BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

The statistics of speciation.

The Darwinian interplay of random and selective processes is not intermediate between pure chance and pure determinism, but qualitatively utterly different from either. Sewell Wright.

We human beings are a mongrelly crew, but we are all sapiens, and thus (as far as we know) the only living species that can contemplate its origins and its ends. Recent discoveries of ritual burial sites, one dated from 250,000 years ago, suggest that there have been other thinking homos, for instance homo neanderthalensis and homo naledi, but we are surely the first to think scientifically about our origins. That ability began well before 1953, when Crick and Watson (and others) discovered the structure of DNA, the ‘genetic material’ that carries forward the instructions and the timetables for making a new whatever: human, rodent, or sweet pea. Charles Darwin launched the idea of evolution by natural selection, which he explained partly by observing the selective breeding practices of pigeon fanciers and horse breeders. But Darwin had been unable to explain the mechanisms that produced such bizarrely feathered birds. In the absence of that explanation, others (like Gregor Mendel) observed genetic variation in action, and his calculations (about sweet peas) helped give rise to mathematical ways of explaining and theorizing about how variation, and then speciation, could occur. Among these statistical pioneers were two Britons, J. B. S. Haldane and Ronald Fisher, and an American, Sewell Wright. Sewell Wright was born on December 21, 1889, in Melrose, MA. As his parents were first cousins, one might call it inbreeding, and it’s interesting that Sewell and his two brothers turned out to be adepts in the languages of mathematics, as was their father, the economist Philip Wright. Whether ‘inbreeding’ was a cause of the boys’ precocities is another question. Even within a family, the causal connection is uncertain. For a whole species it is devilishly complicated. After completing his biology degrees (PhD at Harvard), Sewell Wright devoted himself to the problems of separating genetic causes from mere genetic correlations, and at the species level. Mathematically he came up with powerful theories about how to do this. These were founded upon his laboratory work, appropriately enough with guinea pigs (thousands of them, through many generations). I can’t explain the mathematics, but it’s appropriate that today OpenMx, one of the most powerful freeware programs for ‘structural equation modeling’, uses as its trademark a piebald guinea pig, not unlike the little animal that Sewell Wright used to carry in his pocket to illustrate his lectures on how mathematically to distinguish between genetic drift, adaptive variation, and evolutionary success. ©.

[Stanley]

Diversity in action.

No act of kindness, however small, is ever wasted. From The Lion and the Mouse, by Jerry Pinkney (2009).

If in the early 1950s you were regular at a newsstand in one of the posher precincts of Philadelphia, you might have noticed the stand’s teenaged assistant who filled his idler moments by sketching customers and passers-by. And if you were a cartoonist or a caricaturist, you might have seen that the boy had talent. That’s what happened to John Liney, veteran creator of the “Henry” comic strip. And if you had been the sort of person Liney was, you’d have told the kid you liked his work, invited him to your studio to teach him some of the finer points of sketching, then encouraged him to seek more purposeful training. That’s how Jerry Pinkney got his start as one of the best illustrators of the phenom known as the modern children’s book: these are books that tell it like it is, respect their readers’ good sense and give them hope that that the world doesn’t always have to be “like it is.” But Pinkney may have picked up some talent elsewhere, for his dad was a housepainter with a sideline in paper hanging, his mom was a domestic servant, and they brought up their five kids in a supportive way, encouraging Jerry to find a way to address his own reading problems (later diagnosed as dyslexia). So Jerry Pinkney, born on December 22, 1939, took art courses at a vocational high school, did well enough to win a scholarship to study (and draw) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and to land a good job as an illustrator for a greeting card company. But his big break came in 1964, when Pinkney collaborated with Joyce Arkhurst on a new kind of kids’ book, The Adventures of Spider: West African Folk Tales. It would not be the last of his collaborations, but its success led Pinkney to set up his own studio, incorporate it, and become one of our era’s most successful illustrators and, latterly, story-tellers. His credits, scores if not hundreds, highlight African and African-American themes and were mostly produced for children. But his scope extended also to special editions of classics by Brontë, Swift, Kipling, Faulkner, and Nabokov (Lolita !!!), not to mention the Education of the dour American aristocrat Henry Adams. It’s as if, having brought black and brown characters into print, Pinkney decided to make diversity his trademark. An astonishing diversity. Along the way, Pinkney won every award going for children’s book illustrators and authors (for he wrote, too, including a few with his wife, Gloria). Given their subject matter, I suspect that some of his books have been banned in Florida, but Jerry Pinkney didn’t live long enough to see much of that. He died, full of years and honors, in 2021. ©.

[Stanley]

The Greta Hall connection.

Chill December brings the sleet, blazing fire, and Christmas treat. Sara Coleridge, “The Garden Year” (1834).

Greta Hall, in Keswick on the edge of England’s Lake District, went on sale in 2021 for £1.2 million. I would have bought it, but for the money. Nor could I fulfill the owner’s hope of selling to someone willing and able to preserve the house’s connections with English literary culture. These date to when Greta Hall was nearly new. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his wife Sara lived there, as did Sara’s sister Mary, widow of the Quaker anti-slavery poet Robert Lovell. Mary had been cut adrift by Lovell’s family because she’d dared act on stage. Yet a third sister, Edith, was married to the future poet laureate Robert Southey, and when in 1803 S. T. Coleridge went on his travels (some say off the rails), the Southeys took Greta Hall over and maintained it as a home-away-from home for a gaggle of poets, philosophers, and misfits, including William and Dorothy Wordsworth, John Keats, and Percy Shelley. They dined, drank, wrote, talked and, occasionally, inhaled laughing gas. After Robert and Edith Southey took Greta Hall, the party was completed by Southey’s many cats, whose fanciful names, conferred by Southey, would in 1939 echo through T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. But along with the Southey cats came S. T. Coleridge’s youngest daughter Sara Coleridge, born in Greta Hall on December 23, 1802. So Sara was a baby when her father left, and since she was the niece of the Southeys (and of Mary Lamb) it was natural for her to stay on. Later, Sara would fondly remember her “Uncle Southey” as her more attentive substitute father. She profited also from her association with Greta Hall and its inmates, more directly from Southey’s extensive private library. There, self-taught (although with some help from the Southeys and their guests), Sara mastered Greek and Latin and a number of modern languages, and began to write herself. What else could one do in Greta Hall? In her early 20s she embarked on a long courtship (seven years!!) with her cousin Henry Nelson Coleridge. They married in nearby Crosthwaite Church in 1829, and moved to Hampstead, still a village north of London, where they set about raising a family and preparing Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s papers for publication. Both were labors of love. Through it all Sara (who suffered several miscarriages and lost two infant children) kept writing on her own, and soon acquired her own literary reputation, for a time equal or superior to her father’s. But she has since been seen mainly as S. T.’s faithful editor. Today’s livelier interest in the female voice is restoring, not creating, Sara’s literary reputation. ©.

