BOB'S BITS

[Tizer]

An appropriate piece by Bob. Today we listened to the Open Country episode about Herodsfoot village in East Cornwall. This is Cornwall's only `Thankful Village', one of those whose men who went into battle in WW1 all came back to the village. It's actually Double Thankful because the same happened in WW2. I've not yet been there (it's off the beaten track down windy lanes) but it's significant for me as being a place where a rare mineral was found in the 1800s and because of its mining and gunpowder production. Rather than say more I'll leave you with this link to a web page devoted to the village: LINK

[Stanley]

Be a home for the stranger, a balm to the suffering, a tower of strength for the fugitive. Baha'u'llah.

The felt necessity to prove the literal historicity of one’s peculiar religious communion is a curiosity. Thus in the 1830s a Tennessee Baptist, defending his congregation’s absolute independence from all other churches, including Baptist ones, still went to great trouble to ‘prove’ a direct-line historical connection between the laying on of hands that made him a minister and those described in Acts 6 & 8. Just so, adherents of Bahái (aka The Ninth Way) have ‘proven’ that Bahái’s founder, Bahá’u’lláh, was not only a Manifestation of God but was a direct biological descendant of several other such Manifestations, stretching all the way back to the patriarch Abraham and, with surprising specificity, Abraham’s third wife, Keturah. More prosaically, Bahá’u’lláh was born (in Tehran, as Mírzá Husayn-Alí Núri) on November 12, 1817. His father worked in the Shah’s household as spiritual advisor and bureaucrat, and Mírzá could have gone that way, too, but at 27 he became a follower of Báb, a mystic who preached the unity of all religions (at least monotheistic ones) and prophesied that the One God who ruled all would shortly send a ‘Promised One’ to effect their underlying unity. After Báb was executed, his disciple was released from prison—oddly, by the intercession of the Russian Tsar’s ambassador—and after physical and spiritual journeys of great length and complexity, settled in Baghdad as The Promised One, Bahá’u’lláh. There he declared the new faith, Bahái, in 1863. Despite his many dangers and privations, Bahá’u’lláh’s message soon spread across the world. I first heard of it in the Ninth Way Coffeehouse, in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1961. I was no convert, but as a scholar I can see that it has all the disadvantages of springing from a new revelation in a secular age (in the USA, Joseph Smith ran into similar difficulties). However, Bahái’s core ideas of religious unity and peace have attracted many, with or without the direct connection of its first prophet with Abraham and Keturah. ©

[Stanley]

A highbrow is the sort of person who looks at a sausage and thinks of Picasso. A. P. Herbert

Some say that the frankfurter is exactly 213 years old, commemorating the day in Vienna, November 13, 1805, when butcher Johann Georg Lehner loosed his new product on the market. But the claim is contested, as it would be, for the frankfurter’s origins (like its contents) are murky. If it is from Vienna, we can call it a Wiener without embarrassment, but in the USA we prefer “hot dog,” which nowadays can mean many things, often uncomplimentary, but in supermarkets is still often a “frankfurter.” But if we think of it as just another sausage, then it has a very long history. Almost soon as hominids began to cook, they made sausages, and much later, when hominids of the sapiens variety began to sing poetry, as with the Greek bard Homer, they sang about sausages. If you don’t believe me, try The Iliad. Or, if you prefer a shorter read, there’s a Greek comedy actually entitled The Sausage (I think that’s λουκάνικο, in classical Greek). Today, in parts of Europe, it is said that you know where you are if you know your sausages. In 1991, I spent several happy mornings in a small Bohemian town being guided (patiently, by an amused shop assistant) through several of their nearly 100 varieties of klobása. In the north of England, where we then lived, a favorite sausage is called blood pudding; I will leave the recipe to your imagination. However, the more famous, more local, and even tastier northern England sausage is the Cumberland, and not so long ago every pork butcher had his own recipe. We preferred Kinloch’s, in Lancaster. In Italy, of course, baloney comes from Bologna, a very old place. So “who was first?” remains an unanswered question. In blissful (or Brexitish?) ignorance of Herr Lehner’s achievement of November 1805, the UK’s National Sausage Week takes place in October, while in the land of the free and the home of the brave there is only a National Hot Dog Day, usually in July. So take your pick. After all, as Gertrude Stein reminds us, a sausage is a sausage is a sausage. ©

[Stanley]

If I ever bore you, it will be with a knife. Louise Brooks.

I recently ran across evidence that even before 1900 American women were ready to kick over the traces. In her women’s group in a small Iowa town, in 1897, my Grandma (aged 22) picked for her ‘conversation’ topic Octave Thanet, a writer who advocated female equality and lived openly—in Iowa—in a same-sex relationship. Meanwhile, Grandma’s cousin and college roommate Nina hopped off to Paris where she founded a literary and gossip magazine, The Paris World. But these crusading cousins would be upstaged by the flapper girl, also a small-town lass, Louise Brooks, born in Cherryvale, Kansas on November 14, 1906. Wikipedia’s picture of Louise, aged 16, tells the story all by itself, but it also helps to know that at 15, Louise had been fired from her Hollywood dance group, apparently for behaving as if the world owed her a living. Undaunted, she went to New York to feature (in 1925) with Florenz Ziegfield’s Follies. This was punctuated, or brought to a period, by a love affair with Charlie Chaplin and then a starring role in Howard Hawks’ silent movie A Girl in Every Port (1928). In Hollywood, Louise became famous for her wit, her haircut, and her liberated nature, hobnobbing with Hearst and Davies at San Simeon and having brief affairs with famous men (or with men who would later be famous), before going off to Europe, 1929-31, to star in controversial films whose titles (e.g. Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl) may tell us all we need to know. Drugs and drink then made Louise Brooks into an object lesson for the tellers of morality tales, but she pulled herself up and out of those problems, and before she died in 1985 left us with an autobiographical collection (life stories and essays) to ponder, Lulu in Hollywood (1982 and still in print). Her real starring role, as an icon of the flapper generation in Europe and America, had been ‘rediscovered’ in the 1970s and made her once again famous, and notorious. I doubt whether either Grandma or her cousin Nina would have approved. Or, who knows? ©

