BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

We should have hope because we have earned it. We've worked for it! It's ours. Maxine Waters

Maxine Moore Waters is not everyone’s cup of tea. She’s represented south Los Angeles in congress since 1990 and has irritated every president during that period, including Barack Obama. During the George W. Bush years, she was charged (plausibly and publicly, in the LA Times) on conflict-of-interest matters, and her sympathies for Cuba and for the Palestinians have lost her quite a few friends in high places. More recently, she’s stood out from the crowd with her attacks on Donald Trump and various of his executive crew, and Trump has, on several occasions, singled her out as (among other things) a “low IQ individual.” It’s not clear how Trump himself is qualified to make such a statement, and it’s been widely seen as racially motivated. I think that’s a fair assessment, and on that ground (and a few others) I’d like to wish Maxine Waters a very happy 80th birthday and, moreover, claim her as one of St. Louis’s very own. She was born on August 15, 1938, on St. Louis’s racial underside, the fifth of 13 children of Velma Lee Moore. Maxine’s father abandoned Velma’s growing family in 1940, but Velma kept most of the crew together, and after graduating from Vashon H.S. Velma moved them out to LA, where Maxine made a life for herself, beginning as a teacher in the Head Start program and moving on through local Democratic politics (and a sociology degree at Cal State) to become a state assemblywoman and then US Representative (and, incidentally, the wife of the US ambassador to the Bahamas). Waters has been an effective constituency politician, both in individual cases and in her intelligent, combatively expressed views on the interrelationships between poverty, unemployment, ill health, poor education, crime, and civil disorder. Of course I am not sure what her IQ might be, but it seems clear enough to me that Maxine Waters has learned much from life. So, Ms. Waters gets a “Happy Birthday!!”, returns included. ©

[Stanley]

The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor. T. E. Lawrence, 1920.

The Hejaz railway, which figures tangentially in a couple of Agatha Christie’s whodunits, was to have been the Ottoman Empire’s answer to Cecil Rhodes’ Cape to Cairo railway, threading through Arabia to unite Istanbul with the holy city of Medina. But like “Arabia,” it exists today only in fragments, partly because of the region’s violent modern history, but initially owing to Arab rebels whose fight against the Ottomans inevitably became part of World War I. It was inevitable because the Ottomans were allied to the Central Powers, while France’s and Britain’s long-standing imperial interests in the region were whetted by the whiff of oil. But “inevitability” was given several odd twists by Thomas Edward (T. E.) Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia. Lawrence was an outsider by birth and became one by nature, born on August 16, 1888, the illegitimate son of an Anglo-Irish baronet and a Scots governess who chose to live in sin. The boy read history (brilliantly) at Jesus College, Oxford, then in 1910 switched location and interest (from medieval Europe) to immerse himself in Arabian archaeology, history, and culture. WWI found him studying in the Middle East and made him into a soldier-spy whose astonishing exploits (for instance, destroying the Hejaz railway and the Turkish camps guarding it) and grievous sufferings—when captured by the Turks—made him famous. Justly so. Less well understood is the fact that his aims for Arabia form a historical “might-have-been” for the whole region. Lawrence’s immersion in Arab history and culture brought him to envisage a “real” Arabia, perhaps even a unified whole. This vision—such as it was—was utterly subverted by the imperial carve-up that issued out of Versailles in 1918. The region still suffers the consequences of that “real” settlement. Whether Lawrence’s vision (though still ‘imperialistic’) might have had better outcomes is only an imaginary, if fascinating, question. ©

[Stanley]

To know Jesus is to embrace the nations. William Carey.

It’s often said, in studies of western imperial expansion, that religion followed the flag, a tendency that Mark Twain would excoriate in his “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” (1901). He’d more gently lampooned it in Roughing It (1872), pointing out the damage done by exporting to Hawaii Protestant notions of sin and modesty. But in British India the flag was carried by the East India Company, and the company feared that religion might disrupt both its trade and its diplomacy. So in 1800 a trio of Particular (Calvinist) Baptist missionaries moved out of the Company’s territories around Calcutta to take up residence in the Danish outpost at Serampore. They were led by William Carey, born into a Northamptonshire weaver’s family on August 17, 1761. His father was an improving sort, and as he moved upwards he saw to it that William had access to books, and William made the most of it, teaching himself Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. He also converted to the Baptist communion (in 1783) and became committed to the idea of spreading the gospel amongst the heathen. He had some success at Serampore, but Indians proved resistant and Carey turned his mind to translating the Bible. By the time he and his Indian assistants finished (Carey died in 1834), they’d produced grammars of several subcontinent languages and translated the entire Bible into six of them (Hindi, Bengali, Sanskrit, Punjabi, Telinga, and Bhotia). Moreover, they began the translation into English of Indian classics, making considerable progress on the Ramayana. Ironically, while Carey’s Herculean translation efforts caused tensions with the church back home, they served to establish his credibility with the East India Company, and in 1813 Carey resumed his missionary work ‘under the flag.’ As for his translations, he’d already been appointed Professor of Indian Languages at the Company’s Fort William College and awarded the D.D. by Brown University (then still the College of Rhode Island, a Baptist foundation). ©

[Stanley]

A leader takes people where they want to be. A great leader takes them where they ought to be. Rosalynn Carter.

