BOB'S BITS

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In Europe i have been accused of taking my scientific ideas from the church. In America I have been called a heretic. Louis Agassiz.

One of the greatest and very possibly the most famous of 19th-century American scientists was an immigrant, Jean-Louis Rodolfe Agassiz, born in French Switzerland on May 28, 1807. Louis Agassiz had a major impact on the professionalization of science and science education, and although a bit of a polymath himself was adamant in his view that university science faculty should specialize in a particular branch of science, even a particular problem. He had a major impact, himself, on geology, but his first appointment, at Neuchatel, was as Professor of Natural History. His move to Harvard precipitated the formation of the Lawrence Scientific School (later incorporated into the university). Married to a member in good standing of the New England elite, Elizabeth Cabot Carey, he also had a certain impact on local society, and hobnobbed with social leaders as well as intellectuals like Benjamin Peirce and Asa Gray. Agassiz’ students (e.g. David Starr Jordan, Charles Walcott, and William James) would themselves shape modern American science and philosophy. Agassiz became known, rightly, as the glacier man, and his work in historical geology (as well as in species classification) helped pave the way for science’s acceptance of Darwinian evolution. That was ironic, as Agassiz could never accept that man had evolutionary ties with (as he put it) monkeys. He himself, however, was a little fuzzy on how God had gone about creating humans, and late in life developed racial theories of several separate human creations in which, of course, God had smiled particularly benevolently on European man, the Caucasian.©

[Stanley]

Every body continues in its state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, except insofar as it doesn't. Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington.

All being well, we plan to travel a bit west of St. Louis on August 21, 2017, to witness a total solar eclipse from within the path of totality. We have an observation site already picked out, and we expect it to be only moderately crowded. Perhaps it would be too much to hope to find there some astronomical enthusiasts set up to reconfirm experimentally the truth of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, for on that day and from that spot (assuming proper equipment) it will be possible to “see” light bend, as far distant stars normally hidden by sunlight will show a measurable “shift” imposed on their light by the sun’s gravitational field. This test was first conducted on May 29, 1919, on the island of Principe, off the Benin coast of Africa, by Arthur Stanley Eddington and Andrew de la Cherois Crommelin. It was a remarkable thing scientifically of course, but also politically, for here, with the Great War’s bloodbath just ended, British and French scientists confirmed a German’s revolutionary theory. And indeed Eddington had begun to prepare his vindication of Einstein while the war still raged, and while he was deeply engaged not only in his own astronomical theorizing but in trying to establish his right of conscience (as a Quaker) to stay out of the war, in prison if need be. Eddington’s passion to set a precedent for an important principal of morality was frustrated by his scientific friends who (more effectively) argued he should be spared because of his importance to science. So it was that while Arthur Eddington brilliantly demonstrated General Relativity he was never able to establish an absolute right of conscience. ©

[Stanley]

I was not interested in doing good. I was interested in not being bored. Solly Zuckerman.

Were it not for the word’s pejorative senses, one might call Solly Zuckerman a “gadfly,” for he certainly flitted about and would cause his fair share of creative destruction. Born in Cape Town on May 30, 1904, in 1993 he inspired laudatory obituaries in the world’s Anglophone press. The NY Times called him “a scientist of scope who guided Churchill” and took the opportunity to teach its readers a new British word, “boffin.” Boffin he was. Zuckerman studied medicine at the University of Cape Town but almost immediately got sidetracked into animal behavior, in the end earning two Oxford doctorates (and a fellowship to Yale) and writing about primates, reptiles, rodents, giraffes, and camels. But he soon branched out into endocrinology. As wartime scientific advisor to Churchill, he fought (eventually with some success) against bombing civilians, but only after close study of the Blitz’s failure to hobble Britain’s war machine or dent civilian morale. Afterwards he counseled on agriculture, ecology, cold war military and diplomatic strategies and much else, and was appointed chief scientific advisor to Harold Wilson’s Labour governments of 1964-70. If the bizarre story of publisher Cecil King’s plot against the Wilson government is true, then Solly Zuckerman helped to foil it. Later he publicly scorned Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars initiative and warned of the holocaust that the nuclear arms race would surely, one day, bring. A man of great charm and wide interests, he counted among his chums the likes of Alfred Hitchcock, e. e. cummings, the Gershwins, and Dashiel Hammett. Not bad for a wild colonial boy, not bad at all.©

[Stanley]

California is like Heber's description of Ceylon, every prospect pleases, but when both the 7th and 8th Commandments are repealed, as Thackeray says the 7th is in Paris, then only man is vile. Jessie Benton Fremont to John Greenleaf Whittier, Februa...

