BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

If someday they say of me that in my work I have contributed something to the welfare and happiness of my fellow man, I shall be satisfied George Westinghouse

No doubt many promising young men died in our great Civil War. Others, like J. D. Rockefeller, hired substitutes (the student deferment of the 19th century). Young George Westinghouse, however, volunteered, at the age of 15, then reenlisted in the cavalry, and finally served in the Union Navy. Born in a small village in the Hudson River Valley, on October 6, 1846, Westinghouse was thus only nineteen when the war ended. His reasonably prosperous parents then sent him off to college, but the curriculum bored him to tears and he turned to tinkering. Perhaps it came naturally. His father had owned a machine shop. Within three years George had three commercially viable inventions to his credit, but his big break came when (1873 patent) he invented an air brake for railway cars. Before then, each wagon had its own brake, which made even slowing down a bit dodgy, and the Westinghouse Brake, so-called, made his fortune. But we owe most to him for his advocacy of alternating current electricity, which he backed because it was capable of using greater voltage (and it used some of his later inventions). The AC-DC battle actually claimed some lives, (because absurdly it led to the invention of the electric chair to illustrate Thomas Edison’s claim that AC was fatally dangerous), but not as many as the Civil War. Westinghouse’s contract to light the 1893 World’s Fair settled the matter. George Westinghouse survived both wars, and prospered, a clever inventor who understood the value of patent offices, capital investment, and good wages. Perhaps he learned something in the war, after all? ©

[Stanley]

Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel Prize, 2010.

The Nobel Prize for Literature is to be announced on Thursday morning (7 AM St. Louis time). Ladbroke’s, the British betting shop that gives odds on just about anything, has again done it for the Nobel, an off-track exercise in global cultural awareness. The front-runners, at 4/1, are a Japanese (Haruki Murakami) and a Kenyan (Ngugi wa Thiong’o). The leading American, Philip Roth, is pretty far down the list at 12/1, nestling in behind a Belarusian journalist, a Syrian poet, and a French novelist. Bob Dylan is at 50/1, but a favorite with Swedish bettors. Last year’s Nobel was copped by a Canadian short story writer, Alice Munro. No doubt you should read one work by each Nobel winner. But let your project start with Nobellists from the USA, at one work each per year. They have been (each listed with the year of the award and one of his or her works): Sinclair Lewis (1930: Main Street); Eugene O’Neill (1936: Long Day’s Journey into Night); Pearl Buck (1938: The Good Earth); William Faulkner (1949: Absalom! Absalom!); Ernest Hemingway (1954: The Sun Also Rises); John Steinbeck (1962: Of Mice and Men); Saul Bellow (1976: Herzog); Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978: The Slave); Joseph Brodsky (1987: To Urania: Poems); and Toni Morrison (1993: Beloved). You could do worse, and it would be interesting to contemplate the question: do the American Nobellists speak with an American voice? If they do, what might that mean? And then ask yourself, what’s “foreign” about all the others? ©

[Stanley]

A golden bit does not improve the horse. Dutch Proverb.

In 1556, in the midst of their own Protestant Reformation, European dynastic politics and properties meant that the people of the Dutch provinces and principalities fell under the rule of Philip II of Spain. The Dutch struggle for independence against Europe’s greatest power, which began in earnest in 1568, would encompass three of the great miracles of early modern European history. Not the least of them, the Dutch won the war. But what a war it was, for it lasted long enough to become part of the Thirty Years’ War, Europe’s great religious bloodletting (which makes what’s going on in the Middle East today look like a garden party) and was not concluded until 1648 when the conjoined “Peaces” of Munster and Westphalia brought Europe-wide recognition of Dutch independence and (temporary) respite for war-torn Europe. But along with this unlikely result came two others, the establishment of Dutch religious toleration (oogluiking they called it, rather poetically I think) and the rise of the Dutch to be the richest (per capita, certainly) people in Europe. This “coincidence” was noted by, among others, the English, and became part and parcel of what can be called the “modern” or “secular” rationale for religious toleration. That is to say, “it works.” Why mention this on October 8? Because the first big Dutch victory of the Eighty Years’ War was won at Alkmaar, on October 8, 1573, by a bunch of stubborn, calculating burghers against a besieging army of conquistadores, a symbolic transition in several ways. ©

[Stanley]

He was like our own little Elvis . . . older and very much the leader . . . the quickest wit and the smartest. Paul McCartney on John Lennon.

