A Boat Against the Current

This Day in Civil War History (Jubal Early Ends Md. Invasion, DC Feint)

2009-07-14T20:47:00.000-07:00

July 14, 1864—As he wrote his after-battle report to Robert E. Lee, Lt. General Jubal Early felt entitled to crow about the month-long campaign that ended the day before—a period in which he had roughed up the Federal army in the Shenandoah Valley, diluted the relentless pressure of Union troops against the Confederate capital in Richmond, and reached closer to Washington than any other rebel commander was able to do throughout the war.

Early the morning before, Early had slipped back into Virginia with his army. But, though his campaign had ended, questions about its purposes and results had only just begun.

Both Early’s contemporaries and later historians have proven ambivalent about his performance. But whatever triumphs he couldn’t win on the battle, he was always ready to claim victory on the written page.

A perpetually dyspeptic mouth, likely to erupt in a colorful torrent of curses at any given moment, when coupled with the large bald expanse on his scalp, accentuated “Ol’ Jube’s” image as the snapping turtle of the Confederate high command.

Early as constantly rolling cigars in his mouth, perhaps to get rid of the bad taste he felt because of widespread distrust of his loyalty and ability. He’d opposed secession all the way till the last minute and had only given his reluctant support when his home state of Virginia supported it. Even service in the thickest fighting of the war—at Antietam, Gettysburg and the Wilderness—failed to overcome a reputation for being as fractious with fellow officers as with the Yankee enemy. Some in the army still blamed him for actions on the first day of Gettysburg that contributed to the catastrophic Southern loss.

Now, Robert E. Lee—with his daring instincts coming to the fore again—proposed to give Early the same kind of opportunities he had once provided his trusted subordinate, the late Stonewall Jackson. Early’s mission: relieve Federal pressure off the critical railroad junction of Lynchburg, dash up the Shenandoah Valley, invade Maryland—and, if he judged the path open to him, attack the biggest prize of all: the Northern capital in Washington.

The first part of the plan worked like a dream, as Early pummeled Union General David Hunter at Lynchburg, then drove north into Maryland. By early July, he was heading toward Monocacy Junction, in the heart of what Abraham Lincoln’s War Department called its “Middle Department”—a theater of the war (Maryland, Delaware, and the eastern shore of Virginia) deemed uneventful enough so that a disgraced general could be safely consigned to it.

The only thing General Lew Wallace hated more than his assignment to this post was the lack of resources at his disposal to combat a force of Early’s size. Union Army Chief of State Henry Halleck had tried to pin the blame for the carnage at the Battle of Shiloh on Ulysses S. Grant, who in turn assigned blame to Wallace. Now the former lawyer-politician found himself facing 30,000 Confederates around the Potomac.

Wallace got on a train that took him to Monocacy Junction in Maryland—positioned almost exactly between Baltimore and Washington—and over two days scraped together a makeshift force. In a four-hour battle beginning at noon, Wallace got the worst of it, with 1,880 casualties to only approximately 700 for the Confederates. But he had bought valuable time for the Union.

On July 11, Early was giving serious thought to an attack on Washington, which lay before him, virtually undefended—until he caught sight of the troops of Union General Horace Wright, who’d been ordered to DC on the double.

Early was dubious about his prospects: he no longer had the element of surprise, and, as he explained it in a postwar reminiscence published two decades later, his troops—who had been traveling 12-20 miles per day in the sultry summer weather—were succumbing to the heat. Under the circumstances, any plans for an attack on Washington were put in abeyance, along with any ideas about liberating Confederate prisoners at Point Lookout.

Early decided on a demonstration of force against Fort Stevens. Little did he know that on the Union side, a lanky fellow with a beard and a large dark stovepipe hat were observing the proceedings, serving as an easy target for Confederate sharpshooters. The salty Confederate would have chuckled at the advice given by a young Union officer –later Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.—would deliver to Abraham Lincoln—“Get down, you damn fool!”

The South generally hailed Early’s raid, while the North was divided about how much good it did Lee and Jefferson Davis.

Within a few months, most of the Confederacy turned dramatically against Early. The failures of lackluster generals David Hunter and Franz Sigel in the Shenandoah Valley convinced Grant that he needed to eliminate it as a corridor for Confederate movements, as well as to deprive the Confederate government of its “breadbasket.” This time, he sent one of his most trusted subordinates, Philip Sheridan, against Early.

In three consecutive actions in the fall, Sheridan gave Early a drubbing. Public opinion turned sharply from Jubalation to violently angry. Thanking the general for his service, Lee still felt obliged to relieve him of command.

Worried that the North would treat harshly with him for burning Chambersburg, Penn., during a raid, Early scrambled to Canada to flee retaliation after Appomattox. With lots of free time on his hands and the necessity of making ends meet, he was the first major military figure to come out with his memoirs. For the remaining three decades of his life, he found it fruitful to make people forget about his mistakes by making others—notably James Longstreet—look worse in comparison.

General Lew Wallace used his pen, too, but posterity has been kinder to him than to Early. Monocacy allowed him to achieve a measure of vindication with Grant. In the postwar period, he would serve on tribunals that would judge the Andersonville and Lincoln conspiracy defenders. A decade later, bored by his stint as territorial governor of New Mexico, he came to write in his spare time the classic best-seller Ben-Hur.

Quote of the Day (John Hume, on Difference as Source of Conflict in Ulster and Abroad)

2009-07-14T02:58:00.000-07:00

“All conflict is about difference, whether the difference is race, religion or nationality. The European visionaries decided that difference is not a threat, difference is natural. Difference is of the essence of humanity. Difference is an accident of birth and it should therefore never be the source of hatred or conflict. The answer to difference is to respect it. Therein lies a most fundamental principle of peace - respect for diversity.”—Northern Ireland politician John Hume, Nobel Peace Prize lecture, December 10, 1998

The first death in “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland is generally cited as Francis McCloskey, a 67-year-old Catholic civilian who died on this date in 1969, as a result of head injuries incurred at the hands of a member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary during civil-rights demonstrations in Derry. Nearly 3,500 people had died and 30 years elapsed before the Good Friday Agreement—the peace plan agreed to by John Hume, David Trimble, Gerry Adams, and an astonishingly wide array of other Ulster figures—finally brought the hope, as Adams put it, of taking “the gun out of Irish politics.”

