The Monday Evening Club

The long haul: The Erie Canal's place in the growth of a nation

2012-01-17T20:50:00.003-05:00

Photo by mcgmatt, via Flickr, used under Creative Commons License

Presented to the Club by Albert Easton for on Monday evening, January 16, 2012

“As a bond between the Atlantic and Western states, it may prevent the dismemberment of the American Empire. The most fertile and extensive regions of America will avail themselves of its facilities for a market. All their surplus productions will concentrate in the city of New York, for transportation abroad or consumption at home. And before the revolution of a century, the whole island of Manhattan, covered with inhabitants and replenished with a dense population, will constitute one vast city.” In 1816, when New York governor Dewitt Clinton wrote those words, James Madison was president of the new and struggling country, the United States. His predecessor, Thomas Jefferson, had scoffed at the idea of a canal across New York State, but Madison was more neutral, and actually was persuaded to sponsor a bill in congress providing some funding. The United States was financially exhausted, however, from the costs of the War of 1812, and the bill went nowhere.

However, Clinton was successful in persuading the New York legislature to support the canal building effort, and it became known later as “Clinton’s Ditch”. The advocate who had sold the idea to Clinton was named Jesse Hawley. Hawley had gone bankrupt from trying to get the huge quantities of grain he had been growing on his western New York real estate shipped to market. It was from debtor’s prison in Canandaigua that he began his agitation for a canal along the 90 mile long Mohawk River valley, and with the help of friends (including land speculator Joseph Ellicott, who later became the first canal commissioner) sold the idea to Clinton.

The project presented enormous challenges, of course. The total rise from the Hudson at Albany to Lake Erie is 600 feet, and the tallest locks available in 1800 could handle only 12 feet – thus a minimum of 50 locks over that 360 mile distance. The costs would be enormous, and almost beyond the early nineteenth century imagination. Nevertheless, the New York legislature eventually committed the then huge sum of seven million dollars to the project, and work began on the 4^th of July 1817.

Like any large financial commitment, the canal required elaborate funding. The bill passed by the legislature established the Canal Fund, to be administered by elected officials, and funded by a loan from the state to be repaid from toll revenues. The Canal fund also received revenue from the sale of state land near the proposed canal route, and the inevitable state lotteries. Taxes designated for the Canal fund were on those who would benefit most from it: salt (it was plentiful in the canal region, and expensive to ship without it), steamboat travel (expected to increase greatly on the Hudson) and land within 25 miles of the proposed canal route.

The site for the start of work was well chosen. The area from Rome, New York to Utica is fairly level, and a stretch of about 15 miles could be completed without locks, thus enabling a part of the canal to be put in to service the year after it was built. This, of course, helped to sell the rest of the building effort. The original canal was cut 40 feet wide, and 4 feet deep, with the removed soil piled on the downhill side to form a tow path. Canal boats, then, could be up to 3.5 feet in draft, and pulled by horses or mules on the towpath.

There was only one towpath, generally on the north side of the canal. When canal boats met, the boat with the right-of-way steered to the towpath side, and the other boat steered to the opposite side. The driver of the mules on the right-of-way boat brought his mules to the canal side of the towpath while the other driver took the other side of the path and stopped his team. The rope would go slack as the boat continued on by momentum. The right-of-way team would step over the slack rope; the right of way boat would pass over it, and both would continue on.

As you might expect in any massive project, there were a lot of problems that had to be dealt with in building the canal. The digging wasn’t all through marsh or farmland – some cuts had to be made through hard limestone, all with little more than the power of the muscles of men and animals. Fairly often, the route of the canal cut a farm in half, and the state had to provide bridges over the canal. In an effort to keep expenses down (and minimize the problem of getting livestock over the bridge), the bridges were not very high. Not only did this put limits on the size of boats that could travel the canal, but it also resulted in the famous cry of: “Low Bridge, Everybody Down”. Anyone caught on the high part of the deck as it passed under a bridge would have suffered unpleasant consequences.

There were some other difficulties in building the canal. Dependable water sources had to be found to keep the canal and the locks full in all those seasons when the canal was open (it froze in winter, of course), and in several cases, aqueducts had to be built to provide them. Aqueducts also had to be built to carry the canal itself over rivers and streams that were not active sources of water. Not only did these aqueducts have to carry water, they had to provide for a towpath, so they were combination aqueducts and bridges. The aqueduct over the Mohawk River from Rexford to Schenectady was one of the longest – 610 feet, but there were many others.

The United States had no one who called himself a civil engineer before the building of the canal. All the several geniuses who designed and managed the work were amateurs – lawyers, storekeepers, but later deservedly considered engineers. None had seen firsthand the canals of Europe, but had to rely on written accounts of their design and operation.

The expertise of the engineers in this massive building effort would have meant nothing without the efforts of huge numbers of laborers. While most of the canal laborers were native born, or immigrants from various other countries, canal folklore revolves around those who were Irish immigrants. The Irish immigrants were more often single men without families, and tended to form their own social group. Pay for the laborers was quite generous, and sometimes included room, board, and liquor. The work was steady, but necessarily seasonal, and many found the winters hard to endure without any income.

All work for laborers was hard in the early 19^th century, and canal work was no exception. Massive charges of gunpowder were used to help channel through some of the rocks, and attendant injuries were not infrequent. In the course of building a channel through the swamp around the finger lakes, over a thousand were stricken with what appears to have been a mosquito-borne disease, and many died.

But all in a good cause. On October 26, 1825, the canal was finally completed. A fleet set out from Buffalo on October 6 headed by the boat Seneca Chief. The Seneca Chief carried a large party of dignitaries, headed of course, by Governor Clinton, and was met along the way with celebratory cannon fire at its many stops. It did not end its journey at Albany, but continued down the Hudson to New York, a trip totaling 500 miles. There, in New York harbor, Governor Clinton emptied two barrels of water from Lake Erie into the ocean, in a ceremony that came to be called “The Wedding of the Waters.”

Many sections of the canal had been open for some time when the full length opened in October 1825, and commercial traffic was already well established. Canal boats were capable of carrying 30 tons of freight, and this was a vast improvement over any form of overland transportation. Eastbound cargos frequently consisted of lumber from the still nearly virgin forests of the Midwest, and grain from the Midwestern farms. Westbound the traffic was usually manufactured goods from the quickly growing factories of the Northeast.

Passenger traffic began to increase too. The trip by canal boat across the state was not only quicker, but far more comfortable than a trip by horse or stagecoach. The boats were about 15 feet wide and forty feet long. A special attraction for travelers was the food on board. Here is a description from a boat captain: "Breakfast: The meal may consist of a pike or bass, fresh caught on my overnight trawl line, a steak, bacon, sausage and ham; a platter of scrambled eggs, boiled cabbage and squash, bread (both corn and white), pancakes (both wheat and buckwheat) with sorghum, maple, or honey to choice, and to wash all down, coffee, tea, milk, and cider. Dinner will be heartier."

The journey across the state took several days, and passengers slept on board. Here is a description from David Wilkie whose Sketches of a Summer Trip to New York and the Canadas describes his journey in the early summer of 1834:

There was a good company on board, considering the size of our vessel – about thirty gentlemen, and half as many ladies. Four steps broad and 21 feet long was the size of our sleeping and dining cabin, and here, a score and a half of us had to be stowed away. When we descended from deck between 8 and 9 o’clock, before the retiring hour, we found all the sleeping apparatus displayed in full form. On each side of the long narrow space were hung three tiers of canvas-bottomed frames, hardly broad enough to allow the occupant to stretch himself on his back, and three lengthwise, in all, affording accommodation for eighteen, and our surplus number had to betake themselves to the more humble couch afforded by the floor.

Our berths were allotted to us by precedence as our names were placed on the way-bill. When each cognomen was sung out by the captain, the individual doffed boots, coat and vest, and hoisted himself into place. I contrived with little difficulty to crawl into my lair, and although enjoying less room, I believe, than if I had been a mummy in one of the pyramids, I passed a very unconscious and refreshing night.

Wilkie was fortunate to have traveled in decent weather. Many travelers complained of the excessive heat and stuffiness of the canal boat sleeping quarters.

Once the canal was opened, the problems of maintenance and repair began. There were two kinds of problems – too much water and too little. Actually, the results of both were the same. Too much water caused breaks in the canal wall that ultimately left boats high and dry. Walkers were assigned to pass along the tow path looking for weak spots that might cause problems at the next time of high water. Inability for boats to move through the canal was a serious problem, of course. An upstate newspaper from the 1830’s describes one such occurrence: “The break in the canal early last Saturday gave a few hundred canal men a rest they didn’t want, and cost them a lot of money they couldn’t afford to lose. The lay-up came in the way of a bonanza of restfulness to horses and crews, but it was as welcome as sulfuric torments to the owners who saw drivers and steersmen with hearty appetites for corned beef and cabbage and horses eating their heads off in solemn ease with their noses buried in hay or oats.”

The reference to corned beef and cabbage, of course, is proof that many of the Irish laborers who had built the canal later became its steersmen, drivers and captains. Canal men very often had no wives or families, they too seldom stayed in one place. In Chapter 54 of Moby-Dick, Melville describes two canalers who have shipped on as part of the crew of a whale boat, the Town-Ho, and are the first to follow and last to abandon the rebellious Steelkilt in his attempt at mutiny. Canal men were considered a tough lot. One observer was quoted as saying “The boys who drive the horses [on the canal] are the most profane beings on the face of this whole earth, without exception.”

Then, also, the folklore of the canal is full of tales of the fearful storms that took place. These are part of that staple of 19^th century humor, the tall tale. Consider this example from Mark Twain in Roughing It:

On the Erie Canal it was, all on a summer’s day, I sailed forth with my parents, far away to Albany.
From out the clouds at noon that day there came a dreadful storm, that piled the billows high about and filled us with alarm.
Our captain cast one glance astern, then forward glanced he, and said my wife and little ones, I nevermore shall see.

The exaggeration we are supposed to swallow is that storms on the canal were as fearful as those at sea. They were not pleasant of course, because breaks could occur in the canal wall, stranding boats. But with a depth of only four feet, there weren’t likely to be a lot of drownings.

We need to understand the canal as more like a road than a waterway. Its purpose was never to move or provide water, but to move people and goods from one place to another using the only motive power then available – draft animals. At this it was quite effective, but looming on the horizon was the next great technological wonder of the 19^th century – steam power. In 1807, many years before the canal was started, Robert Fulton’s steamboat had begun commercial service on the Hudson from New York to Albany. In fact, Fulton was a member of the first canal commission, and a strong supporter. Fulton’s steamboat, the Clermont, made the trip from New York to Albany in 32 hours on a regular basis. By the 1830’s, helped by the extra traffic generated by the canal, there were over a hundred steamboats making the run and the time was down to ten hours.

It was inevitable that steam power should next be applied to overland travel – by use of railroads. In fact the Erie Canal spawned the earliest American railroad, the Mohawk and Hudson line, between Albany and Schenectady. There is a rise of 215 feet between the two cities, and in the 19^th century this required 27 locks. The journey of 16 miles between the two cities took a full day. This was fine and acceptable for commercial cargoes. It was most convenient that they be loaded from river to canal transportation only once. But for passengers this added an extra and unnecessary day. Even by horse or couch the journey was much quicker overland. But as soon as the canal opened, a company was formed by, among others, Stephen Van Rensselaer, the patron and owner of most of Albany County, to operate a railroad over the route. The railroad, chartered as the Mohawk and Hudson, began service in 1831, using a steam engine and cutting the time of passage down to 40 minutes.

Other railroads quickly followed. By 1842, the Boston and Albany line was moving goods and people from New England to the canal, and about the same time a line from Albany to Buffalo paralleled the canal. For moving goods, it could not compete well on cost, but it was much faster because it avoided all the lock time that canal transportation required.

So the railroads and the canal and the nation grew up together. The canal was widened and deepened in 1862, and in 1903 the entire canal was replaced by the barge canal. The barge canal made some material changes in the route. For example, instead of paralleling the Mohawk River, canal traffic now travels on it from Schenectady to Little Falls. There is, of course, no longer a towpath. Vessels using the canal must now supply their own motive power. And the locks have become much higher than they could have been in the original canal. There are now only 8 locks between Albany and Schenectady. More pleasure boats than commercial boats use the canal these days, but it is still open all the way from Albany to Buffalo.

Some authors on the canal put more emphasis on the role of the canal in the development of the nation than it may deserve. It is certainly true that the city of Chicago and the entire Midwest went through a period of tremendous growth in the 1830’s and 40’s, and much of this was made possible by the canal. But given the resources of the prairies, that growth was inevitable, and would have occurred with the help of the railroads, although perhaps somewhat later. In any case, the canal was a triumph of American industry and ingenuity, and is an important part of our history.

The mark of a champion: Vince Lombardi and the Green Bay Packers

2011-12-27T14:01:00.006-05:00

Presented to the Club by Erik Bruun on Monday evening, December 12, 2011

1. If you can walk, you can run

The best athlete I have ever known was a friend from college named Henry Fox. Henry had been the New England cross-country ski champion in high school. When I became a coxswain on the Trinity College freshman crew team, Henry was the strongest rower on the Trinity varsity lightweight team, the fastest lightweight boat in the country. He was the kind of person an underclassman like me aspired to be. He was funny, enthusiastic and drove himself incredibly hard. One of his favorite ways to push himself on a run was to pick a spot 100 feet away and hold his breath tightly until he reached the destination, his lungs exploding for oxygen upon arrival.

Henry loved to recite Vince Lombardi sayings and stories. "If you can walk, you can run," he crooned with delight. He told of a time Lombardi's Green Bay Packers played a particularly lackluster first half. As the players waited in the locker room, dreading the fury of their notoriously fiery coach, Lombardi instead opened the door, stuck his head in and with a surprised look declared: "Oh, I'm sorry. I was looking for the men's room." He closed the door and left, letting the players stew in their own shortcomings. The Packers stormed back on to the field and won the game.

Until last summer, Henry's stories about Lombardi were about as much knowledge I had about the legendary coach, other than the cartoon-like mythology of the NFL. To me, Lombardi was a string of clichés. When a theatrical group came to Great Barrington to work out the kinks on their pending Broadway production about Vince Lombardi, they offered to donate proceeds of their opening performance to Monument Mountain High School. A friend asked me to go and having nothing else to do that evening, I went. This was not a play about football, it was about the struggle to achieve perfection, knowing that it is not going to be reached, but embracing the full depths of that struggle. Vince Lombardi, I thought, is a perfect Monday Evening topic. The play was based on the book When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi by David Maraniss. It is the primary source for this paper. The title of this paper comes from a saying of Lombardi’s: “The mark of a champion is not whether you fall, it is whether you get back up again.”

2. The Smallness of Reality

Vince Lombardi was born June 11, 1913, the eldest of five children to Matilda and Harry Lombardi in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn, New York. His parents, immigrants from southern Italy, were devout Catholics from large, bustling families. Matty was known as a perfectionist, demanding high standards from all her children. Harry left his home every morning at 4:30 to a slaughterhouse on Manhattan's West Side. His job was to haul sides of meat. Tattooed across the knuckles of his two large hands were the words "Work" and "Play," two themes that marked his son's life.

Vince Lombardi's youth revolved around family, religion and sports. He was a strong, determined athlete, known more for his drive than his athletic talents. Lombardi was ambitious. When he spent a week working alongside his father in the Meat District, he quit, vowing not to end up doing manual labor. His parents wanted him to become a lawyer. Lombardi used football to get into Fordham University, then a powerhouse in the national college football scene. On the first day of practice, the head coach moved Lombardi from fullback to offensive guard, a position that called more for aggressiveness than size, which Lombardi really did not possess.

Lombardi took subways for an hour and a half each way to Fordham, a Jesuit school. One of his favorite classes was an enormously popular course on ethics. Lombardi seriously considered becoming a priest. The university imposed tight discipline. When Lombardi finally broke into the starting line as a junior, he was suspended for fighting when a fellow player jokingly called him a "dago" in the locker room. Lombardi erupted in fury, lunging at his teammate. Fortunately, he was reinstated on to the team the next year, becoming one of the legendary "Seven Blocks of Granite" that anchored Fordham's run as the national champion. Lombardi, however, was considered the slowest and least talented of the seven. When the season ended, his career as a football player also came to an end.

Lombardi wanted to get into the business world, but this was the Depression and he struggled to find work for two years before landing a job as a teacher and assistant coach at a small Catholic private school in Englewood, New Jersey, called St. Cecilia. He had recently married his wife Marie Planitz, but was frustrated by his slow start and the realization that his career might be centered around a game. His deep ambition transferred into an extraordinary drive to win. He was embarked on a similar struggle as the founder of the Jesuits, Ignatius Loyola, to reconcile "the intolerable disparity between the hugeness of their desire and the smallness of reality."

3. A Way to Live With Defeat

Lombardi learned how to be a teacher at St. Cecilia. In the classroom, he started with the basics — to teach to the slowest students and then build their knowledge up from there. He coached both basketball and football. Early in his 8-year tenure, the head football coach asked Lombardi to give the pep talk to the team before the game started. Lombardi went into a frenzy. "You haven't done anything for me this week," he roared at them. "Now go out there and show me what you've got!" The players stormed on to the field, ready to run through brick walls. Lombardi gave every pre-game speech after that. He soon became head coach, leading the best high school football team in New Jersey to 27 victories and 3 losses under his leadership. "I don't want any good losers around here," he told his players. "Good losing is just a way to live with yourself. It's a way to live with defeat."

Lombardi's success brought him into the college ranks, returning to Fordham as an assistant coach for two years and then to West Point where he was an assistant to Colonel Red Blaik for five years. General Douglas MacArthur took a strong personal interest in West Point's football team. While leading American forces in Korea northward to the Chinese border, MacArthur wrote long letters to Blaik offering advice on pending games. Lombardi often went to the New York City Waldorf Astoria Hotel to brief the general on the team's status, MacArthur in turn delivered talks to Lombardi on the paramount importance of victory at all costs. Blaik taught Lombardi how to run a professional organization, exacting high standards and imposing tight discipline. He introduced Lombardi on how to use films to study opposing teams.

In 1951, however, West Point went through one of its worst scandals when it was discovered that almost the entire football team had been cheating. Players informed each other on test questions, a blatant violation of the college's honor code. The scandal was national news and virtually every player was expelled from the school. There is no evidence that Lombardi knew anything about the violations until after the fact, but his sympathies clearly went to the players. As an immigrant son, he associated himself with the struggling up-and-comers that distinguished West Point's football players. He worked the phones with other college coaches to help players get into other universities. Lombardi also joined Blaik in not resigning. They knew that they would now have a terrible team, perhaps for years to come. Lombardi pushed the new players for perfection, and after two years West Point once again had a winning record.

The owner of the New York Giants, Wellington Mara, had been a classmate and acquaintance of Lombardi's at Fordham. Mara fired his coaching staff in 1954, and he hired Lombardi to be the offensive coordinator under head coach Jim Lee Howell. Lombardi was in his early 40s and ached to become a head coach. Mara implied that he would succeed Howell one day. Howell hired a promising young coach named Tom Landry as defensive coordinator. Landry and Lombardi respected each other, but they were not friends and they were very different. Lombardi had a brilliant, embracing smile; Landry a dour, distant grim. "You could hear Vince laughing from five blocks away," Mara said. "You couldn't hear Landry from the next chair." Both were extremely talented coaches and super competitive.

In his first year, the Giants scored 264 points, the most in the NFL. Lombardi gained a reputation as a sporting intellectual. The New York Daily News ran a photo spread with a large photo of Lombardi and a one-word headline "THINK!" Lombardi was no simple jock. Trained as a priest, and failing to enter law or business, Lombardi applied professionalism to his task and he demanded his players do the same. His signature play was the power sweep in which the ball is handed off to the running back who “sweeps” to the left or right. Every player takes on specific assignments to clear a path for him to run through. The play calls for aggressiveness, precise teamwork, and individual flexibility. These were Lombardi's trademarks. He once delivered an 8-hour talk about the power sweep and the various ways the play could unfold.

In 1958, the Giants lost the championship game in sudden death to the Baltimore Colts 23 to 17. Some people still call it the best game in football history. It was also Lombardi's last game with the Giants. The Green Bay Packers in way-off Wisconsin had offered Lombardi the job of head coach. The team, which is still the only NFL team owned by its community, had just gone through a season of one victory and ten losses. They wanted a change. Mara — who adored Lombardi--recommended he take the job. The news merited a single-paragraph notice in The New York Times.

4. A God-forsaken Place

Lombardi made an immediate impact on the Packers. The team’s committee-like ownership and governance structure had led to easy-going standards and an unfocused approach. Lombardi demanded and received total control of the team. He embraced that authority with a deep fullness, bringing a completely new attitude to the team. “You defeat defeatism with confidence,” Lombardi said, “and confidence comes from the man who leads. You just have it. It is not something you get. You have to have it right here in your belly.” Lombardi was driven to win, but he embraced losing as a learning opportunity. He was consistently harder on his teams if they won playing sloppy football, then if they lost but made a strong effort.
In his first year as head coach, the Packers were 7 and 5. Lombardi won Coach of the Year. The Associated Press declared of the national poll “Vinnie, Vidi, Vici — NFL’s Top Coach.” Lombardi coached the Packers for nine years. They won the national championship five times (1961, ‘62, ‘65, ‘66 and ‘67), including his final three seasons as head coach, which also corresponded with the first two Super Bowls. His string of championships still reigns as the greatest championship streak in professional football. When he died in 1970 from colon cancer, having retired after the 1967 season, the NFL named the Super Bowl championship trophy after Lombardi.

Lombardi started each season from scratch, as if he were teaching a class again at St. Cecilia. Winning a championship season meant knocking his team back to the ground the next season. “Gentlemen,” he declared from the front of the room at the team’s first pre-season meeting, “this is a football.” To which veteran championship player Max McGee once responded: “Uh, coach could you slow down a little. You’re going too fast for us.”

The story of the Green Bay Packers and Lombardi coincided with the emergence of football as a national sport, broadcast into living rooms across the country with the growing popularity of television. Football was an almost ideal sport for television’s format with commercial breaks, zoom-in lenses and the struggles the game evoked. NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle was a former marketing man and he understood football’s appeal and also Lombardi’s. Lombardi personified a deeply American story. The son of immigrants rising from obscurity through hard work and self-discipline, Lombardi went into the American heartland to lift a struggling team to victory through those very same traits. When Lombardi first went to Green Bay as a Giants coach, he told his wife that it was “a God-forsaken” place. But for him, it proved to be a place of opportunity, offering the right ingredients to bring his own life story to success. Lombardi set the tone for national football’s rise to prominence, and also represented the American ideal around hard work, determination and fair play.

5. “The Man Believes in Me”

One of Lombardi’s long-time players described Lombardi as “the biggest asshole in the world.” Experiencing him at work was often like watching tyranny in action. Having gone through the honeymoon period with the national press, articles later emerged portraying Lombardi as an arrogant bully. Lombardi pushed his players to the limits of their own endurance. These were tough, tough men. Linebacker Ray Nitschke grew up homeless and claimed to have beaten someone up every day of his teenage years. The sons of Pennsylvania miners, New England mill workers and prison convicts, football players threw themselves on the field with incredible violence. Lombardi said that football was not a contact sport, it was a collision sport. He used his own role as the authority figure to drive players’ aggression, converting it into an opportunity to become a stronger person. Almost every Green Bay Packer player said that they went through episodes of hating Lombardi.

When players appealed to Lombardi’s wife for help, Marie let them in on a secret. Her husband only yelled at players if he liked them. They should be worrying if he wasn’t yelling in their face, she told them. Many Packers came to love Lombardi. Bart Starr and Paul Horning adored him as a father figure. Lombardi’s secretary with the Packers described him as a “real softie.” One player, Em Tunnel, told a reporter “I’d get out of this town if it wasn’t for Vince. He’s the kind of guy you have to cuss out once a week when you are alone, but nobody else can cuss him out to me. In my heart, I know what he is.”

When friends and colleagues pointed out unfair things Lombardi had done, he often went to great lengths to make amends. He may have believed in tearing his players down, but he was brilliant in building them back up. Vincent Lombardi loved his players. “On this team, there is great love,” he said. “Anybody can love something that is beautiful or smart or agile. You will never know love until you can love something that isn’t beautiful, isn’t bright, isn’t glamorous. It takes a special person to love something unattractive, someone unknown. That is the test of love. Everybody can love someone’s strengths and somebody’s good looks. But can you accept someone for his inabilities?”

In 1965 the Detroit Lions clobbered the Packers in the first half 21 to 3. Detroit lineman Alex Karres yelled at Lombardi as they were returning to their locker rooms at half time: “Whadaya think of that, ya big fat wop!” Surprisingly, the players were more upset than Lombardi. Rather than yell in frustration, Lombardi stepped on a foot locker and delivered a speech on loyalty. “Win, lose or draw, you are my football team,” he concluded. “You are the Green Bay Packers and you have your pride!” These hardened, beaten up men misted up, went back on the field and stomped on the Lions for a 31 to 21 victory.

When the Packers lost a game to the Baltimore Colts, rookie Willie Wood was burned for nine catches and more than 100 yards trying to keep up with Raymond Berry. His teammates teased Wood mercilessly, predicting his career would come to an end that week. But Lombardi took the rookie to the side and told him “Don’t you believe anything those fellows say. You’re not going anywhere. You’re staying right here with me. Every one of those guys making fun of you has had the same thing happen to them. You’re going to be here as long as I’m here.” Wood, who later entered the NFL Hall of Fame, told Lombardi’s biographer “Lombardi gave me confidence when he did that. I said, ‘What I’m doing has got to be right because the man believes in me.’”

Wood was one of four black players on the Packers at that time. This was in the very early days of integration in national sports and in Green Bay blacks represented .01 percent of the county’s total population. Lombardi later said that he did not have black players or white players, with the Packers he only had green players. This was more than a trite truism. Restaurants and bars in Green Bay were warned that if any of them refused to serve black football players, no players would be allowed to frequent their establishments. During his first year as the Packer head coach, he delivered a speech on racism to his team. “If I ever hear nigger or dago or kike or anything like that around here, regardless of who you are, you’re through with me. You can’t play for me if you have any kind of prejudice.” Lombardi avoided games played in the South where Jim Crow laws would split the players into different accommodations. When this was impossible, he used his old army connections to arrange for housing on military bases so the team would stay together.

Tolerance ran deep in the Lombardi family. When his younger bachelor brother Harold Lombardi who was in his 40s living in San Francisco wrote their father a letter that he was gay, Harold dreaded the return letter. This was in the early 1960s when society viewed homosexuality as a disease. But when Harold opened the envelope, his father simply wrote: “I don’t care. You are my son.” Vincent Lombardi knew his brother was gay and never gave any indication to anyone that this was an issue.

“Vincent Lombardi,” Willie Wood said “was the fairest man I’ve ever known.”

6. The Greatest Mistake of Your Life

Lombardi was driven to win. He no sooner savored a victory with a party at his house, then his mood turned sour as he thought about the next week’s game. He left the party and went into the basement to watch films on the next opposing team until the early morning. It was such a predictable event that his family called it the Cinderella hour. Lombardi’s obsession with winning did not justify doing anything to win, however. He did not allow cheap shots. Winning was the outcome of his drive to achieve perfection. Winning also meant making sacrifices, something Lombardi often said, rarely noting what his own sacrifices were. But his obsession led to unfortunate imbalances in other parts of his life.

Marie told a visiting writer in the 1960s “I wasn’t married to him a week when I said to myself, Marie Planitz, you have made the greatest mistake of your life,” he told the surprised interviewer. “I found out what to do. When it gets so bad I that I can’t stand it, I stand right up to him and he backs off.”

The Lombardi household was an unhappy household. Marie was usually alone at home and when her husband was home, football was often the only thing on his mind. Drinking problems plagued her throughout her life. The couple had two children, Vincent Henry and Susan. Visitors often noted a tension inside the family. A friend of Susan’s later said it was a home of sadness. “It was a sad house as soon as you walked in, empty. You could feel the family void.” Although Vince Lombardi’s parents attended all of their son’s games when he was a player in high school and at Fordham and even afterwards when he became a coach, Vince Lombardi never went to his son’s games. The son longed for his father’s approval, but when he declared that he wanted to follow his father’s footsteps and become a coach, Vince Lombardi was furious. “You can do that, but I will not spend one dollar to support you,” he said. Lombardi wanted his son to become a lawyer, just as his parents had wished for him. Nonetheless, the son played football and received tongue lashings for his play, even when he did well. When he was injured, the legendary coach ripped into his son for falling short, bringing tears to the boy’s eyes.

Susan Lombardi felt herself to be almost a non-person to her father. He insisted on bringing her on the road for away games, but never interacted with her. She was left alone in hotel rooms and sent to the stands to watch the football games, thousands of miles away from her friends and an even greater distance in her own eyes from her father.

But the coach was not a complete goon at home. He loved to practice magic tricks and was notoriously bad at them. He relaxed by watching McHale’s Navy and cleaning closets. A friend of Susan’s recalled a time when Lombardi took his daughter and a bunch of her friends, all around 20 years old, out on the town to a bunch of restaurants and bars in Green Bay. “I danced with Mr. Lombardi,” Mary Jo Antil recalled. “I can still see him doing the locomotion and the watusi. He was totally out of his realm, and he enjoyed it immensely.”

In the off-season, golf was almost as much of an obsession to Lombardi as football was during the season. The difference was that he was a bad player in golf and no matter how hard he tried, he could not get better. In football, Lombardi could use the skills and talents of his players to extend beyond his own limitations. It allowed him to become greater than himself in a way that he could not do alone on the field of sports, or at home with his family.

7. The Shadow Self and the Real Self

Vincent Lombardi got up early every morning to go to mass. He prayed every time that he would gain control of his temper and be a better husband. But every day he went to work and lost his temper. He then went home and struggled to be a man connected to his family. Prayer was the essence of his religious practice. He exercised it with the same discipline he invoked in sports. Lombardi did not call upon God to win football games, but he did bring the same fundamental principles the Jesuits taught him to the task of winning. Repetition, discipline, clarity, faith, subsuming individual ego to a larger good were extensions of his religious faith.

Lombardi kept old black wooden rosary beads dating back to high school in his coat pocket and he carried a bible wherever he went. It was the Holy Name Edition of the Catholic Bible, which had been given to him as a gift. Inside were two black-and-white photographs of his children Vincent and Susan. Neither child knew the photographs existed or were constantly in his clutches. Years later Vincent said of his father: “He went to mass to repent for his anger. He thought, I’ve got this temper. I fly off the handle and offend people. I apologize. But it’s this temper that keeps me on edge and allows me to get things done and people do things. Life was a struggle for him. He knew he wasn’t perfect. He had a lot of habits that were far from perfect. His strengths were his weaknesses, and vice versa. He fought it by taking the paradox to church. It went back to the Jesuits and the struggle between the shadow self and the real self — your humanity and your divinity. He saw that struggle in clear and concrete terms.”

8. The Mark of a Champion

The Green Bay Packers played the Detroit Lions on Thanksgiving Day in 1961. The Packers were undefeated going into the game, but Detroit had a brutal defense, anchored by a pair of 300-pound interior linemen named Roger Brown and the previously mentioned Alex Karras. The Lions leapt to a very fast 26 to 0 lead and the defense was absolutely pulverizing the Packer offense. Quarterback Bart Starr was getting sacked on almost every drive. Offensive lineman Fuzzy Thurston said this was the game in which he perfected the so-called “lookout block,” a maneuver in which he would look over his shoulder and yell “Look out, Bart!” By the time the fourth quarter arrived the Packers still had not scored and it was clear they were going to lose. Starr turned to his bruised and bloodied wide receivers and asked if any of them could get open. The ball-hungry players normally pestered Starr to throw to them, but not this time. Max McGee answered “Bart, why don’t you just throw an incomplete pass and nobody’ll get hurt.” The joke lightened the mood and the Packers scored two more touchdowns, not nearly enough to win, but to make the rest of the game bearable.

This would become a championship season for the Packers and Lombardi did not give up on his team. In fact, Lombardi saw the defeat as an opportunity. He gathered his team around him and told them: “Let it be an example to all of us. The Green Bay Packers are no better than anyone else when they aren’t ready, when they play as individuals and not as one…. Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”

What would Thomas Paine do?

2011-11-15T20:48:00.001-05:00

Presented to the Club on Monday evening, Nov. 14, 2011 by Charles F. Sawyer

In 1989, I delivered my first paper to the Monday Evening Club. The subject of the paper concerned the implications of a book written by Bill McKibben, entitled “The End of Nature." Published that year, after having been serialized in the New Yorker, it is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has been printed in more than twenty languages. A recent updated version was published in 2006. The message of the book was that true nature, which was independent of human influence, has been replaced by an artificial nature that had been created by the actions and interactions of human beings. He pointed out that human activity had changed the chemistry of the atmosphere, with enormous implications for the quality of life in the future. He pointed out that our influence on climate, with changing temperatures and sea levels would likely lead to less predictable and more violent weather events. McKibben’s discussion of the issues presented by these changes was both broad and detailed and illustrated in both scientific and human terms. He listed possible consequences of environmental degradation including floods and famine, worsening asthma and hay fever. He points out that we way in which we live, with our cars, our houses, plastics and pesticides, are as much a part of our world as the trees, waters and hills that are the natural landscape. He takes the position that we will have decide between our material world and the natural world. He envisions a “humbler world” where we would make do with less and thus take a less dominant position with relation to nature and where nature might once again establish itself as independent and constant. In the end, he does not think that likely. He sees a managed world, in which human beings control the climate, genetics and ecology as the most likely scenario, short of ecological catastrophe.

This being my first paper delivered to the Club, I recall wondering how it would be received. My memory is that the book, and thus the paper, was considered by several members to be a polemic and, as such, somewhat out of the mainstream o f papers. I would be interested to see how the Club would receive it today. I may get the chance, because my paper deals in large part with the questions and concerns treated in a recently published book entitled “Fool Me Twice – Fighting the Assault on Science." Let me tell you about the journey that took me to that book.

Last summer I was sitting on the porch at Wahconah Country Club [Dalton, MA], having just finished a round of golf. I had played with one of my regular partners and a local high school science teacher, whom he had invited. It had been a pleasant day and we were having drinks and talking about nothing in particular. Somehow, and I don’t recall how, the conversation turned to a discussion of the teacher’s science classes and the teaching of evolution. As the conversation went on I realized that he was telling us that he managed to include some version of intelligent design into the curriculum. I couldn’t just sit there and listen as he went on, so I jumped right in. As I did so, I thought “whoa.” I’m not sure that I’m equipped to defend and discuss the theory of evolution, something that I didn’t think needed defending. Me, the history major, who had jumped the science ship as soon as I was permitted to.

I actually think I did OK, talking about natural selection, carbon testing, archeological findings and what science means by the idea of a “theory.” Later, however, as I thought about all of this, I was not only

troubled by the idea that the latest iteration of creationism was being snuck into high school science class, but by my own ignorance and inability to intelligently discuss something so fundamentally important. If I, a college and law school graduate, a person interested in politics and current events, a daily reader and watcher of the news, was so limited in my understanding of evolution, considered to be the foundation for an understanding of modern biology, what was the state of general understanding? I was determined to be more informed, in no small part I must admit, so that I would be better armed for the next creationist. That led me to buy a book by Richard Dawkins entitled “The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution.” In the book, Dawkins takes on creationists, including followers of “intelligent design” and all those who question the fact of evolution through natural selection. He uses living examples of natural selection in birds and insects, radioactive data that calibrate a timescale for evolution, the fossil record and the traces of our earliest ancestors and confirmation from molecular biology and genetics. I now felt somewhat more learned, and prepared.

My journey was moved forward by several current events. I think we all have become increasingly aware of the issue of global warming and climate change. And much has been learned and explored since Bill McKibben’s book, 22 years ago. The events of this year have, I think, been particularly significant in raising our attention level. I refer to tornadoes that have raced across the country, not only in what we consider the tornado belt, but here in western Massachusetts with the June 1 tornado that hit Springfield. The National Weather Service has concluded that this has been the deadliest year of tornadoes since 1936. I also refer to the drought that has persisted in Texas and would appear to become the worst on record. And we can’t forget about hurricane Irene and the 100 year flood events that accompanied her.

Now I think we are all mindful of the fact that weather and climate are two different things and that there have always been extreme weather events that do not represent an accurate picture of the actual climate. However, we are being presented with more and more scientific information that supports the fact of global warming, if not climate change. I read recently about a prominent physicist and skeptic of global warming who spent two years trying to find out if mainstream climate scientists were wrong. In the end, he determined they were right. Temperatures really had risen. The study of the world’s temperatures by Richard Muller was partially bankrolled by a foundation connected to global warming deniers. He pursued long held skeptic theories in analyzing the data. He was spurred to action in part because of “Climategate,” a scandal involving hacked emails of British scientists. He found that the land is 1.6 degrees warmer than in the 1950’s. Those numbers from Muller, who works at the University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, match those by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA. His ultimate finding of a warming world was presented at a conference in Santa Fe, NM in late October. One quarter of the $600,000 to do the research came from the Charles Koch Foundation, whose founder is a major funder of skeptic groups and the Tea Party. The Koch bothers, Charles and David, run a large privately held company involved in oil and other industries, producing sizeable greenhouse gas emissions.