John Winston Lennon was born in Liverpool on October 9, 1940, and his troubled youth began with the Blitz and continued through abandonment by his father and his virtual adoption by his maternal aunt, Mimi Smith, and her dairyman husband George. From them he learned something of domestic stability, how to play the harmonica and banjo, to enjoy doing the crosswords, and to admire Elvis Presley and Fats Domino. He did not, however, learn to be a good student, failing most of his national exams and getting into art school thanks only to Mimi’s intervention. His misbehavior there was compounded by failing all his exams, and at 15 he dropped out of the educational system and formed a “skiffle” band, named (with no doubt deliberate irony) after a local high school. Two years later he met Paul McCartney and invited him in, much to the disapproval of both families. The Smiths thought McCartney too working class and the McCartneys knew that Lennon was a troublemaker. But it worked out. There followed a dozen-year odyssey from obscurity to fame, a journey as well traced as any in the history of popular culture, and a story line that includes marks of musical genius. Which of the four Beatles was most responsible for the genius was, sadly, one of the reasons the group broke up, but their music survives. Lennon’s ambiguous politics, and his murder in 1980, contributed to a separate Lennon legend, as did his marriage in 1969 to Yoko Ono, whereat he also changed his middle name to something more in tune with his life. ©

[Stanley]

To copy the truth can be very good, but to invent the truth is better, much better. Verdi.

Caught up in the romantic nationalism of Italian Reunification—indeed, he would be one of its heroes—Guiseppe Verdi liked to claim a birth origin from the illiterate peasantry. Thus, perhaps, Italy’s rise to nationhood (the Risorgimento) could be made to parallel his own ascent to be the premier composer of 19th-century Europe. But Verdi was born (on October 10, 1813) into a family substantial enough to buy the boy a spinet and have him installed as the official organist in the local parish church at age 8. Rural to be sure (his birth-house looks like a barn), but in addition to music lessons mama and papa brought the boy up with private Latin tuition. His talents already recognized, the adolescent Verdi turned to composition while at music school in San Bartolomeo and enjoyed some fame for his “The Delirium of Saul” (a suitably romantic theme) aged only 15. To get further in his career, he needed a patron, and found one, moving on to music school in Milan, where he first conducted at La Scala in 1836. His first fame as an opera composer came in 1839, was interrupted by his grief and depression at the deaths of his wife and children, and then came full flower with Rigoletto (1851),La traviata and Il trovatore (both 1853!!!), and Aida (premiered in Cairo, 1871). In his later years he returned to an enthusiasm of his youth, with fine operas on Shakespearean themes, most notably Otello (1887). Amidst national mourning, young Arturo Toscanini conducted the music at Verdi’s funeral, 1901, in Milan. ©

[Stanley]

If work was a good thing, the rich would have it all and not let you do it. Elmore Leonard.

October 11 is a good day to celebrate bloody murder, not that we would ordinarily do such a thing, the honors college being a house of learning, but it is the birthdate (New Orleans, 1925) of Elmore Leonard, crime writer extraordinaire and lover-chronicler of Detroit, where he lived since he was 9 years old. Of course, he did not love Detroit too much. “If I lived in Buffalo,” he once said, “I would write about Buffalo.” Well educated by the Jesuits in Detroit, he served in the Navy during WWII, then returned to the Jesuits to graduate (English and Philosophy) from the University of Detroit in 1950. He began writing seriously in 1951, westerns as it happens, and very quickly Hollywood saw something in his writing, making 3:10 to Yuma in 1957 (and a remake in 2007) from one of his early short stories. Leonard also dipped successfully into writing screenplays, beginning in 1970. Nicknamed “Dutch” (after a famed Tigers pitcher of the 1930s), Leonard went on to make a reputation as a serious writer through his crime fiction and, every once in a while, westerns of a crime sort (Hombré, for example, later made into a Paul Newman film). He was regarded by other novelists (e.g. Martin Amis, Stephen King, Saul Bellow) as a master craftsman, especially in his ability to capture dialogue, and in 2007 Leonard took the plunge into writing about writing, with 10 Rules of Writing. (His “big” rule: “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”) He was an old-fashioned sort, writing drafts in longhand and finishing with a typewriter, and scoffing at Facebook (“500 million people . . . saying . . . not much.”). But there will be no new Leonards; Elmore died last year, aged 88. ©

[Stanley]

Am I afraid of high notes? Of course I am afraid. What sane man is not? Pavarotti.

