BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

I prefer the term "autonomy" to "equality." Strictly speaking, who can be, or wants to be, "equal" to anyone else? Eleanor Leacock, on women's status in egalitarian societies.

On July 2, 1964, Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. It was in historical context primarily about race, a response to the modern Civil Rights movement, but equality was in the air, and among the many inequalities the act sought to address was gender inequality. Specifically, in Title VII, the act prohibited gender discrimination in the workplace. It was a nice irony, then, that on July 2, 1964, her 42nd birthday, Eleanor Burke Leacock was still struggling to find a tenured faculty position in her field, Anthropology, despite her already impressive list of professional achievements. She was then a “research associate” at a polytechnic institute, moonlighting as adjunct faculty several New York City universities. This anomaly was corrected in 1972 when the newly-minted Professor Leacock vaulted into the chair of the Anthropology Department at the City University of New York. Eleanor Burke Leacock was born on July 2, 1922, in suburban New Jersey, but spent most of her youth in New York City where her father, Kenneth Burke, was making a name for himself as an essayist, philosopher, and public intellectual. Eleanor married at 19, but was nevertheless able to finish her education (BA, MA, PhD) at Barnard College and Columbia University. Her work in native American anthropology, and her reading, convinced her that the subjugation of women was an historical construct rather than a legislation of human nature, and she found an explanation for that partly in her reading of Marxism, but partly also in reflecting on her own life and the challenges she had faced, as a young wife and mother (of four), in establishing a professional status commensurate with her professional achievements. When she did suddenly emerge as a full professor, Eleanor Leacock credited neither that 1964 act nor her own accomplishments, but the modern women’s movement and its call for diversity in faculty appointments at the nation’s universities. ©

[Stanley]

What is this life if, full of care,// We have no time to stand and stare. William Henry Davies, "Leisure."

One of the more interesting of our “rediscovered” poets is William Henry Davies, born into the skilled working class of South Wales on July 3, 1871. Somehow young Davies—an unruly child, he tells us—picked up wanderlust, so wander he did. His tramp’s life took him to North America, riding the rails, begging, taking odd jobs, returning home occasionally to pick up his accumulating inheritance (a weekly allowance of 10 shillings, left him by his grandma). A hobo’s life has its hazards, and Davies fell victim to one of them, severing his right calf trying to board a moving freight at Renfrew, Ontario. That didn’t stop his wandering but it brought him back to Britain, where (between itinerant peddling and street-corner preaching) he lived in London boarding houses (on his allowance). And, yes, somewhere along the line he’d caught another bug, writing, both poetry and prose, and in 1905 the first of many volumes, The Soul’s Destroyer and other Poems, issued out of a respectable London house. Davies sent copies, gratis, to leading lights of the day, including George Bernard Shaw, and the harvest was patronage. It came variously but most helpfully as an entrée to further publishing. This included not only poetry but (eventually) three volumes of memoirs and two semi-autobiographical novels. In these, apparently, Davies pulled no punches. The first (1908) was called The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp; in another, (Young Emma, published posthumously in 1980) Davies recounted his odd search for a wife among London’s poor girls. On February 5, 1923, he found Helen Matilda Payne, abandoned, alone, and pregnant, aged 23, at a bus stop. They lived happily ever after, at least until Davies’s death in 1940. Ever the writer, Davies told the tale first in poetry,The Lovers’ Song-Book (1933), and then in his very last publication, in prose, Young Emma. The very title afforded Helen the cloak of anonymity, but she had died, as old as her century, in 1973. ©

[Stanley]

Racism can not exist in the Puerto Rican family, given its origins and its history. Pilar Barbosa de Rosario, in the biography of her father.

Academics don’t usually expect public honors, but as Professor Pilar Barbosa de Rosario approached death, she directed that her funeral rites should be private. She feared too much might be made of her death and of her long life. Pilar Barbosa de Rosario was born in a San Juan on July 4, 1898, in the midst of the war that made Puerto Rico into an American protectorate. Her Afro-Puerto Rican father, José Barbosa, quickly became a leader of the statehood movement, and Pilar followed in his footsteps. Like him, she found her higher education in the USA. Like him, she performed brilliantly, winning her history PhD in very short order (dad had been first in his class at the U of Michigan medical school), and like him she became the conscience of her political party, always striving to secure American statehood and end the island’s anomalous existence as a “free associated state” (an odd phrase that, as Donald Trump has proven, means nothing much at all). But Pilar had a life of her own, too; she was the first woman to hold a faculty appointment at the University of Puerto Rico (1921), the founder of its Department of History (1929), and for many years its director. There, before and after her marriage (to an economics professor at the university), she established an informal seminar—a salon of advice and counsel—for students with political ambition, and thus became the éminence grise of the New Progressive Party, when it was founded in 1967, the year of her retirement from the university. No doubt that would have been her father’s party, but he died in 1921, and she did see to it that its goals included “social justice” as well as statehood. Pilar continued her salon until just before her death, at 99. Her request for a private funeral was only partly honored, and on January 22, 1997, as she died, the island legislature proclaimed that three days of official mourning would follow on from her church funeral. Her father’s birthdate (July 27) was already an official Puerto Rican holiday. ©

[Stanley]

After all it must be confessed that silence is the most flattering applause an Actor can receive. Sarah Siddons.

