BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

Dealing with network executives is like being nibbled to death by ducks. Eric Sevareid.

Among the unsung American heroes of World War II were its journalists, some (e.g. Ernie Pyle) ‘embedded’ with front-line units. But we should especially remember “Murrow’s Boys”, most of whom worked for CBS before as well as during the war, the professional brood of Edward R. Murrow. They included William Shirer, Charles Collingwood, Howard K. Smith, and one girl, the intrepid Mary Breckinridge. Their reports helped waken the US to the Nazi menace and the plight of embattled Britain, and after the war a number of them (including Murrow himself) would stand up to "Tailgunner" Joe McCarthy. They were long-lived. Dick Hottelet worked CBS until 1985 and is still living, aged 98. But perhaps the tallest among them, in several ways, was Eric Sevareid, born in North Dakota on November 26, 1912. His first published work, Canoeing with the Cree (1935), told of his fantastic canoe trip from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay just after he graduated from high school. One of my absolute favorite books, it’s still in print. But Sevareid is more justly famous for his eyewitness reporting, first of the Fall of France, then the Battle of Britain, later (inadvertently) from behind the lines in Burma. After the war, J. Edgar Hoover and others decided Sevareid was a subversive. The FBI investigated him, McCarthy denounced him, Lyndon Johnson excoriated him for his Vietnam analyses, and later Richard Nixon counted him on the famous “enemies list,” but Eric just kept on reporting, for CBS, until his retirement in 1977, and after that for PBS and NPR. Right now you might find him on a USPS memorial stamp, still in the frame. ©

[Stanley]

Zuni is even more beautiful than usual, all yellow blooms and marvelous sunsets. Elsie Parsons to Hugh Parsons, 1918.

Elsie Worthington Clews was born rich, in New York City, on November 27, 1875. She stayed rich, too, marrying (in 1900) Hugh Parsons, a wealthy and prominent Republican, an intimate of Teddy Roosevelt, in the Newport, RI, wedding of the season (“many New Yorkers were present” according to a breathless piece in the Times), bearing four children, and getting in a fair amount of sailing. But before that she had insisted on getting her doctorate (1899). Her mother was upset: “we cannot see what it will lead to.” What it led to, first, was three books on marriage and the family. The first caused so much scandal (“the morality of the barnyard,” one reviewer thought) that she published the next two anonymously. One of those, The Old-Fashioned Woman (1913) pointed the way towards Elsie’s future by treating New York society women ethnographically, in a way both witty and scholarly. Two years later she was doing the same thing for the Zuni in New Mexico. She was apparently such a pleasant person that she caused no offense to either high society or the Zuni. She would go on to write many more anthropological studies, help to found the New School for Social Research, and serve as the first female president of the American Anthropological Association. Her biography may possibly be worth reading. It’s called Elsie Clews Parsons: Inventing Modern Life, and it describes a woman who was “a cross between Margaret Mead and Georgia O’Keefe.” I suggest that you look that woman up. ©

[Stanley]

The middle classes have a truly extraordinary conception of society. Engels.

Friedrich Engels was born (on November 28, 1820) into the upper reaches of the industrial revolution, the wealthy son of Evangelical parents, cotton mill owners, in the Kingdom of Prussia. As a youth, he embraced Christian pietism, portent perhaps of a lifetime of idealism. At any rate, his first career move was to join the Prussian Royal Household Artillery, as an officer-cadet of course, and it was during this period that he began reading philosophy (Hegel) and observing the way his world worked. He didn’t like it much, not much at all, and in a misguided effort to quell his newly radical idealism, his father sent him to work the family business in Manchester, England. It didn’t pan out. Engels’ long affair with the radical Mary Burns and above all his acute powers of observation resulted first in his The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), an association with England’s Chartist Movement, and soon a second, happier meeting (and lifelong friendship) with Karl Marx. These new associations and the Revolutions of 1848 inspired The Communist Manifesto, jointly authored with Marx, and the (to him) pathetic failure of those revolutions in turn led to a lifetime about equally divided between subversive activities, further education, pleasant socializing, and economic analysis. Engels remains to this day an enigmatic figure, foxhunter, bon vivant, radical fugitive, humanist, linguist, acute social critic, historical theorist, even religious mystic. You can take your pick. Should Engels, or should he not, be held responsible for the excesses of Soviet communism? On that one, the jury is hung. ©

[Stanley]

Man must have some recognized stake in society and affairs to knit him lovingly to his kind, or he is wont to revenge himself for wrongs real or imagined. Bronson Alcott.