As an Irish-American, I long found it a source of anguish that Ulster became one of the world’s most constantly cited sources of sectarian violence. I now find it a source of pride that this same region now serves as a laboratory for conflict resolution to be studied all around the globe.

My greatest hope is that somehow, this same conflict-resolution model can be duplicated in the Mideast.

A huge difference between Northern Ireland and Palestine is the attitude of insurgents toward the government they blamed for injustice. No matter how much the Irish Republican Army pointed to the British government as the source of iniquity in the province, no serious element in the movement sought to destroy Britain itself as a nation—the IRA simply wanted it out of Ulster.

That same condition does not obtain in Palestine, where Israel’s right to exist is questioned by terrorists and their foreign enablers.

Additionally, the British Parliament, despite its shortcomings, provided a model for communication, give-and-take and compromise even for its Irish adversaries. Such governments are in short supply in the Mideast. In fact, the one country that practices democracy most strenuously—Israel—is the very one whose physical survival is at stake.

Germany and Japan after World War II are often cited as examples of successful democracy-building in countries where they had not previously existed. But planting the seeds for such reform is tenuous, as Iraq is proving right now.

Respect for diversity, as Hume’s lecture implies, runs both ways. Let’s pray that both sides in the Mideast come to accept this.

This Day in Media History (“Bouncing Czech” Robert Maxwell Buys Mirror)

2009-07-13T21:01:00.000-07:00

July 13, 1984—The improbable—no, preposterous—career of press baron Robert Maxwell took another unexpected turn, as he took control of the Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN)—and positioned himself for another down-and-dirty rumble with fellow yellow journalist Rupert Murdoch.

I’m not surprised by the allegations of phone hacking of private citizens by Murdoch’s minions in the U.K. After all, the publisher of the New York Post has never adequately explained how his paper was able to get a photo of serial killer David Berkowitz asleep in prison (an image that got plastered on the front pager with the headline, “SAM SLEEPS”).

I am surprised, however, by all that I hear about Maxwell. The amount and variety of his shenanigans continue to astound, 18 years after his mysterious death aboard his yacht.

Some years ago, on a field trip for librarians, someone on the tour recounted how Maxwell had offered her a job as an executive assistant. Initially, she was torn about taking it, because the money was so good. Eventually, she decided not to make the job switch because she did not want to lose precious time with her family by constantly being at Maxwell’s beck and call.

After Maxwell’s death, time wouldn’t have been the only commodity lost by the librarian. The scandal of Maxwell’s death was how much he had endangered the pensions of his employees.

Over the years—and especially with the premiere of the BBC adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now—Maxwell was often compared with Augustus Melmotte, the con artist extraordinaire at the heart of the Victorian masterpiece of high finance and meager ethics, especially on these counts:

* Both vaulted to the top of their professions using nefarious financial schemes.

* Both were émigrés from the Continent (Maxwell, from Czechoslovokia, inevitably became known as the “Bouncing Czech”) who sought and gained political office in their adopted country (in the ‘60s, Maxwell served in the House of Commons as a Labour Party member).

* Both men died as their financial house of cards was about to collapse.

But Maxwell’s resemblance to Melmotte on a particular point brought out especially invidious comparisons, as well as the worst aspects of their accusers. Both men, it was noticed, were Jewish.

In Trollope’s time, anti-Semitism was a product of the right; in Maxwell’s, it had switched over to the left, many of whom over the last two decades have dismissed guesses that Maxwell accidentally drowned or (more likely) committed suicide. No, these new anti-Semites believe, Maxwell was killed on order of the Israeli secret service, Mossad. Or by the Russian Mafia. Or who knows who? Pick your favorite conspiracy theory. One’s as good as another.

The purchase of MGN was particularly heartening for Maxwell—it meant he not only had fulfilled his dream of owning a national paper but that he could finally take on Murdoch, who had defeated his 1969 attempt to purchase The News of the World.

Maxwell’s ambitions far outstripped his ability to keep his empire going, however. By the end of the ‘80s, he was in a merry-go-round of acquiring and disposing of one item after another: media groups, paper producers, printers, banks, insurance and leasing companies. Within a year of his death, his company filed for bankruptcy.

Quote of the Day (Alice Meynell, on Traveling)

2009-07-13T02:50:00.000-07:00

“Spirit of place! It is for this we travel, to surprise its subtlety; and where it is a strong and dominant angel, that place, seen once, abides entire in the memory with all its own accidents, its habits, its breath, its name. It is recalled all a lifetime, having been perceived a week, and is not scattered but abides, one living body of remembrance.”—Alice Meynell, “Spirit of Place” (1899), in The Essays by Alice Meynell (Centenary Edition), by Sir Francis Meynell

Flashback, July 1809 (Excommunicated Napoleon Takes Pius VII Prisoner)

2009-07-12T20:23:00.000-07:00

A dictator who rose from the ashes of his country’s last military conflict succeeded in encircling and isolating a pope named Pius.

The pope-dictator couple, however, were not Pius XII and Adolf Hitler, but Pius VII and Napoleon Bonaparte.

The similarities in names and situations notwithstanding, the struggle between Europe’s first would-be dictator and the Papacy differed markedly from that between Hitler and the later Pius. In other ways, it also represented a critical departure from the archetypal church-state conflict, between Pope Gregory VII and Emperor Henry IV.

The most obvious difference between these other figures was that Pius was more of a meek servant of the Lord. Napoleon was not facing Julius, the Renaissance pontiff and arts patron who was probably more at home leading armies than congregations in prayer. Pius VII left Vatican functionaries slack-jawed by making his own bed and mending his own cassock.

None other than Hitler’s junior partner among the Axis powers, Benito Mussolini, urged the Vatican to excommunicate the German leader. What would have been the consequences of this? As the example of Pius VII demonstrates, extreme peril for the pontiff.