Save for the fact that she was born in Kentucky (near Lexington, on May 31, 1824) , spent most of her youth in Washington. D.C., and was buried in California, Jessie Ann Benton might be seen as one of Missouri’s favorite daughters. She qualifies as the daughter of Thomas Hart Benton, the colorful, powerful politician who represented Missouri in the US Senate for thirty years and was, among other things, the lead architect of the 19th-century idea of Manifest Destiny. “Old Bullion” wanted a son, but he got Jessie, and then she went out and got her father a “real” hero in John C. Frémont. There’s some evidence that Senator Benton didn’t much like Frémont, who captured Jessie’s heart when she was only 15 (they eloped when she was 19), but needs must and Benton helped his son-in-law jump start his career as a politician and military explorer. Some say that Jessie, a consummate politician when women weren’t supposed to be, then took things over, publicizing Frémont’s expeditions, promoting his presidential candidacy as an anti-slavery Republican in 1856 (he came closer than most are aware), getting him established in California. His alleged philandering did not keep her from being, also, his great literary agent and political defender through all the thicks and thins of married life, secession and Civil War and the early development of California and the Arizona Territory. Jessie was, perhaps, more her father’s daughter than she was her husband’s wife. Many thought of Jessie Benton Frémont as the “first lady of the land” and surely Missouri should claim her as one of its own. ©

[Stanley]

Learning can take place only in the absence of defensiveness. William Sloan Coffin.

William Sloane Coffin, Jr., was born into the American elite (in New York, on June 1, 1924), and was educated at Phillips Academy and Yale. In both schools one of his closest friends was George H. W. Bush who (at Yale) helped to insure that Coffin was accepted for membership in the elite Skull and Bones Club. Both men had similarly distinguished records in World War II. But afterwards they led different lives. George Bush’s is well enough known. Coffin, after another spell of CIA service in the early 1950s, got off the boat, so to speak, and went back to Yale to study theology, earning his B.D. (and Presbyterian ordination) in 1956, marrying Eva Rubinstein (the pianist’s daughter) in the same year, and in 1958 accepting appointment as Yale Chaplain. In that position, Coffin decided to teach Yale’s young gentlemen (for Yalies were then still all gentlemen) how to be radicals, as he would put it “true Christians” rather than “true Blues.” He recruited Yale students to (and led) anti-segregation freedom rides in the deep south, played an active role in the first years of the Peace Corps, and then in the mid-60s broke with many fellow liberals to become an early critic—and a vociferous one—of the Viet Nam War, arrested and jailed more than once. Coffin, prep school friend of Bush senior and college chaplain to Bush junior, would be memorably caricatured by yet another Yale man, Gary Trudeau, whose Doonesbury strips gave us all cause to wonder at how common educational experiences could lead people down such different paths. ©

[Stanley]

Play it like something you hear down by the river. Sir Edward Elgar, directions for the second movement of his Symphony #1.

June used to be graduation month USA, and thus appropriate that it was also the birth month of Edward Elgar, the most famous of English composers, born on June 2, 1857, in a serviceable house in the village of Lower Broadheath. His mother was a farm worker’s daughter, an independent sort who converted to Catholicism while pregnant with Edward (her fourth child). By her, he was brought up a Catholic in love with the English countryside. By his piano tuner father (also a good violinist), he was brought up musical. These childhood richnesses became memory strands he plucked out and wove through the music he created. But it was a long road, and although he had some formal training his music education was eclectic, even accidental, including a spell as conductor of the inmates’ concert band at the Worcester and County Lunatic Asylum. Like Vivaldi at his girls’ school, so Elgar with his lunatics was at once constrained and trained by the instruments at hand. He himself branched out from violin to oboe and bassoon, and all this while was reading voraciously and teaching himself German, for he had discovered an ambition and (at 29) a wife, Alice, who recognized his talent and thought that “the care of a genius is enough of a life work for any woman.” Elgar hit his stride the 1890s and composed his most famous work, the Enigma Variations, in 1900. From there it was but a short swagger to the Pomp and Circumstance marches, five of them, the first (1901) best known in the US as a graduation march and in England as the rollicking, rhythmic finale of the London Prom concert season, “Land of Hope and Glory.” Indeed. ©

[Stanley]

A mingled mess . . . full of emotional appeals to class and race prejudices, solemnly put forth as science, On Eugenics, by Raymond Pearl.

