BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

The true college will ever have but one goal - not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes. W.E.B. Dubois.

Most northern evangelical Protestants were, by the 1840s, anti-slavery, but that did not mean unity. Some, for instance, demanded immediate abolition, and this was among the fissures that produced, in 1846, the American Missionary Association, a ragbag of Congregationalists, Methodists, and Presbyterians that included Owen Lovejoy, brother of the martyred Elijah Lovejoy and an eminent Congregational minister. Come the Civil War, AMA volunteers (clergymen and others) follwed the Union Army south, eager to minister to the needs of the black population, slave and free. Among the most important needs, they thought, was education, and (all things considered) their record was phenomenal. Besides many freedmen’s schools, scattered about the southern landscape, the AMA founded no fewer than eleven degree-granting institutions, for which they were wholly or mainly responsible. The most famous of these were Fisk (1866), Howard (1867) and the Hampton Institute (1868), but the very first was Atlanta University, founding date September 19, 1865, 150 years ago today. The AMA still exists as a constituent of the Justice and Witness division of the United Church of Christ. Atlanta University’s successful history also includes a series of mergers, some of them masterminded by a distinguished faculty member, W. E. B. Dubois (at Atlanta for several prodigiously productive decades), and it still exists as the graduate school division of Clark Atlanta University, a Carnegie Research Institution pulling down, at last report, almost $20 million annually in research grants. Happy 150th birthday to a pioneer in American higher education. ©

[Stanley]

Sir James Dewar /Is cleverer than you are. /None of you asses /Can condense gases Anonymous limerick.

Given that Dewar’s is the leading Scotch on the American market, one might guess that the “Dewar’s flask” was made so that one could take a nip on cold, windy days at the game or in the hunting blind. But it’s not so, although it does have much to do with “cold.” The Dewar’s flask is the original vacuum flask, the original Thermos ©, and it was invented by a Scotsman indeed: Sir James Dewar as he became in his eminence as a leading scientist of his day. But Sir James was not of the distillery family. This Dewar was born in very modest circumstances in Kincardine, on September 20, 1842. Both parents died when he was but 15, but his talents had already been noticed and he was taken through the Scottish educational system at a rate of knots to be appointed (in 1863) assistant in the Edinburgh University chemistry lab of Sir Lyon Playfair. Within ten years he was Professor at Cambridge, and soon after that landed the coveted post as Fullerian Professor in the Royal Institution. Meanwhile, he was becoming a physicist, particularly fascinated by the properties of the gases under low temperatures—liquified indeed—and essaying the most wonderful ways of makng them, studying them, and using them. And so (in 1891) he invented the vacuum flask in order to store them. But Sir James (as he was by then) neglected to take out a patent, which was seized upon by a small American company, “Thermos”, of Norwich, CT, which in 1903 took out its own patent. In the ensuing court case Dewar’s invention was recognized but his rights to profit from it were not upheld. In defiance of patent law, many scientists still call the things “Dewar flasks” which is, it seems to me, just as it ought to be.©

[Stanley]

The brain upon which my experiences have been written is not a particularly good one. H. G. Wells.

His Bromley childhood was a bit catch-as-you-can, and in its way exciting. He was born Herbert George Wells, on September 21, 1866, and his parents’ dilapidated odds and ends shop (mainly china and sporting goods) did not provide steady sustenance. Windfalls came when his father, a Kent cricketer, struck it rich on the pitch. Another windfall came when “Bertie” broke his leg and, confined to bed, discovered books. All through a childhood of difficult apprenticeships and episodic education, books kept alive Wells’s imagination, and then a scholarship to study science under Thomas Henry Huxley helped him to cultivate a taste for reality. These polarities, dreams and realities, would characterize his prodigious output as a writer. It all started with a science fiction novel, and that would remain characteristic, but his vision was wide and would produce social criticism, realistic fiction, political polemics, theology, utopias and dystopias, and (heaven help us) history. Throughout, there was a serious interest in science, and Wells’s science fiction was regarded as foundational by many later writers in the genre. There was also a nearly bipolar merging of eugenics with anti-racism, persistent and peculiar (we were all mongrels, Wells finally concluded, so why bother with racial purity?). In this prolific writer there was also an unslakable thirst for intimacies with women, most famously with Margaret Sanger and Rebecca West. Wells reflected, late in life, that he was never a great lover but had had many loves. His biographers are still counting, and David Lodge has put it all into a memorable fiction, A Man of Parts. To which one can only say, indeed. ©
Bob Bliss

[Stanley]

If you want to be fashionable, be always in the company of fashionable people. Ward McAllister.