[Stanley]

If the people cannot trust their government to do the job for which it exists--to protect them and promote their common welfare--then all else is lost. Barack Hussein Obama.

Everyone seems to prefer July 4 as the USA’s birthday, despite its explosive notions about equality. But other birth dates are possibles, e.g. November 15, 1777, for it was then that the Continental Congress approved (and sent to the states for ratification) the Articles of Confederation. The new country was at war with the world’s most powerful nation, and there was “an absolute necessity of uniting all our councils and all our strength, to maintain and defend our common liberties.” But the Articles were better at maintaining state powers than nurturing our strengths, and the new government found it almost impossible to pay its soldiers, raise taxes or, to coin a phrase, “promote the national welfare,” and so in the 1780s a few men got together to give the national government some teeth (aka “sovereignty”). Using the usual tricks of educated, effete elites (“words” and “arguments” and ”evidence” and things like that), they manoeuvred the Congress into calling a convention to amend the Articles. Once met, the convention played yet another trick and—behind closed doors and, for that matter, closed windows—moved to create an entirely new frame of government. Then, having done so, they completely bypassed Congress and submitted the document directly to popularly-elected state conventions. So the Constitution of 1787 was approved by “we, the people,” almost as dangerous a concept in 1787 as the “self-evident” truth of equality had been in 1776. And as a very wise student taught me, about 30 years ago (from her reading of James Madison’s Federalist #10), the Constitution was a very “modern” document, suffused with a belief that politics, the ‘art of the possible,’ and government (the institutional embodiment of politics) offer the best ways to define our problems, hammer out our solutions to them and so do a better job of “uniting . . . all our strength to maintain and defend our common liberties.” And it all started on November 15, 1777. ©

[Stanley]

I have no idea of the extent of this zoo. I know only my corner and whatever passes before me. R. K. Narayan, A Tiger for Malgudi, 1982.

As a scholar I hav­­e long envied novelists for their ability, unconstrained by my search for verifiable facts, to tell truths about a society. But since I’ve never worked up the courage to write fiction, I ponder this problem vicariously, e.g. through comparing William Faulker’s fictional creation, a Mississippi county, with C. Vann Woodward’s magisterial histories of the American South. As a young man, I once summoned up the nerve to ask Woodward about it—over an Italian dinner in an English town—and got a very satisfactory answer. My next task might be to compare the works of two Indians, the anthropologist Mysore Narasimhachar Srinivas, born on November 16, 1916, and the novelist R. K. Narayan, born in 1906. The task is made more inviting because the two became close friends through discussions of their differing trades, discussions helped along because their works—scholarly and fictional—created a modern understanding of their South Indian birthplace, its people, and its cultures. Srinivas, educated in India and Oxford, was a fieldwork anthropologist whose best-known works focused on South Indian villages and caste systems. But I would start, I think, with his autobiographical The Remembered Village (1976), where he ruefully reflects on his limitations as a scholarly observer of his own culture. Meanwhile, Narayan created his own ‘remembered village,’ Malgudi by name (much easier to spell than Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha), and through observational fiction tells us its story and about the lives and aspirations of its residents and its exiles. It might take me a while. There are a great many Malgudi fictions by Narayan and almost as many social science tracts by Srinivas. I can’t ask either of them about it over a dinner table, for they’ve both passed beyond my reach, but perhaps a short fiction about their last meeting, in 1999, which occurred only two days before Srinivas’s death, might provide a very satisfactory answer. ©

[Stanley]

When you find out who you are not allowed to criticize, then you will realize who is in control. Voltairine de Cleyre.

Hector de Cleyre became a citizen of the USA in the usual way, by showing up. He also practiced his trade in an orderly manner, married a local woman, Harriet Billings, and fought in the Civil War (for the country, not against it). Hector and Harriet named their youngest daughter Voltairine de Cleyre (born in Michigan on November 17, 1866), and the name suggests that they hoped they’d birthed a radical (Harriet’s family had been active reformers in New York’s ‘burned over’ district). If so, they may have got more than they bargained for. Voltairine expressed herself early and readily, writing poetry in a maple tree for instance, and running away from her convent school because she’d learned to dislike dogma. At 19, she was already giving public lectures for the Freethought Movement, Robert Ingersoll’s mob, and enjoying some notoriety, but she moved on from there to become an unclassifiable radical, lecturing and agitating on a broad front and a variety of subjects. Her biographers think that what set her off on that broad front was the Haymarket Affair (1886) and the unjust executions that arose from it. Besides lecturing and hosting lively discussions on (inter alia) women’s rights, anarchism, prohibition, socialism, and sex, she worked ‘on the street’ to alleviate the brutal conditions experienced by workers and immigrants. Her positions were difficult to pin down, but a consistency can be found in the idea of “anarchism without adjectives.” Many claimed her (notably Emma Goldman) as an ally, but throughout her short life (she died at 45, of a septic infection) Voltairine de Cleyre asserted her ideological independence. Whatever her political stripe, clearly she qualifies for inclusion in the New York Times’s second-thought obituaries, “Forgotten No More,” a fascinating series that attacks (ex post facto?} what we might call the dead white male syndrome. One thinks Voltairine would have approved. ©

[Stanley]

We are all ladies and gentlemen working together here, and we’ll all come through the front door. Rose Knox, 1908.