Muller’s research team carefully examined two chief criticisms by skeptics, One is that weather stations are unreliable. The other is that cities, which create heat islands, were skewing the temperature analysis. These factors were considered and accounted for in the final analysis. Muller asserted that the temperature rise that had been previously reported had been done without bias. I saw that Muller had recently written a piece that appeared in the Wall Street Journal, a place friendly to skeptics. There he pointed out that in his research he did not address the cause of global warming, although he did say that it makes sense to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide created by fossil fuels. He did not think that the threat was as proven as the Nobel Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says it is.

What caught my attention in reading one article about Muller’s work was a reference to Shawn Lawrence Otto, author of the book “Fool Me Twice” that criticizes science skeptics. He noted that Muller should expect to be harshly treated by global warming deniers. “Now he’s considered a traitor,” Otto said. “For the skeptic community, this isn’t about data or fact. It’s about team sports. He’s been traded to the Indians. He’s playing for the wrong team now.” I went out and bought Otto’s book.

In a 2006 Alaska gubernatorial debate, Sarah Palin came out in favor of teaching both evolution and creationism in science class, saying, “Teach both. You know, don’t be afraid of education. Healthy debate is so important, and it’s so valuable in our schools.”

The central question that Otto raises is one that is as old as the republic. Are we Americans well informed enough to be trusted with our own governance? More specifically, are we going to use true science, and the scientific method, to understand and engage with such important issues as climate change, population growth and food supply. Despite the crises we are and will be confronting, political discourse in the United States in the last decade has seen a reactionary pullback from science and reason, as manifested in the decline of science journalism and the boastful indifference to scientific facts by many elected officials. Otto describes the ghettoization of science in American journalism, whereby the policy implications of scientific issues are not reported in the way that the effects of business and economy are. Science has earned a sort of untouchable status in American discourse, allowing for rhetorical treatment of matters that are the proper subject of scientific study. Often, religion fills this vacuum and, as a result, a false dichotomy has been created between science and religion. As one observer has said, this may be best evidenced by Rick Perry’s August 18, 2011 response to a New Hampshire child who asked him if he believed in evolution. Perry said “It’s a theory that’s out there. It’s got some gaps in it. In Texas we teach both creationism and evolution.” How stunning it is to have one of the leading contenders for the Presidency publicly express doubts as to the veracity of the scientific theory which is the foundation of modern medicine and biology. The press seems to accept the notion that it should report every such statement as simply one side of the story, and that there are always two sides to every story, each of which are equally valid, with the truth lying somewhere in between. And thus Governor Perry goes unchallenged.

Early in his book Otto points out that science has been responsible for roughly half of all US economic growth since World War II. He notes that by 2006, anti science views focused on three main areas, the denial of: (1) the science of reproductive medicine; (2) the science of climate change; and (3) the science of evolution. He puts significant emphasis on the importance of enlightenment ideals as the foundation of our Republic. He tells of the struggle that Thomas Jefferson had in framing the beginning of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson’s initial effort began, “We hold these truths to be divinely inspired, that all men are created equal.” Unhappy with this, he sought advice from Benjamin Franklin, and out of that collaboration came the statement so familiar to us, “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal.” To be self evident was to recognize natural law, using reason alone to understand the true nature of things. The Enlightenment was important to America because it provided the philosophical basis of the American Revolution, which was more than just a protest against British authority .As it turned out, the Revolution provided the blueprint for a democratic society, for an enlightened concept of government whose most profound documents may have been the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. Thomas Paine, who authored Common Sense, a reasoned argument for American independence, later wrote: “You will do me the justice to remember, that I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be from mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave to himself of his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it. ... The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is Reason. I have never used any other and I trust I never shall.” To feel the full impact of the Enlightenment on America one needs only to look at the first Inaugural Address of Thomas Jefferson, who along with Benjamin Franklin, is considered to be the American most touched by the ideas of the Enlightenment. Jefferson wrote: “if there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated, where reason is left free to combat it.”

Early in the book Otto talks about the scientific method and the difference between matters of faith and scientific theory. He explains that the scientific method is a process of observation, Hypothesis, experiments and conclusion, From observing something in the natural world a hypothesis is made, which is advanced by experiments that support the hypothesis. A conclusion is reached , which is then presented to the scientific community. Other scientists the test that hypothesis with their own experiments. The more that time and tests confirm the conclusion, the more that “theory” approaches fact. Those that say evolution is only a theory do not understand what is meant by that appellation or choose to ignore it because it challenges their belief system. After 150 years of having been subjected to hundreds of thousands of tests, it is the one explanation that has been confirmed by all the known and validated experiments performed to date. Another point Otto makes is that if there is no way to prove a hypothesis is false, then it cannot be science. For example, saying that God, or some intelligent equivalent, created something, be it the earth, humans or the universe is not a scientific statement because it’s not limited to the natural world and because it can’t be disproved.

At this point in my reading, I paused to consider the question: Why are the theories of gravity, global warming and evolution met with very different degrees of acceptance by skeptics and deniers. I’m sure it’s not an original thought with me, but it seems that the notion of gravity is accepted by almost everyone because it is not threatening to accept that idea. Whether gravity is or is not does not challenge anyone’s economic, political or religious interests. It is also an idea that we all see in operation every time an apple falls from a tree, the earth circles the sun or our skin sags further each year. Global warming is accepted by many, but still has many skeptics. Compared to the idea of gravity, it is a very recent concept. We simply have not been wrestling with it for very long. It’s not easy to understand how more snow this winter can be a result of global warming, rather than the contrary. And although it probably doesn’t challenge any religious interests, it most certainly challenges the economic and political interests of many groups. Big oil and coal, major polluters, Kyoto opponents and politicians who are beholden to any of those are to be found in the front ranks of the naysayers. The theory of evolution is quite another matter. It has a shelf life that just goes on and on. Why is this? It doesn’t represent a challenge to anyone’s economic interests, nor to any political groups. However, it does challenge the fundamental religious beliefs of a substantial number of Americans. And therein lies the reason why it may be the most challenged scientific theory of all time.

Fool Me Twice is divided into five sections ‘America’s Science Problem’ discusses how science has been devalued at a time when technology has become more important than ever to sustaining America’s wealth and competitiveness in the global economy. The religious authoritarianism and fascism that have gained strength following the attacks of 9/11 have put science to the side in order to protect the corporate status quo, thereby leaving many pressing issues unresolved and presenting America with an uncertain future.

‘Yesterday’s Science Politics’ asserts that America was not founded as an explicitly Christian nation but one that was inspired by the Enlightenment ideal of reason as God’s natural law. Otto recounts how the sciences once flourished in a free America that routinely attracted scientists who were driven out of repressive places like Nazi Germany, and when figures such as Albert Einstein and Edwin Hubble were cherished national figures. He laments how WWII and the Manhattan Project instilled widespread public fear and the subsequent Cold War funding of big science projects drove most scientists away from the public forum. He contends that anxieties about the bomb and the effect of polluting technologies on the environment provided an impetus to the rise of an anti-scientific political culture. He also notes that the end of the FCC Fairness Doctrine in 1987 gave the corporate media free reign to use rhetoric to influence public dialogue, a power that has largely been used for the benefit of private interests at the expense of reason, science and the public’s right to know.

‘Today’s Science Politics’ explains how issues such as global warming have been captured by an identity politics that is driven by emotion, not science. For example, Otto details how the fossil fuel industry has funded disinformation that is churned by a mainstream media which tends to exploit controversy for ratings while ignoring sound science. Assessing the merits of several scientifically credible solutions to the crisis, he proposes that an investment of $30 billion a year would be a reasonable solution toward curbing global warming while revitalizing scientific innovation and the economy.

‘Tomorrow’s Science Politics begins by reminding us that anti-intellectualism is a strategy often embraced by authoritarian powers. Otto argues that corporate pollution represents a tragedy of the commons that has been imposed by the few upon the many’s right to a clean, nontoxic environment. However, as the insurance industry has been stressed by increasing payments associated with more frequent and violent storm events, he makes a strong case for protecting wild nature to ensure benefits for future generations.

"The Solution" attempts to bridge the culture wars by moving towards common ground through science. Otto is strongly spoken when he write that religious leaders are immoral when they lie about issues that will undoubtedly have detrimental consequences for our children, but admits that science must do its part to have its voice heard by appealing to human aspirations, not fears. He hopes that scientists will reach out to moderates in the religious and political communities, who in turn must include scientific truths in the discussion.

In an Appendix at the end of the book Otto proposes that our elected officials take The American Science Pledge. He asserts that many in this generation have failed to solve the accumulating science challenges , preferring to punt them into the future or, increasingly deny they even exist. He sees the need for candidates in both major parties who will lead on tough science questions and who will emphasize the primacy of knowledge and science as the best basis for informed, effective and fair public policies in a diverse nation. He contends that The Contract from America, the Taxpayer Protection Pledge and the No Climate Tax Pledge all seek to restrict reasoned debate. Candidates are asked to sign the Pledge to show their commitment to its five core principles and to agree to debate fourteen top science questions in public forums.

The five core principles are:

Public decisions must be based on knowledge. “I will support public policy decisions based on the knowledge produced by science, which may be informed by economic interests and my values but never superseded by personal opinions or political objectives.”
Knowledge is supreme and must not be suppressed. “I will protect and defend the precious basis of America’s freedom, which is the scientific consensus of knowledge, against political forces that seek to deny it, suppress it, or substitute for it rhetoric or opinion.”
Scientific integrity and transparency must be protected. “I will oppose all efforts to reduce freedom by holding back or altering scientific reports because they conflict with personal opinions, economic interests or political objectives.”
Freedom of inquiry must be encouraged. “I will oppose acts that reduce freedom by attacking, intimidating, interrogating, prosecuting, disparaging or silencing scientists and
Academics whose research or scientific reports conflict with personal opnions, economic interests or political objectives.”
The major science policy issues must be openly debated. “To demonstrate my commitment to these principles and to moving America forward in solving these challenges, I will participate in one or more substantive, nonpartisan, public, televised, independently moderated debates on the top science challenges facing America.”

What are you reading? John Irving’s fictional landscape

2011-06-26T21:09:00.003-04:00

Presented to the Club on June 13, 2011 by David T. Noyes

"What are you reading?" Such was the signature greeting of my mentor, Dr. Guy W. Leadbetter, Chief of Urology at the University of Vermont Medical School. Of course, despite the rigorous health sciences program of Medical School, and a residency training program consuming 80 or more hours a week caring for patients, he was not referring to academics. He wanted to know what I was reading for fun. What imaginary story of intrigue was capturing my interest? Or, perhaps, whose biography was garnering my attention. He didn’t care that the book might not be great or famous or even popular — only that he felt it was critically important to be stimulating one’s mind with something other than medicine. He himself was a great fan of Louis L’Amour — the American author who described his novels as “Frontier Stories.” I believe Dr. Leadbetter claimed to have read all 105 of L’Amour’s books.

This was the same man who, following any conference presentation, challenged each individual in the audience with the requirement to have a question at the ready. His caveat: “If you don’t have a question, then you weren’t paying attention.” (Kind of reminds you a bit of the Monday Evening Club, doesn’t it?)

When I entered medical school, I was certain I wanted to be a pediatrician. At that time, the third year curriculum required two months of OB/GYN, two months of psychiatry, two months of pediatrics, three months of medicine and three months of surgery. After serving on the Pediatric hospital ward for the first of the two required months, I was even surer that this was the career path I would take. However, the second month in a local pediatrician’s office, proved to be my undoing — one screaming child after another. Talk about cluster headaches at the end of the day! I simply couldn’t manage it.

It was during my surgery rotation, that I first encountered Dr. Leadbetter. At that time, he was in his early 50s. He had written five lead articles for the New England Journal of Medicine. He had conceived, and invented two different pediatric urologic operations — one for severe incontinence, the other for ureteral reflux. Tireless in his pursuit of achieving the best possible outcomes for his patients, he expected 110 percent effort from his staff, but only because he lead by example. A giant in the field, he would go on to become the president of the American Urologic Association.

Yet there was a certain air of the absent minded professor about him. In those days smoking was allowed in the hospital (although not in the patient rooms). He would usually be smoking his pipe when he arrived for compulsory Saturday morning teaching rounds. The residents would gather outside each patient’s room and discuss why the patient was in the hospital, providing up to the minute details of his or her current condition. The entire entourage would then go into the room to visit with the patient and learn small, but important nuances from the master. One day Dr Leadbetter simply stuffed his pipe in his back pocket just before entering one the rooms. He must have thought it was out, but ten minutes or so later, it was obvious that his pants were smoking! He was on fire!

Also, in contrast to the usual image of a surgical department chief, he always was sincere and gentle in his conversation.

I chose to spend a one week elective with Dr. Leadbetter, and I became hooked. I wanted to become a urologist and complete a training program under his watchful guidance. Perhaps, we all have had such figures appear in our lives at crucial turning points. One of my most treasured possessions is a photograph from the final year of my training, of Dr. Leadbetter and me at an operating room table working together on a patient. I keep it on my office bookshelf.

We have all heard it said that a given critic “couldn’t put a book down.” I’m not that person. In fact, it’s fair to say that I have never read a book I couldn’t put down. If I’m reading in the evening after a long day, I’m quite likely to fall asleep even during a very exciting plot twist. On vacation, relaxed, reading mid afternoon in a comfortable chair, I’m very likely to find myself napping mid chapter. Furthermore, I find I don’t have the patience to read, even the most intriguing novel, for more than an hour or two at a time. I have to walk, stretch or do something physical before I can sit back down again with the book. And I gave myself permission many years ago to put a book down permanently if it wasn’t entertaining. I don’t feel the compulsion to slog through a book just because someone else has proclaimed it to be good. Most recently I found this to be true with both Thomas Pynchon’s recent works: the 773-page Mason and Dixon, and the 1083-page Against the Day. Both highly acclaimed, both with a scattered multitude of characters and little to no common thread tying scenes together. Umberto Eco’s 1983 novel The Name of the Rose was the last book I forced myself to finish.

Perhaps at some point in your life, a specific novel has held you spellbound. You feel a special affinity for the author’s point of view. Or you develop an intimate appreciation for the characters. John Irving’s 1989 novel, A Prayer for Owen Meany, was such a book for me. As a product of the anti-war, antiestablishment 60’s, and as a man with a Congregationalist faith, I found special resonance with Irving’s observations. In the Forward to the novel, Irving credits Frederick Buechner, his former teacher at Exeter, for his help with the manuscript and the Preface includes the following Buechner quote: “Not the least of my problems is that I can hardly even imagine what kind of an experience a genuine, self-authenticating religious experience would be. Without somehow destroying me in the process, how could God reveal himself in a way that would leave no room for doubt? If there were no room for doubt, there would be no room for me.”

Prominently noted throughout the novel is the incompetence of the national leaders of the day--especially Johnson’s expansion of the Vietnam War, to the ultimate sacrifice of 58,000 young men. JFK’s trysts with Marilyn Monroe (and Jackie’s apparent willingness to be deceived), receive the reader’s attention. Irving satirizes such American phenomena as teenagers with their rock music and marijuana; and mocks the onset of sycophantic television evangelists selling Jesus like junk food. (I’m reminded of one of my favorite bumper stickers of the era — TELEVANGELISTS DO MORE THAN LAY PEOPLE).

Irving gives us Owen Meany, a young man from a modest and unpretentious background. Owen always does and says the right thing. He is aided by prophetic powers and a single-mindedness that makes him capable of achievements far beyond expectation. He can’t explain his actions, except to note that he is confident that his experiences will be needed some day. Throughout Owen’s life, he is continually practicing for what turns out to be the courageous event that ultimately culminates in his heroic death.
Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes once said that “life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.” And so, exactly 20 years after the publication of this Irving novel, we have the saga of Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger landing his US Airways plane in the Hudson River in January of 2009, saving all 155 passengers. Like Owen Meany, his whole life seems to have been in training for this event — he graduated for the US Air Force Academy, where he was one of only a handful of cadets to participate in the glider program and by the time he was a senior he was instructing the younger cadets in the technique. At graduation, he received the Outstanding Cadet Airmanship Award as the top flier at the Academy. Sullenberger served as a fighter pilot for the Air Force, piloting the McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II from 1975 to 1980. He advanced to become a flight leader and a training officer. While in the Air Force, he was a member of the official aircraft accident investigation board. Since 2007 he had run his own safety consulting business, Safety Reliability Methods Inc., which provided "emergency management, safety strategies and performance monitoring to the aviation industry.” He had also been involved in a number of accident investigations conducted by the USAF and the National Transportation and Safety Board. He served the Air Line Pilots Safety Association as safety chairman, accident investigator, and national technical committee member. Instrumental in developing and implementing the Crew Resource Management manual that is used by US Airways, he has taught the course to hundreds of other airline members. And so, indeed, Mr. Sullenberger’s heroic actions and his lifelong preparation for just such a calamity, provide a prime example of Life imitating Art.

When interviewed in 1989, at the time of publication of this novel, Irving reflected: “Like most teenagers, for 19 years I sat in church and hated every minute of it. But the accumulated time takes a toll or leaves you with images that cast a doubt on one’s former atheism.” It was the element of precognition in the Gospels that appealed to his artistic imagination. “One event that always got me was that Jesus told his disciples that they were going to betray him.” Owen Meany issues a series of prophecies — including one of his own death — that become reality. “What degree of religious belief I can manage owes as much to personal experience as it does to all those years of training within the church. When I am moved to see beyond my usual doubt, when I am moved to something that approaches real faith, it seems to me, I am basing those instincts for belief on personal experience as much as I am on any formal religious training.”

Irving’s eleventh novel, Until I Found You, gives us a protagonist, Jack Burns, whose mother is a famous tattoo artist. She drags him as a child around through various tattoo capitals in Europe while searching for his father, a church organist, who is addicted to being tattooed. And so Irving writes: “In this way, in increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us — not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.” Eventually, Jack goes on to become a famous movie star playing mostly female roles. But his psychiatrist bluntly asks: “Is it because of your mother’s lies to you, or your missing father, that you are an unanchored ship — in danger of drifting wherever the wind or the currents, or the next sexual encounter take you?”

Many have surmised that this novel is Irving’s attempt to resolve the themes of his life and work. His biological father, John Wallace Blunt, divorced Irving’s mother, Frances, before he was born. Blunt disappeared from his son’s life and went on to become a hero during WWII. Frances remarried, this time to Colin Irving, a Slavic languages and literature major at Harvard and a Russian history instructor at Phillips Exeter Academy. John Wallace Blunt, Jr. thus became John Irving. “I have never lost a single night’s sleep wondering or imagining who my biological father is,” Irving says: “I passed up several opportunities I could have had to confront him. I wasn’t interested.” He said of searching for one’s biological roots: “It’s not going to do any good. Unless you’re looking for something to attach your victimhood to, which is a common ailment of the contemporary time.”

In a passage from The World According to Garp, Irving writes: “If Garp could have been granted one vast naïve wish, it would have been that he could make the world safe. For children and for grownups. The world struck Garp as unnecessarily perilous for both.” But, Irving claims, he simply uses the theme of an absent parent for the same reason that Charles Dickens did; because orphans make for good stories.

The family lived with Irving’s grandmother in Exeter, N.H. until John was almost seven years old. From this experience, his grandmother, who had three daughters and no sons, often told him how proud she was of “her boy.” She had graduated from Wellesley with an English Literature major, but apparently she did not enjoy Irving’s work. She read his first novel and stopped after that (which Irving has said is probably a good thing). She told him that she disapproved of the language and the subject matter. Furthermore, from reviews that she had read about the other books, it looked to her as though things did not improve with maturity. She made no effort to read the subsequent four novels that followed the first and died in l982 almost reaching her 100th birthday.

Irving says he would not have qualified for admission to Exeter via the normal admissions process. He was a weak student due to dyslexia, although no one knew that at the time. He gained entrance as a faculty child. Because he failed both Latin and math his senior year, he was required to remain at the Academy for an unprecedented fifth year, graduating in 1961. When he was asked to recall his Exeter experience, he said: “I’m eternally grateful to the Academy for its rigorousness. I’m a hard worker, and I had to be at Exeter — needing five years to complete the four-year program. What Exeter can’t necessarily prepare a student for, are the kinds of experiences the characters in my novels generally face: sorrow, loss, grief, or dysfunction. No school does.”

Exeter was where Irving came to love wrestling. He was team captain in his senior year and actively competed until he was 34. “My life in wrestling was one-eighth talent and seven-eighths discipline. I believe that my life as a writer consists of one-eighth talent and seven-eighths discipline too.” In the movie, The World According to Garp, Irving plays the referee because: “it was a non speaking part,” and the original actor proved to be inept because he had no wrestling experience. Irving was voted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in 1992.

From Exeter, he went on to the University of Pittsburgh, predominantly so he could pursue his wrestling ambitions and compete with the top athletes. However, when it became apparent to him that he would be, at best, a backup for an All American at any of his possible weight classes, he opted to transfer to the University of New Hampshire. Here he received a graduation prize in recognition of a “high degree of creativity in an academic program.” He married his first wife and became a father while he was still an undergraduate. Following graduation from UNH he entered the University of Iowa’s writing workshop, where he was mentored by Kurt Vonnegut from 1965 until 1967. (you may recall that we heard Bob Anderson quote Vonnegut in his paper earlier this year) He could only find time to write two hours a day, waking at 5 a.m. for the two prized hours of peace and quiet before his son, Colin, awoke. Irving supported his family with jobs in the university library restacking books, teaching one undergraduate writing course, selling cowhorns, bells, stadium cushions and pennants at the home football games, and waiting tables in “a nauseating restaurant out on the Coralville strip.” He never imagined that he would be able to make a living from his writing, but Vonnegut had told him: “You may be surprised. I think capitalism is going to treat you okay.”

After Iowa, he moved back east and taught at Windham College in Putney, Vermont (no longer in existence), and then at Mt. Holyoke College. Subsequently he went back to Iowa as a teacher from 1972 to 1975 where his students included: T. Coraghessan Boyle, Ron Hansen, Douglas Unger, Kent Haruf (rhymes with sheriff) and Susan Taylor Chehak.

Until Irving’s fourth novel — The World According to Garp — vaulted him into celebrity in 1978, he usually had a full time job teaching creative writing or coaching wrestling. His meager income was supplemented with awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship during the preceding 11 years.

Irving divorced his first wife after 18 years of marriage in 1982. Five years later he married his literary agent — a Toronto native, 12 years his younger. Irving says of the experience: “There are only two ways you can feel, I suppose, when you have a second marriage and start a second family. You either feel you are lucky to have had that chance or you feel you’re a damn fool to have made the same mistake again.” Irving’s habits are a bit different now, as he writes from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., then works out in a gym that is part of his house where he has a wrestling floor mat. Afterward he usually prepares dinner, as he is the family’s sole chef.

Although he won an Academy Award in 2000 for the best adapted screenplay taken from his 1985 book The Cider House Rules, Irving says that he thinks “books are better.”

In 1984 came A son of the Circus, set in India and Toronto, and Mr. Irving’s only attempt at a mystery novel. Readers are treated to his usual vast array of characters. These include a well dressed, dignified Indian orthopedic surgeon researching the gene responsible for achondroplastic dwarfism, identical twins separated at birth (one an Indian film star, the other an American Jesuit), a child prostitute who may be HIV positive, a beggar boy whose foot has been crushed by an elephant, transvestites and transsexuals., and a drug filled dildo carried by an American hippie. It is here that I came across one of the simplest but most frightening lines of Irving’s fiction. The protagonist is alone in the bedroom of a prostitute. He hears the killer coming down the hall and he furtively seeks a place to hide, choosing a closet with only a curtain for a door. As the killer enters the room, Irving writes: “the only sound you can hear is the sound of someone trying not to make a sound.” Who amongst us, in childhood games of Kick the Can or Flashlight Tag, has not been in the same plight — trying desperately not to make a sound!

However, despite the bizarre and violent plot twists, Mr. Irving again explores some serious issues — especially the theme of perpetual exile. (The book is dedicated to Salman Rushdie.) The Indian orthopedist finds that he is not comfortable in his adopted home of Toronto where he is subject to racial abuse. Nor is he comfortable in his native India where he finds the country’s misery and chaos oppressive.

Irving also portrays the Indian circus as a social welfare institution where many performers are children who are sold by their parents as a way to see that they are cared for. His circus descriptions are reminiscent of the circus scenes of the highly acclaimed Canadian author, Robertson Davies, in his series of novels, The Deptford Trilogy. Irving has said that he does not believe in the mantra of many writing teachers — that an author must write about what he or she knows. This novel would seem to prove the point, as Mr. Irving has never been to India.

Irving says: “I’m not the guy to ask about American literature. I feel out of place in it, and have always been more at home in the British novel.” He admires 19th century authors such as: Dickens, Hardy, Trollope, Turgenev, Flaubert and Tolstoy. “I am a conscious imitator of those forms of the novel: narrative, large, full of plot and fate, and of characters who strive to be more than ordinary.” American influences make up a small portion of his list of favorites. He cites Melville, but especially Hawthorne and says: “I am not a Faulkner-Hemmingway-Fitzgerald person. Perhaps, in part, because I was forced to read that stuff in school when I was too young to appreciate it, and hated it. Vonnegut and Heller mean much more to me than Twain.”

Irving begins his memoir Trying to Save Piggy Sneed, with a disclaimer: that all memoirs are false. “A fiction writer’s memory is an especially imperfect provider of detail; we can always imagine a better detail than the one we can remember. The correct detail is rarely, exactly, what happened; the most truthful detail is what could have happened, or what should have. Being a writer is a strenuous marriage between careful observation and just as carefully imagining the truths you haven’t had the opportunity to see. The rest is the necessary, strict toiling with the language; for me this means writing and rewriting the sentences until they sound as spontaneous as good conversation.”

Irving says of his writing: “My instinct is to reach you emotionally, which includes wanting to make you laugh, but also wanting to move you, to make you cry, to hurt you. I’m not an intellectual, I’m a storyteller. And, as such, I’m a craftsman. I care very much about building characters to a point where you care deeply about them, and when you lose them, it’s like losing someone you knew.”

Irving, like Dickens, uses the backdrop of the societal ills of our time in which to display his novels. He creates distinctly unique and memorable characters. His themes have to do with how his characters handle loss or the effort to control some part of life that is, ultimately, random and uncontrollable. Perhaps his popularity arises because we see parts of ourselves mirrored in his fiction? We certainly are part of his landscape.

So Gentlemen, what are you reading?

Material for this essay was obtained from the New York Times Book Reviews, Phillips Exeter Academy Alumni Bulletins, Mr. Irving’s memoirs, and, of course, his wonderful novels.

No longer a god: How Hirohito’s image was refurbished after World War II

2011-06-23T15:15:00.002-04:00

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Presented to the Club by Martin C. Langeveld on May 16, 2011

From December 7, 1941, until August 1945, the personification of America’s enemy in the Pacific War was Emperor Hirohito of Japan. Public officials, military leaders and the press rarely missed an opportunity to tie Hirohito’s name to the struggle against Japan. For example, General Douglas MacArthur, speaking in March 1942 to the Australian parliament, promised the lawmakers “there can be no compromise . . . We shall die . . . in the fight to drive Emperor Hirohito’s invasion armies back out of the southwest Pacific.” War correspondents were fond of language like, “Hirohito’s invasion hordes were reported striking peak fury down the Malaya peninsula today.”

Often, Hirohito’s name was being uttered in the same breath as the other Axis leaders: “Mr. Hirohito, Mr. Hitler and Mr. Mussolini will be entirely eliminated from the picture—and that soon!” the mayor of Pittsburgh said in a speech. “Mr. Hitler and Mr. Hirohito, take notice!” the Christian Science Monitor started a story about military preparedness. “Hirohito’s invasion hordes were reported striking peak fury down the Malaya peninsula today,” the Associated Press reported.

“Blame Hitler, Hirohito and Benito! . . .Don’t blame your grocer!” was the headline on a 1942 newspaper advertisement from Heinz, explaining why tin rationing might squeeze supplies of some of the “57” varieties.

In 1944, this ad headline in the Spokane Spokesman Review offered an incentive to buying $18.75 worth of war bonds: “How’d you like to send your compliments to Hirohito on a bomb? Well, here’s your chance . . . There’s a parachute bomb that’s all yours, just waiting for your personal greetings to be added to start it on its way.”

But while that kind of rhetoric continued, by 1945 there were hints that Hirohito might not be in the same archfiend league as Hitler and Mussolini.

The government had begun to hint at a go-easy on Hirohito policy, and some columnists were beginning to warm up to it. Direct military attacks and even propaganda attacks on him were being avoided out of concern that doing so would elevate the conflict to a religious war and increase the fanaticism of the Japanese people, and because the word for unconditional surrender would ultimately have to come from the emperor’s lips.

“We confess we are not convinced what should be done with Hirohito,” editorialized the Rock Hill Herald of South Carolina in mid-1945. “We do not know how much responsibility for the war is on his shoulders. It is possible he may be the mere figurehead he is often described to us."

This doubt was by no means unanimous, however. The Japanese capitulation came on August 15, 1945, and American occupation began August 28. Just weeks later, on September 18, Georgia Senator Richard Russell called for immediate prosecution of the emperor for war crimes. Anti-Hirohito sentiment in the U.S. was intense. Polls taken in June 1945 showed three-quarters of Americans in favor of severe punishment for Hirohito as a war criminal, with nearly 50 percent favoring execution, while only 7 percent favored leaving him in office.

A barrage of editorials and columns calling for the arrest, imprisonment and ultimate execution of the emperor continued for several months after the Japanese surrender, even though President Truman and the occupation chief, General MacArthur, had by then made clear that he would stay.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch thundered that retaining the emperor “would perpetuate…the fanatic delusion of imperial divinity and keep unbroken the thread of dynasty leading again inevitably to war.” Others focused on the fact that Hirohito had failed to use the actual word “surrender” in his broadcast to the Japanese nation. The New York Times noted that reliance on Hirohito “appears to be [strengthening] the Emperor’s autocracy.” And Roscoe Drummond, writing in the Christian Science Monitor, asked “By retaining the Emperor, are the Allies promoting anything more than a palace-approved façade of Japanese democracy, behind which the Japanese imperialists will be even freer to work than were the German militarists behind the weak Weimar Republic?”

But by early 1946, a remarkable change in sentiment had come about. In its issue of February 4, 1946, Life magazine published a photographic essay, “Sunday at Hirohito’s”, showing the emperor watering his plants and relaxing with his family. “He is a model family man,” Life wrote, “aged 44, neat and nervous, methodical, thrifty, decent, with a strong voice and handshake, and fond of his wife (a love choice), his children and his mother, who was opposed to the war. He admires Abraham Lincoln…he has read the works of Longfellow and Whittier.” In the final picture in the essay, Hirohito is shown reading The New York Times and Stars and Stripes, the newspaper for U.S. service personnel.

In May, the New York Times, in a story headlined “At Long Last, Hirohito Begins to Enjoy Life,” published a photo of the emperor and his son splashing in the surf. And U.S. opinion polls, which had shown practically no support for keeping Hirohito on the throne in mid-1945, showed in mid-1946 a 60 percent approval rating for MacArthur’s handling of the occupation, of which Hirohito’s retention was a central tenet. That support grew to 81 percent by 1949.

What changed? How did the emperor acquire these new clothes, and what transformed the attitude of US media and citizens? Indeed, why did the Allies decide to retain the emperor? And did Hirohito do anything that actually merited his lenient treatment?

To explore these questions, first it’s important to understand the Japanese perceptions at the time of the “emperor system”, or the Japanese national polity as it is often referred to.

Every country has a polity, as do many institutions such as churches. The word means a system of governance but typically it refers also to the basis of its legitimacy. In the U.S., our polity is based on the statement in the Constitution’s preamble that “We the People” are the source of all authority.

In the Japanese polity, as understood especially by Japan’s wartime military and civil leadership, all authority flowed from the emperor, and a Japanese government without an emperor was unthinkable. Contrast this with the European constitutional monarchies, where royal families are retained out of tradition and even genuine affection, but where few citizens would consider it unthinkable to switch to a non-monarchical form of statehood.

The Japanese word generally translated as “national polity” is Kokutai, but a great deal of meaning is packed into that word. The principles of Kokutai have origins deep in Japanese history, but in order to consolidate power around it, in 1937 the government ordered a committee of scholars to codify the Kokutai principles into a booklet (Kokutai no Hongi, or Fundamentals of our National Polity), millions of copies of which were distributed. Proceeding from essentially religious or metaphysical assumptions, rather than logic and reason, it became the basis for every aspect of domestic and foreign policy, as well as of Japanese civilization and culture. Kokutai implied not a constitutional monarchy, but an emperor-centered state in which the emperor was above the constitution. The “imperial way” was embedded in kokutai as a motivating theology that penetrated every aspect of Japanese life.

Lester Brooks, in his book called “Behind Japan’s Surrender”, described Hirohito’s status in this system as one of “supremely paradoxical fiction.”

Brooks wrote:

Because the Emperor was head of the ‘national family’ and all Japanese (except naturalized ones) were related by blood to him, unblinking, wholehearted belief was given to such slogans as Emperor and People are One. Through ages eternal, past and future, each Japanese had a place in the supreme scheme of things. And the Emperor was the pole star by which he could orient himself and to which he could direct his devotion. It was the combination of three things deriving from this that made the Japanese character distinctly Japanese: unswerving loyalty to the Emperor system, deep conviction of their mission on earth, and belief that their inherited, divinely given qualities were superior.

The Japanese constitution, “given” to his subjects by Hirohito’s grandfather, the Emperor Meiji, stated “The Emperor is Heaven-descended, divine and sacred; he is preeminent above His subjects. He must be reverenced and is inviolable.”

In other words, the Emperor was understood to be a living god. And yet, his status as supreme commander of the armed forces was a title without actual authority, and his supremacy over the civilian cabinet was similarly constrained through. An elaborate set of rituals, guardians and procedural mechanisms. While the emperor’s signature was required on direct orders (called rescripts) from time to time, in actuality the emperor had no ability to control policy or actions. This had been the case, to a greater or lesser degree, for more than 1000 years until 1868, during which shoguns and samurai ruled Japan and often kept emperors in seclusion and poverty. In 1868 the Meiji Restoration eliminated the shogun and returned the country to a powerful emperor system, but with the Meiji Constitution of 1890, which remained in force through World War II, an elected parliament assumed primary authority and the emperor’s powers were limited by the requirement that any order he issued needed to be signed by a “Minister of State.” And as a practical matter, orders always originated from the government bureaucracy rather than with from the palace.

So the “supremely paradoxical fiction” of the emperor was that he was the head of state, but he was not; all authority flowed from him, but it did not. The Allies began to understand this as early as 1943, and incorporated it into their postwar planning even as they allowed the public and the media to continue another fiction, the demonization of Hirohito.

Historians have mixed views on whether Hirohito was an active participant in the pursuit of what in Japan was called the Greater East Asia War, including its antecedents the invasion of Manchuria in 1931, and the war against the Republic of China launched in 1937. He did not object to either incursion, and his questions about the Chinese war dealt with how long it might take, and whether the Soviet Union might become involved. He authorized war against the United States, but said after the war that if he had not, there would have been a coup d’etat including complete with his assassination.

With his network of advisors and private intelligence channels, it’s likely that Hirohito, despite his isolation, always had a good sense of which way the wind was blowing; and by the summer of 1945, he had become convinced that Japan should end the war on any terms possible — although there is a current of historical opinion that says Hirohito actually delayed peace by waiting too long to break with his government’s militarists.

In any event, by midsummer the emperor’s views, those of his closest advisor, the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, Koichi Kido, and of the Prime Minister, Kantaro Suzuki, had begun to coincide around the view that the war needed to be brought to a close.

In early August, following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the issuance of the Potsdam Declaration by the Allies, Kido and Suzuki engineered the convening of an Imperial Conference to consider next steps. This in itself was not unusual. Typically, the conference brought together a dozen top military and civilian leaders; the emperor would listen in silence to a discussion of the issues, and would assent to whatever decisions emerged. At this conference, held late on the night of August 9 in a bomb shelter deep beneath the Imperial Palace, that’s what most in attendance expected.

The discussion revolved around possible conditions for Japan’s acceptance of the Potsdam terms, which called for Japan’s capitulation, occupation by the Allies, the reduction of her territory to the principal islands of Japan, complete disarmament, and the punishment of war criminals. Some in the Japanese leadership hoped to mitigate the impact of these terms by attaching conditions, which included the continuation of the imperial family, the disarmament of the armed forces by Japan herself, the trial of war criminals by Japan herself, and a limitation on the duration and extent of occupation.

Two hours into the imperial conference, there was no resolution in sight. Some of the leaders, including foreign minister Shigenori Togo, were realists, willing to limit the conditions to retention of the Emperor system, while others, hoping to protract the war, favored listing all of the conditions. Finally, in an unprecedented, but premeditated step, Suzuki addressed the deity seated at the head of the table. “Your Imperial decision is requested as to which proposal should be adopted, the foreign minister’s or the one with the four conditions.” Then the emperor-god spoke to the shocked group.

“Then I will state my opinion,” he said.

I agree with the foreign minister. My reasons are as follows. After serious consideration of conditions facing Japan both at home and abroad, I have concluded that to continue this war can mean only destruction for the homeland and more bloodshed and cruelty in the world. I cannot bear to have my innocent people suffer further. Ending the war is the only way to restore world peace and relieve the nation for the terrible suffering it is undergoing.” He countered the military men’s suggestions for a final, decisive battle that might allow Japan to negotiate better terms by citing a number of specific promises and projections that the military had not lived up to.