It’s Rosalynn Carter’s birthday today, and as far as I know she’s still going strong, despite advancing age and, earlier this year, a challenging surgery. She was born (Eleanor Rosalynn Smith) in Plains, Georgia, on August 18, 1927. Her father, Wilburn, was a farmer, but those were not good times to farm in Georgia, and he helped make ends meet as a car mechanic. Her mother, Frances, contributed as a seamstress, and when Wilburn died (leukemia) in 1939 that sideline became the family’s chief source of cash. But growing up within the intimacies of a small town, Rosalynn took her poverty in stride, became school valedictorian, and set off to college with her family’s support. But all that got sidetracked when, aged but 18, she fell hard for an older, richer neighbor, then a midshipman at Annapolis, 21 year-old Jimmy Carter. They kissed on their first date, got married in July 1946, went off on Jimmy’s naval tours, produced four kids, but then returned to Plains to help run the Carter family farm and business. It was a move Rosalynn bitterly opposed—perhaps she felt she’d escaped Plains and didn’t want to be reminded how—but by now we all know that Rosalynn Carter made the best of it. She steeled herself to tasks she didn’t like, notably political campaigning (she remembers being spat at in the first campaign), schooled herself on the issues facing her state, then the nation, and brought to bear on those issues a full-to-overflowing cargo of family values and small-town virtues. Her conduct in the governor’s mansion, then the White House, and afterwards in her restlessly energetic “co-retirement” with her husband, have proven that those values and virtues have been deeply held, modestly displayed, and tirelessly applied. Happy 91st Birthday, Rosalynn Carter!! ©

[Stanley]

The best children’s writers know that they are writing for the child in the adult, and for the adult in the child. Barbara Wersba.

I’ve always felt that the best children’s literature is suitable reading for adults: e.g. The Wind in the Willows or Charlotte’s Web. But there is an undefinable ‘innocence’ about those classics that dates them, for as the 20th century wore on a new children’s genre emerged, focused on adolescents: children’s books with ‘adult’ themes, not only unhappiness or insecurity (you can find those in Peter Pan) but such issues as addiction, gender identity, broken marriages, even evil. This has become normal, vide the immense popularity of the Harry Potter series, but it required brave pioneers. Among these was the American Barbara Wersba, born in Chicago on August 19, 1932, who as author, book reviewer, and ultimately publisher (The Bookman Press) wrote and encouraged books that braved the headwinds of Pecksniffian school boards and (in her case) came to harbor with prestigious nominations and awards. She has written that her desire for such books was born of her lonely childhood in her parents’ unhappy marriage, and her books often turn on tales of sensitive, gifted youngsters who find comfort and direction from older, wiser, and rather odd adults. Wersba found her first release in the theatre (at 12, she was mesmerized by The Glass Menagerie), and after graduating from Bard College she worked in actors’ workshops in New York and New England. But soon she was writing for children, first for very young ones (The Boy Who Loved the Sea—1961—and Do Tigers Ever Bite Kings?-1966) and then from 1968 (The Dream Watchers) for that broad group known now as young adults. It may have been her two years (1966-68) nursing and reading to Carson McCullers that changed Wersba’s focus; if so it was yet another illustration of how the best fiction doesn’t always recognize marketing categories based on the age of readers. In 1957, I was given Cannery Row by our neighbor, a middle school English teacher, for my birthday. “How old are you, Bobby,” she asked? “Fourteen,” I replied. “Then you’re old enough for this.” ©

[Stanley]

Although the Turk is not called Christian He did not burn anyone for the faith As the Papists do, every single day. Translated from a Dutch revolutionary song, late 16th century.

In 2018, with Donald Trump in the saddle and too many of his supporters convinced that “religious freedom” gives them the right to be cruelly and publicly intolerant of Muslims and others, we need to remind ourselves that toleration has not, historically, been prominent in Christian DNA. In early modern Europe, Catholics and Protestants eagerly incinerated each other, and in medieval France Christians from all over the west virtually destroyed a whole culture—and its people—in the Albigensian crusades. But today offers a particularly appropriate reminder, for it was on August 20, 1191, that King Richard the Lionhearted—a leader of the Third Crusade—had 3,000 Muslims executed at Acre (Akko) in Palestine. Not only that, but he ordered the bloodshed atop a high hill (“Ayyadieh”), in full view of the Ottoman army of Saladin, and included non-combatants (the elderly, women, and children) among his victims. King Richard’s reputation is not good in Muslim memory banks, and indeed at Acre and elsewhere Christian cruelties contrasted with the general Ottoman practice of tolerating Christians and Jews in captured (or recaptured) territory. Indeed, in recapturing Acre in 1187, only four years before Richard’s bloody reentry, Saladin had allowed Christians to leave the city unharmed. Later Ottoman conquests in the Balkans (extending at one point to the gates of Vienna) solidified this reputation (and help to explain the survival of Orthodox and Catholic Christianity in Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and Yugoslavia). So obvious was the contrast that when the Dutch rose up to throw off their Spanish (Catholic) yoke in their own generations-long war of independence, they embraced the Turkish model and made religious toleration central to the astonishing success of their new nation. In America, in their New Amsterdam, the Dutch called it “overlooking.” It’s not a bad idea; nor is it a new one. It deserves our consideration. ©

[Stanley]

I'm so affected that even my lungs are affected. Aubrey Beardsley.