You might not know that in the 19th century the upstate town of Johnstown was the center of New York’s substantial leather goods industries, with no fewer than four tanneries inside the town. So when Charles Knox realized that his new bride’s ingenious home kitchen methods of making and using gelatin might be a winner, he and Rose moved to Johnstown to go into gelatin big time. They were partners in every way, management, research, sales, and parenting their kids, and there’s no doubt that Rose’s gelatin expertise and her recipes were the Knox Company’s driving engines. So when Charles died in 1908, Rose took over the whole show. Rose Markham Knox, born in Mansfield, Ohio on November 18, 1857 would become one of America’s leading business persons, always intent on putting her Republican and Presbyterian values to work in the Knox Gelatin Company and in Johnstown itself. And they were progressive values. A Knox plant manager who said he would never work for a woman was granted his wish, and Rose went on to establish a five-day week with two weeks’ paid vacation along with a generous pension fund. And these benefits were for all her employees including women. Equal pay and benefits for equal work was one of her mantras. While becoming a major philanthropist for the city of Johnstown, she expanded the business, too, through advertising (including a “Mrs. Knox Says” syndicated column of cooking advice big on gelatin) and acquisition of rivals, always extending workers’ benefits. Come the Great Depression, the Knox Company, then the country’s biggest manufacturer and vendor of gelatin (for home and industrial use) kept on all its workers and (to compete with Jell-O), expanded into flavored gelatins. Rose Knox, who in her old age looked exactly like Joan Hickson’s Miss Marple, turned the business over to her son in 1947 to take a well-earned rest. Less rock-ribbed than mom, he sold out to Lipton’s in 1975. ©

[Stanley]

My generation must recognize that our accomplishments are not sufficient or final; change is inevitable, youth must express itself and mature, and we are obligated to help. Gladys Hobby.



One of the best-known stories in the annals of science is the ‘accidental’ discovery of penicillin. I like it because, in 1948, when there still wasn’t much around for civilian use, penicillin saved my life, but mainly because it lessens my discomfort about my only occasionally serendipitous research methods. It’s almost as well understood that this accident needed much work before it became medicinally viable; thus Alexander Fleming shared his 1945 Nobel with Howard Florey and Ernst Chain. What isn’t so well known is the work done by Gladys Lounsbury Hobby, in 1940-41, to create a penicillin that would be compatible with (a) human hosts and (b) mass production. Hobby was born on November 19, 1910. Her dad was an art curator, but she took a different road, graduating BS Chemistry at Vassar (1931) and PhD Bacteriology at Columbia (1935). Early in 1940, she and her lab colleagues at Columbia (Henry Dawson and Karl Meyer) wrote to Howard Florey requesting penicillin samples. Hobby, Dawson, and Meyer then very quickly synthesized, and tested, a form of the antibiotic that met requirements. Thus penicillin was made available, first (understandably, given the date) for military use, and then in 1948, for my Uncle Bill (a surgeon who flew in from Louisville to act as my very own National Health Service) to apply to my ‘mysterious’ lung infection. Meanwhile, Dr. Hobby moved on from Columbia to work for Pfizer. There she co-discovered Terramycin and developed an antibiotic treatment for tuberculosis. In 1959, she became chief scientist at the Veterans Administration research unit in New Jersey. Before and during her retirement, Hobby gave of her money and her time to encourage women to study science and then to take up science careers. Her book on Penicillin: Meeting the Challenge (1985) is still regarded as an excellent work in the history of science, as generous in its way as Florey’s sending her those precious samples in 1940. ©

[Stanley]

The taste of mole was the most repulsive I knew until I tasted a bluebottle. William Buckland

Scholars label the 19th as “Darwin’s Century,” partly in tribute to the dominating importance of his On the Origin of Species (1859). Mainly it’s a recognition of Darwin’s precursors. Among these the geologist William Buckland (1784-1856) figures prominently. What is less well known is how heavily Buckland depended in his research and his writing on his wife Mary. They married in 1825. Famously, their year-long honeymoon was a geological and paleontological tour of Europe. Nor was she a blushing bride being initiated into the mysteries of science. She was already, for all practical purposes, a geologist. Mary Buckland was born in Abingdon on November 20, 1797 into the Morland family, best known for brewing. But Mary’s father was heavily involved in canal building and coal mining, nurseries of modern geology. As a girl, Mary spent much time with the family of Christopher Pegge, an anatomist with a geology hobby, and inherited Pegge’s geological collection. Her marriage to Buckland, then, was built on a common interest, and it produced nine children and a mountain of work-in-common, fueled partly by Mary. She was expert at finding, reconstructing, and illustrating fossils and, it is now believed, writing about them. She kept their house full of “bones, rocks, and dust,” and she must have had something to do with Buckland’s many eccentricities, not least his aim to eat his way through the animal kingdom, including invertebrates (their son Frank, a naturalist, followed the same dietary rule). As William and Mary worked, it dawned on them that the earth was very much older than Genesis, nor could its structures be fully explained by reference to Noah’s flood. But like many of Darwin’s precursors and collaborators, they remained convinced that the earth and its denizens were God’s creations. After all, besides being professor of geology, William became Dean of Westminster Abbey and preached, Sundays, at St. Nicholas Church, Islip near Oxford. ©