Classical music artists who ‘bend at the knee’ and make a second career as popular singers have been particularly plentiful among operatic tenors, note Mario Lanza, Enrico Caruso, Lauritz Melchior, and (still going strong) Placido Domingo. It rarely seems a case of needing the money, for at the top opera pays well, but in Luciano Pavarotti’s case his willingness to seek larger markets may have owed somewhat to a poverty-stricken and war-dislocated childhood during which (besides dreaming of keeping goal for Italy) he idolized Mario Lanza, trying to attend every one of his movies. Born October 12, 1935 to parents who baked bread and made cigars, Pavarotti became a child refugee, moving to the countryside to escape bombing and trading a two-room apartment for a single room in a farmhouse. He did learn to love music from his father, an amateur tenor. An early choral success (1961) at Wales’ Eisteddfod fuelled his ambitions. There followed a breakthrough tour with soprano Joan Sutherland (1964), debut roles at La Scala (1965), Covent Garden (1968). the Met (1972) and (oddly enough) at William Jewell College in rural Missouri (1973). His breakthrough into popular stardom came, ironically enough given his childhood soccer hopes, as the voice over music theme of the World Cup (Italy, 1990), inevitably the aria “Nessun Dorma” from Turandot. With popularity came controversy, for instance over whether the man could read music, but also the wealth to do good works, and Pavarotti became (before his death in 2007) a noted philanthropist. ©

[Stanley]

Well, that could have been worse. Molly Pitcher's legendary comment on her petticoat being shot away during the Battle of Monmouth.

Women’s history has come a very long way when you think that, 60 years ago, about the only women you read about in connection with the American Revolution were Betsy Ross, who sewed a flag, and Molly Pitcher, who carried water to the artillery batteries at the Battle of Monmouth. We now have biographies of all sorts, notably Abigail Adams and Mercy Warren, but also better understanding of how women shaped the Revolution (e.g. by sustaining the trade boycotts of 1765-1774) and were reshaped by it (the emerging ideal of “republican womanhood” which would eventually produce giants of reform like Margaret Fuller, Dorothea Dix, and the Grimké sisters). Still, Miss Molly is worth a moment. She was born Mary Ludwig in Philadelphia on October 13, 1744, married William Hays in 1769, and both became involved in the revolutionary movement in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. When Hays enlisted in the militia, Mary followed him right through the awful Valley Forge winter and into the heat of the Monmouth battle. Molly Pitcher was her battlefield christening, but she abandoned her water work (although it was 100o at Monmouth) when her husband was wounded. She took up his position loading cannon where she displayed great courage under fire. Legend has it that, later that day, George Washington commissioned her (“Sergeant Molly?”). History has her and William moving back to Carlisle. Much later, age 68, Mary Hays (by then Mary McCauley, a cleaning woman) she received a yearly pension of $40 for her heroism in the war.©

[Stanley]

Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave. Frederick Douglass.

Black history is fascinating for many reasons, not least the excellence of its scholarship. Take for instance the debate over black autonomy in slavery times. Overwhelmed by slavery’s brutalities (thanks partly to Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution (1956), Stanley Elkins produced a study (Slavery, 1959) that likened American slavery to the Nazi concentration camp and argued that it completely “emasculated” slave culture and slave psychology. Since then a host of studies have argued the contrary and produced masses of evidence that, whatever the brutalities of the system,The Slave Community (to borrow the title of John Blassingame’s fine book) was a reality, that it developed its own ethics, its own powerful version of Christianity, its own inner counterpoise to the white master class and to slavery’s oppressive laws and customs. Revision scholars rediscovered slave voices, most notably Frederick Douglass’s Narrative (1845). One constant theme of all this (including the first-person narratives) is self-education, the amazing extent to which slaves learned and then preserved their own ways of life, to read on their own, to spread literacy in the slave quarters, to preserve it, to develop and tell their own stories. When freedom came, then, black people flocked into schools. And schools of all sorts rose up out of the dust to take them in. So let’s celebrate the birth of the country’s oldest “historically black” college, St. Augustine’s College (now university), founded in Raleigh, North Carolina on October 14, 1867. ©

[Stanley]

the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into physics as their Neolithic ancestors would have had. C. P. Snow.