[Stanley]

Life is not a having and a getting, but a being and a becoming.

The difficulty for democracy is, how to find and keep high ideals. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869).

According to H. L. Mencken, the chief defect of American society was its “lack of a civilized aristocracy.” Writing in 1920 (in, of all places, The Yale Review), Mencken lamented that the aristocracy we’d ended up with was too tied up with making money (from such infra consumer goods as breakfast cereals and fridges) to have interest in or knowledge of the finer things of life. America’s riches were too nouveaux, too like the “booboisie” from which they had too recently risen. In Mencken’s complaint there was an echo of an earlier social critic, England’s Matthew Arnold, born near London on December 24, 1822. In his mature disillusionments, Arnold would divide England into the aristocracy, the middle class, and the masses, and not hold out much hope for any of them. They were, in rank order, “the Barbarians,” “the Philistines,” and “the Populace.” Rank indeed: their virtues were overwhelmed by their crudeness and shallow materialism. Worse, they all seemed to be bent on creating a new democracy in which, politically, the only thing that would matter would be some low, common denominator. But H. L. Mencken was the “bad boy of Baltimore,” the outsider son of an immigrant cigar maker. Mencken had reached his eminence the hard way, through the scrabbling world of urban journalism, ‘city’ desks and the police beat. Matthew Arnold was born into a very secure middle class. When Matthew was only nine, his father, Thomas, was appointed headmaster of the Rugby School, from which eminence Thomas continued his lifelong task of educational reform in the name of the higher virtues so necessary to public spiritedness and true wisdom. There was a Romantic strain, then, which Matthew nurtured at Rugby, then at Oxford, and later as a budding poet. And a good one, too, good enough to be elected in 1857, with the help of well-placed friends, to the Oxford chair of poetry. It was from this eminence, and with this background, that Matthew Arnold the poet became Matthew Arnold the literary and cultural critic. He could find much in mid-Victorian England to bemoan, but he could never employ the coruscating bitterness of a Mencken. Arnold was forthright enough in his criticism, but in his mind’s eye he could see the future triumph of England’s best self. That would not come from the Barbarians or from the Populace, but from within Arnold’s own class, a true bourgeoisie (not Mencken’s “booboisie”) with enough brain to be educated into a better spirit and with enough vigor to carry their lessons forward into something like a national, cultural reinvigoration. There was, thus, no Arnold in Mencken. ©

[Stanley]

What is a 'traditional' carol?

In a manger laid, and wrapped I was
So very poor, this was my chance
Betwixt an ox and a silly poor ass
To call my true love to my dance.
From William Sandys, Christmas Carols Ancient and Modern(1833).

It’s Christmas again (‘yet again,’ one might say). As has been our habit, we listened yesterday to the Festival of Lessons and Carols as read and sung by the choir and congregation at King’s College, Cambridge. Each time we remember Christmases past with family and friends. But, yet again, we were disappointed that the music included so few ‘traditional’ hymns and carols, familiar ones laden with memories. But then, what is tradition? Our Christmases today, gaudy and commercialized in the street yet intimate within the family circle, are really rather “modern.” In colonial New England, it was illegal to celebrate Christmas, a popish invention. It took an outsider, New York’s Clement Clark Moore (1779-1863), to make American Christmases shake like the proverbial bowl of jelly. His “’Twas the Night before Christmas” was printed (anonymously!!) in Troy, NY, in 1823. At about the same time, something of a Christmas revival, or resurrection, was going on in old England, where Charles Dickens jumped onto the bandwagon with Scrooge, the miserable and miserly skinflint who learned generosity just in time for Christmas morning and never forgot his lessons. Before Dickens trumped the publishing world with his A Christmas Carol, another Englishman was reinventing Christmas as a truly English and genuinely traditional celebration. This was the antiquarian and amateur musicologist William Sandys (1792-1874),who published his Christmas Carols Ancient and Modern in 1833. I can’t find the actual publication date, but I suspect that the book came out, in London, just in time for the season. Dickens would make the same calculation with A Christmas Carol, which was first available for sale on December 19, 1843. Many of Sandys’ carols were very ancient, reproduced in Old and Middle English, with some older Celtic examples—and even some in modern French. I am not sure I would recommend any of the really ancient ones to the choirmaster at Kings, but some of Sandys’ rediscoveries have triumphed to become, again, “traditional.” And some of them, in past years, have been featured in the King’s College festival. Yesterday we heard “The First Noel” and “Hark, the Herald Angels.” In previous years from King’s we’ve had “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” and “I Saw Three Ships Come Sailing In.” But my favorite of all the songs unearthed by Sandys’ scholarship is “Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day.” So be it.©

[Stanley]

Good food is always a trouble.

As everybody knows, there is only one infallible recipe for the perfect omelette: your own. Elizabeth David, French Provincial Cooking (1962).

Writers on cookery come and go; they profit from and are then doomed their readers’ tastes for the newly discovered. But there was one British (or I should say English) woman who is widely credited with revolutionizing English palates. It was about time too, as her first essays on creative kitchening came just after the privations of depression, war, and rationing. She was Elizabeth David, and for her it was personal. Some biographers give credit to her breaking down in tears when her sister brought home six (count them, 6!!) fresh tomatoes. Or her inspiration came out of fury, not envy, when she and her then lover had a horrid dining experience at an otherwise posh and (strangely) overheated seaside hotel: shades of Fawlty Towers. But there was more to David’s anger than overcooked sprouts and overdone steak. She’d experienced a liberation that came with eating well: the pleasures of a dish made with the right ingredients, cooked in appropriate ware, fittingly garnished, pridefully served. Elizabeth David was born Elizabeth Gwynne on December 26, 1913, into the uppermost reaches of the middle class. Her father was a well-connected Conservative MP and her mother came from the stable of the viscounts Ridley. As if to spite her privileged childhood, she took off to sail the Mediterranean with an adventurous workingman. Then WWII put her on the run, living hand to mouth in Provence, then Athens, then Cairo. All along the way she ate what she could get, and it changed her views on food and on how it’s made best. At Cairo she did pretty well on her own, then when she married a Lt. Colonel David, and even better when she secured a really good chef. But come the peace (and her incompatibility with married life) she returned to Blighty and its blighted menus. Her first cookery advices appeared in magazines and newspapers, just before A Book of Mediterranean Food (1950) and French Country Cooking (1951), both inspired by her wartime wanderings. Given the increasing unpopularity of rationing (the British masses were never better fed in terms of calories and vitamins) among the professional classes, these must also be seen as political publications. Her fame grew, and more books would come, and by the time we arrived in England in 1969 she’d attained the status of minor prophet. Elizabeth David died in 1992, ornery as ever. But such was her influence that the newspapers published retrospectives of her life and her recipes on the 20th anniversary of her death and then on the centenary of her birth. What they all tried to explain was the way in which her rather exact recipes floated on an autobiographical tide. Elizabeth David was her own person because she was her own cook. ©.