“Progressive” ideas about education got a full treatment from John Dewey (1859-1952). But he was not the first. In the 1640s the young English Puritans Samuel Hartlib and John Drury dared to opine that the desire to know was natural in the child and only wanted encouragement—not punishment—to bring it out. The most famous of America’s progressive pioneers was Amos Bronson Alcott. Alcott was born on November 29, 1799 on a Connecticut farm no longer able to feed the family, and so he took to road and wagon to peddle dry goods to southern planters. He learned to dislike both slavery and sales and acquired a burden of debt that he decided to discharge by teaching. His voracious reading had convinced him that education needed root and branch reform. This was too much for rural Connecticut, so he was soon unemployed but not discouraged and took his ideas to Boston, then Philadelphia, then Concord, founding schools in each place and drawing support from the intelligentsia of the day, notably Emerson and Thoreau but also the Peabody sisters of Salem, Margaret Fuller, and Orestes Brownson. His most famous school, a utopian commune he called Fruitlands, wasn’t as happy a place as it sounds. Alcott’s daughters, including the novelist Louisa May (born on November 29, 1832), didn’t enjoy home life much until Bronson finally (1858) landed a paid job, as Superintendant of the Concord school system, and stopped bossing them around. He held that one down for quite a while, but by 1879 he was at it again, running the “Concord School of Philosophy and Literature,” which met in his living room, presumably progressively. ©

[Stanley]

Swift has sailed into his rest/ Savage indignation there/ Cannot lacerate his breast./ Imitate him if you dare,/ World-besotted traveller./ He served human liberty. W. B. Yeats¹s translation of Swift¹s Latin epitaph.

Jonathan Swift was born (November 30, 1667) into a family not quite well-connected enough. His was an age of patronage, and his family’s losses in the civil wars—compounded by his father’s early death—left Swift in particular need ot a patron. In a long life he found several (among them a wealthy uncle, Sir William Temple, and Bishop George Berkeley) but not a one of them gave him the preferment he believed his due, which may help to explain his flowering as the greatest satirist of a satirical age. He dabbled journalistically in politics, betting on the wrong horse, the Tory party of Godolphin and Bolingbroke, and when their ministry fell amidst charges of treason it seemed best to take up the position that patronage had purchased for him, the deanship of Dublin’s Church of Ireland Cathedral (not the Catholic one). A recent biography has him as a pretty good dean, but from that vantage point the very Reverend Jonathan Swift produced the sublimest satire of his era. He is most famed for Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World ... by Lemuel Gulliver (1726), in which his not quite human subjects behave in distressingly human ways. Honors College freshmen, now and again, read “A Modest Proposal” (1729) a delightfully ghoulish recipe on how to prepare tender Irish babies for the table (“a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food”). It does not conceal his rage at Irish poverty. Swift never married but developed exceedingly close relations with two Esthers, whom in turn he called Stella and Vanessa. Some believed he married Stella. Their deaths (in 1723 and 1728) broke Swift’s very human heart. ©

[Stanley]

Mine was a coordinating job. Gerard Swope.

December 1 is the birthday of one of St. Louis’s most distinguished native sons, Gerard Swope, who was born here, into an immigrant Jewish watchmaker’s family, on this day in 1872. Gerard showed a precocious talent for electricity and for social work, and (after graduating from MIT) found his life’s work in electrics and his life’s wife (Mary Hill) at Jane Addams’s famous Hull House, where for a time Gerard taught poor people how to make and repair electric motors. After marrying Mary in Mackinac,at an Addams summer camp, Gerard moved on from Hull House to Western Electric and then, in 1920, to General Electric, where (as CEO) he transformed the company, advocated trades unions and involved them in management planning, arguing for a full employment economy and (one could say) getting himself and the country ready for Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. When the Depression came, Swope and the GE unions negotiated “employment stabilization” so the company could maintain its workforce, and in 1934 an unemployment insurance and pension scheme that also extended profit sharing (started by Swope in the mid 1920s) to the whole work force. Swope had already in the 1920s instituted GE involvement in cooperative housing ventures wherever it had significant industrial plant. Hull House, we might say, trained its sons well. Or was it MIT? Or perhaps it was Isaac and Ida Swope, those immigrant parents who also (by the way) birthed a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Herbert Swope. Anyway, it seems to me that St. Louis and Missouri might still have a few lessons to learn from this Swope boy. ©

[Stanley]

I will always be as difficult as necessary to achieve the best. Maria Callas.