The new aristocracy of 19th-century America was preoccupied—some say obsessed—with issues of membership. Money was important, but there was so much of it that distinctions begged to be drawn, primacies established, pecking orders imposed. The whole edifice was savaged by Edith Wharton (by birth and marriage, a member in good standing) in The House of Mirth (1905). But in order to be the subject of such a disturbing novel, the structure had first to be designed, and one of the leading architects (by her estimation, the architect) was Caroline Schermerhorn Astor, born into the older Dutch aristocracy of New York on September 22, 1830. Caroline (“Lina” was her inappropriate diminutive) then married into the neweraristocracy, the Astors, and soon set about to devise ways to exclude the newest aristocracy—or make them pay dearly for admission. Lina’s first problem was her sister-in-law, an elder Mrs. Astor who disputed primacy with her, but the issue was decided when the elder Astors moved to England, leaving Lina as “The” Mrs. Astor. At which point Lina and her cousin Ward McAllister set about the task of formalizing McAllister’s claim that American high society was defined and delimited by “The 400” top families. Most famously, they tried to exclude the Vanderbilts from “The 400” (Lina thought railroad money “distasteful”) but were foiled by Alva Vanderbilt’s clever use of social convention to gain Lina Astor’s attendance at Alva’s daughter’s coming out ball. Lina Astor (possibly overcome by reading The House of Mirth?) finally laid down her crown and sceptre at her Fifth Avenue mansion in 1908. Appropriately, the Empire State Building would soon arise on that very spot.©

[Stanley]

The Christian religion is the religion of our country. William McGuffey, foreword to the first edition of the McGuffey Reader.

Today concerns are expressed about those who wish to rewrite schoolbooks in line with their image of the world, demoting evolution to “only a theory,” suggesting that slavery had nothing to do with the Civil War, and failing to mention “capitalism” (“free enterprise” is preferred). Often such folk echo my grandfather in urging readoption of the famed McGuffey’s Readers, the most successful textbooks of 19th-century America. But among questions the McGuffey crowd needs to answer is, which edition? McGuffey’s Readers were the creation of William McGuffey, born on September 23, 1800 and educated episodically but well enough to become Professor of Languages at Miami of Ohio and then Professor of Moral Philosophy at Virginia. It was while he was at Miami that he wrote the four McGuffey’s Readers, designed to see pupils through high school. They were indeed popular, Christian, quite specifically Presbyterian and Calvinist, and culturally of a prounounced WASPish bent. They sold 122+ million copies. But well over half those, including (almost certainly) the ones revered by grandpa and others (including Henry Ford) were edited out of all recognition by clever publishers who saw that the schoolroom was becoming more diverse and educational requirements much more demanding. So volumes 3 and 4 virtually disappeared (as too elementary to save), and the two primary school volumes were almost totally rewritten. One cannot say whether McGuffey would have approved. He died six years before the 1879 edition hit the market. What can be said is that the political editing of school textbooks had become a national pastime.©

[Stanley]

The Government of the United States, then, though limited in its powers, is supreme, and its laws, when made in pursuance of the Constitution, form the supreme law of the land, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithst...

24th September is a doubly signal day in American legal history for it was on this day in 1755 that John Marshall was born, and it was on this day in 1789 that the new United States Congress passed the first Judiciary Act. The new Constitution (of 1787) provided (Article III) for a “Supreme” Court and for “such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time establish.” Indeed the prospect of a uniform system of law, with clear jurisdictions for state and (new) national courts was one of the attractions of the Constitution (for some: for others it was and has remained an anathema). So the first congress got right to work and within a month we had the Judiciary Act of 1789; it created a supreme and some inferior courts (on which, at the time, supreme court justices sat). The Act also provided for a Chief Justice. Beyond doubt the most important Chief Justice in American history was John Marshall of Virginia, the fourth to hold the office and (still) the longest serving Chief Justice in US history (1801-1835). His landmark cases established the functional meanings of “supreme” and set many other critical precedents. The most famous were Marbury v. Madison (1803), McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), Cohens v. Virginia (1821) and Gibbons v. Ogden (1824). Look them up, and discover why and how the “Supreme” Court of the United States became much more than just a name.©

[Stanley]

So too we are dwarfs astride the shoulders of giants. We master their wisdom and move beyond it. Isaiah di Trani, circa 1240.