Along came Darwin and then Mendel, and the idea of a natural aristocracy (always popular among those who thought of themselves as natural aristocrats) suddenly acquired apparent scientific legitimacy. It probably would have appalled Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel, but by the 1920s it was respectable to advocate selective human breeding (among those of “us” with “good” traits) in order to improve “the race” (by which people meant “us”). But in Baltimore there was a group of hard drinking, conservative iconoclasts gathered around Baltimore’s very own “bad boy,” H. L. Mencken, who thought this a load of liberal claptrap, and at least one of them was a Johns Hopkins scientist, a geneticist, and a pioneer biometrist, Dr. Raymond Pearl. Born in New England on June 3, 1879 and educated at Dartmouth and Michigan, Pearl had himself been drawn to eugenics (as selective human breeding was called), and like many of his era he was a racial bigot. In 1908 he wrote a paper with the provocative title of “Breeding Better Men.” But by the 1920s his devotion to statistics had satisfied him that predicting genetic outcomes was a mug’s game at best and potentially a criminal enterprise. And although no one yet knew about DNA, he thought the idea that “breeding” could guarantee big muscles or a Harvard scholarship a statistical absurdity. So he turned to his friend Mencken and in 1927 published an exposé, not in a scientific journal but in Mencken’s firebrand literary periodical, The American Mercury. Raymond Pearl would go on to prove, in 1938, that smoking tobacco causes death, but it took us a very long while to figure that one out. Marlboro men didn't believe in statistics. ©

[Stanley]

He who rides a tiger should never dismount. Traditional saying.

In our time we have climate change deniers, evolution deniers, and those who insist tobacco smoking is not harmful. The last group, these days, seems to consist mainly of lawyers, but they all remind us that politics and science do, after all, mix. It was just so in ancien régime France, where science was alive and well and enjoyed the patronage of the crown, of liberal aristocrats, and of burgeoning bourgeois industry. It was a good situation, and science prospered. Then came the Revolution, and although many men (and women, for as we have seen there were a few) of science were at first favorably inclined, soon their patronage connections rendered them vulnerable. The sad fate of Antoine Lavoisier, who taught us conclusively that air was not plain, was outlined in an earlier anniverary note. Another aristocratic scientist who came under scrutiny during the Terror was Jean Antoine Chaptal, who had the additional handicap of being (thanks to an uncle’s death) quite rich. Born on June 4, 1756, and soon busily at work (like Lavoisier) on gases, but even busier on industrial processes (like wine-making) involving chemistry, Chaptal was ennobled by Louis XVI on the eve of Revolution. It was bad timing, and he worsened it by contributing a witty pamphlet on internecine strife between the Montagnards and the Girondins. He was arrested and threatened with the guillotine, but the Revolution needed gunpowder and his friends successfully argued that Chaptal was just the man to supply it. After all, he had named nitrogen and knew how to mess around with it. Put at risk by politics, Jean Antoine Chaptal was also saved by politics. ©

[Stanley]

No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. Adam Smith.

Traditional thinking limited virtue to those who were virtuous, whether by religious conversion or the blood of their fathers, or both. But the Enlightenment brought a new conception, based on the “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal.” However, when one sees how people actually behave, say in politics or in the market place, this creates some logical difficulties, at least for anyone who wants most things to turn out well for most people. How to insure that a widespread and even universal equality of virtue doesn’t do us too much social harm was a big problem in 18th-century thought. American revolutionaries thought they’d cracked it with the federalism and the checks and balances of the 1787 Constitution, a mechanism they hoped would run of itself no matter how bad we became. Meanwhile, in Glasgow, Professor of Moral Philosophy Adam Smith beavered away at the problem and came up with The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and The Wealth of Nations (1776). A common-sense fellow and, like his friend David Hume, one who thought it unlikely that a providential God would step in on behalf of virtue, Smith tried to build an ethical balance for society on the basis of what we might best call enlightened self-interest. Those who want to take Smith as the hero of absolute self-interest or unregulated capitalism should take his whole philosophical task into account. Once one does that it becomes no irony, but a pleasing historical coincidence, that Adam Smith (born on June 5, 1723) shares birth dates with the hero of 20th-century welfare economics, John Maynard Keynes (born June 5, 1883).©

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I always say that everything we do springs from English country dancing. Ninette de Valois, interviewed on her 100th birthday.