“Diva” is Italian for a female god, and given the reputation (long in the building) of women opera stars for hot tempers, stormy scenes, and long, long revenges it’s not at all surprising that they have become known as Divas. On the plus side, one has to admit, their voices can raise the roof, lift the hackles, and stir the pulse. So we celebrate today a leading diva of the last century, Maria Anna Sofia Cecilia Kalogeropoulos, born of immigrant Greek parents in a downtown and downmarket Manhattan hospital on December 2, 1923. The family lived uptown, around Columbia University, where papa had a pharmacy, and Maria attended PS 164 where her singing talent was noticed. Although papa Americanized their surname to Kalos, the new land did not work out as well for pharmacy as it would later for opera, and so Maria Kalos and her family returned to Athens, where she won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music, and before she was out of her teens she was Maria Callas, singing lead roles, and (even by her detractors) was being called “god-given”. She continued performing during the German occupation, and won plaudits from German critics, but at war’s end travelled to Manhattan and the Met, Chicago and the Lyric, Milan and La Scala, London and Covent Garden, everywhere triumphing with her passionate stage presence, her strong voice, and almost everywhere convincing people that there was, after all, some deeper meaning in the word “diva.” Maria Callas finished her career at Covent Garden, singing—and acting—as Tosca, in July 1965. ©

[Stanley]

Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training. Anna Freud.

In upper middle class Europe, younger daughters often ended up caring for elderly parents, and so it was with Anna Freud, the last child of Sigmund Freud and Martha Bernays, who was born on December 3, 1895, in Vienna. After the family moved to London, fleeing the Nazi Anschluss in 1938, she did just that, a short task with her father (who was dying of cancer). Another oddity about the story, a biographical pathetic fallacy, is that Anna Freud had an unhappy childhood, locked in a competition with an elder sister for her father’s affection, developing an unusually cold, distant relationship with her mother, and into the bargain afflicted by tempestuous dreams and “all sorts of unreasonable thoughts,” including a dream when she was 19 months old! Anna quickly developed espertise in psychoanalysis, becoming quite close with her father, and delivered her first psychoanalytic paper in 1922, “Beating Fantasies and Daydreams.” She proceeded to develop a somewhat independent line of attack, becoming more interested than dad in psychoanalysis of children and arguably more open to other developments in psychiatry. Still, she’s known today mainly as a staunch defender of her father’s reputation. In London, her adopted home, she’s also remembered kindly as the founder and patroness of a “War Nursery” where infants and young children deprived of full parental attention could luxuriate in learning, and after that Anna led an orphanage for young survivors of the Holocaust, a grim reminder of her unhappy childhood in what had proven to be a fundamentally anti-Semitic society. ©

[Stanley]

Be it known that I, Chester Greenwood, have invented certain new and useful Improvements in Ear-Mufflers. Patent declaration, 1877.

“Today’s youth” is a phrase often followed by paeans to pessimism, but I take a different view. Last night a dinner thrown by our student newspaper staff sent me home feeling especially optimistic. But I do notice, these winter days, that many young people are likely to sacrifice comfort and health to style. They should understand that they can be warm and look good. Long ago an ingenious youth called Chester Greenwood addressed that problem. Born on December 4, 1858, in Farmington, ME, Chester was a skater who loved to keep warm, and thus the problem. How to look good on ice with warm ears? So, at age 15, he invented improved earmuffs, ones that hugged close to the ears but with no unsightly ties. He used tempered wire, cut to the right length and bent to the right shape and tension to hold beaver fur muffs tight to his ears. And so Chester (and his grandmamma, who had sewn the muffs) went off to the patent office and, in March 1877, Chester won US Patent No. 188292 for his “improved ear-muffler.” It was the archetypal better mousetrap of an inventive age. By 1880, young Chester employed eleven workers and produced 50,000 mufflers annually. By the time he died, in the midst of the Great Depression of the 1930s, he was producing 400,000 annually. Millions of muffs. You might have a pair in your attic. If you find some, keep them as memorials to a youth’s good sense and good style. Or you could go to Farmington and march in its annual Chester Greenwood parade, on Maine’s annual Chester Greenwood Day, for besides being quite clever, Chester was also a very good citizen. ©

[Stanley]

We are selling corn, and I like corn. Walt Disney.