He continued,

I feel great pain when I think of those who have served me so faithfully: the soldiers and sailor who have been killed or wounded in distant battles, destitute families who have lost all their possessions — and often their lives as well — in air raids on the homeland. Indeed, disarmament of my brave and loyal military is excruciating to me. It is equally unbearable that those who have rendered me devoted service should be considered war criminals. However, for the sake of the country it cannot be helped. To relieve the people and to maintain the nation we must bear the unbearable . . . All of you, I think, will worry about me in this situation. But it does not matter what will become of me. Determined, as I have stated, I have decided to bring the war to an end immediately. For this reason I agree with the foreign minister’s proposal.

He had spoken for nearly half an hour. It was the longest public speech in his life to that point. Having achieved his objective, Suzuki immediately adjourned the conference. Some of the military leaders, still hoping for a way around the imperial command, looked for ways to delay. It took five more days, and considerable palace intrigue, for the emperor’s decision to be ratified by the cabinet, for it to be transmitted to the Allies through neutral Swedish and Swiss diplomatic channels, for the allies to transmit a response, for the language of that response to be parsed and discussed, and finally for the emperor to record a message to his people for broadcast over state radio. In the meantime, a group of army colonels attempted to engineer a last-ditch coup, and actually succeeded in penetrating the imperial palace grounds with the aim of taking the emperor prisoner. They also invaded the radio headquarters, seeking to prevent the broadcast of the speech. But in the end the uprising was put down, and mid-day on August 15, for the first time ever, the people of Japan heard the voice of the sacred crane, the Showa Emperor, speaking to them directly.

It was not a message written for immediate understanding, but for the ages; and it was written in an arcane form of Classical Japanese used only at court, with many words and inflections not familiar to ordinary Japanese. Even the English translation sounds stilted:

After pondering deeply the general trends of the world and the actual conditions obtaining in our empire today, we have decided to effect a settlement of the present situation by resorting to an extraordinary measure. We have ordered our government to communicate with the governments of the United States, Great Britain, China and the Soviet Union that our empire accepts the provisions of their Joint Declaration.

He went on to explain his reasons:

The war has lasted for nearly four years. Despite the best that has been done by everyone . . . the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest. Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is indeed incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives . . . . The hardships and sufferings to which our nation is to be subjected hereafter will certainly be great . . . . However it is according to the dictate of the time and fate that we have resolved to pave the way for a grand peace for all the generations to come by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is insufferable.

Mystified as his listeners may have been, the gist of the message was clear, the war was over. And it had been the quiet insistence of Hirohito, and his shrewd manipulation of the byzantine workings of the Japanese political system, that had at least hurried the end.

Of course, the story of Hirohito’s pivotal role would come out much later, and at the time of the surrender, the Allies were unaware of it. And certainly the American public and press knew nothing about it and continued to issue calls for a noose to be put around the emperor’s neck.

But American officials had come to the conclusion to accept the continuation of the imperial system, not because Hirohito helped end the war, but for strategic as well as practical reasons. First, U.S. occupation planners were convinced that keeping Hirohito was key to the success of the occupation. With Japanese cooperation, MacArthur projected, he could make do with 200,000 troops, as opposed to the 900,000 or more it might take otherwise. Indeed, even before occupying troops landed on the Japanese mainland, Hirohito had ordered demobilization to begin.

Secret U.S. planning for a postwar Japan began as early as 1943 and was in full swing during 1944. Early on, some zealous schemes had been put forward — for example the idea that Japan would not be allowed to surrender until it was virtually destroyed, and that that would be followed by a 25-year occupation. More rational thinking took hold, and although some of the early thinking was largely anti-emperor, a pro-emperor view gradually came to predominate: if having the emperor in place would help the development of the kind of government to which the Allies would be willing to hand over control, then the emperor should be kept on.

The reasoning went that an occupation could not happen without the involvement of Japanese officials and existing Japanese institutions; most Japanese officials viewed the Throne as the source of their own authority; and removing the institution of the emperor, or stripping him of all power, would lessen cooperation from the bureaucracy by making it feel it had lost its legitimacy.

The proponents also advanced a legal argument, based on the 1907 Hague Convention, which stipulated that an occupying power had no right to change the political institutions of an occupied country. Therefore, removing Hirohito would not alter the existence of the monarchy itself, and a successor would simply take his place.

Still, the final report of the occupation planning group made it clear that its recommendations were just that, and that the Supreme Allied Commander in Japan would have the final say. As it turned out, MacArthur, with President Truman’s support, accepted the council’s arguments. In effect, MacArthur’s policy of using the emperor to help implement demilitarization and other occupation aims coincided with the deeply-held concern kokutai beliefs of the Japanese bureaucracy.

In September, Hirohito met with MacArthur, and a widely-circulated photo of the general towering over the emperor, dressed in formal attire but hatless, was seen as signifying the monarch’s submission to MacArthur’s authority, as well as providing the first hints to the Japanese people that their emperor was a mortal being just like them. In fact, the Japanese government considered the photo so disturbing that at first they tried to ban its reproduction in the newspapers. MacArthur’s staff continued contacts with Hirohito and his advisors, and persuaded him to issue, on January 1, 1946, an Imperial rescript in which Hirohito declared his humanity. It was actually an adroit piece of communication: the English translation implied a renunciation of divinity, referring to “the mistaken belief that the emperor is divine”; while the Japanese-language version for domestic consumption had him descending only partway from heaven, stating, in esoteric language, that the emperor was not a “manifest deity”, and not touching the accepted belief that he was a direct descendant of the sun goddess. And, and in fact, language added by Hirohito to the Allied first drafts included a full quotation of the Meiji emperor’s Charter Oath of 1868, one of the founding documents of modern Japan. The Charter Oath included principles of deliberative assemblies, free enterprise, and abolition of class distinctions. Thus, the rescript served to place Hirohito back at the center of national polity, but this time with a democratic constitutional monarchy.

Of course by this time the spread in Life magazine was already in the works, and the passage of time had already begun to soften attitudes in the U.S., but the perceived renunciation of divinity was particularly well-received by some of the erstwhile anti-Hirohito editorialists and politicians in the U.S.

Also at the urging of MacArthur’s staff, the Imperial Household Ministry, which had for centuries supervised the imperial family’s affairs, began in early 1946 a series of steps to humanize and demystify the emperor. He began to travel around the country, visiting schools and factories and riding in public parades. He would tip his hat to the crowds, and on several occasions shook hands with American servicemen — both unthinkable gestures in the past. Not everyone was thrilled by this — the Soviets considered it to be monarchist propaganda, and even the Australian foreign minister expressed concern — but the travels continued. Later in the year, Hirohito addressed the Japanese Diet to urge the adoption of a new constitution that would strip him of most of his traditional powers, referring to him only as the “symbol of the state and of the unity of the people”.

U.S. newspapers that had been critical of Hirohito began to modify their stance. The Washington Post editorialized, “The notion that Japanese militarism could not be destroyed unless the Emperor, too, were destroyed, was evidently not based on any knowledge of his personal character.”

It helped, of course, that the occupation authority could keep a firm censorial grip on the kind of information and news reporting that came out of Japan, so that by and large it could be ensured that a flow of positive news about Hirohito and the imperial family would reach U.S. readers.

When Hirohito died in 1989, 159 countries sent representatives, including President George Bush and 54 other heads of state. The occasion brought out criticism, especially from veterans groups, and some countries like the Netherlands, in deference to the still-vivid memories of wartime treatment at the hands of Japanese armed forces, sent cabinet-level representatives rather than royalty or heads of state. Still, the ceremony was a final indication of the emperor’s rehabilitation, both domestically in Japan and internationally.

After his radio address in 1945, Hirohito never again made a broadcast address to the nation. It was not until March 15 of this year, in the wake of the Japanese earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster, that a Japanese emperor, Hirohito’s son Akihito, would again speak to the nation, this time on television. Akihito has continued the descent from heaven initiated by his father. His recent speech was delivered in standard Japanese, not the Classical Japanese of Hirohito’s speech, which is still spoken at court. He was the first emperor to marry a commoner; when he underwent prostate surgery in 2003, the public was informed — in the past the state of the emperor’s health had been kept secret. The cause of Hirohito’s death, pancreatic cancer, was not disclosed until after his death; it is unclear whether even Hirohito himself was told the diagnosis after he fell ill. Through Hirohito’s generation, royal offspring were largely raised by court-designated tutors, but Akihito and Empress Michiko actively raised their own children. The royal family and the Imperial Household Agency consciously look to European royalty for role models. To be sure, the imperial family still lives largely in isolation, and is perhaps surrounded by more ritual and stiffness than some of its European counterparts. Jokes about the royal family, commonplace in Great Britain, are out of bounds in Japan. But, although, like any royal institution, the Japanese monarchy is not without its controversial aspects and outright opponents, the Japanese people generally regard the royal family with affection and understand their emperor as a figurehead of the European kind, and no longer as a deity. In that sense, a generation later, the emperor’s change of clothes is complete.

U.S. government photo by Lt. Gaetano Faillance

By the hair of my chin: Facial hair through the ages

2011-05-20T22:05:00.000-04:00

Presented to the Club by William A. Selke on Monday evening, March 21, 2011

It was on "The hair of my chin," his beard, that the little pig vowed his defiance to the wolf. With men, as well as well as little pigs, beards have been traditional symbols of maleness, and, in some eras, have had important significance. Implying that a man would rather emasculate his chin than fail to live up to a promise is reflected in the oath, “By my beard” used by Shakespeare in “Two Gentlemen of Verona.” In all but the most primitive societies, when a beard was worn, it has been a conscious choice, but that choice has waxed and waned throughout history. It is the wearing of beards, and the razors for removing them, that we will consider this evening.

On display in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo are several oval gold disks, with small handles on one side, identified as razors of the period four millennia ago. If one doubted that these devices were effective, relics and pictures of Egyptian royalty of that period show the men shaven, though in some cases with a small circular beard, real or artificial – of gold – in the middle of their chins. Clean chins and jaws have been a possible choice for the elite for a very long time.

Meanwhile, across the Red Sea, Jews following the instructions in Leviticus, Chapter 19, verse 27 wore truly full beards. That verse states that “Ye shall not round the corners of your heads; neither shall thou mar the corners of thy beard.” (We might note that verse 18 of that same chapter includes the “Great Commandment “ –“Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”) Over the course of history, we’ll see men adding or removing their beards for indefinite reasons, but in this case the authority is clear.

Moving forward to ancient Greece we note that Zeus was always bearded, as was Poseidon. but the young god, Apollo, was usually represented as a beardless youth, a kouros. Statues of mortals are less common, but the customs of the mortals can be inferred from contemporaneous statues of the gods. The similarity in appearance of gods and mortals is evident in the fact that a number of unwitting women bore children fathered by gods whom they had mistaken for their husbands. Hermes, always free-spirited, wore a beard when posing for his early statues, but was beardless from the fifth century BCE.

Greek fashions changed after Alexander the Great’s sweep of conquest in the 4th century BCE. He ordered that all his troops remove their beards, so as to deny the enemy handles by which soldiers could be grabbed and killed. While it was introduced for practical military reasons, shaving spread through the Macedonian Empire as fashion. When a beard was worn, it would be by a philosopher, as a professional badge. This predictably led to proverbs such as “The beard does not make the sage.” So, in the third century BCE, the majority of aristocratic Greeks shaved.

As the Roman forces took over the Greek Empire, the Hellenistic era begins with the conquerors learning to imitate the Greeks they had conquered. That most expert military leader, Scipio Africanus, who was granted that name for his conquering of Hannibal in 202 BCE, is represented in Rome clean-shaven in a splendid bronze bust. And that style was followed by all the early Caesars . Shaven Ceasars were the rule until 117 AD, when the brilliant and transformative leader, Hadrian, wore a beard to signify his respect for the cultural richness of the Greece of 500 years earlier. His successors followed his model for centuries.

Looking at the Middle East two thousand year ago, we ask did Jesus wear a beard? We never see representations of him without one, and we can be sure that no artist took it upon himself to make such an important decision himself. The teachings of Leviticus were, from the start followed carefully by members of some groups – the orthodox Jews throughout time – but not widely. Nowhere in the Gospels is there direct mention of Christ’s beard, nor, for that matter of its absence. The evidence of his beard comes from centuries of biblical scholarship. The Old Testament book of Isaiah, you will recall, foretells the coming of the Messiah. Chapter 5, verse 6 states “I gave my back to those who strike Me, and my cheeks to those who pluck out the beard.” This is indirect, but unassailable proof.

In his depiction of the Last Supper, Leonardo da Vinci showed all of those gathered with beards except for two. One of these is conventionally identified as the Apostle John, known to be younger than his fellows, and therefore, frequently shown as beardless, as was Apollo, the young one in an earlier holy group. On less distinct grounds, the other beardless man is thought to be the Apostle Philip. One would hope it is with tongue in cheek that some feminists now question those identifications, all of them male. They propose that one of the beardless figures is Mary Magdalene and the other, perhaps Martha.

In the Islamic tradition, God commanded Abraham to keep his beard. Accordingly, Muhammad encouraged the growing of beards. In recent times, only a minority of schools of Islamic Law regard beard wearing as compulsory, but all regard it as at least commendable.

Whether the man is Greek or Roman or Jew, his beard starts to grow when, during puberty, pre-existing hair follicles are stimulated by dihydrotestosterone, a derivative of the male hormone, testosterone. A particular follicle will produce hair for a fixed period, designated the anagen. The length a hair can reach depends on the duration of the anagen; since the hair is dead, its growth is not influenced by whether it is cut or not. The anagen of follicles on the arm, for example, will be a few weeks to three months. On the scalp or chin, it is two to six years. When the anagen is over, during a period called the catagen, no further length is added, but a clublike end is put on the base of the hair. After a few months of rest, the follicle pushes out the old hair and another anagen commences.

There are significant differences in the beards of men of different races with in general Caucasians with bigger beards than East Asians. What might be called the earliest Asian immigrants in the US, the so-called native Americans,” are essentially beardless.

Looking for a group within the Caucasian race with a genetic difference in beard length, one might look at the Lombards, the Germanic group which conquered northern Italy in the 6th century and who controlled most of Italy near the end of the seventh. Their name, Lombard, is indeed a latinization of “Longo bardi,” — long beard. I was disappointed to find that the there is no evidence that the anagen period of the chins of Lombard men was ever unusually long. Instead, the name comes from what is probably a fanciful tradition. As the story is told, when the ancestors of the Lombards were a very small tribe in Northern Europe they found themselves opposed by superior force. As they lined up to battle their foe, they were badly outnumbered by the attacking tribe. The order went out for the women to pull their long hair up over their faces and to stand next to their husbands This fooled the invaders and brought instant victory. The term, Lombardy, whatever its true derivation, remains the name of the northern part of Italy, where the descendents of the Germanic invaders remain to this day.

Psychological warfare is not a recent innovation. When those early German tribes were threatening Rome, the defenders tried to demonize their opponents by attributing atrocities to them. They alleged that before a young German man was allowed to wear a beard, he must personally kill a Roman. Whether that was accurate or mere slander, it is an example of the current customs by which the wearing or the shaving of a beard is governed by tests of manhood. In some groups, one can shave only after killing a deer. In others, shaving follows finishing hockey playoffs. A feature of the 250th birthday celebration of Great Barrington is a contest for the longest, bushiest, and most creative beards. After the judging, participants will have “…those follicles (sic) removed for free…” at Sim’s Barber Shop. For some men, unhappy about the trends of our society, the appeal of any customs involving beards is that they are among the last refuges that can’t be invaded by women

In Renaissance Europe, church hierarchies kept switching between requiring priests to be shaven and forbidding them to wear beards. Martin Luther wore a beard, and so young Reformist priests wore beards as marks of their positions. Across the Channel, Henry VIII wore a beard, and his archbishop, Henry Cranmer, honored Henry by growing a notable beard. His subsequent defiance of the catholic Mary I led to his being burned at the stake as a heretic in 1556. With the resumption of the Reformation, it was the bearded Catholic priests who perished on the stake.

In his 1949 book “Beards: Their social standing, religious involvements, decorative possibilities, and value in offense and defense through the ages,” Reginald Reynolds relates how in the 16th and 17th centuries there were constant fights within the church hierarchy as to whether the wearing of beards should be mandatory, or should be proscribed. The disputants were bitter in their partisanship, even though they could not have believed that either side had divine favor. The theologian Valerino Bolzai acknowledged that neutrality with his judgment that “God is not offended by hair,” In Italy some in the clerical community seems reluctant to let shaving be a personal or a parochial choice. In 1656, in Benevento, an Antibeard Party lost in its bid before the regional council for ecclesiastical enforcement of their position that priests must shave. In a show of good sense, that council held that the only theological limitation on facial hair was that mustaches must be sufficiently short as to avoid defiling the sacrament

Even though the switches in custom over the last millennium are dictates of fashion, not instructions from a deity. Following the local style could be an essential career move. Monarchs are accustomed to being flattered, and we know that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Thus when bare-chinned, eight-year old Louis XIII ascended the French throne in 1610, beards disappeared from court. Philip 5th of Spain, crowned in 1683, couldn’t grow a beard. So members of his court also displayed bare cheeks and chins.

Getting closer to our time we note that mid-19th century figures such as Nathaniel Hawthorne just had big mustaches, but by the end of that century the leading literary figures wore beards. Melville and Henry James and James Russell Lowell all sported beards. J. Willard Gibbs of Yale – the first American Ph.D. in engineering, father of chemical thermodynamics, is always pictured with a beard. The leaders in other fields at that time are also pictured with beards, Charles Darwin, Richard Wagner, Auguste Rodin, to name a few.

While numerous generals and civilian leaders wore beards in the early 19th century, our presidency has generally had fewer beards than business and political leaders of their eras. The New York Times recently showed an unfamiliar picture of Lincoln, taken in June 1860. One sees that he has not yet joined what was a nationwide swing to beards. A photograph from later that year shows him starting the beard which in 1861 marked the man we remember. There was a short run of presidential non-shavers, but that ended, with Benjamin Harrison being our last bearded president. After the terms of William Howard Taft, no facial hair at all has been worn in the White House.

For thousands of years, the means existed for men to be shaven if they wished. The metals used for razors followed the general advances of technology, with bronze replacing gold and iron replacing bronze. After the eruption of Vesuvius an 79 AD, pieces of glassy obsidian provided a sharper edge than the metal of the day. Obsidian knives were employed for ceremonial sacrifice by the pre-Columbian Meso-Americans

Eventually, there developed the open-bladed steel straight razor with folding handle, and the strop for the final sharpening This was the true classic design, the standard of excellence for centuries. In the OED, there is a citation for “strop: strip of leather or wood covered with leather for sharpening razors” dated 1702.

Some men found the idea of straight razors near their throats worrisome. They might have shaved themselves were it not for the fear of accidental suicide. In recognition of these potential users in the late 1800s several so-called safety razors were brought to market. In every case, the guard, which protected the throat, prevented the sharpening of the blade in place, making shaving a rather involved process. In 1898, the American team of William Nickerson and King Gillette patented a safety razor with easily changeable disposable blade. Gillette was at that time a very successful salesman for the Crown Cork and Seal Company. From that experience he knew it was possible to make a lot of money by supplying a large number of well-made small and simple objects. (These caps sealed 90 percent of the beer bottles we saw earlier this season). Gillette’s razor was introduced to the market in 1902 and immediately took a leading share of this growing field. Gilllette is usually, but undeservedly, regarded as the inventor of the business model in which the razor is sold at a loss and the profit comes from the sale of the blades. In its introduction, his razor sold for a very high price, five 1902 dollars. Later, to maintain share in the emerging market, he copied his competitors, who already had adopted the strategy usually referred to as ”giving away the razor.” (Currently there may be no better example of this business model than the pricing of computer scanner-printers. The price of two pairs of short-lived refills – color and black – exceeds the price of the printer, itself.)

At some point in the history of shaving there appeared a vital accessory product, the little white styptic pencil, to stanch the flow of blood from the inevitable nick or gouge. While I mention these little cuts in connection with straight razors, only with the advent of plastic injector cartridges was nicking entirely eliminated. Those without a styptic pencil stuck a bit of tissue paper on the bleeding spots, hoping to remember to remove them before the public day began.

Gillette had a flair for marketing, and he expanded the market of shavers. His picture was part of the trademark and appeared on every folder of blades. In 1910, after Theodore Roosevelt had left the presidency of the United States, with great fanfare, Gillette offered him the presidency of the Gillette corporation at a salary of one million dollars. Of course Roosevelt declined, but at very little cost, each party received desired publicity.

Throughout the western world, the first decades of the twentieth century saw change from one in which all men had beards to one in which almost all shaved (or were shaved) daily. The introduction of the safety razor must have helped, but there were other forces in the same direction. In World War I, many of the British inductees, rural laborers, most of whom were bearded, were found to be infested with head lice. The vital step in fighting these parasites was denying them shelter, which meant ridding the soldier of hair, both from his head and from his face. From then on, he had to shave. Among American draftees, infestations were not as severe, but sanitation still favored clean shaving. To this end, the army bought a Gillette shaving set for each inductee, and, of course, made every inductee a consumer of Gillette’s blades. The advent of gas warfare in World War I brought forth an issue somewhat parallel to that faced by Alexander’s Macedonian troops. Beards could interfere with the sealing of gas masks. On this basis the armies of many countries still require that in some branches, if not all, soldiers be clean-shaven. Concern about the fitting of emergency oxygen masks led to the world-wide prohibition of beards on airline pilots.

In the 1920s, beards became a rarity. The only bearded man that I can remember seeing in the flesh, except for the department store Santa, was an uncle, who stereotypically was an alienist. That trend continued through World War II, so that beard wearing in the United States fell to its all-time low by the 1950s. Teaching at Columbia at that time, I don’t remember any of the academic giants of the Philosophy or the English Departments following the example of the bearded philosophers of ancient Athens. Elsewhere, there were small numbers of beard-wearers, following the customs of their groups. An example are Amish men. Young bachelors must be clean shaven, but upon marrying, the Amish man grows a beard which he wears for the rest of his life. The leaders of the Eastern Orthodox church retained their beards. Some Catholic monastic orders continued, and still continue to wear beards, and as do orthodox Jews. But all these small groups together represent a small fraction of American men.

In the late 1960s, the trend reversed, and we started to see more beards. These new beards were not on the Melvilles of the day, but on young men who spurned conventional fashion. But, as we come up to the present, beards spread more and more widely in our society, and lately appear more on members of the Establishment than of the counterculture. The neatly dressed young Mormons who ring our doorbells did not abandon shaving, but members of a wide range of the professions have done so. In the past few days I’ve seen pictures of the following: David Wessel, Economics editor of the Wall Street Journal, Bruce Josten, Chief lobbyist of the US Chamber of Commerce, Randy Moss, wide receiver, Dr. C. Everett Koop, former Surgeon General, Benjamin Bernanke, Federal Reserve Chairman, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged terrorist .

Picking up on the story of razors, we find that although his company thrived, Gillette, himself, having been spectacularly extravagant, suffered ruinously in the great depression. When he died in 1932 he was almost bankrupt. From the very beginning, Gillette razors dominated the market around the world. But in 1960, their position was challenged by a competitor, Wilkinson Sword of Sheffield, England, who introduced a superior blade. It was of stainless steel. It was known that when a blade is used, it rendered the blade dull. The stainless alloy used by Wilkinson extended the life of the blade more than enough to justify its premium price. But after a brief dent in their market share, Gillette blades, now stainless, were again dominant.

The Gillette Company thrived, buying up competitors and other consumer-care businesses including Oral-B, Duracell, and Braun. The company was finally sold to Procter and Gamble for $57 billion in 2005 and the brand name Gillette is still strong.

The pairing of Gillette razors and Duracell dry cells matches the fact that the Wilkinson Sword Company, which sells its razors in the US under the Schick tradename, is now owned by Eveready Battery, the Energizer Company These groupings of product lines — razors and batteries — are evidence that in modern business, having common distribution channels is more important than, for example, having similar technological bases.

The American inventor Col. Jacob Schick introduced the first electric shaver in 1928, starting what is called in the trade “dry” shaving (the traditional use of razors being called “wet”). Dry shaving had a further lift when Remington Rand introduced an electric shaver in 1937. More recently, a third design, called a Rotary razor, was introduced by Philips Laboratories. Dry shaving changed where one shaved; it didn’t need to be to the bathroom. Then, with the introduction of rechargeable batteries, it was not even tied to the electric socket and so really set free. Driving in morning commuter traffic in Atlanta one sees almost equal numbers of men, telephoning, drinking caffeinated beverages, and shaving.

Reliable statistics on how American men treat their cheeks are hard to find. Any survey involving the internet is prone to distortion by a disproportionate participation by prepubescent boys. With that caveat, consider a recent report:

Wet shaving — 45 percent
Dry shaving — 17 percent
Not shaving — 38 percent

Another survey found that 75 percent of men shave daily. Of the nonshavers, 7 percent cite religious restrictions — presumably these include Orthodox Jews as well as Amish Christians. That survey found 64 percent wet shavers vs. 11 percent dry shaving. It should be noted that some of the newer electric razors are waterproof, leaving ambiguous whether the “wet” category includes electric shavers used with water.

If an anthropologist wanted to fix the date of construction of an American house of the 20th century, he could inspect the bathroom and note changes to accommodate differences in how we shaved. One clue would be the presence or absence of a slot in the back of the medicine cabinet for used razor blades. We used to poke our blades in there, only occasionally wondering about their ultimate fate. When it was no longer a simple blade that we discarded, but instead an injector, or an entire plastic-handled razor, the slot was too narrow to accommodate it, But, for that matter, those discards would not be pose the disposal problem as did a menacing bare blade. Next, the spread of electric razors spurred the installation of Ground-fault- detector electric plugs near the bathroom mirror

My recollections of my first professional haircuts, are of the wonderful barber chairs, and white-coated men wielding frightening straight razors bending over customers, whose faces were covered with thick foam, whipped up with a brush which had been in one of the elegant mugs from the shelves which covered the back wall of the shop. But that hedonistic luxury of being shaved by a barber has almost vanished from our lives. My barber in Lee shaves a few men each week. Generally, they are men physically unable to shave themselves, because of fractured limbs or severe palsy. Theirs is not the excellence achieved only with a straight razor; he uses a cheap plastic throw-away. In New York City one can still be shaved with the incomparable straight razor. The Metropolitan section of the Sunday Times of November 14 carried a feature entitled “A Straight Razor, a Warm Towel, a Fading Art.” It tells about The Hair Box, a storefront in Soho, which has housed a barber shop for over 100 years. There, old Italian men enjoy haircuts for $20, and shaves for $17. For a very different clientele the Style section a week later mentions that places like the “fancy pants” New York Shaving Company in NoLita, charge $25 to $40 for a straight razor hot shave.

For millennia, man had shaved with single blades. Very slight gains in closeness of shave can be demonstrated by two-blade assemblies at little additional cost. The second blade stretches the skin, pushing up the follicle as did the free hand of the user of a straight razor. But with the fraction of American men shaving having fallen so radically in the past 50 years, one might wonder why Gillette and Schick spend so much on developing flashier and flashier new razors, adding blade after blade for incremental, if detectable, improvement in actual performance? However, there is a rational explanation, viz. the evolution of the broadcasting of sports events on television. The audience for these broadcasts is well matched to shaving devices, and pictures of these products can be quite alluring. Verbal descriptions of a razor with – now — one more blade than the competitor’s couldn’t have stirred much interest in “play-by-play” but now men don’t give much thought to spending a dime or two more each day for fancier new razors. Were it not for playoffs and the World Series, we might never have had razors with more than two blades?

While it may not have been a widespread feeling, I believe that many of us would have worn beards in the past had we not faced a serious obstacle. That barrier was the awkward period between the stopping of shaving and the displaying of a recognizable beard. A recent development makes it possible to make that transition without at any point being out of style. In much earlier eras, aristocratic German youths sat for portraits wearing several days’ growth of beard – stubble. In the 60s, a stunt by some trend-setting American young men was to appear ostensibly unshaven, wearing one, or two, or three day’s growth of stubble. Third day growth, for example, is clearly perishable, but daily use of an electric clipper with suitable spacers permitted presenting the same – presumably transient — appearance day after day. American television viewers were introduced to stubble by a series called Miami Vice carried by NBC in the 1984 to 1989 seasons. Appropriately, the clipping equipment to maintain the stubble was called a Miami Device. (Recently, I saw one for sale in a local drugstore for $15). This practice was given impetus by publication of what was purported to be the results of a poll in the UK. It stated that women rated men with facial stubble as tough, mature, aggressive, dominant and masculine, and judged them as the best romantic partners either for a fling, or for a longtime relationship With endorsements like that, it is not surprising that the wearing of stubble spread around the globe like a porcine flu.

It is ironic to contrast the current glamorization of stubble with the attitude towards five-o’clock shadow in 1960. For the first televised debate, presidential candidate Richard Nixon spurned the use of makeup to cover his five-o’clock shadow. He lost badly and it is generally agreed that his appearance that night contributed significantly to that loss. And as for importance of the debate, we should note that in the general election Nixon received only 0.2 percent fewer votes than Kennedy.

Over the span of history, we’ve seen the fashion in beards swinging back and forth, even within the 140 years of our club. Were you to be required to make a prediction, would you expect such oscillations in style to continue through the next 140 years?

Phone by dawkeye, used under Creative Commons License.

Food for thought: The Beard-Child-Claiborne-Waters culinary revolution

2011-04-24T17:42:00.005-04:00

Presented to the Club by Ronald Trabulsi on Monday evening, April 11, 2011

In the last 50 years there has been a revolution in this country. It has been non-violent, but certainly exciting, spirited, and dramatic. It has affected each of us in either major or minor ways, but no one has been immune.

I’m talking about the change in America’s food and eating habits.

Fast food is one branch of this upheaval. But the other direction – and one more interesting to me – has been the enormous increase in the variety of food we now take for granted. An orange in your Christmas stocking (perhaps along with a lump of coal if you had been involved in some misdeeds) was a treat – now we have grapefruit and oranges year round. Salsa and sushi were unknown. Now salsa has surpassed ketchup as America’s most popular condiment and sushi is even in Pittsfield, Lenox, and Great Barrington.

Butter used to be, well, just butter. Now it comes in a variety of butterfat contents. And one writer describes being at a salt tasting, of all things. “The waiter, like some particularly elegant cocaine dealer, gently spooned nine mini-mounds onto a little board, each salt a different hue and consistency from the next – one as fine and white as baking powder, another dark and chunkily crystalline.” This is a long way from the all-purpose Morton’s Salt we grew up with.

It is, in short, a great time to be an eater. And how often do we get to say something as unreservedly upbeat as that? We often complain that things aren’t as good as they used to be: movies, music, baseball, political talk – but food is one area of American life where things just continue to improve.

If we’re cooking at home, we have a greater breadth and higher quality of ingredients available to us. If we’re eating out, we have more options open to us.

How did we get to this point? We learned there is more to the restaurant world than Schrafft’s or Howard Johnson’s and food became part of our popular culture – with even its own TV channel.

The consensus seems to be that it began with James Beard who developed a successful catering company in New York called Hors d’Oeuvres, Inc., starting in 1939. His mother, who ran a boarding house in Portland, Oregon, was a superb cook and he learned from her. He came to New York wanting to be an actor in the theater, but had no success. He did, however, have a highly cultivated palate and was a great charmer of the people he often cooked dinner for and who were able to give him and his catering business significant publicity.

The success of his catering company led to a series of cooking book contracts. Along with the recipes – and probably more important – he defended throughout his books the pleasures of real cooking and fresh ingredients. He wrote a lot about outdoor grilling at home and that men could legitimately be involved in home cooking. His writing was appealing and his considerable girth made him non-threatening to the home-based, non-professional cook.

To Beard, cooking and eating comprised a fulfilling cultural pastime, to be pursued as ardently as golf, opera, or any other activity that aroused one’s passions. His enthusiasm was contagious and he was read widely.

At the same time in New York the 1939 World’s Fair along with World War Two led to several notable French chefs arriving ultimately to open a remarkable group of top-tier classic French restaurants. Le Pavillion, the Colony, Le Cirque, La Caravelle, to name a few, based on 18^th Century French traditional recipes and techniques to some degree interpreted by Escoffier in Paris and London. Another was the Brussels where some 60 years ago a very indulgent bachelor uncle of mine and his long-legged very glamorous to me lady friend introduced me to smoked eel. To this day I still enjoy it when I can find it. I courted Ann while I was living in a Brooklyn Heights brownstone and we frequented a French bistro on Third Avenue in Manhattan where the order of the day was piles of sautéed frog’s legs and match-thin French fries along with a bottle of wine. Each of these restaurants generated others as employees trained at these left to open their own establishments.

Post-war America, partly because of GI’s coming back from Europe, considered classic French cooking to be the highest form of culinary art. Chuck Williams, the founder of the kitchenware store Williams-Sonoma, writes as he completed his Air Force service and built himself a house in the then undiscovered hinterland of Sonoma, California, that "The magic that France had at the time was felt by so many of us. It was roaming on the side streets of Paris and eating in the small mom-and-pop restaurants. It was the haunting music and songs sung by Edith Piaf that I heard everywhere. It was the wonderful pastry and chocolate shops in every block, the butcher shops, the crepe and waffle stands, the standup bars where you stopped for an espresso, a café au lait, or a cognac. I wanted to capture the magic of Paris in my shop and make it completely French."

Also enthusiastic about all things French was a young, 6-foot, 2-inch, Smith College graduate from Pasadena, California, named Julia McWilliams. She spent the war years working for the OSS (Office of Strategic Services — the predecessor of the CIA) in Washington and then in India on a tea plantation the OSS had commandeered as its base of operations from which to plot attacks on the Japanese. It was there that she met Paul Child a cartographer for the OSS.

Child was a good six inches shorter than she, but he loved to cook and dine out and was very knowledgeable about cooking. Eventually they were assigned to Kunming in China where Julia became interested in food and the various Chinese cuisines.

Back in the United States the couple was married in 1946 and soon left for Paris where Paul Child worked for the State Department implementing the Marshall Plan. During the decade they were in France, Julia set about learning all things French which eventually included enrollment at the famed Cordon Bleu cooking school. Her teacher had apprenticed under Escoffier himself. At night she often cooked for dinner the dishes the class had made that day.

Meanwhile, back in New York, a young man, and the third member of our founding trio, named Craig Claiborne – also with a mother who ran a boarding house and cooked extraordinarily well – arrived fresh from a stint at a Swiss hotel school. By luck he got himself a short-lived job writing for Gourmet magazine which turned out to be mostly useful for the people he met and the connections he made. One of these led him to an interview at The New York Times which was looking for a food editor but had always had a woman in the position. It had apparently not occurred to the Times that a man could do the job.

He was eventually hired and began a twenty-year association with the paper that was destined to change America’s food culture. He started at a time when post-war Americans were ready to improve their kitchens and cooking. They were ready to go beyond food as “maintenance” and explore new ideas. GI’s brought back familiarity with ethnic cooking as well as French Cuisine. And Claiborne was ready to lead the way by treating food as more than just recipes. It was a journalistic responsibility to discover what was going on in America’s more creative kitchens. He wrote about home cooks as well as professionals. He introduced the idea of restaurant reviews that could make or break a place.

The food world reaction was one of awe. Here was a man writing about food and cooking with the same intellect and rigor that the Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson wrote about Eugene O’Neill and Samuel Beckett.

An interesting side note is that in 1961 when Claiborne wanted to do a cookbook using the Times name, the paper thought a cookbook would be so minor that Claiborne was given the rights to use the Times name with no obligation. The New York Times Cookbook became a best seller and sold more than three million copies.

Going back to Julia Child, who we left in Paris at the Cordon Bleu, her next adventure was to open a cooking school in Paris to educate Americans, who were wealthy wives brought abroad by their husbands’ jobs in business or government, about French cooking. Along with running the school with two French collaborators, the idea of a cookbook for Americans emerged.

This became Mastering the Art of French Cooking after a decade of recipe testing and adapting French measurements, methods, and ingredients to the American kitchen.

The success of the book lies in both its multi-year meticulous preparation and Child’s charismatic publicizing of it. There is probably no other cookbook in American history that better combines breadth, thoroughness of explanation, culinary authenticity, distinctive authoritarian voice, and reliability. Whereas Escoffier’s book assumed the reader knew the fundamentals of French cookery, Julia assumed the cook knew nothing. The recipe for a basic omelet runs seven pages and has six illustrations.

Alfred Knopf published the book in 1961. By this time Julia and her husband had returned to the United States and settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Shortly after the book was published Craig Claiborne gave it a rave review in the Times calling it the most comprehensive, laudable, and monumental work on French cooking and predicting it would endure as the definitive work for non-professionals. James Beard gave the book his blessing and he and Child became great friends. Julia often was a guest instructor at Beard’s school which was at his town house in Manhattan. Beard was often a guest at the Childs’ getaway home in Provence, spending entire days in the kitchen with Julia.

Mastering the Art of French Cooking went through five printings. Its publication coincided with Jacqueline Kennedy’s time in the White House and her hiring of a French chef by the name of Rene Verdon. The Times, now the lifestyle manual of culturally correct postwar upper middlebrows, played Verdon’s hiring on page one with a article by Claiborne that described Verdon’s first official assignment, a luncheon for the British prime minister Harold Macmillan, that included trout cooked in Chablis, fillet of roast beef au jus, and artichoke bottoms Beaucaire – filled with a fondue of tomatoes simmered in butter. French food was now fashionable – and to some extent competitive because now you could really astonish your dinner party guests.

Kitchenware suddenly attained the status of fetish objects in certain American circles. You just had to have a Le Creuset casserole dish and a crepe pan the size of a manhole cover. Williams-Sonoma was now “the source” and was located in the heart of San Francisco.