I suppose if you were born Edris Stannus (in Co. Wicklow, on June 6, 1898), and as a teenager decided you wanted to become a prima ballerina, you’d think about changing your name. And so it was that in 1911 the world got Ninette de Valois. But if it was only a ballerina the world wanted, it got way more than it had bargained for. As Ninette de Valois she danced for Sergei Diaghilev in the Ballets Russes, 1923-1926, becoming a soloist but also learning from him as teacher, choreographer, impresario, and bean counter. And then she moved on to form her own company, the Academy of Choreographic Art, basically a ballet school for girls but the base DNA from which were born the Sadler’s Wells Ballet, the Royal Ballet, the Royal Ballet School, and the Birmingham Royal Ballet. Of course Ninette had help from her friends, notably the indomitable Lilian Bayliss who supplied stages, footlights, ticket offices, patrons, and the other impedimenta of the dance at the Old Vic and Sadler’s Wells theatres. But in the end it was Dame Ninette de Valois, “Madam” as she became known, who created the English ballet (not “British,” she insisted) and discovered or brought to artistic maturity the most famous names in English dance, e.g. Frederick Ashton, Alicia Markova, Moira Shearer, Margot Fonteyn, and Robert Helpmann. Ninette de Valois went on for a long time, outliving almost everyone (not Markova), giving sparkling interviews, patronizing her favorite local pub, enjoying her assigned role as the grey eminence of the dance. She died at 102, affectionately mourned for “her persuasive charm that was almost irresistible and seldom resisted . . . totally unforced, full of fun and humour.”©

[Stanley]

Art hurts. Art urges voyages - and it is easier to stay at home. Gwendolyn Brooks

Had Gwendolyn Brooks stayed in her natal city, Topeka, (born June 7, 1917), she might have been the parent who brought suit in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education. But her parents whisked her away to Chicago, where she encountered a not-quite-segregated school system, attended an all-white school, then an all-black one, and finally the integrated Englewood High School. Chicago was where she found her “voice.” She was, she said, an “organic Chicagoan.” The city was her workshop, her “headquarters,” the rich seam that gave her the characters she would limn memorably enough to become our first black Pulitzer winner, for her second volume of poetry, Annie Allen (Harper & Row: New York, 1949). The volume told, in verse, the story of a young girl, the eponymous Annie, who through struggles and sadness comes to age, wisdom, and a fierce determination to understand and change her world, her particular Chicago. So it’s autobiographical, but beware of that too easy identification. In an influential review of Annie that Brooks always believed made her reputation, Paul Engle said that her Annie Allen was no more “black” poetry than Robert Frost’s was “white” poetry. As Brooks would herself write about Frost as a poet, he was

. . . splendid. With a place to stand. Some glowing in the common blood. Some specialness within. In short, not white but glowing.

Gwendolyn Brooks’s poems are, likewise, splendidly worthy of our attention. ©

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Yes, I have milked a thousand cows. But the cheese is all mine. F. H. King, responding to a critic's charge that his work was derivative.

The “land grant ideal” in public higher education was born in the hothouse of anti-slavery politics in the 1850s and, once the southern states seceded, won through in the 1862 Morrill Act. Once in practice, it had its pioneers. My grandfather qualifies as the founding director of Iowa State’s Extension Service, but one of his predecessor pioneers, and heroes, was Franklin Hiram King, born on a farm near Whitewater, Wisconsin, on June 8, 1848. King was educated at the Whitewater ”normal” school, then at Cornell before taking an appointment at the University of Wisconsin. His professorship, in “Agricultural Physics,” suggests the dominance of agriculture in these institutions. And physics it was. King studied how soils stuck together under the assaults of wind, flood, and frost and urged contour planting and spring ploughing. He studied how air moved in enclosed spaces and how best to keep that air cool and dry, and invented the silo (!!!) and designed a self-ventilating barn, the gold standard of rural architecture before the New Deal’s Rural Electrification Act. He pawned his life insurance policies in order to study farming in Asia, and in a classic work, published posthumously, urged American farmers to emulate certain Chinese practices for the sake of their bank balances and the balances of nature. A progressive Republican (remember when?), he was Teddy Roosevelt’s Director of Soils Management (at one of those unnecessary federal bureaucracies) before returning to a land grant life. Franklin Hiram King’s monuments dot our landscapes, and his buildings are said to have inspired the architecture of Gropius and Wright.©

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I built St. Petersburg as a window to let in the light of Europe. Peter the Great.

In the early modern England monarchy was still the gold standard of government. It could be hazardous to think otherwise, note the fate of Algernon Sidney, but in a world dominated by territorial magnates and landed gentry, the descent of rule by inheritance seemed to legitimize the descent of property and aristocratic status. Then along came Tom Paine and common-sensically blew it all out of the water. Monarchy’s history, Paine wrote, was a compendium of evil tales: of murders, usurpations, invasions, and infanticides. Had there been good kings? If so, it was in spite of the system. Paine used mainly England and Rome for his examples, but he might better have used Russia where even the greatest of Tsars, Peter I, experienced nearly all of Paine’s evils just to establish his legitimacy, and perpetrated a few himself just for good measure. Pyotr Alexeyevich was born on June 9, 1672, and in a fairly short life (d. 1725) ruled successfully and did much to civilize his sprawling empire, but only after surviving a couple of troublesome and murderous regencies, including one where his dominating elder half-sister, Sophia, ruled him through a hole cut in the back of his throne. A royal puppet show. Later Sophia rebelled against Peter. He got her back by forcing her into a nunnery, where she could count herself lucky. He tortured and executed 1,200 of her supporters, pour encourager les autres. Peter indeed modernized Russia, and so he is Peter the Great. But not Peter the Good, for his triumphs came at costs that Thomas Paine might have added to his famous debit account in Common Sense (Philadelphia, 1776). ©