When Sarah Siddons retired, on June 29, 1812, just short of her 57th birthday, she chose to exit as Lady Macbeth. It was a role she had become identified with in the popular mind, and for Siddons—who had remade the character in her career—the identification was personal, a psychological thing. Once again, in the sleepwalking scene (Act 5, scene 1, Lady Macbeth’s last appearance on stage), Siddons’ portrayal—her heart “sorely charged” and her hands so drenched in blood they could not be cleansed—transfixed the house, and the audience would not allow the play to continue. After a time, Siddons took the stage and, in her own character, dressed spotlessly in white satin, she spoke her sad farewell and took her leave. Sarah Siddons’ acting career had begun almost with her birth, in an upstairs room in the Shoulder of Mutton Inn, Brecon, Wales, on July 5, 1755. Her parents, Roger Kemble and Sarah Ward, were actors themselves, and on tour, and in time seven of her siblings would also take to the stage. Her brother John Kemble, indeed, may have been her best Lord Macbeth, several times, notably in their first run at the ‘Scottish play’ in March 1785 and then again in a remade Drury Lane Theatre in 1794. Besides creating the modern Lady Macbeth we all fear, and secretly admire, Sarah Kemble Siddons is best known for her role—on stage and off—in making acting respectable. Though her own life was certainly not without scandal, her acting (in both tragedies and comedies) established a powerful vogue, made theatre-going the thing to do. Siddons moved audiences to tears and laughter (even gentlemen found it acceptable to weep at a Siddons show), and moved herself in the highest circles (in 1783, George III’s queen, Charlotte, appointed Sarah as “reader” to the royal princesses). To be sure, the Kemble family continued in its ‘trade,’ but as Sarah’s niece Fanny Kemble would prove, it was a trade that now could be deemed decent. ©

[Stanley]

The Dutch East India Company . . . employed all the machinery of despotism to squeeze from the people their utmost mite, the last dregs of their labor. Thomas Stamford Raffles, The History of Java.

If we can concede (to the likes of Niall Ferguson) that there was something good in British imperialism we must recall that there was also a good deal of bad. Looking for such ambiguities, one of the figures that springs to mind will be Sir Thomas “Stamford” Raffles, born on July 6, 1781. He was born to empire, not only at sea, near Port Moran, Jamaica, but in the service of empire, on his father’s ship Ann, in the captain’s cabin. He entered imperial service himself at age 24, as an assistant secretary to the East India Company’s governor at Penang, in Malaysia. There he began a career that left his imprint, and his name, on Britain’s Asian empire. In the process, he became a learned man, adept in several languages, expert on indigenous cultures and their histories, and not least a storehouse of scientific knowledge on local flora and fauna. Among other things, he offered protection and support to the researches of the American botanist Thomas Horsfield and saw to it that Sir Joseph Banks’ Royal Gardens (at Kew) was kept well supplied with plants and seeds (and the Regents Park Zoo with animals). He was a liberal in his time, and as he ascended in imperial responsibilities (in several East India company posts, at several places) he curbed the power of arbitrary princes and chiefdoms, introduced jury trial (and the idea of prison as rehabilitation), and abolished slavery, including freeing the company’s own slaves. He’s best known for founding Singapore (in 1819), where still a posh hotel (founded in 1857, well after Raffles’ death, in England, in 1826) bears his name. So, too, do several species of tropical plants. Stamford Raffles (as he liked to be called) admired local cultures and their peoples, and believed that they would benefit from western government, western enlightenment, and western trade. His was imperialism at its best, but it was still imperialism, and so his heritage is, inevitably and rightly, disputed ground. ©

[Stanley]

I am very sorry that I made no progress. Emperor Frederick III to Dr. Morell Mackenzie, June 11, 1888.

Kaiser Frederick III, who reigned for only 91 days, in 1888, is one of history’s more interesting might-have-beens. His liberal instincts and values, his close alliance with British royalty (he was Queen Victoria’s son-in-law), his political and intellectual allies in Germany, made him feared by conservatives. Just so, his early death (from throat cancer) gave them an opportunity to exercise their anti-British nationalism, not least because his lead physician was British, highly recommended (if not chosen) by Victoria herself. Indeed, Dr. Morell Mackenzie was knighted by the great queen for his care of Frederick while he was still Prussian Crown Prince, and to express her delight with Frederick’s apparent recovery. Mackenzie, born in Essex on July 7, 1837, had become Europe’s and perhaps the world’s leading laryngologist. Called in (in 1887) over the heads of Prussian doctors who had diagnosed the Crown Prince with cancer, Mackenzie executed a biopsy and announced that the growth was not cancerous. That was a medical diagnosis with profound political consequence (by Prussian law, a debilitating illness could exclude a prince from the succession), and it became more important when Frederick succeeded to the throne and then succumbed to his illness. The resulting feud not only ruined Mackenzie’s reputation (his published self-defense revealed much private information about Frederick, and thus contravened British medical ethics) but further poisoned the well of Anglo-German relations when he actually blamed Frederick’s German doctors for ‘provoking’ the cancer. Mackenzie’s The Fatal Illness of Frederick the Noble (1888), recently reissued as a classic in medical history, can thus also be read as a prelude to the bloodbath of 1914-1918. And Frederick’s death brought his son Wilhelm to the throne, a man of decidedly different views, who would make his own contribution to the coming—and to the duration—of the ‘Great War.’ ©

[Stanley]

Competition is a sin. John D. Rockefeller.