English majors who get the vapors at having to take a math course or engineers who collapse in a heap at the sight of a sonnet are not as rare as hen’s teeth, even in the Honors College. Such timid souls may be experiencing the gap between “The Two Cultures,” an idea not invented but in a sense coined by Charles Percy Snow, a physicist who rose to eminence in the world of science policy but also as a novelist and essayist (and thus bridged the gap, we might say). C. P. Snow was born on October 15, 1905, in Leicester, England, where his father was choirmaster. He received his BS from Leicester and his PhD (Physics) from Cambridge, where he became a fellow of Christ’s College. Snow became a top civil servant during the war, advising on technical and scientific matters, but became modestly famous for eleven novels known collectively as “Strangers and Brothers.” These fictions generally portray the tensions intellectuals encounter (and create, and intensify) when they try to make their way in the world (whether that world is a college common room or a government office). His 1959 Rede Lecture at Cambridge, on “The Two Cultures,” struck a chord by depicting another, specific tension between science and the arts. Though magisterial in tone, Snow’s Rede Lecture fixed the blame pretty clearly on the arts and the bias towards them in the British educational system. From a distance, he thought the US (and Germany) did better in this respect, but several stints teaching here as a visiting scholar weakened his optimism. Snow’s search continues for a scientifically literate poet class. ©

[Stanley]

I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. Oscar Wilde.

My year-long Freshman English course was, I think, designed to show me (and my fellow unwashed) the lineaments of good Language and good Literature. On the Lit side of things, the English department chose Lady Windermere’s Fan to show us some of the essentials of drama, and no doubt of satire too. (You should know that, for novels, we got Heart of Darkness and The Portrait of a Lady). Sallow frosh that I was, all this had little impact, and it was only much later I came to appreciate Lady Windermere and other writings by Oscar Wilde, who was born on October 16, 1854, in Dublin. One of the miracles of a good play, so difficult for me to “see” from reading the script, is how compelling a story can emerge from rich dialogue and good stage direction. On the printed page, Wilde’s wit falls flat and seems contrived. Badly staged, a Wilde play can look and sound like one of American television’s less accomplished sitcoms. Well done, a Wilde drama offers endless instruction, if any were needed, in our generous capacity to make fools of ourselves through the words we speak. Plus (as my Freshman course hoped) Wilde will help you to brew up a working definition of satire. See a Wilde play as soon as you can. If a nearby theatre is not doing a Wilde thing, try the Colin Firth/Judi Dench/Oliver Parker cinema version of The Importance of Being Earnest. It came out in 2002, 102 years after the early, tragic death of its author, and is currently making the rounds of late-night cable TV. Listen more carefully than you watch. ©

[Stanley]

I have been called worse things by better people. Pierre Trudeau, on being told that Richard Nixon called him an asshole.

On 18th October 1919 Joseph Philippe Pierre Ives Elliott Trudeau was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, the son of a bilingual family whose dad, Charles-Émile, was a lawyer on his way to becoming a wealthy capitalist and, eventually, owner of the Montreal Royals, then a minor league baseball franchise. Soon the son changed his name to Pierre Elliott Trudeau and, after an education at Harvard, the École des Sciences Politiques (Paris), and the London School of Economics, and a distinguished career as a legal scholar, he became Prime Minister of Canada in 1968, a post he held until 1984. As Prime Minister, Trudeau did much to cut Canada’s ties with Britain (for instance creating a new Canadian constitution) while, at the same time, reconciling French-speaking Quebec to life within the Canadian union. A politician who combined style and substance, Trudeau was capable of great charm, savage wit, and a maverick foreign policy not always popular with the USA. He early recognized mainland China, made alliances with democratic socialist leaders like Olaf Palme (Sweden), Julius Nyerere (Tanzania), and Willy Brandt (West Germany), and in general awakened Americans to the facts that their northern neighbor had a voice and the voice was changing. As James Reston wrote, Trudeau “was a good neighbor and a good friend. We liked his crusty arrogance and the rose in his lapel. He gave us his truth as he saw it, even if we didn't always like it.” ©

[Stanley]

Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf. Lewis Mumford.

The number of prophets without honor in their own countries who have warned us about the devastation wrought by unchecked and unplanned urbanization must by now be nearing infinity, and still we don’t listen. Some of them, it’s true, have suffered from monomania on the subject, but Lewis Mumford, who was born on October 19, 1895 near Flushing Meadow in Queens, one of the most eloquent, was also one of the most multifaceted. His formal education was cut short by tuberculosis, but not his life (he lived to 95, his wife Sophia to 97), and before he was finished with learning he had become a leading historian, literary critic, philosopher of science, and sociologist. Without a degree in anything. His first real job, after the navy in WWI, was with The Dial, a literary journal in whose history he became interested enough to write groundbreaking studies of the Transcendentalists as a whole and Melville in particular. But we knew him best as an architectural critic and a proponent of the humane city. A practitioner of Big History way before it got a trendy name, Mumford argued that our “organic humanism” shaped our past and would shape our future, too, if we could but slake our thirst for “technological” “progress,” tempering both, so to speak, with our aesthetic preference for and organic need of clean water. Not to mention clear air, green spaces, quiet places, and pleasing vistas. Mumford sought what he called “biotechnic” balance, and remains worth reading for that interesting notion, and more. ©

[Stanley]

The Fifth of Four.