[Stanley]

My father taught me never to owe anyone anything, not even a kindness. Hetty Green

Collis P. Huntington called Hetty Green “nothing more than a glorified pawnbroker.” Since Huntington himself was no angel, one is surprised to learn that Hetty wasn’t, either. Hetty was born Henrietta Howland Robinson, in New Bedford, MA, on November 21, 1834. As her names and her birth place suggest, she was the inheritor of two whaling fortunes. In 1865 she tried to make it three by forging a codicil and signature into her childless Aunt Sylvia’s will, but her cousins contested in court, and Aunt Sylvia’s fortune went—as intended—to charity. When the cousins then threatened criminal charges, Hetty and her new husband (Edward Green) fled to London. There they birthed two children, Ned and (ironically?) Sylvia, and Hetty began her investing career. It was her money alone, for she’d seen to it that Edward (a minor heir of the Astor fortune) was excluded by pre-nuptial agreement. Once the dust raised by her forgeries had settled, they returned to the USA, and Hetty went seriously into the investment game with an initial stake of perhaps $100 million (in today’s $$). By the time she died, in 1916, she had increased that to perhaps $4 billion (again, in today’s $$). There isn’t much evidence of fraud in this later story, although Hetty did emerge virtually unscathed from the failure of the Wall Street investment house which held most of her accounts (the failure caused in part by her husband’s peculations). And scholars have credited her with pioneering Warren Buffet’s model of “value investment.” But there is a great deal of evidence of ruthlessness, of tax “avoidance”, and of a pathological miserliness that probably killed Hetty and earned her the nickname “the witch of Wall Street.” After she died, Ned and Sylvia enjoyed the income a great deal more than Hetty had, and then they willed the capital to education (mainly MIT) and other worthy causes, just as their Quaker great-aunt had intended. ©

[Stanley]

As the universe expands, we cannot stand still in our efforts to unlock the cosmic secrets of matter, space, and time. Charles F. Berlitz, 1995.

Nowadays, if you want to learn a language, computer-based programs proliferate, and most of them have such clever names you think they must work. Among them are Fluenz®, Linguotica®, Rosetta Stone®, and +Babbel®, an odd misspelling devised, perhaps, to avoid copyright problems with the author of Genesis (Genesis 11, 1-9), who is believed to be very jealous when it comes to rights. But before all these, in my youth, and for generations before me, it was Berlitz®. The thing was founded by Maximilian Berlitz, a German-Jewish immigrant in Providence, RI. I’ll get to him in due course, but today we’ll study his grandson, Charles Frambach Berlitz, born to some considerable wealth (thanks to Maximilian) in New York on November 23, 1913. For obvious reasons, the family was sold on languages, and Charles grew up in a household where every servant and relative was charged to speak some different language to the boy. I think these were all European tongues, perhaps an oversight as things have turned out; nevertheless the boy was full of it when he set off to Yale. He graduated magna cum laude, and then worked for the family firm, rising to CEO by the 1960s. He also spent a decade working for US intelligence, and there or somewhere along the line he became fascinated by the paranormal. It began with his decision that the lost continent of Atlantis (misplaced by Plato and never found again) really had existed, but the imagination (left to its own devices) can be a slippery slope, and soon Charles Berlitz embraced the whole works, UFOs, the Bermuda Triangle, interventions by Extra-Terrestials, etc. When in the late 1960s it was decided to sell off Berlitz® language schools to Crowell’s (aka Macmillan’s), Charles Berlitz went full time as a fantasist. But when he tried to use his own name as his trademark, he had to learn yet another language, legalese, and he didn’t learn it well enough. Crowell’s had bought it, owned it, and refused to vacate. ©

[Stanley]

The true wealth of a nation consists not in its stored gold but in the intellectual and physical strength of its people. Veerabhadran Ramanathan, 2008.

Donald Trump has said that global warming science is a Chinese plot, but that’s not the whole truth. It’s also an Indian plot, thanks to the life’s work of Veerabhadran Ramanathan, aka “Ram”, currently holder of an endowed chair at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCSD. Of course this particular Indian hasn’t been plotting all his life, a life that began in Madras on November 24, 1944. His Tamil family was reasonably prosperous and, from age 11, Ram attended schools where English was the language of instruction. It was at that point, Ram later joked, that he stopped listening and tried to figure things out for himself. That demanding curriculum carried him to the SUNY Stony Brook physics department where he had intended to study wave theory (to do with light), but his mentor had shifted to atmospheric physics, taking Ramanathan with him. The global warming plot has a long history, and then (early 1970s) there were plenty of people already working on it, but young Ramanathan made immediate impact by proving that other than the ill-famed “greenhouse gases” were also agents of climate change. Some of his subsequent research (on the cooling effects of high clouds, natural aerosols, and methane) has been used by climate change deniers to argue that warming is not the story, but Ramanathan will have none of that. Rather, his work shows that the scientific community is not a conspiratorial monolith and that it is driven by data and theory, not politics, and assuredly not by “liberal” politics. Latterly, having won almost all the awards going and plotted with the pope (on climate change of course) and for all I know the Chinese, too, Ramanathan turned to a project designed to lessen India’s substantial contribution to global warming. His Project Surya (“Sun” in Sanskrit), aims to bring cheap solar ovens to the Indian countryside, lessening in several crucial ways the costs of cooking with fossil fuels. ©

[Stanley]

The growing disposition to tax more and more heavily large estates left at death is a cheering indication of the growth of a salutary change in public opinion. Andrew Carnegie, in his "The Gospel of Wealth," 1889.