The 19th century was the era of “the self-made man.” It’s a misunderstood phrase, as scholars Thomas Augst and Daniel Howe have argued. Its first meaning was the idea that each of us has a moral duty to use our personal combination of skills, brains, and backbone to become a better person, and to shower that improvement on others. We owe our misunderstanding of it (as a rags-to-riches story) to the new plutocrats of our industrial age. These men generally did their bit to improve upon the theme, sometimes hiring journalists to write up their very own rags to riches story: poor boys heroically making good in tough times. The myth has been exploded, starting with a collective biography of industrial leaders in Cochrane’s and Miller’s The Age of Enterprise, which demonstrated that most of them were born rich, or at least comfortably well off. But there were exceptions, “real” self-made men. One such was John D. Rockefeller, born on July 8, 1839 to a devout Baptist mother and a ne’er do well confidence artist father and becoming, in due course, possibly the richest man in the world. He inherited some traits from each parent, prospering through hard work, moral certainty, sharp practice and political corruption. As to the latter, he was said to have done everything to the Pennsylvania state legislature except refine it, a nice joke given that the oil industry was the basis of his wealth. But his liberal Baptist element never died out. He tithed 10% of his income to the Northern Baptist Convention and gave even more to its mission to help freed slaves, and their children. Before he died he’d given away a third of his fortune, the bulk of it to the United Negro College Fund and the Rockefeller Foundation. J. D. Rockefeller was a grand designer of both monopoly capitalism and targeted philanthropy. Virtue being its own reward, old John D’s 69th birthday present was his grandson Nelson. ©

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When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American. Dorothy Thompson, 1935.

When Dorothy Thompson died in 1961, her long New York Times obit failed to note that she was the model for the Tess Harding character in the Katherine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy comedy Woman of the Year (1942). Like Kate’s Tess, Dorothy Thompson was indeed a prominent journalist, an international correspondent of great stature who enjoyed the distinction of being the first journalist expelled from Nazi Germany (in 1934). She never wrote that Hitler had little hands, but she did ridicule him as “formless. . . inconsequent . . . ill-poised and insecure . . . the very prototype of the little man.” This “blasphemy” (as she called it) seems to have got under Hitler’s skin. Dorothy Thompson, born on July 9, 1893, was the daughter of a Methodist minister. She majored in economics and politics at Syracuse, where she also was bitten by the suffragist bug. Determined to vote, she was also determined to fashion her own life as a journalist, and began writing for money, in Europe, in 1920. By 1925 she was chef de bureau in Europe for the Philadelphia Public Ledger, and had fashioned a unique network of sources in Germany and Austria—including Thomas Mann, Berthold Brecht, and Stefan Zweig. A woman with friends like that could scarcely be friends with Hitler, and she wasn’t. By the late 30s she had a large audience for her own column (“On the Record”) and for her current affairs essays in Ladies’ Home Journal. The column would eventually appear in 170 dailies, and the Ladies’ Home Journal’s circulation was 3 million. In 1939, Time magazine called her the most influential woman in America (after Eleanor Roosevelt). In 1961, her obit did mention that she was married to Sinclair Lewis (from 1928 to 1942), but only briefly and because Dorothy Thompson died in Lisbon where she had gone to visit her (and Lewis’s) daughter-in-law and grandson. “Miss Thompson” was, after all, her own woman, and ‘woman of the year’ for many years. ©

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Louis dixhuit// Got decidedly cold feet// When he heard that the Little Man// Had landed at Cannes. E. C. Bentley, "Louis XVIII".

Among the lesser reasons for wishing that our president were a[n even] greater writer, the “clerihew” is a very entertaining literary form admirably suited to his twitterverse. It has but four lines, rhyming AABB, and the fewer rules it follows as to line length and meter, the better. As for example:

George the Third

Ought never to have occurred

One can only wonder

At so grotesque a blunder

Admittedly, the Declaration of Independence reads better, but for brevity the clerihew has merit. The form was invented by an Englishman named Edmund Clerihew Bentley, born in London on July 10, 1875. His father was a rugby international (one of the very first), but Edmund turned out bookish, first at St. Paul’s School, then at Merton College, Oxford. As an adult, he published (as E. C. Bentley) some serious poetry, a few detective fictions (he was an enthusiast for the genre, and his Trent’s Last Case, 1913, is regarded as a classic), and columns in two or three papers (not all at once). I like it that he was a fan of Damon Runyon’s, and he edited a Runyon omnibus to introduce Runyon’s low-lifes (he called them “Broadway bandits”) to British readers. But the “clerihew”? Young Edmund coined his first one to amuse his St. Paul schoolmates, and perhaps to mock his history master, for his “clerihews” were mainly about historical figures. What began as an entertainment became almost a vice, and Bentley published three volumes of clerihews which, I think, you can find on Project Gutenberg. But the form, albeit quite simple, is perhaps too artful for Mr. Trump, and besides the best of Edmund Clerihew Bentley’s clerihews have at least the ring of truth about them. And that would make the clerihew difficult meat, indeed, for our deceptive Donald. ©

[Stanley]

For my part, I must say that science to me generally ceases to be interesting as it becomes useful. Sir Robert William Grove, Jubilee Address to the Royal Chemical Society, 1891.

