conscience’, not to mention disgust at the excesses of the “Gilded Age.”   He returned to the family papers, to our lasting benefit.   His eldest son, John, tended the family fortune while Henry and Brooks tooled up to satirize the country and bemoan its demotic tendencies.   Charles Francis died in 1886.   Abigail Brooks Adams, broken-hearted, followed him in 1889.   ©.  

[Stanley]

The man who saw snakes in space.

The way you remember the past depends upon your hope for the future.    Story Musgrave.  
 
Astronauts, who allow themselves to be incarcerated atop a bomb and then blown into orbit, are unusual people.   They must be.   So thought the “new journalist” Norman Mailer and then his unruly imitator Tom Wolfe.   In Mailer’s Of a Fire on the Moon (1970) and then in Wolfe’s The Right Stuff (1979) we began to learn about these eccentricities.    But if Mailer and Wolfe were looking for the unusual, they really should have waited for the advent of the astronaut Franklin Story Musgrave, in some ways the oddest of them all.   Story Musgrave, as he likes to be called, was born in Massachusetts on August 19, 1935.   His maternal and paternal family trees were overloaded with Puritan heroes and Yankee patriots.   His Story ancestors included a participant in America’s most famous tea party and a Supreme Court justice.    Elsewhere we find Saltonstalls, Grays, even a couple of passengers aboard the Mayflower, whom we might call astronauts of an earlier age.   And at first it looked like Story Musgrave would follow along the same lines.   Certainly his education began at a couple of prestigious private schools.   But that route was closed off by a car accident which caused him to drop out on the eve of his final examinations.   “Home” became Lexington, KY, where he began as a humble enlistee in the Marines.   There he learned some things about electric circuits and airplane mechanics, earned a GED in his spare time, and became quite an academic.   Discharged (honorably, I think) from the Marines, he earned a math BS from Syracuse and went to work for Kodak.   There followed a string of degrees from various institutions: another baccalaureate (chemistry) from Marietta College, an MBA from UCLA, an MD and MSc from Kentucky, and an MA in English (!!??) from Houston.   But along the way, in 1967, he’d been selected as a future Astronaut, first concentrating on the physiology of space flight but eventually getting back to circuitry, for he was chief technician on the shuttle flights sent up to place and then repair the Hubble Space Telescope.   Without a doubt, he was a scientist-astronaut.   But the experiences of “flying” abord all six of the ‘shuttles’ made him a poet, too, and something of a philosopher.   Still claiming Kentucky as “home” and “nature” as his only book, his mental freight also included the works of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.   Clearly he seems a man brim full of the “right stuff”—whatever that is.    Story Musgrave retired from astronauting in 1997, except for John Glenn the oldest person ever to orbit—and, so far, the best poet.   And his quotation, given above, might be seen as good political advice for the 2024 election campaign.   ©  

[Stanley]

Romantic or Modernist?

Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context—a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.   Eliel Saarinen.

Eliel Saarinen, who was born in rural Finland on August 20, 1873, practiced what he preached.   But it took him some time to develop and then actually create that harmony of design which connected chair to room, room to house, house to neighborhood, neighborhood to city.   He was known first as a romantic nationalist.   And Finland, in 1873 a ‘grand duchy’ of Russia’s Tsars but populated by a distinctive people who spoke an even more distinctive language, proved a fertile ground for romantic nationalism.   As a ‘grand duchy,’ Finland already had its own parliament, even its own currency, and was developing its own literature.   Drawing on a long history of resentment against one imperial power, Sweden, Finland transitioned to being a rebellious Russian province.
            Swedes we are no more
            Russians we cannot become
            Therefore Finns we must be.
And while Jean Sibelius composed a new national music, Eliel Saarinen designed Finlandish buildings.   The most notable of them was a grand railway terminal in the capital, Helsinki, a ten-year Saarinen project completed (1914) three years before Finland’s formal declaration of independence.   It still stands, not so much ‘modernist’ as a collage of tendencies, art nouveau in its main building oddly complemented by a great tower of indeterminate parentage.  Saarinen’s fascination with towers began with the National Museum (1904) and would continue until at least 1942, when, long since moved to the USA, Saarinen composed (in 1942) the First Christian Church of Columbus, Indiana.   But by then the tower and the main building, the sanctuary, are severely modern, shorn of embellishments.   And by then Saarinen had been president of the Cranbrook School of Art, in Michigan, for over a decade, putting together a faculty that included the furniture designers Charles and Ray Eames and a whole campus design into which Saarinen could comfortably place his aggressively modernist tea urn.  My home town. Des Moines, benefitted from an even more modernist design, Eliel’s art museum that hugs a small hilltop at the north end of Greenwood Park, and Saarinen’s tiny, cylindrical, not-quite-windowless chapel at Drake University’s divinity school.  At about the same time, Saarinen collaborated with his son Eero on Drake’s new residence halls, buildings whose severe simplicities seem worlds apart from Helsinki Central.   In that sense they set the stage for Eero’s most iconic structure, the Gateway Expansion Arch in St. Louis.   While Eliel Saarinen traveled westwards, he moved through several stages of modern design.   ©  