Hitler, though baptized a Catholic, had not practiced the faith since childhood. He believed that Christianity would gradually fall away, though he was prepared to move that process along. After becoming dictator, he launched a campaign of intimidation against German Catholic seminaries, for instance.

Napoleon was not what you might call the most devout Catholic, but he knew that a substantial number of the French were and, at least partly for that reason, had made life difficult for the revolutionary regime when it passed anti-clerical measures. To some extent, then, he thought it wise to have ecclesiastical cover for his claim to power.

Nobody expected, at the start of the reign of Pius VII, that difficulties with France would be problematic. The former Barnaba Chiaramonti, according to Nicholas Cheetham’s history of the papacy, Keepers of the Keys, had been selected by the 1799 papal conclave as a compromise candidate who would stand up to the Emperor of Austria, Francis II, over the latter’s encroachments in northern Italy.

As I hinted above, Pius was temperamentally disinclined to disagree with anybody. But what we have here, in his multi-year confrontation with Napoleon, is the case of the proverbial 98-pound weakling who, cornered by a bully, decides to stand his ground and give as good as he gets.

Some of the problems between Napoleon and Pius began when the little Corsican general decided he wanted a promotion from First Consul of France to Emperor. Pius, upon being told tearfully by the Emperor’s beloved, Josephine, that the two had not been formally married, refused to go along with her coronation as empress until that matter had been rectified post haste. Napoleon was so ticked off that he made Pius watch as he crowned himself and Josephine.

Thereafter, difficulties multiplied between the two:

* The wedding gift from Pius to Napoleon and Josephine turned out to be a subtle insult—the jeweled tiara consisted of stones from former papal tiaras that had been robbed during the capture of Rome by French forces under Napoleon in 1799.

* Pius’ four-month stay in Pius after the coronation increased his popularity among French Catholics, and mightily displeased the emperor, who wanted no competing center of attention among his subjects.

* Pius refused to take part in the ceremony when Napoleon took the Iron Crown of Lombardy. (Question: Where did these titles come from? And why would anyone want to fight over a crown of Lombardy?)

* Pius refused to annul the marriage of Napoleon’s love-besotted, 19-year-old brother Jerome to an American, Elizabeth Patterson of Bonaparte. (Note: A descendant of that marriage eventually, Charles Bonaparte, eventually became a member of Theodore Roosevelt's Cabinet.)

* The pope protested against Napoleon's occupation of the papal city of Ancona, a port that Napoleon claimed as protection against British and Austrian forces.

* In a single threatening letter, Napoleon demanded that the pope dismiss from Rome ambassadors from Sardinia and Russia; pouted that he was going to send a Protestant as his representative to Rome; and speculated that the Pope might have to be reduced to Bishop of Rome rather than the supreme head of the Church.

* In front of his entire court, Napoleon threatened to dismember the Papal States—unless Pius, “without ambiguity or reservation,” publicly declare an alliance with the emperor.

* Napoleon demanded that one-third of the French cardinals should belong to the empire—i.e., him.

* Napoleon invaded Rome with 10,000 troops under the command of General Miollis in February 1808.

* Napoleon, chafing over his cooling relations with the Vatican, declared that he’d annex the Pontifical States and had the flag of those states lowered.

* Deciding that he’d had enough, Pius excommunicated Napoleon.

* Declaring that the pope had shown he was a “lunatic,” Napoleon had Miollis demand Pius’ resignation as head of the Papal States. Upon his refusal, Miollis ordered the pope and his secretary of state seized. At 4 in the morning, they were hustled out of the residence with only their ceremonial robes and 20 sous between them—not enough for a single meal.

Napoleon determined that he’d shut Pius off from advisors and break his will. The ploy almost worked. For the next four years, the pontiff would be engaged in a war of nerves with Napoleon, especially over the emperor’s proposal for filling vacant bishoprics without papal authorization.

Pius was ready to yield on this last point, except for one condition: he wanted to retain the power to fill bishoprics in the Papal States. Napoleon regarded this as defiance, and got his back up. Pius rallied and refused to yield.

In 1812, Napoleon had his troops haul Pius overland for a confrontation about yielding papal powers. Pius developed a chronic urinary infection during the trip across the Alps, at one point needing to have his carriage stopped every 10 minutes to relieve himself. The last rites were even administered to him at one point.

A year later, it looked as if Napoleon had broken Pius’ will at last—allegedly by smashing crockery and grabbing him by the buttons of his cassock. The pope signed a paper ceding his temporal power in Rome and allowing Napoleon to move the papacy to Paris. Two aides, upon hearing the news, rushed to the pope’s side and urged him not to give up. Pius recovered his nerve, repudiating the agreement he had signed under duress.

In 1814, Napoleon lost power (his escape from Elba and return to power was soon crushed at Waterloo), and the pope returned in triumph to Rome.

Pius had survived, and he would have been the first to say that it had only been through the intervention of the God to whom he prayed. But his plight became an object lesson to all his 19th-century successors. The way they interpreted Pius’ close call, the loss of his temporal powers in the Papal States had also nearly resulted in the irreparable loss of his spiritual authority.

Did Pius XII have the fate of Pius VII in mind as he puzzled out how to deal with Hitler? Very probably. While a century might appear enormous to Americans, it would seem like only 20 minutes in the context of the ancient institution known as the Vatican.

In the tense period when the Axis powers held sway across whole swatches of Europe, the Vatican would have been best advised to stop worrying and recall one particular incident from the Napoleonic era. At one point, the dictator launched into another tirade, telling Pius’ adept, seen-it-all Secretary of State, Ercole Cardinal Consalvi, that he would “crush” the Roman Catholic Church.

The cardinal sighed and shook his head over the emperor’s naivete. "If in 1,800 years we clergy have failed to destroy the Church, do you really think that you'll be able to do it?" he answered.