Once the word “science” meant knowledge in general, or its pursuit. Just so, “scientist” is a modern coinage, and it was only during the 19th century that ‘science’ became a remunerative profession, the realm of the boffin, someone paid to be interested in why things (organisms, planets, and frictionless planes) actually work the way they do. But the 19th was still a century of amateurs, the most famed of whom was Charles Darwin. Another was William Robert Grove, born in Wales on July 11, 1811. His father was a lawyer, and after reading classics at Oxford that’s the profession William took up. He did well at it, becoming a Queen’s Counsel in 1853, and eventually a high court judge. Queen Victoria knighted him and, upon his retirement from the bench in 1887, elevated him to her Privy Council. But on the side William Robert Grove liked nothing better than messing about with “science.” After Oxford, he returned to Swansea to set up (with other messers about) a philosophical society. He also joined London’s Royal Institution, where he met his wife and worked with others, mostly amateurs, on current scientific puzzles. Grove made important discoveries in electricity (including what may have been the first incandescent electric light), invented the “Grove cell,” and involved himself (rather deeply) with astronomy and photography. He was one of the first to demonstrate, in the lab, the dissociation of molecules under thermal pressure, and his work in that area led him to an early statement of the theory of the conservation of energy. Elected to the Royal Society in 1840, Grove set about the task of modernizing that august institution, to the consternation of some, and he continued to lecture (entertainingly) and write about science. But from the 1840s he fed, clothed, and housed his family as a lawyer and judge. In science, Sir William Robert Grove was not the last of the amateurs, but he was one of the best of them. ©

[Stanley]

Dare to be naive. R. Buckminster Fuller.

In my college years, R. Buckminster Fuller was trendy and cool. It was an odd fate for a provincial professor (at Southern Illinois University) who was pushing 70. He was born in New England on July 12, 1895, and was made conscious of his ancestry, which included, collaterally, Margaret Fuller. That got him into Milton Academy, but he drank himself right out of Harvard and nearly into the gutter. At 30, in Chicago, he claims to have had a mystical experience which set him on a mission to improve, if not to save, humanity. For all practical purposes self-educated, he made friends in the arts, in the sciences, in business, impressing most with his intelligence and his ambition, filling temporary faculty positions here and there, and developing several theories about how the world worked, and about how it ought to work. While he was at Bennington College, already a fairly odd place in 1945, he designed the structure for which he became most famous, the geodesic dome. In many ways it was a parable of his life, a structure that really “should” have been quite frail, even evanescent, but by utilizing tension (between almost all of its parts) showing immense strength and, for some, a strange beauty. He had other obsessions, too, e.g. the “dymaxion” motor car, and a kind of Emersonian optimism that if people would just accept his genius (and discover their own ‘inner’ geniuses) mankind would set on a course of geometric improvement. In 1966, the New Yorker magazine (which featured Fuller several times during that lively decade) called him “a man interested in almost everything” (at that particular interview it was Maori chants). It was an apt characterization. Fuller now seems a great naïf; but in the age of Trump I have to say that I miss him. “Come back, ‘Bucky’ Fuller: all is forgiven.!!” But Bucky Fuller died, holding his dying wife’s hand, in 1983. They’d been married 66 years. Now they’re both resting in Mount Auburn cemetery, along with quite a few other Emersonian geniuses. ©

[Stanley]

You do not frighten me. I have survived worse than you. Simone Veil, responding to neo-Nazi thugs at a political rally in 1979.

45,000 Jews were deported from wartime France. Among the 2,500 who returned alive was Simone Annie Liline Jacob. Back in France, she resumed her education, married Antoine Veil, birthed three sons, and took up a life as a working mother until fate intervened and (almost by accident) made her into a politician. Simone Veil was born on July 13, 1927, in Nice. Her father, brother, and mother died in death camps. She and her younger sister survived. An older sister, Denise, fought in the Resistance and survived capture by concealing her Jewishness. In her political life, Veil served (in conservative, Gaullist governments) long terms as minister of justice and then of health, in the 1970s authoring the Lois Veil (France’s abortion statute) and easing access to contraceptives. She also was a defender of immigrants, notably of North African Muslims, and in all these guises attracted the hatred of the far right and neo-Nazis. Veil responded always with disdain or defiance, and became one of France’s and indeed one of Europe’s most popular politicians, one of the few who owed their popularity to their courage (“the only man in the government,” one of her socialist rivals once called her). In 1979, she became the first president of the first democratically elected European Parliament, in more ways than one a living symbol of reconciliation. In her later years, Simone Veil became the Grand Old Woman of French political culture. One of the few females ever elected to the Académie Française (the 6th, in 2008), Veil died only last year. She was first buried in Montmartre Cemetery, but earlier this month (on July 1st) she and Antoine were re-interred in the Panthéon, as President Macron had promised, in 2017, at her state funeral. Among her Panthéon relics is her Académie sword, inscribed with the mottoes of the French Republic and the European Union, and with her Auschwitz number, 78651. ©