[Stanley]

He jes' keeps rollin' along.

Don’t you believe ‘em when they say that what you don’t know won’t hurt you. Biggest lie ever was. From Show Boat (1926), by Edna Ferber.

One of the great episodes of American literature occurs when Huck Finn and his savior Jim run across the Duke and the Dauphin, con men who float the river pretending to nobility and providing riverbank audiences with garbled Shakespeare. Twain set it in the 1830s, but after the Civil War theater on the river became common, a paddle wheeler carrying a stage, a musicians’ pit, and a whole cast of characters. In 1925, when novelist-journalist Edna Ferber visited the James Adams Floating Theatre in North Carolina, the trade was dying. Ferber knew that she wanted to make a fiction of it. And we got the novel Show Boat (1926). It was a good story. Ferber had just won the Pulitzer for So Big (1924) and she was now well connected in New York, a member in good standing of the famed Algonquin Circle. To shorten a long story, Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein, and Florenz Ziegfield thought they could do something with it. Moreover, they assured Ferber that their ‘something’ would be worthwhile, not a musical revue or a girlie show, but serious entertainment. Ferber consented, and so, after many revisions and much cutting Show Boat arrived on the New York stage as the paddle-wheeler Cotton Blossom, making landfall at the brand new Ziegfield Theatre. It was the evening of December 27, 1927. On deck, a con man called Gaylord Ravenal (shades of Twain’s Duke?) espied the lovely Magnolia Hawks, and the modern American musical was born. Since then, on stage and in film, Show Boat has experienced several revivals and survived many editors. Efforts have been made to ‘cleanse’ Show Boat’s racial stereotyping. But the show-stopping songs “Ol’ Man River” and “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” will always survive, even though the dreaded “N-word” is now usually edited out. Such white-washing, if I may use the term, is distorting. It excuses us from acknowledging Edna Ferber’s deep, personal hatred of racial prejudice. She’d learned all she wanted of racism as a little Jewish girl in Ottumwa, Iowa, where her rather feckless immigrant father had tried his hand, and failed, at shopkeeping and where she had been mercilessly mocked, by adults and by children, for her ‘Yiddishness’. Ferber, Oscar Hammerstein, and Jerome Kern (not to mention Twain) were freed enough by their own experiences to create real black characters, noble and ignoble, heroic and comic. We, with problems enough of our own, should leave them alone and let their N-words live. ©.

[Stanley]

And Gottfried Wilhelm Leitner, whose adopted Arabic name was "The Traveler."

My Lord, enrich me with knowledge. From The Qur’an, 20:114.

In 1971, riding British Rail from London Waterloo to visit American friends in Woking, Surrey, we noticed an elaborate building, clearly a mosque, just south of the rail line. We thought it evidence of recent in-migration, but it was, and is today, the oldest working mosque in the UK: the Shah Jehan. Established in 1889, its early history brings together the stories of, Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner (1840-1899) and Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din, who was born in 1870 and who died on December 28, 1932. Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din was born in Lahore, British India, now Pakistan, into an eminent family. At Punjab University, he won First Class honours (in economics) and built on that to become the principal of Islamia College in Lahore. Then he turned to the law, his father’s profession, and prospered mightily. Along the way, Khwaja became ever more convinced that there was, or should be, a dynamic relationship between Islam and the modern world. Upon his wife’s death in 1912, he was moved by a voice “from within” to undertake a mission for his faith. He called it a “jihad by persuasion.” Moving to England, he started preaching at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park. That’s a tough venue for anyone, more so for a turbaned Muslim, but his deep knowledge of other religious traditions, not least Christianity, helped him to gain an audience and a foothold. Then his wealth (and his knowledge of English law) enabled him to take over the Shah Jehan Mosque and to prevent the heirs of its founder from putting the mosque (and its associated Oriental Institute) up for sale. That founder was Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner, a Hungarian Jew who, as a youth (and miraculously precocious linguist) was fascinated by other “eastern” religions. Before his teens Leitner was fluent in Turkish and Arabic, and as a young man he added many other tongues. At 21 he was appointed chair of Arabic at King’s College, London, and then went to Lahore, where (in 1884) he helped found Punjab University. Back in London, Leitner took over a defunct acting school in Woking, and established it as a center for oriental studies. In 1889, he added a mosque, the Shah Jehan, so that Muslim students at King’s College could worship, as well as study, in congenial surroundings. After Leitner’s death, the institute fell into disuse, just in time (so to speak) for the providential arrival, on a religious mission, of a wealthy, scholarly lawyer, Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din. Just a bit further along that rail line, you can find Gottlieb Leitner’s tombstone (in Brookwood Cemetery). It bears the Arabic saying, “knowledge is better than wealth.” But as the lives of these two quite extraordinary men testify, wealth helps. They did not need to know each other to learn that. ©.

[Stanley]

When you care enough to send the very best.

If a man goes into business with only the idea of making money, the chances are he won’t. Joyce Clyde Hall, founder of Hallmark Cards.

Henry Cole (1808-1882) was a Victorian middle-class hero, a senior civil servant, inventor, educator, public intellectual—and the founding director of London’s Victoria and Albert. The V&A, as it’s affectionately known, is perhaps the world’s greatest repository of things domestic: art, artifacts, memorabilia. Inter alia, it holds a huge collection of “Christmas cards:” only the most memorable of course, but now comprising 30,000+ examples. And it’s still growing. This is hardly accidental. Not only has the Christmas card become, in itself, an icon of domesticity, but Henry Cole is said to have been its inventor. On December 17, 1843, only two days before Charles Dickens put Ebenezer Scrooge and Tiny Tim on our cultural map, Cole approved an artist friend’s design of a Christmas card and, taking advantage of Britain’s new Penny Post mail service, sent one out to all his family and friends—of whom, we are told, there were a great many. It’s in modified triptych form, the center showing three generations of Coles drinking a joyous Christmas toast and he side panels showing acts of mercy to the afflicted and charity to the poor. Taken together, these were winning themes (for who could complain about love and charity?), and it’s no wonder that the idea took root and spread. But, and perhaps predictably, it took an American to make a billion dollar business out of it. He was Joyce Clyde Hall, born in David City (not Bethlehem), Nebraska, on December 29, 1891. He was the youngest of three brothers in a poor, devoutly Methodist family, and indeed was named after Bishop Isaac Joyce. He never liked his name and insisted on being called “J. C.” After Joyce’s rather undependable father died, he and his brothers eked out the family income by selling picture post cards to stores in eastern Nebraska. He graduated from David City to Kansas City, unschooled in anything but the main chance, where he hit upon the idea of designing and selling his own ‘cards,’ inscribed with a fitting message and supplied with a fitted envelope. He called in his brothers Ollie and William to help, and after many difficulties they enjoyed enough success to incorporate (in 1915) as Hall Brothers. Since Christmas cards come only once a year, they created lines of birthday cards, anniversary cards, birth cards, and in due course everything cards. In 1923 they became Hallmark Cards, and today they still are. Of course J. C., Ollie, and William are long gone, but Hallmark continues as a really big business. Among its many subsidiaries is Crayola LLC, and there’s also “The Hallmark Theater,” but its main cash flow still depends on those who care enough to send the very best. ©

[Stanley]

A new drink for a new south

I’d like to buy the world a Coke . . . Since 1971, a recurring song slogan for the Coca-Cola® Company.