President Trump’s ‘real’ life story suggests that the easiest way to get rich is to start that way. But his effort to fake it as his own triumph is not new. The “robber barons” of the 19th century fell all over themselves to ‘prove’ that they had risen from rags to riches. We fell for it hook and sinker, but most were false narratives, fake news. There were exceptions, including Andrew Carnegie, born on November 25,1835 in Dunfermline, Scotland, into the family of a weaver soon thrown out of work by steam power and mechanized looms. In poverty, the family pooled its resources and sailed steerage to the USA. They settled near Pittsburgh, and Andrew, 13, found his first job, at pennies an hour, 12 hours a day, as a bobbin boy in a cotton mill. His boss made his library available to the children at the mill, and Andrew started to read, and learn. He would later endow 2,811 public libraries, including the one where I learned to love books, in Grundy Center, Iowa. This poor, ragged immigrant kid rose through the ranks to telegraph boy then to clerk in the bobbin mill, whence he went into steel and railroads to become one of the richest men in the world. He sold out in 1901 and set about to give away his fortune (“the man who dies rich, dies disgraced”). Carnegie was no friend of inherited wealth. He thought it grossly unfair, and to the end of his life he urged creation of a graduated inheritance tax (quoting Shakespeare, up to at least 50%). But Carnegie’s fortune proved too large to give away. His lifetime gifts to libraries, the peace movement, universities, and the pensioners of U S Steel and the Pennsylvania Railroad left enough over for him to endow the Carnegie Corporation and its four offshoots whose overriding purpose, as set down in his will, was “to promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding.” He was yet another immigrant who fled poverty to enrich himself, did so, but ended up enriching us all. ©.

[Stanley]

You men are not our protectors. If you were, who would there be to protect us from? Mary Edwards Walker.

The Congressional Medal of Honor had a confusing, often sticky early history, and in 1917—seeking to clean it up—Congress removed the award from 911 individuals. There was an outcry at this mean act, for many—though certainly not all—of these 911 had performed courageously in time of war. Congress leaped to its own defense, pointing out that it was done by commission, that the cases were not examined by name but by number, and that the issue was often not the valor of the person but whether he was qualified. Exhibit A in this group was William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody, who had been a civilian scout for the army during the Indian wars. Exhibit B was also a civilian, but the case aroused particular controversy because “B” was a woman, so far the only woman ever to receive the medal of honor. She was Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, born in Oswego, New York, on November 26, 1832. Her parents had been swept up in the reform movements of the time, and they raised all seven of their children according to their lights. So Mary Edwards grew up thinking she was just as good as any male, a view she maintained to the end of her days, and in 1855 she was one of the first American women to graduate from medical school. She married a doctor, but she soon ‘deserted’ to serve the Union Army as a surgeon. The army wouldn’t have a woman, but it needed surgeons, and so Mary served as a civilian surgeon, bravely, and in the midst of battle, often crossing through front lines and treating civilians and soldiers on both sides, a dangerous practice that led to her capture, and imprisonment, as a spy. She received the Medal of Honor in 1865, and there’s little doubt that she ‘deserved’ it. When, in 1917, Congress declared that she didn’t ‘qualify’ for it, she told Congress that if they wanted it back they could come and get it. In that, as in her wartime service and her lifetime of reform, Mary Edwards Walker was being perfectly consistent. ©

[Stanley]

I die! I die! I live! I live!// This is the hairy man// Who fetched the sun// And caused it to shine again. Te Raupahara, from the Ka Mate haha, circa 1820.

New Zealand’s tangled relationship with its Maori past has its most famous expression in the ‘Haka:’ literally and figuratively the tribal “challenge” performed by the New Zealand All Blacks, the national rugby union team, before taking the field to (usually) wipe the turf with the opposition. The version most used by the All Blacks is “Ka Mate,” composed in about 1820 by the war chief of the Ngāti Toa, Te Rauparaha, to celebrate his miraculous escape, naked as a baby, from another clan planning to serve him up as a ritual supper. Instead, he took refuge with an allied clan chieftain (the “hairy man” of the Haka chant). Te Rauparaha was a great war chief, born about the time of Captain Cook’s explorations. Before he died (November 27, 1849) he had vaulted his tribe from a minor role in the North Island (indeed, the whole clan once took refuge on the small island of Kapiti) to something like dominance on both islands. He did so by welcoming the whites as allies (and suppliers of firearms) and as whalers. No toady he, though; his band once massacred most of a company of British troops, not without provocation, and he was exonerated by a commission of inquiry led by Captain Robert FitzRoy, RN (he of Darwin and HMS Beagle fame). Te Rauparaha’s place in Maori legend is ambiguous, however, for he was a chief who—perhaps recognizing the inevitability of white conquest—signed the infamous Treaty of Waitangi (1840). Whatever the war chief thought of the treaty, the whites claimed it gave them, in perpetuity, a tremendous chunk of New Zealand (this part of the tale sounds very American). Although he never converted to the European god, Te Raupahara did allow Christian missionaries in his territories. Under his protection, the first Maori Christian church was built, at Rangiātia. Symbolically, he was buried in the churchyard, but his family took his body away to give it an appropriately Maori send off, perhaps including a Haka. ©

[Stanley]

I can assure you, it was not my idea of pleasure. Cecilia Colledge, circa 1998, reminiscing over her early training in figure skating.

