BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

'Never argue with your opponents; it only helps them to clear their minds.' Annie Rogers.

Shortly after arriving in Oxford, in 1969, I was hit by a lorry. I was thrown up against the wall of the Indian Institute and crumpled to the pavement, attended by a crowd of helpful souls, none of whom took the lorry’s license number. Little did I know that I shared something in common with Annie Mary Anne Henley Rogers, who in October 1937 was hit by a lorry just a few yards west of my accident, in St. Giles. There were two differences. First, her encounter was fatal. And secondly, she had a very much greater impact on Oxford than I did. Annie Rogers was born on February 15, 1856, into two prominent Oxford families, her father a professor (and MP) and her mother the daughter of a top civil servant in the Treasury. Annie’s privileged childhood included joining Alice Liddell at Christ Church to listen to the fantastical tales of Charles Dodson (Lewis Carroll). But just being the guest of a college or the daughter of a professor was not what Annie Rogers had in mind. She aimed to be a student and get her degree. Much later, Annie Rogers told her story in Degrees by Degrees, a title summarizing her painstaking progress towards that goal. It began when Oxford, letting down its guard, opened its “schools exams” to girls, only to have Annie win two of the scholarships. This caused quite a stir and helped Annie gain entry (five years later!!) to study for “degree level examinations” (but no degree). Again Annie confounded everyone by taking first-class honors in Latin and Greek (1877) and then in Ancient History (1879). So Annie was on the spot when Oxford first established women’s colleges (also 1879) and she was still right there (as a women’s college tutor) when women finally were allowed to take home a degree for all their hard work (1920). That decision was accompanied by the university, finally, conferring an MA on Annie Rogers “by decree.” It is said that Annie Rogers could be a bit abrasive. It sounds to me as if she had to be. ©

[Stanley]

The planets show again and again all the phenomena which God desired to be seen from the earth. Georg Joachim Rheticus, circa 1547.

In early modern German states those convicted of capital crimes not only lost their lives but their names, too, so that they were literally the end of their line. So when in 1528 his father was executed (for theft and witchcraft) young Georg Joachim Iserin (born on February 16, 1514) had to find a new name. He finally settled on Georg Joachim Rheticus (the Latin name of the German province of his birth). And that is how he’s remembered today. His father’s medical practice was taken over by the humanist scholar Achilles Gasser, who recognized the boy’s considerable talent, schooled him, and then sent him to Wittenberg, a hotbed of Lutheranism and mathematics. There Rheticus was befriended by Philip Melanchthon, who urged him to apply his math to astronomy, and it was for this reason that in 1538 the young Rheticus traveled to Frombork (in present-day Poland) to meet the aged (then 66) Nicolaus Copernicus. Rheticus stayed with Copernicus for over two years, captivated by the man and by his ideas and convinced that—however dangerous those ideas—they should be published to the world. So the first widely published version of Copernicus’s theory was Rheticus’s Primo Narratio (1541) followed by Copernicus’s De revolutionibus (1542). Neither was immediately popular (Melanchthon was furious). Approval came not least because of Rheticus’s use of mathematics in both the Primo Narratio and De revolutionibus to support Copernicus’s observations. In a surprisingly short time European intellectuals accepted that the planet Earth was not the center of the universe. Many also liked Rheticus’s argument that the Bible should not thus be faulted for error: rather it should be accepted that God had used the language of the people and not the language of science. After midwifing Copernicus’s heliocentric theory, Georg Rheticus returned to mathematics, as Professor at Leipzig, where he can be said to have birthed modern trigonometry. ©

[Stanley]

When the pot boils, the scum will rise. Attr. to James Otis, Jr., 1776.

In 1777, gentleman James Madison, future president and architect of the US constitution, lost his seat in Virginia’s House of Burgesses to a tavern keeper. Even before this, in Boston, in 1776, James Otis, Jr., a hero of the early resistance, began to have doubts about independence and revolution: “When the pot boils, the scum will rise,” he is reported to have said. It was a widely used cliché, and it described a real phenomenon in early America, one intensified but not created by the revolution itself. And some of the upwardly mobile caused concern. Otis might have been talking about John Sullivan, born in New Hampshire on February 17, 1740, and even as Otis issued his warning already risen to the rank of general in the rag-tag and bobtail army besieging the British in Boston. Before that, this son of Irish Catholic immigrants (who had prudently converted to Protestantism) had risen rapidly in New Hampshire. He apprenticed to a prominent lawyer, then became the only lawyer in town in a frontier region where his high fees and arrogance caused complaint but his effectiveness drew clients. Sullivan attached himself to the royalist Wentworth clan, wangling an appointment in the colony militia, but soon switched sides. His revolutionary career as general and politician saw some successes, some failures, and much controversy. His bad manners and short temper wore thin on many gentlemen, not least on George Washington, but like a bad penny or pot scum (his biographer called him “ethically obtuse”) Sullivan kept turning up—and moving up. An early supporter of a stronger national government and still a local hero, he was appointed by President Washington (in 1789) as federal judge in New Hampshire, doubtless with misgivings. But Washington needn’t have worried. Sullivan’s alcoholism kept him from doing much work (or much damage) as a judge. He rarely presided in court, and his life-time appointment terminated with his early death in January 1795. ©

[Stanley]

“All right then, I’ll go to hell”...awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. Huckleberry Finn.