It’s well-known today that Coca-Cola® was originally laced with cocaine. It was a recipe hit upon by John Stith Pemberton (1831-1888) in his efforts to still the pains from his Civil War wound (he had been a colonel in the Confederate cavalry) and to control his own morphine dependency. Cooked to a syrup, it sold better than his other experiments, sweet enough to attract the attention of an Atlanta druggist, who bought the formula in 1888 for $238.88. It was a healthy sum (about $10,000 in today’s $$), if not enough to keep Pemberton alive. What then happened to Coca-Cola® is an illustration of the importance of contingency in business history. The purchaser, Asa Candler, was a go-ahead sort, already involved in the rebuilding of Atlanta, physically and reputationally. He was alert to the chances of profit and a great believer in the power of advertising. Born in rural Georgia on December 30, 1851, Asa Candler and his softening drink would help Atlanta rise from the ashes (literally, for General Sherman had burned the place in late 1864) and then polish its reputation as a stronghold of the ‘New South Creed,’ modern, progressive, prosperous, willing to put the old days of plantation slavery on the back burner and to cook up a ‘New South.’ Legions of historians have shown that it wasn’t so new as all that, but Asa Candler made a ‘new’ soft drink out of an old drug. A devout Methodist (a brother would become Bishop of the Methodist church in Georgia) and influenced by the growing trend towards prohibition, Candler not only created the Coca Cola® Company but also cleaned up the drink enough to call it (in a 1906 marketing campaign) “The Great National Temperance Beverage.” Not only did Candler remove the cocaine (all of it?); but he strongly deprecated the use of the shortened trade name of “Coke.” Keeping strict control of the new recipe and the syrup, Candler capitalized on the entrepreneurship of others to license out bottling rights (and then patent the bottle’s profile). But for Candler it wasn’t all about Coca Cola®. Already a civic sort, he became a crusading, improving mayor of Atlanta, first divorcing himself from company management and then, in 1921, selling the whole enterprise to a consortium led by another Atlanta entrepreneur, Ernest Woodruff. As mayor, Candler devoted much of his private fortune to city improvements (including fresh water and sewers) and to the expansion of Emory University. His children continued the tradition. Today Candler mansions house, and Candler capital sustains, several of the city’s leading cultural and recreational institutions. And Coca Cola® is still “The Real Thing.” ©.

[Stanley]

The Roosevelt Dime, 1946--?

Art didn’t start black or white. It just started. Selma Burke, sculptor.

Today, to coin a phrase, the dime is “not worth a dime.” In my hot youth, a dime could get you a large Mars Bar ®, and when I worked the lunch counter at a corner drug store it was good for a coffee and a refill. I have special regard for the ‘Roosevelt dime,’ a coin almost my age (first minted in 1946) and, in my grade school days, the totemic focus of my annual contributions to the March of Dimes, a campaign which took off at Christmas and climaxed on President Roosevelt’s birthday (January 30). There were even heavy cards you could fill, slot by slot, with Roosevelt dimes. The Roosevelt connection was obvious. FDR had triumphed over his polio, and the March of Dimes was going to do exactly that for every child in the country. Fittingly, the “March” was a major contributor to the research that produced the Salk-Sabin vaccine and the near eradication of ‘infantile paralysis.’ So to me the Roosevelt profile, on the obverse, makes the dime worth more than any candy bar. It’s a great profile; enlarged, it shows an aging FDR in heroic pose, looking both forward and upward. But there has been dispute over who designed it. The obvious candidate was the mint’s chief engraver, John Sinnock, or his then assistant, Gilroy Roberts. But they had trouble getting approval, and submitted alternate sketches. Since the subject was dead, where and how did they get them? One candidate has been the sculptor Selma Burke, born in rural North Carolina on December 31, 1900. Her bas relief of FDR’s head (done from life and approved by FDR) now graces the Recorder of Deeds Building in DC. Burke’s life is as interesting as Roosevelt’s. She was drawn to modeling in clay very early, but was told by her elders that it was no way to make a living—so she trained as a nurse. But when she moved to Harlem, she associated with an artsy crowd. Her talent was recognized, rewarded, and cultivated by studio fellowships in Europe. Burke made a good living at it, although during the war she put her priorities into work at Brooklyn Naval Yard. In 1943, Burke was selected to portray the president, and did so in two sittings in 1944. Her bronze relief was finished in late 1945. Eleanor Roosevelt didn’t like it, but Harry Truman did, and that’s how Selma Burke’s sculpture found its way to the Deeds building. Whether that is the real original of the Roosevelt dime is a question beyond my capacities to answer. But I like Selma’s response to Mrs. Roosevelt’s criticism. “This profile is not for today, but for all time.” Today, Selma Burke’s works populate many museums, and it just may be that you have one in your purse. My advice is to set it aside for a worthy charity. And if you can’t afford the dime, give a dollar. It will make for a happier new year. ©

[Stanley]

I vote for December 22, usually the first full day after the winter solstice.
Fast away the old year passes, fa la la la la la la la la
Hail the new, ye lads and lasses, fa la la la etcetera
Traditional seasonal carol, Ancient Welsh tune, various lyrics.