Aubrey Vincent Beardsley was born in Brighton, England, on August 21, 1872, the second child and only son of a genteel mother and a slightly less than genteel father. His childhood was divided between school in Brighton and residence in London, and in both he impressed his parents and others with his precocious talents in, first, music, and then and much more lastingly in graphic art. The latter (line drawings, book illustrations, caricatures) made him famous, mark him as a precursor, even an inspirer, of Art nouveau, and allied with his studiously flamboyant style of life helped to define his era, or at least served to mark its fringes, even though he himself only enjoyed five years of fame (circa 1892-1897). Then, certainly wracked with tuberculosis and, some said, with guilt, he withdrew with his mother and sister to the south of France, was received into the Catholic church, and ordered his friends to destroy all his work, at least “by all that is holy all obscene drawings.” He died in March 1898, aged just 25, and after a requiem mass at Menton cathedral was buried in the churchyard. The capacity of the man and his work to both outrage and fascinate was demonstrated often during his short life, and then long afterwards. In the early 1890s, his association with The Yellow Book and the Oscar Wilde circle led to false charges of homosexuality (and absurd ones about his personal hygiene): and also to a high market value for his drawings. Thus was proven (yet again) that public outrage is often the very best form of advertising. Then in 1966, while a retrospective Aubrey Beardsley exhibition was wowing visitors to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, a nearby gallery owner was arrested and fined (for public obscenity) for displaying the very same drawings and engravings in his streetside windows. You can judge for yourself, for his work was never destroyed, and these days it is widely displayed on the internet. ©

[Stanley]

This came in from Bob this morning......

Corrections

Two scholarly friends even more elderly than I note errors in two recent anniversary notes.
First, the Saladin who took and then surrendered Acre in the 12th century was not an Ottoman but a Seljuk. Still a ‘Turk,’ though, still Muslim, and still somewhat more tolerant than the legendary friend of the legendary Robin Hood, Richard the Lionhearted.
Secondly, Aubrey Beardsley was racked, rather than wracked, with tuberculosis. I have nothing more to offer here, although there must be a pun somewhere in it. Beardsley did wryly note that he was not likely to live even as long as Keats, who had also been racked by tuberculosis. But they both succumbed at 25.
These were careless errors, but they were errors, and so I correct them for other reasons than respect for my elders.
Thanks, all. Bob

[Stanley]

More from Bob!

Trust a retired journalist and editor (from Trump’s hated Fake Press) to have what I hope will be the last word on Saladin and the Turks. Saladin was a Kurd, the founder of the Abayyid dynasty in medieval Egypt. Acre was in territory not only coveted by Christian crusaders from the “West,” but at issue between Saladin and the Seljuks. The Seljuk Empire stretched to the eastward from Palestine, and the Seljuks were then the chief threat to Christian Byzantium. Saladin stepped in, so to speak, to make himself into the “infidel” enemy of the West.
So the Third Crusade made strange bedfellows of the Seljuks and the Abayyids. Wars do that sort of thing, which is a lesson we’ve learned again (or have we?) with our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Ottomans came along later, more or less displacing the Seljuk empire and, eventually, stretching well into the Balkans.
I feel particularly badly about these errors because, in my junior year at Penn, I was (mistakenly, by sort-card error) placed in a PhD seminar on the medieval history of the Levant, about a dozen PhD students and I, under the direction of a visiting professor, Lionel Butler, then Dean of the Faculty at St. Andrews. Butler, who’d been promised an undergraduate class, urged me to stay to become his “token undergraduate.” They were all very kind to me, and it was a wonderful experience for a junior until then unsure of his vocation. But my excuse for Saladin, if there is one, is that my research paper for Butler was on “Venetian Diplomacy in the Levant to 1571”, and thus only tangentially on the crusades. At any rate, I apologize to readers for offering them a small set of “alternative facts.”
I did want readers to know that during this summer I had a bad patch, a case of sepsis, that laid me very low on July 28 and for over a week thereafter. It made these anniversary notes very touch and go, including on first drafts about ten typos per line, and I would hesitate to look them over for more serious errors. If there were none, it was by chance, I think, for among other things I suffered hallucinations and delirium, but these notes did keep me to a task and perhaps had something to do with my recovery.
I am now much mended, albeit over 15 pounds lighter, and looking forward to this morning’s anniversary note.
Thanks for the editing.
Bob Bliss

[Tripps]

My goodness what a site to be connected with. (sorry - with which to be connected)

This thread is worth the price of admission on its own.

[Stanley]

Isn't it..... and here's more:-

Laughter is the valve on the pressure cooker of life. Hugh Nanton Romney.

