BOB'S BITS

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Scientists still do not appear to understand sufficiently that all the earth sciences must contribute evidence toward unveiling the state of our planet in earlier times. Alfred Wegener.

In scholarship, the virtues of interdisciplinarity began to emerge almost as soon as specialization and professionalization reared their (useful if ugly) heads. Partly it was nostalgia for the long-lost polymath, partly the realization that out there, in the real world we study, “things” (facts and phenomena) are not split up into our tidy professional fields and do not recognize property rights. But interdisciplinarity is hard work, and most scholars play the game within bounds. One who gambled with trespass was Alfred Wegener, born in Berlin November 1, 1880, the son of a Lutheran minister. After graduating from school top of his class he studied astronomy, physics, meteorology, and mathematics at several universities, finally settling on astronomy for his doctorate. Once in an academic post, however, he went back to metereology and added geology to his manifold interests. His brother later remarked that Alfred wanted to “reestablish the connection” between disciplines that been “completely ruptured” by specialization. Alfred also became quite an accomplished arctic explorer, a research pursuit that would kill him in 1930. Before that, however, Wegener published (first in 1912, much refined in 1915 and 1926) his theory of continental drift, an idea based on his wide knowledge of weather patterns, ocean currents, rock formations, fossil distribution, and various other branches of science. Ridiculed when it first appeared, still ridiculed when he died in Greenland, Wegener’s “drift” theory has now been amply confirmed by work in (you guessed it) a number of scientific fields.©

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I'd best be getting home. Alicia will think I've got a girlfriend. Dr. Moonlight Graham, in Field of Dreams.

Burton Stephen Lancaster was born 101 years ago, in Manhattan, November 2, 1913, of working class, immigrant (Northern Ireland) stock. He excelled enough scholastically to attend one of NYC’s best high schools, where he also starred in athletics. He would grow up to star in films but not before a varied career as a circus acrobat, waiter, floor walker at Marshall Fields, and, in WWII, with a USO acting troupe. Once in Hollywood his ascent to star status was fairly quick, perhaps despite his vocal support for liberal causes (and against the HUAC investigations of Hollywood). A secondary role in From Here to Eternity (1953) involved him in a famous love scene with Deborah Kerr, which may have helped, but his best-known roles were as Elmer Gantry (1960), as a conscience-stricken defendant in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), and as The Birdman of Alcatraz (1962). He also dabbled in directing and became known as a producer who would invest heavily in films which, he felt, reflected his values. On the other hand, despite his liberal politics, his Hollywood associations were pretty catholic, including Jimmy Stewart, Rock Hudson, John Frankenheimer, and Joan Blondell (with whom he may, or may not, have had an affair). His friends from early on, acrobat-actor Nick Cravat, agent Harold Hecht, and make-up man Robert Schiffer, remained his friends (and beneficiaries) for life. Lancaster was perfectly cast in his last film (Field of Dreams, 1989) as a kindly small town doctor, Archie ‘Moonlight’ Graham, who had once, almost, become a major leaguer. ©

[Stanley]

Be always drunken, Nothing else matters . . . With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken. Long Day's Journey into Night.

November 3 is a good day to remember that every writing career begins somewhere. On November 3, 1916, a new “Playwrights’ Theater” opened its doors in Greenwich Village, New York, with three one-act productions. Two were by authors then well known and now (almost) forgotten, Floyd Dell and Louise Bryant. The third, Bound East for Cardiff, was by an absolute outsider named Eugene O’Neill. But you could say that O’Neill was born in a theater trunk. His parents were successful actors and sent him to private school and then Princeton, but they also left him with tuberculosis and an alcohol issue. Eugene turned to writing, he tells us, for solace or truth, but most would say his plays offer truth rather than solace. It was Beyond the Horizon(1920) that made O’Neill’s reputation and won him a Pulitzer. Several other early titles should be mildly familiar, for instance Anna Christie (1922, Pulitzer), Desire under the Elms (1924), Strange Interlude (1928, Pulitzer), and Mourning becomes Electra (1931). O’Neill is (so far) the only American playwright to have received the Nobel Prize for Literature (1936). There followed a relatively dry period, but The Iceman Cometh (1948) suggested a return to form, as did Long Day’s Journey into Night (1957, Pulitzer). Eugene O’Neill, born in a Broadway hotel on 16th October 1888, died in a Boston hotel on November 27th, 1953. His last words were “I knew it. I knew it. Born in a hotel room and, God damn it, died in a hotel room.” ©

[Stanley]

Something entirely new seems to have been given to me. Nellie Tayloe Ross, ca. 1925.