The older I get, the less celebratory I have become about the ‘New Year.’ I suppose there are some obvious reasons for that, and there are equally obvious reasons for which many, perhaps most, cultures have celebrated a “new” year. The obvious candidates would be the winter solstice or the spring equinox, and it’s possible that, in its deepest origins, January 1 is just a near miss for December 21. But if you want documentation, then you must blame the Romans first, and possibly even the first Roman, Romulus himself, who was said to have initiated the calendar year. Romulus was also said to have been born of a god-visited virgin, then suckled by a wolf, and then (tough guy that he had to be) became a fratricide, so we moderns can take that idea with a grain of salt. But whoever was responsible, the Roman calendar began with the month of Janus, the appropriately two-faced god. A better-documented birthdate for the new year came on January 1, 153BCE, when the Roman Republic decided that the terms of office for consuls should begin on that day. That idea survived the death of the Republic and the rise of the Empire thanks to Julius Caesar himself. As First Consul and soon-to-be dictator, Julius instituted the “Julian” Calendar, and after his assassination the Roman Senate put its seal on the question by proclaiming, on January 1, 42BCE, that Caesar had been, in fact, a god. So while other cultures celebrated new year’s day at other times (Mesopotamia, for instance, at the spring equinox), January 1 became ‘the’ date within the Roman Empire. The rise of Christianity, within and then without Rome, brought some confusion with a different calendar of feast days, Easter being the most important one and dated by a lunar schedule. Uncertainties persisted until 1582, when Pope Gregory XIII promulgated the “Gregorian” calendar, declaring that January 1 was the first day of each New Year. But even within Roman Christianity variations had persisted. In 12th-century England, for instance, March 25thbecame New Year’s Day, a distinction strengthened when England went Protestant under Elizabeth I and, somewhat inconsistently, insisted even more strongly on Julius Caesar’s version. That wasn’t cleared up until 1752, when the British Empire (now including Scotland and Ireland) brought itself into conformity with the rest of the (western) world by killing off 13 days. Thus George II and the British parliament made January 1 the day on which we should all celebrate a Happy New Year. So, HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! And while you’re at it, why not deck the halls, too? As the old song has it, Fa la la la la, la la, la la. ©

[Tripps]

Romulus was also said to have been born of a god-visited virgin,

Now where have I heard that story before. . . .

A virgin rollcall might include Romulus and Remus, twin founders of Rome, born of the virgin Rhea Silvia. In ancient Egypt, Ra (the Sun) was born of a virgin mother, Net; Horus was the son of the virgin Isis. The Phrygo-Roman god, Attis, was born of a virgin, Nana, on December 25. It resonates because he went on to be killed and was resurrected. In ancient Greece, Dionysos was the son of either the virgin Semele or the virgin Persephone. Persephone was also the virgin mother of Jason. And Plato’s mother, Perictione, was a virgin.

The list goes on. Hinduism, Buddhism and ancient China all have their share of them and none is more or less believable than any other myth, or fable.



Put me down as mildly sceptical. . . .

[Stanley]

There's a notable omission from that list.....
I agree David.

[Stanley]

Master of Peterhouse and Bishop of Ely

[Preachers must] behave very modestly in their sermons preaching faith, obedience, and good works . . . and without intermeddling with matters of state. Bishop Matthew Wren, 1636.

In the latter decades of the last century, Peterhouse Cambridge developed (some say nurtured) a reputation as a redoubt of scholarly reaction. It thus became a perfect target for gifted satirists, thinly disguised by Tom Sharpe in Porterhouse Blue (1974). The oldest, one of the richest, and the smallest of Cambridge’s colleges, in Sharpe’s fiction it became a war zone between a reforming master, Sir Godber Evans, and a raggle-taggle of reactionary spirits, including even a lustful college servant, the bedmaker Mrs. Biggs. The novel climaxes, if that’s the right word, with a spectacular explosion involving condoms, a blocked chimney, and Mrs. Biggs. The absurdities continue when Scullion the head porter is named as the new Master, having ‘accidentally’ killed Sir Godber. No one could accuse a Sharpe farce of being realistic, but shortly after the novel became a best seller (and was adapted for TV), life at Peterhouse imitated art as some Peterhouse alums became important ministers in Margaret Thatcher’s government while, back in college, a knot of truly reactionary academics plotted to turn history around by making a truly conservative historian the new master. It all turned out badly, and comically. But the association between Peterhouse and conservatism was a long one, though perhaps not continuous. An early Master of the college, Matthew Wren, had made Peterhouse a conservative think tank before going on to greater things as the royalist Bishop of Ely, then lesser things as the prisoner of parliament, confined in the Tower of London for nearly the whole period of the Civil Wars and Interregnum. Wren was born of ‘the industrious sort of people’ in December 1584 and baptized on January 2, 1585. Upwardly mobile to a fault, he became a devotee of the early Stuarts’ divine right ideas of kingship and, more to the point, an eloquent and active foe, theologically and ecclesiastically, of the rising puritan movement in the church. Master of Peterhouse 1625-1635, his enthusiasm for high church gewgaws (altar rails, kneeling in church, bells, ‘dumb sermons’ and maybe even incense) carried on when he became Bishop of Ely and the scourge of many East Anglian puritans, many of whom fled to New England. Bishop Wren lived long enough to see monarchy restored and to marvel at the precocity of his nephew Christopher Wren, who redesigned the college chapel at Wren’s expense. Despite being born of burgher stock and spending 18 years in the Tower under threat of death, Matthew Wren died as rich as Croesus and as reactionary as Attila, a true hero of Peterhouse. ©

[Stanley]

A novelist of the Antipodes.

Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding. Proverbs, IV, 7.

That text is the epigraph in The Getting of Wisdom, a 1914 novel by the Australian Henry Handel Richardson. It has only rarely been out of print, and you can buy it with a foreword by Germaine Greer. Greer, now in her 85th year, is herself an Australian, an exile, and a feminist who burst upon the British scene in the 1960s and then never quietened. And the novel itself is about Laura Rambotham, an Austrailian girl who wanted better things than she could find at home. Her widowed mother surrenders, and scrapes to send Laura to a posh girls’ school in Melbourne. There Laura finds herself: she is indeed a rather difficult person who struggles with cheating on school work and with her own sexual identity. So this was an odd story for a young male Australian novelist. Aussies are notoriously arrow-straight, not least about gender, and as for culture they have been seen as archetypal ‘provincials.’ Another Aussie emigrant of the 1960s, Barry Humphries (1934-1923), lampooned Australian taste using his alter egos Dame Edna Everage and Sir Les Patterson (the latter as an Aussie cultural attaché!!). Just so, I find that Henry Handel Richardson was a pen name. The real author of the novel was Ethel Richardson, born in Melbourne on January 3, 1870. Indeed the novel was dedicated "To my unnamed little collaborator," a rather coy reference to Ethel Richardson, who (as the adolescent daughter of a widowed mother) was sent to school, in Melbourne, in hopes that she could make something out of herself and rise above her father’s unhappy life. Indeed she did. Intending to become a concert pianist, Ethel spent several happy years in Leipzig, married an Irish linguist, then in 1903 moved with her husband when he took up the German chair at London University. Ethel’s literary output came later, perhaps motivated by her unhappiness with London, and four of her novels are now on my ‘must read’ list: The Getting of Wisdom is one. The trilogy The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney (completed in 1929 with Ultima Thule) makes up the others. Ethel Robertson, or Richardson, never did return to Australia (except briefly, for research on the Mahoney trilogy). Nor, critics say, were her novels really ‘Australian’ (though they were family stories in several ways). On the other hand, they were not ‘provincial.’ They are said to have been European realist in plot and characterization, a dividend of Ethel Robertson’s happy years in Leipzig and of the yearnings she felt as a ‘country’ schoolgirl in Melbourne. She was nominated for the literature Nobel in 1932, but the honor of being Australia’s first novelist-Nobelist went (1973) to Patrick White—not a pseudonym, nor an exile, nor a provincial. ©

[Stanley]

The real James Bond.