To add to the excitement, WGBH TV station in Boston started “The French Chef” cooking show starring, who else, Julia Child. For the better part of ten years she was a cooking instructor to America and quickly became the most popular attraction on WGBH. The show was picked up by public television stations throughout the country.

So while Craig Claiborne was dominating the print media with his New York Times columns reviewing restaurants and providing his readers with recipes for such dishes Spanish paella and other ethnic foods, Julia was the television personality keeping America’s cooks (and eaters) focused on whatever was this week’s recipe. She criss-crossed the country for book signings and cooking demonstrations.

But it rapidly became apparent, as attention to food increases, that the quality of American ingredients was sadly deficient.

We had only parsley, no chives, said one French chef. He also pointed out the experience of needing special mushrooms and having them arrive in cans from Germany instead of fresh. It turned out they were grown in Oregon and because there seemed to be no market in the states for them, they were shipped to Germany for canning and then sent back to the U.S. when ordered. By this time they barely resembled the original. So professional chefs were frustrated.

Home cooks were becoming totally dependent on the large supermarket chains that were springing up – particularly in the suburbs, aided by the increase in car ownership, the advances in refrigeration, and even the introduction of the shopping cart. The old butcher, baker, or greengrocer shops were becoming obsolete.

One food columnist wrote that she found her local Grand Union supermarket to be at once disturbingly alien while also marvelously convenient. The pre-butchered chicken parts in cellophane-sheathed white Styrofoam containers, she wrote, arranged in refrigerator cases and illuminated by florescent lights were something out of a science-fiction movie. The chicken pieces lying there were dead in their little coffins. Bread, it was noted, looked and tasted like facial tissue.

By the early seventies out on the West Coast, a group of culinary-minded young radicals had gotten mad as hell about the supermarket state, and they decided they were not going to take it any more.

Many of them had come together on the Berkeley campus of the University of California and had been the prime movers of the radical Free Speech Movement that demonstrated and for a while took over the Berkeley campus in the 1960’s. Gradually their counter-culture philosophy came to include a serious disagreement with the giant agricultural businesses and supermarkets that were determining the American diet. There came to be a feeling that just because you were a revolutionary didn’t mean your idea of a good meal should be Chef Boyardee ravioli reheated in a dog dish – as Alice Waters who went on to fame as the owner of the exemplary Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley put it.

She and others encouraged small providers (what we now see as “organic” growers) and co-operative grocery stores throughout the California Bay area. Farmers’ markets, brimming with fresh, local produce became regular fixtures. Interestingly, this winter on Sanibel Island off Fort Myers in the Gulf of Mexico, there was a weekly farmers’ market for the first time. Sanibel has always been deprived of fresh produce, which is silly considering all the agriculture nearby. But it was only this year that the Food Revolution arrived and incidentally included wonderful fresh greens that we don’t get here and marvelous fresh Gulf shrimp that were never frozen. It has been said that the fresh food movement was perhaps the Berkeley counter-cultural movement’s greatest and most lasting triumph.

The emphasis on high quality ingredients spread rapidly throughout the country.

The Spartan, traditional health foods stores were supplemented by colorful, bountiful markets with organically grown produce and fresh baked goods. Whole Foods market became a national chain. The ranks of specialty coffee companies grew, such as Starbucks, which started in Washington. Coffee and activism were a good fit; most coffee beans came from Third World countries where poverty and human-rights violations were problems, and many specialty coffee drinkers were college students who were eager to be politically engaged.

But it wasn’t just the politically conscious, back-to-mother earth foodies who discovered the power of upscale, high quality food, it was also the next generation Italian grocers and Jewish delicatessen men who saw a world beyond the small markets of their fathers. Balducci’s, Zabar’s, and DeLuca’s in New York are examples. They set out to re-educate the American palate. The stores became destinations for specialty foods. Guido’s here in the Berkshires is part of the same trend.

The food revolution is here and it is continuing. We can watch Price Chopper supermarket on Route 7 and Guido’s virtually next door expanding to go head to head to capture not only the shopper’s dollar but also his or her participation in this new world of food.

"Nothing intelligent to say...": Servants and slaves in southern New England; the initial years for natives and settlers

2011-02-08T21:38:00.002-05:00

Presented to the Club on Monday evening, January 23, 2011 by Robert G. Anderson

Last fall I began to search for material about slavery in 17th century southern New England with the hope that I would have something intelligent to say for my first endeavor as “reader.” No surprise, there is a richness, complexity and darkness to the history of natives and settlers, as differing peoples began to mix it up in this territory. I will describe some key events from 1620 to 1640, an incomplete narrative, after taking a look at the respective cultures that clashed once English settlers began to arrive on native land. My enigmatic title is part of a quote from the novelist Kurt Vonnegut which I will explain later.

I hope to explore how English settlers got here, how servitude evolved and slavery took hold as a significant economic, social and security development. The sources I found are almost exclusively based upon accounts of colonist history by colonists and accounts of native activity by colonists. Archeology has provided limited data regarding the lives of natives in the early 1600s. What we mostly have is one side of the story.

I. Backdrop of the Clash of Peoples

As far back as 7,000 years ago peoples inhabited our four season region of woodland, mountains and coastland. The migrating Algonquin people arrived 2,000 to 3,000 years ago, divided into nations, living a life of hunting, fishing, gathering and seasonal crop farming, with clustered villages along the coast in the warm months and inland by other waters during the coldest, following game. They lived in circular thatched dwellings easily moved with the seasons or in more permanent longhouses.

By the early 1600’s there were six Algonquin peoples residing in the region, each with populations of 10,000 to 20,000, a common language and distinguishing dialects and habits. They were traders and gifted in negotiation and diplomacy as a shifting balance of power forged alliances between them in the face of disputes and aggression. Each of the peoples was led by a sachem or pow-wow, a male head who was priest, medicine man and chief. Conflicts between native peoples might lead to violent skirmishes or raids, often resolved through diplomacy and concession. Slaves were a benefit of a war victory, traded as a commodity or often incorporated with standing into village life. There was no servant class per se, although women attended to the activities and burdens of family and village life.

Families were comprised of a man and a woman with children living in a round house that would include other families and generations, especially in the cold months. Women tended to home based work, child care and planting while men were hunters and warriors. The environment was revered and studied, viewed as alive with lessons, trusted for providing necessities. Deer, turkey, geese, fish, shell fish and berries were abundant. Fields and open spaces were burned off twice yearly to stifle growth and enhance crops, while swamps with thick forests, inhabited by the plenteous beaver served as refuge from danger.

We know much more about Elizabethan England in the early 1600s, estate, farm and village based. Nobility ruled as the landed aristocracy. A rising gentry sought to find fortune and land, fed by the economy of trade that began to reach to other shores. Working on the estates were yeomen, farmers who with good fortune were issued, loaned or sold modest plots of land for farms and herds. When the harvest was abundant, villages bustled with craftsmen, artisans and merchants.

A large servant class was estate based and included the unskilled, those bonded to service for stated years, a documented contract between parties. Children of the poor were often given over to the owners of estates, farms or shops to learn a trade or to creditors. Indentured servants, age 15 and over, could be bonded for seven years or more to work off a debt, for a minor crime, or for passage to other shores.
New settlements in Ireland, called plantations, as the migrants were known as planters, were founded beginning in the 1500s amidst natives viewed as heathen and uncivilized. There was opportunity, land and resources on the horizon.

During this volatile religious and political time under Charles I, separatists coalesced in many villages in search of freedom from the newly formed Church of England and rallied by a communal ideal based upon Christian scripture. Led by pious gentry, separatist communities met in homes, comprised of the families of artisans and yeomen of modest means. They sought to return to the purity of the early church, with no papist hierarchy and ritual. After being derided as puritans, they began to embrace the label. They viewed themselves as chosen by God to found a new Israel, a purified community where they would have the freedom from the influence of others. They were ready to venture as pilgrims to seek out a new land, where they might settle and prosper.

II. The Journey of Separatists

Such a community had developed by 1600 in the inland town of Scooby, half way between bustling London and the border with Scotland. “Come out from among them and be ye separate saith the Lord and touch not the unclean thing” (Christian Scripture II Cor. 6:17) was the holy covenant for the some 300 faithful who gathered under the leadership of John Robinson and the younger William Bradford. As self proclaimed “saincts” they separated themselves from and increasingly defied Anglican doctrine and bishop and congregated independently, centered on their hearing and learning from the authority of Holy Scripture. Any outside their circle were known as “strangers.”

Isolation in matters of faith brought day to day social and economic strife and hardship. After a few years of intense scrutiny and growing persecution, the Scooby community resolved in 1611 to migrate to Leyden and the tolerant Netherlands across the North Sea (Club member Al Easton provided us with a valuable description last year). They claimed to be pilgrims but the capital P did not appear until the 19th century as a primary designation.

During the 10-year sojourn in Leyden under John Robinson’s compassionate and wise leadership, the community struggled to adjust to the seduction of a more tolerant culture, the younger generation less willing to remain separate. Longing led to resolve to relocate to a distant shore where they might live untainted by strangers. Plans were made by wealthy members to venture to a new Dutch colony across the seas, an “unpeopled” land. Contracts were signed with a Dutch trading company and merchants to secure the Mayflower and the smaller Speedwell to depart in the spring of 1620, to transport some 120 members. By the early summer supplies had not been secured by the merchants, deposits had disappeared and the separatists could only pay for half of the passage leading to just as many non-separatist strangers signing on.

The Speedwell proved to be unseaworthy so those passengers were taken into the Mayflower, already a miserable arrangement with insufficient food, beer and supplies, doubled up quarters and a late start for a three month westerly sail into frightening gale force winds. There was hardly enough provisions, most was consumed before the trip was half over, starvation, disease and death was rampant. The Mayflower Compact was written in this desperate situation, to band together against foreboding elements, as separatists and non-separatists, “into a civil body politic. . . to enact, constitute and frame. . . just and equal laws. . . for the general good of the colony.” In exasperating hours better nature prevailed and groundwork was set among the adventurers for civil consent to be instituted.

Upon sighting land in late November, still short of their destination of New Amsterdam, they scouted for the best locale in the arm of an extended cape and settled amidst ice and snow to a formerly inhabited clearing near a swamp. They learned later that this opportune spot had been abandoned by natives just a year before, due to an epidemic which had killed most of the Pokanoket peoples who lived there. “A virgin soil plague”, likely smallpox or influenza, had been transmitted by European traders. No sachem had the power to stave off the disease which killed over 90 percent of the native settlement. When the migrants learned of the plague they attributed it to God’s preparing the way for their welfare at the site they named Plymouth Plantation, after the port of their departure. From its inception it was an armed fortress and every settler carried a weapon.

III. Clash of Peoples and Cultures

There were primarily six nations among the eastern Algonquin peoples who shared a common language: the Pokanoket (later Wampanoags), Massachusett, Naragansett, Pequot, Nipmuc and Mohegan. The more western Naragansett and Mohegan nations had evaded the rampage of recent epidemics. They were professing new might and strength from gods that had spared them, leaving their weakened neighbors fearful of aggression. Skirmishes between warriors, kidnappings and the enslavement of captured neighbors resulted from border hostility but the preference was diplomacy, negotiated concessions and treaties to resolve disputes and solidify peace, always culminated with extensive ceremonies.

European traders were known to the native peoples for over 15 years prior to the first English settlement. Provisions, beaver and animal pelts were traded for metal tools, weapons and pots. In 1614, the abduction by Thomas Hunt and crew of 27 warriors who came on his ship with gifts to trade quickly spread as a hateful tale about the men with firing weapons who travelled in big ships. Hunt’s captives were either sold into slavery to the Spanish or taken against their will to England as evidence of the new mysterious land. The notorious Hunt kidnappings led the following year, 1615, to natives reciprocating by capturing a group of unsuspecting French traders, killing most and trading three into slavery. One native, Squanto, brought to England in servitude by Hunt was taught English and remarkably returned with traders in early 1621 to become a trusted translator and diplomatic courier. His subsequent efforts to undercut Massasoit, the Pokanoket sachem in tribal negotiations with the pilgrims led to his poisoning and death.

Natives who observed the appearance of the Mayflower kept their distance for months, fearing abduction or death. The presence of women and children and efforts to build strange wooden homes in clusters led natives to reconsider. Why would they settle at the site of horrifying sickness, death and sorrow? Were their gods fearless? The migrants, meanwhile, hungrily dug up caches of stored native corn which did not trouble the observers since they had no sense of personal property. The Pokanokets were willing to share what they had to demonstrate goodwill. Massasoit, a sophisticated diplomat, weakened by the loss of most of his warriors to the epidemic, set to watch and wait. The new migrants fearfully knew they were being observed from a distance.

In March 1621, Squanto was sent to propose a meeting and hostages were exchanged leading to a face to face conference between Massasoit and the pilgrim’s Governor John Carver accompanied by William Bradford. They exchanged gifts and a libation and offered friendship. Massasoit upon drinking the aqua vit broke out in a cold sweat. Tensions were high but an agreement with six points was reached that day. Parties resolved not to injure or hurt each other, to send any offender for punishment, to restore tools, to aid each other in the event “any did unjustly war” against one of them, to deliver confederates, and to leave their weapons behind when visiting. In his nation’s weakened state Massasoit had found a new ally. When pilgrims carried their muskets to a follow up ceremony even as the natives laid down their bows, Massasoit’s brother called them to respect the treaty. Firearms were then set aside, the treaty tested in its first hours.

Other native peoples were wary of the new settlers and allied to watch developments. In 1623, when Massasoit became deathly ill with typhus and was reported to have already died, Edward Winslow volunteered to visit the village to pay respects, finding Massasoit still alive and petitioning for medicine to restore his health. Winslow cooked up a pottage and Massasoit remarkably improved and the alliance was saved. A civil and diplomatic approach with natives continued to calm the waters and Winslow’s ability was lauded.

A new settlement at Wassagusett, north of Plymouth, was a disaster of poor planning and starvation. The village’s intrusion had provoked the Massachusett tribe, English hostages were being held and a rumor arose that natives were mobilizing against all English settlers to wipe them out. Massasoit warned of the danger and advised an attack before hand, seemingly a way to diminish his neighboring enemies who had taken advantage of his people’s weakened state. The settlers, with no reliable intelligence of their own, agreed to attack.

Miles Standish, the colony’s military leader, led an armed party to Wassagusett in 1623 and was told by the settlers that though the situation was dire, the natives had in no way been threatening. Some settlers were even living in round houses with the native Massachusett. Challenged face to face in a meeting over a meal, Standish attacked two native emissaries and killed seven warriors who had come with them. This provocative incident, fed by rumor, became known as the Wassagusett massacre, the first military incident in the clash of cultures. Massachusett natives fled to the west, taking their stories to Mohegan territory. Conflict developed among Plymouth settlers about the use of military means. Word spread among the native peoples that murder and massacre could be expected; if you were not an ally you were an enemy. In the face of their intruders, native peoples came to refer to themselves as “original people” or ‘true people.” In Leyden, John Robinson, the Scooby community founder, was quite troubled when informed of the violent actions against natives.

IV. Various Migrations

Back in England, after almost a decade of heightened civil unrest and persecution of those opposed to the authority of the English throne and church, a significantly larger and more prosperous band of puritan believers crossed the sea in 1629 to the new found land of promise. A royal charter as the Massachusetts Bay Company had been secured and a fleet of 11 ships with 1,000 migrants, hundreds of livestock and chickens, departed from England led by John Winthrop in the ship Arabella, landing in summer to what would become Boston harbor. During the 1630s over 20,000 migrants would follow to the eastern shore of the colony, fanning out to enclaves in the circle of the harbor and to outposts beyond the eastern plains to inlets and along a steady river running north to south to a large sound. The 1630s became known as the decade of the great migration, the first land stampede of our history. Plymouth plantation with its tiny harbor became a backwater, little more than 300 as thousands of new arrivals reached these shores. By 1638 settlers outnumbered natives.

Various forms of servitude in colonial New England stemmed from the culture and mores of both natives and settlers. Neither were slaving societies that relied upon mass labor for military, agriculture or public works. As noted, natives had slaves primarily as the benefit of a war victory, often incorporating those captured into their family units, especially women and children. Men who were slaves might also be given standing after some years of demonstrated trustworthiness and hard work.

The settlers brought with them lifelong servants as well as bonded servants in a contractual form of servitude. Slavery in the new settlements, as a justified form of property, grew out of political, social and economic developments, first as a result of outright war and then by colonial laws and judicial edicts. Later in the century slavery would become a major commodity in trans-Atlantic trade between England, the Americas and Africa. While the English settlers came with reliance upon a white servitude class, they readily accepted both servants and slaves of other races primarily for household labor in the new land. Settlers looked upon natives, marked by racial difference, as uncivilized savages living in an untamed wilderness who held heathen and magical beliefs. They would benefit as a servile class by civilizing Christian benefactors.

The constant flow and migration inland of settlers in the 1630s brought curiosity, wariness, consternation and fury within and among the native peoples of the area. Natives learned about the baffling notion of land ownership and sachems negotiated sales with eager settlers, at first for a few household items of trade and later for firearms and clothing, with little understanding of land value. Efforts by natives to stave off and concede to new arrivals did not stem the tide. The elders of the Bay and Plymouth colonies encouraged ( and evicted) newly arriving non-separatist strangers to move on to settlements west and south, leading to direct contact with all nations by the late 1630s. Recognition of the distinguishing characteristics between native peoples was evident but skin color was the defining reality. Natives were outsiders. Courts and laws began to define forms of social control and privileges in land purchases.

V. Violent Clashes and Slavery

The Pequot War of 1637 was the major development in the acceptance of slavery. Trade by the Bay Colony was extending to Dutch and other English colonies to the south and west. Clashes by new settlements in the west along the Connecticut River with native peoples included disputes over property and hunting rights, destruction of native crops by settler livestock, selling of alcohol and dishonest traders. In 1634, scores of the Pequot people, inhabiting what is now eastern Connecticut, died in a smallpox epidemic. The election of a new sachem led to a split with the Mohegans who then quickly allied with English settlers. Weakened to half their numbers, the Pequots felt cornered. A trader and founder of Wethersfield, John Oldham was killed in July of 1636, a killing attributed to Pequot natives and settlers called for punishment.

As tensions and rumors increased on the expanding frontiers, the role of separatist Roger Williams is valuable for our discussion (Harold Salzman in his recent Club paper cited Williams’ crucial role in fostering religious freedom). Expelled from the Bay Colony in 1636 for his heretical pronouncements, Williams ventured south with his followers to land purchased from Massasoit, adjacent to the land of the Pequots and Narragansetts. He had privately professed the necessity of what he referred to as “friendship” with natives as well as “civility and courtesy” since in his eyes they were not heathen. Williams was learning their language and seeking to understand their way of life and point of view. When it came to land issues, he claimed that they were more Christian than many settlers. Soon after his expulsion, however, he was petitioned by Bay Colony leaders to mediate their competing claims with natives, to seek an alliance with the Naragansetts and to convince the Pequots to lay down their arms, to cease raids and the taking of prisoners. The Pequots refused Williams’ offer of negotiated peace but the Naragansetts agreed to the alliance with the English, creating another significant division between the native peoples.

When the captains of several trading vessels were killed by natives in spring 1637, a united military party of the various settlements was sent south along the coast to attack the isolated Pequot tribe. Once again unconfirmed reports and rumors were fed by fear of the wilderness.

Coming upon the main Pequot settlement and fortress in May of 1637 near what is now Mystic, Connecticut, the united troops of the colonies, together with native allies, attacked and set them ablaze, shooting men, women and children who attempted to flee. At the end of the day over 500 Pequot natives had been massacred. Upon hearing the news Bradford wrote, “It was a fearful sight to see them frying in the fire… and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the praise thereof to God.”

Nothing intelligent can be said about a massacre. Settlers came to regard these actions not only as collateral to a just war but as a final way to solve the threat of the enemy.

The Pequot War brought new precedents. Justification about what to do with captives was acted on by the governing Bay colony court, namely as property to be sold into slavery for war expenses. Over 180 surviving women and children were sold within the colony and 124 men were sold and shipped out to Bermuda and the West Indies, lest they rise up and attack settlers. The surviving Pequot, some 2,000 in number, fled west and sought refuge with the Mohegan peoples though they were allies with the English. A fear of natives on the widening English frontier grew. Decades later courts were still ruling on runaway servants, now adults, bonded from the Pequot War.

With the onset of war, slavery became justified as a permanent and perpetual form of servitude. No contract or form of indenture was needed. Judicial edict began to solidify special colonial laws, joining Negroes and Indians as a different class, as property, deeded or otherwise. Such became an essential preface to the role of New England traders in the enslavement and transport of Africans to these shores. The civil contract was first and foremost for the settlers.

More extensive atrocities of war took place in the second generation, King William’s War in 1675-1676, pitting settlers with their native allies against other native peoples, losses by both sides in the thousands, the destruction of countless settler towns and a tragic diaspora of natives from our area. The prevailing rules of engagement had been set in the war of the first generation, the Pequot War. If we see our region’s heritage as the clash of peoples, one could surmise that our first civil war began within years of the settler’s arrival to these shores, more pointedly a series of wars and genocidal retaliations, which along with slavery has been lost in a darkened corner of our common history.

VI. Concluding Remarks

Historians have described three basic motives of European zeal to colonize the Americas in these early years: elements of fame, fortune and faith. Our English ancestors, separatists and non-separatists, were driven by a combination of destiny and righteousness, based on a covenant with God and a search for prosperity. What it meant to be a civil people, to provide for welfare in the face of an unnumbered enemy, to shape the common good, a commonwealth was being forged. We find formulations about just war, justified military action and the killing of civilians taking hold from the onset. Property rights came long before human rights in this civil contract.

One cultural historian described this period not as “good pilgrims and savage natives or dastardly pilgrims and innocent natives.” In the first decades of English arrival to our region migrants and natives could not peacefully live in the same territory due to divergent world views and ways of living, especially when an imbalance of populations and civil power increased.

Settlers had come with a quest to subdue an uninhabited wilderness. As colonies took root, a racial bias against darker skinned and uncivilized native peoples emerged. In the second generation, settlers founded what came to be known as praying towns where agreeable natives were clothed, their hair cut, a trade and domestic life taught as well as the ability to read and converse in English. They were to be civilized with the hopes that they would convert to and be matured in the Christian faith. The yoke of Christ was cited as a civilizing and humbling form of servant hood and social control.

In 1629, the Massachusett Bay Colony adopted a seal for the charter granted by King Charles I. Around the circumference were Latin words stating the “seal of the Society of Massachusetts Bay in New England.” The center depicts a native, clothed with leaves for a loin cloth holding a bow in the left hand and an arrow pointed downward in his right, depicting a gesture of peace. He stands on the land, two tiny pine trees to either side. The trail from his mouth read “Come over and help us.” The intent of the seal was to underscore the religious and economic benefits of colonization of the natives and land which the settlers were civilizing and creating into a commonwealth. Until recently this represents the prevailing interpretation of our history. The words stem from Christian scripture (Acts 16:9), where the Apostle Paul entreats missionaries to come over to Macedonia, crossing from what would be known as Asia Minor to Europe, to bring words of deliverance. The seal and subsequent revisions depict a native offering peace and seeking aid from the commonwealth.

In Slaughter House Five, Kurt Vonnegut, a US Army prisoner of war, recounts his survival of the bombing of Dresden in World War II and his effort to make sense of a world where massacres, on whatever scale, continue to occur. He exclaims to Sam, the publisher offering him the contract for his book, “there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.” The passionate impulse or strategy to finish off the enemy, to wipe them out, is a feature of war. All that might be said finally is that such an impulse and strategy is part of our earliest history, a legacy to be held in the light of day.

Yes! They built them here: Rolls Royce manufacturing in Springfield, Massachusetts

2010-11-24T19:04:00.003-05:00

Logo on a Springfield Rolls

Prologue

Had you just returned from The Great War, say around 1919 or so, you would have noticed that the Wilson Administration’s haphazard efforts to rev up the economy to absorb the many doughboys being mustered out were having a negligible effect. The economic first fruits of what eventually would be called “The Roaring 20s” were still far from ripe, and the sons of America’s great burgeoning middle class were coming home from Europe to marry their sweethearts and to have kids.

The members of their parents’ generation, born in the late 1870s and early 1880s, who may have served in the Spanish-American War, who suffered economic deprivation in the depression years of the “Gay ‘90s,” and who marveled at the American “Can Do” spirit that constructed the Panama Canal, did well during The Great War. A great many companies, formed during the darker economic days of the late 19th Century, expanded and profited in the early 20th Century. They were buoyed by the groundswell of trust-busting and prosperity that characterized the “Oughts” and the “Teens.”

The doughboys returned to jobs as farmers, factory workers, clerks, salesmen, and accountants. Some had money in their pockets…but all were suffering from two to three years of pent-up demand. One savvy engineer in Detroit, a chap named Henry Ford, figured out how to meet that demand. He devised a way to produce a four wheeled, self-propelled vehicle called a Model T, on a scale so efficient that the end product — a transportation appliance, if you will — started out being sold in 1907 at $850, but could be sold in the early 1920s for the princely sum of $290.
But if you were a member of the elder generation and fortunate enough to be of the ownership class, you were prepared to spend a great deal more on an automobile. You could afford the best…and you knew that the name of “the best” started with a “P.” You would choose either a Packard from Detroit, or a Peerless from Cleveland, or a Pierce Arrow from Buffalo. These were cars of the highest quality in both their design and their construction. Typically they cost somewhere between five and seven thousand dollars, depending upon the configuration of the car you ordered from the manufacturer.

But, if you were among the truly elect, let’s say from the class of American wealth who’d built the cottages of the Berkshires or Newport, those whose net worth was the envy of the world, you didn’t buy an automobile that started with the letter “P.” Between 1921 and 1931, you could buy an American automobile with a double name, both of which began with an “R,” because Yes! They built them here.

Act One: Satan’s Kingdom, November 1977

I have always had a passion for walking in the woods. Not hunting, not fishing, not camping — simply walking. I become lost in my thoughts or I spend time noticing little details of what’s bloomed along the path I’m following. I find it soothing, as if trees themselves are absorbing whatever’s troubling me at the moment. I always come out of the woods feeling at peace.

It was on a Sunday afternoon during November 1977 that I was on just such a walk in the woods neighboring the Farmington River in New Hartford, Connecticut, the eastern-most town in Litchfield County. I was passing through conservation land in a section of town known as “Satan’s Kingdom.” I don’t know the derivation of the name; but if you were to stop at the post office in New Hartford to ask for “Satan’s Kingdom,” they’d direct you eastward through the hamlet of Pine Meadow, past the old Waring Blender factory, about a mile or two from the Canton town line.

It was a gray afternoon; pure November. The sky was pewter, the leaves had fallen from the trees and blanketed the floor of the forest, and a myriad of gray trunks lined the rutted dirt road I was walking along. The breeze had a nip in it and would carry a leaf or two in a swirl around my head. But I was too busy to notice, choosing instead to mind my footfalls, making sure I wouldn’t trip on the frozen jeep tracks that had hardened in the road, leftovers from a late October rain.

There were no birds to sing in the treetops; they were long gone. All you could hear was the rattling of oak leaves clinging to the branches that were buffeted by the wind and the babble of the Farmington River as it hurried on its way to the mighty Connecticut.

But hold on! There was a hum down the road a piece. Not very loud, mind you, but down around the bend, out of sight. Sure enough, I saw what it was as I passed over a small rise in the road. Down the gentle slope, coming slowly around the bend, I could see through the woods some kind of antique automobile, picking its way through the ruts and carefully avoiding the larger of the rocks embedded in the road.

It was a deep green, open touring car with two aboard. The driver was seated on the wrong side of the car, and his passenger, a woman of a certain age bundled up in a wool coat and scarf with her hair tucked beneath a dark beret, came slowly up the rise to meet me. I stepped aside and waited for them to pass.

The green automobile was no less than an ancient Rolls Royce, replete with wooden spokes and skinny little tires barely broader than the wooden wheels of a horse-drawn buggy. It was a lengthy car, with a broad-but-empty back seat. The driver, wearing a tweed cap and jacket, tugged at his brim with a gloved hand, acknowledging my stepping aside to allow him and his vehicle to pass. His passenger stared straight ahead, not noticing me in the slightest.

They passed me by, continuing to pick their path along the right-of-way, and passed down the gentle slope on the other side of the rise. I stood and watched them until the road took another bend, and they disappeared from view.

Months passed. Winter came and went. And the following spring, while attending a vintage car meet in nearby Avon, Connecticut, what do you think I saw? The very same car with the very same couple, lining up with all the other old cars hoping to qualify for a ribbon from the local judges.

I approached the green car, screwed up my gumption, and spoke to the couple. It was immediately apparent that the woman who’d failed to acknowledge my presence in the woods the previous November was far from impolite. She was blind.

Her husband was a voluble fellow, who stepped down from his automobile and entertained my questions. “Yes,” he told me, “this most certainly is a Rolls Royce — a 1921 Silver Ghost, in fact. But this is no ordinary Silver Ghost, don’t you know. This one was built in Springfield, Massachusetts.”

“Springfield?” I asked, rather puzzled.

“Oh yes!” he replied. “They built them here.”

Act Two: Exposition

Frederick Henry Royce was the quintessential engineer. He possessed an analytical and exacting mind and owned an electrical manufacturing firm of some modest success. In was in his factory in 1904 that he built his first car…which he dubbed a “Royce.” Within a year he’d sold one to an adventurer and bon vivant by the name of Charles Stewart Rolls, who was the classic salesman — boisterous, generous, “hail-fellow-well-met.”

Though cut from two different bolts of cloth, Royce and Rolls hit it off, and in 1905, the two decided to form a company to produce automobiles utilizing Rolls’ abilities to raise capital through his considerable personal relationships and Royce’s impeccable engineering skills.

In 1905 and 1906 the newly founded company produced 40 vehicles with four cylinder engines that produced an astonishing 20 horsepower. In the autumn of 1906, Charles Rolls, considered by some to be a marketing whiz, decided to take four cars to America to drum up interest in its rapidly growing market for high-end luxury vehicles.

Rolls was driver and an automobile enthusiast, and during that trip, he took great delight in meeting Wilbur and Orville Wright, whose adventures at Kitty Hawk just three years before had captured the world’s imagination. The encounter turned out to have more significance, though, than Charles Rolls realized. He was absolutely smitten with what was then termed the “aero plane,” and within four years he was dead, Britain’s first flying casualty.

But Rolls was delighted by his reception in America. He sold his first car immediately upon arrival. The car had barely made it out of the cargo hold before it was sold and was shipped to Texas. The second of the four was sold in quick time to a local resident in New York, and Charles Rolls hung on to the remaining two. One appeared at the New York Auto Show, which engendered an order for four more cars and resulted in the creation of the entity that would become the Rolls-Royce American distributor.

But it was the non-auto show vehicle that made the most news. Charles Rolls took his car to Detroit, where he met with William C. Durant, the general manager of Buick and Ransom E. Olds, the owner of Oldsmobile. Durant had built a grueling test track for new automobiles. Not a single car of the era could round the track for more than three hours before breaking down — not a Buick, not an Oldsmobile, not a Ford, not a Cadillac, not even a Stoddard-Dayton, which had been designed from 1906 to be America’s finest example of automotive engineering. Durant suggested that Rolls try his luck.

The Silver Ghost not only broke the three hour mark; it went on to complete a full 24 hours before it motored away. The news was electrifying.

The annual American sales of Silver Ghosts went from four in 1906 to 100 in 1913. But the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 meant there were no more Rolls-Royce chassis to be had. Instead, owners elected to rebody their pre-war cars, ensuring that they would keep up with the latest fashions. Therein lies a huge difference between buying a luxury automobile in 1913, and buying a luxury car today.

Were you to walk into a Rolls-Royce showroom in those days, be it in London or New York, you would buy nothing more than a chassis with an engine, steering column, and wheels. No body, no seats, no accessories. And it wasn’t cheap. You’d be plunking down about $10,000. The corresponding cost for a Peerless, Pierce-Arrow, or Packard was about three thousand dollars less, and you’d obtain delivery of a complete car, just like the one you saw on the showroom floor.

The custom in Europe, including Great Britain, was completely different. You bought a chassis from a manufacturer, and you took it to a coach builder.

There were coach builders in the United States, too. In fact, some of the more successful ones were scooped up in later years by the American manufacturers themselves. In the 1930s, Fischer Auto Body was acquired by General Motors. Likewise, LeBaron was purchased by Chrysler.

But at the turn of the 20th Century, there were dozens of American coach building companies, each of which was eager to build you a body for whatever frame you had purchased. In the case of Rolls, the locations of coach makers ranged from Amesbury, Massachusetts to Cincinnati, Ohio. The most notable of the group was the Brewster Coachworks of Long Island, New York, a company that had started building horse-drawn coaches in the mid-19th Century.

After four long and bloody years, the guns across Europe fell silent. Though victorious, the British had suffered tremendous losses, and Britain as a nation was exhausted.

Not so in the United States. Yes, American men died in the fighting after the country entered the war in 1917, but the percentage of the men in the ranks who were killed or wounded paled in comparison to that of the British, the French, the Belgian or the German armies. Before entering the war, the nation had begun to flex its industrial muscle, producing a soaring economy that barely broke its stride with the advent of hostilities. And with the Armistice in 1918, America was ready to supply an exhausted Europe both with aid and with goods.

Henry Royce, whose partner had died in a plane crash eight years earlier, recognized that the American automotive market was so large that it exceeded that rest of the world combined. He also realized that his chassis’ reputation in America had only increased during its four year absence from the market. Lastly, his business sense told him that the price he’d established in the United States between 1906 and 1914 would yield a far greater profit were he able to avoid paying tariffs. The only way to do that was to begin manufacturing Rolls Royces in America.

In 1919, Royce dispatched Claude Johnson, his general manager, to New York. His mission? To scout out an appropriate location to establish a manufacturing plant. Johnson before the war had advocated the creation of such a plant, even to the point of renting space in 1913 from the Brewster Coachworks at their facility on Long Island.

This time, however, Johnson had even grander ideas. He settled on a factory in Springfield, Massachusetts, formerly home to the American Wire Wheel Company. Springfield made great sense from a business standpoint, as the region was filled with skilled machinists and metal workers who had learned their trade in the armories and factories along the Connecticut River from Vermont to Long Island Sound. The region, famed for producing everything from Columbia bicycles to Colt revolvers, from Royal typewriters to Winchester repeaters, was the Silicon Valley of its day.

Springfield was also equidistant between Rolls’ two largest markets: Boston and New York City. And the American Wire Wheel factory sat alongside a rail line, making it an ideal site for shipping chassis to coachbuilders.

In 1920, no less than Henry Royce himself, along with 50 British managers and foremen and their families, arrived in Springfield to set up the facility. In short order, after hiring some 400 assembly workers, the factory produced its first Rolls Royce “Silver Ghost” chassis in early 1921. The company stated firmly from the very start that the output of the Springfield factory was to be the equal of that of its Derby, England production plant.

The first 25 rolling chassis were identical to those produced in England, in large part because they were constructed of parts manufactured and shipped from the Derby factory. But as time went on, more and more of the content of the American-made Rolls Royces came from American sources.

By 1921, the Silver Ghost had grown in power and speed. The engine had evolved from four to six cylinders, displacing 460 cubic inches, and making 80 horsepower. It boasted a top speed of 70 miles per hour, the likes of which only a sports car like a Mercer Raceabout or Stutz Bearcat could attain before the war.

In 1925, the Springfield manufacturing facility made significant changes in the cars they were producing. Unlike their British cousins, their engines now featured valve covers. They adopted the use of drum headlights, sturdy American electrical components, and tubular bumpers. But the most radical development was creating a car with the steering wheel on the left. Even the mighty Rolls Royce, which had stubbornly resisted the move for four years, would finally bow to American tastes.

Yes, many of Rolls Royce’s American customers engaged a chauffeur to maintain and drive their vehicles. But the percentage of cars termed “self-drivers,” in which the owner him- or herself operated the automobile, was far greater than in Britain, and the figure was growing. Having a steering wheel on the right-hand side, with a floor-mounted gearshift on the right blocking access to the driver’s seat (as was the practice in Britain), was now considered by American “self-drivers” an impediment to entry.

The year 1925 also saw two important corporate developments for Rolls Royce, one affecting their Springfield facility and the other affecting their factory in Derby. In America, Rolls acquired the Brewster Coachbuilding Company, enabling the seven factory-owned showrooms in New York, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, San Francisco, Hartford, and Troy, New York, and the sixteen independently owned dealerships around the country, to offer a standard line of bodies ranging from roadsters to sedans to sedancas, the classic chauffeur-driven design which cosseted passengers in closed comfort while the driver sat in the open, unprotected from the elements.

In Derby, 1925 saw the introduction of the Rolls Royce “New Phantom,” a model meant to supersede the Silver Ghost, which had been in production since 1905. It was a thorough modernization, introducing an overhead valve, in-line six cylinder engine that was capable of producing 113 horsepower, mated to a newly designed three-speed transmission, and stopped by servo-assisted four wheel brakes.

It would be two more years until the tooling would become available to have Springfield begin the manufacture of “New Phantoms.” But when they arrived in 1927, they were greeted with great acclaim. A Phantom could run at speeds in excess of 100 miles per hour.

With the booming American economy, the Springfield plant was producing 12 automobiles a week, and the public was clamoring for more. They were now commanding $20,000 apiece.

But 1928 saw a weakening of demand. American manufacturers like Packard, Deusenberg, and Cadillac were producing comparably powerful and equally luxurious cars at a much lower price. Twelve automobiles per week drooped to nine per week.