It’s election season so political anniversaries abound. For instance November 2 was the anniversary of Harry Truman’s astonishing victory over Tom Dewey. But, after all, that was only an upset. Let’s celebrate today the predictable election of the nation’s first woman to have been elected governor, Nellie Tayloe Ross, elevated to the office by the voters of Wyoming on November 4, 1924, 90 years ago. Nellie, born in St. Joseph, Missouri, in 1876, moved first to Kansas and then to Nebraska and then to Tennessee. Along the way she collected an education, a profession (music teacher), a European grand tour (paid for by her brothers), a devotion to progressive causes, and (in Tennessee) a husband, William Ross, a lawyer of similar political views. The couple moved to Wyoming where Ross opened a law office and rode the so-called “Progressive Era” into the governor’s mansion in 1922. He was popular with progressive wings of both main parties so when he died in office Nellie was nominated (by the Democrats). She did not campaign but announced her program of tax cuts for the poor, government aid to farmers and ranchers, banking reform, and laws protecting laborers, especially women, children, and miners. Nellie was also an ardent prohibitionist. She won easily in 1924, lost narrowly in 1926, and finished out a long career in public service as the (first female) director of the United States Mint, 1933 to 1953. In retirement, Nellie grew rich, continued to push progressive reforms, and wrote for women’s magazines until her death, aged 101, in 1977. ©

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I have always endeavor'd to please them, as an Actress, to the best of my Abilities. Kitty Clive.

Before our Revolution, several American colonies banned theater as bad for morals and productive of public idleness. There the idea of female actors was anathema. Partly it owed to the Puritan-Calvinist heritage, partly no doubt to knowledge of scandals in the contemporary English theater. If that’s true, our forefathers (and foremothers) may well have been thinking of Catherine (Kitty) Clive, the most famous actress of the day: “A pleasing Actress but a Green-Room scold/ Puffed with Success, she triumphs over all/ Snarls in the Scene Room, Curses in the Hall.” Born to a wealthy landholding Irish family on November 5, 1711, Katherine Raftor moved to London when the family lost its fortune. She turned to acting (in part to support her penurious father and possibly some siblings). She had talent and brass and quickly became famous, starring in several plays by Henry Fielding (eg. The Intriguing Chambermaid), in an early translation of Molière, and perhaps most notably (in 1732) as Polly in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, when (from a critic) she received the accolade of “the Darling of the Age.” She was then only 21, but Catherine aged well. Married into the Clive family in 1732, she became Kitty Clive, was notoriously unfaithful (her husband would cut her out of his will) and developed a liaison with Horace Walpole, and went on acting (including often starring for David Garrick) into her late 50s. Unlike many of her profession, she was thrifty and lived out a healthy, prosperous old age, no doubt confounding American moralists. In the end, the English church took her in; you may be able to find Kitty’s gravestone (1785) at St. Mary’s, Twickenham. ©

[Stanley]

The talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. John Philip Sousa, congressional testimony, 1906.

Before cylinders, disks, tapes, CDs and microchips made us all into couch potato musicians, we attended concerts and recitals and, often enough, played and sang at home in our side parlors or, if our money didn’’t run to side parlors, where space permitted. And conforming to those market realities, musicians kept body and soul together by performing live and selling sheet music. Goodness knows how much sheet music John Philip Sousa sold (a lot), but the Sousa Band—which he organized in 1892 upon his retirement from the Marine Corps, gave no fewer than 15,623 concerts before Sousa’s death, in March 1932, in Reading, PA (oddly enough, in the Abraham Lincoln Hotel). Music may have been in his genes. He was born in Washington, DC (on November 6, 1854) where his father, a Portuguese immigrant, was trombonist in the Marine Corps band. (Mom claimed descent from colonial period immigrants). John Philip joined the Marine band as an apprentice in 1867 and became its conductor in 1880. He is known as the March King, and of course is famous for his stirring military music, familiar to us all even if we don’t remember the titles: “Semper Fidelis,” “The Washington Post,” “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” “El Capitan,” and many more although by no means ad infinitum. Sousa composed only 136 marches and during his lifetime was also known for his operas (more than 10), his novels (3) and stories, and his champion trap shooting. And, oh yes, John Philip Sousa strongly disapproved of recorded music, and although the Sousa band did record, it was only very rarely with Sousa swinging the baton. ©

[Stanley]