One of my best teaching experiences has been in UMSL’s course called “Science Literacy.” I helped plan the course and am teaching in it again this semester. It involves colleagues in several fields, the usual suspects (chemistry, physics, and biology) and a potpourri of others, including this refugee historian. I present on two issues, first the “scientific revolution” of the 17th century, wherein I concentrate on the classic experiments of Robert Boyle on “the spring of the air.” In them, Boyle demonstrated, proved beyond reasonable doubt, that air, the atmosphere, had substance, weight, volume, and mass. He showed how it behaved differently at different temperatures, indeed at different altitudes, and that it possessed several distinctive parts or qualities. His lovely (and they are both entrancing and instructive) experiments aimed simply at finding things out, otherwise known as “truth,” but they would have their uses, including most famously the steam engine. But that took a while. What came more quickly was the pressure cooker, that wonderful kitchen savior of time and energy. For centuries in France it was called “le Papin,” after its inventor, Denis Papin, born in the Loire on August 22, 1647. He was working on the air himself, in Paris, with Christian Huygens and Gottfried Leibniz, but came to London to assist Boyle who was producing a revised and corrected publication of his experiments. That book, which you can read on line (it’s a great primer on the ‘scientific method’), came out in 1680, but already in 1679 Denis Papin had presented, to London’s Royal Society, a laboratory demonstration of a machine he called (unpoetically) his “steam digester.” It also had a primitive, but workable, pressure valve, which helps to explain why the Royal Society could go on being a focal point of the “Scientific Revolution.” Otherwise, put under great heat and pressure by M. Papin, the Spring of the Air would have blown them all to bits. ©

[Stanley]

The publisher is the middleman, but he calls the tune to which the whole rest of the trade dances; he does so because he pays the piper. Geoffrey Faber.

During our years in England, one could not but notice that one of the better publishing houses was Faber & Faber, with an impressive ‘stable’ of established writers but also putting out new voices (American authors included). My Robert Lowell volumes are all by Faber, likewise a few Faulkners. A remarkably uncurious academic, I thought the name “Faber” faintly Mitteleuropa and left it at that, imagining its founder to be a bit of an outsider. It was a reasonable guess, but wrong. Sir Geoffrey Faber came from an old Yorkshire family that was, in the 19th century, making its mark in the church and in the academy. Geoffrey Faber was born at Malvern College (on August 23, 1889), where his father was Housemaster, and he followed his grandfather, father, and uncles through to Oxford where he performed brilliantly in classics (a ‘double first’), and then after war service was elected a fellow of All Souls (where, as estates bursar, he modernized the college’s substantial real estate holdings). Faber was already a published poet, but he liked doing business, too, and after a turn at brewing he fell into the publishing trade. In the 1920s he took over a small scientific publishing house and quickly turned its head towards literature, putting T. S. Eliot on its board and then transforming it into Faber & Faber in 1929. Almost immediately the one-time poet was publishing promising youngsters (Stephen Spender and W. H. Auden in the 1930s) and kept it up through and beyond Geoffrey Faber’s lifetime, giving early breaks to the likes of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, Philip Larkin and Seamus Heaney. If those early works didn’t sell like hot cross buns, then Faber’s list of established authors (including Faber himself, until his death in 1961) took up the slack. The second “Faber,” by the way, was Geoffrey’s wife, Enid Eleanor, whom he married in 1920 and who long survived him, dying in 1995, as old as her century. ©

[Stanley]

It is when and only when my caricatures hit exactly the exteriors of their subjects that they open the interiors too. Max Beerbohm.

Literary criticism being a notoriously inexact science, compiling a list of the “100 best novels” qualifies as masochistic, even with the precaution of limiting them to the English language and the 20th century. But that’s what the Modern Library did, and among the selections that caused most heartburn was no. 59, Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson (1911). It was not so much its ranking that rankled, but its mere presence. This Oxford Love Story (the subtitle) was a satire, a comic fantasy, in which a young woman of odd antecedents, dubious profession, and irresistible charm arrives in Oxford (to visit her grandfather, Warden of the strangely-named Judas College), and proceeds to lay waste to the entire (male) undergraduate population. Literally. Cupid-stricken but rejected (the divine Dobson will love only the man who is impervious to her charms), they all commit suicide, and Zuleika, puzzled but undaunted, sets off for Cambridge. It was Beerbohm’s only novel, and he didn’t think it was one: “the work of a leisurely essayist amusing himself with a narrative idea.” This is actually a good view of his main trade, that of caricaturist. For Max Beerbohm, born in London on August 24, 1872, was universally acknowledged as the master who made caricature into an art. Max did go to Oxford (he read classics at Merton College, the template for Zuleika’s Judas), but even at school he was already drawing people, distilling them into their (usually comic) essences, and his fame spread before him. He was also a gifted theatre critic, and his brilliant satires of established novelists (A Christmas Garland, 1912) inspired others, notably James Thurber and E. B. White, to commit similar flatteries or, if you prefer, offenses. From 1910, Beerbohm spent most of his long life in Italy, an eccentric and reclusive English gentleman, but he was always (in George Bernard Shaw’s phrase) “the incomparable Max.” Max died in Rapallo, but his ashes lie in St. Paul’s Cathedral, London. ©

[Stanley]

Pardon me, boy, is that the Chattanooga Choo-Choo? Glen Miller.