[Stanley]

In them days, I'd just as soon have died--if it wasn't for my harmonica. Sonny Terry.

After hearing your interpretation of my Chanson Russe, I would be happy to let you play anything of mine.    Igor Stravinsky, speaking to Tommy Reilly.    

So what instrument did Tommy Reilly play?   The truth is, quite a few, the violin for one, and in 1939 he entered the Leipzig Conservatory as a student of the violin.   But it wasn’t a great year for a Canadian to be in Leipzig studying anything.   Hitler invaded Poland.   Britain declared war on Germany.   Canada, proud member of the Commonwealth, followed suit, and Reilly was interned as an enemy alien.    He spent the next six years in various prison camps, always with his violin.   At war’s end, he was shipped back to Britain, but the violin was lost in transit.   No matter, for what Stravinsky was talking about was Reilly’s consummate command of another instrument, the once-lowly harmonica.   If you’re in an internee camp, the harmonica is a much easier instrument to keep and to maintain fighting fit, and one of the oddest things about Reilly’s incarceration is that, throughout, he was kept in harmonicas by Hohner Musikinstrumente, already the world’s premier manufacturer of harmonicas.   I can’t find why, or how, Hohner kept sending harmonicas to an imprisoned enemy alien, but it paid off.   When in the 1960s Tommy Reilly had become famous, he commissioned Hohner to build him a new concert harmonica—its inner workings encased in sterling silver.   And by that time Hohner was selling harmonicas to the likes of John Lennon, Brian Jones, and Bob Dylan.   As for Tommy Reilly himself, he was playing all sorts of music on his Hohners, and composing too.   Jazz and blues of course, and pop, and soundtracks for sitcoms and movies.   Among his credits were the opening themes for Last of the Summer Wine and Midnight Cowboy.   But Reilly played classical too.   He recorded with the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, including works composed especially for him (and for his Hohner) like Vaughan Williams’ Romance for Harmonica.   Thomas Rundle Reilly was born in Ontario on August 21, 1919, the son of a Canadian military bandmaster (and demon hormonicist!) who encouraged Tommy to play ‘better’ instruments (e.g. the violin).   But Tommy had other interests, including circus performing (on the tightrope) and jamming jazz with his mouth organ.   Getting him to Leipzig with his violin was, in that sense, a victory.    But the war intervened, and in internee camps Tommy Reilly turned increasingly to his Hohner.    He went on playing, for himself, for Stravinsky, for Bing Crosby, for Marlene Dietrich, until he died, just outside of London, in September 2000.   He was survived by his wife Ena Nabb, whom he met on the English “variety show’ circuit when she was just 17 and he (at 27) was setting out to see what he could do with a mouth organ.   Quite a lot, as it turned out.   ©.   

[Stanley]

Platonic lovers?

It mattered less what Venetia did with her legs than what she did with her lips.   Raymond Asquith. 
  