A physicist who never lost her humanity. Otto Frisch's inscription on Lise Meitners's headstone, Bramley, England,

The number of women who might win a science Nobel is growing daily, while the number who should have won remains small. Sic transit, as they say. Among the should-haves, we find Rosalind Franklin (of DNA fame) and Jocelyn Bell who, when a very young astronomer, discovered pulsars. Both those women have been noticed in these birthday notes, but one I have missed is Lise Meitner who we might call the Mother of The Bomb except that she would not want us to, for she was a woman of peace. On the other hand, she would have been pleased to know that element 109, meitnerium, is named for her, for she was a superb researcher and theorist. Lise Meitner was born in Vienna on November 7, 1878 and was the second female to win a doctorate in Physics at the University of Vienna, which must have been a struggle because she was not allowed to attend “in public.” She moved to Berlin, converted to Lutheranism in 1908, and in 1926 became the first woman professor of Physics in Germany. There she became involved in an international race to create ‘new’ elements beyond uranium in the periodic table. After Hitler came to power, many of her colleagues fled but she stuck on until 1938, when she fled to Sweden. There she continued theorizing, with colleagues in Berlin and Copenhagen, and is credited (with them) with the discovery of nuclear fission and with getting the news to Franklin Roosevelt. After the war, Meitner received just about every scientific award going, but never the Nobel. She died aged 90. Her statue stands in a Berlin courtyard flanked by those of Hermann von Helmholtz and Max Planck. ©

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Don't call me a saint. I don't want to be dismissed so easily. Dorothy Day.

Remember Dorothy Day, born in Brooklyn on November 8, 1897, and by any account a most unusual person. It’s best to regard Day as self-educated, although she did touch base at the University of Illinois, but she dropped out to be a full-time bohemian in Greenwich Village, to run through two common law marriages and an abortion, and to begin her career as a radical journalist. A second pregnancy was carried to term in 1926, and Dorothy became a mother (daughter Tamar). Dorothy then joined the Catholic Church in 1927. She hadn’t been a normal bohemian, nor would she be a normal Catholic, for she continued her association with radicalism through the Catholic Worker newspaper (which she helped to found), personal columns in national magazines, and her membership in the International Workers of the World. In the pages ofThe Catholic Worker Dorothy condemned the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and successive New York Archbishops, notably Cardinal Spellman, and alienated much lay Catholic support because of her complete commitment to pacifism (including in WWII). Her religious devotion was recognized with the Pacem in Terris award (1971) from the Davenport, Iowa diocese and the Laetare Medal (1972) from Notre Dame. Dorothy Day combined a commitment to women’s rights, social equality, and peace with a deep devotion to the church. Day was proposed for sainthood in 1983, three years after her death, endorsed by the New York Archdiocese (!!!) in 2000, but still awaits (as a “Servant of God”) canonization. Perhaps Pope Francis will move her on. ©

[Stanley]

We have taken as much Care of these Prisoners, as if they were our own Flesh, and Blood. Indian speech at the return of Mary Campbell and others, 1764.

Among the most heart-wrenching reads are advertisements for missing children, which spring up especially at travelers’ places such as service stations along interstate roads. Such notices can be found, too, in colonial newspapers and in correspondence as Euro-American families sought to find their children who had been captured by native Americans. Such a one was Mary Campbell, taken by a Lenape band in 1758, aged 10, and according to a touching notice her father placed in The Pennsylvania Gazette, “red-haired and much freckled.” The family was “very desirous of seeing her.” Indeed Mary was returned, in a general exchange of hostages (Indians were also taken captive) on November 9, 1764, and became an interesting example of what historian James Axtell has called “the white Indians of colonial America,” for family stories have it that Mary was reluctant to leave the Lenape, among whom she had found a new name and a new home. If so, Mary was among quite a number of European hostages (usually young when captured) who “became” Indian, often in a very short time. Some chose to remain with their “captors;” some who reluctantly returned maintained friendly relations with their Indian “families.” Mary herself returned, married, and lived out her life as a Euro-American. A beautifully evocative story of a captive who did not return, a story stretching over several generations, is found in John Demos’s The Unredeemed Captive: a Family Story from Early America. It’s still in print and will be found in many libraries. ©

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I am unjust, but I can vote for justice. My life's unkind, but I can vote for kindness. Vachel Lindsay.