Competition in Europe was equally fierce. Rolls Royce on the continent was being chased by Hispano-Suiza, Mercedes-Benz, Bugatti, and Isotta-Fraschini. By 1928, the “New Phantom,” introduced just three years earlier, was being eclipsed. To counter their competition, in early 1929 Rolls introduced an ultra-high tech and thoroughly more sophisticated model dubbed the “Phantom II.”

And then the market crashed.

The nine-per-week production rate of Springfield “New Phantoms,” now termed “Phantom I’s”, dropped to just under three a week, and before long, it went down to less than one per week.

The estimated cost of re-tooling the Springfield factory to produce the Phantom II was thought to exceed one million dollars, and the demand for cars that cost $20,000 a piece had collapsed. It was clear that given the state of the American economy, Rolls Royce would never recover the expense.

The factory closed its doors in 1931 and was soon sold, but the company honored the last 200 orders for their cars. By 1935, these cars had their coachwork installed on Long Island and were delivered to their customers.

Today the factory still stands, and is visible from Interstate 290, a stretch of superhighway connecting I-91 to the Massachusetts Turnpike. It houses Tite-Flex, a division of Smiths Tubular Systems, and its red brick walls have been painted white. Ten years ago in a freak windstorm, the Tite-Flex sign was blown off the building, revealing the distinctive Rolls Royce logo that had been painted onto the brick surface in 1921.

Act Three: Ask the man who owns one

There were many notables who owned the cars manufactured in the Springfield Rolls Royce factory. Former President Woodrow Wilson owned one, as did the Guggenheims and the Bloomingdales. But arguably the most famous owner of a Springfield Rolls was a fictional character invented by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Jay Gatsby, the central figure of the novel The Great Gatsby, owned a 1922 Silver Ghost, a cream colored car that Daisy Buchanan was driving back to East Egg when she struck and killed Myrtle Wilson.

The most notable owner of a Springfield Rolls, however, was a fellow by the name of M. Allen Swift of West Hartford, Connecticut. In 1928, Allen Swift was given a brand new Phantom Roadster by his father as a graduation gift. Over the intervening years he put 170,000 miles on the car, driving it until October 2005, when Swift passed away at the age of 102.

When he died, Mr. Swift’s Rolls Royce, along with a donation of $1,000,000, went to the Springfield Museums, where today it stands proudly as the centerpiece of a museum display devoted to Springfield’s history as a center of automobile and motorcycle manufacturing.

M. Allen Swift, by the way, owned and operated his Springfield Rolls for more than 77 years. This is the longest amount of time any human being has ever owned and operated an automobile purchased new.

Act Four: The Satan’s Kingdom Rolls Royce

Given Mr. Swift’s example, it appears that once you own a Springfield Rolls Royce, you become reluctant to part with it. With the help of the current president of the Modern Car Society of the Rolls Royce Owners Club, a chap named Michael Gaetano of Hopkinton, Massachusetts, I’ve been able to track down that Silver Ghost I saw in the woods 32 years ago.

No longer green, it’s now red, but it’s still owned by the same fellow, John Parker III of North Stonington, Connecticut. Sadly, his wife, Amy Morgan Parker, passed away in 2008 at the age of 77. John bought his 1921 Springfield Silver Ghost in 1970, and last September he won best in class at the 44th Annual Bennington Antique and Classic Car Show. As you’ll see from the picture I’m passing around, he's clearly proud of the fact that "Yes! They built them here."

Photo by Glenn Franco Simmons, used under Creative Commons License

The Club's historic membership roster, part VI: members joining 1916-1941

2010-11-16T21:22:00.008-05:00

Editor's note: No new members joined from 1913 to 1915. In previous installments of our historic membership roster, we've been able to provide a biographical paragraph on most members, largely thanks to the powers of Google to locate sometimes obscure data sources. It turns out, however, that our members joining before 1920 or so are far more Googleable than those joining in 1920 and later, so some of these bios are very brief indeed. As in prior installments, some of the basic information here comes from Harold Hutchins' research in city directories at the Berkshire Athenaeum. If any reader can supplement the information listed here, we would be much obliged — contact Martin Langeveld, the Club historian/webmaster, at the link at the top of the right column.

1916

Rev. James Edgar Gregg —Born in Hartford, Conn. Nov. 24, 1875; grew up in Colorado Springs; graduated from Harvard University in 1897; attended Harvard Divinity School 1900-1901; taught school in Rhode Island for three years; prepared for ministry at Yale, receiving a Bachelor of Divinity in 1903. Came to Pittsfield as an assistant to (Club member) Rev. William V. W. Davis at First Church of Christ and was ordained at First Church; became the second minister of Pilgrim Memorial Church in Pittsfield. From there, went to Kirk Street Congregational Church in Lowell; returned to Pittsfield to succeed Dr. Davis at First Church in 1912. Presided over the 150th anniversary observances at First Church. Resigned his pastorate in 1918 to accept an unsought appointment as the third president (then called principal) of the Hampton Institute in Virginia where he served until 1929; received a Doctor of Divinity from Yale in 1918. At historically-black Hampton, he was notably involved in a controversial episode in 1927 in which students revolted with a strike against the perceived overly conservative and paternalistic policies of the white administrators. Gregg died in 1946.

1923

Elmer Bridgham — Principal of Pomeroy School

1924

Rev. Vincent Godfrey Burns — pastor of South Congregational Church. In 1927, his resignation was reported in Time Magazine as follows (April 24, 1927):

Because his flock did not relish his criticism of U.S. Secretary of State Kellogg's Latin American policy, the Rev. Vincent G. Burns of the South Congregational Church, Pittsfield, Mass., recently resigned his pastorate. Said he: "In a day when hypocritical clergymen are mouthing old theologies, in a day when mammon-worshiping, penny-pinching hypocrites are defending the system that exploits millions and sucks the lifeblood out of the workers around the world, in a day when snobs and aristocrats hold up the iron wall of class and caste, I have dared to stand up and tell the truth concerning these soul-blasting tyrannies."

Burns wrote the introduction to a book by his brother, Robert Elliott Burns, entitled I am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang, originally published in 1932, reissued by the University of Georgia Press in 1997 and still in print as of 2010. The book was a bestseller, later turned into a movie, that recounted Robert's conviction on a minor charge and his sentence to a ten-year sentence on a chain gang, virtually a death sentence in its day, and his subsequent escapes. Eventually, the brothers had a falling-out when Vincent sued Robert for a share of the profits from the book and movie. The film was remade in 1987 as The Man who Broke 1000 Chains for HBO. Vincent became an Episcopal priest and poet, servicing as poet laureate of Maryland from 1962 until his death in 1970.

1925

Joseph J. Lawrence — a writer who lived at 39 Harding St.

Lorne B. Hulsman — 1881-1957. Graduated from Boston University in 1905. Listed as principal of Melrose High School in 1916; listed as principal of Pittsfield High School as of 1919. As of 1925, employed at C. D. Parker Co., an investment brokerage located in the Berkshire Life Insurance building in downtown Pittsfield Buried in Elm Street Cemetery, Braintree, Mass.

James M. Rosenthal — Pittsfield city solicitor, partner in the firm of Cummings & Rosenthal

1929

Rabbi Harry Kaplan — Spiritual leader of Temple Anshe Amunim. Harry Kaplan was born on October 6, 1901 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He was educated in the public schools of Minneapolis. In 1923 he graduated from the University of Minnesota, with the degree of Bachelor of Arts, majoring in Sociology and Community Organization. He was a member of the first graduating class of the Minneapolis Talmud Torah, a nationally known Hebrew School. He was ordained as rabbi from the Jewish Institute of Religion, New York City, in 1927, while also receiving a Master of Hebrew Literature, cum laude. He took postgraduate work at the University of Wisconsin, at Ohio State University, and at the Geneva, Switzerland Institute of International Studies. From 1926 to 1935 he was Rabbi at Temple Anshe Amunim in Pittsfield. From 1935 until his death in 1969 he was Ohio State University Hillel Director. In addition he was Midwest Regional Director for the B'nai B'rith Hillel Foundation and a member of the National Hillel Cabinet. he was also a member of the Central Conference of American Rabbis and a Rotarian. He was a past President of the Jewish Teachers' Association of the New England Liberal Schools, of the Pittsfield Council of Social Agencies, and of the Alumni Association of the Jewish Institute of Religion. Rabbi Kaplan's articles appeared in Religious Education, The National Jewish Monthly, and The Commentator. Rabbi Kaplan was honored in 1953 with the honorary degree of Doctor of Divinity by Hebrew Union-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1955 Ohio State University gave him an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws. Harry Kaplan died on February 7, 1969. He was survived by his wife, Theresa, and four children.

Rev. John Gratton — Born in London, U.K.; naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 1922. Studied law in London; in the U.S., worked as a farmhand to put himself through Drake College, Des Moines, Iowa; graduated from Union Theological Seminary in 1922. Served five years at Palisades Park Presbyterian Church, New Jersey; came to Pittsfield to become pastor at First Church in 1928 and served until 1952. While at First Church, he initiated the expansion and renovation of the parish house completed in 1952, the rebuilding and enlargement of the sanctuary organ the same year, and the merger that year of the separately constituted Church and Parish. As well, he presided over the church's 175th anniversary observance in 1939.

Dr. Floyd Smith — Pittsfield's first pediatrician

Charles H. Wright — Assistant District Attorney

1930

Dr. John B. Thomes — physician and surgeon

Maurice A. Levy — Pastor of the First Baptist Church. Graduate of Newton Theological Seminary; previously served the First Baptist Church of Hingham, Mass.; chaplain of the Pitttfield Lodge of Ancient Free and Accepted Masons.

1931

Thomas Nelson Baker — Baker was born a slave in Northampton County, Virginia in 1860; he graduated from the Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) in Hampton, Virginia in 1885; from the Mount Hermon School for Boys in Gill, Mass. in 1889; and from Boston University as valedictorian in 1893. He earned a Bachelor of Divinity in 1896 and a Ph.D. in theology in 1903 from Yale University, the second African-American to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy anywhere in the United States, and the first former slave to do so. (No other African-American earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale until 1946.) His doctoral dissertation was entitled "The ethical significance of the connection between mind and body." After his ordination he took charge of the Dixwell Avenue Congregational Church, a black church in New Haven, and came to Pittsfield in 1901 as the second minister of the Second Congregational Church. (The first was the Rev. Samuel Harrison, chaplain of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment during the Civil War.) He married Lizzie Baytop, an 1884 graduate of Hampton, who served as its librarian. He died in Pittsfield Feb. 25, 1941. His son, Thomas Nelson Baker Jr., born in Pittsfield in 1906, became a professor of chemistry at Virginia State College.

Dr. Modestino Cricitiello — 1894(?)-1982. Physician and surgeon in Pittsfield. Born in Avellino, Italy, came to the United States with his parents at the age of 9. Graduated from Princeton University in 1917 and from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1921. He served during World War I with the Army Medical Reserve while attending college, and during World War II he was chief of surgery with the 1000-bed 117th General Hospital near Bristol, England. He was discharged in 1945 as a lieutenant colonel. He came to Pittsfield in 1922 and opened a practice in medicine and surgery; was associated with the Pittsfield Department of Health, campaigning for the pasteurization of milk. He developed the clinical pathology department at St. Luke's Hospital in 1926, establishing there one of the first schools for laboratory technicians in western Massachusetts. He was a fellow of the American College of Surgeons and a member of the Massachusetts Medical Society.

1932

Dr. Horace K. Richardson — Assistant medical director, Austen Riggs Foundation, Stockbridge. Co-author with Austen Riggs of "The Role of Personality in Psychotherapeutics." Later active in Baltimore. Born about 1880, died 1962.

1933

Merle Dixon Graves — Born October 13, 1887 in Bowdoinham, Maine (son of Rev. Lucien Chase Graves and Annie Dixon Graves); graduated from Amherst College, 1908; graduated from Harvard Law School 1912; married Clara Cooley Stevenson; lawyer; member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives 1921-1924; owner of "Gravesleigh," an estate on Williams Street. Much of this property is now the Canoe Meadows Wildlife Sanctuary operated by the Massachusetts Audubon Society.

Arthur M. Robinson — Lived in Williamstown; Register of Probate and Insolvency, North Adams; later a probate judge; served on the Mt. Greylock State Reservation Commission.

Rev. George A. Tuttle — pastor of South Congregational Church. Earlier pastor of Second Congregational Church, East Amherst, Mass.

1935

Rev. Henry Gordon Ives — Pastor of the Unitarian Church. Previously pastor of the Amherst Unitarian Universalist Society, 1919-1929.

Francis Harold Henshaw — librarian, Berkshire Athenaeum. Native of Indiana, graduate of Occidental College. Worked as assistant librarian in the Los Angeles Public Library, then obtained a master's degree from the Columbia University School of Library Science. In 1946, he became State Librarian of Texas, serving until 1950.

1936

John J. O'Connell — manager at Pittsfield Electric Company

1937

Gardner Flick Knight — Born in Somerville, Mass., April 22, 1901. Attended Cambridge Latin School; graduated from Harvard University 1922. Became a Fellow of the Actuarial Society of America in 1935. Assistant to the state actuary of the division of Savings Bank Life Insurance, 1925-1927; examiner and assistant actuaryof the Massachusetts Insurance Department, 1927-1935; appointed associate actuary of the Berkshire Life Insurance Company; actuary in 1938; vice president and actuary in 1942; senior actuary in 1960. He was a charter member of the Boston Actuaries Club and did not miss a single meeting from its formation in 1931 until his final illness. Served as chairman of the Community Chest and on the board of the Girls Club, Salvation Army and the Red Cross. President of the Berkshire Harvard Club in 1948. Member of the First Baptist Church and lay preacher for the Berkshire Union Chapel; past president of the Pittsfield Area Council of Churches. Married to Elsie. F. Nelson. Died in Pittsfield, April 13, 1962.

1938

William S. Annin — Berkshire Eagle editorial writer; Richmond selectman and teacher; dairy farmer in Richmond; longtime "Our Berkshires" columnist.

Herbert C. Dunkley — born 1908, died 1986. Born in Earls Barton, England, Dunkley moved from Canada to Pittsfield to become assistant actuary for the Berkshire Life Insurance Company. From Pittsfield, he moved to Minneapolis as actuary for North American Life and Casualty Insurance Company. Later he became a consulting actuary in California. He maintained a dual career as an organist, performing as a radio organist for the Canadian Broadcasting Company. He was a member of the American Guild of Organists and of the American Theater Organ Society.

1939

Rabbi Saul Habas — replaced Rabbi Kaplan at Temple Anshe Amunim in 1935. Health problems necessitated his resignation from this position in 1943.

1940

Stuart C. Henry — curator of art at the Berkshire Museum beginning about 1932; director beginning in 1939 as successor to Laura Bragg.

Charles W. Kellogg — writer for The Berkshire Eagle.

1941

Charles W. Butler — teller, Berkshire County Savings Bank.

The bed of Procrustes: Norman Rockwell on education in the Soviet Union, circa 1965

2010-10-03T22:02:00.009-04:00

Norman Rockwell was a member of the Monday Evening Club from 1957 until his death in 1978. In this paper, delivered about 1965 following Rockwell's visit to the Soviet Union in December 1963, Rockwell concludes by saying that he "never did paint" the picture he intended to do, juxtaposing U.S. and Soviet country classrooms. However, in 1967 he completed for Look magazine a picture called "Russian Schoolroom," (above) which later was stolen from a gallery in Missouri in 1973. In 1989, it turned up in the collection of film director Steven Spielberg (a noted Rockwell collector and longtime supporter of the Norman Rockwell Museum), and eventually became the subject of a complex legal tangle with possible connections to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. The case was resolved in 2010 with the painting being awarded to Newport R.I. art dealer Judith Goffman Cutler.

This paper is transcribed from an undated manuscript in the collection of the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass. The title "Bed of Procrustes" is written on the envelope in which it was originally contained, along with the words "ad lib." In this transcription, spelling and punctuation is generally left as it is in the original.

The Club is grateful for the assistance of Corry Kanzenburg and Jessika Drmacich of the collections staff at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass. for providing access to the manuscript of this and other papers Rockwell presented to the Club, to the museum's director, Laurie Norton Moffatt, for alerting us to their existence (via a Facebook comment!) and to the Norman Rockwell Licensing Company for permission to publish the papers.

Licensed by Norman Rockwell Licensing, Niles, IL.

A year ago last December my wife and I journeyed to Moscow. I was going as a specialist for the United States Information Service [sic — actually the U.S. Information Agency]. My job was to work with our half of an exchange exhibit of graphic art.

I had a project. This of course, was in addition to my work with the graphic show.

My project was to illustrate with a picture, or pictures, the elementary schools of Russia. Look magazine was definitely interested so I made my inquiries among our personnel at the exhibit and also at the American embassy. They, in turn, put in a request that I meet the minister of education in Moscow.

Things move slowly in Moscow — at least for an American with a project. Not only is there a vast bureaucracy, but there is an amazingly devious procedure that just can not be cut short. Then, too, there’s an atmosphere of mutual distrust.

After some weeks I was given an interview with the assistant minister and stated what I wanted to do. I told him I wanted to paint a small country school, and its students, that would be comparable to just such a school in America, and that I wanted to do it honestly and fairly, as a way toward mutual understanding. His associates were most smiling and amiable, and said that there were no small country schools near Moscow, but that they would arrange that I should visit an elementary school. I was very happy, we all bowed, and I left the massive building which was just off “Red Square.” Two or three weeks later I hadn’t heard. Then I talked to my embassy and exhibition friends and they laughed and said, “You’ll never hear from them.” But I was sure they were wrong because the officials had been so amiable and cooperative. Then another week went by and I began to get a bit restless.

By accident, at the Metropole Hotel, I met an American television director and his crew, who, after two years of intense negotiations, were going to make pictures in a school the next day. When I told Mr. Powers my predicament, he told me to meet him the next morning at eight o’clock and he would take me to the school as one of his assistant camera men – well, really not a camera man, I was to be disguised as the man who carried the cameras for the assistant camera man. Next morning we piled into the television bus and arrived at the school as it opened. It was a school that emphasized the teaching of English. Once I was inside, there were no restraints whatsoever. I listened and watched and sketched and measured everything. Nobody questioned or interfered with me.

When I got back to the hotel that night I had a notice that the assistant minister of education had arranged that I could go with my wife, an interpreter, and a photographer to a very fine Moscow school (somehow or other he knew I had been to a school that day) — and it was a very find school. In fact, it was their showpiece. The Russians have a sort of inferiority complex and want you to see only the best.

Physically, it could have been a large American city school, except for the inevitable giant statue of Lenin out in front. Externally, it was of white concrete block construction. Inside, it was light and spacious, with many plants and bulletin boards. I was fascinated by the children's clothing: every child wore a uniform. The girls wore identical brown dresses under identical brown pinafores. The boys wore ill-fitting gray jackets and long gray trousers. Almost without exception, everyone wore the red handkerchief of the “Young Pioneers,” who are, of course, the boy and girl scouts of Russia. The only variation, which was amusing, was the shoes. They were of every type, color and condition.

The majority of the children wore their good conduct medal, which was a “Baby Lenin” button—a good-sized button, gold colored with a bas-relief of a curly-haired baby Lenin. It was only to be worn when their conduct was ideologically and otherwise perfect.

Another thing that struck me was that every room had its Lenin corner with a white marble statue of Lenin, and behind it the red flag with hammer and sickle and fresh flowers laid on the base of the statue. Also repeated everywhere were Lenin’s favorite words to students: “Study, study and study in order to become a good communist.”

We were very fortunate that at our all-Russian hotel there was a group of four American doctors. Naturally we got acquainted, and we found that they were not doctors of medicine but Ph.D.’s in the field of education and were making a third trip to Russia for the American comparative education society, as guests of the Russian trade union of education, culture and science. The outstanding member of the group was a Dr. Rudman of the University of Michigan [sic — this was Herbert C. Rudman, actually a professor at Michigan State University]. He spoke Russian and is one of the three greatest experts in America on Russian education, and is the author of a number of books and articles on the subject. He was most affable, and most of this paper is based on what we learned from him directly and from books and papers he has forwarded to us.

To begin with, the Russian system of education is monolithic. Every official is answerable to the central power, every act must fit itself to a master plan. Decrees which establish the plan come directly from the presidium and central committee of the Communist Party, and become operative when consented to by the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R., and the council of ministers of the U.S.S.R.

Now I come to the title of this paper:

The Bed of Procrustes

As you doubtless remember, “Procrustes,” in Greek legend, was a robber of Attica, who placed all who fell into his hands upon an iron bed. If they were longer than the bed he cut off the redundant part: if shorter, he stretched them till they fitted it. Hence any attempt to reduce men to one standard, one way of thinking, or one way of acting, is called “placing them on Procrustes’ bed.”

As Procrustes fitted every victim to his bed, so is every child molded to fit the Russian educational system, which is designed for one end: to give each child those qualities which will best serve the state. The students are channeled through a common course of study in such a way as not to lose sight of individual occupational talent, and the system provides for increasing specialization in the senior year. However, once the choice of specialization is made, the curriculum is rigid. There is no opportunity for choosing elective subjects, and practically no one ever changes from one special course to another.

Since the revolution there have been four master educational plans, though all have been founded on the same three purposes: politically, to teach the principles of communism and to establish preference for it above all other systems; economically, to make the U.S.S.R. most productive of all nations; and culturally to give everyone access to all the glories of the Russian tradition and to educate them in the materialism of Karl Marx, which says that man owes everything to his control of material forces which are always in motion, and has no need of a universal spirit. In 1931, there was a strong reaction against the system that had first been adopted. It had been influenced by so-called progressive ideas and particularly by John Dewey. The Russians were completely disillusioned and threw it out lock, stock and barrel, in favor of a traditional academic plan. In 1958, Khrushchev announced that production was not increasing satisfactorily, that intellectual snobbery was gaining ground, and that labor was losing respect. He drew up a new system, it was approved in 1958, and the change-over was supposed to be complete in 1965. It is this plan that I will tell you about.

It provides for optional pre-school, with a small tuition fee, and for eight years of free compulsory elementary school, from ages 7 to 15, with increased emphasis on vocational work. It envisaged two years to follow this of occupational work, primarily in factories and on collective farms, but apparently this has been only partially enforced. Various ways are designed for students to return to senior elementary work. On-the-job training is provided in factories and on collective farms, and night schools and correspondence schools are available. Those who wish, return to full-time general education or vocational school, or to schools preparatory for professions and sciences. In addition, there are special schools, some of which reach back into earlier years. These are provided for the handicapped or for special training in ballet or art, or they emphasize military training. Much has been heard about Russian boarding schools. In practice, however, they seem to be chiefly for those without adequate supervision at home, or for problem children. Even in special schools, however, a hard core of prescribed curriculum common to all schools is required.

Each republic of the U.S.S.R. has its own ministry of education. There are some local variations, chiefly with respect to local languages or dialects. As education becomes more vocational in character, local, economic and occupational conditions affect the schools more closely. In actual practice, the ministries of all the Russian republics model themselves on the ministry in Moscow.

The purpose of all ministries is to assure results as designed by the central directive. The Russians are very firm in the presupposition that all children have equal ability, though they recognize that tastes and special talents may vary. Therefore, any failure to succeed is due o one of three causes: the students are lazy or bad, the teachers are inadequate, or the parents fail to give proper supervision.

Through a system of inspectors, directors, principals, class monitors and class meetings every effort is made to have all students succeed. I’d like to mention briefly two further institutions that differ rather sharply from anything we know.

The first is the parents’ committee. It differs from our parent-teachers association in that its purpose is wholly to assist in work that the school deems important. Of the various sub-committees, that of teaching and upbringing is least like ours. It provides supervision for those who do not have enough supervision at home. The following passage from Dr. Rudman’s book [possibly Structure and Decision-making in Soviet Education] shows how it is involved in the discipline of the students:

If a child receives more than two marks of “2” in a week, the teacher or the director may give the parents’ group his name. This subcommittee may then call the child to the school—to take him to task and warm him to study better. Parents are also warned that their child is not doing as well as he should. If this does not produce the desired result, the parents’ subcommittee may inform the trade union or party committee at the place of work of the parents. The party or trade union then may call a meeting, where the parent of the pupil is publicly shamed for his failure as a parent and where advice is volunteered by his comrades as to how to make his child succeed in school.

In some cases, there are councils of aid on a district wide basis. They are responsible for registration of all students. Each member has a case load of five to seven students and arranges, if necessary, for supervision of their homework and special tutoring. It also arranges meetings where students and parents become acquainted with one another’s work. On bulletin boards in the schools, and also in the factories or collective farms, the pictures of parents and children are posted if all have done work of special merit. If any member of the family fails to keep up his record, all pictures of that family are removed. Further pressure is brought to bear on parents through newspapers, meetings of trade unions, occupational superiors, and even dismissal.

All that has been said heretofore is true, but I can’t help wondering does the title, “The bed of Procrustes” quite fits. He tortured and amputated his visitors. So, too, have Russian children been molded and disciplined to fit the design of the Russian state. In my five weeks there in Moscow, I naturally saw many children on the streets, and then those two days in the schools I saw them being molded. But, if I am completely honest, they seemed like normal children, maybe more stolid in their expressions, but certainly healthy, and what seemed to be normally happy. This is what puzzles me. Realizing the disciplines and regimentation they nave been under, compared with our system which allows for so much more freedom of the individual in choice and behavior, why is there so little difference in the appearance of the children?

May I add a short postscript?

My original theme was to promote mutual understanding by picturing the similarity of the American and Russian schools, but this theme was destroyed by what I had learned about the narrowness and repressions of the Russian system. On the other hand, the narrowness and repressions were belied, from a picture standpoint, by the apparent normal and happy appearance of these Moscow children.

So I never did paint the picture.

[Note: see introductory section above regarding "Russian Schoolroom" later painted by Rockwell in 1967.]

A voice in the wilderness: A call for safer cars predating Ralph Nader's "Unsafe at Any Speed"

2010-09-29T22:16:00.000-04:00

Presented to the club by Roger B. Linscott in early 1965. Roger was, for many years, the associate editor of The Berkshire Eagle, Pittsfield's daily newspaper. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his editorial writing in 1973, and died in 2008 at the age of 88, having been a member of the Club since 1950.

This paper predates by about nine months Ralph Nader's seminal book on the same subject, Unsafe at Any Speed, which was published November 29, 1965, but could well have served as an introduction to it.

Like most newspaper offices, ours is a regular port of call for a large and varied assortment of cranks and crackpots who fancy us to be the appropriate mouthpiece for their maledictions against mankind or who hope to find in us a willing vehicle for promoting whatever harebrained schemes they wish to foist upon the public. Some of these earnest but offbeat promoters can be put down as harmless eccentrics, and some are quite obviously psychopaths who belong in institutions.

In the latter category is one local character who, because I made the mistake of listening sympathetically when he first visited the Eagle, has made me his particular confidant. He comes to the office perhaps once a month, and his message is always the same: He is convinced that the Hotel Wendell building is top-heavy, and is in imminent danger of falling down with catastrophic consequences. Moreover he feels there is a conspiracy among our leading citizens to conceal this danger from the public, and he suspects that the conspirators are determined to silence him by fair means or foul.

Ordinarily I have an extremely difficult time easing this fellow out of my office, especially as he has a rather wild-eyed, hysterical manner which makes one hesitant to treat him brusquely. But on his most recent visit, two weeks ago, the problem took care of itself. Midway in his peroration he suddenly stopped short, announced that he had forgotten to put a nickel in his parking meter, and bolted out the door.

In my relief at being rid of him so easily, it was some moments before an obvious thought struck me. This man, a certifiable nut with clearly paranoid tendencies, owned an automobile and was apparently licensed to drive it on the highways and byways of the commonwealth. This bothered me. But what bothered me even more was that when I mentioned the incident to several other people, it seemed to bother them not one whit. The typical reaction was a chuckle and a shrug of the shoulders, accompanied by a remark to the effect that if all the persons unfit to drive were ruled off the road there might be precious few licensed drivers left.

More recently another episode brought home to me once again the extraordinary indifference of the average person toward the problems to highway safety. On Christmas Eve an elderly Lee (Mass.) couple and their daughter were killed in a singularly gruesome two-car accident on the Pittsfield-Lenox Road. The driver of the car which the police said caused the accident submitted in district court to findings of wet driving, drunkenness, operating to endanger and driving an unregistered car. He was sent to Northampton State Hospital for observation on the basis of testimony that he had been under mental treatment for some 20 years.

But the far more remarkable aspect of this case was the disclosure that this person had been issued a Massachusetts driver's license in November, six weeks before the fatal accident, notwithstanding the fact that during the previous four months he had received four district court convictions for motor vehicle violations, all of which had been reported to the Registry of Motor Vehicles, and had been involved in two other accidents which had also been duly reported. Wondering how a person could obtain a license with this record, I inquired of the Registry and was told that he had failed to mention his mental record or court convictions on the application form, and that it is not customary for the Registry to check its [own] files in order to verify an applicant's statements before issuing a license.

Once again what bothered me most about the episode was not the laxity of the licensing procedure so much as the evident indifference to the laxity. The Registry official I talked to seemed quite unconcerned. When I was moved a few days later to comment rather caustically on it in the editorial column there was no evident public response. Individuals with whom I discussed it shrugged it off as neither surprising nor particularly shocking. Several of them pointed out to me that it is no more disturbing than the Registry's longstanding practice of restoring suspended licenses at the request of the offending motorist's legislator — a practice which is universally engaged in by even the most conscientious legislators and apparently condoned by their constituents.

My point in citing these two episodes is not to indict the Registry of Motor Vehicles, negligent though it often is, but rather to illustrate the curious ambivalence of the American public's attitude toward carnage on the highways. Outwardly, of course, we all deplore it, we preach against it, we write editorials about it, we heartily endorse safety campaigns designed to make us more aware of it; but we don't actually want to do much about it. We talk about the need for stricter licensing and for periodic re-examination, but we don't demand it with any vigor. We pontificate on the evils of driving after drinking; yet an astonishing number of otherwise responsible and law-abiding citizens think nothing of driving home from a cocktail party after four or five drinks. We complain about lax enforcement of speed limits, which most of us freely violate, and we complain about inadequate policing while denying to state and local police establishments the funds they need to do even a rudimentary job of highway patrolling. We in this room tonight represent, I expect, a singularly sober, staid and law-abiding segment of our community. Yet I venture to say there is not one of us does not on occasion violate the motor vehicle laws of the commonwealth, and without any discernible pangs of conscience. The motor car has made scofflaws of the best of us.

This ambivalent attitude is all the more extraordinary when one considers the truly staggering dimensions of the highway safety problem in both human and economic terms. In 1962 the highway death toll passed the 40,000 mark for the first time in U.S. history; in 1963 it reached an all-time high of 43,000, and although final figures are not yet available, it is believed that the record for 1964 was even worse [Editor's note: it was 45,645], despite the fact that our doctors are steadily becoming more proficient in keeping accident victims alive. Moreover, the traffic deaths tell only part of the story; for every person killed, 125 are non-fatally injured, and the total number injured on the highways each year is climbing almost astronomically. In 1963 alone, it is estimated, more than 4.5 million Americans were injured on the highways, and approximately 200,000 of these suffered permanent disabilities. In a sense, the most tragic aspect of all this is that by far the heaviest death and disability toll is in the younger age brackets — particularly males from 15 to 30 years old. Today more young people die from automobile accidents than from any other cause.

The byproducts in economic and legal terms are almost equally awesome. In 1958, when the highway toll was considerably less than today's, the National Safety Council estimated that traffic accidents cost the nation approximately $1.5 billion in lost wages, $1.8 billion in property damage, $150 million in medical expenses, and $1.7 billion in overhead insurance outlays — a total of about $5.3 billion in direct costs. In legal terms, highway accidents are making a mockery of our ideal of speedy justice by clogging court calendars to an increasing degree. In Massachusetts, which is not untypical, motor vehicle cases now comprise nearly two-thirds of all jury trials, notwithstanding the fact that the great majority of cases never actually go to trial. As an unhappy footnote to this it should also be observed that our claims procedure tends inevitably to be unfair in practice, however just [it is] in theory. Claims for minor injuries are generally settled quickly and often overgenerously, while payments for those who are killed or seriously injured on the highways are usually long delayed and relatively inadequate, especially in the case of low-income families which are economically in no position to hold out for a more favorable settlement.

I could go on for many, many pages citing other manifestations of the highway safety problem, but that is not the point of this paper. The one aspect of the problem that every one readily agrees upon is that its dimensions are staggering; where agreement is conspicuously lacking is on the question of what can be done about it. And here we find an astonishing thing. Although the automobile has been with us for more than 70 years and has been a major factor in our mortality rates for more than half that period, traffic safety has been the subject of an almost negligible amount of consistent, systematic research. In the words of Daniel P. Moynihan, former chairman of the New York Traffic Safety Policy Committee and now Assistant Secretary of Labor [later U.S. Senator 1976-2000; note also that Ralph Nader was an assistant to Moynihan at the time], "Automobile injuries reached epidemic proportions a generation ago — yet our efforts to control the problem are still largely based on a hodge-podge of suppositions and inferences derived from assumptions we have never verified and which, more significantly, we have never tried to verify."

Any systematic approach to the problem, it seems to me, should begin with a recognition of the two basic variables in the traffic equation: the individual driver, and the vehicle. Obviously both are closely interrelated; but considering them separately gives some useful clues as to what approaches are feasible and what ones are not.

At present the bulk of our effort to control traffic mortality is directed toward the first variable: the driver. On the face of it this seems a reasonable place to concentrate our efforts, since most accidents obviously involve a degree of human failure — but in practice the results have been pathetically unsatisfactory.

We have tried, and on a massive scale, the technique of exhortation. Enormous amounts of time, energy and money have been expended on traffic safety campaigns. Billboards and newspapers and radio stations have preached the message endlessly; the National Safety Council has spent millions promoting the slogan approach — "Slow Down and Live" — "The life you save may be your own!" — and has received abundant publicity for its periodic lugubrious predictions as to how many deaths and injuries will result from every holiday weekend.

Yet the exhortations have been largely ignored by a motoring public which, as I noted earlier, is shockingly indifferent to the problem, except on the discussion level. Why this indifference, this immunity to exhortation? Basically, it would seem, for two reasons: first, the average person's firm belief that he himself is a superior driver and that the exhortations are not for him but for everybody else; and second, that most Americans are incurable optimists, to who the prospect of death or serious injury on the highway seems remote and impersonal. You can tell him — quite accurately — that 50 percent of the cars now on the road will be involved at some time or another in an injury or death-producing crash, but he will remain sublimely confident that his car is one of the 50 percent who won't be.

Along with exhortation, we have tried, of course, to control the human element in the traffic safety equation through police action and criminal prosecution — to the tune, in fact, of some 20 million traffic court cases a year in the United States. Obviously this has an enormous deterrent effect, and would have a great deal more if traffic laws were enforced more efficiently and adjudicated more sternly. But just as obviously, the threat of punishment has not served to reduce the dimensions of the problem. The most one can say for it is that the situation would presumably be rather worse without it. Indeed, I would even be hard put to verify my statement that more rigorous enforcement of the motor vehicle laws would necessarily have any greatly beneficial effect, for the sober truth is that there are many indications to the contrary — such as the much-publicized crackdown on speeding which then-Governor Ribicoff instituted in Connecticut in 1955 and which was followed by an appreciable increase, rather than the hoped-for decrease, in the number of accidents and injuries per passenger-mile.

There are several plausible reasons why the threat of punishment has proved incapable of halting the increase in highway accidents. One is that traffic laws, of necessity, often violate the precept that a criminal law should be clear and comprehensible — such terms as "reasonable speed" and "all reasonable care" are vague to the point of virtually inviting violation and inequitable enforcement. Another problem is that accidents are often the consequence of inadvertent factors — an icy stretch of pavement, for example, or a brake failure — which do not involve any infractions of the law. And finally, disregard for traffic laws on the part of many otherwise responsible citizens tends to be encouraged by the arbitrariness with which they are often enforced, the haphazard fashion in which punishments are meted out, and the notorious ease with which tickets can be fixed in most localities.

Another aspect of the attempt to deal with the human element in the highway safety equation is through driver education — and here the results have been even less satisfactory than in the field of enforcement. Driver training programs are based upon the assumption that technical skill in operating a car decreases the likelihood of accidents — but unfortunately a growing body of evidence indicates that personality traits and emotional factors are far more important elements in one's driving performance — and these are elements which no amount of driver training is likely to change. There is, to be sure, some favorable correlation between driver training and accident rates — but this is probably attributable to the fact that the type of person who takes driver training is less likely to have an accident in the first place, and vice versa. Indeed, there are some skeptics who suggest that high school driver training courses may actually increase accident rates by encouraging teenagers to obtain their licenses earlier than they would otherwise.

The same complications which tend to nullify the value of driver training in the highway safety problem also militate against the effectiveness of stricter licensing requirements. As I remarked at the beginning of this paper, we can and should be much tougher than we are in ruling obviously unfit drivers off the road. But I would be the last to suggest that this is any sort of cure-all. For one thing, very few emotionally unstable drivers can be readily identified as such; "accident prone-ness," insofar as it exists, is usually detectable only after the damage has been done. For another thing, the political obstacles to a really stringent licensing policy are probably insuperable in a society where a driver's license is for most persons virtually an economic necessity, popularly regarded less as a privilege than as a cherished right. And finally, physical impediments are not really a major factor in the total accident picture. Statistically, after all, our worst drivers are young men in the prime of life who are both mentally and physically fit.