On October 20, 2014, we celebrate the birthday (1882) of Margaret Dumont, the funny woman who appears in the classic Marx Brothers films. The fifth Marx brother, as Groucho called her, was born Daisy Baker in Brooklyn but mostly raised by her godfather, Joel Chandler Harris, Atlanta newspaperman and author of the Uncle Remus stories. Daisy trained as an opera singer, changed her name to Daisy Dumont, but fatefully appeared briefly in vaudeville, in Philadelphia. But before she got involved in funny stuff she married a southern sugar millionaire, John Moller, and retired briefly from the stage. Moller died in 1918, and Daisy (now Margaret) Dumont returned to star in musical comedies like Go Easy, Mabel and The Fourflusher. She first appeared with the Marx Bros. in the Broadway production of The Cocoanuts (1925) and kept with it in the film version (1929), one of the first “talkies”. Thereafter she became a regular, cast always as a wealthy, snooty widow whom the brothers either courted or swindled, or both. Ms. Dumont was Mrs. Potter in The Cocoanuts, Mrs. Rittenhouse in Animal Crackers, Mrs. Gloria Teasdale in Duck Soup, Mrs. Claypool in A Night at the Opera, Mrs. Suzanna Dukesbury in At the Circus, and Martha Phelps in The Big Store. Her Emily Upjohn in A Day at the Races (1937) won her a Best Supporting Actress award and a suggestion, from a leading film critic, that she deserved a statue for her steadfastness in the face of constant harassment from her lunatic co-stars. Margaret Dumont’s last role was played in 1965, eight days before she died, oddly enough opposite Groucho Marx. ©

[Stanley]

Water, water, everywhere,/nor any drop to drink. Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Most lives of any length come to include odd associations. For instance, the life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge enables us to draw a connection between poetry and pottery. It was not that Coleridge threw pots (though for all I know he may have). But in 1798 the poet accepted an annuity from Josiah Wedgwood, offered on condition that he abandon his idea of becoming a Unitarian clergyman. Wedgwood, eminent potter, radical abolitionist, and eventually the father-in-law of Charles Darwin, was by no means down on religion but greatly admired Coleridge’s poetry and hoped to encourage him to write more. It worked. The annuity, or if you prefer bribe, was generous enough to preserve Coleridge for poetry. Young Coleridge, born on October 21, 1772, was in 1798 already well known as a poet, had already hooked up with William and Dorothy Wordsworth, and the annuity encouraged him to publish Lyrical Ballads (1798) which, including “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” further secured his literary fame. Coleridge went on to greater poetic achievements but is also famed for his philosophical, critical, and political contributions to the age and with justice might be considered the aesthetic and intellectual father of Anglophone Romanticism. Certainly he was a great inspiration to the American Transcendentalists. Though troubled by ill health, depression, and a serious opium addiction (laudanum), Coleridge continued to be productive nearly to the end of his life (1834). On balance, then, we can thank a pottery fortune for a poetic life. ©

[Stanley]

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift. . . . Ecclesiastes 9:11

Every chemical compound has its formulaic or molecular signature, for instance C6H14, which tells those who know about these things that the hexane molecule has six carbons and fourteen hydrogens. But a great many have scientific names, and they are usually pretty literal minded. Ascorbic acid, for instance, means “without scurvy”, and is the scientific name for Vitamin C, which indeed prevents scurvy. It had been known for quite a long while that eating lemons or limes would help sailors (and any other primate on board ship) avoid loss of teeth, internal bleeding, neuropathy, and death (the symptoms and the end result of scurvy). But no one knew exactly why. Enter Charles Glen King, the American biochemist who figured it all out. King was born in a very small town in Washington on October 22, 1896, attended a one-room school but still managed a PhD in Chemistry. On the Pitt faculty, his research focused on vitamins, and soon he was engaged in a race with a Hungarian chemist to isolate the compound that was to be called Vitamin C. Most of the world thinks that Szent-Györgi got there first (by four weeks, in 1932), and the Hungarian was indeed awarded the Nobel prize. But Szent-Györgi wasn’t born on October 22, and around the University of Pittsburgh they still think that King deserved equal credit. At any rate, it’s King’s name for the compound that survives. Szent-Györgi called it “hexuronic acid”. Either way, it’s C5H8O6. ©

[Stanley]

The computer doesn't understand these things. Ted Fujita on his research methods.