One remembers, occasionally, supreme teaching moments, as when my 10th-grade English teacher, Oakley Ethington, sat at his piano (which he had newly installed in his classroom) and used Vachel Lindsay’s “General William Booth Enters Into Heaven” to demonstrate the importance of rhythm and melody in poetry. Oakley had a strong baritone voice, considerable skill as a pianist, an MA in music, and boundless enthusiasm, but the brio with which he belted out “Booth led boldly with his big bass drum—Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?” was wasted on our group of 15- and 16-year old barbarians. Embarrassed then, we learned later what a privilege it had been to see and hear Oakley’s performances. Vachel Lindsay, the subject of that day’s lesson, or its author, was born on November 10, 1879 to a wealthy family in Springfield, Illinois where (he later wrote in “Lincoln walks at Midnight”) “A mourning figure walks, and will not rest.” He studied for his father’s profession, medicine, but never quite made it. Studying art in New York, he discovered poetry in himself, beginning to write (and hawk) his verse earnestly in 1905. Oakley’s choice was perfect, for Lindsay was a great performer, and an advocate of stressing its qualities of sound and meter in his own poetry performances. Vachel Lindsay is remembered today not only for his poetry but his passionate (if ambiguous) advocacy of African culture and of the rights of African-Americans. Oakley Ethington is, I suspect, also remembered by his pupils. ©

[Stanley]

Malice is of a low stature, but it hath very long arms. George, Marquess of Halifax.

On 11 November we should be remembering Armistice Day 1918, but instead we celebrate a man who thought tact, discretion, realism, and flattery were better alternatives to the kinds of political sacrifice that lead to war. This was George Savile, first Marquess of Halifax, born on this day in 1633 and died (in his bed of natural causes, he would have been glad to say) on 5 April 1695. Savile was related by blood to many of his future enemies and friends, and perhaps his intimate knowledge of this web of personal and family relations—and the pleasure he apparently took in it—colored his political world and led to his most famous writing, The Character of a Trimmer, composed in 1684 or 1685. Halifax was the classic man in the middle in 17th-century English politics, riven as it was by religion, by fear of a rerun of the civil wars of mid-century, and by those who would make any sacrifice to exclude Catholic James, Duke of York, from the throne. Halifax steered a middle course, helping to engineer the arrest of the leading exclusionist, Shaftesbury, while urging conciliation on the Duke and his brother, King Charles. It was all for naught, and Halifax fell from power in 1683. In The Character of a Trimmer, he adopts an attitude best described as (very late) renaissance skepticism, producing one of the most literate and accessible of all 17th-century political tracts. James’s excesses, when in power, finally forced Halifax to take sides. Luckily for him, he chose the winning side (also a “Trimmer” characteristic) and lived out his remaining years as the elder statesman of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. ©

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Set out at 7 oClock in a Canoo with Cap Lewis my servant york & one man at 1Ž2 past 10 arrived at St Louis, Clark's Journal, April 7, 1804.

Pupils at a progressive middle school in north St. Louis are divided into learning teams, and this semester the teams named after famous explorers. While on a visit there recently I was asked to identify the explorers, and much to the delight of the pupils I flunked. I could not think of who “York” was. Of course York was the African-American who was part of Lewis & Clark’s company of exploration, 1804-1806, and it was good to think of him in company with Magellan, Frobisher, etc. York was born on November 12, 1870, his whole family (father, mother, and a sister and brother) slaves near Ladysmith, Virginia. As was fairly common on Virginia plantations, York (a likely lad) was made companion and servant to his master’s son William Clark, and it was in that role that the adult slave York joined the expeditionary force. York proved a sensational success. Most of the native Americans encountered on the journey had never seen an African, and York soon was playing diplomat. Among other exploits, he saved Meriwether Lewis from a grizzly and became a more than ordinarily important member of the party. Evidence suggests that he played a part in decision-making as well as serving as medic, hunter, guide, and extremely strong laborer. What happened to York afterwards is a mystery, to which there have been several intriguing answers, most in line with the general reevaluation of black history that has occurred in the past 60 years. The one I prefer is that York escaped into the Crow Nation and lived there as a chieftain. ©

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The mind commands the body and is instantly obeyed. The mind commands itself and meets resistance. Augustine of Hippo.