Thus Raymond Asquith, the grandson of the British prime minister Herbert Henry (H. H.) Asquith, referred to the romance between his grandfather and Lady Venetia Stanley.    H. H. Asquith was prime minister from 1908 to 1916, troubled times indeed, and it was during the first years of WWI that the ‘affair’ reached its most passionate intensity, with the PM writing letters to Venetia even during cabinet meetings.   Apparently, Venetia responded in kind.   But theirs was (almost certainly) a platonic passion.   After all, Venetia Stanley, born on August 22, 1887, was the best female friend of Asquith’s daughter Violet.   Both Violet and Venetia were London debs who ‘came out’ in 1907 but were in no hurry to marry.   Instead, their coterie of aristocratic women, the “Young Souls,” enjoyed life in London high society.   At one point Violet courted with the young maverick Winston Churchill, but was not heartbroken when Winston went, instead, for Clementine Hozier, herself part of a different circle we might call the Mitford connection.   Doubtless H. H. Asquith had known Venetia Stanley for some time, but it was during a family holiday in Sicily (in 1912) that the PM  discovered her as a fascinating young woman in whom he might confide.   “The scales dropped from my eyes,” he remembered, and Venetia became his intimate, the central figure in what Asquith’s wife called his “little harem.”  But it was Venetia in whom he trusted, and it was their relationship that was the most closely guarded secret, both their meetings and their letters.   Asquith destroyed most of her letters.   Had they surfaced, he would have lost the premiership.   She kept his letters, though, closely guarding them, disclosing their secret to no one.    And it was she who broke off the affair by marrying (in 1915) one of Asquith’s proteges, the radical Liberal Edwin Montagu (who had first fallen for Venetia during that Sicilian holiday).   Later, after most of the dust had settled and Montagu was dead, Venetia let Asquith use his letters to her as sources (which he cited as “contemporary notes”) for his memoirs, published to some acclaim in 1928.   For her part, Venetia survived her unhappy marriage to Montagu, had several physical affairs, including with Lord Beaverbrook (the Rupert Murdoch of his day), and died with her lips still sealed in 1948.   Hence Raymond Asquith’s ambiguous post-mortem compliment.   When the prominent Labour Party minister-scholar Roy Jenkins wrote his biography of Asquith (published in 1964) he had full access to Lady Venetia’s treasure trove of letters.   And that did cause a break in the Asquith family.   Violet Asquith, by then known as Violet Bonham-Carter, Baroness Asquith, did not approve.   “Young Souls” do age, sooner or later.   ©.  

[Stanley]

Religion in politics.

For me it is enough that God is here, to whose goodness I commend my soul, which is so soon to issue from my body.    Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, August 23, 1572. 
   
Whether or not de Coligny actually spoke these words, it’s certain that he knew his life was in danger and that he sent some of his closest and most trusted friends away to safety, lest their wives and families would curse him to the end of time.    His actual murder, a very grisly one, on the night of August 23, 1572, began the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, first in Paris and then in several French provincial centers.   How many people (besides de Coligny) were slain remains a matter of dispute.   Estimates range from 2,000 to 70,000.   15,000 may be about right, but the actual toll doesn’t matter.   Victims were French Protestants (Huguenots), and the massacres were an act of Catholic statecraft.    The result pleased the Pope in Rome who (as soon as he heard the news) commissioned the artist Vasari (who was quite good at limning corpses) to produce celebratory frescoes which still grace the Vatican’s collection.    European Protestants were horrified, tended to overestimate the number of victims, and took the whole thing as further proof of Catholic duplicity, cruelty, and autocracy.   It was certainly the outcome of the strategic thinking of the queen mother of France, Catherine de Medici, and both her motives and the demography of the dead reflected the philosophical assumptions of the age.   Although the victims (however many) did include women and children, the chief targets were rich, powerful, and well-connected men, merchants and aristocrats.   Kill the leaders, the thinking ran, and the followers will succumb.   And although a kind of republicanism had been percolating up through French Protestant thought, the Huguenots were not egalitarian democrats.   Their enmity to Queen Catherine and her son Charles IX may have included a primitive social contract theory, but in the main Huguenot leaders thought that they were better rascals than the Catholics in power.   Their weaknesses (in numbers and in territories they controlled) had led them to hope for a negotiated truce, not triumph.   Their titular leader, Henry of Navarre, escaped death by promising to convert.   He hedged on that but later, and famously, decided that it would be “worth a mass” to succeed to the throne as a Roman Catholic.   As for the Huguenots as a group, most proved Queen Catherine’s point by either converting to Rome or fleeing France altogether.   In doing so, Huguenot refugees (and there were many) took their incipient capitalism with them.   Settling mainly in southern England and in the Netherlands, they helped set the stage for the more “modern” wars of the following era, wars which would, in the end, send the French monarchy into decline.   ©.    

[Stanley]

Women in science!!

Let us choose for ourselves our path, and let us try to strew that path with flowers.   Emilie du Châtelet.   