In April 1864, Abraham Lincoln wrote to a Kentucky newspaper editor defending his decision to enlist former slaves in the Union army. Necessity (aka ‘history’), he wrote, justified his decision, but more famously he began with “if slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong. I cannot remember when I did not so think.” For Sam Clemens, growing up in Missouri and thus in a slave society, that was a lesson to learn and not in the beginning an obvious moral truth. It took Sam a while, but as he became Mark Twain and gained fame and fortune, and as he married into an abolitionist family, the Langdons, he learned it, most directly from his wife, Olivia Langdon Clemens, and her elder sister Susan Langdon Crane. In the late 1870s, on Susan and Theodore Crane’s farm near Elmira, NY (which they’d set up to help freed people learn how to be free people), Twain-Clemens began to write Huckleberry Finn. The book, published on February 18, 1885, was about many things: boyhood, innocence and its loss, friendship, and freedom. It’s also about a great river. But centrally it’s about Huck Finn’s learning that truth that Lincoln knew in his bones, that if slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong. Huck’s teacher is the “Nigger Jim” (as Toni Morrison—herself born on February 18, 1931—has pointed out, the N-word is essential) a runaway slave. On their raft, Jim’s love and his nobility gradually bring Huck to the realization that they were enough alike as to make no difference: prick Jim, he bleeds; trick Jim, he’s hurt. If you enslave him, he wants to be free. Huck knows these things are “wrong,” but when he has a chance to turn Jim back to his “owner” and do the “right” thing, Huck Finn decides instead to go to hell, and he feels good about it. It’s one of the great moments in modern literature, not least because it frees two people, both Huck and Jim—and if you include Sam Clemens, maybe three. ©.

[Stanley]

The Quiet Revolutionary. Title of the lead essay in the Festschrift presented by the Music Department to Professor Eileen Southern on her retirement at Harvard, 1987.

As a little girl, Eileen Jackson Southern (born in Minneapolis on February 19, 1920) grew up in the white world of Sioux Falls, SD, and when she showed her precocity in music it was as a devotee of piano classics. Her family moved to Chicago in 1932, where her piano teachers (though all were white) thought she should know more about Afro-American musical traditions. They were successful enough, for her MA thesis (University of Chicago, 1941) was on “The Use of Negro Folksong in Symphonic Form.” But that wasn’t where the money was; as a touring concert pianist she still played Beethoven, and as a scholar she moved further back to Renaissance music (her 1961 PhD was on “The Buxheim Organ Book”, a late 15th-century compendium of keyboard music). Teaching music at historically black colleges in the American South and then at CCNY turned her again towards black music and black culture. In 1971, she and her husband Joseph Southern founded a scholarly journal,The Black Perspective in Music, and her distinguished scholarship in that field brought her a music appointment at Harvard in 1974 where, two years later, she became the first black woman to hold a tenured post. She later reflected that she did not particularly enjoy being a “black presence” in a white world or a “female presence” in a man’s world, but she persevered, and with the help of Professor John Milton Ward of the Music Department, she became, so to speak, her own presence, the first chair of Harvard’s Afro-American Studies program and the person who led that program to acceptance in Cambridge and eminence in the nation. With her The Music of Black Americans (1971 and now in its third edition) and her works in the Greenwood series of music encyclopedias and biographies, she fulfilled her ambition to follow the example of W. E. B. Dubois and “make her mark,” and so she did, as a scholar in both Renaissance and African-American music. ©

[Stanley]

"It was a bright, sunny day, and we walked briskly. I remember getting to those great big steps." Linda Brown, on the day in 1950 when she tried to enroll in Sumner School.