Before John Curry’s annis mirabilis (1975-76), “British skating” was considered an oxymoron, at least by those with short skating memories (and mine are very short). But in the late 1930s, after the reign of Heinie, women’s figure skating was dominated by two English girls, whose own runs began by placing 7th and 8th in the 1932 world championship. I use “girls” advisedly for at the time the younger of the two, Cecilia Colledge, was 11 years and 4 months old, while her great rival, Megan Taylor, was but a month older. Magdalena Cecilia Colledge was born at home in London on November 28, 1920, her mother an admiral’s daughter, her father a research medical doctor. Her circumstances, then, were comfortable, and when at 8 she saw Sonja Heinie win the world championship Cecilia told her mother that’s what she wanted to do—so she did it. After coaching in Norway, Switzerland, and London, her ‘debut’ in 1932, and her performance at Berlin in 1936, Cecilia and Megan dominated on British and European ice, and did very well in world and Olympic competitions. In eight championship competitions, they came first and second (sharing places evenly, 4-4). This did not much please Colledge’s idol, Heinie, who was so incensed that she tore down the posted rankings during the 1936 Olympic competition, and is believed to have nobbled the Berlin administrators for a favorable draw in the final (Colledge skated second, Heinie last). Whatever the truth of that story, Heinie finished Gold, Colledge Silver. Thereafter Colledge and Taylor ran the show, Colledge being perhaps the more inventive in her skating where she is credited with three maneuvers now required parts of international competitions. WWII ended their dominance prematurely. Colledge drove a London ambulance during the Blitz and in 1943 lost her beloved brother, Maule, shot down over Berlin. Afterwards, Colledge won one more championship (the British, in 1946) then ‘retired’ to skate professionally and to coach at Lake Placid and Boston in the USA. ©

[Stanley]

Marcus Garvey told me the English are no good but I said there are some good people in this world. Esther Bruce, 1992.

Writing is “self-expression,” and that’s a term that’s become so sloganized we hardly consider its explosive potential. Oral storytelling is fine, as Homer proved, but we know “Homer” because someone, sometime, wrote it all down. When you write you create an artifact of history, and it’s your history that you can place front and center. The newly-literate sense this and see themselves anew, young Frederick Douglass being an example. He was first a slave, then a reader; but he became a writer and a free man, and we know him in that latter guise. The empowerment that can come from writing is one reason why community projects so often include writing workshops. It was through such a project that Josephine Esther Bruce expressed herself (Aunt Esther’s Story, 1992) and introduced her own history. Born in London (on November 29, 1912) to a West Indian father and a Scots mother, Esther (as she wanted to be called) spent her life as a seamstress, and a good one too (working, for instance, for actresses on tour and for theatres). Her mom died when Esther was 9, and her father taught her a thing or two about racism and how to deal with it. An activist himself, he introduced her to Marcus Garvey, who lived for a time in their Fulham neighborhood. But he also taught Esther about the neighborhood itself, and the story that Esther finally put to paper, as an old seamstress lady, was about how neighborhood, the fellow feeling and kindness that can be built upon mere propinquity, can trump racism. Esther Bruce was a hero on her working-class street, where she found other heroes, mostly white ones. Her ability to write about life had something to do with that (self-discovery becoming self-expression), and it is certainly a way we can learn about it. Her story was first published by the “Hammersmith and Fulham Ethnic Community’s Oral History Project,” a mouthful in itself, before the book caught on as a real artifact of a real life. ©.

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Squanto sought his own endes and plaid his owne game. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation.

Thanksgiving is a good time to remember Squanto, for in national myth he’s credited with setting the stage for that first happy occasion, at Plymouth, when the Indians and their new neighbors sat down to a jolly feast. And Squanto (full name Tisquantum) also died at about this time of year, late November (in 1622), almost certainly of a disease the Pilgrims brought with them. Tisquantum was a Patuxet who was captured by the John Smith 1614 expedition (after which Smith renamed Tisquantum’s homeland “New England”) and sold into slavery in Spain. Somehow he got to England where he gravitated to people interested in colonizing, fishing, and trading ventures. Whatever his status with his hosts, it was a convenience. Tisquantum had picked up English, his hosts needed information, he wanted to get home. But when he got there (via a fishing expedition in 1619), his tribe was dead or dispersed, victims of a lethal cocktail of European illnesses. He seems to have been adopted by the Wampanoags (the woodland Indians were good at adoption, when it suited them), and so he was there when the Pilgrims landed. Tisquantum was not their first contact; that was Samoset, but Samoset told them of another native, with better English, who might help them, and Tisquantum then appeared with the Wampanoag leader, Massassoit, and helped negotiate a ‘treaty.’ It was an agreement in Massassoit’s interest (he needed Pilgrim guns and trade goods to navigate war and peace with his more powerful neighbors), but the Pilgrims also got access to Indian food and instruction as to how to grow it. As was their habit, they credited their own cleverness, courage, and God’s providence. As a religious group the Pilgrims were inclined to days of humiliation, but they did throw a “thanksgiving” to celebrate their delivery from starvation. Distrusted by both sides (with some reason, but also often the fate of peacemakers), Tisquantum lived alone on the fringe of the English town, and he died alone but not unmourned, the last of his kind. ©

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All politics is local. An old saying made moderately famous by Tip O'Neill.