Not all of our immigrant ancestors came to these American shores unwashed, pinched by poverty, and (as Trump has it) eager for criminal careers or to steal ‘American’ jobs. Hyman and Rebecca Cohen, for instance, came in 1870 with established skills and about $1,000 in capital. It was not a fortune (about $23k in today’s $$), but Hyman used it to set himself up in his chosen trade (making hats), and although Rebecca worked she also had time to settle into the role of Jewish mother. They brought children with them, too, once here added others, and taught them to speak English at home (the family had spent a few years in London, en route to America). One of their American-born (on August 25, 1877) was Joshua Lionel Cohen, He was a clever boy, and the family sent him to Columbia University, but Joshua was a tinkerer, clever with chemicals, good with gadgets, and he tinkered his way right out of college, formed an inventor partnership, and started inventing. His first break came in 1899, when he patented a new flash powder for photography. It didn’t turn out as he’d intended (the Navy used the patent for new mine fuses), but it netted $12,000 ($350k today). The next invention also didn’t turn out as intended. Joshua married his interest in batteries with the romance of trains and made (for a New York toy store) a Christmas display centered on a battery-driven model train. It went into the store’s window in 1901, but to everyone’s consternation Christmas shoppers wanted the train, not the toys on display. Thus was born the Lionel Model Train corporation, and Joshua’s fortune. Already riding the wave of success, Joshua changed his surname to Cowen, in 1910. But he stuck with the Lionel and made a fortune. As for immigrant criminality, his sister Rachel turned out to be Roy Cohn’s grandmother, but let’s not blame her (or Joshua) for that. Roy’s criminality was as American as apple pie. ©

[Stanley]

We must trust to nothing but facts. These are presented to us by Nature, and cannot deceive. Antoine de Lavoisier.

This day offers an embarrassment of anniversary riches, from the commissioning of Michaelangelo’s Pieta (1498) to the Ottoman Emperor Suleiman’s annexation of Hungary (1541), but let’s celebrate our chemistry majors and their science by noting the birth, in Paris, on August 26, 1743, of Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier. His family was rich, and he became richer when he used an inheritance from his mother to buy a share in the “Ferme,” the unpopular method of collecting unpopular taxes for the crown. Meanwhile, he grew up a child of the Enlightenment, studying the sciences, and publishing works that quickly brought him election to the Academy of Sciences. His arranged marriage with Marie-Anne Paulze (then 14 years old) turned out well, both for her wealth and for her brains. Her abilities to translate English put Lavoisier in touch with cutting-edge work on air (by Boyle and Black and others), and her lab savvy helped in the fabrication of instruments and then the publication of Lavoisier’s experiments. These upended most existing work on the composition of the atmosphere, not to mention the composition of water, and make plausible the idea that Antoine de Lavoisier is “the father of modern chemistry.” His foundational experiments with oxygen and hydrogen (the names are his, though he did not “discover” these elements) are the best known of his works. Alas, come the French Revolution, all this was for naught, and his membership of the noblesse de robe and more particularly of the hated Ferme sealed his fate. Early in “the Terror” Lavoisier was tried and found guilty (of various offenses) and was guillotined on May 8, 1794. Efforts to save him because of his vast and significant contributions to science brought the response, from the Tribunal, that “the Republic needs neither scientists nor chemists.” That, we can say in retrospect, was a factually inaccurate statement. ©

[Stanley]

Whether we choose Birkenstocks or whether we choose Burberry--it all signifies something and it's really interesting to me. Meryl Streep.

I think it was in the late 1950s that a men’s rainwear item known as the Burberry® reached Des Moines. At any rate, that was when my mother (who loved to buy clothes for anybody) bought me not one of those but a look-alike London Fog®, for the Burberry® raincoat was sold at a gentleman’s price, not a college-bound freshman’s. That was a distinction of which old Mr. Burberry would approve, for he set himself up to cater to the discerning and spent much of his long life cultivating that market. But it took a while for a man of humble origins. Thomas Burberry was born on August 27, 1835, in Surrey, his father a farmer and a religious non-conformist. After an apprenticeship, Burberry set himself up in 1856 as an independent draper in Basingstoke, and soon prospered, specializing in men’s outfitting. His independent designs and his use of new cloths brought him profits and a reputation with the growing Victorian middle class, and by 1870 he employed 80 staff (in manufacture and in sales). In the next decade, he made use of a new cloth, “gabardine,” and a way of weatherproofing it without rubber, to expand his market. Beginning in 1889, Burberry’s son Arthur and his partner R. B. Rolls moved directly into London, in the 1890s establishing a shop in Haymarket, a clothing works in the East End, and even a wholesale warehouse. It was then that the company began to develop an image, based on royal patronage but, even better, on heroes like Shackleton, Kitchener, and Baden-Powell (latterly Roald Amundsen) who chose Burberry over other outfitters. And the price went up. Throughout, Burberry (who died in 1927) retained his Baptist principles, paid good wages, campaigned against alcohol, tobacco, and Sunday opening, and presented to the world a much less “stylish” persona than anything that might be found in his shops. And I still don’t own a Burberry, even though in St. Louis (and in 42 other American towns) there is a Burberry’s outlet. ©

[plaques]

Bill Bryson born Des Moines, one of my favorite light reads, never mentioned Burburry but I could be wrong.