Ironies abound in the tragic history of American apartheid. The 1954 Supreme Court decision that killed the cruel myth of “separate but equal” had its share, not least in the names of the schools. The little girl who desegregated Topeka attended Monroe School, an all-black grade school named after a slave-holding president, and she applied to attend Sumner School, an all-white school named after a senator had who campaigned against slavery and for black civil rights. But that child was no irony. She was Linda Carol Brown, and she was born on February 20, 1943. Her parents (Leola and Oliver) were not unhappy with Monroe School, but Sumner was much nearer to their integrated neighborhood where Linda remembered playing with “children that were Spanish-American, white, Indian, and black.” Come the daily school bell, the children went their segregated ways. Linda and other kids of color had to walk through a rail yard, cross a busy highway, and then take a bus to Monroe. In its landmark decision, the Supreme Court did not dwell on these inconveniences but zeroed in on the very principle of ‘separate but equal,’ which in ringing terms the justices declared to be an oxymoron, and a nasty one. By the time of the decision, Linda Brown was already in junior high which was, possibly another irony, integrated. Later in life, Brown taught, acted as an educational consultant, and continued to press for comprehensive school integration. In 1979, again in Topeka, she filed suit (on her daughters’ behalf) against persistent segregation, and she won that case, too, but not until 1993, well after her girls had moved on. Another irony? Perhaps. But one certainty is that Linda Brown (who died last year) was never satisfied, nor should she have been. “Sometimes it’s been a hassle,” she once modestly said of her struggle for fairness, “but it’s still an honor.” And Monroe and Sumner are now ‘National Historical Landmarks.’ But shouldn’t we call them National Hassle Landmarks? ©

[Stanley]

"From rags to riches:" the story of John Mercer.

A ‘mercer’ was originally a dealer in fine fabrics, but John Mercer was only a poor smallholder’s son, born near Blackburn, Lancashire, on February 21, 1791. The family did, mercer-like, engage in handloom weaving to eke out their farming income, and at the age of 9 John went to work as a bobbin boy in a nearby mill. When his father died, his mother married again (another Mercer, perhaps an uncle) and brought forth yet another mouth to feed. Young John was so entranced by his baby brother’s orange gown that he set himself to learn about dyeing. He also learned to read (from a fellow worker), to figure (from a neighbor), and to pray and sing as a new-minted Wesleyan Methodist. He learned much, too, from the chapel girl he married (in 1814), also providentially named (Mary Wolstenholme), who would have much to do with John’s accomplishments. By 1814 Mercer had already made important innovations in the dyeing process, and (whether inspired by Mary or by his own copy of the Chemical Pocketbook . 3rd edition, 1803), he now turned to experiment with chemical dyes, among them lead chromate, potassium ferricyanide, and manganese salts. As he rose to prosperity and partnerships in the industry, he came to the attention of pioneer chemists, joined in regular scientific meetings, and invented the process still known as “mercerizing,” an old word in a new guise, but having much to do with cloth. As John Mercer rose to the top in industry and in science, he joined the Royal Society in 1852, where (fascinatingly) he anticipated Mendeleev’s Periodic Table. Although he patented a few of his inventions and processes, he shared more of them. Mercer was also known as a good employer, a far-too-lenient magistrate, a reformer in politics, and a generous philanthropist. He returned to the Anglican communion, and in 1866 he was buried in the church where, as a poor family’s baby, he’d been baptized in 1791. ©

[Stanley]

"Tea Party members go to their meetings on Medicare scooters." Ishmael Reed.

A high-yellow lawyer woman told me I ought to go to Europe to “broaden your perspective.” This happened at a black black cocktail party, an oil portrait, Andrew Carnegie,
smiling down

This Ishmael Reed tease is entitled “What You Mean I Can’t Irony?” ‘Irony’ could be Reed’s middle name, but instead it’s ‘Scott,’ conferred on him by his parents, at his birth, in Chattanooga, TN, on February 22, 1938. That’s possibly another irony, for Reed has spent his life championing American culture’s diverse undercurrents, including Gaelic and Celtic traditions. From Reed’s perspective, though, the main undercurrent is African. But don’t say “of course it would be” for although Reed is black enough he’s still held himself at an ironic distance from ‘his’ roots, which may be why he’s (so far) failed to cop any of our really major literary gongs. He’s still a “neohoodooist,” as he first put it in a series of poems and fictions published early in his career, but he claims that all Americans would be ‘neohoodoo’ if we really looked in the mirror and saw ourselves whole. Looking in that mirror, by the way, is the very odd plot of Reed’s most anthologized poem, “beware: do not read this poem,” which appeared in his first (1970) volume of poetry, Catechism of d neoamerican hoodoo church. To keep body and soul together, Ishmael Reed published some 30 volumes of fiction, poetry, criticism, and drama; taught for years at the University of California, Berkeley; wrote music (jazz & blues); and established his own publishing house. He also won a MacArthur ‘Genius’ grant in 1998. As far as I know he’s still at it; a new novel, Conjugating Hindi, appeared just last year, and it seems to be very much within the Ishmael Reed undercurrent. ©

[Tripps]

Gets you going this site doesn't it ? Mentally stimulating, I mean.