The world wide export of American culture (substance and icons) is nowhere better demonstrated than in Michel Souris, Topolino, Miki Kuchi, Muse Pigg, El Raton Miguelito, and Miguel Ratoncito. But let me give you his Russian name, Mikki Maus, and the puzzle is solved. He was American culture’s most enduring cartoon character, Mickey Mouse (who was also, by the way, the password at Allied HQ on June 6, 1944). Mickey was followed by a cavalcade of others, and they all evolved in color and shape (brilliantly explained once by paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould) to mesh with the audience’s instinctive predilections for infantile features. Their creator, and then their chief evolutionary designer (no pun intended), was Walt Disney, born in Chicago on December 5, 1901. Disney would share with another Chicagoan, Ernest Hemingway, the experience of being an ambulance driver in WWI, but he decorated the sides of his ambulance with cartoons, which I don’t think Hemingway would have done. Afterwards, in Kansas City, New York, and then LA, Disney experimented with various cartoon characters, finally settling on a mouse. Mrs. Disney, also a cartoonist (Lillian Bounds) christened it Mickey, and the rest is legend. But I can’t let the moment pass without mentioning that I resent Uncle Walt for his wicked stepmother-queen in Snow White. I saw her in a quonset hut cinema the summer before I started school (in Grundy Center, IA) and she populated my nightmares for years. But I haven’t had the dream recently so I suppose, having forgotten, I should forgive. So Happy Birthday, Uncle Walt. ©

[Stanley]

Jazz is about freedom within discipline. Dave Brubeck.

As my school friends may remember, I grew up as clueless as one can be about all forms of popular music. My dad’s time working in Kansas City was evidenced by a few blues 78s, and aged 16 I had a brief enthusiasm for Glenn Miller, but otherwise “popular” was a blank. Then with a bang I was introduced to jazz, cool jazz, at a 1960 concert near Saarinen’s reflecting pool at the Des Moines Art Center. It was the Dave Brubeck Quartet, basking in the fame of their recent LP “Take Five,” and it was, well, cool. No other word for it (it was also my most expensive date ever, up to that time anyway). Brubeck was born December 6, 1920, near San Francisco, to a cattle rancher and a piano teacher. Oddly enough he would change his college major from pre-vet to music, so we can say he took after his mother. After military service, he returned to finish his studies and start his music career, himself at the keyboard and, at first, a circulating support cast, but by 1951 he’d been joined by Paul Desmond (sax), later by Joe Morello (drums) and still later by Gene Wright (bass). And that was the “classic” Brubeck Quartet. That “Take Five” album, which I still have, was more innovative than I could have known, and its irregular rhythms remain a mystery. It secured (rather than made) Brubeck’s reputation as one able to innovate, sometimes radically, and yet remain popular. The “classic” quartet lasted only nine years, disbanding in ’68, but Brubeck kept at it until his death just one day short of his 92nd birthday. The beat goes on; five of his (six) children are musicians. ©

[Stanley]

Freedom is participation in power. Marcus Tullius Cicero.

On 7th December, which is of course Pearl Harbor day, we dip way back into the classical past to recall the assassination of Marcus Tullius Cicero, on this day in 43 BCE. Cicero was assassinated on the orders of Mark Antony, and we would be right to remember Cicero for his political courage and his dedication to the ideals of the Roman Republic. His only complaint about the assassination of Julius Caesar, in March 44 BCE, was that he had not been “invited. . . to that most glorious banquet on the Ides of March.” Once the tyrant was dead, Rome divided into two factions, the Caesarian (led by Mark Antony) and the republican (led by Cicero, the leader of the Senate). As Antony quickly gained in power, he was able to proscribe his enemies, and Cicero planned to flee to Macedonia. However, he was betrayed. Captured, he offered his neck to his assassins, saying “do try to kill me properly.” In the course of time, the man Cicero hoped to bring to power, Octavian (Caesar’s adopted son), became the Emperor Augustus, and Cicero’s eloquent oratory and expressive republicanism were but memories, and dangerous ones to recall in Imperial Rome. Still there is a story that when Augustus surprised one of his grandsons reading a work by Cicero, he did not punish the boy but handed the volume back to him and said “he was a learned man, dear child, a learned man who loved his country.” We remember Cicero for his oratory, his histories, his preservation of Greek culture, and his challenging conception of a liberal education as incorporating not only all branches of knowledge, but also and crucially the courage to use them. ©

[Stanley]

Form the tools so the tools themselves shall fashion the work and give to every part its just proportion. Eli Whitney.