There really is a James Bond, you know, but he’s an American ornithologist, not a secret agent. Ian Fleming, 1961.

Although I ‘came of age’ in the 1960s, I didn’t succumb to the ‘Agent 007’ fad. Ian Fleming had published the first James Bond novel (Casino Royale) in 1953, but in the US the phenomenon didn’t take off until Jack Kennedy confessed his addiction. And since Kennedy was young, glamorous, a president-elect, and an ex-war hero to boot, ‘James Bond’ became a fashion. I saw two Bond films when they came out (how could one avoid them?), and I did dip into one of the Fleming novels. After that dive into the Fleming shallows, I could only enjoy the raft of Bond-ish spoofs which followed, notably “The Avengers” (1961-1969). Its plots, born of malice, were hilariously unlikely and, better, were graced by Honor Blackman (as ‘Cathy Gale’) and latterly by Diana Rigg (as ‘Emma Peel’). Both, especially Rigg, made the Fleming anti-heroines into mere glamor pusses, and raised questions about Fleming’s attitude towards women. But to get back to the ‘real’ James Bond, he was born into Philadelphia’s ‘Main Line’ aristocracy on January 4, 1900 and began his education at posh private schools. In 1914, his mother having died, his father took him to England where he finished his schooling at Harrow, then went on to Trinity, Cambridge, graduating BA (Hons) in 1922. (A Bogart figure, or Chandleresque, one might say). But Bond returned to Philadelphia to do what Main Line scions did (banking) when nothing else attracted. He didn’t like that, either, and (having taken up birding as a hobby) he became an unpaid ornithologist at the Academy of Natural Sciences. There he met curator Rudolphe Meyer de Schauensee, another wandering aristo, and the two of them decided to do their birding more methodically (and more pleasantly) in the islands of the Caribbean. There they became scientific pioneers, not only classifying new species but finding that Caribbean birdlife was essentially (or genetically) North American. Although they shot most of their specimens (a gentlemanly art?), they also became ardent conservationists, urging local authorities to set aside nature reserves for the islands’ avian rarities. James Bond it was who drew the “Bond Line” between the islands’ North American species and those of the southern continent, and who wrote the definitive Birds of the West Indies (1936). Sometime later, another West Indian wanderer, a would-be aristocrat, and an amateur birder himself, bought the book. This was Ian Fleming, and he thought the author’s name was perfection personified, the perfect moniker (when we wasn’t wandering incognito) for a spy hero. And so a pioneering work on island speciation gave birth to a fad in literary trash. It almost makes one believe in irony. ©.

[PanBiker]

Another one, when Sally went to china she met a guide and interpreter who chose James Bond as his European name as his proper name was unpronounceable unless you could speak Mandarin or one of the many Chinese dialects.

[Stanley]

The Best a Man Can Get

Through beachhead troubles or home front stubbles, Gillette smooths the path. World War II advertising circular for the Gillette Safety Razor.

The Gillette family name derives from the Norman French for “son of Guillaume.” This gave the surname cachet in medieval England, at least after 1066, when the throne was seized by ‘Guillaume’ the Conqueror, who otherwise might have been known to us as ‘Guillaume’ the Bastard. But in the truly mongrel USA, the ‘Gillette’ line produced a rainbow of personalities, including a pioneer pediatric surgeon, a jazz trumpeter of note, a successful Democratic Party politician from the state of Iowa (those were the days), and a murderer named Chester Gillette, who was hanged in 1908 for murdering a young woman he did not want to marry. He killed her with his tennis racket, which was innovative, but he’s more famed for being the real-life character on whom Theodore Dreiser based Clyde Griffiths, the central figure in his An American Tragedy (1925). There was also William Gillette, in translation ‘William son of William,’ modestly famed during his lifetime for his Sherlock Holmes ‘impersonations.’ But the man who made the Gillette surname a household word was King Camp Gillette, of French (Huguenot) stock translated through Puritan New England, who was born in Fond du Lac, WI, on January 5, 1855. King Gillette moved to Chicago with his parents in time to survive the Great Fire of 1871, and in due course became a salesman for a bottle cap company. Legend has it that this intricately-designed cap, with its crimped edges and its cork seal, inspired Gillette to dream up another well-designed and dispensable item, the Gillette Safety Razor. It’s more likely that his inspiration was the “Star Razor,” patented in 1880 by a couple of German immigrants. King Camp improved upon the Star Razor by using better metal and a cheaper production method (stamping the blade out of thin carbon steel), and in 1901 the Gillette Safety Razor hit the market. It caught on like influenza, for despite its substantial price ($5.00, or almost $170 in today’s $$$s), it was indeed safer than the old straight razor, almost as safe, one might say, as Chester Gillette’s tennis racket. Suddenly wealthy, King Camp Gillette was freed to develop his eccentricities, including his peculiar brand of utopian socialism, a brand new nation, not a throwaway item, to be powered by Niagara Falls, to be called “Metropolis,” and to be presided over by Teddy Roosevelt. King Camp offered Teddy the job at a very cool $1,000,000, but (strangely) TR turned it down. Overeager to spend money, Gillette sold out in 1921, then dissipated his accumulated cash in various ways, and died poor in 1932. His Palm Springs mansion still stands, as does the Gillette brand, now a subsidiary of Proctor & Gamble. ©.

[Stanley]

The Fifth of Hearts.

A new friend is always a miracle, but . . . such a bird of paradise rising in the sage brush was an avatar. Henry Adams, 1918, recalling his first meeting with Clarence King.