Isaac Newton famously wrote that if he seemed to see further, it was only by “standing on the shoulders of giants.” It expressed a modesty made all the more becoming by Newton’s towering genius, but ironically Newton was probably quoting Bernard of Chartres, a medieval philosopher. Indeed the idea is an old one, and expresses an underlying reality that most knowledge is indeed cumulative. Another who saw further was Louis Pasteur, often credited with the discovery that many of our diseases are carried, and caused, by organisms much smaller than ourselves. And yet Pasteur, too, acknowledged his own set of pioneers, among whom the most important was Agostino Bassi de Lodi, born in Italy on September 25, 1773. His father was a wealthy landowner and lawyer, but also an enthusiastic amateur in science, very much an Enlightenment gentleman. Bassi himself carried that tradition on, and at the turn of the 19th century became interested in a disease plaguing the Italian silk industry, a kind of white mold that was killing domestic silkworms. Using a clever brain, primitive laboratory equipment, and incredible persistence, Bassi concluded (in 1835) that the disease (mal del segno) was caused by a pathogen carried by, or on, a fungal spore. His recommendations (basically hygienic) rescued the Italian silk industry and made him famous throughout Europe. Bassi went on to make similar discoveries and suggestions concerning (inter alia) potato blight, syphilis, winemaking, and leprosy. His works were translated into French and read by a young Louis Pasteur, a genius who gladly gave credit to his very own giant by hanging a portrait of Agostino Bassi in his laboratory office. ©

[Stanley]

No person is your friend who demands your silence. Maggie Lena Walker.

According to her own assertion, Maggie Lena Mitchell was born on September 26, 1868. But it is certain that she was born in 1864 to an unwed mother, and later changed her birthdate to make it appear she had been born after her parents’ wedding day in 1868. That transition from illegitimacy marked also a transition from slavery, for at Maggie’s birth her father was a slave in Richmond. Her mother was free, and worked in the household of Elizabeth Van Lew. Ms. Van Lew was that rare bird, a Virginia abolitionist, and she (and Maggie’s mother) worked as spies for the Union in the capitol of the Confederacy. So Maggie Mitchell had quite an odd pedigree. It became odder still, for by degrees Maggie Lena Walker (she married Armstead Walker in 1886, and they had two sons) became a laundress’ assistant, a school teacher, a member and then the leader of a fraternal burial benefit order (the Order of St. Lukes), then when Armstead Walker died in 1915 a banker and businesswoman in her own right. Nor was she one of those who, having pulled herself up to wealth and eminence, set about pulling the ladder up. In Richmond she became a leader of efforts to gain full civil rights for African-Americans as newspaper publisher and editor and local president of the NAACP. Maggie built solid foundations for her own family, too. When her sons married, they moved in with her, and the Walker house grew by degrees into a notable Richmond mansion. Still owned by her descendants in 1979, it became in that year the Maggie L. Walker National Historical Site. There you can see her fine furniture and inspiring private papers, and also her wheelchair, for Maggie Walker finished her career as a handicapped person.©

[Stanley]

I personally feel that I cannot leave. Men are not asked to leave their ships . . . and women are not asked to leave their children. Minnie Vautrin, April, 1937, Nanking.

Minnie Vautrin was born on September 27, 1886, in a tiny Illinois town. Her mother died when she was six, and the courts decided that her father, a French immigrant blacksmith, was not a safe pair of hands for a little girl. Minnie thought otherwise and after living in a series of foster homes she was allowed to return to her dad, where she immediately assumed a housekeeper role. Alongside that, she also was brilliant in school, and in due course won a scholarship to Illinois Normal (now Illinois State) where she majored in mathematics, finished first in her class, and discovered a passion for volunteer work. That passion took her to China for a year’s tour as a missionary-teacher, but she stayed for nearly 30, a span broken only by a long furlough to earn a graduate degree (in education) at Columbia and then, later, to care for her aged father. At Ginling College, in Nanking, Minnie had a major impact on education programs and on the college’s role in social welfare. She encouraged her students to bring these two concerns together in their own lives and prepare to help China’s poor to a better life. Her authoritarian methods were not universally popular, but proved effective in helping the city prepare, as best it could, for the Japanese invasion. During the horrors of the “Nanking Massacre” (an event that still disturbs Sino-Japanese diplomacy) Minnie Vautrin saved many lives and has since become the equivalent of a Chinese saint. But she could not save thousands. What went on in Nanking that she could not stop brought on a severe and lasting depression. Evacuated to the USA, Vautrin attempted suicide several times, finally succeeding on May 14, 1941. ©

[Stanley]

I have become more and more convinced that teaching is absolutely vital to everything we do. John Wedgwood.