Quote of the Day (Robert Runcie, on Tourists and Religion)

2009-07-12T06:17:00.000-07:00

“In the Middle Ages people were tourists because of their religion, whereas now they are tourists because tourism is their religion.”—Robert Runcie (1921-2000), Archbishop of Canterbury for the Church of England, quoted in “Sayings of the Week,” The Observer (London), December 11, 1988

This Day in Presidential History (Washington, JQ Adams Meet Chickasaws at Philly White House)

2009-07-11T23:39:00.000-07:00

July 11, 1794—As he celebrated his birthday, 27-year-old John Quincy Adams did not carry on like a party animal, the way people before and after him were wont to do. Instead, the future President of the United States received an impromptu lesson on how to conduct oneself in office from the current occupant, George Washington.

This date was not a special hinge moment in American history, if you want to know the truth. But more days than not are like that in the Presidency.

That’s not to say, though, that nothing much was going on. For students in American history, this day holds its own kind of interest, from these standpoints:

* Relations with Native Americans. The noontime meeting at the President’s House in Philadelphia between Washington and members of the Chickasaw tribe represented an important attempt by a longtime Indian fighter to resolve a problem that would plague virtually every Chief Executive for the next century—how to balance Indian rights and white encroachment.

* A study in Washington’s character. His actions on this day showed how “The Father of His Country”—a man who, it is generally believed, was sterile—had an eye for talented young men whom he could mentor. They also displayed why he was so careful to manage his appearance.

* The education of John Quincy Adams on requirements of higher office. The young man’s father, John Adams, had prepared him, with Puritan relentlessness, for the intellectual demands of public life. But Washington’s Vice President was not in a position where he could school him in how to act with self-discipline in affairs of high state. Washington was, and did.

* The paradoxes of cross-cultural goodwill and misunderstanding. Washington wanted to do everything he could to maintain peace with the Indians—who he knew, from service in the French and Indian War as well as in the American Revolution, inevitably became pawns in the conflicts among old European and new American powers. But a key symbolic moment at the meeting—the kind that Washington, with his passion for theater, normally executed flawlessly—turned out to be an occasion for head-scratching.

Back in 1755, Washington received an important lesson in asymmetrical warfare when he saw the perfectly trained British troops under the command of Gen. Edward Braddock ambushed on the Monongahela River by the French and their Indian allies. In 1779, now commander-in-chief of American forces in the revolution, he ordered one-quarter of his entire undermanned army, under John Sullivan and James Clinton, to carry out the largest military campaign ever mounted against native North Americans—specifically, Iroquois who either actively sided with the British, or were even neutral in the conflict.

But as the ultimate realist of the revolution, Washington believed in neither permanent friends nor permanent enemies. If the new nation was to prosper, its people had to live in security with the estimated 75,000 Native Americans living on the other side of the Alleghenies—including the approximately 20,000 warriors among them. To this end, he hoped to make peace with the Indians.

In some ways, Washington had more room to maneuver here than there was on another delicate issue involving non-whites: slavery. The President and his Secretary of War, Henry Knox, settled on a policy that treated the Indians as members of foreign nations, subject to treaties that would be maintained by the force of federal policy over the states.

The Chickasaws sought American help to ward off attacks made against them by the Creek Indians. The President was prepared to help any country that helped Americans, so he invited important Chickasaw dignitaries to meet with him in the President’s temporary mansion in the nation’s temporary capital of Philadelphia.

The President felt the effort to secure Chickasaw help was so necessary that he ignored a balky balk—as noted by biographer James Thomas Flexner, “the first injury he had in his long and dangerous career ever suffered.” He knew from past experience that Native Americans scorned lame warriors. So he determined to grit his false teeth and sit up straight.

Just as he was grateful to the Chickasaw for any peacemaking efforts, he also felt grateful to the young John Quincy Adams for supporting the administration at a time when it was being heavily attacked by the Democratic-Republicans. During the Revolution, Washington had learned how to spot and promote younger, able men such as Nathaniel Greene and Alexander Hamilton.

Sensing another such man, and knowing both his familiarity with Holland and fluency in the Dutch language (both of which the young man had learned while traveling with his diplomat father in the revolution), Washington appointed Adams minister to the Netherlands. He invited his new appointee first to dine, then to the welcoming ceremony for the Chickasaw the next day.

If you’re a young man, you’d think, your mind might run riot with booze and women. JQA wasn’t buying that—he’d leave those practices to brothers Charles and Thomas Bolyston Adams, both of whom would lead blighted lives because of their addictions.

So young Adams showed up for the luncheon. We owe to his diary (which he maintained assiduously for much of his long career, about as much as he maintained his penchants for morning walks and skinny-dipping in the Potomac) most of what we know about this event—including the consternation caused among the Chickasaw when the President passed along a peace pipe:

“These Indians appeared to be quite unused to it, and from their manner of going through it, looked as if they were submitting to a process in compliance with our custom.”

What was going on? Chickasaw tribal historian Richard Green has an excellent account of the event that outlines the clashing perspectives of the two would-be allies.

The Chickasaw, like most Native Americans, used clay or stone hand-held peace pipes. Washington must have really wanted to impress his visitors, because this one was of "East Indian" (Adams’ words) origin, made of leather and was 12 to 15 feet in length. Heck, they could practically have a hernia just trying to lift the thing!

You can imagine how the Chickasaw felt. Adams noted that their expressions reflected “novelty,” “frivolity,” a sense of the “ridiculous.”

The Americans mirrored the astonishment felt by their visitors, but on a different matter. Washington and Adams were facing a truly motley crew—a mix of full- and mixed-blood tribe members, some dressed in "coarse jackets and trowsers, and some in the uniform of the United States." (The visitors undoubtedly wanted to demonstrate loyalty to their hosts.) Some wore shirts, others none.

Washington made a brief speech with some specific offers thrown in to cement the friendship between the Americans and the Chickasaw:

* Arranging for accommodations in New York City if they wanted to continue their journey;

* Educating younger tribe members; and

* Defraying expenses “on a liberal scale” if they linked arms with the Americans against Spanish or British interlopers in the Northwest.

And, in a custom that continues to this day, Washington had gifts for his visitors: either $600 or $1,000 (that's $12,000 to $20,000 in today's money) to their chief, Piomingo; clothing and boots for everyone; and presents for families and for persons named by Piomingo but who were not present.

But this was the best: Each Chickasaw received $30 to use for purchases in Philadelphia stores. (Too bad Wanamakers wasn’t around then!)