So much for the human factor in the highway equation. What I have tried to show in the preceding paragraphs is that, whatever the benefits derived from our heavy concentration on this facet of the problem, they have not served to bring the problem under control. Nor are they likely to, given the enormity of the problem, the complexity of the psychological and political obstacles, and the sheer impossibility of changing human nature to any significant degree. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that if the driver were the only factor in the equation we would have to throw up our hands and resign ourselves to a continuing rise in highway casualty rates and all of the vast problems which they bring in their wake.

Happily, however, the picture is not that bleak. For along with the driver, the other major variable in the highway equation is the vehicle; and here we are dealing with an inanimate and relatively tractable element. If we can't do much to make drivers safer, we can at least do a great deal to make automobiles safer. If we can't prevent accidents, we can at least make them far less costly in both human and economic terms by better automotive design.

Our failure to have done so long ago is, in my opinion, a tremendous indictment of the automotive industry and, more particularly, the American motoring public, which after all has the last word in how automobiles are designed. A recent issue of Traffic Safety magazine quoted Col. John Strapp of the Air Force as saying that "the automobile industry is the only one whose product can still be sold after killing thousands and injuring millions of its customers every year." [Editor's comment: Except for the tobacco industry.] Several months ago Prof. J. Douglas Brown of Princeton University, addressing a national convention of engineers, put the point in the form of a question: "If engineers can design space ships to go to the moon, why can't they design a safer automobile?"

The answers, of course, is that they can. A vastly safer car. Some engineers estimate that if all cars incorporated the safety features that have already been developed and proven, the number of annual highway fatalities could be cut from 40,000-plus to 10,000 or less, with a proportionate reduction in serious injuries. And this without adding prohibitively to the cost of the product.

There are two aspects to the safety design problem. First are improvements designed to help prevent accidents from happening. Second, and even more important, are what might be called "fail-safe" features designed to keep bodily injuries to a minimum when a collision occurs, the car stops short, and the passengers keep traveling at the speed of impact until they are stopped by the instrument panel, the steering wheel, the windshield or, possibly, the pavement via an open door.

In the first category — accident prevention, the faults of most present-day automobiles are numerous and well-documented. To cite but a few: the heavy emphasis on "low silhouette," which often seriously impairs the driver's vision and could be, but isn't, partially remedied by vertically adjustable seats; or the widespread use of tinted windshields, which are promoted as a deterrent to daytime glare but are actually a safety hazard because of the dangerous extent to which they impair nighttime vision; or the non-standardized and generally inefficient arrangement of instrument panels, often compounded by a hood over the panel so that the instruments can not be read without taking one's eyes off the road for longer than desirable; or the tendency to excessively insulated and cushioned interiors which cut the driver off from the "feel" of the movement of the car, from his sense of speed, and from sensing an incipient skid or roll; or the failure to provide as standard equipment on most models independent braking systems for front and rear wheels, so that if one fails the car can still be brought to a stop.

In the second category — the "fail-safe" features designed to minimize injuries when crashes do occur — the deficiencies of most contemporary cars are even more numerous. Again, to mention only a few, we find doors without safety locks, which fly open on impact; cardboard-like roof structures designed for appearance rather than strength; poorly anchored seats which easily become dangerous missiles; protruding dashboard control knobs and door and window knobs, all sources of lethal injury; jutting metal dashboards and chisel-like rearview mirrors; and, of course, non-collapsible steering wheels neatly designed to impale the hapless driver. An orthopedic surgeon writing in the American Medical Association Bulletin recently remarked that to speak of the interior design of most automobiles as "faulty" is "actually a gross understatement, as there is almost no feature of the interior design that provides for safety. It is surprising anyone escapes from an automobile without serious injury."

The deficiencies are not, of course, limited to the interior. Most bumpers today are principally ornamental — so much so, indeed, that several makes and models actually put bumper guards on their bumpers. Yet a tough, energy-absorbing bumper of hydraulic design could have an enormously healthy effect in reducing the rate of deceleration on impact, and bumper-resistant frames along the sides of a car can provide vitally important resistance to lateral impact. From the viewpoint of the pedestrian — who is the victim of almost half of the automobile fatalities in urban areas today — the exterior design of the typical Detroit dreadnaught is particularly menacing. According to one standard textbook on preventive medicine:

If one were to attempt to produce a pedestrian-injuring mechanism, one of the most theoretically efficient designs which might be designed would closely approach that of the front end of some present-day automobiles. When the pedestrian is struck in a typical encounter, the bumper fractures the lower leg; the needless headlight hood or other protuberances rupture the liver, spleen or kidney; and commonly, his head strikes an ornament or outside mirror o the car's hood, causing a punctured skull. Then, he is often thrown against the windshield, where he is likely to meet a passenger on the way out.

In any event, it can be stated as unassailable fact that death and injury on the highways can be drastically reduced — perhaps by as much as 75 percent — through better automotive design and by better packaging of the driver and passengers. The obvious question is why hasn't this been done? The answer, quite simply, is that Detroit is in the business of selling automobiles, not selling safety. It tailors its product to the marketplace; and the American auto buyer is primarily interested in appearance and power, not safety. One industry spokesman estimated that "less than 3 percent of new car buyers look under the hoods, and fewer still ask questions as to construction or reliability." Another spokesman — the top safety official of Chrysler — has likened autos to "women's hats, which must have a special attractiveness that inevitably leads to compromises with function and safety." The result is that vast sums are spent on automobile styling, while (relatively speaking) nickels and dimes go for safety engineering. And this, of course, suits the industry's short-run profit goals very well; for, as one observer has remarked, "the industry is built on calculated, non-functional obsolescence — the appeal of the new color, the new gimmick, the new silhouette, the added horsepower or wheel base or wheel track. What else is it that induces a motorist to turn in his '63 model for a '64 or a '65?"

And in all candor, it must be added that the auto industry has not been at all hesitant about catering unabashedly to the frivolous and often dangerous tastes of the marketplace. If the public is overly enchanted with excessive speed and horsepower, it is certainly part of the result, as well as the cause, of the industry's excessive emphasis on these factors in its promotion. Consider, for example, this piece of copy from a magazine advertisement: "All new! All muscle! All glamor! That's the '63 Buick Wildcat! American's only luxury sports car ... with an almost neurotic urge to get going. Very definitely for the sportsminded male and his equally adventurous mate. There's a Wildcat at your dealer's just rarin' for someone like you to give it a brisk workout." Or this advertising headline: "Pontiac's new, big-bore Strato-streak V-8 with a terrific thrust of 227 blazing horsepower." Or the two-page magazine ad showing a long blurred streak of color and the caption: "9.1 seconds ago this Plymouth was standing still." Or consider some of the names which Detroit gives to its various models in order to suggest speed, power and danger: Thunderbird, Spring, Comet, Meteor, Rocket, Tempest, Fury, F-85, Dart, Lancer, Sting Ray. These, one might justly suspect, are not names selected by an industry eager to convert the public to the idea of safer and more sensible transportation.

It is true, of course, that the industry has made some concessions to safety in response to its critics. All cars now come equipped with anchorage for seat belts, for example; and some cars make available such features as padded dash boards and even collapsible steering columns. But here, two points must regretfully be noted. First, the provision for seat belts was the result not of any initiative in the auto industry but rather of state legislation compelling it — legislation which the industry initially opposed with considerable vigor. Second, the other safety features which have been introduced in recent years are almost all optional extras rather than standard equipment and in many cases fall short of reasonable safety standards in performance, being designed more to give the appearance of safety than to ensure it. Meanwhile, to quote another critic, the industry goes right on designing cars capable of going 140 miles per hour, even with the knowledge that as cars are presently designed, no one would come out alive from a 40-mile-an-hour crash into a barrier."

So much for the indictment. What is the remedy? In the absence of any concerted public demand for a safe automobile, is there any likelihood that the industry will regulate itself in this respect — will it make safety a matter of primary concern regardless of the vicissitudes of the marketplace?

I think not, and most persons who have studied the problem more exhaustively seem to agree. the auto industry is so intensely competitive that even if the manufacturers were genuinely eager to subordinate style and appearance to more sensible considerations they could not afford to add to the cost of their cars for the sake of safety without risking disastrous consequences in the frantic competition for the sale.

What, then, is the answer? Like many others, I believe — and now I belatedly come to the main point of this paper — that the only sensible and realistic answer is for the federal government to establish and enforce safety standards in automobile design, just as it has long established and enforced safety standards in the design of trains and aircraft. And lest anyone protest that this is a socialistic notion, I would point out that passenger cars are the only form of interstate travel which is not regulated by the federal government for purposes of safety.

That regulation of auto safety would be well within the constitutional authority of the federal government is beyond dispute. On this score, it is relevant to recall that some years ago a number of deaths caused by the suffocation of children in abandoned refrigerators cuased Congress to pass — over initial opposition from the manufacturers — a law requiring refrigerators to be equipped with a safety device enabling them to be easily opened from the inside. And this notwithstanding the fact that only 39 deaths had been attributed to this cause during the previous three years. The vastly greater justification for safety regulation of a product which kills more than 40,000 persons a year hardly need be pointed out. In the case of the railroads, the death toll among passengers and, particularly, train crews, was a national scandal until the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act gave the federal government the power to require the installation of two basic safety devices — air brakes and the automatic coupler — which had long been available but had not been voluntarily adopted by the industry. In the case of aircraft, private as well as commercial, stringent federal regulation of safety standards has long been taken for granted, with highly salutary results.

Necessarily, federal promulgation of automobile safety standards would have to be accompanied by an etensive and continuing program of safety research, comparable to the research programs that have long been carried out by the federal government in other areas of public health. In more than half a century of experience with the motor car we have acquired surprisingly little firm knowledge about how to make it a less deadly product, largely because we have made no massive effort to do so. But i would submit that the grim and growing highway toll makes it more clear every day that such an effort is long overdue. The idea of federal regulation of automotive safety standards may sound radical today. But a generation hence I think we will be astonished that it took so long to come about.

Editor's note: While it took a few more years after this paper was written for the highway death rates to begin declining, we think Roger would be pleased to learn that in 2009, the death toll on U.S. highways, 33,808, was the lowest in more than 60 years, and that 2010 is on track to come in even lower. More impressively, the 2009 death rate was 1.13 per 100 million vehicle miles traveled, compared with 5.39 in 1964, just before this paper was written. In absolute number, the peak year for fatalities was 1972 with 55,589, but even then the rate per 100 million vehicle miles had dropped to 4.40. A rate below 1 per 100 million now seems possible, perhaps even in 2010 or 2011.

However, it's interesting to note that even in 1965, when viewed in the context of total miles driven, the automotive death rate, at about 5 per 100 million vehicle miles, was far lower than it had been historically. In the early 1920s, when vehicle-mile records begin, the rate was more than 20 per 100 million vehicle miles; in the 1930s it gradually dropped from 15 to about 11; in 1946 it fell below 10 for the first time. (Data source — PDF link)

The silent language of the star

2010-09-25T21:47:00.004-04:00

Photo by StarrGazr, used under Creative Commons

Presented to the Club by Albert Easton in April, 1974

We live in an age where the eye is constantly bombarded by visual stimuli. The survival of a television producer, as well as some very important economic results to a number of people, depends on his being able to dazzle the eye of the viewer to a greater extent than his competitors for the viewer's time.

Thus, it should come as a surprise, perhaps, that in our house on a certain night in January, and I suspect our house was not alone in this respect, the family was not to be found at its usual place before the TV set. Instead, they were crowded around the southeast windows watching, at a distance of about three miles, that part of a display of pyrotechnics which was not obscured by South Mountain. To this enduring fascination which fireworks seem to hold for the human imagination, I would like to turn our attention tonight.

Fireworks are usually considered to be any combination of chemicals capable of combustion without necessarily obtaining oxygen from the atmosphere, and intended primarily for either noise or visual effects arising from that combustion. The first fireworks, then, by this definition, were probably those used in China in the eleventh century, A.D. Note that this definition rules out the earlier use of what was called "Greek Fire" in Byzantium around A.D. 676, where the visual and audible effects were secondary to the primary goal of setting fire to the enemy.

It is interesting, however, to compare the formula for Greek Fire with that for the Chinese fireworks of four centuries later. Greek Fire consisted of rosin, sulfur, bitumen, and (almost certainly) saltpeter, although the early formulas do not mention it. This mixture was rammed into a copper tube and ignited, the resulting spurt of fire directed for military purposes. Although the two may have arisen independently, it is not unreasonable to hypothesize a historical connection with the Chinese fireworks reported by Marco Polo to have been used for amusement, not military purposes, and which consisted of powdered charcoal, sulfur and saltpeter, rammed into a tube of bamboo. Making allowances for the different materials native to the two regions, the formulas are about as close as they could be.
Saltpeter is a key ingredient in both formulas, since firework devices will not work properly unless they have some means of obtaining oxygen other than from the air. It seems curious that the ancient formulas for Greek Fire do not mention it, but speculation suggests two possible reasons for this. First, it may have been that the true formula was a well kept military secret, and the one essential ingredient was deliberately left out by the recorder. It also seems possible that the ingredient bitumen, which even today is not a well defined mineral chemically, consisted in some part of potassium nitrate, the principal constituent of saltpeter, and about the only good oxidizing agent for fireworks purposes that occurs naturally in any reasonable proportions.

When the technology of pyrotechnics reached Europe from China, it was the military potential, of course, that appealed immediately to Europeans. Fireworks for amusement purposes do not seem to have had much existence independent of the military, although it was not uncommon to celebrate a victory with a fireworks display. At first, these displays almost certainly consisted of a firing off of some surplus shells unexpended in the battle, but they later came to be quite elaborate, and specially designed for visual effect. Special military pyrotechnicians were retained for the purposes of designing victory displays, although I'm sure there was no objection if these pyrotechnicians discovered, in the course of designing a victory display, an effect that was also militarily useful. It might seem at first that retaining a technician to help in celebrating a victory before the battle has been fought is somewhat bold, but if so, this is a boldness not unknown to politicians in our own time.

The art of fireworks construction as carried on in our own times (and there has been very little change since the late 19th century) consists of finding ways to combine and control the timing and direction of a relatively limited number of basic fireworks effects. The first, and perhaps most important of these effects is the force that arises from expanding gases when ignition takes place in a confined space, and for this purpose, the centuries have permitted very little improvement on the classic combination of charcoal, sulfur and saltpeter, which is still effective enough that it is commonly used today, since the ingredients are relatively inexpensive and easy to obtain. There is some advantage in substituting a metal such as powdered aluminum or magnesium for the material being burned, and potassium chlorate for the oxidizing agent, but these ingredients are hard to handle in some ways, and the relatively slight improvement over the classic formula is often considered not to justify the extra expense.

The second important fireworks effect is sparks, which may be obtained from the classic mixture, but here substantial improvement may be gained by adding a powdered metal. Iron will generate large bright yellow sparks, and the intensely bright light generated by the burning of powdered magnesium or aluminum needs no description to most of those here.

The final important effect for visual fireworks displays is the colored fire effect. Here the classical mixture leaves much to be desired. The combination of charcoal, sulfur and saltpeter burns with a dull yellow light, not unlike a wood fire, and except as noted for sparks, it is not often used as the colored portion of a fireworks device. A huge variety of colored fire recipes exists, usually relying on a metallic salt to impart color to the basic mixture, Thus, substituting strontium nitrate for the potassium nitrate leads to red fire, addition of boric acid leads to green fire, etc. Usually, these colored fire combinations do not burn quite as well as the basic mixture, and they are always more expensive, and therefore used only when necessary and where they will be seen.

About six basic fireworks types result from a combination of these basic effects:

Stars are basically just bits of colored fire. In the elaborate commercial displays stars may be used as the terminal effect of some other type such as a rocket or shell, or they may be arranged to spell words or show some symbol of the celebration such as a flag.
Shells involve a charge placed in a hollow tube with the force resulting from ignition used to propel some sort of payload into the sky. An important distinguishing characteristic of the shell is that the charge itself is not propelled, but remains in the tube.
Roman candles are similar to shells, in that a retained charge propels a payload, but distinguished by the fact that the payload in this case is an already ignited star. (The payload in a shell is controlled by a fuse that does not ignite it until sometime after it is aloft.)
Rockets depend on the expanding gases in a charge to propel the charge; and sometimes a payload as well, into the sky.
Fountains are basically rockets pointed toward the ground, so that the shower of sparks is propelled into the air. Usually the sparking power is improved by the addition of some powdered metal.
Pinwheels are rockets mounted on a revolving wheel so that the propelling force and shower of sparks are resolved in a circular direction. As with fountains, powdered metal sparks are a usual addition to enhance the visual effect.

From a very early time in their history, fireworks have suffered from what we would call today "a bad press" — sometimes, I must admit, with complete justification. In the 1930s, it began to become common to make fireworks for private consumption that relied on much more powerful explosives than those involved in the classic formulas, without adequate control or consideration of the additional dangers involved. Thus, it was possible to purchase (and is today in some parts of the country) a device resembling a firecracker that contains dynamite, gun cotton, or some other modified form of nitroglycerine, or even mercury fulminate as its primary charge. Also there has been considerable use of fireworks by children and others whose judgment is unreliable. Considering that the ingredients, and in some respects, the effects are the same, it makes no more sense to put a roman candle in the hands of a five year-old than a pistol. Given the reasonably mature judgment that is required, say, to use a rifle or a table saw safely, and given properly concocted and manufactured fireworks, pyrotechnics does not have to be a dangerous business.

Be that as it may, fireworks have, for some time, been subject to considerable legal restriction. A 1731 colonial Rhode Island law forbade the “unnecessary firing of guns, pistols, squibs and other fireworks." Pennsylvania adopted a similar law in 1751, and the Massachusetts law on the subject dates from at least 1836, although it has been strengthened at least once since then.

All told, 42 states and the District of Columbia now have laws restricting or prohibiting the use of possession of fireworks within their borders.About fifteen of these, including California and the District of Columbia, permit the use of fountains and stars, but prohibit the other types. The Massachusetts law on the subject is a classic example of legal overkill, and bears quoting for that reason: “No person shall sell, or keep, or offer for sale, or use, explode, or cause to explode, any combustible or explosive composition or substance, or any combination of such compositions or substances, or any other article, which was prepared for the purpose of producing a visible or audible effect by combustion, explosion, deflagration or detonation..." If I interpret that literally, it means that if I light a match, and decide to watch the flame instead of lighting my cigar, not only am I in trouble, but so is the tobacco store that gave me the matches.

I want to conclude this with a consideration of some of the psychological factors that make fireworks appeal to us, but before I do, and perhaps by way of illustration, I want to recount some of my personal experiences with fireworks. When I was fifteen, my parents indulgently permitted me to mantain a chemistry lab in a spare room in the basement of our house. The lab started out with honest and honorable intentions, and I did learn a lot of chemistry as a result. Chemlcal experiments fall into two categories, however, those that are interesting enough to repeat, and those that are not. Even today I have no desire to again observe the fact that litmus paper turns blue in the presence of a base, and due consideration for the limited attention span of a 15 year-old boy makes it easy to see why I soon became sated with experiments of that type.

For that reason,those expermments which were repeated tended to be those with the more spectacular effects, and I began concentrating more and more on fireworks. At first, these were confined to the very limited formulas which could be set off in the lab, but gradually I began to increase the quantity of the ingredients to the point where it was necessary to make use of the main part of the basement to fully enjoy the effects. Finally, even that became inadequate. A surprisingly small quantity of fireworks materiel can make enough smoke to completely fill a fairly good-sized house, and my parents absol-

utely forbade the further detonation of fireworks indoors.

For that reason, I arrived at the penultimate event of my career as a juvenile fireworks manufacturer under some severe restrictions. It was a mi-April day in 1954, almost exactly 20 years ago, and the weather in the Hudson valley at that time of year tends to confine itself more or less to cold and unremitting rain — exactly the kind of weather absolutely prohibitive to an outdoor fireworks display. I had as my guest a contemporary fellow experimenter, and the two of us having recently perfected our manufacture of rockets, were attempting to adapt that knowledge to the manufacture of a roman candle. We developed several trial models, and began to give consideration to the search for a suitable testing ground. Clearly, both the house and the great outdoors were out of the question, but at the back of our yard was a large outbuilding, intended as a garage, but now used mainly for storage purposes. This, we concluded, if not the ideal spot, was at least adaptable for use as a test site.

We adapted it by opening the two swinging doors to their widest, and placing the roman candle on a table with the business end pointing out the open end of the garage.

It is unwise to be satisfied with a partial scientific education. Learned as we may have been in chemistry, we were ignorant, or at least forgetful, of the practical effects of Newton's first law of motion. The proto-roman candle turned into a rocket, and instead of firing balls out the door, it fired itself into a mattress at the closed end of the garage. Dousing the matress with water did not succeed in extinguishing the sparks, and that night the garage burned to the ground in a conflagration still quite well remembered in that neighborhood.

That was not quite the end, although it should have been. Ordered by my parents to rid myself of all chemicals and supplies in any way related to fireworks, I began searching for a buyer. To facilitate this, I included in the purchase price an offer to mix the ingredients purchased to the buyer's specifications, and on this basis, I was able to sell the entire quantity quite quickly. The buyer's specifications, in this case, happened to be that we would make a giant roman candle out of a well pipe that had been sunk in his yard, but had reached rock before it ever reached water. Our intent was to use up all the chemicals in such a way as to create a varied and memorable display. It was at least the latter, if not the former.

For reasons that are still not entirely clear to me the gigantic experiment did not go at all as we planned. After filling the pipe with the ingredients, we poured down a combination of chemicals that will ignite spontaneously in about 6o seconds, and drew back some distance to witness the display. It is fortunate that we did; in about 60 seconds there was a single tremendous roar, and the pipe spurted into the sky, spraying mud on all buildings in the vicinity, and leaving a crater about five feet wide and equally deep.

I never attempted such an ambitious experiment again. I hope that these anecdotes are useful in illustrating why fireworks have endured as human amusement in spite of danger and legal restriction, and even lately in spite of better endowed and more commercially profitable entertainment. I note several psychological elements that seem to me to explain the appeal.

First, and perhaps most basic, is the natural attraction that light has for humans, and all living things. For most of mankind's history combustion was the only source of light known to him, other than the astronomical bodies, most of which he showed his admiration for by literally worshipping. If this was the basic, and original element, it came to be joined by another, that of danger, and, more recently, outright prohibition. The same argument which holds that open availability of narcotic drugs would lessen their appeal can be applied to fireworks, although I would agree in both cases that human judgement cannot always be trusted to be the controlling factor in the avoidance of excesses. In fact, in my own case at least, I consider myself fortunate not to have been exposed to the temptation of open availability of fireworks any more than I have.

The Club's historic membership roster, part V: members joining 1902-1912

2010-09-25T20:24:00.077-04:00

Frederick Shurtleff Coolidge

This is the fifth post in a series on the historic membership roster of the Club. These posts may be updated as additional biographical information on the members is uncovered. Research by Martin C. Langeveld, incorporating research by Harold L. Hutchins for a paper given to the Club in 1993.

1902 (Note: No new members joined in 1901.)

Prof. T. Nelson Dale — 1846-1937; taught geology at Williams College from 1893 to 1902; prominent geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey from 1880 to 1920; author of an autobiography he intended to be published posthumously, but the manuscript remained in a box that was not examined until 60 years later. The book was published in 2009 as The Outcomes of the Life of a Geologist (Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences).

Rev. Henry Calkins — pastor of Pilgrim Memorial Church

Judge Charles Lovejoy Hibbard — son of Charles E. Hibbard, who joined the Club in 1886; born in 1871 in Iowa City, Iowa; educated as a lawyer; served as associate justice and justice of Central Berkshire District Court in Pittsfield; married Alice Paddock in 1887. His son, Stephen B. Hibbard, was a founding partner of Pittsfield law firm Cain, Hibbard & Myers.

1905

Clark Harold Foster — Treasurer of W.W. Tillotson Manufacturing Co., "makers of fine cassimeres" (medium lightweight woolens) from 1902 to 1906; born in Hokah, Minn.; educated in Chicago public schools; from Pittsfield, he moved to Troy, N. Y. to become president and general manager of Tolhurst Machine Works.

Dr. Frederick Shurtleff Coolidge — 1865-1915; born in Boston Dec. 1865; graduated from Harvard with an A.B. in 1887 and from Harvard Medical School in 1890; president of his Harvard Class and president of the Hasty Pudding Club; founded the orthopedic department of Rush Medical College in Chicago. For health reasons he moved to to Saranac Lake, N. Y. in 1902 and then to Pittsfield, where he lived until 1913 before moving to New York City for treatment. In Pittsfield he was a founder of the Anti-Tuberculosis Association and founded the orthopedic clinic at the House of Mercy. His widow, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, founded the South Mountain Concerts in Pittsfield (as the Berkshire Music Festival), a progenitor of the Berkshire Symphonic Festival, which became the Tanglewood Music Festival. She also endowed the Coolidge Auditorium at the Library of Congress and commissioned such works as Bela Bartok's String Quartet No. 5, Benjamin Britten's String Quartet No. 1, and Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring, as well as works by Poulenc, Ravel, Prokofiev, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Webern and Bliss.

Rev. Addison Ballard — (1822-1914) Clergyman, educator, author. born in Farmington, Mass; graduated from Williams College in 1842; taught at Grand Rapids, Michigan and Hadley, Mass.; studied for the ministry; taught mathematics at Ohio University. On his 92nd birthday, October 18, 1914, he preached the Sunday morning sermon in the pulpit of First Church of Christ in Pittsfield. Died at the home of his son Harlan Hoge Ballard, who had joined the Club in 1886.

1906

Samuel G. Colt — 1872-1955; graduated from Yale University in 1895; partner in the Richmond Iron Work; mechanical engineer with the Stanley Works; director of the Pittsfield Electric Company; founder of the Colt Insurance Agency.

1907

Rev. Charles L. Leonard — pastor of the First Methodist Church

1908

John Barker — lawyer and city clerk of Pittsfield; born in Pittsfield in 1878; graduated from Williams College in 1899; from Harvard Law School in 1902; served as Pittsfield city clerk from 1907 to 1910; city solicitor from 1917 to 1918; partnered in law with Milton B. Warner; Warner & Baker were counsel for Pittsfield Electric Co., Eaton, Crane & Pike, Berkshire County Savings Bank and Pittsfield Cooperative Bank.

Brace Whitman Paddock, M.D. — 1879-1935; graduated from Yale in 1900; graduated from Columbia Medical School; was on the staff of Roosevelt Hospital and Sloane Maternity Hospital; "an expert with the rifle and had a zest for big-game hunting in Alaska, Labrador and New Brunswick" (Columbia Alumni News, 1935).

1909

Rev. Warren Seymour Archibald — Born in Boston in 1880; pastor of Pilgrim Memorial Church; graduate of Harvard Divinity School. After leaving Pittsfield, he served as minister of South Congregational Church in Hartford, Conn., from 1917 to 1954, one of the longest-serving ministers of that church; a chapel on the church's main floor is named after him.

Walter C. Kellogg — Ward 4 alderman in Pittsfield, lawyer

Rev. Payson E. Pierce — Pastor of South Congregational Church, Pittsfield; later pastor of First Congregational Church of Reading, Mass. (where he opened the church to "blazer-clad golfers and habited riders" for an 8:30 a.m Sunday service to accommodate "outings on Sundays" (The Rotarian, Nov. 1931)

William D. Wyman— First Vice-President and treasurer of Berkshire Life Insurance Company. In 1920, Wyman purchased from the Whittlesey family the house now known as the Thaddeus Clapp House; it was converted to apartments about 1930. Clapp was a member of the Club from 1870 until his death in 1890; the house was then purchased by Club member William Whittlesey in 1906, but he died later that year.

1910

John Crawford Crosby — 1859-1943; born in Sheffield, Mass; graduated from Eastman Business College, Poughkeepsie, N. Y. and Boston University School of Law; practiced law in Pittsfield beginning in 1892; member of the school committee 1884-1990; served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives 1886 to 1887 and the Massachusetts Senate 1888 to 1889; elected to the United States House of Representatives, serving from 1891 to 1893; elected mayor of Pittsfield, serving from 1894 to 1895; city solicitor from 1896 to 1900; justice of the Superior Court from 1905 to 1913; justice on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court from 1913 to 1937; died in Pittsfield.

Judge Edward T. Slocum — probate judge, son of Edward Tinker Slocum, who joined the Club in 1882.

1912

Rev. S. S. Seward — Swedenborgian Lutheran minister, lived at 205 Wendell Ave.; retired from pastorates in Delaware, New York and Detroit.

Joseph F. Titus — Treasurer, Berkshire Life Insurance Company; joined the company in 1911.
Rev. William Merriam Crane — born in 1880, graduated from Harvard University in 1902, ordained in 1907; pastor of the Richmond Congregational Church; Ph.D. in Semetic languages. Built a summer place called "Morning Face," where the Club met in June, 1915 for a summer meeting.
Arthur W. Eaton [Joined about this time] — President and treasurer of Eaton, Crane and Pike paper converting company, Church Street, Pittsfield; previously worked at the Hurlbut Paper Co. in South Lee.

John E. Keeler — employed at Berkshire Woolen Company.

The contentious count: Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford

2010-06-20T18:17:00.001-04:00

Presented to the Club by Roger B. Linscott in 1993.

As usually seems to be the case when my turn comes to read to this august group, I must start by explaining that the title on the notices sent out by [Club secretary] Harold Salzmann has nothing to do with the contents of my paper. "The Way West" was designed to fit an account of the coming of railroads to Berkshire County 150 years ago — but that paper was derailed, subsequent to Harold's call for a title, because I found that a carton of notes I had accumulated on the subject over the years was missing following a move from Pittsfield to Richmond three months ago. Possibly the notes will return in time to bore or edify you in 1993, but tonight you will get a pinch-hitter in the form of a paper that might better be entitled "The contentious count." It deals with a greatly underrated historical figure who has always been a special favorite of mine – Benjamin Thompson, better known to history as Count Rumford.

Lest a few of the more senior members of this group are experiencing vague feelings of deja vu, I should add that he figured in a paper I delivered some 30 years ago — although, if my increasingly unreliable memory serves, he was obliged to play second fiddle to several other 18th century characters on that occasion. In any event, Benjamin Thompson (the name by which I shall refer to him most frequently in this paper) is a person for whom I have always felt a somewhat proprietary interest. I am the possessor of not one but half a dozen cartons of material about him, because I dabbled with the idea of undertaking a book on the subject until that task was authoritatively performed by two competent biographers in the 1970s.
My interest springs from personal connection. Benjamin Thompson was born across the road from my ancestral home in what was then the farming village of North Woburn — pronounced WOEBURN by outsiders but WOOBIN by the natives — a community 12 miles north of Boston. My grandfather, Andrew Linscott, was the founder of the Rumford Historical Association, which still exists; and in front of the Woburn Public Library there stands a statue of the count which, in its inscription, describes him as "one of the first and greatest of American scientists, a man who proved that heat is motion and had a glimpse of the great doctrine known later as the conservation of energy."

Actually, Benjamin Thompson was more than a scientist and inventor of extraordinary insight and originality. He was also a soldier of fortune, a blackmailer, a spy, a social reformer, an unscrupulous adventurer — a many-sided and arrogant genius who was viewed by some as an international scoundrel and by others as a benefactor with few peers. Napoleon rated him among the great minds of his era, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said that Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were the only Americans of that day who could be called Thompson's intellectual equals. Yet his name is far better know today in Munich — where any taxi driver can direct you to his statue on the Maximilianstrasse — than it is in his native land.

But let us begin at the beginning. Benjamin Thompson first saw the light of day on March 26, 1753 in a two-story, gambrel-roofed North Woburn farmhouse which still stands today. In later life he was wont to give glamor to his past by claiming descent from a long line of provincial aristocrats; but this was falsification, for the unvarnished fact is that the family was of simple and impoverished farming stock. Benjamin's father died when he was still an infant — and after only the most rudimentary local schooling, the boy was apprenticed at the age of 13 to a storekeeper in the town of Salem.

Even at this early age, however, Benjamin was beginning to evidence a remarkable intellectual curiosity — nourished, it appears, by his friendship with a somewhat older neighboring youth named Loammi Baldwin, who was later to achieve fame on his own as a civil engineer and as the originator of the Baldwin apple. Together the two boys organized what they were pleased to call a "scientific society," devoting themselves to such varied pursuits as calculating eclipses and trying to invent a perpetual motion machine. By the time Benjamin was serving his apprenticeship in Salem we find him addressing to his friend and mentor back in Woburn such ambitious questions as: "Please to give the nature, essence, beginnings of, existence, and rise of the wind in general — with the whole theory thereof, so as to be able to answer all questions relative thereto" and "Please to inform me in what manner fire operates upon clay, to change the colour from the natural colour to red and from red to black, and how it operates upon silver to change it to blue." And a year or two later, when he had been dismissed from his place in Salem and had become apprentice to another storekeeper in Boston, we find him walking twice a week out to Cambridge, where another friend had obtained for him special permission to attend lectures on natural science and astronomy at Harvard.

Understandably enough, these interests soon led him from storekeeping, a pursuit for which he had neither aptitude nor interest, to school teaching — and it was this, curiously enough, which opened the door to fame and fortune. The town of Rumford, New Hampshire — later Concord — needed a new schoolmaster, and the minister there (who had come originally from Woburn) happened to hear of the ambitious lad from his home town. So at the age of 19, with no money in his pocket and wearing the only suit of clothes he owned, Benjamin Thompson walked from Boston to Concord to begin a new life.

Now it happened that only a few months before this, the leading citizen of Concord — one Colonel Rolfe — had died, leaving behind a huge estate and an attractive, socially ambitious widow of 30. Young Benjamin, six feet tall, strikingly handsome in his suit of clothes, and possessing by now a degree of self-injected polish and sophistication which belied his humble background — struck Mrs. Rolfe as the answer to a widow's prayers, even though he was 11 years her junior. Less than six months after he arrived in Concord they were married — and the country schoolmaster settled down to the life of a country gentleman.

But this, for a youth of Thompson's consuming ambition, was only a beginning. Through his wife's family, he soon obtained an introduction to John Wentworth, the royal governor of New Hampshire; and through Wentworth, who was captivated by his flattery and quick intelligence, Thompson obtained a commission as a major in the New Hampshire Second Provincial Regiment. This new advancement came at a fateful time, for the rumblings of revolt were already audible throughout the British colonies; and Thompson, as an aloof and suddenly well-to-do protégé of the royal governor, promptly became an object of intense suspicion to the colonial patriots in the local Committee of Correspondence. In 1774 the committee accused him of relaying information about their activities to the British authorities, a charge which he denied in vain. Threatened with tar and feathers, Thompson decided that discretion was the better part of valor. Leaving his wife and infant daughter behind, he fled from Concord, never to come back.

Returning to his birthplace in Woburn, he tried to obtain a commission in the Continental Army, only to be rejected because the New Hampshire officers, still suspecting him of loyalist sympathies, refused to serve with him. Once again he was investigated by a rebel committee, and once again he protested his innocence; but he was a marked man, and finally he found no alternative but to go behind the British lines into Boston, which was then under siege by the colonists. When Boston was evacuated by the British, General Gage sent a commission of four men back to London explain his retreat — and strangely enough, Benjamin Thompson was one of the four entrusted with this important mission.

In point of fact, there was nothing strange about it; for we now know that Thompson was indeed a loyalist spy, that he served in this capacity for Governor Wentworth while in Concord, and that he subsequently sent coded intelligence messages through British lines to General Gage even while he was trying to enlist in the Continental Army and was vigorously protesting his innocence to the Committees of Correspondence. The truth of the matter did not come out until 160 years later, when the relevant documents were published in England.

In any event, Thompson's reputation as an espionage agent assured him a warm reception in London, where George III's corrupt colonial secretary, the notorious (and stridently homosexual) Lord Germain, was in urgent need of reliable intelligence about affairs in America. A ruthless politician who had been cashiered from the British Army for cowardice, Germain was favorably impressed by the opportunistic young man from the colonies and decided to make him his protégé and private informer. Within a short time Thompson — now aged 22 — was installed as colonial undersecretary for Carolina and Georgia with the additional title of chief inspector for all supplies sent to the British military forces in America. This combination of posts, larded with the generous quantities of graft available to high officials in that time and place, provided Thompson with an income that was rumored to amount to some 7,000 pounds a year — an enormous sum in those days.

But Germain's young protégé was not content to limit himself to the role of sycophantic courtier. He used his positions not only to enrich himself but also to indulge the intense interest in scientific pursuits which his espionage activities had interrupted. In order to standardize the explosives which he was sending to the King's forces in America he embarked upon extensive research into the explosive force and firepower of gunpowder, creating a variety of ingenious apparatuses that were the first effective measuring devices ever developed for this purpose. His work during this period established him as one of the principal pioneers in the modern science of ballistics.

Once again, however, Thompson's penchant for the cloak and the dagger brought him to the brink of disaster. For at the very time that he was winning fame and fortune as a colonial administrator and ballistics expert he was also secretly conniving with agents of the French government to sell them confidential information about the British fleet. The principal agent, a Frenchman named LaMotte, was caught, tried, and publicly drawn and quartered; but Thompson was spared through the intervention of Lord Germain, who managed to blackmail the Lord of the Admiralty out of having his protégé arrested. Nonetheless, it became desirable for Thompson to leave England post haste, and to this end he had himself appointed lieutenant colonel of a regiment of the King's American Dragoons which had not yet been raised. Two months later he was in Long Island, then occupied by the British, where he somehow managed to raise enough men to bring the unit to full compliment — and, indeed, to arrange a gala commissioning ceremony at which the Prince of Wales himself was on hand to present the regimental colors. It was not, however, and excursion that brought him any military glory. Save for one minor skirmish, his dragoons saw no action, and when he returned to England the following year he was remembered on Long Island not for any battlefield exploits but only for the assorted indignities which he inflicted upon the inhabitants of Huntington, where he had made the church into a stable and the graveyard into a campsite.