Doubtless every family has one skeleton in its closet, likely more, but few families can have produced so many men and women of real accomplishment as have the Wedgwoods of Staffordshire. Ever since 1612, when Gilbert Wedgwood married an heiress and used the proceeds (so to speak) to establish a pottery, the clan has through marriages involving a good deal of cousinage spawned potters of course but also a parade of scientists, philosophers, reformers, mathematicians, and composers. The linked Wedgwood cousinages include the Darwins, the Huxleys, the Keyneses, and the Trevelyans. Today’s note, however, deals with someone in Gilbert’s direct line, John Wedgwood, who was born on September 28, 1919, to interesting parents (a potter father, of course, who campaigned against the evils of inherited wealth and a mother who was a birth control advocate and polio sufferer). John’s medical education was interrupted by his war service and delayed by his grievous war wounds (his minesweeper blew up under him), but in due course he fetched up at a hospital for incurables near London, found that most of his patients were merely old, and virtually invented British geriatric medicine. In a career marked by astonishing energy, dogged persistence, and an optimist’s view that his colleagues’ best traits could always be found and then must always be credited, Wedgwood redrew the National Health Service protocols for treating the elderly disabled. Basically, his regimen was quite simple. Treat each elderly patient as an individual, hopeful case. His work (which even extended to redesigning wheelchairs) went on far beyond his retirement, and finished with his death in 2007, ©

[Stanley]

A wise parent humors the desire for independent action, so as to become the friend and advisor when his absolute rule shall cease. Gaskell, North and South, 1854.

The post-1660 attempt by the English (Anglican) establishment to exclude dissenters (Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers, and in due course Unitarians) from the fruits of public life was partially successful, but its more lasting effect was to create a reservoir of creative energy. So we find the great banks (e.g. Lloyds and Barclays), inventors and scientists (e.g. Joseph Priestley), entrepreneurs (e.g. the Wedgwoods), and social and political critics like Tom Paine. And some would argue that the strongly personal and introspective moralities of protestant dissent found another outlet in improving fiction, novels of social criticism or personal growth. Here Exhibit A might well be Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, born into a Unitarian family on September 29, 1810 in what was then a western suburb of London. Her father and aunts were her instructors (she also attended a Wedgwood-endowed school), and they instilled in her a belief in the possibilities of human progress, an awareness of the realities of social injustice, and a belief that good people could, through reflection and action, do something about both. Her husband William Gaskell, a Unitarian minister, shared these views, and her fiction (Elizabeth began writing in earnest in 1847) reflected them. And once she’d started she could not stop. Before her death in 1865, she produced a flood of novels, novellas, and short stories, a biography of Charlotte Brontë and reportage on English and French social conditions. Elizabeth Gaskell’s fiction is today used heavily by social and economic historians as providing sharp, imaginative insight into the human realities of industrializing Britain, and they are good reads, too. ©

[Stanley]

Something entirely new seems to have been given me. Nellie Tayloe Ross, 1924, on her election as Wyoming governor, the first woman governor in the USA.

30th September is a date of some significance in the history of women’s rights in the United States, for it was on this day in 1889 that the Wyoming state constitutional convention voted for female suffrage, thus confirming a previous decision by the territorial legislature. With a few insignificant exceptions, American female suffrage began in the west, with laws passed by the territorial legislatures of Wyoming (1869), Utah (1870), and Washington (1883). Meanwhile, back in the civilized east, where the women’s movement had started (the Seneca Falls, NY, declaration of July 4, 1848 is a conventional date), things had slowed down. By 1914, all of the mountain and pacific states had embraced women’s suffrage; only Kansas east of the Rockies had done so. But on 30th September 1868, an eastern pioneer of women’s rights, Louisa May Alcott, published the first installment (in that day, many novels were first published by installment) of her novel Little Women. Louisa Alcott, whose father Bronson was also a reformer (of education and diet, among other things), had published her first work in 1852, and then during the American Civil War served as a nurse in the US Sanitary Commission. The Sanitary Commission itself, although essentially a creation of the federal government’s war machine, served as an important focus for women’s freedom to act as public persons, whether as administrators, local fundraisers, or battlefield nurses. So on September 30, let us remember the men of Wyoming, who voted for women’s rights, and the “little women” (Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy) of Louisa May Alcott, whose life embodied them.©

[Stanley]

The score is not a bible, and I am never afraid to dare. Vladimir Horowitz.