Last time I heard the phrase High Yellow was in connection with Eartha Kitt though it was spelled 'High Yaller' - strange things stick in my long term memory. Wiki says 'it is now considered offensive'. high yellow


Never heard of Ishmael Reed so checked him out. Here's a poem - quite complex - strangely reminds me of Bob Dylan - but don't ask me to explain that.

I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra,
sidewinders in the saloons of fools
bit my forehead like O
the untrustworthiness of Egyptologists
who do not know their trips. Who was that
dog-faced man? they asked, the day I rode
from town.

School marms with halitosis cannot see
the Nefertiti fake chipped on the run by slick
germans, the hawk behind Sonny Rollins' head or
the ritual beard of his axe; a longhorn winding
its bells thru the Field of Reeds.

I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra. I bedded
down with Isis, Lady of the Boogaloo, dove
deep down in her horny, stuck up her Wells-Far-ago
in daring midday getaway. 'Start grabbing the
blue,' I said from top of my double crown.

I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra. Ezzard Charles
of the Chisholm Trail. Took up the bass but they
blew off my thumb. Alchemist in ringmanship but a
sucker for the right cross.

I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra. Vamoosed from
the temple i bide my time. The price on the wanted
poster was a-going down, outlaw alias copped my stance
and moody greenhorns were making me dance;
while my mouth's shooting iron got its chambers jammed.

I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra. Boning-up in
the ol' West i bide my time. You should see
me pick off these tin cans whippersnappers. I
write the motown long plays for the comeback of
Osiris. Make them up when stars stare at sleeping
steer out here near the campfire. Women arrive
on the backs of goats and throw themselves on my Bowie.

I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra. Lord of the lash,
the Loup Garou Kid. Half breed son of Pisces and
Aquarius. I hold the souls of men in my pot. I do
the dirty boogie with scorpions. I make the bulls
keep still and was the first swinger to grape the taste.

I am a cowboy in his boat. Pope Joan of the
Ptah Ra. C/mere a minute willya doll?
Be a good girl and
bring me my Buffalo horn of black powder
bring me my headdress of black feathers
bring me my bones of Ju-Ju snake
go get my eyelids of red paint.
Hand me my shadow

I'm going into town after Set

I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra

look out Set here i come Set
to get Set to sunset Set
to unseat Setto Set down Set

usurper of the Royal couch
imposter RAdio of Moses' bush
party pooper O hater of dance
vampire outlaw of the milky way
Ishmael Reed

[Stanley]

It should be incomprehensible David, but as you say it isn't and throws up images in your head. I agree about Dylan.... Stream of thought..... Poetry certainly takes over when normal syntax fails.

[Tripps]

strangely reminds me of Bob Dylan - but don't ask me to explain that.

throws up images in your head. I agree about Dylan.... Stream of thought..... Poetry certainly takes over when normal syntax fails.

I think you just did. Thanks.
This is what it brought to mind. 115th Dream

PS Noticed a mistake in the 115th dream should (of course) be Ahab rather than Arab. There's a box at the bottom to suggest corrections. I might do it. I'll listen again to make sure before I do. Checked just to make sure, and guess what - the narrator in Moby Dick is called Ishmael. I'd forgotten that. Full circle.

[Stanley]

Bit confused, you attributed your quote to me but no matter. You're right about both Ahab and Ishmael.....

Napier, lord of Merchiston, hath set my head and hands awork with his new and admirable logarithms. I hope to see him this summer, if it please God. Henry Briggs to Archbishop James Ussher, March 1615.

Henry Briggs, baptized in Yorkshire on February 23, 1561, was Professor of Mathematics at the new Gresham College, London. In 1615 Briggs set off for Edinburgh, on a pilgrimage. With good luck and dry weather, it took four days, and Briggs went north to meet John Napier, Lord of Merchiston Castle, who had published a book of logarithmic tables. Briggs worked on astronomy and navigation (e.g. planetary orbits and how to measure one’s distance and direction from the north pole), and the calculations required were numerous, laborious, complex, and error-prone. Napier’s “new and admirable” logs reduced long multiplication and division to addition and subtraction. When the two men met, Napier’s attendant reported that they just stared at each other for full a quarter hour; but then they got down to work, for a month, and (probably) can be jointly credited with solving an inconvenient feature of Napier’s tables and thus ‘inventing’ modern mathematics. Modern mathematics is something I don’t understand, but it seems to have been at least partly based on novel and creative uses of geometry. Napier died two years after the meeting but Briggs, reputed a generous and open scholar, would credit Napier with the solution in books he published (in 1618, 1623, and 1628) with new logarithmic tables. These were “only” for numbers from 1 to 20,000 and from 90,000 to 100,000, but at his death Briggs left detailed instructions (and specially-ruled paper) for calculating the rest. Henry Briggs was also by way of being an amateur theologian, a satirical critic of astrology, a gadabout publicist for science in general, and a devout Puritan. He is one of the reasons that many historians like to tie the rise of modern science (aka “the scientific revolution of the 17th century”) to the Puritan movement and to Gresham College. After Briggs’s death, his work would bear fruit in the creation of London’s Royal Society and, arguably, Isaac Newton’s ‘invention’ of the calculus. ©