In British and American politics, a long-standing myth (or hope) is that local politics are not political at all, but all about ‘housekeeping.’ Perhaps that’s why, in the UK, women voted in local elections well before they could in parliamentary contests, the first inroads made in 1867. Still, the apolitical myth persisted, so in Edwardian London people voted for the Progressives or for the Municipal Reformers—even though it was widely understood that they were, respectively, the Liberal or Conservative parties in costume. So when Henrietta Adler joined up with the Progressives, her high tory father, Rabbi Hermann Adler, saw it as a daughter’s rebellion against his patriarchy. In her long lifetime, Henrietta made much more of it than that. Henrietta (Nettie) Adler was born into an eminent family (her grandpa was Chief Rabbi of the British empire) on December 1, 1868. Nettie’s rebellions began with her irritation at being educated “at home,” became more serious when Hermann ended her “unsuitable” courtship with a Liverpool rabbi, and broke into the open when she campaigned for the Progressives in the municipal elections of 1904. After that, unmarried, she was on her own, except of course for her friends, who became legion, and her Central Hackney constituents, who sent her to the London County Council when it became legal (1908) and kept on doing so for decades—despite her Tory opponents’ use of anti-Semitic tropes, especially in the 1920s. But she was more than a local councilor. On the LCC, and later on the magistrates’ bench, she became a scholar of local government, of poverty and delinquency, of low wages and high mortalities, of working women and child labor. And she was a widely-recognized as an authority on these matters. Nettie Adler was much more than a rebellious daughter. Just so, she proved to be a lot more than a housekeeping local councilor. She was a political woman. ©

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The Greatest Show on Earth. Advertising slogan.

The seven Ringling brothers were all born in McGregor, Iowa, or Barbaboo, Wisconsin, such pleasant towns that one thinks they might have stayed put with their German immigrant parents (father made harnesses, and the family name was originally ‘Ruengling’). But five left to form the Ringling Brothers Circus. Along the way, they merged with or bought out other circuses, climaxing with their purchase (in 1907, for $400K) of Barnum & Bailey, whereupon they became (by copyright and their own estimations) “the greatest show on earth.” Forced to look for larger winter quarters, they settled on Sarasota, FL, where the elder two—Charles and John—had begun land speculation on the side. Two monumental mansions, out of place among the palms, record their presence and their passing. Charles Ringling, born in McGregor on December 2, 1863, is the more interesting of the two, partly because he built the more modest mansion, of a nice 18th-century Italian design. Today, visitors may miss the fact that it was originally designed to be the manor house of a large, self-sufficient estate. This was entirely in character, for Charles had always been in charge of the production side of the circus. While John was in charge of marketing, the patriarchal “Mister Charlie” was the one to whom circus types (and they were, notoriously, of all sorts) took their joys and sorrows, triumphs and tribulations. It was also he who, once established in Sarasota, invested heavily in making the city into a fine place to live and work, not just live and loll. Charles Ringling’s bayside ‘manor’ would replicate that strategy and, he hoped, be almost as self-sufficient as the town. Alas, he died just after he moved in, in December 1926. His wife Edith, who was from Baraboo, took over on the circus side as “Mrs. Charlie” and lived in the Sarasota house until 1953. Today, their monument is no manor, but part of the library complex of the University of South Florida. ©

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We can never cease to be ourselves. Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent, 1907.

To be born a Pole in 1857 was to be born without a country, and yet when the nationalism of the “folk” was on the rise. Though devoted to the Polish cause, Joseph Conrad’s fiction bears marks of the author as a stateless man, a free-floating moral observer, his judgment of our crimes harsher when they are committed in the name of the state or of ‘civilization’ (if only dressings for simple greed). He was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski on December 3, 1857. His third name resonated in Polish lore, and he would choose it for his writing. Meanwhile, his father, Appollo, and his mother, Ewa, were nationalists exiled by the Tsar but then killed by TB, leaving Joseph an orphan at age 14. A rich uncle prescribed the sea as a cure for the boy’s various maladies, and it was on sea voyages (usually as mariner) that Conrad gathered most of the material that made him a famous writer and the English that gave him his chosen medium. But first there was the sea, a 20-year career rising slowly through the ranks to become master mariner, and deciding early on to become British and to renounce Russia (the latter took longer). In 1894, poor health made Conrad a landlubber. Marriage to the much younger Jessie George, sensible, competent, and tolerant, and a bequest from that rich uncle made realizable his idea of becoming an author. And he wrote. Breaking into the market was not easy, and Conrad chose short fiction and serialization as his main vehicles. The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897), Lord Jim (1900), and Heart of Darkness (1902) first appeared in magazines, and Nostromo (which some regard as Conrad’s master-work) moved very quickly into book form (1904). The outbreak of WWI found Joseph and Jessie holidaying (with Polish nationalists) in Polish Austria, suddenly a very hazardous place, but as Conrad predicted the end of the war found Poland a nation. Nevertheless, he chose to die in England. He and Jessie lie together in Canterbury. ©

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Democracy, I do not conceive that ever God did ordain as a fit government either for church or commonwealth. If the people be governors, who shall be governed? John Cotton.