Some years ago, planning a course on ‘science for non-scientists,’ I did some reading on female scientists in early modern Europe, notably on Katherine Boyle,  Margaret Cavendish, and Emilie du Châtelet.   These ladies were aristocrats by birth and by marriage who did important work in science.   But they were women.   Their genius was recognized within their elite social circles, but later generations took note only of their partnerships with male scientists and philosophers.   True, Emilie du Châtelet published under her own name, but her main fame was her long affair with the man we know, today, as Voltaire.   Another, but much earlier, ‘unknown’ woman scientist was born Sophie Brahe born in Knudstrup, kingdom of Denmark (now southern Sweden) on August 24, 1559.   She married twice, but we know her by her maiden name because she was the sister, protégé, and partner of the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe.   It’s not clear how these two became close.   Tycho was much the elder, and they were raised in separate households.   Nevertheless, Tycho recognized in Sophie a kindred spirit, and by the time she was in her teens they were collaborators in several fields, and both were determined to study the stars rather than follow the lives expected of them as children of the aristocracy.   We call them pioneer scientists because their partnership in astronomy was of such great import.   But they were also astrologers and alchemists, ancient arts indeed. not yet derided as mysticisms.   In her 20s, Sophie assisted Tycho in his astronomical observations and discoveries, which provided European intellectuals with yet more reasons to accept the new Copernican universe.   It is difficult to pinpoint any finding(s) that owed to Sophie, or what exactly her role was.   Meanwhile, in her own life as a woman of birth, Sophie married Otto Thott, landowner, and then, after Otto’s death, Erik Lange, an aristocratic alchemist.   In those lives she used other aspects of her intellectual partnership with Tycho, notably horticulture, first to manage Thott’s estate and then to try to keep Lange out of debtors prison.   She continued to dabble in astrology, gathering data on Danish aristocratic families and, no doubt, issuing predictions.   She dabbled in medicine, too, and figures as a pioneer homeopath (she used very dilute poisons to treat neighbors’ maladies).   In mid-life, between marriages, she appeared as the narrator in Tycho’s poem, Urania Titani, a love affair between the gods.   And it now appears that she may have been coauthor.   She was of some considerable importance—but she was a woman, a fact that still limits how much can be known about her.   ©

[Stanley]

The cartoon as commentary.

Resolve then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving and tinny blast on tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us.   Walt Kelly, 1953.   

In 1970, Kelly slimmed that down—“we have met the enemy, and he is us.”   Either shows Kelly as a master of lightly-fractured prose.   In my first literature course, I wrote my final paper on Kelly, in response to an assignment (from the great and good E. Sculley Bradley) to write on “a leading contemporary author.”   Bradley had in mind someone like J. D. Salinger.   Walt Kelly was then (this was 1962) at the height of his powers and his popularity as a cartoonist, mainly for his strip (daily and Sunday) “Pogo” but also for his “Pogo” annuals.   In the strip, his animal characters spoke a vaguely southern dialect and, necessarily, were restricted to what could be squeezed into a balloon.   There were exceptions.   Miz Mam’selle Hepzibah, a svelte skunk, had a noticeably French air about her.   Three bats (Bewitched, Bothered, and Bemildred) used urban-American.   Deacon Mushrat spoke in hypocritical Gothic.  P. T. Barnstable the bear spoke in Circus Hoardings.   P. T. was the spit and image of Phineas T. Barnum, the most famous son of Bridgeport, Connecticut, which is where Walter Crawford Kelly grew up, having been born in Philadelphia on August 25, 1913.   Kelly’s was a poor, working-class schooling, provided by all sorts, a muster of mongrels, and it’s easy to see his Okefenokee Swamp animals in the same light, easier still because Kelly said they were.   But Kelly’s route to the swamp strip was full of unexpected turns, several years working for Walt Disney in California (scholars have unearthed bits of Kellyana in Fantasia and Pinocchio), war service (illustrating safety manuals!!), and then a brief, glorious time as the tame cartoonist for the brief, glorious New York Star, the paper that died.   It was at the Star where Kelly first invented his possum, a furry sidekick to the (human) boy “Bombazine.”    As the Star fell, Pogo rose from a supporting role to the center of the Okefenokee glee and social club.   This Possum, his friends (Albert the Alligator, Howland the Owl, Churchy la Femme the turtle), and especially the spiky Porkypine commented on an ongoing saga about human nature, American politics, and, periodically, baseball and the Olympics.   Kelly the cartoonist was one of the first to call foul on Senator Joe McCarthy (who invaded the swamp as the odoriferous bobcat Simple J. Malarkey), and it was this subtle non-subtlety that made Kelly so popular with dad’s students.  And then with me.   It’s harder to find Kelly’s prose, but you could start with his Ten Ever-Lovin Blue-Eyed Years With Pogo (1959 and then reprinted in 2002).   That sourced my paper for Professor Bradley, and (good sport that he was) Bradley gave me my first ‘A’ grade in college.   ©.   