[Tripps]

Bit confused, you attributed your quote to me

I'm pleading 'not guilty' to that - I thought it was being a bit ambitious to reply with quotes from two different posts, and so it proved. Good thing I didn't point out the Ahab / Arab 'mistake'. It is Arab (Ay - rab) - poetic licence I suppose.

No one seems to know who the 'Pope of Eruke' is. Neither do I.

I have a book of his lyrics, and an actual LP record, which I've just dug out and listened to. Amazing it survived - it's over fifty years old and has had a tough life.

I'd forgotten that he has a fit of the giggles as he starts the track, and has to start again.

[Stanley]

But you got the original names right in the book.....

[Stanley]

"If there is technological advance without social advance, there is, almost automatically, an increase in human misery, in impoverishment." Michael Harrington, The Other America, 1962.

Now that ‘democratic socialism’ is again taking the American air, finding a presence even in congress’s hallowed halls, it’s time to remember Michael Harrington, born on February 24, 1928 in St. Louis’s Debaliviere Place neighborhood, and educated there, too, at the St. Roch School and then across Forest Park at St. Louis University High. There, along with his schoolmate Tom Dooley (St. Roch’s and SLUH), he imbibed several Jesuitical principles and made them into a guide for how he should live his life. After Holy Cross (BA), Chicago (MA), and Yale Law, he went to work for Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker, eventually as its editor. As his faith waned into “pious apostasy,” Harrington noted a parallel change in the wider American society: that religion had lost its place as an organizing moral principle, replaced by the soul-less dogmatics of competition. He summed up this discovery in his The Politics at God’s Funeral (1983), but he and his wife Stephanie had already taken steps (as journalists and social critics) to repair that moral center. Their restorationist creed was a decidedly American “democratic socialism.” I am not familiar with Stephanie Gervis Harrington’s work, but I became a (Michael) Harringtonite when I read his The Other America: Poverty in the United States, which came out in 1962. It would have been a shocking book had my father not already shocked me (in the previous summer, just before I left for university) with a tour of my home town’s poorest neighborhood, where his student Jerry Bloom’s family ran a grocery store that was also an ersatz social welfare agency. So The Other America provided me with explanations for instead of an exposé of our growing, deepening inequalities. There are other lessons to be learned from Harrington’s life, too, notably his political tolerance, itself based on his Jesuitical understanding that in this world ‘moral purity’ is a rotten tactic and ‘doctrinal orthodoxy’ little better than a death wish. ©

[The more I learn about Bob's dad the more I like him....]

[Stanley]

One of our hale, sprightly damsels, that are bred among the Hay & Heather. Robert Burns, 1791, describing his wife Jean Armour.

At Burns Night in 2018, I gave the traditional ‘toast to the lassies.’ As is my wont, I researched the matter, only to detail what I had already known in general: the poet Burns knew, in the biblical sense, many lassies, and not only that but in verse he told about them, sometimes in considerable detail. These were the verses that 19th-century collectors kept back of their bookshelves. On the night, my inner Puritan triumphed over my outer Romantic, and I rather roasted Rabbie than toasted the lassies. But there was a lass to whom Burns kept returning, Jean Armour of Mauchline’s Cowgate (locally, ‘Coogate’). She was born on February 25, 1765, and had heard of Burns before their inauspicious first meeting (early Spring 1784), when Burns’s dog ran over laundry she’d laid out to bleach. That day, she gave as good as she got, chastising first the dog and then the poet. “Lassie, if ye thought ought o’ me, ye wadna hurt my dog.” “I wadna thought much o’ you at ony rate.” Later, at a dancing room, they “fell acquainted,” and by early 1786 Jean Armour was pregnant. Neither her parents nor her kirk were pleased, and for a time Burns wasn’t, either, writing (and probably saying) some mean things about her, meaner about her parents. But the relationship, and the pregnancies, continued, and in early 1788 they married, at which point Burns’s tone changed remarkably: no less earthy, he was now clearly affectionate towards his “clean-limbed, handsome, bewitching young hussy.” She also seems to have played her part as sounding-board, even editress, of Burns’s songs and verse, and she was certainly tolerant towards Burns’s other amours. Burns died in 1796 much concerned at Jean’s fate (and about their surviving children), but some of his admirers took good care of her, and all of them came to think very well of Jean Armour, the heroine of a hero’s life. In April 1834 “the Lassie I lo’e best” was buried next to her husband at St. Michael’s, Dumfries. ©

[Stanley]

I have always wanted to do something for boys because of my gratitude to the good God for my own two dear sons. Louise Bowen to Jane Addams, Jan. 11, 1907, explaining her gift of $10,000 to build a boys’ club at Hull House.