Musical virtuosi are often difficult. The all-time champions may be operatic sopranos (the word diva has become an insult in common usage), but other stars in the classical world will also insist on their eccentricities. Take Vladimir Horowitz, the last century’s most brilliant concert pianist, and his several temperamental retirements from (and returns to) the concert stage. In the last of his re-emergences (1974-78 and 1983-86) he insisted on using only his own piano, bringing along his own food and his own cook, and insuring that his hotel rooms were redecorated to a suitable standard. He was not, then, everyone’s favorite genius, but thousands flocked to hear him, and there were mob scenes when, aged 83, he returned to Russia for concerts in Moscow and Leningrad. Born Vladimir Gorowitz, in Kiev, on October 1, 1903 (he later claimed 1904), into a highly cultured and assimilated Jewish family, he left Russia after the Revolution and, at his Berlin début in 1925, adopted the name “Horowitz.” His daring play and dazzling technique brought him instant fame, a New York premier performance in 1928, and a new home in the USA (he became a citizen in 1944 and celebrated by giving public concerts to raise war bonds). After the war his concert career continued in fits and starts (one Horowitz “revival” was apparently made possible by shock therapy) and from 1928 to the year of his death (1989) he made recordings of many composers, which some still prize as the best available. But not all agree. As with his temperament, so it was with his playing. Horowitz’s insistence upon the performer’s duty to “interpret” led some to damn him for “distortion and exaggeration.” Listen, and take your pick. ©

[Stanley]

Stay, aahhh, just a little bit longer. Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs, 1959.

Confessing one’s favorite pops is hazardous, but today calls for courage; two all-time great pops (in my view) share significant anniversaries: “Stay,” by Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs, and “American Pie,” by Don McLean. “Stay” (the shortest song to lead the US charts, at 1:37) released on October 2, 1959 and quickly made its way to No. 1. It was a Columbia recording, in Columbia, South Carolina, not on the coveted Columbia © label. The Zodiacs had recently regrouped, and could only afford to rent a local Quonset hut for the recording. And “American Pie”? Well, it was one of the longest songs ever to reach No. 1 (the US in 1971, the UK in 1972), at 8:33. But the anniversary in question is singer-songwriter Don McLean’s, who was born on October 2, 1945, in New Rochelle, NY, of a mixed marriage (Celtic and Italian). So Don is 70 today and you can wish him many happy returns on his website. It would be more instructive, however, to note that in 2015 he has himself finally and fully explained the song’s complex meanings. Why? Well, it may have had to do with his decision to sell, at Christie’s the auctioneer, the original song script. Christie’s, who know a good thing when they see it, put out McLean’s explanation on internet video just before the auction, and the paper version sold in April for no less than $1,200,000. If you are still curious about it, the gist of the Christie’s interview is available for cheap on The Huffington Post and Daily Telegraph websites. “Stay” has also enjoyed ‘posthumous prosperity’ with re-recordings by The Hollies and The Four Seasons and in the 1987 film Dirty Dancing (speaking of nostalgia). Let’s hope some of the money went to the Zodiacs.©

[Stanley]

Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look/ He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.. Julius Caesar, Act 1, Scene 2.