[Stanley]

For everything that I am and have achieved, I have one person to thank . . . my sublime friend and master, Franz Liszt. Richard Wagner, speaking at Bayreuth, 1876.

From the brief residency of J. S. Bach (1708-17) Weimar was a dynamic center of German culture, perhaps by the end of the century the center, thanks to the presence of Goethe, Schiller and other stars of the post-Enlightenment firmament. Weimar’s eminence did not fade with their deaths, and in 1842 Franz Liszt moved there to take the baton of the Grand Ducal Court Orchestra. Only 31, and already a musical sensation, Liszt was also an admirer of Richard Wagner, and on August 28, 1850 (which was, by the way, the 101st anniversary of Goethe’s birth), at the Staatskappele Weimar, Liszt conducted the premiere of Wagner’s first opera, Lohengrin. It is believed that the singers were somewhat indifferent (the tenor was a pastry chef in real life), but the performance was a great success. Wagner himself was not there; his enthusiasms for the 1848 revolutions had made him an outlaw and an exile (in Switzerland). But in attendance were Liszt’s illegitimate daughters, Blandine (15) and Cosima (13), and his prize piano student Hans von Bülow (20). In due course, Liszt put his daughters’ general education with Frau von Bülow, Hans’s mother, and their musical education with Hans, and—inevitably?—Hans and Cosima married in 1857. On their honeymoon, the von Bülows visited Richard Wagner and his wife Minna, and in a storm of sobs and tears Cosima declared her devotion (to Wagner’s music). Six years later, in 1863, she bore a daughter, suspiciously named Isolde, and indeed the baby was Wagner’s. There followed a short-lived ménage à trois that caused public scandal and, doubtless, some private heartburn. But the friendships survived. In 1865, another Wagner premiere took place, Tristan und Isolde, Hans von Bülow conducting, and in 1868, after the von Bülows’ divorce and Minna’s death (probably from laudanum addiction) Wagner married Cosima von Bülow. Richard and Cosima do not seem to have lived happily ever after, but that’s another story. ©

[Stanley]

Two Kids from Brooklyn. The title of a special exhibit in the Ira Gershwin Hall, Library of Congress, in 2013.

When he was still David Daniel Kaminsky, the comedian Danny Kaye was a loose end kid. He amused his school friends but not his teachers, and never graduated from high school. Nor was he particularly employable. As a file clerk, he got fired for an error that cost his employer $40,000. Then, as office manager for a neighborhood dentist, he used dental drills to repair the office woodwork, and he was fired from that job, too. But in the mid 1930s his luck changed, and he graduated into the lower-middle ranks of New York entertainment, fetching up in The Straw Hat Revue (1939). It was not a great success, but the critics noticed him; and meanwhile he noticed Sylvia Fine, the Revue’s audition pianist and composer of its songs, who turned out to be that dentist’s daughter and, perhaps, the best thing that ever happened to the man who became Danny Kaye. Sylvia Fine was born in Brooklyn on August 29, 1913, went to high school with David Kaminsky (but seems not to have noticed him), graduated, and went on to Brooklyn College to study music. As well as working on Broadway, she “did the music” at a Catskill’s summer resort (her show name was “Snappy”). After Straw Hat closed, she got “Danny Kaye” a job at that resort. They married in 1941, had a daughter (Dena), and she managed Danny’s career (and wrote songs for him, including “Anatole of Paris,” a 1941 number that later featured in Kaye’s “Walter Mitty” film of 1949). Danny and Sylvia separated in 1947, but in enough amity that Sylvia continued as his advisor and agent. Neither ever remarried. Besides her oversight of Kaye’s career, Sylvia became a Hollywood pro on the production side, also writing music for Kaye films and others (including Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm), and then in the 1980s producing a documentary about Kaye’s life. Sylvia and Danny are buried together, in New York, and their letters and manuscripts may be found in the Library of Congress. ©

[Stanley]

When I call him a sonofabitch I am not using profanity, but am referring to the circumstances of his birth. Huey Long, in reference to the Grand Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