One of my Penn mentors, the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell. once told me that, failing a real social democracy, his sole hope for America was the rise (or rebirth) of “a class-conscious upper class” that understood its dependence on and thus its obligations to the whole society. His scholarly output on this theme concentrated on his own class, the aristocracy of “main-line” Philadelphia, with a few Boston Brahmins thrown in, but he could have been thinking of Louise deKoven Bowen. She was born (on February 26, 1859) at the social pinnacle of a very different city, Chicago, that “stormy, husky, brawling,//City of the Big Shoulders.” Born to wealth, educated at the Dearborn Seminary, Louise deKoven married well, and then married off her four children equally well, but she never stopped trying to reform her city, perhaps make it less masculine than Sandburg’s “tall bold slugger,” render it safe for women and children and a place where poor people could prosper. In a long, active life (she died in 1953), Louise Bowen led a successful campaign to create (then administered) a juvenile court system devoted to counsel and reform rather than punishment. She publicized the plight of African-Americans and dared Chicago to do something about it. She helped bring health care—hospitals and in-home nursing—to poor neighborhoods. She even bankrolled a couple of strikes in the garment industry and (as a loud-mouthed stockholder) convinced big Chicago firms (e.g. International Harvester) to adopt equal pay policies for women workers. And of course she campaigned for women’s suffrage, in which she showed special talent at browbeating her fellow Republicans. But Louise Bowen is best or most remembered, as the ‘woman behind the woman’ at Jane Addams’ Hull House Settlement, providing counsel, time, energy and, yes, quite a bit of money to the project over many years (60, to be exact). I wonder if Professor Baltzell ever met her. ©

[Stanley]

"Leadership should be born out of the understanding of the needs of those who would be affected by it." Marian Anderson.

In the bad old days of Jim Crow, almost as bad at the North as in the South, the black community of Philadelphia became resource-full enough to take care of its own, and when community leaders discovered a girl at the Union Baptist Church who sang like an angel they took care of her. She was Marian Anderson, born February 27, 1897, and when her dad died the community saw to it that she continued in school and, as importantly, got private lessons from the likes of Giuseppe Boghetti (who also tutored Helen Traubel). In 1919 the white philanthropists Robert Curtis Ogden and John Wanamaker chipped in by sponsoring a concert for her in the Wanamaker store’s Egyptian Hall, and Ms. Anderson was on her way. When in 1924 Boghetti sponsored her in a New York Philharmonic voice competition (which she won), she arrived. Her “rich, vibrant contralto” became famous but her skin color still proved a kind of obstacle. On tours she was welcomed in the concert hall but not in the hotel next door, so people took her into their homes (at Princeton, Marian Anderson stayed with Albert Einstein). But she preferred European tours, knocking them dead in London and elsewhere. In Helsinki, Jan Sibelius said that she penetrated the Nordic soul. Anderson became even more famous when she was denied a venue at Constitution Hall, in the nation’s capital, by the Daughters of the American Revolution. As a result, my grandmother Lillian Simms, out in Grundy Center, Iowa, resigned from the DAR, but more to the point so did Eleanor Roosevelt. And so it was that on Easter Sunday, 1937, at the Lincoln Memorial, Marian Anderson gave the most famous voice recital in US history. In attendance were the president, the first lady, and about 75,000 others, of all skin shades, who came to hear Marian Anderson sing. She began with “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee.” It is said that there was not a dry eye in the house. ©

Bob then added....
A very old friend (who was not, however, yet alive on the day) wrote to say that Ms. Anderson sang, at Lincoln’s feet, on Easter Sunday 1939. He kindly suggested it was a keyboard slip but it was one of those cases where memory trumped looking it up. It was an error.
And now that I am on the point I must say also that neither President Roosevelt nor Eleanor Roosevelt actually attended the concert. The honor of hosting was taken by Harold Ickes, Secretary of the Interior (and thus responsible for the Lincoln Memorial) and an old warrior for the NAACP (he had served as president of the Chicago branch). Roosevelt had problems with his southern wing (he had twice failed to support an anti-lynching bill) and Eleanor thought, on this occasion, it were better for her to stay in the background.
So errata rather than erratum. Bob.

[Stanley]

"I am afraid . . . that we have more curiosity than capacity; for we grasp at all, but catch nothing but wind." Michel de Montaigne, 'Of Cannibals,' c. 1580.