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We decided long ago we weren't going anywhere. We were going to stay here. . . a commitment . . . a place . . . a direction. Muriel Snowden, quoted in the Boston Globe, 1988

Where you choose to live—if you have a choice—may say much about you as a person, and in that context we might say that Muriel Sutherland Snowden was an extraordinary individual. Born on July 14, 1916, into an affluent black family, she was raised in an almost wholly white community in suburban New Jersey, Glen Ridge. Aspirational to her core, she was valedictorian in her high school, and then did very well at Radcliffe College (she later served Harvard as trustee), graduating in 1938. Seven years later, she married Otis Snowden, son of one of the highest-ranking black officers in the US Army, and a graduate of Howard University (where his older brother Frank would become chair of the classics department). The couple settled in the Boston area, where (despite a good deal of residential segregation) black people of their background and resources had a pretty broad range of choice, and having a daughter they were concerned about her schooling. They chose Roxbury, one of the city’s poorest areas and the core of its black ghetto, and with the already-settled aim of improving the place. Otis was director of a settlement house in Roxbury, and Muriel decided to make Roxbury her job, resigning her salaried position to become a full-time volunteer. Working together, the Snowdens early (in 1949) established “Freedom House,” both a place and an organization, and made it into the wheel house of the Boston Civil Rights movement. They attracted enough support to buy a former Hebrew seminary and expand the functions of Freedom House to include careers guidance and skills classes, but always the focus was on making the city livable for people of color. Muriel Snowden’s lifetime of labor was recognized most notably by the award of a MacArthur Genius Grant in 1987, aged 71. Muriel and Otis are now long gone, but their daughter Gail, as president of Roxbury’s Freedom House Foundation, continues their work. ©

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Nothing received from Bob for yesterday. I have mailed him to ask if he is OK.......

[Stanley]

He's OK!

FW: Let's go again to the pine forest . . . where long shadows fall and fair winds whisper in the trees. To Arthur, My Beloved, by Estelle Ishigo.

One hopes that our current president’s racism will awaken Americans to the absurdities of basing our national identity on race. Meanwhile, real histories remind us of the pain those absurdities have inflicted. Take for example Estelle Ishigo. She was born Estelle Peck in Oakland, CA, on July 15, 1899, the daughter of peripatetic artists who soon abandoned their little girl to a succession of relatives, none of whom met her need for a home, love, identity. She found herself first in her artistic talents, at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, and secondly in Shigeharu Arthur Ishigo. “Love at first sight,” she said. But it was love on the sly, for California’s miscegenation laws were still on the books. At length, the couple decided to marry anyway, but had to do it in Mexico, in 1929. As lawbreakers, the “interracial” (is that a word??!!!) couple experienced much hostility, finding release in wilderness camping trips. Then came WWII and the internment of resident Japanese, citizens and non-citizens, including Arthur Ishigo. Estelle chose to go with him to the concentration camp at Heart Mountain, Wyoming. Cameras were illegal there, but Estelle was an artist, and she recorded the experience in words and pictures. Back in California, peacetime but no peace, Arthur finally found employment, but died of cancer in 1957. Estelle always felt that his cancer was caused by his heartbreak as an enemy intern, and she lived in quiet poverty for years, ill and infirm herself, until her words and pictures were “rediscovered” in the early 1970s. They were exhibited in museums and then published, by Estelle, as Lone Heart Mountain (1972). Then came Steven Okazaki’s documentary film Days of Waiting: The Life and Art of Estelle Ishigo. It won Okazaki an Academy Award (1990). For Estelle Ishigo, it won justice. “I’ve been waiting for someone to tell my story. Now I can die.” On February 25, 1990, she did just that. ©

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I found it a pigsty. I turned it into a palace. Sydney Cockerell on his tenure at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge..