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The Romance of the Great Rebellion . . . a . . . Narrative of the Thrilling Adventures . . . and Happy Rescue of Pauline Cushman (partial title of her autobiography).

In one of her surviving photos (this one by Matthew Brady) Pauline Cushman stares out aggressively, elbow akimbo, and what completes the effect is her Union Army uniform, sabre and all. The photo is real, but after that a great deal is legend, as often happens with spies. She was born Harriet Wood, in New Orleans, on June 10, 1833, and when her parents moved north to set up a trading post in Michigan she was rechristened Laughing Breeze by her Native American playmates. As a young adult (aged 18) she took up acting as "Pauline Cushman," and as the sectional crisis ripened and turned to war, she maneuvered some gullible Rebs into thinking she was one of them and became a Union spy attached to General Rosecran’s division, acting as a camp follower in and around Braxton Bragg’s Tennessee army. How successful she was is difficult to sort out, partly because so much was made of her bravery during and after the war, latterly in a traveling show and a potted biography, but she was certainly arrested by the Confederates, tried, and sentenced to hang. The movement of the armies saved her neck, and Pauline was feted (as a Brevet Major) by Abe Lincoln himself. It must have been a frightening experience, though, and after the war her story was less happy, two more marriages, (one short), two children lost, and a fatal opium addiction. It is impossible to diagnose at this distance but it’s possible Pauline fell victim to PTSD. She had been rediscovered late in her life and so was buried with military honors at the Presidio, San Francisco, where her marker reads “Pauline C. Fryer, Union Spy.” That, it seems, is true enough, for her last husband was a Mr. Fryer.©

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I know very well what I am about, and that my skies have not been neglected. John Constable.

John Constable, born on June 11, 1776, had a good start in life (his father was a wealthy grain merchant), and was early bitten by the art bug. He struggled mightily to reach the top of his chosen profession, but once he reached that pinnacle he found the real estate already occupied, and by a mere barber’s son, Joseph Mallord William Turner (JMW Turner for short). As often happens in such a situation (it’s sometimes tight at the top), the two artists did not get along very well at all. Indeed, they didn’t get on very well even after they died. The two were shown together, at the Royal Academy, in 1832, but a dispute occurred there (it turned, I am assured, on Turner walking in to the gallery, pulling out his palette, and adjusting his entry, a seascape, by adding a small red bouy to it) and the two artists were not shown together again in London until 2010, when a Turner Retrospective at the Tate was thought incomplete without a few Constables present, as it were to enable museum patrons to draw their own comparisons. But the old feud drew attention from the London press, nearly 180 years on. Can we resolve it? Not here, of course, but it can be pointed out that in their lifetimes Turner was better thought of in England, and sooner welcomed into the bosom of the Royal Academy. Meanwhile, Constable’s works did well in contemporary France. Perhaps it’s best to stay on the sidelines and say that both artists painted wonderful landscapes, Constables a bit more bucolic, Turner’s a tad more dramatic. And today both artists are said—in their innovative use of color—together to have influenced the rise of impressionism. After they were dead, of course. ©

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From an immigrant to an immigrant . . . and to all other immigrants who have helped build greater Cincinnati. Dedicatory plaque, Roebling statue at the Roebling span. Given by Matthias Toebben and Family.