It was once the fashion to explain the origins of the American Civil War by reference to the invention of the cotton “gin”. Slavery was reaching its “natural” limits, the crops associated with slavery (e.g. tobacco and indigo) were either unprofitable or geographically limited, and the Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment rendered white Americans uncomfortable with the institution anyway. (We didn’t learn how “uncomfortable” black Americans were with slavery until 1960s era historians ripped aside what might be called the “Gone with the Wind” veil.) Anyway, along came the cotton gin, enabling southern planters to grow long-staple cotton across the old southwest, the price of a good field hand shot skyward, and slavery had a new lease on life. The inventor of the “gin” was a clever Yankee, Eli Whitney, born on December 8, 1765, to Elijah and Elizabeth Whitney, substantial farmers, graduated from Yale, and married into the Connecticut aristocracy. Protected by US Patent #72, the gin should have made Eli rich, but it landed him in lawsuits and needed a good deal of improvement. Once up and running, though, it did have a dramatic effect, but perhaps not quite so dramatic as Whitney’s nearly contemporaneous invention of a new mode of production, properly called industrial rather than mechanical, based on the concept of standardized, interchangeable parts, and critical to the modernization of the northern economy. Both southern slavery and northern capitalism were potent causes of the Civil War. So maybe Eli Whitney was doubly responsible. ©

[Stanley]

Young people come to me, you know, and say do you think we can do this. I say try it. Rear Admiral Grace Hopper.

Scientists seem irremediably attracted to breaking things down to their simplest state, so if your small child is discovered (say) taking apart all seven of your alarm clocks “to see how they work” you might think you had a young scientist on your hands. But if it was 1913 and the child was a little girl? Well, if you were the mother of Grace Murray Hopper (née Murray) you should have said “of course” or “why not”? Grace was born into an upper middle class family in New York on December 9, 1906, and won a scholarship to Vassar College, where she majored in math and physics. She went on to Yale for her math PhD, married, and took up a math professorship at Vassar. Come WWII, Grace volunteered for the women’s naval reserve (she had to gain weight to qualify), passed her officers’ exam with flying colors, and was assigned to a “Ships Computation Project.” Soon Grace was a computer pioneer, still doing contract work for the navy, but also working in private industry (latterly Remington Rand) where she developed an operational computer (1952) and started teaching it languages so, as she said, it could do something more than arithmetic. She then played an important role in developing COBOL and COMTRAN. By the 1970s Grace (now sometimes known as “Amazing Grace”) was back computerizing the navy, where (in 1986 and by special commission) she became the fourth oldest active duty admiral in Navy history. Not bad for the little kid who got in big trouble for eviscerating clocks. ©

[Stanley]

A great librarian must have a clear head, a strong hand, and above all a great heart . . . most of the men who achieve this greatness will be women. Melvil Dewey.

Traditional library classification systems all tussle with the same essential problem, which is that a book can have only one physical location but can be about more than one thing. With a personal library of, say, 500 volumes, that’s not a big problem, but it grows rapidly (maybe geometrically) as books are added. 500,000 volumes, then, constitute a conundrum for anyone searching for books on just about any subject. Where, for instance, should a librarian shelve a biography of Dr. Melvil Dewey? Since Dewey invented the Dewey Decimal System for classifying books, this is not a merely academic question. Melvil Dewey was born on December 10, 1851, in rural New York where, oddly enough, he decided that his life’s mission would be to educate the masses. His first effort was to bring order into the chaos of the Amherst College library, so successfully that the college trustees made him acting librarian when he was only a Junior. But his passion for simplification and organization did not stop with books. Still in his 20s, he founded in Boston the American Library Association, the Spelling Reform Association, and the American Metric Bureau, trying to substitute Thru for Through and the Meter for the Yard. He went on to become head librarian at Columbia University, CEO of New York’s state university system, founder of an institute for workers’ education at Lake Placid (where he also organized the 1932 Winter Olympics), a leader in the Chatauqua movement, a dietary reformer, and in his spare time inventing hanging files and raising a family. So where do you shelve his biography? At UMSL’s library, it’s at Z720.D5 W54. (NOT the Dewey Decimal classification). ©

[Stanley]

A life without once reading Hamlet is like a life spent in a coal mine. Hector Berlioz.