One of the cleft sticks the early Protestant reformers found themselves in was their need—no matter how bad they thought Catholics were—to prove that the long centuries of Romish darkness had never extinguished true Christianity. They needed an apostolic succession almost as badly as the Bishop of Rome. Various church fathers filled the bill, but none better than Augustine of Hippo, born on November 13, 354 CE, in Roman Africa. He was born a freeman, and a pagan, of good enough family to be very well educated and Roman enough to have plenty of experience of sin, sexual and otherwise. He showed some philosophical enthusiasm for Manicheanism before his encounters in Italy with St. Ambrose turned him towards Christianity. But his decisive experience came from studying Romans 12-15, and his account of his conversion became a classic of Catholic, and then Protestant, theology. Augustine’s doctrines of conversion and salvation, his practice of piety, and his notions about free will meant that, over 1000 years later, John Calvin, John Knox, and John Cotton found in Augustine a spiritual hero. Like them, Augustine believed in God’s omnipotence and man’s freedom and argued that—untouched by grace—man’s free will would lead him (inevitably) to sin. Grace alone allowed man to exercise his freedom to be good, just, honest—and saved. To be sure there were a few of Augustine’s ideas that were not as attractive to the reformers, but they were good editors and so bequeathed a safely Protestant “Augustinian Piety” to most of the “reformed” denominations, where it still lives. ©

[Stanley]

She was a thing of trophies . . . A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy. All noble things are touched with that. Melville, Moby-Dick.

Today is the 163rd anniversary of the publication in New York, November 14, 1851, of Moby-Dick: Or, The Whale, by Herman Melville. With the possible exception of Huckleberry Finn, this is the most famed of all American novels, and certainly has the most quoted opening line: “Call me Ishmael.” Moby-Dick was Melville’s sixth book, and was actually first published in London (a month earlier than in New York) as a three-volume work entitled The Whale which when you read it is pretty accurate. Melville prospered ill, in his life, from his literary work, and Moby-Dick itself was not an unalloyed success. In 1865, Melville the author retired to his day job as customs inspector in New York and died in 1891, by that time largely forgotten. His final fiction, the novella Billy Budd, was not published until thirty-three years after his death, and then in London. Melville and his work, but especially Moby-Dick, Billy Budd, and his long short story “Bartleby the Scrivener” were rediscovered by the scholarly community in the 1920s, and became staple items in the rising American Studies movement, which found in the whale-obsessed Ahab, the pretty, fated Billy, and the death-stubborn Bartleby much food for thought about the connections between American literature, American history, and American identity. “Moby Dick Marathons” are an entirely odder outcome. There’s one this very weekend in New York City, where 130 young artistes will read the entire book, seriatim and with feeling, at three Manhattan locations (not one of them a Starbucks). They reckon about 15 minutes each. ©

[Stanley]

IN order to form a more perfect union . . . .

On 15th November we note the United States’ first real national constitution, the Articles of Confederation, approved by the Continental Congress on this day in 1777 and sent to the states for ratification. The states (plural) were at war with the world’s greatest power, and Congress thought there was an “absolute necessity of uniting all our councils and all our strength, to maintain and defend our common liberties.” But “liberty” had several definitions, and a multitude of vested interests (notably various states’ claims to trans-Appalachian real estate) delayed ratification until March 1, 1781. Only two states (Rhode Island and Delaware) had no western land claims, but they compensated by smuggling imports into their larger neighbors, a locally profitable habit which would be put at risk by a truly “national” government. After the 1781 ratification there remained problems (e.g. laying taxes, retiring war debts, paying veterans for their military service, and making treaties) which a few wild-eyed loony radicals like Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, James Madison, and John Adams thought required a sovereign, national government, and using the usual tricks of educated, effete, liberal elites (“words,” “arguments,” “facts” and things like that) they tricked the Continental Congress into calling a convention to “amend” the Articles. You know the rest. The dictatorial, beltway-blinded Constitution of 1787 was the result, and even today patriotic locals labor under its centralizing, authoritarian-elitist, tax-mongering, and liberal sway. Free America!!!! Restore the Articles!!!!! Away with Taxes!!!!!!! You never had it so good as in 1777-1787. ©

[Stanley]

It is pleasant to live where nobody is suffering want, where everyone has self respect, where there are no great differences of condition. Norton to John Ruskin, 1874.