I call The Education of Henry Adams (1918) an American classic: this in spite and because of its recurrent theme, that Henry Adams (subject and author) was born ill-fitted for his time. It can be seen as rueful self-indulgence, for Adams leaves no doubt that, morally and intellectually, he was superior to his time, far superior. Such a theme can grate rather than enlighten, but within the Education, and in his life, Adams did find a hero who coped with modernity while yet maintaining his timeless virtues. This paragon was Clarence King, born into New England’s mercantile aristocracy (in Newport, not Boston), on January 6, 1842. The two met in the unusual circumstance of the famous 40th Parallel Survey, probably in a saloon in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Adams, classically educated at Harvard, was there as an aristocratic tag-along. Clarence King was there because he belonged. Educated at Yale’s scientific offshoot, the Sheffield School, well versed in geology and metallurgy, and already an heroic figure, King was a sort of deputy director of the expedition, and Adams was bowled over. It was a friendship that would last until King’s death in 1901. While King went hither and yon on this or that expedition into the previously unknown, Adams toyed with history, writing his monumental (9 volume) study of the US during the Jefferson and Madison administrations. Married, Adams then settled in Washington DC, where he and his wife Marian (“Clover”) formed the nucleus of an observant circle of friends. When in DC, King became a member. Along with John Hay and his wife, they called themselves the “Five of Hearts”, enjoying cards, conversations, and sardonic comments on the state of American politics. The Five of Hearts, however, was soon disrupted by Clover Adams’ suicide (1885) and then by Clarence King’s odysseys as he traveled the Americas and sought to recoup some level of financial security (his family’s shipping firm had bankrupted). Henry Adams and John and Clara Hay kept in touch with King, often sent him money, and speculated sadly on what he might have accomplished. And King was often in great difficulties, physically, mentally, and financially. What they did not know was that he had assumed another identity, “James Todd,” passed as black in an increasingly racist America and married a woman of color, Ada Copeland. Once they learned of their friend’s secret life, the Hays stepped in to support Ada, and this stipend was continued by their daughter Helen. Ada Copeland (King) died in 1964, aged 104, in the New York city house purchased for her by Secretary of State John Hay. Born in slavery, Ada Copeland was more in tune with her time than Henry Adams. So too, perhaps, was Clarence King. ©

[Stanley]

She traveled home.

Maybe journey is not so much a journey ahead, or a journey into space, but a journey into presence. From Nelle Morton, The Journey is Home (1985).

In his famous address “Self-Reliance” (1841), Ralph Waldo Emerson advised that those who would travel to find wonders had best stay at home. Indeed finding one’s self can be a wondrous expedition, one not measurable in miles. Nelle Morton’s journey began with her birth in rural Tennessee on January 7, 1905. She was then safely middle class, safely Presbyterian, safely white, and safely southern, but in all those places she found a taste for traveling outwards. It didn’t come on her all at once, but perhaps began to stir at her women’s college, in rural North Carolina. The college was named after Flora Macdonald, that Scottish Presbyterian lass who, after the Battle of Culloden, saved the decidedly Catholic bacon of Bonnie Prince Charlie. It was, Flora later said, merely an expression of her humanity. For Nelle Morton another crucial step was her decision to enroll in a theological seminary in Richmond, VA. After that, she took an assistant’s position at Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn, NY, an historic place once the pulpit of Henry Ward Beecher (and a waystation on the Underground Railway). But late in her own life, Morton said it was her work back home, in the rural south, that really mapped her route. In Staunton, VA, she formed a group dedicated to interracial experiences for children (summer camps, no less!!!), and then in wartime she struggled with two serious illnesses: cancer surgery followed by recuperation from a very low state of mind. After all that, Morton worked for the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen and, on the side, ran a rural bookmobile service for poor folk (of all skin shades) in North Carolina’s hill country. “Only” the corresponding secretary of the Fellowship (what else could a girl do?), her reputation spread through her work at the famed Tuskegee Institute, an historically black college, and with mentally and emotionally challenged children in several places. In 1956, having gained the requisite graduate degrees, Morton took up a theological professorship at Drew seminary, in New Jersey, where she taught Christian Education for over a decade. Almost unbeknownst to herself, she’d become a radical, not only on race but also on the function and place of women (of whatever skin color) in whatever communion, including even the Catholic church. She wrote prodigiously on such issues, making alliances across the religious spectrum. Her name is memorialized in courses of work and study at Drew and, across the continent, at the Claremont colleges in California. Nelle Morton’s long ‘journey home’ ended only with her death in 1987. ©.

[Stanley]

Bubble gum at Greenwood Grade School.

Does your chewing gum lose its flavor on the bedpost overnight? Novelty song made famous in 1969 by Lonnie Donegan, but of much older vintage.

Chewing gum is an irritating pollutant. Newly deposited on hard surfaces (bedposts, sidewalks and the undersides of school desks), it sticks. As it ages, it hardens to an indelible black blot and must be a vector for a variety of epidemic diseases. In some ways worse (for those who worry about the future), chewing gum makes its chewers look like particularly slack-jawed members of the Jukes family. But the habit is not ‘modern.’ Gum-chewing is an ancient vice, an invention of the neolithic era of several cultures. It wasn’t always “gum.” Anything would do: birch bark being common jaw-fodder in northern climes, various other substances (sometimes laced with hallucinogens or pain killers) in the tropics. In ancient Athens, Socrates may have chewed mastic tree sap to mask the taste of his hemlock. But in the industrializing USA chewing gum became an innovative industry and the foundation of several fortunes, not least for the Wrigleys of Chicago. Their modern gums were real gums, derived from the chicle once used by the Mayas but now heavily flavored and more heavily sweetened. But even the Wrigleys were innocent of the bubble-gum plague, that pink stuff which, blown up, could completely hide the bubble-gum chewer’s slack jaws. Wrigley’s didn’t market a bubble gum until 1979, with “Hubba-Bubba.” It was not a great success in a market long dominated by the Fleer company’s “Dubble-Bubble.” This was the invention of Walter Diemer, born in Philadelphia on January 8, 1904. Diemer started at Fleer in 1926, in the midst of a campaign by the company’s founder, Frank Fleer, to find an independent source for its ‘gum’ base. Diemer was an accountant, but (keen as mustard) he set about experimenting on his own. Working at Fleer’s satellite plant in Wisconsin, he added a latex to an existing Fleer’s recipe. Eureka!!! Not only could you blow bubbles with the stuff, but big ones, and better yet, should your big bubble burst, it would not stick to your face like Fleer’s “Blibber-Blubber” line (a marketing failure of 1906). Diemer’s pink stuff went on sale in 1928 and took gum world by storm. It netted well over $1 million in its first year, and soon Diemer was setting up dedicated Dubble-Bubble plants. Fleer’s Dubble-Bubble was so successful as to be specifically banned at my grade school in Des Moines, Iowa, probably in order to slow the decline of civilization, at least in the city’s 12thprecinct. As for Diemer, loyal Fleer’s employee that he was, he never patented the foul stuff, and so were spawned a host of imitations, including Wrigley’s Hubba-Bubba. But there was only one Dubble-Bubble. Fortunately. ©.

[Stanley]

"I can't play another old man. I'm only 48."

Permission to speak!! Don’t panic!! Actor Clive Dunn’s tag lines in the BBC sitcom “Dad’s Army,” 1968-1977.