The atomic bomb had some interesting by-products, few more interesting (or in a sense more direct) than Tetsuya Fujita. Fujita was born near Kyushu, Japan, on October 23, 1920, and was educated at the Kyushu Institute of Technology. In 1945 he was resident in Kokura, a city which (little known to Fujita) was the secondary target for the Hiroshima bomb and the primary target for the Nagasaki (“Fat Man”) bomb. Bad weather diverted the B-29 to Nagasaki. An atmospheric physicist, Fujita was soon employed studying the effects of the atomic bombs, and as a result became fascinated by, not to put too fine a point on it, wind. Having analyzed what must have happened at Hiroshima, he wrote his PhD thesis (1952) on what happened during typhoons, and became particularly interested in what we call today (thanks to Fujita) “downbursts” and “microbursts”. His work in this field drew the attention of the University of Chicago, and in 1953 Tetsuya Fujita joined the faculty there, where (perhaps for lack of typhoons) he turned to the study of tornadoes. By such steps, Tetsuya became known as “Ted”, and then “Ted Fujita” became known (at least in the American media) as “Mr. Tornado.” His studies added immensely to what we know about tornadoes, how they form, their constituent parts, and how they wreak their peculiar havoc. To this day, we use the Fujita Scale to summarize or “type” tornadoes, without, I suppose, giving a thought to a young Japanese scientist, years ago, studying the devastation of Hiroshima. ©

[Stanley]

He who is brave, follow me! Battle order of Bernardo O'Higgins at the Battle of El Roble, 1813.

It’s (arguably) only in my lifetime that we’ve learned really to value diversity, and although the Tea Party seems to have its doubts, we are now in danger of making it into a USA monopoly virtue. So October 24 is occasion to remember that American societies north and south are marked by a good deal of ethnic diversity. Why October 24th? Because it marks the 172nd anniversary of the death (in 1842) of Bernardo O’Higgins, hero of the Chilean Revolution of 1817. “O’Higgins” is an unlikely Chilean name owed to his father Ambrose (Ambrosio) who migrated from Ireland to Spain to Chile, entered into an alliance with a prominent local family, and sent his (illegitimate) son Bernardo (born in 1778) to London to study. In London, Bernardo became enamored of (north) American revolutionary ideals, learned a bit of poetry, and joined the Masons (then associated with republicanism and democracy). The Napoleonic conquest of Spain (1808) gave O’Higgins and others a glimpse of a republican and liberal future for Spain’s colonial empire, and that was all they needed, although a long civil war unfolded and the period of O’Higgins’ dominance was itself marked by strife with royalists and between opposing republican factions. During his six-year leadership, 1817-23, O’Higgins brought many liberal reforms to Chile, in economics, education, and government. Later, he was an eminent supporter of Simon Bolivar’s liberation of other American republics. As a result, modern Chilean democrats revere his name, and today the highest honor that Chile can bestow on a foreigner is named after Bernardo O’Higgins. ©

[Stanley]

At night was come in . . . nyne and twenty in a compaignye, Of sondry folk, by aventure . . . and pilgrims were they alle. Canterbury Tales, Prologue.

The further back in time one goes, the dodgier dates become. So we do not know exactly when Geoffrey Chaucer was born, but we are pretty sure he died on October 25, 1400. Chaucer was born in comfortable circumstances in about 1343, in London. He became page in a noble household, fought (and was captured) in France in an early stage of the Hundred Years War, married a Norman gentlewoman—Pillippa de Roet—and fathered several children. By the 1370s he was well placed at court and served Richard II as envoy to the Duke of Milan (and may have met Boccaccio and Petrarch, a nice thought). He also received a royal pension, but his main income came from his “civil service” positions, especially as Clerk of the King’s Works. Yet again, we find that if you are going to be a writer, it helps to have a day job. During his period of royal service he began, and may have finished, his major literary works. Chaucer would be buried in Westminster Abbey, the first writer to be so honored, except that wasn’t the reason for his interment there (one of his royal pensions made him a resident of the Abbey). Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,his best known piece, is a frame poetic narrative in which pilgrims to Canterbury tell stories to pass the time and entertain their fated fellows. These include the Wife of Bath, the Clerk, the Student, the Man of Law, and several were likely based on real people. Indeed, it’s the naturalism of these narratives, their use of the vernacular (Middle English), and their commonplace wit that would make them famous and make Geoffrey Chaucer the father of English literature. ©

[Stanley]

We will soon see each other again. Benjamin Guggenheim, comforting his mistress's maid, April 15, 1912.