[Stanley]

allergies and anaphylaxis.

The living being . . . is stable because it is modifiable—the slight instability is the necessary condition for the true stability of the organism.   Charles Richet, in the 1906 Dictionnaire de Physiologie.

Allergies are among our instabilities, and they are usually slight.   We know that allergies have always been with us.   But the word ‘allergy’ did not appear in the English language until 1908.   Instead, we used folksy, traditional terms like ‘hay fever’ to explain our chronic sniffles and sneezes.   The Oxford English Dictionary states that ‘allergy’ was an import from German, via the Austrian scientist Clemens von Pirquet, but then adds that allergie made its debut in French—as a philosophical term—in 1893.    That’s interesting because the 1913 Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine was won by the French scientist-philosopher Charles Richet.   The award was made in recognition of work he did, beginning in 1901, on anaphylaxis.   And that word was indeed coined by Richet, in 1906.   It was a compound of ancient Greek (ana, for ‘against’, and phylaxis, for ‘protection.’).   Charles Richet was born in Paris on August 26, 1850.   He trained in medicine and did his internship at the Pitié-Salpêtrière, an institution which we might call, today, a psychiatric hospital.   There he studied “hysterics.”   At some point, however, Richet moved over to the science of bodily functions, and was made professor of physiology in 1887.    One of his many interests was in the processes involved in immunization, for instance the ways in which mild dosages of, say, cowpox, can result in an immunity to the deadly smallpox.   So he injected an experimental animal, a dog as it happened, with poisons extracted from the Portuguese Man o’ War.  But instead of producing an immunity, the early injections set off a fatal sensitivity, an “anaphylactic” reaction.   The dog died, but Richet went on to receive the Nobel and to conduct more pioneering work on allergies and anaphylaxis.   Beyond the Nobel, Richet’s distinguished scientific career (in several fields) led to the creation of the Richet chair in physiology, an endowment that still exists.  Beyond science as such, he was an adept in the study of history, and fancied himself as a scientist of society, a sociologist.    He pioneered, too, in aerodynamics and was a keen amateur pilot.   Among his more admirable sidelines was his pacifism, which predated—and then survived—the  bloodbath of World War I.   He also spent much time researching ‘paranormal’ phenomena, not as a believer (in, say, spiritualism) but as a scientific skeptic.   Richet is also remembered for his “scientific” racism in which, unsurprisingly, he argued that Europeans were superior to all others, and that ‘mentally deficient’ Europeans were genetic throwbacks.   That strong belief in racial “selection” was Richet’s most fatal allergy, and one from which he never recovered.  He died in 1935.   ©  

[Stanley]

Yankee Doodle went to town.

Yankee Doodle went to town
A’riding on a pony,
Stuck a feather in his cap
And called in macaroni

The song “Yankee Doodle” has too long a history to recount fully.   A version of it may have been used by Dutch New Yorkers to mock the New England “yankees” who invaded what had once been a Dutch colony.   Then something like it was sung by British regulars in the Seven Years’ War, again in mockery—this time of rag-tag colonial militias.   And it’s well known that the Marquis de Lafayette then used it to insult the defeated British at Yorktown in 1781.   The song was a taunt, and the term “macaroni” was much used to belittle those who dressed for a part they couldn’t play.   So when the First Maryland joined Washington’s army at the western end of Long Island in the late summer of 1776, its soldiers were scorned by the continental regulars who were, by then, veterans of several defeats and of several retreats.   In contrast, the 400 officers and men from Maryland had only been formed up in January.   The First Maryland were officered (from lieutenants on up) by planter-aristocrats like William Smallwood.    And all of them were dressed to the nines.   Whether or not any had stuck feathers in their caps, most had bayonets, a rarity amongst Washington’s men.   Almost as a matter of course, the battle- and retreat-hardened veterans called them “macaronis,” fey and fashionable fellows got up to look like soldiers.   But beneath their false-front finery, these rather effeminate chaps would melt in the heat of battle.    Battle soon came.  The “Battle of Brooklyn,” one of the biggest battles of the whole revolutionary war, went very badly for the Americans.   They’d been encircled from the rear, and it was quickly evident that retreat was the only alternative.   The whole revolution hung in the balance.   And so, on the first day of battle, August 27, 1776, the First Maryland was ordered to cover for the whole American army.   For all I know with feathers in their caps, but certainly using their bayonets (and not much else), they repeatedly charged the British lines.   In the end, only 10 Marylanders made it back to Washington’s army.   Almost all the rest were, to use a recent expression, losers and suckers: over 250 dead; over 100 captured.  And so “The 400” entered American mythology, where they performed a role like that played by the heroes of Thermopylae in ancient Greek history and myth.  And General George Washington learned even more about retreating, an art that served him and saved the revolution.   ©.         