If you needed further proof that a formal education is not an essential element in a richly satisfying career, consider the case of Sydney Cockerell, born into a London coal merchant’s family on July 16, 1867. His father’s early death brought enough of a reversal in family fortunes that Sydney, aged 15, immediately left school and never returned—as a student, anyway. He took up a place in the family firm, but had a yen for other things than coal, and the sort of family friends—many drawn from England’s radical middle class—that could help him. And so he acquired quite a good education from the likes of Octavia Hill, John Ruskin, William Morris, and Wilfred Scawen Blunt. Indeed, in 1896 Sydney Cockerell was named executor of Morris’s will, and he had already taken over much of the supervision of Morris’s Kelmscott Press. Sydney’s education continued with time spent with Count Leo Tolstoy, at Yosnava Polyana, with Thomas Hardy at Max Gate, and from 1907 with his wife Kate Kingsford, a fine art illustrator of note. Their son Christopher would grow up to invent the hovercraft, but meanwhile Sydney, already a noted connoisseur of fine arts and artifacts, was in 1908 appointed Director of Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum. In a distinguished fine arts career that included consultancies with important museums and galleries around the world, it was Cockerell’s work at the Fitzwilliam that made his reputation and (in 1934) brought him a knighthood. He brought the place into order, successfully courted benefactions in money and kind, and built new galleries to hold the resulting harvests. As to Cockerell’s formal education, Cambridge did repair some gaps, with fellowships at Jesus and then Downing colleges and an honorary Litt.D. in 1930. But it’s best to say that Sir Sydney was educated by his friendships and his experiences. ©

[Stanley]

Buy on the fringe. And wait. J J Astor's advice on how to deal in real estate

The USA has been, for better and for worse, the incubator of millionaires, the first of whom was John Jacob Astor, born Johann Jakob Astor on July 17, 1763. He hailed from the fragmented territory of the Palatinate, and thus by the accidents of history was raised in the Reformed tradition. His Protestantism doubtless eased his way in his adopted land, as did his sojourn in England where he learned the language and how to be a salesman. And salesman he was. He arrived in New York City aged 20, quickly wooed and wed his landlady’s daughter (Sarah Todd), and made himself (in almost equally short order) the monopoly middle-man of the American fur trade. This was accomplished through a connection with the upstart Northwest Company, influential relations with politicians, notably Thomas Jefferson, and an unerring ability to negotiate the pitfalls of tariffs and trade wars. Astor’s entrepots, first Mackinac Island, then St. Louis, then Jackson Hole, funneled furs to New York and Europe where the finer of them set styles for the prosperous. His heroic accomplishments were improved upon by hiring Washington Irving to publicize them (in the form of Irving’s classic Astoria: Or, Enterprise beyond the Rocky Mountains, 1836). Astor also figures, somewhat less favorably, in Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, The Scrivener.” Indeed he was a man of many parts and many trades, not merely as a furrier. The Astor dynasty carried on for generations, its ruling eminence in New York society owing not a little to John Jacob’s habit of buying up land in mid- and northern Manhattan Island, and then holding title to it as lessor. Andrew Carnegie thought the whole lot of them ought to be taxed to the hilt as idle land speculators. But John Jacob was also deeply into the China trades, ice and furs to China, opium, sandalwood, and tea in return. Even today, with our surplus of billionaires, Astor ranks among the top ten in the table of richest-ever Americans. ©

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The woman behind the woman. Elizabeth Astley, governess to Elizabeth I.

The passage of events that secured the independence of England’s national church is called ‘the Elizabethan settlement’ after its royal architect, the first Elizabeth. If that’s at all accurate, then we might say that England owes its Protestantism to a governess, Katherine Astley. Born Katherine Champernowne, she was related by blood or marriage to a whole network of west country gentry and aristocrats, thus well-connected enough to be appointed to the household of the infant Princess Elizabeth in 1536, and then sufficiently well-educated to be appointed Elizabeth’s governess in 1547, the year of Elizabeth’s father’s (Henry VIII’s) death. By then in her mid to late 20s, and married (to another courtier), Katherine Astley’s fierce loyalty to the princess and her fiercer adherence to Reformed Protestantism guided them both through the vicissitudes of court politics in a stormy, dangerous time. Katherine’s connections to the Seymours, ascendant early in the short reign of Elizabeth’s brother Edward VI, probably got her the governess post but nearly cost her head, partly because Edward’s early death brought Catholic Mary to the throne but mainly because Katherine injudiciously meddled in dynastic intrigue, first trying to marry Elizabeth off to Lord Admiral Thomas Seymour. Indeed Katherine was put in the Tower and narrowly escaped Seymour’s fate (he was executed for treason). It wasn’t Katherine’s only sojourn in the Tower, but through it all the young Princess remained steadfastly loyal to her ‘old’ governess, pulling Katherine twice out of the Tower and back into the household. So there she was when Catholic Mary died and Protestant Elizabeth ascended to the throne. There was one more foolish attempt to get Elizabeth wed (to the Protestant king of Sweden). This time Elizabeth herself put Katherine in the Tower, but Katherine Astley survived that, too, only to die—still fairly young—on July 18, 1565. ©

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Live life as though nobody is watching, and express yourself as though everyone is listening. Nelson Mandela