His stay in England this time was brief, for the very good reason that he had accumulated too many enemies to feel safe there. Pausing only long enough to have himself appointed a full colonel — a promotion which enabled him to retire from the British Army with a liberal pension — Thompson embarked for the Continent with the aim of becoming a soldier of fortune. The channel crossing, incidentally, he made in company with Edward Gibbon, the historian, who dubbed him "Mr. Secretary, Colonel, Admiral, Philosopher Thompson." Making his way in leisurely fashion toward Austria, where he hoped to offer his services to the emperor, Thompson happened to pass through Strasbourg at the time when Prince Maximilian of Deux-Ponts was preparing to review the troops of the garrison. Once again Thompson's opportunistic instincts came to the fore. Appearing on the parade ground on a white charger in the resplendent uniform of a colonel in the King's Dragoons, he caught the eye of the prince and was invited to join the royal reviewing party. The following day he was en route to Munich, armed with a glowing letter of introduction to Prince Maximilian's uncle, Karl Theodore, the elector of Bavaria.

Karl Theodor, as it turned out, was even more dazzled by this handsome 30-year-old soldier-scientist than Maximilian had been — so dazzled, indeed that he promptly offered him a post as his special military aide and confidential advisor. Characteristically, Thompson not only accepted this offer but simultaneously made arrangements with the British ambassador in Vienna to play both sides of the fence by serving as a secret agent for England in Bavaria. As payment in advance for these services, he returned to England long enough to be knighted by George III before taking up his new duties.

The years that followed made Thompson famous throughout Europe. As the elector's most trusted aide, he became the Bavarian minister of war, minister of the interior, and finally, the prime minister. Armed with broad authority, he set about reorganizing the country's weak and demoralized army until it had become a highly effective fighting force — a feat which he accomplished with a host of reforms ranging from higher pay and better rations to a far-flung program of vocational schooling and organized sports competitions. Most celebrated of all was his use of one entire army corps to transform a huge, swampy wasteland on the outskirts of Munich into the famous Englischer Garten — still regarded as one of the most beautiful public parks in the world.

Meanwhile, Thompson was gaining wide renown as a social reformer by establishing a truly remarkable system of workhouses for the poor. Munich, at that time, was notorious throughout Europe for its extraordinary number of beggars, who were organized into gangs and menaced honest citizens with virtual impunity. So entrenched was this evil that mendicant parents often deliberately maimed or blinded their children in order to make them more pitiful objects of itinerant charity. Appalled by this situation, Thompson devised a plan to combat it in his role as minister of the interior. In one day, he caused every beggar in Munich to be rounded up and arrested — but instead of putting them in jail he lodged them in a huge building which had been specifically set aside for this purpose and which he called the House of Industry. Here the beggars were provided with warm clothes, clean quarters and wholesome meals, and were put to work at reasonable wages, making shoes and uniforms for the Army. Meanwhile the juvenile beggars, who were housed in the building along with their parents, were required to attend special schools conducted on the premises — quite possibly the first compulsory public schooling anywhere in the world. The program was a spectacular success. Mendicancy in Munich was eradicated, several thousand former beggars were taught useful trades, and the government turned a profit by supplying clothing to its Army at minimum cost. In gratitude, the Elector made Thompson a count of the Holy Roman Empire; and thus at the age of 38, the former farm boy from Woburn assumed the title of Count Rumford.

But even these remarkable exploits would not have made Rumford a figure of importance today had it not been for the scientific work which he carried on while in the elector's service. For many years he had been intensely interested in the question of heat — what its actual nature was, and why it reacted as it did on different substances. The scientists of Rumford's day thought that they had established the answers beyond dispute, for they were uniformly committed to the so-called "caloric theory," which regarded heat as a fluid which existed in finite and measurable amounts. This theory Rumford made bold to demolish; and by a series of complex and ingenious experiments he established that heat was in fact not a material substance but, in his own words, "nothing but a vibratory motion taking place among the particles of a body." The theory was not wholly original with Rumford, but the proof of it was; and our conception of the nature of heat today is approximately the same as the conception which Rumford, in defiance of all prevailing expert opinion, enunciated 170 years ago.

As a scientist, Rumford was distinguished not only for his originality. He also was almost unique for his time in the degree to which both the theoretical and practical questions captured his interest. His inquiries into the nature of heat, for example, prompted him to develop a variety of practical devices that many of us probably think of as modern inventions. He invented the double boiler, the pressure cooker, the drip coffee maker and the thermos bottle. He constructed for his Munich work houses the world's first kitchen ranges — a great step forward in an age when all cooking was done over open fires. He made the first systematic studies of the relative heating values of various types of fuels. He developed the first steam radiator and designed the world's first central heating system. He discovered and named the phenomenon known as convection currents — and from this knowledge he not only developed the first fireplace damper but revolutionized the design of the standard fireplace and chimney so successfully that no basic improvements have been made upon his work to this day.

From experimenting with heat it was an easy step to experimenting with lighting — a project which, again, had extremely practical overtones for Rumford as a means of making the operation of his workhouse factories in Munich more efficient. In order to measure the intensity of any light source he developed an ingenious device which is still known today as the Rumford photometer; and in order to establish a standard method of referring to intensities of light, he originated, named and defined the basic unit of candlepower which subsequently was adopted throughout the world. Nor did his concern for increasing the efficiency of his workhouses limit itself to research in heating and lighting. In his eagerness to find methods of providing his workhouse inmates — and his army personnel — with a diet which would be at once healthy and as economical as possible, he conducted exhaustive experiments into the relative nutritional value of various foods. Today, indeed, he is often described as the father of the science of nutrition.

By 1795 Rumford was celebrated throughout Europe as a soldier, statesman and scientist. But in Munich his stock was slipping. Even if he had been blessed with a generous and amiable personality, the inordinate influence which he wielded over the elector would have aroused jealousy in the Bavarian court. The fact that he was actually a man of extreme vanity and arrogance made it that much worse. When he found that his enemies in the court were becoming too numerous and too well-organized to combat, he decided that the time had come to again take flight. The elector Karl Theodor tried to ease the blow by appointing Rumford minister to England — but King George became enraged at the idea that one of his own subjects, and one who had been accused to spying on the British at that, should come to London as the envoy of a foreign government. The upshot was that Rumford was not allowed to present his credentials, and the count became, at the age of 50, a man without a country.

At this juncture his restless mind turned to thoughts of his native land; and to this end he proposed to Rufus King, the American ambassador in London, that he would be just the person to set up a United States military academy comparable to one he had established in Bavaria for the training of Army officers. That Rumford, a former loyalist officer and anti-Revolutionary spy, should have seriously made such a proposal seems astonishing; but even more astonishing was the fact that President Adams welcomed the suggestion and authorized the U.S. War Department to proceed with it. Happily, while Rumford was haggling with the department over the terms of the arrangement, Rufus King made a belated check on Thompson's background. The British government, still eager for revenge against the count for his former double dealings, confided to King the full nature of Rumford's espionage activities, and the negotiations were brought to a hasty end.

Rumford was permitted to remain in England as a private citizen, and for the next few years he devoted himself to the life of a wealthy gentleman-scientist, publishing numerous scientific papers and establishing — largely at his own expense — the Royal Institution, which was the world's first museum of science and, despite bitter birth pangs brought on by the Count's contemptuous attitude toward fellow researchers, was eventually to become a vital force for the advancement of learning. But in England, as in Bavaria, his knack for collecting enemies soon made the atmosphere oppressive. In 1804 he left London forever, and went to Paris. Here he was lionized by Napoleon, whose admiration for Rumford's achievements in the field of ballistics overruled the suspicions engendered by the fact that France was now at war with both Britain and Bavaria.

Here, also, Rumford met and courted the rich and fascinating Countess Lavoisier whose husband, the great chemist Antoine Lavoisier, had been guillotined during the Terror. Rumford's first wife in New Hampshire, whom he had abandoned some 30 years before without any apparent regret, had long since died, so the Count was free to marry again. His marriage to the Countess Lavoisier was, in the words of one biographer, the union of the two most glamorous figures of the day. But his many enemies regarded it more cynically. One London newspaper reported it in the following brief item:

Married: In Paris, Count Rumford to the widow of Lavoisier; by which nuptial experiment he obtains a fortune of 8,000 pounds per annum — the most effective of all the Rumfordizing projects for keeping a house warm.

Rather predictably, the marriage of these two strong-willed persons turned out to be a domestic disaster. The end came when Rumford, enraged that his wife had arranged a dinner party without consulting him, caused his gatekeeper to lock the guests out of the grounds of their Paris house — and the Countess, in revenge, put the kitchen staff to work pouring vats of boiling water over a rose garden that was Rumford's pride and joy. The couple separated amid a welter of public charges and counter-charges, the Count generously settling for only half of his wife's fortune. The Count's only offspring resulting from this marriage was a son — born to the daughter of Madame Lavoisier's gardener.

The few remaining year's of Rumford's life were spent quietly in Paris amid his books, his scientific apparatus, and his gardens. When he died, in 1814, his will provided that the bulk of his estate was to go to Harvard College to endow a chair in physics which still bears his name. His grave, in a small cemetery outside Paris, is still cared for by Harvard in honor of his achievements and his legacy.

Here, you will agree, was a most extraordinary man whose life was filled with achievements that should have guaranteed him an undisputed place in history's hall of fame. In intellectual versatility and scientific creativity he was at least the equal of his esteemed contemporary, Benjamin Franklin. At the apex of his career, his name was a household word in much of the civilized world. Why, then, is he known today only to a few scientists and historians together with a sprinkling of individuals who have stumbled across his path as accidentally as I did? The answer seems to lie largely in Rumford's haughty, amoral and antisocial attitude toward those around him. His contemporaries, with very few exceptions, found his personality so disagreeable that they gave him as little credit for his work as possible when he was alive and forgot him as soon as possible after he died. In a singularly candid eulogy delivered to the French Academy shortly after Rumford's death, the naturalist Baron Cuvier remarked upon the Count's personal vanity and added: "The world is so constituted that a certain height of perfection often seems to it a defect, when the person does not take as much pains to conceal his knowledge as he has taken to acquire it."

Recently Sanborn C. Brown, a physicist at M.I.T., addressed himself to this same riddle of Count Rumford's undeserved obscurity. "In digging out the facts of his story," he concluded,

we find that Rumford's scientific and technological contributions loom very large. We can learn a great deal of the methodology of physics and engineering by a study of his work. A more important lesson, however, is to learn from the story of his life that the really lasting impression a man may make upon history depends as much on his contributions to society in terms of his own character and values as it does on the magnitude of his purely scientific achievements.

Vrest Orton, the late Yankee antiquarian whose country store in Weston, Vermont, many of you may know, expanded on the same theme a few years ago in a delightful monograph entitled The Forgotten Art of Building a Good Fireplace. Benjamin Thompson was scratched from the scrolls of history, says Orton, not only because he was unpatriotic, unprincipled and generally unpleasant, but also because, unlike Benjamin Franklin, he didn't publish an autobiography, which is a powerful way to get one's side of the story on the record. Actually, Thompson began such an undertaking, but on a journey to England in 1795 his private papers and notes for the story of his life were stolen from his postchaise and never recovered.

One further thought on all this, and then I shall let you go. In contemplating the lives of geniuses in the arts and the sciences, one is repeatedly struck by the fact that the greatest outcroppings of creativity seem to have occurred during periods of social and political upheaval, when one might reasonably expect instead a stifling of intellectualism. The Napoleonic era, in which original spirits like Rumford and Franklin — not to mention such giants in the arts as Beethoven — coexisted with general chaos and mass butchery in the public sphere, is a striking case in point. Our own bloody 20th century, which has produced unparalleled scientific advances against a backdrop of political chaos, may qualify as another.

I was reminded of this again last week while watching on television "The Third Man," a 1949 Graham Greene story best remembered by most people for its Third Man Theme. At one point in the movie, the charming but totally unscrupulous central character, Harry Lime, rationalizes his cynicism by speaking of the Italy of the Medicis and the Borgias — a setting of tyranny, corruption and licentiousness in which cruelty and avarice reigned supreme, and which nonetheless produced contemporaneously such creative titans as Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. Compare that, says Harry Lime, with Switzerland: "Five centuries of peace and democracy and stability that produced nothing greater than the cuckoo clock."

I've never quite understood the reasons for this anomaly. Perhaps someone here tonight can provide them.

When East meets West: Personal connections to the Panama and Suez Canals

2010-06-08T20:27:00.001-04:00

Presented to the Club by Michael A. Shirley on May 24, 2010

I suppose most of us old gentlemen, with apologies to the younger among us, can recall an event or two as Jack did in his paper a few weeks ago and on reflection realize that they were connected to momentous events in the course of history. In my case I have two whose significance I did not recognize at the time and certainly did not see how they were related to each other. I guess as children we all remember stories our father told us which never really registered. Well, one in particular comes to my mind.

My dear father, born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1895, had lost his father at the age of five to tuberculosis and his mother a few years later, and was brought up by his grandmother. She was a remarkable woman, called in Jamaica a “drogher woman,” i.e. a trader of goods overseas who travels in a ship called a drogher.

She would frequently go from Kingston to Colon, the Caribbean port in Panama, to sell beer, tobacco, toothpaste, shoes, etc. to the Jamaican labourers who were contracted to build the Canal for the French company in the 1880s. A connection between the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean was seen by all to be an excellent undertaking so obviating a long journey round the southern tip of South America.

Well, my father’s story was of going with his grandmother on one of these trips when he was 14 years of age in 1909, 100 years ago last year, and encountering a tremendous storm which necessitated sending everyone below decks. The ship or “drogher” arrived 24 hours late and he remembered every citizen in Colon lining the harbour to welcome them because they were sure all had perished.

Why were there so many Jamaicans in Colon? Well, at the end of the 19th century, white men didn’t dig holes in the ground! So eager Jamaicans were recruited. Why was it a French company? Well, if you wanted a canal dug there was only one man in the world you wanted to do it, a Frenchman named Ferdinand De Lesseps. He was the King! Through tremendous persistence, diplomacy, coercion and vision he had completed the Suez Canal in1869. The stage was set for another triumph. A French one? No, unfortunately not! But I shall return later to explain why not.

At this juncture I shall recall the second episode in which I was involved and which was a turning point in the world’s history, not that I recognized it at the time. In 1956 I was an undergraduate at Cambridge — England, not Massachusetts. Every long vacation, May to October, I was determined to travel far and wide and adventurously, partly out of curiosity and partly to outdo my undergraduate colleagues. A third of the atlas was not painted pink, i.e. British, for nothing. A good Indian friend of mine at high school and Cambridge had a father who was an agricultural adviser to the Sudanese Government. He would fly to Khartoum and I with another Indian friend would join him, flying cheaply by charter flight to Paris, hitchhiking to Marseilles, crossing the Mediterranean on a boat, sleeping on deck and travelling up the Nile on an Egyptian train from Alexandria. All plans set, all systems at go and excitement and anticipation overflowing, we had not reckoned with Colonel Nasser. He, Egypt’s ruler, nationalized the Canal. My worried mother, resisting all our assertions that we would circumvent all Egyptian nationalistic hostility, called the Foreign Office who advised against our trip. At last Egypt was master of its own canal.

That same canal that DeLesseps had built with European vision, pragmatism and will and mostly Egyptian labour and some money, mostly borrowed, which had left the government in considerable debt, was built and run by the Suez Canal Company, a French company, but whose major if not largest shareholder was British, which was ironic considering the British had never been in favour of building the Canal, had put every obstacle in the way of DeLesseps they could and had in Lord Palmerston the most formidable opponent.

The 19th century was a time when the Industrial Revolution took off particularly in England but followed by Germany and further behind by France and Italy. Mankind was on the verge of conquering the world. Nature would be harnessed for the betterment of all. Disease and ignorance would be no more. Empires were built and trading goods and manufactures became the foundation of wealth and power. The remnants of European influence in that century and into the 20th are to be seen today, the French in North and West Africa and Lebanon, the Dutch in Indonesia and the British all over the world. Germany as a result of the loss of World War I had lost their two colonies in Africa, Tanganyika (now Tanzania) and South-west Africa (now Namibia). The Spanish had never been able to mount enough military or financial power to maintain their once formidable influence in Latin America. Italy’s dalliance with colonialism had provided them with Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) and Libya. It is remarkable to look back and see how the European nations had carved up the world and imperiously set out to outdo each other. Naturally competition was intense, especially between France and Great Britain. The latter’s great strength resided in the Navy. She had come to colonial acquisitions rather late, the Netherlands, France and Spain had started earlier. Acquiring and co-opting Dutch financial expertise at the beginning of the 18th century and building a large and powerful navy, she ruled the waves.

On the other hand France had concentrated on the Mediterranean and particularly Egypt from the days when Napoleon Buonaparte in 1798 landed in Alexandria. He brought with him not just an army but a team of scholars charged with studying the country so that the French could make maximal use of its resources. Into this environment stepped De Lesseps, not immediately but 50 years later after other Frenchmen had tossed the idea of a canal about.

Those other Frenchmen were a couple named Prosper Enfantin and Henri de Saint Simeon. The latter led a group of followers called the Saint-Simonians. They believed in progress but even more they believed that the world had been sundered. Male stood apart from female, religion from science and East was cut off from West. In this duality, said Prosper Enfantin, all suffered. The West was advancing but until it was united with the East, its growth would be stunted. The only way to overcome this division and wounds was to remove the physical bridge that separated them, the land bridge of the Isthmus of Suez, all 100 miles of it. Once the canal pierced the sands and the seas were connected, the energies of East and West would flow together. The world would be made whole and civilization would blossom.

You can imagine that they were considered rather crackpots and barely escaped prison in France and needed the French consul’s protection in Egypt. De Lesseps protected them in the 1830s but 20 years later appropriated their ambition and moved on. But of course to move on required the East’s assent, acquiescence, even collaboration. And here he struck lucky, for in Muhammad Said Pasha, the ruler of Egypt, he found a willing partner.

Said was the son of Muhammad Ali, an Albanian mercenary who rose to power in Egypt in the wake of Napoleon’s defeat. Muhammad Ali was the viceroy of the Ottoman Empire, which had spread across continents into Europe, Persia and the Middle East from its inception in Turkey in 1299. Various states enjoyed different forms of autonomy. Egypt was very autonomous and the viceroy only ceremoniously recognized the Pasha in Constantinople. This state of affairs had come about because Muhammad Ali had gained seniority in the Ottoman Empire in Albania and Kosovo and in 1801, the Albanian commander of the Ottoman army was sent to re-occupy Egypt following the brief Napoleonic occupation, a campaign undertaken to advance France’s trade interests and undermine Britain’s access to India. He was second in command under his cousin.

The French withdrawal left a power vacuum in the Ottoman province. Marmaluke power had been weakened, but not destroyed, and Ottoman forces clashed with the Marmalukes for power. The Marmaluke dynasty had ruled Egypt for 600 years but under Ottoman tutelage. During this period of anarchy Muhammad Ali used his Albanian troops to play both sides, gaining power and prestige for himself. As the conflict drew on, the local populace grew weary of the power struggle and a group of prominent Egyptians demanded that he be installed as the new viceroy. He disposed of the Marmalukes by inviting them all to a ceremonial banquet and murdering every one of them there. Muhammad Ali was convinced of European superiority and Eastern backwardness and the necessity for a modernization of Egypt which he immediately set about and which was carried on by Said, his son.

One of De Lesseps’ tasks was to obtain the consent of Said to build the canal and yet acknowledge the need for permission from the Pasha in Constantinople too. He was a member of the French Diplomatic Service as his father and uncle had been before him so he had lived in several European countries being more of a citizen of nineteenth century Western Europe than of any one country. He spoke several languages. He was a member of what came to be known as “the establishment” and had access to wealth and power but his family was never in the upper tier. Whereas so many of his contemporaries were romantics and dreamers De Lesseps from the voluminous papers, correspondence and autobiographies comes across as a man of tremendous energy and ambition never in doubt. He was a Romantic in action but not in heart. He was confident to the point of arrogance. He sought fame because he thought he deserved it and he was tireless in the pursuit of it.

For most of the 1830s he lived in Cairo at a time when Muhammad Ali was challenging the Pasha, the ruler of the Ottoman Empire, even to the extent of sending an army to topple him and being on the verge of defeating him until the British interfered to send him packing. Turkey for most of the 19th century was “the sick man of Europe” used by the British to fight the Russians in the Crimean War but responsible for much of the instability in its Empire as European powers circled to take advantage. De Lesseps, now the consul, and the French were welcome in Egypt. De Lesseps capitalized on this and, after Said became viceroy, cultivated a close relationship with him feeding him dreams of power and influence through a constructed Suez Canal.

That mission accomplished, over the next few years he was constantly in action. He travelled to Great Britain to attend scores of town meetings to try to persuade the public and business leaders to look favourably on a canal and especially to counteract the British politicians fierce antagonism. And over time he achieved much, particularly when Lord Palmerston left the scene.

Several trips were made to Constantinople to try to pry the Turks away from the British, Moscow to keep the Russians on board and numerous sorties to impress bankers for the eventual raising of money. De Lesseps had one “rabbit up his sleeve.” His cousin had married Napoleon III. Eugenie was Empress of France. She was a tireless supporter of the canal, and given that the Emperor was pretty gung-ho for the glory of France and himself, he didn’t need too much encouragement.

In October 1858, 11 years before the opening of the Canal, De Lesseps sent two letters, one to the members of the press throughout Europe, the other to accredited agents of the Suez Canal Company. Four hundred thousand shares were to be offered at 500 francs each. In addition to the money, subscribers were contributing to the progress of mankind and the onward march of progress. The response was good but not overwhelming. However the stage was set to begin work on the canal.

I shan’t go into details of the construction — suffice it to say that crucially it was almost entirely at sea level, in contrast to the Panama Canal, but more of that at a later date. (I’ve handed a map around.) It entailed excavation of 100 miles, fairly straightforward but of a magnitude never attempted before.

Two or three chief engineers were appointed in the ten years of construction and new enormous machines were built. It was just as well that this mechanization occurred. because the Company ran into immense difficulties with Egyptian labour which had to be brought in from some big distances at great cost and which dried up as a result of the liberal outcry prevalent at that time. Anti-slavery was the “toast” of the era. Perhaps the most noteworthy feature was the early digging of the Sweet Water Canal which brought fresh water from the Nile that was used to irrigate large tracts of land, which became a source of conflict between the Egyptian Government and the Suez Canal Company.

On a windswept day in April 1858 the symbolic strike with a pickaxe was struck at Port Said. If they had seen into the future, De Lesseps would have pushed a button and listened to the roar of an excavating machine. With work under way, De Lesseps’ job was to continue pressure on the British, the Ottomans, Said and the Emperor. In November 1869, the Canal was opened at a great, congratulatory ceremony with all the significant personages of Europe present. It was paid for by the khedive, a new title for the viceroy indicating a diplomatic balance between Ottomans and Egypt, and just as well because the Company was out of money. In fact it had run out of money before the canal was finished and with the carrot of an important and prestigious Egypt dangled in front of him, Said’s successor had bought more shares and with these and other big public works had put Egypt in deep debt.

In 1863 Said, depressed and ill, died — to be succeeded by his nephew, Ismail. (In the Ottoman Empire the oldest surviving male succeeded to the title.) Ismail was the son of a military man, fought against the Ottomans in Syria and had gone to a military academy in France but he was not a military man. In contrast to Said he was deliberate and reserved. He was very much at home with the aristocracy in Europe. On his return to Egypt he avoided the court and built large and prosperous estates in the Nile delta. Again like many rulers of his generation he was an ardent nationalist and modernizer. He loved Egypt and wanted it to be powerful. He admired Europe and wanted to emulate it. Sadly, this required loans which put a huge strain on the budget, which was very reliant on cotton, whose price yoyoed about (not least because of the end of the American Civil War), and on top of that there was the onerous burden of paying for the 177,692 shares in the Suez Canal Company. He tried all sorts of maneuvers to reduce the Company’s influence, such as taking over the cost of the extension of the Sweet Water Canal to Suez but relieving them of their ownership of the irrigated lands it served and confirmed the obligations of his government to pay for the shares that Said had purchased. And further, he abolished the corvee, the Egyptian system for providing cheap labour.

Ferdinand De Lesseps had come too far to allow Ismail and his advisors to endanger his life’s passion. He believed the renewed opposition had one source: Great Britain. But now he was in a stronger position than he had been since the last time the British attacked. He was the head of a large company that was enmeshed in French society. The Canal was part of public life and its fate was intimately bound with French honour. After months of argument, threatened lawsuits and even the issuance of challenges to duels, De Lesseps emerged the winner because the Emperor Napoleon to whom all had appealed finally ruled that the Canal would be finished.

And so it was! Unfortunately for Ismail and Egypt the band did not go on playing. He went deeper into debt. In 1873 alone he borrowed more than 30 million British pounds, which was double the cost of the entire Suez Canal. He admittedly was completing expensive public works projects which were modernizing Egypt and increasing state revenues, but at a tremendous budgetary cost. By the mid 1870s, creditors were becoming worried. They had lent money on exorbitant terms and the interest burden was crushing. In 1875 European bankers decided he was on the brink of insolvency. They turned to his one attractive asset: the shares in the Suez Canal Company.

At first Ismail was considering selling them to French bankers. On hearing that news Disraeli, Britain’s Prime Minister, having already investigated the possibility of purchasing them, jumped at the opportunity to exclude the French. The British had come to rely on the Canal after their original opposition and were competing in a global chess game with the French in their imperial designs. With the help of the Rothchilds a loan was raised and a brilliant coup had been achieved. Britain owned 44 percent of the Company shares and was the largest shareholder. The French were not amused. Of course more debt payments became due and with no more shares to sell and no way to pay the interest due, he was forced to accept a joint Anglo-Egyptian Commission to oversee the country’s finances. His government in effect was placed in receivership and he had lost the ability to determine his own state budget.

Ismail’s rule was a lost cause. He had lost his legitimacy and his ministers turned against him. He went into exile to be replaced by his son, Tawfiq. The naked exercise of European power aroused Egyptian nationalism. Under Said and Ismail the old Turkish ruling class had been forced to share power with native Egyptians, a process occurring across Europe as the electorate was expanded. When Arabic speaking ministers and army officers made a bid for prominence they were rebuffed. Tawfiq appealed for help from the French and British but only the British sent troops, followed by a fleet which bombarded Alexandria in the summer of 1882 after an anti-European riot. They also seized control of the canal. De Lesseps denounced the seizure as a violation of the canal’s neutrality but British troops had in fact occupied the whole country. The Suez Canal had become the lifeline of the British Empire, and it was several years later an International Commission declared that the Canal should never be closed to ships of any nation by any nation, and in the interim the British established a protectorate over Egypt. No nation was going to be allowed to threaten the British Empire and after World War I she ruled Egypt more or less directly.

I think most people in this room remember or heard of the nationalization and seizure of the Canal in 1956. The original 15 percent of annual profits of the Suez Canal Company which Egypt had been issued were ceded back to it in a debt settlement. The sum ran into the millions of dollars. Grievances such as this and the wave of nationalism that was sweeping the world gave the impetus to Colonel Nasser to depose the last khedive, King Farouk, and send him into exile in 1952 and then strike out at the European powers who were in a period of decline following World War II. You remember how the British, French and Israelis colluded in an invasion and occupation of the Canal and then were humiliatingly told to withdraw by the Americans. End of story! The Egyptians now possessed their own canal.

The significances were these: One, most Brits, the government and the outside world had seen a major shift in world power. The arrogance of British imperialism was displayed when we were assured the Egyptians could not run the canal themselves without British and French pilots and administration. They were swiftly proved wrong. At the same time Russia had announced her arrival as a world power by contracting to build the Aswan Dam on the Nile snatching it away from The World Bank, a Western institution.

I think the other present day significance, looking back, is that a similar shift in world power is occurring right now with the emergence of China and the other BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India) and as Britain had to make huge adjustments to the new world order so do we now.
So you see the denial of my trip to Khartoum in the Sudan was brought about by an act which marked a major turning point in history rather than a personal vendetta by Col. Nasser against me.

I believe we can learn another lesson from this event. Europeans and now Americans do not fully realize the resentment and anger caused by the occupation of countries by their armies. Foreign troops in a country are an insult. Repeatedly one hears Afghans and Pakistanis venting their anger at our incursions and bombings. Perhaps we are learning at last but I doubt it.

Finally, I set out to include some of the history of the Panama Canal which included our hero De Lesseps at about the time the Suez Canal opened but I’ve run out of time and space and it looks like you’ll have to wait until May 2012. Please be patient and understanding. Thank you.

Photo: 1880s Suez Canal ferry photo by P. Perdis, via Flickr Creative Commons posting by blaques jacques.

Which way: Norman Rockwell on the state of light-hearted humor

2010-05-11T21:27:00.003-04:00

Norman Rockwell was a member of the Monday Evening Club from 1957 until his death in 1978. He presented the following paper to the Club about 1967. It is transcribed from an undated manuscript in the collection of the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass. The manuscript is typed in all capital letters, with some handwritten notes; the orthography is revised in this transcription to standard capitalization, but spelling and punctuation is generally left as it is in the original. The transcript was originally contained in an envelope on which was written “Monday Evening Club / Is light heart humor.” Throughout the paper, the word is spelled “humour,” which may have been the habit of Rockwell’s wife Mary L. (Molly) Rockwell, the likely typist.

The Club is grateful for the assistance of Corry Kanzenburg and Jessika Drmacich of the collections staff at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass. for providing access to the manuscript of this and other papers Rockwell presented to the Club, to the museum's director, Laurie Norton Moffatt, for alerting us to their existence (via a Facebook comment!) and to the Norman Rockwell Licensing Company for permission to publish the papers.

Licensed by Norman Rockwell Licensing, Niles, IL.

First of all, I want to apologize for the title of this paper – “Which Way.”

When Joe [Joseph C. Nugent, then Club secretary] called me to get the title I had two subjects that interested me. But Joe needed a title right away to I told him my predicament and suggested the title “Which Way.” He said that was all right but now it does not describe the theme. I apologize.

The subject of this paper is “What Has Happened to Light-Hearted Humour in America?”

[handwritten:] First and foremost I want to say, I am, personally, convinced we are making a better America for all Americans to live in. But we live in an age of change and change is painful and it just ain’t funny. Now to the paper. [marginal note: Nuclear]

I do not know the exact date of what I feel is the demise of our good-natured humour, but I suspect it was about 5 or 6 years ago.

It did not die suddenly but I believe suffered a long and slow decline.

We do know that our brand of humour was born with the birth of our country. Ben Franklin was certainly at the birthday party and contributed many wise and funny comments.

America was a strong and lusty youngster and from the writings and records of those early days we find loads of stories and jests that attest to the fact that a good sense of humour was one of our happy birthrights.

Of course most of the jests were poked at our former British rule[r]s. These were good-natured jokes, after all we had won our freedom and could afford to be jocose.

Then came our expansion westward, from which came the robust earthy humour of our frontiersmen.

They created that marvelous legendary figure of Paul Bunyan, the mighty lumberjack, with his superhuman pranks.

Then there was John Chapman, born right here in Massachusetts in 1774. We know him as Johnny Appleseed. He was very serious about his mission in life, but his comic costume and comic manners have placed him in our history as a light-hearted legendary figure.

There is a whole long list of fabulous humourous folklore characters that our ancestors invented to help our nation to grow bigger and stronger.

There was Mike Fink the last of the keelboatmen,
Sam Toolman, the Yankee Pedlar
Big Moose, the super-fireman
John Henry, the famous Negro railroad spike driver
Blue Johnny, the Mississippi River pilot
Sam Bass, the Texas Robin Hood
and Steve Masorac, massive steel worker
and many others

These were all fabulous giant figures conceived out of the imagination of the common people of America, to help them with the overwhelming task of building a new and mighty nation. They are the folklore giants of our nation’s history.

Then came a great change in the source of our humour. The writers of light-hearted humour appeared. These men were not legends but gifted individual human beings who captured and fun-loving hearts of Americans and, in fact, of readers all over the world.

The two earliest such writers were Josh Billings and Artemus Ward.

It is recorded that Abraham Lincoln, bowed down by the stresses and responsibilities, often had his secretary read him excerpts from the fun of Artemus Ward. Often, too, he would ease the tension and worries of his associates in regaling them with some joke by Artemus Ward or Josh Billings.

That light playful humour hurt no one but helped a whole nation at war with itself.

It seems to me that right now we could use some of that light touch to help us over the rough spots.

—

But to get back to the subject at hand.

Next came our greatest humourist, and maybe even our greatest writer, Mark Twain.

May I, here, insert a personal note —

About 30 years ago I was commissioned to illustrate Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

I had, of course, read both these books when I was at school but I felt, now that I was to illustrate them I must read them again and more intently. I was in California, I bought the two books and boarded a plane (not a jet) for the east. I thought reading them again would be something of a bore, but a necessary bore. On the plane I sat next to a stout, sour-looking, elderly gentleman and began reading.

I suddenly became absorbed and amused. I couldn’t help giggling a bit and finally laughing out-loud. Much to the surprise and disgust of my fellow passenger. Finally he asked me what amused me so much. I gave him Huckleberry Finn to read while I went on with Tom Sawyer. He was really a fine old gentleman and we had a wonderfully jolly plane ride all the way back to New York.

Mark Twain was a real genius and his natural and compelling humour captured America and the whole world.

We all know that later in life he became disenchanted and bitter, writing some of the most frightening books ever written, but they will never extinguish the good-natured humour of those early Mark Twain writings.

Even as I am writing this paper I smile, thinking of that masterpiece of crazy fun “Jim Smily and his Jumping Frog” [sic].

Then came minor geniuses of humour such as Ring Lardner and his “You Know Me Al” series, full of America’s special type of fun.

Irvin Cobb with his quiet humourous stories, and many others. Irvin Cobb wrote a wonderfully amusing series about a Southern judge. But Southern judges are no longer a source of humour.

James Thurber was another.

Again a personal note —

Mr. Thurber wrote a story for the Saturday Evening Post called “You Can Read it in the Newspapers.” The editors sent it to me to illustrate. It was about a very unhappy big league baseball manager, whose team was hopelessly in the league’s cellar. He was drinking at a bar and trying to forget his woes when in walked an awful show-off of a midget. The manager, in his cups, got a brilliant idea and put the midget in a baseball uniform. At the next game, the midget got to first base every time he came to bat because the opposing pitcher could not pitch to the midget’s diminutive strike zone. But unfortunately in the last inning the conceited little bastard, instead of letting the pitcher throw him four balls, tried to knock out a home run. Of course he missed. The infuriated manager charged out of the dug-out and, picking up the midget, threw him up into the bleachers. Badly as I tell it, it was a hilariously funny story and I’ll never forget trying to get a midget in Arlington, Vermont to pose. I finally had to go to a theatrical agency in New York City to get my midget.

Thurber was fine but not a Mark Twain. Nevertheless, he was good medicine for America.

Where are our humourous writers today?

—

Years ago there were three outstanding humourous weekly magazines. Life magazine was one, now it is a news picture publication. Judge was another, it died as did Puck magazine.

The New Yorker is a fine magazine and publishes many funny ironical drawings and sometimes a Perleman [sic] story, but it can not be classified as a humourous publication.

The college campus magazines used to be gay and light-hearted but now they seem to be always protesting something or other.

Of course there is Mad comics and Playboy!!!!!!!

—

We all know there are millions of honest, happy, decent Americans and their families, but why then do the most popular big circulation magazines publish almost exclusively articles about sex, homosexuality, race relationship, drug addiction, crime, political corruption, life in the ghettos, sin in the suburbs and war, sandwiched between page after page of glamourous advertising?

This sounds like a pretty grim list and, after a little research, I find it isn’t completely true. These big circulation magazines also print articles on space exploration, advances in medicine, food and fashion, so they are not all bad. But I still contend, and I think they will admit, that what they sell on is the exposé type of thing.

It must be what we want to read and think about, or believe me, the magazines would not print these articles.

[handwritten:] That’s the paper

[handwritten:] Now I am interested to hear whether you gentlemen see the situation as I do?

For 47 years I painted 300 covers for the Post, mostly trying (but not with my tongue in my cheek) to paint the humorous foibles of our friends and neighbors.

No magazine wants them anymore and, to be honest, I could not and do not want to paint them anymore.

I just finished a picture for Look of two colored kids who had just moved into an all white neighborhood*. This type of picture is what I am interested in.

Why?
________

*This painting was “Negro in the Suburbs ,” (sometimes referred to today as "New Kids in the Neighborhood") which appeared in Look magazine in 1967.

From the archives: The Club's 1894 trip to Cummington

2010-04-28T15:49:00.003-04:00

The following communication was sent to members of the Club in August, 1894 in preparation for a summer meeting in Cummington, Mass., to attend the centennial celebration of the birth of the poet William Cullen Bryant on August 16th, 1894.

A transcription of the day's proceedings may be downloaded here.

Commemorating this expedition 111 years later, during a summer outing in 2005, the Club paid a second visit to the Bryant Homestead, now a house museum maintained by the Trustees of Reservations.