[Stanley]

He climbs like a fly on sugar.

For some years past there has been a remarkably rapid increase in the number of men who climb for climbing’s sake within the bounds of the British Isles. Walter Parry Haskett Smith, 1894 .

Taking them altogether, mountain tops are a dime a dozen. Many require only a strenuous walk. Some can be reached on horseback. The view from the summit may be glorious, but then there’s the descent, the aching knees, the blistered heels. Climbing for climbing’s sake, “rock climbing,” is a different matter. Find a more or less vertical cliff, or even better an overhang, map your ascent, get to the top, then descend. To most, it looks too dangerous to be a “sport,” but even in St. Louis rock-climbing is a popular way to spend money and Saturdays, and if there aren’t a lot of cliffs in the city there are a number of gyms providing artificial rocks and ways to climb them. Rock climbing is a sport of recent origin, a refinement (or extension) of the Romantic era’s love affair with places wild and high. And it had its pioneers. One of them, in Germany, was Manfred von Richtofen who, before he fathered the “Red Baron” of WWI fame enjoyed betting his life and limbs against Alpine pinnacles. In England, rock climbing (for the sake of climbing rocks) is said to have been the invention of Walter Parry Haskett Smith, born in Sussex on August 28, 1859. He was not an aristocrat but close enough, the son of a gentleman farmer wealthy enough to set Walter up for life with a healthy income. The intention was for Walter to become a barrister, and at Eton and then Oxford he was thought to be scholarly, mainly in the classics. But he was even better at sports, athletics in particular. Later, instead of settling down to his apprenticeship in the Inns of Court, he loved to ramble, and then fell in love with the English Lake District, not so much its ponds and peaks but rather its pinnacles, cliffs, and chimneys. In June 1886, aged 26, Smith made the first (recorded) ascent of Napes Needle, a formidable 70-foot pillar of Rhyolite (quick-set lava) which from certain angles looks quite ready to tumble down into Wasdale. Exactly 50 years later, Smith made the same ascent in a publicized ‘jubilee’ climb, before a small throng of enthusiasts-eccentrics who regarded Smith as a hero and mentor. To judge by the pictures taken of that jubilee climb, Smith had consented to use ropes, but he was still dressed in the garb of the amateur sportsman, tweeds and all. At 76 years of age, a person is entitled to his or her eccentricities. In between his first and last ascents of Napes Needle, Walter Parry Smith had become a leader of a large fraternity (one that by the 1920s included women). He never married, but lived with his sister in Kensington until the Luftwaffe bombed him out of London. By then he was too frail to climb needles, let alone descend them, but he is still honored for his eccentricities. ©.

[Stanley]

He climbs like a fly on sugar.

For some years past there has been a remarkably rapid increase in the number of men who climb for climbing’s sake within the bounds of the British Isles. Walter Parry Haskett Smith, 1894 .