Today is Nelson Mandela’s centenary: he was born on July 19, 1918, in the old Cape Province. His Xhosa name was Rolihlahla, “troublemaker,” and while it’s true that he grew up to deserve it, he’s better known today— immortalized—as a peacemaker. We might use his name change to say that in order for Nelson to make peace in South Africa Rolihlahla had to cause trouble, which he did as a member of the African National Congress and of the Communist Party. But Nelson became Nelson at school, when his only membership was tribal, for he was born into Xhosa nobility. I ran into him twice, very tangentially. First when—as college principal—I spoke against the Lancaster students’ union proposal to name the library coffee bar after Mandela, thinking it was too pokey a place to bear such a name. LUSU contacted the ANC in London; the ANC contacted Mandela (still imprisoned), and “Mr. Mandela” let us know that he would be honored by such a christening. And so he was. Later, when prisoner Mandela was president of the Republic, I hosted one of his most trusted lieutenants at and after Robben Island, Ahmed Kathrada, when he spoke at UM-St. Louis’s honors college and learned from Kathrada much about Mandela’s crucial leadership role even during his long (1962-1990) imprisonment. Held in brutal isolation on Robben Island for most of that time, Mandela resisted blandishments from the apartheid regime to accept something less than majority rule, maintained his commitment to the armed struggle, and yet conceived and perfected the aim that, come the peace, there would and must be reconciliation. Not only that, but in prison, Mandela and his lieutenants—elder statesmen and young Turks together—maintained a common cause, a united front, and an utter certainty that one day they—or those who followed them—would achieve peace with justice. Nelson Mandela’s century closes today. It belongs to him, for he was one of its grandest persons. ©

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It's from the younger generation that I have the most to learn. Diana Rigg, 2014.

One of the odder things about getting older (or, if you prefer, “old”) is the familiarity dichotomy. That is, it has been (so far) easy to become old, less so to watch one’s nearest family and friends get that way; but the more distant the relationship the harder it is to absorb “aging.” One’s faraway cousins, for sure, should be forever young, and one’s former students too, and when you run into a greybeard you once taught, or a cousin you once played Monopoly© with, who’s “getting on,” it can be quite a turn. So I find it really problematic to understand, accept, get my head around the fact that, today, actor Diana Rigg is 80 years old. But I guess she must be. The math works out. She was born in Doncaster, Yorkshire on July 20, 1938, and spent her early years in India. She was first called to my attention by my PhD advisor, David Lovejoy, as an example of superior English TV acting, in about 1966 or so when she brought her Royal Shakespeare Company talents to star (beautifully) as Emma Peel on The Avengers, a semi-serious send-up of the espionage genre (we used to keep cats, so I remember the “M.E.O.W.” episode especially well, with its killer moggies creeping out of their cages to slay their owners. I couldn’t sleep anight for years.). By then Diana Rigg had already played Shakespeare (of course) and she would go on to do Molière, Stoppard, Colette, Sondheim, Williams (Tennessee), Albee, Chekhov, Euripedes (she must have been a terrifying Medea), Brecht, and just to drive the point of her wide experience home, Noel Coward, Lerner & Loewe, James Bond, and Doctor Who. Right now she’s in some episodes of Game of Thrones, about which I know nowt. But she’s got a 2014 Emmy nomination for it. It would seem that Ms. Rigg has grown old gracefully and actively. It must have been the kedgeree. ©

[Stanley]

We must look to the heavens for the measure of the earth. Jean Picard, La mesure de la terre, 1671.

The microscope and the telescope, both of them early modern inventions, radically expanded our fields of vision, and by rendering sight a measurable thing helped to fuel the so-called “scientific revolution” of the 17th century. But “science” was not yet a profession, and it was a good thing that both had practical uses, as well. An early pioneer in making the telescope profitable was the Frenchman Jean-Félix Picard, born in the Loire on July 21, 1620. His birth town, La Flèche, was also the home of an important Jesuit college, and there he studied, took holy orders, and acquired his interest in science. In his spare time, priestly duties aside, he did become a noted astronomer, using telescopes in what you might call the ordinary way, but he also tinkered a good deal, modified his telescopes, added bits and pieces (e.g. crosswires imposed on the lenses, a quadrant attached to the telescope itself, a clock) in order to quantify sight. Thus he measured very big things. His timed measurements of the solar system helped Newton more exactly to figure out orbits and thus work out his theory of gravitation. He also effected measurements by comparing observations from his own and from distant (e.g. Copenhagen!!) observatories. And Jean Picard used his scopes to come up with a surprisingly accurate estimate of our own planet’s size (he was just 28 kilometers off, an error of only 0.4%). But Picard also saw (pardon the pun) how the telescope, made deliberately smaller and properly equipped with crosswires and quadrant and levellers, could precisely map real property and physical topographies. In short, Jean Picard created modern surveying and gave a great boost to modern techniques of architecture and engineering, most notably at Louis XIV’s new palace at Versailles, where Picard’s elaborate watercourses helped to run the fountains that were the Sun King’s delight. ©

[Stanley]

If women were really to lead, that is, to take the entire responsibility for the climb, there couldn't be any man at all in the party. Miriam O'Brien Underhill, 1934.