John Cotton, one of the founders of the New England Way, was born in Derby on December 4, 1585. The son of godly parents, he went to Cambridge, first Trinity College and then Emmanuel, the latter famous as a nursery of Puritan clergy. Cotton was then called to St. Botolph’s church, in Lincolnshire’s Boston. There his Puritan non-conformity made him popular with the town corporation but not with Matthew Wren, bishop of Lincoln and Cotton’s episcopal superior. A cat-and-mouse game ensued, with Cotton practicing ‘occasional conformity’ (especially when the bishop’s agents were in town) but otherwise continuing his Puritan obstinacy, refusing to wear the surplice and de-emphasizing the sacraments while stressing preaching, prayer, and piety. Boston corporation protected him, but by 1632 Bishop Wren had had enough and instituted church proceedings against Cotton. The penalties were severe enough that Cotton went into hiding and then took ship to Boston in New England. There his fame had preceded him. He was installed as the second minister (“teacher”) in Boston’s First Church. There he would play a major role in developing Puritan doctrine—especially the Calvinist notion that salvation, though free, was undeserved and unattainable by human effort—and New England’s radical ‘congregational’ church government. Stung by his involvement in (even his responsibility for) the rise of Anne Hutchinson, Cotton deserted Anne to become a zealous persecutor of her heresy and indeed of all kinds of “heretics,” including most famously the Baptist Roger Williams, the architect of Rhode Island’s strict separation of church and state. In 1652, John Cotton was buried in the congregational cemetery. It was then the only skull orchard in town, but with the spread of religious diversity, toleration, and a change of land title, Cotton’s body eventually came again under the authority of an Episcopalian Bishop, and there it rests today. ©

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They Can't Take that Away from Me. Ira Gershwin.

On December 5, 1996, musical tributes (at the Royal Albert and Carnegie Hall, respectively) were staged in London and New York to celebrate the centenary of the “other” Gershwin, Ira. Ira Gershwin was indeed born on December 5, 1896, and while his younger brother George was already banging them out in Tin Pan Alley, it looked as if Ira was going to end up as accountant for their dad’s Turkish baths. But Ira was watching. And he was listening: not only to George’s catchy tunes but, as he later said, to all sorts of sounds (traffic noise, the hum of elevators, steam hammers) and putting words to their rhythms. Ira’s career as lyricist began before his work with George, and persisted long after George’s early death (1937). The sibling partnership was all the more brilliant for this early work, and its autonomous roots (for instance, collaborations with P. G. Wodehouse, Guy Bolton, and other fellow admirers of Gilbert and Sullivan). When Ira and George finally did get together (tunes and lyrics for the Bolton-Wodehouse musical Oh, Kay! in 1924) the road ahead was clear; but soon the brothers littered it with immortal songs that many people of my generation (including my bride and my best man) know by heart, having learned them from their parents. Indeed I sometimes wonder how people can get through life without the assistance of Ira’s words—set to music, of course—which are (as appropriate to the situation) witty, wise, or wonderful, and not infrequently all three. One might start with “Beginner’s Luck,” carry on with “I Was Doing All Right” at least until finding some “Embraceable You.” After George died, Ira carried on, brilliantly, until he and his wife Leonora decided to take a rest and give a lot of it away, not just to the Library of Congress but also to the Ira Gershwin Literacy Center at the old University Settlement House, lower Manhattan, where the brothers, so long ago, had learned and taught English, so very well. ©

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I love India a little more than my own country. Warren Hastings.

In the 26 years following its victory over France (in the Seven Years War) Great Britain managed to lose the most prosperous part of its empire, aka the USA. The role played in that loss by East India Company tea is well understood, but the accompanying irony (the establishment of clear British sovereignty over India itself) is less well understood. The central figure in this story, hero and villain, Warren Hastings, was born in 1732, December 6, in Churchill, Oxfordshire. He was raised by an uncle, who placed Warren in employment with the East India Company. In 1765 Hastings returned from his first tour wifeless, childless, without much fortune but with a bad Company record. However, he’d learned a great deal about India’s languages and cultures, and about the labyrinthine relationships between the Company, local rulers, and the Indian trades. He made much noise about India, convincing many that it had become imperial territory and should be made so formally. He returned to India, rising rapidly to the governorship of Bengal (1772), from which base he proceeded to transform British rule through alliances, warfare, and more positively the creation of bureaucratic and (especially) judicial systems, the latter designed by Hastings to hybridize the best elements of British, Hindu, and Moslem law. This was well done, well enough to provoke an Indian cultural revival, but the wars were brutal, revenues suspiciously insufficient, and Hastings was recalled. In England, Edmund Burke’s sympathies for the Americans made him unsympathetic to Hastings, and Hastings’ chief prosecutor. Hastings was impeached and tried, and though he was found not guilty the six-year trial broke his fortune. Enough of it was left for him and his second wife, Marian, to live an “inconceivably dull” life on his Worcestershire manor. There Warren Hastings died in 1818, leaving historians to argue over his reputation and over the British Raj he did so much to create. ©