Obituarists who search for pattern in their subjects’ lives gladly noted that in the late 1940s Clive Dunn was often cast as old men (here doddering, there sprightly), and this when Dunn himself was only in his late 20s. This may have prepared Dunn for the role that made him famous, as Lance Corporal Jack Jones in Dad’s Army, the BBC sit-com about the Home Guard of World War II. The series ran for ten years, long enough for Jones to be doddering or sprightly, but memory tells me that he became more doddering as the years passed, this garrulous veteran of the Battle of Omdurman (1898), now a part-time soldier and full-time village butcher. Clive Dunn had acting in his blood. He was born Robert Dunn in Brixton, London, on January 9, 1920. His parents were comic singers who enjoyed success enough to send their son to fee-paying schools, finishing off at the rather posh Sevenoaks School. Although he did some acting in school, his first paid job on stage was as a dancing frog. But it wasn’t until after the ‘real’ World War II (during most of which Dunn, captured in Greece, was at a POW “Stalag” in Austria) that he decided to go full time, as Clive Dunn (his mother’s stage name had been ‘Connie Clive’). From 1947 he enjoyed some success in supporting roles, providing light relief, several times as an eccentric elder. Then (1960-1963) he starred as a crusty octogenarian in a television sitcom, which probably got him the role of Lance Corporal Jack Jones in Dad’s Army, one of the two members of the Walmington-on-Sea platoon who had ‘real’ military experience. Some would say that Corporal Jones made the show as the comic foil of the pompous Captain Mainwaring, faithful to a fault (including supplying Mainwaring with bootleg beef) and forever bringing up his experience of the Sudan campaigns to bolster the platoon’s civilian bravado. Dunn parlayed his Dad’s Army fame into a chart-topping comic song (“Grandad”!!!!), also a reprise of his parents’ profession. After Dad’s Army, Dunn’s career quietened, though he did land comic cameos in opera (Frosch the jailer in Die Fledermaus) and Shakespeare (Verges the master of the malaprop in Much Ado About Nothing). He retired in the mid 1980s (his mid 60s) and moved with his second wife, Patricia, to Portugal where he helped run his family’s restaurant, painted seascapes (watercolors of course), and wrote an autobiography, Permission to Speak (one of his Dad’s Army taglines). Dunn, who died in 2012, had been one of the youngest actors in the Dad’s Army platoon. Today only ‘Private’ Ian Lavender (born in 1948) survives. ©.

[Stanley]

Crossing the Rubicon, January 10, 49 BCE

Veni, vidi, vici. Julius Caesar’s report on his military campaign of 47BCE.

Julius Caesar, military governor of Gaul and already an important Roman politician and war hero, took his XIII Legion across the River Rubicon on January 10, 49 BCE. Ever since, ‘crossing the Rubicon’ has been idiomatic (in many languages) as marking a point of no return. Whether this single act was in fact the critical one that led (ineluctably or inevitably) to the fall of the Roman Republic is a matter of dispute. But Caesar’s publicists, and Caesar himself, made much of it. Suetonius may have invented the famous quotation, “[now] the die is cast” (“ālea actus est”), but it sounds like something a Caesar (Kaiser, Tsar) might well have said. Caesar knew that for a military governor to bring his army into Roman Italy (the Rubicon was regarded as the northern border of Roman Italy) was to incur the death sentence and ritual execution. So ‘crossing the Rubicon’ was certainly big business, big enough to deserve the legend that Caesar made his decision because of a supernatural visitation by (of course) the gods. Caesar could have depended upon established republican procedures to rise to power. Instead, he found it convenient to believe that any such procedures, including elections, would be rigged in advance against him, so he (or perhaps his gods) saw civil war and conquest as better bets. There followed a long period of civil war, more accurately wars, plural, as Caesar and his legions dispatched a series of his enemies in famous set battles, most of them ending in massacres as Caesar rarely gave quarter to those he defeated. The more power he gained, the better he became at using it to secure yet more power, and if this involved massacre and murder, so be it. Looking back, it seemed that his rise was fated. He began as an outsider, and like many such nouveaux he magnified his narrowest victories into major triumphs, and may have passed his personal “Rubicon” whenever it was that he decided that he was a man of destiny. Wars followed him wherever he went, including in Italy proper, south of the Rubicon. He won most of them, and by 46BCE had become so assured of victory as to pardon and pension off many of his erstwhile republican enemies. Thus they became grist to Caesar’s new publicity campaign as the merciful savior of Rome. It was to avoid this fate that one of his stoutest opponents, the military man, senator, and philosopher Marcus Porcius Cato, committed suicide. Cato would rather die than add his mite to the Caesarean myth. Cato had used fair means and foul to stop Caesar’s rise and had failed. At the last, his self-inflicted martyrdom made Cato forever after the secular saint of principled conservatism. But the Republic died with him. ©.

[Stanley]

Aldo, Estella, and the Land Ethic.

The land ethic enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (1949)

The Des Moines school curriculum required me (and everyone else) to write two “career booklets,” the first in 9th grade, the second in 12thgrade. At 14, I chose forestry, in which I as a conservationist would work for what looked like a measly wage. At 17, I chose the law, in which I planned to make money. In the end, I followed neither path, but looking back I think of my changing adolescent preferences from forest ranger to legal eagle as a kind of concession to the realities of life in the USA. Had I read Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac it might have worked out differently. But the Almanac was not a career booklet. Published posthumously in 1949, it was Leopold’s reflection on a career that had begun conventionally, as a forester intent on the advantageous (profitable) management of natural resources, but ended in recognition that nature itself was a community. All its parts were radically equal because of their interdependency. Its health depended on its diversity. To exploit one bit for profit (or pleasure) would be to endanger it all. But I didn’t read Leopold until long after my brushes with forestry and lawyering, indeed after I had become an historian. I acquired A Sand County Almanac when I first canoed the international wilderness on the Minnesota-Ontario border. Aldo Leopold was born into a German-speaking household in Burlington, Iowa, on January 11, 1887. He learned English in school, well enough to star academically. After school he played outside, traversing the bluffs and the mighty Mississippi itself, and in summers enjoyed the ‘accidental’ wilderness of Marquette Island, lying just offshore of Michigan’s northern peninsula. His family prospered enough to indulge Aldo’s youthful ambitions to become a forester, and he earned a graduate degree in forestry at Yale. He began as a manager, eager to make nature work for us, whether we were hunters or fishermen or loggers, but in a faculty post at the University of Wisconsin he acquired longer sightedness. This came to fulfillment when he and his wife acquired a smallholding in Sauk County and set about the task of helping it to work by its own design, rather than one he might impose. One result was A Sand County Almanac, which I hope you have read (if not, it’s still in print at 2 million plus copies). Other results included Aldo and Estella’s five children, all of whom became distinguished scientists of the “land ethic.” When Aldo died fighting a Sauk County fire his son Luna saw to the publication of A Sand County Almanac. Aldo was buried at home, in the Leopold family plot, Aspen Grove Cemetery, Burlington, Iowa. ©