Sometimes transforming inventions do nothing more, nor less, than revolutionize a traditional design. So it was with the suspension bridge, man’s way of crossing streams and gaps from time immemorial. But it was limited in load and span, and it awaited modern materials and modern design to allow it to carry the weight of the industrial and transportation revolutions. Perhaps the greatest pioneer of the modern suspension bridge was John Augustus Roebling, born in Prussia on June 12, 1806. After a brief education at technological academy, he migrated to America and with his brother and other neighbors founded Saxonburg, a Prussian settlement near Pittsburgh. Soon he found work on the state-owned Portage Railroad, where the problems of mountain and valley construction set him to thinking how to improve suspension bridge design. Roebling hit on two ideas, the first being woven wire rope, the second (after the runaway success of the cable factory he established in Trenton, NJ) being the web truss. By 1866 Roebling had a dozen long spans to his name, most famously across the Ohio at Pittsburgh and Cincinnati and across the Niagara at the Falls. So when he proposed to connect Brooklyn to Manhattan it was not thought lunatic although the project required a single span of 1600 feet. He won the contract and is rightly regarded as the builder of the Brooklyn Bridge, famed in song, story, and fable (as the first thing a hick tourist buys when he gets to the Big Apple). Sadly, John Roebling died in a construction accident on the last, and the most famous, of his suspension bridges. ©

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That an outcast should become a privileged citizen . . . this was a romance more thrilling than poet ever sung. Mary Antin.

The USA possesses its share of cultural myths, the strongest of them made potent by their rootedness in reality. We did, for instance, actually have a “frontier” and a “wild west,” and they birthed for us much more than a Hollywood genre—although they did that, too. Another such myth grew up around the plain fact that we—most of us—are a nation of immigrants, from all over: a crucible that forged a new nationality some would say, a mongrel pot to those who still think in terms of “’real’ Americans” (to quote a recent vice-presidential candidate). Among those who thought of melting, mixing and melding, undoubtedly Emma Lazarus is the best known for her poem “The New Colossus,” welded to the base of the Statue of Liberty: “give me your tired, your poor. . .” Perhaps better known in her own day was Mary Antin, born in Belarus on June 13, 1881, who came to these shores with her family in 1894 and fell quite in love with the place even though she grew up in one of Boston’s most notorious slums. After an earlier work in Yiddish, her anglophone autobiography The Promised Land (Boston, 1912), first serialized in the Atlantic Monthly, was a huge success both in critical and sales terms, telling the tale of her own assimilation, especially noting how her education (Girls’ Latin in Boston and then Columbia), was really an “act of consecration” for her father. Mary went on to become a prominent progressive Republican (remember when?), an advocate for immigrants’ rights, and withal a famously unpredictable eccentric, proving to the rest of us immigrants that it was possible for a foreigner to become a good American citizen and still be really rather odd. ©

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By some special graciousness of fate . . . I am deposited in the right place at the right time. Margaret Bourke-White.

Hyphenated surnames were still the preserve of the aristocracy in 1927 when Margaret White (born on June 14, 1904) decided to add her mother’s name to became Margaret Bourke-White. Her brother did the same, in honor of their free-thinking parents, a Polish Jew who Anglicized to “White” and an Irish Catholic from the Bronx named Minnie who stuck with “Bourke” all her life. When Margaret hyphenated, she’d earned her BA (at Cornell), had acquired a deep if amateur interest in photography, and had just moved to Cleveland. Perhaps she wanted to be near her brother, then just starting a successful business career, but a girl has to make a living and Margaret began doing industrial photography. But we know her today as one of the 20th century’s most famous photo-journalists, and in her case the hyphen again makes sense because she wrote beautifully about what she saw and what she framed. After 1929, she worked for the Luce empire, starting at Fortune and moving on to Time and Life, and she covered Soviet Russia, WWII (some searing pictures and text from the concentration camps), and the violent partition of India in 1947. Bourke-White was especially good at using pictures to puncture holes in our clichés, most famously one taken during the 1937 Ohio River floods showing black refugees queuing for food in front of a billboard that proclaimed “There’s no way like the American Way” and boasted of the “world’s highest standard of living.” The family pictured on the billboard was, of course, white. A prolific letter-writer, she corresponded with everyone, and her papers (76 linear feet of them!!), housed at Syracuse, surely should be published. ©

[SG note. See THIS LINK for more information]

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Drawing is a way of reasoning on paper. Saul Steinberg.

On the eve of the Great War, Râmnicu Sărat was a small town on the Danube plain with about 15000 people, 10% of whom were Jews. On June 15, 1914, the town got one more, the baby Saul Steinberg. There is no evidence that Steinberg set out to be a cartoonist (few cartoonists do, it seems). Rather he studied Philosophy at Bucharest and then, failing that, he enrolled in 1933 in architecture at Milan. That worked out well, but he had begun to draw for the satirical magazine Bertoldo. This was bad timing. Mussolini had no sense of humor and didn’t like Jews, and so Steinberg the architect (whose cartoons had begun to appear in American magazines) took ship to the Caribbean where he waited for his immigration application (sponsored by Harold Ross of The New Yorker) to come through. After a spell with American military intelligence (in Africa, Italy, and China) Steinberg continued what became a 60-year association with The New Yorker, during which he produced 87 covers, 33 cartoons, and hundreds of small line drawings the magazing used as column fillers. Just as Saul Steinberg never intended to be a cartoonist, so we should remember that he played a creative role in New York’s art world, putting on several important shows (by himself and in partnership with other artists), developing a supply line relationship with leading New York galleries, acquiring a reputation as a demon lover, and withal traveling the world as an official representative of American high culture and high humor. He remained fascinated by line, color (almost always flat, his color functions as filler), and whimsical outcomes or perspectives.©