The Chickasaw wanted something a bit more from the Americans—actual language spelling out treaty obligations. The President was happy to oblige. If only subsequent events were a match for his good intentions…

Earlier in his administration, Washington had to overcome attempts from within his own Cabinet, from Thomas Jefferson—reflecting trans-Allegheny frontiersmen—warning against launching land-fraud allegations against whites encroaching on Native-American land. The Georgia legislature sold 15 million acres to brazen speculators calling themselves the Yazoo Co. Unrest flared in the Northwest, with Washington eventually forced to send Gen. Anthony Wayne out to quell the tribes, which he did at the Battle of Fallen Timbers.

Washington groaned at what Indians could expect at the hands of his unscrupulous fellow countrymen: “I believe scarcely any thing short of a Chinese wall will restrain Land jobbers and the encroachment of settlers upon the Indian country.” After his death, matters would grow far worse, when Jefferson would double the size of the country with the Louisiana Purchase, gaining an area filled with even more Native Americans, and Andrew Jackson would push the Cherokee west of the Mississippi.

One happy outgrowth of these days in Philadelphia, however, was Washington’s growing confidence in his new diplomat. When John Adams succeeded him three years later, Washington was pretty careful about not interfering with his successor, but he gave some advice that must have made Adams senior proud.

Don’t be afraid of charges of nepotism, Washington told John Adams: his son would “prove himself to be the ablest of all in the Diplomatic Corps.” And so it turned out to be, as John Quincy Adams was launched on a career that would make him America’s greatest Secretary of State—though not, unfortunately, a great President.

Song Lyric of the Day (Joe Jackson, on Babe Ruth as Spur to Optimism)

2009-07-11T19:41:00.000-07:00

“Think of Babe Ruth

And you think of hot dogs and beer

But if he could hit a home run so could you

And your weight is just nowhere near.”—“Go for It,” written and performed by Joe Jackson, on his Body and Soul LP (1984)

Released in March 1984, Joe Jackson’s Body and Soul represents, along with his earlier Night and Day, the pinnacle of the singer-songwriter’s achievement. It displays the fascination he had developed with the polyglot culture of America—from its heroes to its multiple styles of music—after he had moved from the U.K. to the U.S. following his divorce.

Though other songs on the album were more celebrated—notably the hit “You Can’t Get What You Want (Till You Know What You Want”)—“Go for It” is my favorite. As much as “Gonna Fly Now (Theme From Rocky)”, it celebrates the underdog. In moments of battling the odds over the years, when called upon to draw on reserves of encouragement, I recall the lyrics of this song and its propulsive, driving rhythmic pulse.

From reading an online biography of Jackson, I found that he was a sickly youngster who didn’t play sports. I wonder, then, if he developed his interest in Babe Ruth at this point in England or after he had moved to the U.S. In any case, it only demonstrates what a near-universal symbol the “Sultan of Swat” remains, decades after his heyday.

That line about “hot dogs and beer” interests me, too. As more than a few people have pointed out over the last few years, those dietary preferences, not steroids, fueled his astonishing home run binges.

But this lyric from Jackson, fun as it is, bears only some relevance to why I’m using it today. It’s a hook, if you will (a word that a musician like Jackson would appreciate), to tell you about an event in the life of the Babe. And the Babe in this event had little to do with homers—and, at least at this point, “hot dogs and beer” wasn’t such a huge part of his persona, either.

On July 11, 1914, 19-year-old George Herman Ruth, Jr. made his major-league debut with the Boston Red Sox. He’d only arrived at “the hub of the universe” at 10 am that morning for his pitching start at Fenway Park against the Cleveland Indians, because his contract had only just been purchased from the Baltimore Orioles of the minor league International League.

Remember how the Robert Redford film The Natural showed the temptations that could await a young, unsuspecting player on the train up to “The Show”? Ruth knew all about those temptations. Actually, there’s an excellent chance he’d yielded to one or two of them already.

You have to remember this about Ruth: he was on his own for the first time as an adult. For the prior 12 years, he’d lived in what was, in effect, a Catholic reform school.

Ruth’s sickly mother and his bartender father were in no position to keep an eye on their boy. This left George Jr. free to get into all kinds of mischief in Baltimore: truancy, chewing tobacco, stealing, drinking whisky. His parents, deciding he was completely ungovernable, put him at age seven into St. Mary's Industrial School for Boys, with the proviso that he was to remain there until he was 21.

A friend of mine whose work has given him access to many oldtime players over the years told me once how a Yankee of the Ruth-Gehrig era called the latter a gentleman, while Ruth was
“an animal.” In his heyday, the Sultan of Swat was guilty of boozing, whoremongering, and jealousy (he badly wanted the manager’s job that went instead to Joe McCarthy).

But as a boy, young George must have been positively feral. Sometimes even St. Mary’s couldn’t take him anymore, so they sent him back to his parents. The sad thing was not only that they never kept him for long, but that even when he returned to St. Mary's they never came to see him.

Nowadays, especially when you read about abuses in many of the religiously operated institutions that have caused such an uproar in Ireland, you figure that the worst thing that could have happened to Ruth was to be stuck in St. Mary’s.

But Ruth was lucky. The person in charge of discipline, Brother Matthias, made sure to correct his errant ways, yes, but also helped foster his interest in baseball. Ruth gave due credit to this towering (six-foot-six, 250 pounds) figure in his life in his autobiography: “It was at St. Mary’s that I met and learned to love the greatest man I’ve ever known…He was the father I needed. He taught me to read and write, and the difference between right and wrong.”

I’ve always been curious about this Brother Matthias. He appears to have been a Canadian-born Catholic convert originally named Martin Boutlier, who passed along to Ruth and his other charges at the school the baseball skills he’d learned in his small mining town. Brother Matthias recognized young Ruth’s aptitude for the sport. I’m sure he must have told Ruth that developing this skill would mean he wouldn’t have to be stuck making shirts (the trade he learned in St. Mary’s) for the rest of his life.

More important, the Xaverian brother got the minor-league Orioles interested in Ruth. But to get him out of St. Mary’s, a way had to be found to get him around the custody issue.