One young person who eventually followed his own talents, or genius, rather than his parents’ wishes was Louis-Hector Berlioz, born on December 11, 1803, in La Côte Saint André. His Isère village lay within sight of the Alps, then coming into their own as objects of Romantic Era wonder, delight, and (approachable) mystery, rather like the music that Hector Berlioz would ultimately create. First, though, he had to deal with his physician father’s ambition that he, too, should become a doctor. So Hector could not be a child prodigy (not, anyway, in music), and indeed played, practiced, and composed on the side, in secret so to speak, and with small instruments, never at the piano. At 18, perhaps to please pop, Hector went off to Paris to study medicine, found he didn’t like corpses (he liked women well enough, first the actress Harriet Smithson, but living ones), and discovered that very large instrument, the orchestra. At 21, he left medicine for good, composed his first major work, and devoted himself with Romantic abandon to Music. He was especially alive to the Romantic currents of his age, shared enthusiastically in its vogue for Shakespeare, not to mention Scott, Beethoven, and Goethe (all of whom would inspire some of Berlioz’s most famous compositions). His Symphonie Fantastique (1830) made his first big splash and remains his most famous piece, although at the time it impressed fellow musicians like Franz Liszt more than it did the Paris crowds. Like its author’s life, it is a pretty wild composition overall but carries within it some well-integrated scenes of quiet and repose. ©

[Stanley]

Sexual reproduction is the chef d'oeuvre, the master-piece of nature. Erasmus Darwin, 1800.

Natura non facit saltus (“nature does not make great leaps”); nor does science itself, normally. That’s what Loren Eiseley meant when he titled his book on the origins of evolutionary theory Darwin’s Century. Brilliant and profound as Charles Darwin was, his ‘great leap’ was made possible, in some ways anticipated, by the myriad smaller advances others had made. Of these perhaps the most important was Charles Lyell, whose Principles of Geology gave Darwin’s species the vast time they needed to evolve from—perhaps—a single organism, but even before Lyell the idea that our earth was—had to be—“millions of ages” old, was the conclusion of Charles Darwin’s very own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, born into the wealthy Wedgwood-Darwin clan on December 12, 1731, and educated (at Edinburgh) to be a physician. He was indeed a quite passable doctor, also a poet, a translator, a lover, an astronomer, a crusader for women’s education and against slavery, but today let’s recognize him as a pioneer of evolutionary theory. Pondering what seemed to him the clear relationships between species and among generations, Erasmus Darwin decided that change was the rule of life and speculated that all life descended from a common ancestor and constituted, embodied “one living filament” (an eerie, if wholly accidental, prefiguring of the double helix of the DNA molecule). So evolutionary theory grew, through observation, experiment, and contemplation, as one insight begat another, and as Erasmus begat Robert who begat Charles. ©

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That union of man and nature that yields the naturalist is a process of time. Dallas Lore Sharp, 1901.

As American industry waxed in power, it called forth a countervailing force, never quite strong enough, whose adherents believed that nature was something to be preserved rather than exploited, treasured rather than banked. Its heroes were eminent, including a president (Teddy Roosevelt), his Forest Service chief (Gifford Pinchot) and the old Scotsman (John Muir) who guided them both around El Capitan and the redwood groves. Their monuments are magnificent, Yosemite itself, Sequoia and King’s Canyon, Arcadia and Olympia. But those are distant places for most, and we need to treasure nature close by. A pioneer in that exploration was Dallas Lore Sharp, an English professor by trade (at Boston University) but in real life an apostle of observation in your backyard, in a nearby pasture, in the stream not far from home, or in that huge oak just down the street. He wrote a monthly column on those sorts of things for The Atlantic, in a sentimental mode now quite out of style, and his book titles tell his story well enough: Wild Life Near Home, A Watcher in the Woods , ad almost infinitum through The Face of the Fields and The Hills of Hingham. Enough said, perhaps, save that Professor Sharp was born in rural New Jersey on December 13, 1870, got his degrees at Brown University, became for a time a Methodist minister (before going back to the academy), married Grace Hastings, produced a son (Waitstill Sharp) who became a Unitarian missionary famous for saving Jewish refugees in Europe, and is now nearly forgotten. ©

[Stanley]

I scarce ever met with any Person, Man or Woman, of better Natural parts than Lady Conway. Henry More.