In the early 1640s, as England spiraled into civil war, two young immigrants in Oxford (Samuel Hartlib and John Dury) brashly set up an “Office of Information” so that they could collect ‘real’ (experiential) data from Europe’s best minds, freeing themselves from the shackles of scholasticism. As another liberation, and even more brashly, they proposed to make education enjoyable. In some mythical college, or perhaps just a big house, their pupils would live French, or Latin, or Mathematics, and, absent the threat of the birch or the rod, they would learn better, faster, and more deeply than their ancestors. Where they got such an absurd notion is anyone’s guess, but it could have arisen out of their reading of the life and learning of Michel de Montaigne, born into the French nobility on February 28, 1533. Montaigne’s father set out an ‘environmental’ scheme for his son’s humanist education. To learn how the poor lived, Michel lived with the poor (for three years). To learn Latin, his dad not only secured Michel a tutor who spoke no French but ensured that all the household spoke only Latin. So if the boy wanted bread for breakfast, he could not ask for “le pain” but for “panem.” To learn about religion, Michel would learn about the decidedly odd and varied religious history of his family. Grown to an age, Michel de Montaigne became not only a seasoned and sought-after diplomat (in several impossible situations as religious wars tore France apart) but a great scholar (of many subjects). His modus vivendi, as a student of life, was to read about a subject, discourse about it, experience it if practicable and imagine it if not, and then bring his learning or imagining to a point with a short essay. Montaigne’s Essays, highly personal, gently skeptical, often witty, in John Florio’s English edition, soon found a very wide readership. Montaigne’s Essays can still be read—as Dury and Hartlib hoped for their strange school—for reward without punishment. ©

[Stanley]

"Their monument sticks like a fishbone in the city's throat." Robert Lowell, "For the Union Dead," 1960, on Augustus St. Gaudens' memorial to the 54th Massachusetts, Boston Common.

Elizabeth Bishop and Elizabeth Hardwick both forgave Robert Lowell, so I guess I can, too, and since I prefer my literary heroes to be at least semi-decent human beings, I can also still think of him as my favorite modern poet. I first judged him so for his politics, possibly an even more irrelevant criterion, but the 1960s were a good time to admire political poets. Bishop and Hardwick (respectively, his wives #2 and #3) were themselves gifted writers, and for at least parts of their lives (before, during, and after their marriages) they shared and voiced that judgment. But it was hard for them (as it had been for wife #1, the writer Jean Stafford). Robert Traill Spence Lowell, III, born into the Boston aristocracy on March 1, 1917, suffered from severe mental illness for most of his life. It was manic depression, and Lowell himself speculated that he wrote only, or best, during his manic swings. Those could be happy times, too, for Bishop and Hardwick, who were not only his ‘muses’ (a loaded term with male writers) but also his editors and sounding boards. Then came the depressions, hard enough for those close to him even when he was in hospital, let alone at home. And after that, when Lowell was at the height of his powers, came the “cruel and shallow” use of Hardwick’s letters in Lowell’s The Dolphin (1973). Those words were Adrienne Rich’s, angry enough at Lowell’s literary exploitation of ‘his’ women to call the book “bullshit eloquence.” I haven’t read The Dolphin (I was put off by the reviews), but it was probably better than that, as it were despite its cruelties. And the rest of his poetry (there’s a lot) can be quite beautiful even when (as, surpassingly, in “For the Union Dead”) it embodies the bitter judgment of a man whose mind, unruly and yet diamond-sharp, made him an outcast even in his own home town. Robert Lowell died of a heart attack in 1977, while on his way to visit Elizabeth Hardwick. ©

[Stanley]

Lady Liberty of Calumet, Michigan, 1888-1956.

The race for the 2020 Democratic nomination already includes a passel of women, and women of varied ancestries, including Amy Klobuchar. Her Klobuchar great-grandfather immigrated from Slovenia to work in the open cast mines of Minnesota’s Iron Range. So Senator Klobuchar shares something in common with “Big Annie” Klobuchar, a union agitator for the Western Federation of Miners. Anna Klobuchar (Clemenc) was born on March 2, 1888, in Calumet, Michigan, at the heart of the Upper Peninsula’s copper range. Her parents were both Slovenian immigrants, her father working in the copper mines, her mother hiring out for domestic service. After an education in the mining company’s school, Anna grew to a great height (6’2”), married and soon divorced an even taller miner (Alois Clemenc, a violent 6’4” alcoholic), then cared for crippled miners in a local church hall. She also organized for the WFM union, and when in 1913 company thugs murdered two union members (and wounded several others) she vaulted into prominence. She carried a large American flag at the head of the funeral procession, and (big and young and strong and tall) she looked like Lady Liberty incarnate (although, of course, Annie was fully clothed). The next year, her Women’s Auxiliary organized a Christmas party for striking miners and their children at the Italian Hall in Calumet. Someone—probably a company agent—shouted “fire” and in the ensuing panic, 75 died, most of them children, of suffocation. Annie led another funeral march; demoralized strikers went back to work. Unionization took a long time and more violent struggles. Annie faded away; but in 1996 Big Annie Clemenc was voted into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame, and by a Republican state legislature, an early electoral success for a Klobuchar, albeit one not directly related to the senior senator from Minnesota, whose Slovenian ancestor came in a later migration to a different mining range. ©