Taking them altogether, mountain tops are a dime a dozen. Many require only a strenuous walk. Some can be reached on horseback. The view from the summit may be glorious, but then there’s the descent, the aching knees, the blistered heels. Climbing for climbing’s sake, “rock climbing,” is a different matter. Find a more or less vertical cliff, or even better an overhang, map your ascent, get to the top, then descend. To most, it looks too dangerous to be a “sport,” but even in St. Louis rock-climbing is a popular way to spend money and Saturdays, and if there aren’t a lot of cliffs in the city there are a number of gyms providing artificial rocks and ways to climb them. Rock climbing is a sport of recent origin, a refinement (or extension) of the Romantic era’s love affair with places wild and high. And it had its pioneers. One of them, in Germany, was Manfred von Richtofen who, before he fathered the “Red Baron” of WWI fame enjoyed betting his life and limbs against Alpine pinnacles. In England, rock climbing (for the sake of climbing rocks) is said to have been the invention of Walter Parry Haskett Smith, born in Sussex on August 28, 1859. He was not an aristocrat but close enough, the son of a gentleman farmer wealthy enough to set Walter up for life with a healthy income. The intention was for Walter to become a barrister, and at Eton and then Oxford he was thought to be scholarly, mainly in the classics. But he was even better at sports, athletics in particular. Later, instead of settling down to his apprenticeship in the Inns of Court, he loved to ramble, and then fell in love with the English Lake District, not so much its ponds and peaks but rather its pinnacles, cliffs, and chimneys. In June 1886, aged 26, Smith made the first (recorded) ascent of Napes Needle, a formidable 70-foot pillar of Rhyolite (quick-set lava) which from certain angles looks quite ready to tumble down into Wasdale. Exactly 50 years later, Smith made the same ascent in a publicized ‘jubilee’ climb, before a small throng of enthusiasts-eccentrics who regarded Smith as a hero and mentor. To judge by the pictures taken of that jubilee climb, Smith had consented to use ropes, but he was still dressed in the garb of the amateur sportsman, tweeds and all. At 76 years of age, a person is entitled to his or her eccentricities. In between his first and last ascents of Napes Needle, Walter Parry Smith had become a leader of a large fraternity (one that by the 1920s included women). He never married, but lived with his sister in Kensington until the Luftwaffe bombed him out of London. By then he was too frail to climb needles, let alone descend them, but he is still honored for his eccentricities. ©.

[Stanley]

From mysticism to "philanthropology"

I will change my name. I will change my being.    Sarah Worth, writing to her husband in John Updike’s novel S. (1988).   

Western fascination with the mysticisms of the Indian subcontinent did not begin when the Beatles added Ravi Shankar’s sitar to their music and certainly did not end with John Updike’s delightful satire S., an epistolary fiction in which the eponymous S., Sarah Worth, a not-yet-matronly Boston wife, finds love in (and then embezzles from) an ersatz Arizona Ashram.   And there are, pardon the pun, many worthier examples.   One of the most remarkable was Verrier Holman Elwin, born in Dover, England, on August 29, 1902.   Such an at-home place, Dover, but Verrier Elwin’s parents were servants of empire.   His paternal grandfather had done much to engineer British India, and his mother had taken ‘birthing’ leave from her husband, Elwin’s father, who was the Anglican Bishop of Sierra Leone.  So perhaps Elwin had empire in his blood.   But his education was very English, and very evangelical.   Then, at Oxford, Verrier Elwin went mystic and ‘converted’ to high church Anglo-Catholicism.   After a short tenure as vice-principal of an Oxford (Anglican) seminary, he went even further, to India, where in 1927 he joined a Christian Ashram, not a contradiction in terms, that called itself the Christa Seva Sangha (the Brotherhood of the Love of Christ).    Elwin remained in India for the rest of his life, 37 years.  Deeply involved with serving the poor, and always alive to his scholarly interests in languages and anthropology, he became interested in India’s tribal peoples.   Indeed he married one, a Gondi woman named Kosi, and continued his career as an anthropologist.   Early Elwin also came to the attention of Mahatma Gandhi, who conferred on him the title of Din-Sevak (‘Servant of the Poor’).  This association with India’s Congress movement led to Elwin’s estrangement from British imperial authorities and, indeed, from the Anglican communion.   He became, instead, a “philanthropologist” (his coinage), and in many works of scholarship (including recordings and transcriptions of traditional tribal musics) became very well known in academic circles, with an honorary DPhil from Oxford.   After Gandhi’s assassination and Indian independence, Elwin served Jawaharlal Nehru’s government as, in effect, minister for tribal societies.   He died in 1964, already disappointed by the Congress party’s increasing identification with Hinduism as an expression of nationalism.    Verrier Elwin would have been horrified by the Hindutva  (“Hinduness”) policies and ideologies of India’s present right wing, neofascist government under Narendra Modi.   India’s Bharatiya Janata Party plainly doesn’t like Muslims.   Although it calls itself the “people’s party” the BJP no place at all for India’s tribal peoples.  ©. 

[Stanley]

Nevada feminism. In Reno!!

Will I never have any ambition, will I never accomplish anything? O, I must do something. I suppose I should live more for others, but I don’t understand how. I must do something. Anne Henrietta Martin, diary entry, 1893.