“My” century, the 17th, was full of original minds. The names of Hobbes, Locke, Leibniz, and Newton spring to mind easily enough. But that of Anne Finch, Viscountess Conway, is hardly known. It may be a measure of how deeply women were buried in “his”tory that I knew nothing of her until she swam into my vision (as a prominent Quaker convert at a time when it was dangerous to be a Quaker). But that wasn’t the half of it. She existed, for sure, and she was well known in her era, to the Quaker William Penn to be sure, but also to Gottfried Leibniz and to the Cambridge Platonist circle led by Henry More. Anne Finch was born to an eminent family, her father MP for London and Speaker of the Commons in the increasingly troubled sessions of the 1620s, her elder brother Heneage would become Earl of Nottingham and a leading Restoration politician. Anne, born December 14, 1631, may have accompanied her younger brother John to Cambridge, where he studied under More. In any case, Anne became More’s student-by-correspondence and influenced him enough that he dedicated a book to her. Meanwhile, Anne married the Earl of Conway (another student of More’s) and continued her studies. These led Lady Anne Conway (as she is now usually known) into mysticism, logic, and the history of philosophy, to her correspondence with leading European intellectuals, and to written works on philosophy which were printed soon after her early death in 1679. ©

[Stanley]

Art . . . make it proud of you . . .it will fill your heart before it breaks it; it will make you a person in your own right. Maxwell Anderson.

Now and again you run into someone who finds “getting on” in life too inconsistent with their sense of what is right. Call it honesty or courage or just plain orneriness, these sorts find it exceptionally easy to offend others. Such a one was Maxwell Anderson, who would eventually find his niche as a gifted playwright (and screenwriter), but before that found his life to be a series of fights, most of which he lost. Born to a Baptist minister’s family on December 15, 1888, Anderson’s first challenge was moving with his father, as it were from pulpit to pulpit, finally fetching up at the University of North Dakota (BA English, 1911). He taught high school in North Dakota, where he was fired for pacifism. After a Stanford MA, he got fired from Whittier College for defending a student who was a conscientious objector. He then got fired (in succession) from the Evening Bulletin and then the Chronicle (both in San Francisco), and then (by Herbert Croly, no less) from The New Republic. And then he did something new. He actually resigned a job (at the New York World). And then he became a playwright, a rather good one who won the Pulitzer and several Drama Critics’ Circle awards, and certainly prolific. Many of his plays became movies, starring the likes of Bogart, Bergman, and Huston, and he also wrote screenplays of other classic dramas. Among his own titles were What Price Glory?; Key Largo; and Both Your Houses. His film credits include All Quiet on the Western Front; Death Takes a Holiday; and, a little out of character, Ben Hur. Perhaps, when you can’t agree with anybody, you should work for yourself. ©

[Stanley]

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid. Jane Austen.

Blenheim Palace, Nelson’s Column, and the Churchill cult aside, the unflappable British have been generally slow to celebrate their great personages, but it still seems too phlegmatic by half that today is the first ever “Jane Austen Day”. Of course it is her birthday, but it’s number 239 and you might think they’d have gotten round to it sooner. Jane Austen was indeed born on December 16, 1775, both parents from substantial gentry families and her father an Anglican clergyman and gentleman farmer. There were eight children, and the evidence is that they led each other on an unusually lively and creative chase, with Miss Jane often leading the revels, staging plays (some of them her own) and “publishing” manuscript novels and poems. Given the critical role played by marriage in Jane’s published fiction, it’s interesting that neither of the two Austen girls married, but the boys did (Jane proving a devoted aunt). Much of the Austen children’s literary production was humorous, comic plays and satires, a fact which should encourage readers to look for, and find, wit in her later work, not horselaughs to be sure but plenty to smile about, and some to wince at. She’s most famous—and rightly so in my opinion—for Pride and Prejudice (1813), in which a proud young man and a prejudiced young woman are pleasantly pained to find virtue in one another, but the whole corpus can (and should) still be read with pleasure and for instruction, exactly as Miss Austen would have intended. So Happy Jane Austen Day, 2014! ©

[Stanley]

There is no singe provable case of any person being injured or seriously affected by the slightly extra radiation created by these atomic bomb tests. Willard Libby, 1957.

The number of early scientists who killed themselves off experimenting too intimately with new matter is at once distressing and inspiring. But at least these brave pioneers knocked themselves off. Put their discoveries into industrial production, involve others, and caution is more highly recommended. But typically we have been slow to adopt caution. Take radioactivity for example. It was only discovered in 1896 and further nailed down in the following decade by the Curies and Ernest Rutherford. Safety advice came very quickly (indeed, starting in 1896) but was not heeded. As is well known, Madame Curie killed herself with radium poisoning, but what about the women who painted radium dots on clocks at the Waterbury Clock Company in Ottawa, Illinois? They started dying off in the 1920s, and continued to do so. And we’re still dealing with “remedial action” for radioactive contamination at several sites around St. Louis, from the nuclear weapons programs of the 1940s and 1950s. But it’s not all bad news, of course. Radioactive isotopes decay at regular rates, and in 1960 Willard Libby received the Nobel Prize for demonstrating that Carbon 14 and Tritium could be used to provide astonishingly accurate dating of a great number of things, including (inter alia) glacial ice, paleontological artifacts, and the dolmens at Stonehenge. Libby, born on a Colorado farm on December 17, 1908, taught at Berkely, UCLA, Princeton, and Columbia and discovered Carbon 14 dating on a $5,000 grant. Libby did not die of radiation poisoning, although he was far too skeptical about atomic hazards to health.©

[Stanley]

Research in applied science leads to reforms. Research in pure science leads to revolutions. Sir J. J. Thomson.