[Stanley]

Give workers only as much as they need to survive. Thriving is something that management should do and that workers don't have a right to do. George M. Pullman.

Besides being the grand old man of Penn’s history department, Thomas Cochran sat on the Chase-Manhattan board, so it was odd that his The Age of Enterprise (1961: coauthor William Miller) was attacked by some as anti-capitalist and un-American. But it stands as a fine social history of capitalism in its prime, swashbuckling era, the late 19th century. Among its gifts was a biography of Gilded Age business leaders, ‘captains of industry’ or ‘robber barons’ as you may wish. The book showed that very few of them were “self-made men.” The “rags to riches” stories that they liked to tell of themselves were mostly mythical. Almost all were born into comfort, many were born rich, and if they made the most of their talents they also made much of their inheritances. This was a collective biography, but Cochrane and Miller could have been thinking of George M. Pullman, whose luxurious Pullman Sleepers became the carriage of choice for his fellow plutocrats and whose production plant and company town (Pullman, IL) became the model for late 19th-century economic paternalism—at least until the great Pullman Strike of 1894. George Pullman was born on March 3, 1831, into a family that waxed wealthy from its connections with Erie Canal construction, and young George carried public enterprise further when (1859) he moved to Chicago and set up a firm that built the city’s first public water and sewage system (not only installing the plumbing, but raising buildings the 8 feet required by the construction). Pullman himself soon moved into another publicly financed enterprise, the railways. He supplied the carriage that moved Lincoln’s corpse from DC to Springfield and then a whole line of luxury sleepers, club cars, and diners-on-wheels (menus by Delmonico’s). Pullman saw himself as a self-made hero, but by the time he died (1897) he was seen as such a villain that he was buried deep in a fortified mausoleum where his body could not be disturbed. Nor, perhaps, his myth. ©

[Stanley]

In my heart, I was always home. I always imagined going back home. Miriam Makeba, 2008.

Miriam Makeba was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, on March 4, 1932. 18 days later, she went to prison with her mother (who’d been jailed for 6 months for selling home-made beer). It was not a good start, but the family—mother and daughter—kept together for a time. Out of prison, mom went back to work as a domestic and a traditional healer (“sangoma”), while Miriam spent long periods with her grandmother on a tribal ‘reserve’ near Pretoria. Miriam learned much of local, African traditions from both her mother and grandmother, and as a teenager she took up a singing career, specializing in what we’d call today ‘fusion’ music, a mélange of African and European forms but really the ‘folk’ music of the shabeens, illicit clubs on the wrong side of several racial divides. As a result of appearing—singing and speaking—in a documentary on South African apartheid, Miriam was ‘discovered’ at the Venice Film Festival, 1959. Her outspokenness caused the revocation of her South African passport and her voice inspired Harry Belafonte to bring her to the USA and to sudden fame, mainly but not entirely as a ‘folk’ performer. Miriam’s albums and singles (particularly “Qogothwane,” aka ‘The Click Song’) did well and her TV performances landed her a Grammy award (1965). But her marriage to the black power militant Stokely Carmichael (1968), put her on the wrong side with American as well as with South African authorities. She chose exile (in Guinea), but continued to tour the world and speak (including at the UN) against Apartheid in South Africa and segregation in the USA. Then Nelson Mandela brought her home, in the early 1990s, and after Mandela’s election as President, Makeba served as goodwill ambassador for her new rainbow nation, a role to which she was, one might say, perfectly attuned. In 2008, on tour in Italy, Miriam Makeba, “Mama Africa,” died. Her distinctive voice still lives, and if you haven’t yet heard it, you should. ©

[Tripps]

Her distinctive voice still lives, and if you haven’t yet heard it, you should.

This took a bit of digging out , but I found it. I've been listening to this lady, off and on, for more than fifty years. The cover notes from Harry Belafonte says this is her second album.

I'm starting to feel old.

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[Stanley]

It gets worse David. Brace yourself!
Bob is very good value lately, I think we get the drift of his political thinking. He mailed me this morning to ask how I was..... Nice!