“Populist,” as a category in US politics, is full of ideological contradictions. President Trump is, we are told, a populist. But then so was Huey Long, “The Kingfish,” who until his assassination (on September 10, 1935) seemed likely to upset several applecarts. Huey Pierce Long, Jr., was born on August 20, 1893, in Winn, a northern Louisiana parish. Politically, this was an odd place, a hotbed of Unionism in the Civil War, then of the People’s Party in the 1890s, and Winn went socialist in the 1912 presidential election. Relatively well off in a very poor parish, Huey early chose the side of the underdog, causing trouble even in high school. He dabbled at higher education and passed the Louisiana bar exam in 1915. Not much later, he entered politics as the champion of “the people,” and won his first office (on the Railroad Commission) through the poor white vote. And he returned the favor, mobilizing the commission to act on behalf of “the people” rather than—as had been its habit—the plutocracy. He rode that program into success as the state’s governor (1928-32) and then senator, and he seems to have meant it. He used taxes on corporations (a Louisiana novelty) to fund public works, public hospitals, free textbooks for kids, and adult literacy classes. He beat back an attempted impeachment (among the charges were “blasphemy”), and made Standard Oil and the “petroleumites” his favorite enemies. On the national stage, after 1932, he broke with Roosevelt to propose a “Share the Wealth” program, taxing the rich, placing limits on incomes and on inheritances. The proceeds, he claimed, would be used raise “the people” to decent standards of life, health, and education. Huey Long had his failings, some of them sinister, but had his brand of “populism” succeeded, he would have taken the American political economy several million miles away from the destinations favored by our current “populist” president. ©

{have a listen to THIS. Randy Newman singing 'The Kingfish.}

[Stanley]

Nately had a bad start. He came from a good family. Joseph Heller, Catch-22

I vividly remember a 1970 conversation between my father (2d lieutenant) and Neil Fisher (captain) about their early experiences in their respective armies (American and British) in WWII. While each had their talents (in journalism and in history) it was clear to them that that they owed their commissions to their social and educational backgrounds. They agreed that this was more important in Britain’s military, but only relatively. It was the need for bodies that vaulted workingmen into the ‘officer class,’ and never did Britain need more bodies than in the “First War.” That was certainly the experience of Arthur Stanley Lee, a publican’s son, born on August 31, 1894 in Lincolnshire. Unable to enter the Royal Flying Corps in 1914 (his first ambition), he joined up as an infantryman. Battlefield carnage and his own heroism brought him an army commission, and then persistence brought him a transfer to the RFC. He remained in the RFC, then the RAF, and served heroically in both world wars, but it was not until the middle of WWII that he was able to (pardon the pun) rise above RAF group captain. This was probably because, despite his relatively low rank, he was left to organize the final retreat from Crete. He did so, bravely and brilliantly, and by war’s end was promoted to senior rank and placed in command of Britain’s military mission to the Balkans. Lee handled both its difficulties and its delicacies, war and politics, managing military and diplomatic relations with Marshall Tito in Yugoslavia. Among his many rewards for bravery, one of the last was Yugoslavia’s Partisan Star, but Cold War problems prevented Lee from receiving it until the 1970s. As for Lieutenant Bliss and Captain Fisher, they did OK too, but then they had been expected to do well. As they agreed in 1970, during a sunny afternoon under the main flight path of RAF Brize Norton, they were deemed “officer material” before they joined their armies. ©

[Stanley]

There is no greater calling than to serve your fellow men. There is no greater contribution than to help the weak. There is no greater satisfaction than to have done it well. Walter Reuther.

On September 1, 1907, Walter Reuther was born in Wheeling, West Virginia. His formal education ceased at 16, but his father, a leader of the local brewers’ union, led family seminars on the history and aspirations of American (and German) workers. After a tool and die apprenticeship, Reuther (and his younger brother Victor) moved to Detroit where he soon snagged a job at Ford’s River Rouge plant. He was soon (1932) fired for his off-site work for the Socialist Party, and he and Victor spent some time in Russia, imparting their skills to the workforce at a new auto plant, but they were repelled by Soviet (and, in Germany, Nazi) totalitarianism. Back at Ford, he headed a team of tool and die workers, but he was not impressed by his own promotion. The River Rouge factory was, he said, a “social jungle,” and in the depths of the Great Depression (1936-1937) he led one of the most important strikes in American labor history, ultimately forcing Ford to recognize the United Auto Workers Union as the sole bargaining agent for the Ford workforce. He became a full-time labor organizer, in a climate still unfriendly to unions, and survived two assassination attempts (not Ford’s doing; probably the mob-related management of a local stove and metalwork factory). As he rose in labor ranks (president of the UAW from 1946 and, for a time, of the CIO), he brought with him a strong streak of anti-communism and a stronger commitment to social and economic justice. These ends, he thought, would be best achieved by collective bargaining in the workplace and (based on trade union solidarity) political action in the wider society. A member of the “anti-communist left”, Reuther was fearless and aggressive in his support for progressive causes such as civil rights and women’s rights, and he was generous in assisting other unions less powerful (and less well financed) than his own. His UAW financed SCLC civil rights activists, and their activities, in Detroit, and helped to organize (and spoke at) the famous 1963 March on Washington, leading some to call him “the white Martin Luther King.” Later he brought his union in on the side of César Chavez’s migrant farm workers’ union, and was instrumental in the national boycott of California farm products (I still have my “Boycott Lettuce” poster, somewhere) which helped to secure that union’s surprising successes in the 1960s. Reuther and his wife, May, were killed in a plane crash on May 10, 1970. ©

[Stanley]

On peut dominer ce qu'on ne peut pas franchir. Emilia Francis, Lady Dilke. (One can dominate that which one cannot pass through.)