The first “All-American” football team (1889) included a young Princeton back called Edgar Allen Poe who (besides having a name to reckon with) was a Phi Beta Kappa student. They didn’t do an “All-American” intellectual team that year; if they had, Poe might have made it, but one who certainly would have, and as captain, was Charles Eliot Norton, whose name had reckonings in New England where the Eliots and the Nortons were eminent intellectuals, professors, bankers, Harvard presidents, and merchants. Norton was born on November 16, 1827, and would become known as the most cultivated of Americans and—even better—the father of the grand old American notion of a “liberal education.” First, though, he tried and almost immediately tired of the Indian trade (working for an uncle), then turned to translate Dante’s Divine Comedy (it took him about 30 years, off and on, with the help of his friends Longfellow and Lowell). Meanwhile Norton edited the North American Review, took a Harvard chair (in Art History), and developed a large, transatlantic circle of devoted intellectual friends. At Harvard, Norton decided his young gentlemen needed to learn more about more things, and believed also that a good grounding in all the disciplines (studying that which made the world tick) would greatly benefit the sons of immigrants (the best of whom, he hoped, Harvard would take in, as if to season the American elite). Norton’s own seasoning can be followed through a fine 2002 biography, very aptly titled The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton, by James Turner, wherein if you look carefully you will find the origin of the credit hour. ©

[Stanley]

The human being who acts is the human being who lives. That is a terrifying circumstance. Lee Strasberg.

The Moscow theatre scene was surprisingly free under the last tsars and for some time under Lenin and Stalin. One who helped produce and then protect this freedom was Konstantin Stanislavski, who parlayed his taste for acting, his family fortune, and his impatience with the stylized drama of his youth into a legend of democratic socialism, the ”Stanislavski Method” or, for short, “The Method.” His Moscow Art Theatre flourished from 1897 to his death in 1938, producing Russian and Western drama without (apparently) much interference from the various autocracies of the time. But in 1922-24 his company toured the USA, and some of his staff jumped ship, thinking the prospects better in Manhattan than Moscow, and there they took on a young Austrian émigré, Israel Strasberg, who would single-handedly (almost) revolutionize acting in America with The Method. Strasberg, born on November 17, 1901, had changed his given name to Lee and was already dabbling in acting when he saw a Moscow company performance. He carried through to his own acting school Moscow’s dependence on actors’ abilities to enrich their roles, reconstruct them really, out of the richness of their own experience, their deepest emotions. This staging of “psychological realism” made Strasberg famous. Graduates included actors Paul Newman, Geraldine Page, Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Jane Fonda, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, Robert de Niro, and Patricia Neal, and were preferred by playwrights Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Elia Kazan, Sidney Lumet. It was, as they say, quite a performance. ©

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I feel safe in the midst of my enemies, for the truth is powerful and it will prevail. Sojourner Truth.

By the time she had reached the age of 46, and decided to change her name, the slave Isabella had been sold three times, carried five children to term and escaped from slavery (in 1826) leaving three children behind. She was a New York slave, but the state’s emancipation of 1827 would not touch her status, for it applied to slaves born after 1799 and Isabella had been born on November 18, 1797, on a New York Hudson Valley estate. But freedom was in the air and, courageously, with the help of white friends, Isabella sued to recover her child Peter, who had (aged only 5) been illegally sold south to Alabama as a slave. At just this point, Isabella converted to Christianity. Later, having won freedom for her son, and then lost him again (a mysterious disappearance), Isabella took her new name in 1843, the one we know her by, Sojourner Truth, and took up in public the causes of abolition and equality. She traveled throughout the north, wrote, became an adept public speaker, and broadened her scope to take in temperance and women’s rights. During the Civil War she visited President Lincoln, worked for freedman’s relief and took care of her growing family (two daughters and their children). Afterwards she continued her reform efforts, adding anti-smoking to her list of causes in 1868. In 1883, appropriately, the aged reformer died in the care of another reformer, John Harvey Kellogg, in Battle Creek, where Sojourner had lived in freedom since 1867. ©

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I here present the reader with a new sign which I have discovered for detecting diseases of the chest. Auenbrugger, 1761.

Some inventions are thoughtful rather than complicated, as for instance in the case of Josef Leopold Auenbrugger, born in Graz, Austria, on November 19, 1722. Chances are pretty good that, the next time you visit your doctor, you’ll experience the Auenbrugger Technique. This is the use of percussion to hear what might be wrong (or, for that matter, right) about and around your main body cavity, aka your thorax. Or to give it Auenbrugger’s own title, “A New Discovery that Enables the Physician from the Percussion of the Human Thorax to Detect the Diseases Hidden Within the Chest.” Of course he wrote it in Latin. Published in 1761, it excited little attention, and Auenbrugger happily went on treating his patients, becoming especially good with tuberculosis care, braving a couple of typhus epidemics like Albert Camus’s later existentialist hero, and establishing his local fame (in Vienna) as exceptionally charitable (in time and money) towards the poor of the city. He lived just long enough (d. 1809) to witness the general acceptance of his technique through the work of Napoleon’s physician, Jean-Nicolas Corvisart. A few years later, his successor in Vienna Josef Skoda made percussion a required diagnostic in the new medical school (and continued Auenbrugger’s charitable work with the poor and among tuberculosis sufferers). In legend, Josef Auenbrugger learned his stuff tapping wine barrels in his innkeeper father’s cellar. Let’s hope it’s true. It’s interesting, too, that Auenbrugger, Corvisart, and Skoda all came from humble origins. Upwards mobility was not an American monopoly. ©

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I am not the champion of lost causes, but the champion of causes not yet won. Inscription at the Norman Thomas Library, Princeton University.