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Once, power was considered a masculine attribute. In fact, power has no sex. Katherine Graham

It is an irony that Katherine Meyer Graham is seen as a giant of the “liberal media” [sic], for her parents were Republican activists and she married the scion of a Florida family that produced a flock of conservative politicians (albeit Democrats) including Senator Bob Graham. If it is an irony, it’s one that reminds us that once the Republicans had a progressive wing, powerful and electorally successful. Miss Meyer was one of them. Born to a wealthy New York family on June 16, 1917, she never quite got over her domineering, eccentric mother but went to the right schools, finally the University of Chicago and, her father having bought the Washington Post at a bankruptcy option, started off her working life as a journalist (in San Francisco). Katherine transferred to the Post in 1938, married Phil Graham in 1941, and after Phil got through with the war he was made publisher by Katherine’s dad. In Washington, the Grahams moved easily among Republicans and Democrats, at least socially, but under Phil the Post became more clearly identified as a liberal paper. Phil’s suicide (1962) vaulted an uncertain, vulnerable Katherine into the executive chair of a publishing empire, but she had an eye for talent (Ben Bradlee was her man as managing editor of the Post, Warren Buffet her financial guru), and she earned the affections of her staff and the enmity of the Nixon White House. Famously, Attorney General John Mitchell threatened to squeeze “Katie’s” tits in a wringer, but in the Watergate scandal it was Mitchell’s that got squeezed, and “Katie" Graham of the Post played a critical role in the drama. ©

Bob Bliss

[Stanley]

We should be rigorous in judging ourselves and gracious in judging others. John Wesley.

Throughout Protestant history, religious revival has most often produced ecclesiastical schism, even splintering. Individuals suddenly possessed of holiness—as they see it—are likely also to discover new dogma and create from it new churches. And so we have, especially in the USA, a kaleidoscope of denominations. But the Rev’d John Wesley, born in Lincolnshire on June 17, 1703, thought it should not be so. Himself seized—in the unlikely setting of 18th-century Oxford—by a “New Holiness”, Wesley insisted that he and his legions of disciples would stay within the Anglican communion. Church of England theology was in flux, generally moving towards reasonableness and “free will,” so he was comfortable to stay there and preach to those who would willfully apply the means of grace to their lives and work to liberate themselves and others from the dominion of sin. His own religious experiences gave him the strength, the discipline, to succeed, and so he preached a similar “method” to others and in 1739 created the Methodist Society. Wesley’s “Methodism" stayed within the Church of England, but in time and especially in the North American colonies and then the infant USA, the ‘method’ became its own church. In the expansive conditions obtaining in frontier America, this Wesleyan stress on individual holiness and free will conversion—even, in the North, to social perfectionism—attracted millions. But because of the church’s strict episcopal discipline, Methodists stuck together, containing their zeal and making their church the largest and fastest growing Protestant communion in the young Republic. ©

[Stanley]

His kindness to those around him was a natural extension of his love for his own family. US Naval Laboratory, obituary of Jerome Karle, 2013.

Physics probably grabs most headlines in its theoretical speculations and empirical research on the structure and origins of the universe, black holes and all, but the mother of all the sciences (according to physicists) is even more intimately concerned with the structure and properties of matter. And when you get down to basics, dealing with molecules and atoms raises some profound theoretical and observational difficulties. One of those difficulties might be stated as “how do you see something that cannot be seen?” One of the answers is to bombard the something (with smaller units of matter or energy) and see what comes out the other end. And so for instance we have cloud chambers, something that Herman Kirkpatrick bombarded me with in high school physics (only to find that nothing came out the other end) but today we focus on X-Ray Diffraction. Its development is a fascinating story of 20th-century science, touching on almost everything (e.g. Martian soil!!) and playing a vital role in the discovery of DNA. The importance of X-ray Crystallography may be quantified in the number of Nobels it has generated, directly or indirectly. One of the most important went to Jerome Karle, who was born into a family of artists on June 18, 1918 but studied physics (at CCNY, Harvard, and Michigan) instead. He and his wife Isabella (they married in 1942) then worked most of their lives for the US Navy, retiring from its Research Laboratory only in 2009 (!!!!), an interesting saga in itself. Along the way to his 95 years (he died in 2013) Karle taught us a dramatically new way of using X-Rays to paint the structures of very small things, for which fine art he was awarded the Nobel in 1985. ©

[Stanley]

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction. Blaise Pascal.