Those are common concerns for 18 year olds, but for Anne Martin, born in frontier Nevada on August 30, 1875, the prescription was to become a wife and mother. Her three sisters had all married, and her mother was a Bavarian immigrant with traditional ideas about women’s proper role. To prepare her for a good marriage, Anne had been sent to Bishop Whitaker’s School for Girls, on a hilltop outside Reno. Instead, Anne transferred to the fledgling University of Nevada to major in (of all things) History. She then went on to Stanford, to make her Nevada BA respectable, then added an MA, and returned to Reno to become (in 1897) the founding chairman of Nevada’s history department. Quite an accomplishment for a 22-year old woman: but much more was to come. Later, reflecting on her youth, she saw her father as her liberator. The son of Irish immigrants, William O’Hara Martin had moved to Nevada to make his fortune as a silver miner. He soon decided there was more money in water, groceries, and then banking, clever choices indeed. He became a leading Nevada politician, and his daughter Anne followed in his footsteps. William’s death in 1901 left her “alone in my family” as its sole “feminist.” Already in Europe, and alone geographically as well, Anne Martin continued her history studies, and in England got involved with the suffrage movement and went to jail with the Pankhurst women. An old Stanford friend, Lou Henry Hoover, and Lou’s husband Henry, offered to bail her out, but a rich Fabian socialist beat the Hoovers to it. And indeed, Anne Martin (now writing for money as “Anna O’Hara”) had moved too far left for the Hoovers. Anne Martin then returned to Reno, reassumed direction of the history department, and set about to win full citizenship for women: first the vote, which in Nevada came in 1910, and then the full panoply of equal rights which has never yet been codified. Having won the vote (and having been jailed, yet again, for suffragette agitation). the next thing was to enter politics, and in 1918 (and again in 1920) Anne Martin became the first woman to run for election to the US Senate. But Nevada was not ready for a woman senator, especially one who advocated nationalization of the railways and other public utilities. Having failed in electoral politics, Ms. Martin moved to a quieter life in the better watered town of Carmel, California. She did, however, continue to write history, in recognition for which her alma mater, the University of Nevada, awarded her an honorary Doctorate of Laws in 1945. Anne Henrietta Martin, her father’s daughter, died in Carmel, CA, in 1951. ©

[Stanley]

Alcohol and accidents

If you drink, don’t drive. Don’t even putt. Dean Martin.

In every US state, the legal definition of drunk driving (DUI for short) is set by a ‘blood alcohol content’ of .08%. The same standard applies in many nations across the globe, but not everywhere. Across the European Union it’s .05%. But whatever the variations, and whatever their causes, the science is clear. If you have recently consumed alcohol, you should not drive, because alcohol in any amount will blunt your perceptions—and it will slow your responses. If you need a reminder of the consequences, ask around your neighborhood or check your local newspapers. It’s not just common experience or common sense. It’s a matter of scientific proofs, many done in laboratory conditions (perceptions and responses). But the most influential was carried out in a statistical survey of driving accidents and incidents in Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1962-1963. The main investigator was Robert Borkenstein, then a professor at the University of Indiana. How he got there is an interesting story, one in which, as far as I can tell, drink per se did not figure at all. Robert Frank Borkenstein was born (in Fort Wayne, Indiana, of German-speaking Evangelical Lutheran parents) on August 31, 1912. He had intended to go on to college, but the Great Depression intervened. So he got a job as a photographic technician, a clever enough one to have played some role in the development of color film. More to the point, his cleverness also brought him to the attention of the Indiana State Police. They needed technical help in their forensic labs: crime scene photography first, then lie detectors (polygraph machines): but soon Borkenstein was working with an Indiana University professor who had invented the “Drunkometer.” It measured blood alcohol content, but was cumbersome and error-prone and thus beloved by defense lawyers. Borkenstein figured out a more exact way to do this with a portable device that he called a Breathalyzer. The name is still with us today although newer devices work differently. Borkenstein himself went on to obtain a science degree and then a faculty appointment at Indiana University. That’s when he carried out the Grand Rapids study, proving that alcohol, in almost any quantity, impaired driving skills. Statistically and legally, he set the bar (no pun intended) at 0.08%. He’s remembered today by a legion of admirers and in Indiana’s “Borkenstein Courses,” offered to train up cops and prosecutors (no defense lawyers can apply!!!) in the science and the law of drunk driving. So, the next time you’re buzzed, take a taxi, arrive safely, and offer thanks to a quite extraordinary character named Robert Borkenstein. ©