In Europe a perennial question about the USA was “why no socialism”? Western Europe was awash with democratic socialist parties, some of them successful, and Germany and Scandinavia had been experimenting with social welfare since the 19th century. But the USA seemed immune. One American who cannot be blamed for lack of effort was Norman Thomas, six times the presidential candidate of the Socialist Party of America (1928 to 1948, inclusive). Thomas was born in Marion, Ohio on November 20, 1884. His father was a Presbyterian minister, but although young Norman had to earn money delivering papers for Warren Harding he was sent to Princeton by a generous uncle and repaid the favor by graduating with Latin honors in 1905. He then earned a theology degree from Union Seminary and was ordained a Presbyterian minister in 1911. Before Union and while there, Thomas imbibed Social Gospel thinking, and so he preached economic democracy and, in WWI, pacifism. This drew him away from Presbyterianism and to the Socialist Party, then showing some significant electoral strength in eastern and Midwestern cities, and his intelligence and good humor helped him survive the sectarian conflicts of the party (meanwhile helping to found the ACLU), and he emerged in 1928—after Eugene Debs died—as the party’s presidential candidate, almost by default. Thomas continued uneasily in the socialist saddle until 1950, moving the party vaguely rightward, and (rather oddly) remained active in and popular with the Princeton alumni association until his death in 1968. One of Princeton’s libraries is dedicated to his memory.©

[Stanley]

When a pitcher's throwing a spitball . . . . just hit the dry side. Stan Musial.

Time was, most star athletes were associated with a particular team or club for most or all of their playing career. It still happens, occasionally, witness the career of Derek Jeter, drafted out of high school by the damned Yankees in 1992 and their starting shortstop pretty much non-stop from 1995 to 2014. He even lived in New York, for most of that time, although not in the Yankees’ home borough, the Bronx. It can’t be said that his private life was untroubled or that he was a model citizen in every respect, but hey, it’s a new world in sports and you can’t have it all. But Stan (“Stash,” the Man) Musial seems to have given it all to his home club and “home" town, St. Louis. Stan wasn’t born here, but rather in some place east on November 21, 1920, but he joined the Cardinal organization (as a pitcher) in 1938, moved here as an outfielder in 1941, became a first-baseman, and very possibly the best all round hitter ever. By the time he died here, last year, he had been local hero #1 for about 72 years, about as long as he was married to Lill (not a St. Louis girl but she became one) although Stan’s playing career lasted “only” until 1963. After that, besides winning the World Series as General Manager, Stan became number one citizen, supporter of good causes, and among other things has two big bridges named after him, one of them in St. Louis, the other one some place east. When he died, Bill DeWitt (the newish owner) said “we have lost the most beloved member of the Cardinals family”, true enough once, and “beloved” still works, but hey, there isn’t a Cardinals “family” any more. ©

[Stanley]

You don't write melodies. You find them . . . and if your fingers don't stray, the melody should come out of hiding. Hoagy Carmichael.

The Carmichaels’ house in Bloomington, IN was small, but it had a spare room or two and in the late summer of 1899 they let their spare to a circus troupe, “The Hoaglands.” Lida Mary Carmichael was pregnant during that time, and when she delivered (on November 22, 1899) they called the baby Howard Hoagland. Pretty soon Howard became Hoagy, and well before that he was playing the piano almost as well as Lida (who played for a local silent movie theatre). The Carmichaels were poor whites but interesting ones, for besides hosting circus troupes they had some black friends, including the Rhythm King Reg DuValle, who taught Hoagy some musical tricks Lida didn’t know, and before long Hoagy Carmichael was playing with Bix Beiderbecke, hobnobbing with Louis Armstrong, and (ultimately) deciding that his law degree was not part of his own personal future. He had already composed songs for Beiderbecke, but the final break with the law came in 1927 when Hoagy composed “Stardust.” It wasn’t all champagne and roses after that, and the poverty of Hoagy’s childhood kept him company for a while yet, but by the mid 1930s he was famous, the friend of Gershwin, Ellington, and Astaire, living nicely on his royalties, and just beginning his acting career. And composing the likes of “Heart and Soul,” “Skylark,” “Georgia on My Mind,” “Lazybones,” “Rockin’ Chair,” et alii. You can listen to them and more at http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/collections/hoagy/, for his donated papers and music rest at his alma mater, the University of Indiana, right across the street from the house where he was born.©

[Stanley]

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary. Areopagitica.