Relatively few American zillionaires give birth to stories that are both romantic and true, so it’s just as well that we note, today, the birth of Benjamin Guggenheim, on October 26, 1865. Benjamin did not create the Guggenheim fortune. That was the accomplishment of his father, Meyer Guggenheim (1828-1905), mining magnate extraordinary and first citizen of Leadville. Nor did Benjamin have a whole lot to do with the various Guggenheim philanthropies, notably the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Foundation. Those were the gifts of his brother Solomon Robert Guggenheim (1861-1949). Nor did he live the life of a famous art patron and avante garde collector, which is what his daughter Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) accomplished, leaving some of her art to her uncle’s museum and the bulk of it to her own Guggenheim collection, housed in Venice. Our Ben inherited his fair share of his dad’s fortune, married well (Florette, the daughter of an investment banker), and more or less contentedly grew his money and traveled with his mistress (Léontine Aubart, 1887-1964). Ben is famous for going down with the Titanic, on April 15, 1912, after making sure that Léontine, her maid, and other women and children got aboard the lifeboats. Ben and his valet, Victor Giglio (1888-1912), then retired to Guggenheim’s first-class suite, donned formal evening wear and “prepared to go down like gentlemen” sitting in deck chairs by the Grand Staircase, sipping brandy, roses in their buttonholes. ©

[Stanley]

As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. Madison, Federalist 10.

At the risk of exciting controversy, let’s call Political Science an optimistic discipline. There’s a real world out there, political scientists say, and it can be analyzed, understood, and even improved. This “modern” delusion (if such it is) was long in birthing, but a signal date was October 27, 1787, the day the first of the Federalist Papers appeared in the New York Independent Journal. The ‘Papers,’ 85 essays written to urge ratification of the 1787 US Constitution, were jointly the work of John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison. Since all political writers presumed to speak for the common good, res publica, these essays were anonymous, signed only as “Publius.” These were partisan pieces, and in that sense hardly progenitors of an academic discipline, but they were remarkable for their time (and offer lessons for ours) in that they took politics to be secular phenomena, subject to analysis, hypothesis, evidence-based argument, and defensible conclusions. Most importantly, the authors took human beings, warts and all, to be the objects and subjects of politics, both noun and verb so to speak, and so it is that these essays stand out also for their ethical realism. The fundamental question they posed (as the new nation became “We, the People”) was how to secure res publica through the aims and actions of ordinary, fallible folk. Of all 85, the essay whose moral realism (and political science) stands out, is James Madison’s Federalist #10 (November 23, 1787), required reading for anyone who desires a life of active citizenship in the great republic. And I ask myself: has anyone read it recently? ©

[Stanley]

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me/ I lift my lamp beside the golden door Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus

128 years ago, on October 28, 1886, President Grover Cleveland traveled to New York City by train to dedicate a gift of the people of France, which we call the Statue of Liberty. There was actually a good deal of confusion about why it was given, what the sculptor thought about it, and how it was received, so Emma Lazarus’s famous verse (“Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”) was a little ironic even on the day, let alone given our huge confusion (before and after 1886) about whether we, immigrants all of us (or their spawn), have any business slamming the doors shut on other travelers whose only sin, it seems, was to try to get in after we did. Whoever “we” are. The sculptor, himself a bit of a mongrel (he was Franco-Italian) probably had in mind the recent freeing of the slaves, not those huddled masses of Europe who were, after all, closest to Ms. Lazarus’s heart. The New York Times, no friend of the “huddled masses” then crowding Manhattan, sent a reporter who muttered about the “dismal” weather, the sloppy construction, and the corrupt distribution of tickets (by the immigrant-dominated Tammany machine) to “gin mill keepers and ward heelers of the lowest type” (presumably Italians, Jews, Slavs, and Irishmen), and there was some unhappiness that the official French delegation was headed by Ferdinand de Lesseps, the genius of Suez, who was now threatening to make the Panama Canal a reality and, worse, a French possession. All in all, it was a very “American” occasion. So Happy Birthday, Lady Liberty!!! ©

[Stanley]

I think Marsh is impaled on the horns of Monoclonius sphenocerus. A one liner salvo from the Bone Wars.