It’s been said, with reason, that history is a great hobby for pessimists, but it also offers glimmers of hope. One such is the vein of radicalism one strikes in studying the upper middle classes of Victorian and Edwardian England. Its emergence is perhaps not a puzzle. Told that they lived in the greatest society in history, some of these very prosperous folk looked carefully at their surroundings and decided that it wasn’t so. One of the easier ways to learn that lesson was to be a female. “Walled in behind social conventions” of “ordinary life,” as one of them, Lady Emilia Francis Dilke put it, women who dared to break through could well “lose more than they gained.” Lady Dilke, who did break through, gained quite a bit. Born Emilia Francis Strong, of American loyalist stock, on September 2, 1840, she was (as were many good girls of her era) educated at home, and very well, in ancient and modern languages by her tutors, and in art and culture by her father (a banker) and her mother. She began to defy convention as an art student, first by being one at all, and then by demanding to have instruction in drawing from the nude. Failing that, she engaged a private tutor, hired models, and did it herself. And she was only 19. At art school, in 1858, she also met Sir Charles Dilke, second baronet, another radical of her ilk, and would marry him in 1885 after her first husband, a rather stiffly conventional Oxford don, died. But Francis (who preferred her masculine second name) didn’t become famous through her marriages, but through her work, first in art history (wherein she became a distinguished scholar) and secondly in trades union agitation, for her experience of Victorian and Edwardian England had taught Emilia Francis, Lady Dilke, that working-class working women were among those who did not need to learn that their country was not the greatest in history. And so Lady Dilke decided to do something about it. ©

[Stanley]

I sell here, sir, what all the world desires to have--POWER. Matthew Boulton to James Boswell, 1776.

The connections between scientific innovation and industrial progress are often chancy, and one reason for that is the difficulty of finding money. As in the theatre, so in the marketplace of new technologies, it helps to find “angels” who will invest in your discovery—and then allow you to retain some of the profits. Economic history is littered with the bodies of brilliant inventors who died poor, often after selling their patents for pittances. One inventor who died rich was James Watt, whose improved design for a steam engine made possible the industrial revolution. Watt’s angel was Matthew Boulton, born in Birmingham on September 3, 1728. Boulton seemed an unlikely candidate. He was wealthy enough, true, but his business was making trinkets, little things, often ornamental, of precious or base metals, and selling them to the aristocracy and to the rapidly-expanding middle classes. It had been his father’s business, it became his, and why risk it by investing in a still-unknown quantity? But Boulton was a progressive, numbering among his friends Josiah Wedgwood, Erasmus Darwin, and Joseph Priestly, with whom he met regularly (on the night of the full moon: it was called ‘The Lunar Society’) to consider and even to make advances in science, industry, and agriculture. Plus Boulton was a practical man. His workshops did a lot of metal stamping (indeed, he was also a mint-master), and he could see the benefits of a better steam engine. So when James Watt’s first partnership collapsed, Matthew Boulton stepped in, assumed its debts, secured its rights, and encouraged Watts to stay on as partner (and chief techie). Meanwhile, Boulton continued to produce ornamental silver, to encourage science, and to enrich Birmingham with his philanthropies in medicine, theatre, and music. Today, Watt and Boulton appear together on Britain’s new £50 banknote, which is a good place for both to be, the inventor and his angel. ©

[Stanley]

We create our future by improving our present opportunities. Lewis Howard Latimer.

Progress means, among other things, that shopping today for a light bulb requires qualifications in electrical engineering and (to buy one) a bottomless bank account. So let’s fondly remember the inventor of the old, cheap incandescent bulb, Lewis Howard Latimer. His parents, George and Rebecca, were escaped slaves. George appreciated the irony of having July 4th as his birthday, more so after he was arrested (in Boston, October 20, 1842) and charged with larceny, having stolen himself and Rebecca from their masters. That significant criminal case was finally settled out of court by a cash payment of $400, raised by eminent Boston abolitionists, but thus young Lewis Latimer (born on September 4, 1848) cherished his personal freedom enough to join the US Navy in 1863 and, on the USS Massasoit, spend two years chasing Confederate gun runners. Back in civvies, he became an inventor, and a clever one. His earliest patent (1874) was for a flush toilet in railway cars. Perhaps on the strength of that he was hired by Alexander Graham Bell to draw the patent illustrations for Bell’s diabolical invention. Then Lewis Latimer moved over to electricity, working first for Hiram Maxim and then for Thomas Edison. Along the way Latimer patented a method for making carbon filaments strong enough to stand the strain of irregular electric currents and delicate enough to fit in his vacuum bulb (1881, 1883). The first brought him employment with Edison’s firm, the second (after a merger or two) with General Electric. There, oddly enough, for Latimer was a man of many parts, he worked mainly in the legal department, moonlighting also as a patent consultant on legal matters. Until his death in 1928, Latimer lived in Queens, New York, where today his house is a museum, a memorial to the life and work of a remarkable person. Elsewhere in New York you’ll find PS 56, the Lewis Latimer School, and in Queens itself the Unitarian Church founded by Latimer and his integrationist friends. ©