Words betray their historicity unwillingly, but the Oxford English Dictionary makes it easier. There we learn, for instance, that the English “atom” derives ultimately from the Greek atomos which itself was a compound meaning (roughly) “can’t cut.” Atomos was coined via mind games, as the ancients pondered the nature of matter. And so we inherited a word and used it to designate an indivisible (and “pure”) piece of matter, nature’s smallest building block. And it spawned other words, notably “atomistic,” when applied to ethics the idea that each of us is, at base, a selfish, self-centered, self-absorbed Ayn Randy “self.” But the root concept was not established experimentally until the late 18th century, and then at the end of the 19th century Joseph J. Thomson, an English physicist, demonstrated that the word “atom” was a fraud. He bombarded atoms with cathode rays and by studying the diffraction on the other side reasoned, and then proved, that atoms themselves were made up of smaller parts each of which carried an electric charge. He first called them “corpuscles” but we know them better as “electrons.” Thomson, born in Manchester on December 18, 1856, was also a brilliant teacher, so not only did he win the Nobel for Physics (in 1906), for correcting our dictionaries, but no fewer than eight of his Cambridge students or lab assistants would later win the same prize. (Thomson must have had interesting seminars). He is appropriately buried next to Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey.©

[Stanley]

The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and the possibility of their ever being supplanted . . . is exceedingly remote. A A Michelson, 1903.

That sound is a physical phenomenon that takes time to travel from origin to ear must have been obvious from the first, but light was a different problem. Aristotle thought light was either here or not here, and recorded his disagreement on the subject with Empedocles who thought that light must take time to get from candle to eye. But both were mind-game philosophers, and that we now know that sunlight takes a little over eight minutes to light our life owes to an ingenious experiment thought up first by Léon Foucault in 1857 and then refined by Albert Michelson, another one of those pesky immigrants (his move to the USA gave us our first American Nobel Prize, in 1907). Born in Prussia on December 19, 1852, Albert came to California aged 2. As with many middle-class German Jews, his parents were not religious, and Albert was agnostic. Despite his lack of faith President Grant appointed Albert to Annapolis, where he got interested in optics and started trying to measure the speed of light. He got better and better at it over the years, in the meanwhile proving—in the famous Michelson-Morley experiment—that that space was not made up of the “aether”. Whether or not this discovery helped Albert Einstein to figure out his theory of relativity is a matter of some dispute, but what is clear is that clear that Michelson’s increasingly exact measurements of light’s speed helped—much later and in turn—to validate Einstein. To prove that light bends, it seems, you need to know how fast it travels. ©

[Stanley]

Crime, family dissolution, welfare, and low levels of social organization are fundamentally a consequence of the disappearance of work. William Wilson.

Events in Ferguson have produced a lot of thinking about our society, which may yet be a good thing. But if we are to find some helpful answers, some hopeful outcomes, we have to be sure we are asking the right questions. We could do worse, in that respect, than to consider the life’s work of William Julius Wilson, the son of a coal miner and a kitchen maid, born in hard coal Pennsylvania on December 20, 1935. Aged only 79 today, Wilson is currently still going strong as one of 24 ‘University Professors’ at Harvard, holding a social policy appointment at the Kennedy School of Government. His academic career began at Wilberforce (BA), continued with a PhD at Washington State, and then academic appointments at UMass, Chicago, and Harvard. Along the way, he’s picked up every honor the social sciences have to offer, including 40+ honorary degrees, but right now we should consider him as the author of provocative and hugely useful studies on sociology, economics, and politics. Most notable is Wilson’s 1978 study, The Declining Significance of Race. Way too smart to think we live in a post-racial society, Wilson argues that our basic institutions and social structures have, so to speak, compounded our difficulties and become independent factors, shaping social classes, ethnic groups, and individuals in ways which make the sad events of August 9, 2014 and after almost inevitable. In the “almost,” Wilson would argue, we may yet find ways to ask good questions and find helpful answers. ©