If you were born poor, it’s a great idea to come equipped with a wealthy, generous uncle. If this is advice, it was followed by Othniel Charles Marsh. His mother Mary was a Peabody who probably did not follow advice to marry one of her own class. Othniel was thus born poor, in Lockport, NY, on October 29, 1831. Uncle George Peabody, however, undertook to pay for the boy’s education, and sent him to Phillips Academy and then to Yale (the Peabody family’s favorite schools) and then on to Berlin and Heidelberg. Along the way, Othniel developed a remarkable enthusiasm for fossil hunting (he was an anatomist) and a famous rivalry with Edward Drinker Cope. Cope was born rich, but he lacked the uncle, left school at 16, and taught himself enough anatomy and paleontology to become professor at Haverford. The two began in friendship but that quickly degenerated into one of the fiercest, least ennobling scientific rivalries in history, a rivalry marked, if you will excuse the pun, by an excess of skullduggery. Marsh’s uncle built him a museum (the Peabody, at Yale), and Cope directed a Philadelphia museum, and they directed their assets and energies into the “Bone Wars” of 1877-1892. Concentrating on the American west, and on dinosaurs, they discovered heaps of fossils, grossly inflated their species counts, cultivated their bile, and nearly exhausted their fortunes. Whether it all ended with Cope’s death, the great Depression of 1893, or exhaustion is anyone’s guess. Maybe they just ran out of uncles. ©

[Stanley]

Suddenly, like a thing falling upon me from without, came fear. H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, 1897.

On 30th October 1938, the land of the brave survived (barely) one of the most successful communications hoaxes ever, the War of the Worlds broadcast, itself an updated version of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. The chief perpetrator was Orson Welles, the narrator and director, at the time only 23, aided and abetted by a-not-quite-so-young John Houseman (then 37). Welles intended no hoax. The program was introduced as a radio drama, sponsored by Mercury and starring thus and so. But thousands tuned in when the show was well underway. So effectively was the drama presented (first as successive “news flash” interruptions of a normal radio broadcast) that many listeners became convinced that this was the real thing, and that, indeed (as a “reporter” had it) "something's wriggling out of the shadow like a gray snake. Now here's another and another one and another one. They look like tentacles to me ... I can see the thing's body now. It's large, large as a bear. It glistens like wet leather. But that face, it ...it ... ladies and gentlemen, it's indescribable. I can hardly force myself to keep looking at it, it's so awful. The eyes are black and gleam like a serpent. The mouth is kind of V-shaped with saliva dripping from its rimless lips that seem to quiver and pulsate." Clearly the Earth was being attacked by M-m-m-martians. Happy Halloween, as they say. Amid much outrage Welles was investigated by the Federal Communications Commission, which found that no law had been broken, at least NOT the law of the lowest common denominator. ©

[Stanley]

The Main Street Across America.

One doesn’t like to think of roads as memorials, but let’s make an exception today for the Lincoln Highway, the USA’s first transcontinental highway, dedicated on October 31, 1913, a date that would seem incredibly early, but the road was not even begun. The first actual section was completed in December, 1913, in New Jersey. But the route had been mapped and traveled (by motor car!!) by Indiana businessman Carl G. Fisher and supporters he had gathered from among auto manufacturers, bankers, and just plain citizen-boosters in towns all along the planned route. Indeed, the cast of characters reads a bit like a Sinclair Lewis novel, possibly Main Street, albeit with a couple of presidents thrown in. Some stood aloof. Henry Ford, that notorious old socialist pinchpenny, refused to give a dime because, he believed, the gummint ought to build roads, but Fisher was indefatigable. He manufactured car headlights and thought it would be good business to have a transcontinental road (and he was also responsible for the Indianapolis 500, for roughly the same reason). So the road was first dedicated to the memory of the great liberator, and then built, and in 1928 congress decided that it should be called US 30, all 3,389 miles of it, from Times Square, NYC, to Lincoln Park, SF, and even after rerouting and reconstruction you can still find parts of it like Lincoln Way or Lincoln Avenue or Lincoln Boulevard in towns and cities strung like bangles along the grand old road. But not the Lincoln Tunnel, oddly enough never a part of the Lincoln Highway. ©