Italy’s Dolomite range is full of forbidding peaks, and Torre Grande is one of them. One of its more difficult routes was first completed in 1926, and is known as the “Via Miriam,” after the young American who mapped and made it, Miriam Eliot O’Brien. She was born in Baltimore on July 22, 1898, the child of parents who thought girls ought to have careers. It’s not known whether their list included mountaineering; at Bryn Mawr Miriam studied math and physics (BA) and psychology (MA). She also started a PhD in Physics (Johns Hopkins). But at 16, with her parents in the Alps, Miriam had already started climbing, in a small way, and then at college she joined the Appalachian Mountain Club, and that seems to have been where her heart lay. She began serious climbing in her mid 20s, and in 1926 not only pioneered the Via Miriam but also made the first-ever ascent of the Aguille de Roc, on the Mont Blanc massif, a peak that—much later—became one of the ‘logos’ of NASA’s Voyager missions. Her ascent of the Aguille du Grépon (1932) was made in tandem with another woman, Alice Damesme, which germinated in Miram’s mind the feminist charm of making all-female climbs. Her article “Manless Alpine Climbing” appeared in the National Geographic in 1934. But she did climb with men, too, and one of them, Robert Underhill, a Harvard professor, became her husband in 1932. Together they produced two sons and made mountaineering a family habit. The Underhills made their name into a kind of oxymoron, accomplishing many difficult routes (in Europe and North America) and also compiling several “challenge” lists, for instance climbing all (48) of New Hampshire’s 4000-foot summits—which they did, for variety’s sake, in mid-winter. It’s interesting that Miriam’s autobiography, Give Me the Hills (London, 1956) did not find an American publisher until 1971, perhaps yet another accomplishment of our modern feminist movement. ©

[Stanley]

I really wanted women to feel good about themselves. Ruth Whitney.

On her death (in 1999), Ruth Whitney was eulogized as the first editor to make women’s magazines relevant. Beware eulogies. Among several, the Ladies’ Home Journal, under and after the editorship of Edward Bok, harbored many “relevant” writers (fiction and non-fiction) into the 1920s. But the Journal was a provincial publication (Des Moines, Philadelphia, then again Des Moines), its editorial glory days were long gone, and Ruth Whitney’s Glamour was New York to its core, and it was a “now” thing. And, of course, Ruth was a woman, not so much a child of the modern feminist movement as a reason for it, even a spokesperson. Born in Oshkosh on July 23, 1928, she grew up to Hollywood heroes like Lauren Bacall and Katherine Hepburn, whose Woman of the Year (1942) offered a model. And so Ruth Reinke (as she then was) went to Northwestern to become a journalist, married another journalism major (Daniel Whitney), and upon graduation went to work for Time. But by the 1950s Katherine Hepburn had become Doris Day, and Ruth Whitney discovered that “if you had a uterus, you couldn’t write for those magazines.” Thus she referred to Time, which fired her, and Newsweek, which would not hire her. So she went the women’s mag route, fetching up at Glamour in 1967 as editor and then editor-in-chief. And she did indeed transform the magazine, announcing her arrival by featuring a black model on its cover and proceeding to win multiple gongs for editorial excellence, including a National Magazine Award (1992) for a series on the availability and safety of abortions in America, past and present. In 1991 she completely redid the October issue to feature Anita Hill, then testifying against Clarence Thomas’s nomination to the Supreme Court. As one of her competitors said, Ruth Whitney “tried to turn her readers into functioning citizens of America;” and most of her readers, of course, had uteruses. ©

[Stanley]

The Chippewa do not say that the North Star [Kiou-hatten-nanank] does not move, but that they believe that it does not. Such a reply is endowed with reason and is most remarkable. From The Journals of Joseph Nicollet, July 29, 1836.

Surely one of the USA’s odder monuments to local pride and local history is the Niccolet Tower at Sisseton, SD. The brainchild of a local banker, it’s 80 feet tall, and from its summit you can see quite a bit of three states and Lake Traverse, the source of the Bois de Sioux River. In 1930 the lake was paddled by Eric Severeid—then aged only 18—on his way to Hudson’s Bay via the Red River, Lake Winnipeg, and the Nelson. But the tower is not the Severeid tower; it’s named after the French explorer who gave us the first accurate mapping of the Red River watershed and indeed much more than what you can see from the tower, not only correcting errors of Zebulon Pike and others, but confirming Schoolcraft’s source of the mighty Mississippi (which flows the other way) and making maps and writing journals that, incidentally, provide us with one of the best sources for the names Native Americans gave to the landscape, its flora and fauna, and its nighttime stars. Joseph Nicolas Nicollet was born in France, the Savoy, on July 24, 1786. He became quite a prominent astronomer and mathematician, a professor at the Collège Louis-le-Grand. Fallen on hard times, mainly because of the revolution of 1830, he traveled to the USA not as an emigrant but hoping to restore his European reputation. Instead, often traveling alone or with French guides, he mapped most of what became the state of Minnesota, much of the Dakotas, and some of Iowa. He is memorialized in various places besides Sisseton, including a Minnesota county, a quiet country town, and bustling Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis. But all that came well after Nicollet’s pioneering explorations, all completed before his death in 1843. Nicollet’s notebooks, maps, and astronomical observations are available at the St. Olaf College website, in remarkably clear photocopies. They are visually quite informative, but to appreciate them fully please first brush up on your French. ©

[Stanley]

No instalment as yet today. I have mailed Bob and looked in my junk but no joy as yet......