The solution: Orioles manager Jack Dunn had to legally adopt the young man. When Dunn brought his new talented but callow recruit around to the park, some veterans snickered about “Jack’s newest babe.” The name stuck.

Ruth didn’t stay long with Dunn and the Orioles. Not that it was his fault: it was just that a competing team was right across the street. The Orioles, forced to sell their best players to stay solvent, sent Ruth packing up to the Red Sox.

So: What was Ruth like when he came to the Bosox, and how did he do?

In answer to the first question: Not great, but not bad. In baseball parlance, he found a way to win. He didn’t overpower his opponents, the Cleveland Indians, but he kept them off balance and helped himself – in the field, anyway.

Though he allowed two singles in the first inning, Ruth snuffed out a potential breakout inning for Cleveland by picking Shoeless Joe Jackson off first. The Red Sox gave the young southpaw a 3-1 lead going into the seventh inning. He might have had another at-bat coming up in that frame, but Boston manager Bill Carrigan wasn’t going to take any chances—especially when Cleveland rallied to tie the score that inning.

And now, here’s where you have to blink twice: Carrigan removed The Babe for a pinch-hitter.

What?

Unbelievable, in hindsight, but true. Actually, the manager’s move was one that nobody at the time would ever have second-guessed. Not only had Ruth batted only .200 in Baltimore, but he would have been batting against a lefty pitcher.

Carrigan had no compunction, then, about sending in a pinch-hitter for the future Hall of Famer. The pinch-hitter eked out a single, then came around to score—the last run of the game. Afterward, Carrigan looked like a genius and Ruth had himself his first victory.

Ruth still didn’t have a rocket-like rise to the top, however. Despite the vast improvements wrought by Brother Matthias, he was still what might be charitably be called “a work in progress” as a person. Teammates—not an Ivy League or prep school bunch of guys themselves—were soon shaking their heads over his gargantuan eating capacity, his uncouth manner, and incidents that veterans like Smokey Joe Wood labeled lackadaisical.

The Red Sox soon sent Ruth down to the minors, but he didn’t stay there long. They recalled him for the final week of the season, when he won—and got his first major-league hit—against a truly sad-sack team that nobody ever dreamed would be a match for the Red Sox: the New York Yankees.

(By the way, as you can tell from the image accompanying this post, Ruth might have been a big kid physically at this point in his life, but he had not yet reached the 250 pounds that settled on his frame by the end of his career.)

Release from St. Mary’s meant, in a real sense, freedom for Ruth, with all its concomitant promise and peril, symbolized by this fact: he got his driver’s license—and got into his first car accident. His teammates thought he was an undisciplined brat, but he had proved he could win.

In one sense, I don’t think he ever completely got over being an unloved, unwanted child. But maybe at least a few of Brother Matthias’ lessons had been absorbed by now. In any case, he was ready to go for it. In another six years, after he’d worn out his welcome in Beantown, he welcomed a trade to the Bronx—an occurrence that my college friend Mike and I, Yankee fans both, believe to be the central event of the 20th century.

After all, as Susan Sarandon’s Annie Savoy says in Bull Durham: “I've tried 'em all, I really have, and the only church that truly feeds the soul, day in, day out, is the Church of Baseball.”

Come to think of it, as his waistline grew with his fame, Ruth did come to have this Buddha-like look to him, don’t you think?

Theater Review: Lillian Hellman’s “The Little Foxes,” at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey

2009-07-10T22:27:00.000-07:00

The revival of Lillian Hellman’s 1939 drama The Little Foxes that last month concluded a 3 1/2-week run at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey was a perfect meeting of magic and moment. Not only did the production come together in the best kind of theatrical alchemy—with a cast uniformly acting with skill and conviction—but it arrived at a time when Hellman’s acerbic observations on American capitalism as a vast, destructive force have gained renewed currency.

When the festival’s director, Bonnie Monte, began planning the current season over a year ago, some clouds had gathered on Wall Street, but the American economy had not yet experienced its fall tsunami, nor had the Bernard Madoff case astonished the world.

Line after line from the play, written toward the end of the Great Depression, elicited knowing nods from the audience at the matinee performance I attended.

Before I go any further, a word about the company itself:

Running from spring to December, the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey operates on the arcadian campus of Drew University in Madison, N.J. Now in its 47th season, it does not, despite its name, subsist entirely on the Bard, but instead supplements the Bard with other carefully chosen plays such as this season’s The School for Wives (the Moliere comedy now playing), Noises Off (Michael Frayn) and The Grapes of Wrath (Frank Galanti’s adaptation of the John Steinbeck novel).

Previously, I’d seen Richard III and King Lear (the latter reviewed in a post last year) at the festival. To date, I have yet to see a production that has disappointed me. Neither did this one, under the adroit handling of director Matthew Arbour.

Hellman’s memoir trilogy, we now know, was filled with cunning little evasions of the truth, but this drama benefits from cunning of a different kind: a theater professional’s solid craftsmanship. In its way, it is far smoother agitprop than, for instance, Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty. At the heart of the play is a character study only partially dependent on the ostensible post-Civil War milieu.

One wonders if Hellman influenced a later scenarist of leftist sympathies, Oliver Stone. Like the latter’s Platoon, The Little Foxes becomes, in effect, a battleground for the mind, heart and conscience of a younger generation.

The Little Foxes lends itself well to the festival’s 300-seat main venue, the F.M. Kirby Stage. Several of the drama’s most revealing moments depend on the dichotomy between an observer and the action occurring elsewhere on the set—something that the stage, molded under the watchful eye of set designer Scott Bradley, accommodates well. These observers act, if you will, like foxes waiting to swoop down on their prey.

In the New South of the post-Civil War era, rapacity replaces gentility and racism runs rampant. Or, as the senior Hubbard sibling, Ben, tells a Northern financier who’s come south about a prospective deal, describing what has happened to the antebellum plantation aristocrats: “Twenty years ago we took over their lands, their cotton and their daughters.”