Back when western political elites were classically educated, the decline of the Roman Republic and its translation into an empire were subjects of deep study and deep disagreement. Those of ‘republican principles mourned the corruptions of the old republic, celebrated its virtues, and sought both out among contemporaries whether to stop the rot or strengthen the res publica, the “public good.” Among their heroes were Julius Caesar’s assassins, Gaius Cassius Longinus and Marcus Junius Brutus, brothers-in-law and friends of Cicero. Cassius was born on October 3, sometime before 85 BCE. Cassius interested Shakespeare and should interest us, a hater of despots who began his political career by defying a school bully who was the son of the dictator Sulla. Cassius got away with that, went off to Rhodes to study Greek literature and philosophy, and returned to the life of a Roman Senator even more devoted to republicanism and its virtues. Not surprisingly, he opposed Julius Caesar from the critical moment when Caesar “crossed the Rubicon” and even more so after Caesar was proclaimed ‘dictator in perpetuity.” Cassius (and Brutus) formed and led the plot to assassinate Caesar, which succeeded on the Ides of March, 44 BCE. Cassius then led the war against Caesar’s self-proclaimed successors, the Triumvirs. Believing himself to be on the losing side of the Battle of Philippi, Cassius ordered his freedman Pindarus to kill him. Cassius, mourned by Brutus as “the Last of the Romans,” thus died in error on his birthday in 42 BCE. Without “brave Cassius,” the wars went on, but in 27 BCE, Octavian, the surviving Triumvir, was proclaimed Emperor Caesar Augustus, and Cassius’s beloved Republic was dead. ©

[Tripps]

A very timely posting, following the death yesterday of Dennis Healey. I read that he got a double first in 'Greats' at Oxford in the 1930's. Since I only vaguely knew what that meant, I checked it out.

Oxford Greats

It gives me a headache just reading the syllabus. Rather worryingly - it is said that Boris Johnson also got this degree. If they are so clever, why do they join the Bullingdon Club?

[Stanley]

Even if students cannot become assistant professors at an early age they should be encouraged to do original work. Kenichi Fukui.

My chemistry education finished on a high note with Alan MacDiarmid, a brilliant lecturer who also (by misadventure) became my lab instructor in second semester. In spite of this, he won the chemistry Nobel in 2000 with a Japanese colleague and friend, Hideki Shirakawa. Indeed, chemistry had been alive and well in Japan for a long time. Institutional and industrial science and technology were the favored routes by which the nation “westernized.” Another Japanese chemistry Nobelist was Kenichi Fukui, born in Nara Prefecture on October 4, 1918. He first studied biology, but changed to chemistry because he was attracted by its “more logical character,” its greater dependence on experiment, and its (correspondingly?) lesser demands on memory. Fukui did his graduate work at Kyoto University, and turned to organic chemistry where, first, he worked on synthetic fuels for the military. After the war, he turned to a more theoretical issue, trying to understand how and why it was that certain organic chemistry reactions occur much more quickly than others. Fukui was also an inspiring teacher, and it was in concert with his students that he presented his groundbreaking paper (in 1952, in the Journal of Chemical Physics) on a ‘molecular orbital theory’ of reaction rates in aromatic hydrocarbons. This was not much noticed at the time, but Fukui’s theories have stood the tests of time and experiment. In 1981, the Nobel committee awarded the chemistry prize jointly to Fukui and Roald Hoffman (of the USA) for their independent work “concerning the course of chemical reactions.” Kenichi Fukui died in 1998. Hoffman, 20 years younger, still works in his Cornell University laboratory.©

[Stanley]

Children don't expect their beloved writer to redeem humanity. . . Only the adults have such childish illusions. Isaac Singer, Banquet Speech, Stockholm, December 1978.

It is said that students learn more from other students than from their teachers. Perhaps so, but occasionally at least students can be resistant to their fellows’ wisdom, as for instance I was when (in my senior year) my flatmates urged upon me the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer. I still haven’t read anything by Singer, and more’s the pity as he sounds like someone who dispensed wit and wisdom in great and nearly equal measure. The Nobel committee thought so, speaking of his “redeeming, melancholy sense of humor and [his] clear sightedness free of illusion.” Singer’s world, the committee noted, was gone forever (he grew up and began to write in the Jewish quarter of Warsaw) and yet still Singer wrote with a kind of worldly-wise optimism. Humanity’s faults, even when compounded by “the capricious infliction of circumstance . . . and their own passions” were redeemable if only people would stop, think, reflect, and recognize themselves. These were entirely appropriate attitudes for a Polish Jew who wrote in Yiddish for what turned out to be a worldwide audience, the more so as the heroes of his youth included Baruch Spinoza and Leo Tolstoy. Well before the Nobel committee gave Singer its prize (it was awarded, by the way, on October 5, 1978), there were several Singer novels available in English (there are more now), but now that I intend to follow their advice I can’t remember which one Paul and Jim were reading in the autumn of 1964. As Singer himself might have said, one really big problem with rejecting good advice when one is young is to remember it later. Just so, Singer worried in his Nobel speech about how to replace his decrepit Yiddish typewriter. ©

[Stanley]

I don't like the two-fisted shot, except with Chris Evert. She has a way of making it look beautiful. Helen Wills Moody.