Rather late in his short life, Blaise Pascal wrote the theological essays for which he is most famed, Lettres provinciales (1656-1657) and Pensées (ca. 1662). Published after his death, both caused controversy and placed Pascal in the Jansenist movement, perhaps best conceived as incorporating into Catholicism important principles of the Calvinist reformation. In the Pensées we find “Pascal’s Wager,” the famous argument that the rational person will elect to believe in God after weighing the odds of disbelief. It’s worth looking up. But it also suggests something of Pascal’s “other side,” for he was a gifted mathematician and the inventor of an ingenious calculating machine, the “Pascaline,” which he hoped would help his father in calculating taxes. Pascal made a number of these, and a few survive to this day. Pascal’s father was indeed a prominent tax collector, who home schooled his three children (including sister Jacquéline, by the way) in both arts and sciences. Blaise Pascal, born in the Auvergne on June 19, 1623, was especially precocious, and when dad was promoted to Paris became a bit of a sensation in the salons, especially for his mathematical genius. René Descartes took an interest, but thought “Pascal’s Theorem” too advanced for a child of 16. Descartes was finally satisfied, and Blaise Pascal went on to important discoveries in probability and statistics, geometry, and (in physics) the weight, substance, and properties of the air around us. His ‘conversion’ to Jansenism lends weight to the notion that the scientific revolution of the 17th century owed something to the Reformed tradition in religion.©

[Stanley]

We were so poor and everybody around us was so poor that it was the forties before anyone even knew there had been a depression. Chet Atkins.

Chester Burton “Chet” Atkins started out in poverty. He didn’t qualify as poor white trash (he was hungry only sometimes), but being born (June 20, 1924) to a poor rural household in Tennessee’s hill country almost qualifies. Plus Chet had nighttime asthma and the only treatment affordable was to sleep sitting in a straight-back chair. Shy and withdrawn, he became musical, moving from uke to fiddle to a warped guitar he acquired from his brother. It was the instrument he would make his own, and his largely self-taught skills (Merle Travis offered pointers) would take him to the pinnacle of the country music industry. But at first he played where he could, and his first breakthroughs were with swing bands. This and his sophisticated fingering made “country” folk suspicious of him at first, and perhaps helped Atkins himself to become famous as the musician who successfully bridged the gap between ‘country’ and the rapidly expanding world of ‘pop.’ After some time in Chicago, though, Atkins’ first step to real fame was pure country, playing for Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters (including June Carter) and then (1952) as a member in good standing of the Grand Old Opry. Once established in Nashville, he got involved in production, becoming VP at RCA Victor and bringing many famous names to the label, including Charley Pride, one of the few African-American country artists. Atkins himself played jazz (e.g. at the Newport Festival), enjoyed great pop success as an individual artist (not least in Britain), and finished out his career playing "mostly country" for NPR as an honored guest on Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion. ©

[Stanley]

To be made to feel that I was not wanted, although in a place where I had every right to be, even months afterwards caused me sometimes weeks of pain. Henry Ossawa Tanner.

After Renaissance artists had laid bare the wonders of the human body, sometimes literally through cadaver dissection, art in some societies became downright prudish, nowhere more so than in the USA. Would-be painters got no closer to painting from live models than discussions (classes segregated by gender, of course) and work with plaster models. Then along came Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy, who taught from live models and (horrors!!!) admitted women to his studio classes. What is less well known is that Eakin also integrated his classes by race, beginning with Henry Ossawa Tanner. Tanner’s mother Sarah had escaped slavery and, once in Pittsburgh, married Benjamin Turner, a pioneer pastor of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Henry was born on June 21, 1859, and was admitted to Eakins’ class in 1879. Facing live models and perhaps the occasional cadaver, Henry Tanner developed into a fine painter of the human figure and visage and became one of Eakins’ favorite students. But American racism wore him down, and in 1891 he decamped to Paris, where he blossomed as an artist, even winning a medal at the annual Salon. In 1899 he married Jessie Olsson, an American opera singer, and they enjoyed a happy life despite strong disapproval emanating from the land of the free. Tanner’s WWI work (painting battle scenes, working for the Red Cross, etc.) won him the Legion of Honor from the French government, but full American recognition of his talent was delayed until long after his death (in 1937). Today, Henry and Jessie Tanner lie together in the graveyard at Sceaux, upstream from Paris. ©