By the end of the first act, the central plot point has come into focus: Whether Ben’s brother-in-law, sickly banker Horace Giddens, will accept the offer to come in as a one-third partner in the steel mill deal concocted by wife Regina and her brothers Ben and Oscar Hubbard. Another issue—not unrelated to the first—is why Horace hasn’t returned home sooner from his hospital stay in Baltimore.

Regina spells out her limited options in more piquant detail when she says, in the play’s foremost acknowledgement of the deeply racist elements of the Deep South, “I think you should either be a nigger or a millionaire. In between, like us, what for?” Had she ever longed for a third choice besides these, she need only look at the fate of her sister-in-law Birdie, a Blanche DuBois-type figure of broken gentility, shaky self-esteem and alcoholic tendencies.

Nostrums are trotted out to justify the Hubbards’ deep-boned selfishness, several of which belong alongside Gordon Gekko’s “greed, for want of a better word, is good” in Stone’s Wall Street:

* “It’s every man’s duty to think of himself.”
* “God forgives those who invent what they need.”
* “The rich don’t have to be subtle.”

Half the fun of The Little Foxes resides in appreciating the differences in temperament among the Hubbards, even as they share an overweening desire to accumulate. One senses Hellman’s fascination with the family, for this is the only one of her plays to inspire a companion drama, the prequel Another Part of the Forest.

The Little Foxes, despite its title, is not really an ensemble piece, but crucially dependent on the actress who plays Regina. In Kathryn Meisle, they have a quietly magnetic center—not one of the prior scenery-chewing Reginas of stage (Tallulah Bankhead, Elizabeth Taylor, and Stockard Channing) or screen (Bette Davis), but one with her own subtle take on the material—as a woman hemmed in by her brothers since childhood, now bound and determined to make her way in a masculine world. Scarlett O’Hara, another attractive Dixie survivor, has nothing on her.
Meisle was matched well with Phillip Goodwin, investing Ben with a white-haired, wry presence that made him a Southern counterpart to John Huston’s evil Noah Cross in Chinatown, as well as with Brian Dykstra, who extracted every bit of Oscar’s blustering bullying of wife and son. And Deanne Lorette was heartbreaking as Birdie.

And, as African-American maid Addie, Venida Evans got to deliver, with assured dignity, the speech on which the entire play may hinge: “Well, there are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. Then there are people who stand around and watch them eat it. Sometimes I think it ain’t right to stand and watch them do it.” In her self-possessed, dignified reading of the lines, she delivered not just Hellman’s rallying cry against capitalism but also the first tentative stirrings of the civil-rights movement.

In an enlightening post-show discussion period, Bonnie Monte and the cast offered their takes on the relevance of the play for our time, their views of their characters, and other tidbits related to the production (e.g., Monette noted that the production did its part in the cause of sustainability, with 65% of materials used being recycled from other shows).

I was also fascinated by how the actors approached this play in which so many of the characters are drawn in such dark tones. Dykstra disputed the implication in my question in the post-show period that it might be difficult to find the humanity in the characters. On the contrary, he said, one of the fascinating aspects of the play was the sheer delight that Regina and her brothers took in one-upping each other. It was like a game for them, something that energized them, he noted.

Song Lyric of the Day (The Kinks, on What It’s Like to Be “Low Budget”)

2009-07-10T02:43:00.000-07:00

“Millionaires are things of the past

We’re in a low-budget film where nothing can last

Money’s rare, there’s none to be found

So don’t think I’m tight if I don’t buy a round.”—“Low Budget,” written by Ray Davies, performed by The Kinks on their Low Budget LP (1979)

There are certain men—Andy Rooney among them—who claim they keep their old ties for years with the expectation that they’ll eventually come back in fashion. So it is for baby-boom fans of The Kinks, who suddenly find, 30 years to the day upon its U.S. release, that Low Budget has become more relevant than ever.

The original LP was issued immediately after the British electorate had turned the Labour Party’s James Callaghan out of office, and just as their American counterparts were about to turn irretrievably away from Jimmy Carter. (In another five days, the American President would deliver his much-discussed—and, in the end, disastrous—“Malaise” speech.) High gas prices and long lines at the pump were the order of the day.

Though “(Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman” became the hit single, much of the rest of the album reflected the changed political and economic climate, with titles such as “Catch Me Now I’m Falling,” “Pressure,” “National Health,” “Misery,” and, inevitably, “A Gallon of Gas.”

Running like a thread through it all were the fiendishly clever lyrics of Ray Davies, lifting the group back to the commercial highs it had last known during the English Invasion of the Sixties. “Low Budget” is a good example why. Not only did the song have a near-irresistible hook (the kind, it seems to me, functioning best as a chorus in an English pubs), but, as the lyrics I’ve quoted demonstrate, I think, it’s laugh-out-loud funny.

In the transatlantic stripped-down regulatory environment that held sway not only under Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan but even under their more liberal successors, Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, many people acted as if the boom-and-bust cycle had been suspended for the duration. For them, “Low Budget” must have seemed at points like a nostalgia piece from the late Seventies, like disco and mood rings.

They should have known better that Ray Davies and his crew would have the last laugh—not only because you can’t disregard the laws of economics, but because the brilliance of The Kinks at their best remains undimmed, to help us through get through the current recession, as they did the last one, with some much-needed humor.

Flashback, July 1939: Renoir’s “Rules of the Game” Becomes Cause Celebre in Prewar France)

2009-07-09T20:44:00.000-07:00

A title of a 1966 film about France’s capital under siege by Resistance forces in WWII asked, Is Paris Burning? The same question might just as easily have applied to the major row that broke out over actor-writer-director Jean Renoir’s Le Regle du jeu (The Rules of the Game), which premiered 70 years ago this week. In fact, at its opening, a disgruntled moviegoer set fire to his newspaper in an attempt to burn the theater down!

You really have to hand it to the French: They really go for filmmakers who are, shall we say, critically underappreciated in the U.S., like Jerry Lewis.

(The story goes that Orson Welles, upon being told that the French regarded him as one of the three greatest directors, inquired who were the other two. “D.W. Griffith and Jerry Lewis,” he was told. The orotund director sighed as he admitted that it was always the third name that killed you.)