MONDAY EVENING CLUB

The Monday Evening Club will show its respect for the memory of William Cullen Bryant by having the summer meeting of the Club, at the Bryant Homestead in Cummington, on Thursday, August 16th, in connection with the centennial celebration of the birthday of the poet.

Each member of the club is expected to invite such guests as he may choose, and to make his own arrangements for food and transportation, and thereafter to grumble only at himself. But the committee suggests that members join in making arrangements to attend the excursion in such parties as they may find agreeable.

The route is via. Dalton, Windsor P. O., East Windsor (alias Jordanville) and West Cummington — the road to the Bryant place crossing the stream at the first bridge below West Cummington. The distances are, from Pittsfield to Windsor P. O., thirteen miles; to West Cummington from Windsor P. O., four miles; total from Pittsfield to the Bryant Place, twenty-one miles. The road is good. Shaw's hotel at West Cummington village is pleasantly located. As the distance from Pittsfield is but twenty-one miles, the whole excursion can be made by rising early on Thursday; but the best way is to drive to Windsor or Cummington after business hours on Wednesday, sleep there, go to the celebration on Thursday, returning home in the afternoon. Accommodations can be secured at private houses in Windsor, East Windsor and West Cummington. Oats should be taken for the horses, as the farmers have only new hay. Also a pail to water horses on the route. A daily mail for Windsor, East Windsor and West Cummington goes by stage, leaving Dalton at one o'clock P.M.

Members who desire further information will please interview the committee. The point of rendezvous at the Bryant Place will be indicated by the banner of the club.

Members are requested to inform the Secretary promptly whether they hope to attend the meeting.

Per order of the Commitee,

GEO. H. TUCKER, Secretary

Pittsfield, Aug. 7th, 1894.

From the Daily Union [Springfield, Mass.] of Aug. 6th, 1894.

"CUMMINGTON, August 4. — All the arrangements are now practically complete for the observance of the 100th anniversary of the birth of William Cullen Bryant, August 16th. On the evening of the 15th the school children will have a celebration of song and recitation in the village church.

At the celebration on the 16th, Lorenzo H. Tower, librarian of the Bryant library, will give an address of welcome. Parke Goodwin [sic., actually Godwin] of New York will then preside. The address will be given by Edwin R. Brown of Elmwood, Ill., who will arrive at Cummington about the 10th. After the oration the only surviving brother of William Cullen Bryant, John H. Bryant of Princeton, Ill., will read three poems. One is "The Rivulet," and the other two are poems of Mr. Bryant's own composition, "A Monody," and "At 87." This will be followed by the singing of Mrs. Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic."

A basket lunch will follow and then will come the after dinner addresses. The speakers will be Charles Eliot Norton, Charles Dudley Warner, President [of Clark University] G. Stanley Hall and George W. Cable.

Mrs. Julia Ward Howe will be present and will read a poem written by her for Bryant's sixtieth birthday and read at the Century Club in New York. To this she has added several stanzas appropriate to the occasion. There will be letters from ex-Senator [and Club member, Henry L.] Dawes, who was born in the same house with Bryant, and from Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. During the day John W. Hutchinson of Lynn, the only surviving member of the Hutchinson family, that created such enthusiasm by their singing during abolition times, will sing "Old Friends are the Best."

John Bigelow, the warm friend of Bryant, and who was associated with him for many years on the New York Evening Post, has been obliged to cancel his engagement to speak at Cummington, because his duties in connection with the New York constitutional convention will detain him in Albany."

___________________

Here's a New York Times report of the centennial celebration, published the next day, August 17, 1894:

POET BRYANT'S NATAL DAY

____________________

CELEBRATED IN THE WOODS WHERE

"THANATOPSIS" WAS WRITTEN

_________________

Eloquent Addresses Delivered by the Friends of the Genius Whose Inspirations Came from the Berkshire Hills, Their Forests, Streams, Birds, and Flowers — John Howard Bryant Read "The Rivulet" — Minds and Hearts of Those Present Stirred.

CUMMINGTON, Mass., Aug. 16 — Pleasant skies and the presence of distinguished speakers and poets, together with the desire to do honor to the memory of William Cullen Bryant, drew hundreds of visitors to this little town to-day, and the centenary of the birth of the poet was celebrated.

The exercises were held in a beautiful grove a few rods beyond the Bryant homestead. It was at this homestead that Mr. Bryant passed the last twelve Summers of this life, and here that he spent the days of his youth and young manhood. It was in these woods that "Thanatopsis" was written, and the rivulet of which he wrote still goes murmering to the larger stream as it did in the days of his boyhood.

In the grove where the exercises took place, the visitor to-day can see the traces of the initials cut on the trees by the Bryant boys. The grove is situated alongside the roadside between the upper and lower Bryant places, so called because the lower one was the homestead of the Bryant family and the upper one was the home of Bryant's mother, whose maiden name was Snell, and both were repurchased by Mr. Bryant in the evening of his life.

The exercises consisted of an address of welcome by Lorenzo H. Tower, the librarian of the Bryant Library [in Cummington], on behalf of the townspeople. Then Parke Godwin of New York, who was associated with Mr. Bryant for many years and who married his eldest daughter, was made the presiding officer.

In taking the chair Mr. Godwin quoted Samuel Johnson's sentence: "The man is little to be envied whose patriotism would not gain force on the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona." Mr. Godwin said that Johnson meant by this that localities by mere historic association acquire a power which stirs the minds and hearts of men to their fountains. Such a locality is this, and assuredly no American can visit these hills without feeling his whole nature exalted by the consciousness that here one of the first and most energetic of American citizens, William Cullen Bryant, was born.

In closing, he said, "Mr. Bryant died in his eighty-fourth year, and the last words that he uttered in public were in aspiration for the coming of that universal religion and soul liberty, when the the rights of human brotherhood shall be acknowledged by all the races of mankind."

Mr. Godwin then introduced Edwin R. Brown of Elmwood, Ill., a native of Cummington and the orator of the day. Mr. Brown spoke eloquently, and his address occupied something over an hour in delivery. He said in part:

Bryant was a marvel, but no miracle. He was the result of high and favoring conditions, among which is the fact that he came of a line sound in physique, strong of brain, and eminent for virtue , and that the perspective of his pilgrim lineage runs back to John Aldon and Priscilla Mullins, under the bows of the Mayflower. In Bryant's parentage there was a happy combination of cavalier and Puritan in temperament.

Bryant's power of acquiring knowledge was so prodigious and his industry so unremitting that, in effect, he lived two or three centuries.

John Howard Bryant, now eighty-seven years old, the only surviving brother of the poet, and himself a poet of recognized ability, read his brother's poem "The Rivulet," and followed it with two compositions of his own, the first being, "A Monody," written in 1878, just after the death of William Cullen Bryant, and the second, "At Eighty-seven," written for the occasion.

After singing some of the old familiar tunes, under the direction of Mrs. Julia Shaw, including Mrs. Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic," an adjournment was taken for dinner.

After lunch, which for the uninvited guests was in the form of a basket picnic, the people were called to order again, and a number of addresses were given by distinguished men and women. Among them were Prof. Charles Eliot Norton of Harvard University, Charles Dudley Warner, President G. Stanley Hall, the Rev. John W. Chadwick of Brooklyn, George W. Cable and H. S. Gere, the veteran editor of the Hampshire Gazette, in which paper Bryant's first poem was published, when he was ten years old.

Mrs. Julia Ward Howe read a poem written for the sixtieth birthday of the poet and first read at the Century Club in New York. To this Mrs. Howe added several stanzas appropriate to the present occasion.

John W. Hutchinson, the only surviving member of the famous family of singers whose stirring songs created so much enthusiasm in the old abolition days, was also present by invitation, and sang "Old Friends are the Truest."

In the course of his remarks, Prof. Norton said:

In the long run, Bryant's fame is likely to rest on a few poems. One of the greatest services which a poet can render to his people is to make their land dearer to them. This is what Scott and Burns did for Scotland, Wordsworth for the English lakes, and it is what Bryant has done for Western Massachusetts. The nature from which he drew inspiration was that of the hills, the forests and the streams of Berkshire and Hampshire Counties, and the character expressed in the poetry and its dominating sentiment were the descriptive character and the sentiment of the people of this region during his youth.

Happy the poet who has this power. Happy the poet who thus deepens the patriotic pride of his own people and becomes thus part of it. Happy is he who indissolubly connects the thought of himself with a scene or with some natural object — even with a bird or a flower.

The harebell nods with the rhythm of Scott's delightful verse; the daffodil dances to Wordsworth's tune; the lark sings Shakespeare's "Hark! hark!" at heaven's gate; the nightingale never ceases to lament for her poet's untimely dead in Keats, and as Burns has made the mountain daisy, so has Bryant made the fringed gentian his own. And as long as a wild duck shall cross the crimson sky of evening in his flight, so long shall Bryant's memory float heavenward with it.

Say it ain't so: Unravelling misquotations

2010-04-17T20:44:00.001-04:00

Presented to the Club by Roger B. Linscott in December, 1996.

I have been, for most of my adult life, an avid collector of quotations. This began more than 40 years ago, when I took a leave of absence as a young reporter at The Berkshire Eagle to do the research for a volume that Harper's publishing company was putting together on the life and times of Theodore Roosevelt — to be published in 1958 on the centennial of TR's birth.

The project immersed me in a remarkably colorful era. Teddy Roosevelt was, of course, one of the most quotable figures in American history, with dogmatic opinions on just about every subject under the sun and not the slightest hesitancy about expressing them. Many of his contemporaries in that post-Civil War era, when the country was being catapulted into the role of an industrial giant and world leader, were similarly outspoken in their political views and equally skilled in the arts of verbal rough and tumble.

With that as a starting point, I began filling what with time have become a dozen notebooks with colorful quotes and noteworthy aphorisms — for the most part of the sort that one doesn't find in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, which draws the bulk of its material from the Bible, Shakespeare, Cervantes and the other great authors, and from eminent statesmen and philosophers of history — and relatively little from the journalistic, political, sporting and entertainment sort of figures that populate my own unpublished book of quotations.

Like many others who have become addicted to the mining of celebrated sayings, I soon made a basic discovery: An astonishingly high percentage of the world's most familiar quotations, when one researched them a bit, turn out to be misquotations — often plagiarized by the persons credited with originating them, usually re-worded almost beyond recognition over the years, and frequently totally spurious.

Let me cite a few well-known examples.

Every sports buff is familiar with the heart-rending link, "Say it ain't so, Joe" — addressed to the baseball great, Shoeless Joe Jackson, by a juvenile Chicago fan when Jackson was being led into a courthouse grand jury hearing as one of eight White Sox players charged with throwing the 1920 World Series in exchange for a gambler's bribe. Shoeless Joe's famous response to the tearful young admirer was, "Yes, kid, I'm afraid it is."

The interesting thing about this poignant exchange is that, in reality, it never took place. It was wholly the invention of an imaginative sports reporter, and Jackson never knew about it until he read it in the Chicago Herald-Examiner some days after it was supposed to have happened.* The fact that it was counterfeit was pointed out at the time — but nobody cared to listen. The story expressed a widespread feeling of disenchantment and lost innocense, and people wanted to believe it whether or not it was true.

Here's another example from the sporting world. Back in 1946, the Brooklyn Dodgers were leading the National League when their rivals, the New York Giants, were ignominiously occupying seventh place. The Dodgers' aggressive manager, Leo "the Lip" Durocher, was acidly badmouthing the Giants' capabilities to a group of sports writers one day when Red Barber, the sports announcer, jokingly said to him, "Why don't you be a nice guy for a change?"

"Nice guy?" said Durocher, pointing to the Giants' bench, "They're the nicest guys in the world — and where are they? In seventh place." Within a few days, Durocher's remark had been bounced around in the nation's sports pages, and by a process of fast osmosis, had becoming the much pithier dictum: "Nice guys finish last." That's the quote that is endlessly repeated today, half a century later, and no one is bothered by the fact that it isn't what he actually said.

Or take an example from the entertainment industry. the best-remembered saying of W. C. Fields, the great comedian and misogynist, is: "Any man who hates dogs and children can't be all bad." A nice one-liner, with only one problem: Fields never said it. At a 1939 Hollywood banquet in which Fields was the guest of honor, one of the minor speakers on the dais was Leo Rosten, an obscure academic, who was called upon after a number of windy eulogies had been offered. In an effort to bring the boring evening to an early end, Rosten confined himself to one sentence: "All I can say about Mr. Fields, whom I have admired since the day he advanced upon Baby Leroy with an ice pick, is this: Any many who hates babies and dogs can't be all bad." The remark brought down the house — and because Fields was famous while Rosten was not, it was quickly attributed to Fields. It has now become an unshakable part of his legend.

Somewhat comparable —to move from Hollywood to the grand stage of world history — is the case of Marie Antoinette, Austrian-born wife of Louis XVI. The one thing tht the world remembers about her is that when told that France's impoverished peasants had no bread, she airily replied, "Then let them eat cake." Over the centuries it was served as a tag line for callous indifference to the poor — and incidentally, the title of one of the Gershwin brothers' best Broadway scores — but no historian has ever been able to come up with evidence that Marie Antoinette said it. The saying had been mentioned many years earlier in Roosseau's Confessions has having come from the mouth of some provincial duchess (the wording was "Let them eat brioche," not cake) and other variations have been traced back through earlier centuries. Marie Antoinette, cordially disliked by the French populace, was just a handy name to hang it on.

This illustrates another phenomenon well known to collectors of quotes: Famous remarks require famous names. The line about hating dogs and children would have died aborning if it had been credited to the obscure Mr. Rosten; it achieved immortality only by its false attribution to Mr. Fields. Likewise, "let 'em eat cake."

One of my favorite bon mots was uttered by the second Lord Melbourne, a British Whig prime minister of the early 19th century. Speaking of his contemporary, the distinquished but somewhat arrogant historian Macaulay, Melbourne said, "I wish I were as cocksure of anything as Tom Macaulay is of everything." The phrase languished uncelebrated for many years until Disraeli — who was a good phrase-maker himself, but was quite shameless about stealing phrases from others without attribution — used it against his political arch-enemy, Gladstone. That immediately made it a familiar quotation, for which Disraeli is generally given credit.

Ironically, Disraeli himself has been the victim as well as the perpetrator of plagiarisms. The adage "Never complain, never explain" was credited to him by a biographer at the turn of the century. But for the American public, at least, it is generally credited to Henry Ford II, hardly a likely source of perceptive observations. Two decades ago, when Ford was arrested in Santa Barbara while driving under the influence with a lady who was not in fact his wife, his public relations man got to the scene before the newspaper reporters did. The consequence was that Ford limited his press comments to the phrase "Never complain, never explain" and received credit among the unknowing as a man of the world — and a phrase-maker as well.

Probably no American writer has been given credit for more things that he didn't say than Mark Twain. He was, of course, a very funny man, especially on the lecture circuit; but many of his best lines were not, in fact, his. A good example is the widely-quoted observation that "Wagner's music is actually a lot better than it sounds." The actual source of that witticism was a late-19th century humorist named Bill Nye — and Twain in his autobiography was careful to say so, to no avail. "We see this all the time," said Robert Hirst, curator of the Twain papers at the University of California. "Attributing something to Mark Twain adds to the joke: When they hear his name, people are disposed to laugh. That's the reason why he's saddled with so much stuff that isn't his."

Twain is only one of the many people who have become peculiarly strong magnets for quotes. In our own time, Winston Churchill is perhaps the most striking example. He was, of course, a magnificent phrase-maker, as his writings and particularly his inspiring wartime speeches attest. But because of his celebrity and verbal brilliance, he became the subject of far more than his share of apocryphal stories which people continued to tell even after he had denied their authenticity.

One of the best-known of these was the episode at a dinner party at which a lady sitting next to him declared indignantly, "You're drunk!" — to which he is supposed to have replied, "Yes — and you, madam, are ugly. But tomorrow I shall be sober." The other legendary exchange of insults involved Lady Nancy Astor who, according to the story, said, "If I were your wife I'd put poison in your tea" — to which Churchill allegedly replied, "And if I were your husband, I'd drink it." No Churchill biographer, including his son Randolph, has ever found a scrap of evidence to authenticate these anecdotes which, among other things, are totally inconsistent with the prime minister's distaste for personal insults and his deferential manner with women. Still another famous Churchill put-down which in fact is in the realm of fiction is his supposed remark that Clement Atlee, his Labor Party opponent, "is a modest man who has much to be modest about." Mr. Churchill vigorously denied ever having said this — in part, he explained, because he didn't consider Mr. Atlee at all modest.

On this side of the Atlantic — and many removes from the world of Churchillian eloquence — a notorious magnet for quotes during the golden age of Hollywood from World War I to the emergence of television was the irrepressible movie mogul Sam Goldwyn. A Polish immigrant who never fully got the hang of the English language, he was already famous in my youth 60 years ago as master of malaprops and a butcher of his adopted tongue. When he was told that a proposed movie script was "too caustic," he was said to have replied, "To hell with the cost — if it's a good picture, we'll make it." On the same theme he supposedly declared: "I don't care if my pictures don't make a dime, so long as everyone comes to see them."

On another occasion, he was quoted as declaring that "a verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on." Perhaps most famously, it was reported in Variety that he had broken off a tense labor negotiation with the statement, "Gentlemen, include me out."

By the mid-thirties, the word "Goldwynism" had been added to the American vocabulary, and inventing new ones became a cottage industry among press agents and celebrities, to the point at which it was impossible to know which quotes were authentic and which were fake. One of the best of the latter was his supposed dictum that "Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist should have his head examined." Quote detectives finally attributed this one to the playwright Lillian Hellman after Goldwyn himself had denied authorship on the grounds that he himself had been to psychiatrists on many occasions.

In addition to the dictum that famous remarks need famous names attached to them, an axiom of the quotation business is that words of wisdom should be as concise as possible, ideally punchy enough to fit on a bumper sticker. This tends to be a problem for people like Ralph Waldo Emerson, who sounded off with great sagacity on a wide range of subjects, but whose words tend to get severely abridged in the retelling. One of America's most cherished quotations is "Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door." But one can search Emerson's journals in vain to find any reference to mousetraps at all. He did once write, "If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards or pigs to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs than anyone else, you will find a broad, hard-beaten path to his house, though it be in the woods." The bumper-sticker version substituting the mousetrap for Emerson's list of products was, in fact, concocted in 1920 by Elbert Hubbard, a popular editor and orator, who attributed it to Emerson in a book entitled A Thousand and One Epigrams, rather a bestseller in its day.

Emerson has suffered from abridgement in an equally familiar quotation that is still being retailed under his name. What he actually said was, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines" — but the abridged version that that is almost universally quoted ["Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds"] omits the crucial word "foolish" and simply pictures consistency itself as a vice, thus converting a sensible observation into a handy and rather meaningless aphorism for people addicted to changing their minds.

Another example of the tendency to give famous remarks the Reader's Digest treatment is a familiar quotation that is closely associated with Berkshire County — the statement that the ideal college would consist of "Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other." The quotation is attributed to James Garfield, then a U.S. senator from Ohio; Mark Hopkins was the revered president of Williams College from 1836 to 1872, and Garfield's words in his praise were spoken at an alumni dinner in New York in 1871. No copy of Garfield's speech exists, and no two alumni who attended the session agreed afterward on just what he had said. But after Garfield became the 20th president of the United States 10 years later and was martyred by an assassin's bullet shortly after taking office, he became the subject of a eulogy penned by his friend and fellow-Williams alumnus John Ingalls, an enormously popular figure on the national lecture circuit. It was Mr. Ingalls who arbitrarily boiled down the late President Garfield's comments about higher education to the log with a student and Hopkins at opposite ends. In its abridged form it may have put it quite differently than Garfield did, but by wrapping it up in a concise package it provided an enduring commentary on the concept of teacher-based education.

Well, having commented at such length on the fact that many of our most cherished popular quotations are wrongly remembered, wrongly attributed or just plain fictious, one should probably ask whether that actually matters very much. Probably not. Yet, aside from being a fascinating pastime, the study of how we misquote, and why, does tell us a great deal about ourselves that we can't learn in any other way. As one of the most literate of contemporary scientists, Stephen Jay Gould, has observed, "Almost all 'standard quotations' are wrong. The stories of their rectification give us great insights into human foibles and cultural biases."

*Or maybe it was the Chicago Daily News, according to a piece about Jackson in Sport Magazine in 1948:

I guess the biggest joke of all was that story that got out about "Say it ain't so, Joe." Charley Owens of the Chicago Daily News was responsible for that, but there wasn't a bit of truth in it. It was supposed to have happened the day I was arrested in September of 1920, when I came out of the courtroom.

There weren't any words passed between anybody except me and a deputy sheriff. When I came out of the building this deputy asked me where I was going, and I told him to the Southside. He asked me for a ride and we got in the car together and left. There was a big crowd hanging around the front of the building, but nobody else said anything to me. It just didn't happen, that's all. Charley Owens just made up a good story and wrote it. Oh, I would have said it ain't so, all right, just like I'm saying it now.

Photo: "Shoeless Joe" Jackson

The rich get richer: Is there a solution to the inequitable distribution of wealth?

2010-03-28T20:37:00.003-04:00

This paper was presented to the Club by Roger B. Linscott in 1989. Roger was, for many years, the associate editor of The Berkshire Eagle, Pittsfield's daily newspaper. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his editorial writing in 1973, and died in 2008 at the age of 88, having been a member of the Club since 1950. We are indebted to Roger's daughter, Wendy Lamme, for a treasure trove of Roger's Club papers which we will be publishing during the rest of 2010. In this paper delivered 20 years ago, he tackled the issue of the skewed distribution of wealth in America, which has only gotten more skewed in the two decades since he wrote it.

A widely-admired New Yorker cartoon of my younger years — done, I believe, by Peter Arno in the 1940s — depicted a rather elderly and obviously successful cleric seated at his desk in front of a huge vaulted window in the office of a Fifth Avenue cathedral. Fingertips together and eyes cast heavenward, he is addressing an eager-looking novice on the other side of the desk; and what he is saying to him is: "Young man, as one who would seek preferment in our calling, I would admonish you to avoid whenever possible two subjects: politics, and religion."

I was given approximately the same advice, albeit under the considerably less pious auspices of my sponsor, the sainted Billy Annin,* when I joined the Monday Evening Club 40 years ago. While it was not writ in stone, he said, or even officially in the bylaws, there was a tacit understanding that readers should circumambulate the subjects of politics and religion, lest sensitivities be wounded and fires started which might not be easily quenched. I trust that tonight's paper won't be felt to trespass on that on that taboo. It deals with a subject of unavoidably close concern to all of us: money — and more specifically, the appalling inequity with which money is distributed in our society.

Obviously this has political overtones, but not of a particularly partisan nature. Very rich people, for self-evident reasons, tend to be political and economic conservatives, but there have always been plenty of exceptions, especially among those of primarily inherited wealth. On this score it might be noted that the three richest American presidents in this century — the two Roosevelts and John F. Kennedy — were all professed reformers who made no bones about their contempt for economic royalists. TR told Congress that "our prime objective should be to put a constantly increasing burden on the inheritance of these swollen fortunes, which it is certainly no benefit to this country to tolerate." FDR was of course denounced as a traitor to his class for what he liked to characterize as his relentless war on entrenched greed. And JFK was fond of quoting an eminent authority, his own ruthlessly acquisitive father, to the effect that "all businessmen are sons of bitches." In any event, it is getting harder and harder to type-cast the very rich in a political sense. Most of the vast new fortunes being made today are accumulated by essentially apolitical entrepreneurs who are pragmatists rather than ideologues. They will go wherever the money is and will deal with whomever they need to get it.

And (to return to the main theme of this paper) they are getting it in astonishing quantities. After nearly half a century of slow but steady reductions of extremes of inequality of income in this country, the pendulum about a decade ago began swinging the other way. Since the late 1970s the rich have been getting richer and the poor, in real dollars, poorer. And now the great American middle class is beginning to get squeezed from both directions.

This growing gap between the very rich and the rest of American society has not been generally acknowledged by the public, or acknowledged by the politicians, many of whom are part of the problem, but the facts and figures are indisputable. A recent Congressional Budget Office study found that for the 40 percent of Americans at the bottom of the economic scale, average after-tax income is lower today than it was in 1977. Real after-tax earning for typical middle-class families held just about even during the same period. But the average real after-tax income of the richest one percent of the population jumped by a staggering 74 percent.

The disparities are particularly arresting when one uses the much more meaningful yardstick of net worth, which is to say the difference between an individual's total assets and total liabilities. An exhaustive analysis by the Congressional Joint Economic Committee two years ago established that while the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans owned approximately 63 percent of our nation's economic pie in 1964, their holding had increased to just under 70 percent 20 years later. The same study found that the concentration of wealth in the top one percent had reached 34 percent — significantly (and ominously, in the opinion of economist John Kenneth Galbraith) the highest concentration since 1929, the year of the great crash.

All indications are that in the several years since the figures in the Joint Economic Committee's study were collected, the disparities in incomes and net worth have been accelerating. For seven years now, Forbes Magazine has been turning a crew of researchers loose to compile a list of the 400 richest Americans. In 1982, one only had to have a net worth of $93 million to make the Forbes 400. By 1988, the minimum needed had jumped to $240 million.

Other statistics from other sources are equally mind-boggling. A study made by the economics department at Georgia State estimated in 1987 that there were approximately one million millionaires in the U.S., and that their ranks were being expanded at the rate of about 10,000 new millionaires a year. The Income Statistics Bulletin of the Internal Revenue Service has estimated that the number of U.S. millionaires approximately doubled between 1976 and 1982 and may have more than doubled in the years since. In 1987, the responsible publication Financial World reported that the five top moneymakers on Wall Street (individuals, that is) the previous year had averaged $88 million apiece in earnings — and yet only one of them was rich enough to rate a place on the rarefied Forbes 400. That one was Michael Milken, the celebrated junk bond king who, though a mere vice-president at Drexel Burnham Lambert was worth an estimated $600 million at age 40. (Incidentally, Mr. Milken's relative youth is unusual but far from unprecedented among the super-rich. Prominent on Fortune's current list of billionaires is 32-year-old William Gates III of Seattle, whose 40 percent holding in Microsoft computer systems is valued at $1.4 billion.)

Probably one reason there has been relatively little public concern about the concentration of so much of the national wealth in so few hands is that most people have great difficulty in comprehending individual fortunes of such magnitude. The figures may be somewhat more comprehensible when described in comparative terms. For example, the net assets of the 400 richest people listed in Forbes add up to a figure considerably greater than the horrendous federal deficit that we seem to incapable of bringing under control. The total assets of the Forbes 400 also are greater than all the savings that all Americans have in commercial banks — and, if Social Security is taken out of the equation, greater than all of the annual federal expenditures currently directed to assisting directly or indirectly the tens of millions of Americans classed at underprivileged.

The concern here, it should be emphasized again, is not with the unequal distribution of wealth as such. This has always been a fact of life under the free enterprise system and, within reasonable limits, has generally been considered a reasonable price to pay for the enormous benefits that the free enterprise system can convey both in terms of enhancing political freedom and stimulating economic growth. The concern, rather, is with the fact that in recent years the historic movement away from excessive inequalities — a trend that has been an essential element of social harmony in this country — has been reversed, with great potential risk of both economic and social damage to the national interest if the reversal continues.

The factors that have contributed to this turnabout — to this great explosion of individual wealth — are numerous, ranging from skyrocketing value of such finite resources as land and minerals at a time of escalating population, to the huge opportunities that large-scale deficit spending offers to the creditor class.

But much of the explanation is basically political: specifically, the changing nature of our national party system. These changes tend to magnify the political influence of big money while diminishing the influence of the more populist elements that have historically demanded legislative and regulatory restraints on excessive concentration of wealth. Instead of the old-style ward and precinct organizations aimed at getting out the working-class vote, we now have technology-based campaigns run essentially by the new fund-raising, polling and TV-oriented consulting elite. Organized labor, long the strongest driving force for populist policies, has lost virtually all of its muscle as the shift from manufacturing to service jobs has sent union membership plummeting. One crucial result is that while voter turnouts among those in the top third economically have held steady since the 1950s, turnouts among those with less-than-the-median incomes have fallen sharply and steadily. Considering all of these factors, it is hardly surprising that the "L" word was considered a bogeyman in the recent presidential campaign and that regulatory policies in Washington have been run for some time now by men who share the view of Edwin Meese III that "the progressive income tax is immoral." Such an ambiance is not conducive to restraints on a system that creates and sustains increasingly grotesque accumulations of family wealth.

One of the problems with such an ambiance is that vast wealth, in the absence of adequate restraints, tends to expand itself in a sort of chain reaction process without any particular relationship to the wisdom or foolishness of its possessors. On this point I would cite no less an authority than Edgar Bronfman, the whiskey baron and loyal son of Williams College who, according to Fortune, was worth $3 billion at last count. "To turn $100 into $110," said Mr. Bronfman recently, "is work. To turn $100 million into $110 million is inevitable." In other words, if you are exceedingly rich, doing nothing will guarantee your becoming even richer. If you want to diminish your fortune, you really have to work hard at it.

The Dupont family of Delaware is a striking example of how big money — in this case, inherited money protected by competent estate managers — just keeps on growing, no matter how much the heirs may try to screw it up. Although they are one of America's very richest families, with net assets of well over $10 billion, no Dupont of recent generations has been an entrepreneurial success and none in the current generation is even a big factor in the family business. Yet there are 35 Duponts on the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans. Interestingly, one of the few members of the clan who even tried to become a big entrepreneur on his own was Lammot du Pont Copeland Jr. (known as "Motsey") who flopped so dismally in 1970 that he was obliged to file the biggest personal bankruptcy action in U.S. history, listing liabilities of $59 million. But all's well that ends well. By 1985 the timely arrival of some new inheritances had restored his fortunes and put him back on the Forbes 400 list with a net worth of $150 million.

Another example of the tendency of big money to proliferate without much human intervention was cited by Vance Packard, the popular sociologist, in his recently published study of American affluence entitled The Ultra Rich. In the course of doing the research for his book, Mr. Packard interviewed 30 ultra-rich individuals whose net worth averaged $330 million. That was in 1985. By the time he had completed his research in mid-1987, the average net worth of the same individuals had risen to $425 million.

Mr. Packard's interviews also underscored an interesting fact which, while it has been noted by many others, helps explain why the increasing concentration of great wealth into relatively few hands has not aroused much public notice, let alone concern. With a few flamboyant exceptions, most of those who have it don't flaunt it, if only because they don't want to advertise themselves any more than they have to to thieves, blackmailers, IRS investigators, charitable fund-raisers and the like. This is in fascinating contrast to the ultra-rich of 75 to 100 years ago whose main gratification, as Veblen pointed out in his Theory of the Leisure Class, seemed to be to parade their wealth in the form of conspicuous consumption. Most of today's rich wouldn't want to burden themselves with anything like the turn-of-the-century manor houses of Lenox or Newport, even if they could find the household help to staff them. They tend to rent rather than own, and to hire service agencies rather than employees of their own. Of the 30 ultra-rich interviewed by Packard, one-third had no live-in help whatever. Only one-fourth could be classed as big spenders. Most lived on considerably less than $1 million a year, and some on less than $200,000.

Interestingly, Mr. Packard found that more than one-half of his 30 super-rich subjects had to be rated low in terms of social responsibility, with a record of contributions to charity that appeared to be at best minimal when measured against their assets. This is consistent with a recent study conducted by the Council on Foundations in conjunction with the Yale Program on Non-Profit Organizations. That study concluded that the greatest holders of wealth tend to give only a tiny percentage of it while still alive. There are, of course, some splendidly deep pockets, like those of An Wang, founder of Wang Laboratories, who has become this state's leading patron of the arts, or David Packard, co-founder of Hewlett-Packard in California, who is in the process of systematically turning over nearly $2 billion of his assets to good causes. They are, unfortunately, the exceptions. Few of today's ultra-rich would subscribe to the principles of the great steel tycoon, Andrew Carnegie, who declared that "a man who dies rich, dies disgraced." (As it turned out, Mr. Carnegie didn't quite achieve his goal of dying poor — but he gave it a real college try. For nearly 20 years after selling U.S. Steel he devoted himself to getting rid of the enormous proceeds, principally by the commendable device of building several thousand public libraries in small towns throughout the nation. At his death — which occurred in 1919 at Shadowbrook Cottage, scarcely a mile from where we now sit — only about $10 million of his $350 million fortune remained.)

The question I raised at the start of this paper remains to be answered. Can fortunes in the $100 million to $10 billion range be justified today — especially when the great bulk of the wealth is merely passed on to heirs who typically have done nothing to earn it and are unlikely to devote a significant portion of it to worthwhile social purposes? And more particularly, can we afford a continuation of the present trend, in which the already enormous inequities are becoming more so as a smaller proportion of the population acquires a larger share of the total wealth?

The answer, I submit, is no. Any kind of wealth that is used to generate legal economic activity has some value to the general economy, and any society that is to thrive needs a surplus of wealth after its citizens meet necessary living costs, for investment in economic growth. But a sensible balance is needed. As Lester Thurow, the MIT economist, has pointed out: "If the wolves ate all the caribou, the wolves would also vanish." There is no real justification for letting people acquire vastly more than they can possibly spend, and there is almost an element of indecency in having so much of the national wealth tied up in so few hands when the nation has an abundance of urgent social problems along with a staggering national debt. Both the growing irrelevance of large fortunes and the many negative consequences for society in permitting them to proliferate, raise important questions. Clearly, in my opinion, there is need for a national policy that put the concentration and perpetuation of vast accumulations of private wealth under closer public control.

The Federal tax system in its present form is not a particularly satisfactory way of doing this, mainly because taxes are based almost entirely on annual income — wages, fees, dividends and profits from the sale of assets. While the ordinary citizen's income amounts, typically, to at least 95 percent of his wealth, the billionaire's income may be less than one percent. If he has good estate planners, his income may indeed be just enough to pay his bills. He may take no salary, or only a nominal one. He may place his wealth in land or in stocks with negligible yields — the kind of investments that simply grow and grow with no federal tax reckoning until sale or death, by which time competent estate lawyers will have dispersed most of the taxable assets through trusts and other strategies.

This problem has suggested to Vance Packard and many economists the desirability of instituting a direct tax on wealth — specifically, a progressive annual tax on that portion of a citizen's net worth that exceeds a very high base — say $25 million, at present levels. It is not a radical idea: At last count, 17 nations, mostly in Western Europe, were already doing it. Its obvious selling points in this country would be as a means of simultaneously producing tens of billions in new revenue and stimulating the rich to invest idle money, while making a real start toward reversing the current trend toward concentration of wealth in fewer hands.

The logical companion policy in any effort to keep the gap between the very rich and the rest of us from continuing to widen would be to institute much tougher limitations on the transfer of wealth in estates at death, or by gift during the donor's lifetime. Vance Packard's proposal — which seems to me rather too lenient — is that no one should be allowed to transfer by will, trust or outright gift (except, of course, too a spouse) more than $25 million in 1989 dollars. Until that ceiling (beyond which there could be no further transfers) were reached, current tax rates on transfers would prevail. Contrary to the contention of many economic conservatives, this wouldn't require the dismantling of family enterprises. There are many way to keep a controlling interest in a family business — most simply by issuing two kinds of stock, one with voting rights and one without, and keeping the voting stock within the family.

As Mr. Packard points out, imposing such an absolute ceiling on the amount of assets that could be transferred to heirs would produce a sustained explosion of benevolence, to the great benefit of numerous worthy causes and society in general. Creation of foundations has been out of vogue with the super-rich since Congress tightened them up two decades ago by requiring that at least five percent of their funds must be distributed to charitable causes each year. A ceiling on transfers to heirs would revive foundations overnight. Wealth holders confronted with the alternative of enriching Uncle Sam would certainly correct the situation in which significant philanthropy doesn't begin until death, and even then on an average scale that is not notably generous.

My own sentiments are pretty close to Mr. Packard's on this point, but I have no illusions about the extreme difficulty of getting his modest proposals written into law, at least until the rich get a lot richer and the rest of us a lot poorer. A favorite theme of mine for many years has been that while I don't begrudge a man's right to make as much money as a he legally can, I do think it grossly unfair that the beneficiaries of his acquisitiveness should be heirs who probably couldn't have made it on their own and who, in any event, have already been given a substantial head start in life educationally and otherwise. I myself would be happy to see an inheritance tax of 100 percent, but what has always amused me is that when I espouse this argument, the people who object to it most vociferously are often the ones who have the least prospect of receiving any significant inheritance and the least prospect of having any significant bequests to leave to others. Like the weekly buyers of lottery tickets, they do not take kindly to killjoys who threaten their secret dream that someday, somehow, lightning will strike.

There is another factor at work here, too: a sneaking admiration for great wealth that has been characteristic of the lower economic orders since time immemorial. I remember that in my salad days, when I spent more time than I should have at the Pillars, Bill Monahan's colorful but now defunct** roadhouse in West Lebanon [N.Y.], a framed sign behind the bar asked, "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" It is, of course, an outrageous question, suggesting as it does that the highest pursuit of human intellect is the acquisition of money. But it reflects a belief that is probably held devoutly by most working stiffs as by the rich themselves. It helps explain why, except in times of deep economic distress, populism is not really very popular.

*William S. Annin, a Club member and Berkshire Eagle columnist
**The original roadhouse was defunct in 1989, but a successor establishment continues in the same location today.

Photo of Roger Linscott from The Boston Globe.
Monopoly photo by Giovanni Orlando, used under Creative Commons License.