Whether women can play ‘real’ tennis was as stupid a question in 1973 when King whipped Riggs as it was in 1933 when Helen Wills Moody beat the American #8, Phil Neer, in straight sets. Neer was no over-the-hill loudmouth, either, aged only 30 at the time. Moody was then 28, born on October 6, 1905. Her dad Clarence Wills and mother Catherine had been worried about their frail child, so taught her ride, shoot, play tennis, and to study. Helen played tennis at California Berkeley where she was Phi Beta Kappa in art and art history. (She later modeled for Diego Rivera, and painted all her life). And she played real tennis, becoming the most dominant woman player in history, matched only by Navratilova, with 21 Grand Slam singles titles. Before that, she made waves by rejecting the long dresses tennis ladies were supposed to wear in favor of knee-length pleated skirts (Charlie Chaplin thought Helen on court the most beautiful thing he had ever seen). Her reason? Long skirts weakened every woman’s play. She was an implacable competitor, but on court an utterly quiet player who (almost) never contested a call. The famous exception came when she was only 20 and, with great ballyhoo, was brought on court to face the French champion, Suzanne Lenglen. Helen lost that match, and they never played again as Lenglen turned pro. Helen remained the very model of the devoted amateur, and was no fan of the tantrum artists, dismissing Jimmie Connors as a spoiled brat. She lived long enough, though, to play tennis into the late 1980s, to appreciate Pete Sampras’s serenity and admire the strength of Martina Navratilova. “She pumps iron,” Helen said, perhaps approvingly.©

[Stanley]

We do regret this. Something went wrong, and it just cascaded. Simon Goldblatt, Assistant Risk Manager, University of California, Berkeley, 2012.

In 2009, cleaning house, the University of California museum sold a redwood panel, sculpted in bas relief, for less than the cost of the wood ($150 plus tax). At that price, the 22-foot panel might have gone to decorate a Silicon Valley rec room. But it’s now valued at $1 million and will be a centerpiece for the new ‘American’ wing of the Huntington Library. It’s a Works Progress Administration piece by Sargent Claude Johnson, born in Boston on October 7, 1888. His is a tale of identities which the curator who sold the panel for peanuts would like to have known. Johnson’s father was Swedish, his mother of African and Cherokee parentage, and he was orphaned at an early age. He and his nine siblings were sent to orphanages (girls to one, boys to another) until their rescue by an uncle and aunt, she (May Jackson) a sculptor specializing in African-American themes. While Johnson’s siblings ended up identifying themselves as white or Native American, and none as artists, Johnson elected to be black and became a sculptor. He was also a painter, potter, and printmaker, and a long-time member of the Communist Party. Indeed he received his formal training in San Francisco, and later moved there permanently, but his first breakthrough came in a New York show, in 1926, a prize of $150 for a porcelain head of a black child. His varied art, itself a study in identities, derived from his readings of various American and Meso-American cultures, and it now sells quite well. So don’t hope you can pick up a Sargent Claude Johnson piece for $150—not, anyway, from the University of California (which has found another Johnson panel in its storage cellar, and plans to hold on to it). ©

[Stanley]

No government is to be submitted to at the expense of that which is the sole end of all government,--the common good and safety of society. Jonathan Mayhew, D.D.

We would all do well to remember Tom Paine’s acidic analysis of monarchy in his Common Sense (1776), in relation to market size the all-time best seller in American history and, some say, the book that precipitated the American Revolution. But it may be that Paine was preaching to the choir, for a quarter century earlier the Rev. Jonathan Mayhew had published his own blockbuster, his Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission (1750). It didn’t sell quite as well as Paine’s, but it was read by “everybody” (according to young John Adams), and its timeliness was also appreciated. It was a sermon Mayhew delivered (first from his pulpit in Boston’s Old West Church) on the 100th anniversary of the execution of King Charles I, “that man of blood.” Born on Martha’s Vineyard on October 8, 1720, where his great-great grandfather had established a mission to the Indians, Jonathan Mayhew couldn’t escape a ministerial career, but along the way he had acquired a D.D. at Aberdeen, drunk deeply at the fount of the Scottish ‘common sense’ Enlightenment, and had found Trinitarianism contrary to reason and unjustified by any biblical text. So his 1747 ordination at the Old West caused a stir (some ministers refused to take part), and then (in his 1750 Discourse) the young whippersnapper had the gall to suggest that the sainted Carolus Rex had got just what was coming to him: the executioner’s axe was justice incarnate. Not only that, but monarchy was by its nature a perfectly irrational form of government: “nothing can well be imagined more directly contrary to common sense,” Mayhew wrote, thus perhaps giving Tom Paine his cue and his title. ©

[Stanley]

An artist has no business to marry . . . for a woman . . . it is a moral wrong, for she must either neglect her family, or her profession. Harriet Hosmer, 1830-1908.