Today we should all sing a song for freedom, for it was on 23rd November 1644 that Areopagitica was published, in London. The author was John Milton, not yet the sublime poet of Paradise Lost but well known among the Puritan intelligentsia for his full command of several languages, including of course Greek (his title refers to ‘logos aeropagitikos’ and an ancient Athenian speech on freedom) and for his radical views on marriage. Areopagitica was published during the English Civil Wars, and in the Parliamentary city of London, but its arguments were not congenial to the controlling “Presbyterian” majority in Parliament, for it was above all else an attack on their press censorship. Or the King’s, of course. Like most thoughtful folk, Milton did not favor complete press freedom, for authors (and printers) must take ultimate responsibility for what they wrote (or printed), but Areopagitica set a marker for the long road to freedom of expression (and freedom of conscience). And confronts us today with the query, are we yet there?

For books are not absolutely dead things, but . . . preserve as in a vial the purist efficacy and extraction of the living intellect that bred them.

As good almost kill a man as kill a good book. Who kills a man, kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God in the eye.

Remember Areopagitica, Milton’s paean to freedom and its expression. ©

[Stanley]

Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get. Dale Carnegie.

Efforts to define the American ‘national character’ began before there was a USA. Thomas Jefferson, writing to a Frenchman in 1785, made a neat attempt, turning the national character on a regional axis, but it was too critical to survive. Those who want to be complimentary have settled on several species of informality: openness, friendliness, etc. Less positively, Americans are joiners, glad-handers, back-slappers; they will tell a stranger their life story before he hangs up his hat. Whether those qualities really existed is one question, and how long they have persisted is the next. Some recent political rhetoric suggests that our open approach (to foreigners, anyway) may have taken a beating. But the call to “be” friendly remained popular well into the 20th century, witness the astonishing publication history of Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends and Influence People (1936). My father was given a copy, perhaps for his 21st birthday, one of 5 million sold before Carnegie’s death in 1955. Carnegie, born in Maryville, MO, on November 24, 1888, wanted to be friendly, and while at college took to public speaking precisely because he had no friends. This proved so successful that after a short time selling lard for Armour & Co. he made a business of buttering people up or, rather, showing others how to do it. A New York Times review of the book opined that there was a certain “subtle cynicism” in all this, but this caution was lost on a friendly, informal, and perhaps rather anxious book buying public. Our ability to forge friendships remains an open question, but books on how to do it sell here like hotcakes.©

[Stanley]

I can remember a reporter asking me for a quote . . . I thought it was a kind of soft drink. Joe DiMaggio.

There’s much in the scholarship on immigration to interest “real” Americans (some of whom seem to be politicians), e.g. the groups with the highest rate of repatriation. Last time I looked it was the Serbians. They were given a close run by Italian males who developed a taste for earning dollars and then retiring to Calabria or wherever to marry the padrone’s daughter and live in luxury’s lap. One Italian male who stuck it out was Giuseppe DiMaggio who landed at Ellis Island in the 1890s and started to look for somewhere to continue his old life as a fisherman. He finally found it near San Francisco, made some money, but instead of going back home to Sicily he sent for Rosalia Mercurio—his wife—and together they birthed and raised a boat crew, Tomas, Michael, Giuseppe, Jr., born on November 25, 1914, Vince, and Dominic. But the last three didn’t want to fish. Immigrant children are like that, learning English better than the old folks, becoming streetwise, and in the case of the Dimaggio boys taking up “our” national game and making it “theirs.” They were all good, but Giuseppe (“Joltin’ Joe” in American), was magic, setting records all over the place and confounding the statisticians by hitting safely in 61 straight games in the minors and then 56 straight with the damned Yankees in 1941. He set other records too (e.g. hitting .406 in the same year) but that’s the one that sticks. It’s impossible. Then Joe went and married Marilyn Monroe. Just shows you what immigrants can get up to, once “we” let “them” in. But watch out, folks; those pronouns will shift, and when “they” become “us”, who will “we” be?©