One of Harriet Hosmer’s most beautiful sculptures lies (it is the recumbent, tragic figure of Beatrice Cenci) in the St. Louis Mercantile Library on the UMSL campus. Hosmer became an accomplished sculptor at a time when women artists rarely gravitated to what had seemed a male preserve. Harriet Hosmer was born in Watertown, MA, on October 9, 1830, to a prosperous, well educated family, and caused concern because of her frailties. But no Victorian female retirement for this weak child. Her parents introduced her to the strenuous life, and in the 1850s she took a leaf out of Teddy Roosevelt’s book before he wrote it, traveling by herself to the Dakota country where she visited a Sioux encampment. It may have been on this same trip that this frail female won a footrace up a Mississippi bluff (475 vertical feet) near Lansing, IA, which is now called Mount Hosmer. More to the point, she studied anatomy at the Missouri Medical College, and became interested in the fundamentals of the human form. Harriet’s physician father then took her to Italy where, for seven years, she studied sculpture under the Welsh expatriate John Gibson, consorted with a large group of female artists, met George Sand and George Eliot and became friends with the Brownings (and, later, a character in Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun). She was an innovative sculptor, technically daring, and the inventor of a process for turning limestone to marble. A listing of her surviving works shows Hosmer especially interested in female subjects; her figure of Senator Thomas Hart (“Old Bullion”) Benton, which may prove that rule, can still be viewed at Lafayette Park in St. Louis. ©

[PanBiker]

An artist has no business to marry . . . for a woman . . . it is a moral wrong, for she must either neglect her family, or her profession. Harriet Hosmer, 1830-1908.

A listing of her surviving works shows Hosmer especially interested in female subjects, but she was also the creator of the renowned statue of Lincoln known as the Freedman’s Memorial, commissioned by Frederick Douglass and other former slaves in 1867. ©

Wikipedia and other sources have this particular sculpture credited to Thomas Ball. Harriet put forward two alternative designs for the memorial but both were rejected in favour of the design by Ball.

[Stanley]

Uncle Bob agrees with you and thanks you for the correction. I have edited the post as he suggests.

[Stanley]

I'd rather be a Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; so might I . . . hear.old Triton blow his wreathed horn. Wordsworth, The World is Too Much with Us, 1802.

“What’s in a name?” asked Juliet, and in Shakespeare’s Verona the tragic answer was, “quite a bit.” It was also asked at UMSL when a student vote changed the school’s name (for its sport teams, etc.) from Rivermen (and Riverwomen) to “The Tritons.” It’s proved popular with students—which seems to me to pass a crucial test—but there were plaintive queries, mainly from ex-Rivermen. Triton is, for instance, the name of a few manufactures (Tennessee boats, Wisconsin trailers, a jewelry company specializing in non-precious metals). It’s also, intriguingly, the name of a consolidated school district in Massachusetts (they call themselves the Vikings). Originally, it was the name of one of the lesser Greek gods, a male mermaid (more a frog than a fish, so not unlike our new mascot, Louie) whose chief accomplishments were to guide Jason and the Argo away from peril and to be step-parent to Athena, the goddess of wisdom: both nice thoughts for a university. But I like the campus’s connection with Triton, a most unusual moon (one of Neptune’s), discovered on October 10, 1840, by William Lassell, a Liverpool brewer and accomplished amateur astronomer (who has been featured in these anniversary notes). Triton is a remarkable moon in several ways, a retrograde orbit for instance, but also with an active geology (nitrogen volcanoes, tectonic plates made of frozen gases, rock, and metals) and an actual atmosphere. It is also probably not a child moon, formed out of the parent planet, but (so to speak) an adopted student, once a free-floating “plutino” (look it up). Best of all, it seems to me, its odd orbit forms a nearly perfect circle, around which it whirls at a quite astonishing speed. Go, Tritons!!! ©