But when it came to one of their own—Jean Renoir, an authentic genius with a streak of films in the Thirties that were either remade shamelessly by Hollywood (Boudu Saved From Drowning, later adapted into Paul Mazurski’s Down and Out in Beverly Hills) or which placed among the greatest films of all time (the antiwar Grand Illusion)—the French threw a fit. Once audiences left theaters in droves and the critics pummeled it, the French ministry got into the act, banning his masterpiece twice (first under the prewar government, then under the collaborationist Vichy regime).

During WWII, when Renoir (pictured here on the left) fled to the U.S. to avoid the Nazis, many in France derided him for having “gone Hollywood”—as if the man had any chance, given that all other markets for his life’s work had been effectively shut down by a virtually continent-wide dictatorship. A 1943 movie made in the U.S., about the French Resistance, was received scathingly by his countrymen, who were still under Hitler’s thumb.

In the end, Renoir would not make a movie again in his native country for 15 years after The Rules of the Game.

What upset the French so much about the film? Anyone watching the movie today would be hard pressed, judging strictly by what they see onscreen, to figure it out. It helps to have some context.

Start with this: Only two years after rightwing forces in France had vented their frustration with the first Jewish premier, Leon Blum, with the soon-to-be-regretted motto, “Better Hitler Than Blum!”, many in the audience at the premiere expressed their annoyance with the casting of the Jewish actor Marcel Dalio. Zenophobes were only slightly more charitable to Austrian-born actress Nora Gregor.

Overarching everything, though, was Renoir’s portrait of a decadent society—an upper-crust bent on maintaining appearances, even when larger issues (the necessity of stopping Hitler) overshadowed should have overshadowed petty concerns and an authentic hero (an aviator) became sacrificed in the movie as a result of a tragic mistake.

Within a week after the film’s disastrous premiere, Renoir set to work trimming minutes from its running time, in an attempt to improve its commercial fortunes. Not only did the ploy not work, but his luck was about to worsen: the movie was cut yet again and the original negative was destroyed during the war. It would be more than a quarter century before a painstaking reconstruction allowed audiences to see what all the original fuss was about.

If you’re speculating about the filmmaker’s surname, you have surmised correctly: he was indeed a son of the great impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir. His experiments with deep-focus cinematography demonstrate that he had his own strong visual sense.

But what I loved so much about The Rules of the Game when I first saw it more than 20 years ago was the following:

* It felt like a novel. The ensemble cast benefited from a script that gave each character individuality. All kinds of complex characterization were taking place in the upstairs-downstairs setting of a “shooting party” at a country estate.

* It constantly surprised the viewer. It morphed from rueful satire to breakneck bedroom farce to tragedy.

* It did not jump on a soapbox with a sign announcing its message. Renoir was perfectly willing to discuss his leftist sympathies, but felt that ideology had to be subordinated to character development. He did not look down on any of his characters, but assessed them with a pitying but all-encompassing eye—perhaps exemplified best by the line given to Octave, the character played by the director himself: “The terrible thing about this world is that everyone has his reasons.”

The Rules of the Game inspired films by, among others, Woody Allen (Manhattan) and Robert Altman (Gosford Park). Though these latter movies were fine in their own right, they were either chillier (Gosford Park) or slighter entertainments (Manhattan) than the original.

There are all kinds of reasons why this masterpiece is usually ranked next to only Citizen Kane in polls of critics. But I don’t want to spoil any of the pleasure that awaited me when I saw it. Find out for yourself what the hullabaloo's been about for 70 years.

Quote of the Day (Peggy Noonan, on Eulogies)

2009-07-09T03:55:00.000-07:00

“I love eulogies. They are the most moving kind of speech because they attempt to pluck meaning from the fog, and on short order, when the emotions are still ragged and raw and susceptible to leaps. It is a challenge to look at a life and organize our thoughts about it and try to explain to ourselves what it meant, and the most moving part is the element of implicit celebration. Most people aren’t appreciated enough, and the bravest things we do in our lives are usually known only to ourselves. No one throws ticker tape on the man who chose to be faithful to his wife, or the lawyer who didn’t take the drug money, or the daughter who held her tongue again and again. All this anonymous heroism. A eulogy gives us a chance to celebrate it.”—Peggy Noonan, What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Revolution (1990)

I don’t share Noonan’s romantic conservatism, but the memoir by the White House speechwriter-turned-Wall Street Journal columnist is one of the best-written peeks inside the bubble surrounding the President and those working within his circle. Besides her sharp profiles (see her take on how Michael Deaver took a form of revenge on the Reagans for having temporarily dumped him in the 1980 primary season by securing Edmund Morris as the President’s authorized biographer), it also offers interesting insights such as the above quote (which is itself an outgrowth of equally fascinating reflections on the Irish “certain affinity for death,” especially as manifested in the wake).

What she has has in mind in the above quote, I think, is the send-off given to the type celebrated in Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” where the poet conjured up “some mute inglorious Milton” or “rustic moralist” laid to rest. It was not the wildly over-the-top goodbye to Michael Jackson the other day.

Eulogies often address two audiences: those who knew the deceased well and those who might not have. Aside from the enormously difficult task of addressing the raw emotions of the listeners (with the speaker sometimes having to surmount his or her own), there is also the issue of honesty: i.e., how to acknowledge the faults of the deceased without losing sight of virtues.

Federalist politician Gouverneur Morris was faced with this delicate task when his friend of 30 years, Alexander Hamilton, was killed in a duel. In his diary, Morris bemoaned the impossibility of the job.

Even though he looked to Hamilton as a party leader as well as a friend, Morris also was keenly aware of his faults: “He was indiscreet, vain and opinionated.” In the end, Morris took at least some account of the violent emotions stirred by the fiercely partisan Hamilton by noting that he bore his heart “as it were in his hands.”

The best eulogies that I’ve heard have managed to maintain the delicate balance that Morris despaired of finding, often by offering aspects of the deceased’s character that one never knew and by using these to account for the fault. I’ve remembered those parting sendoffs years after the event, and hope that, when my time comes, someone will treat me with similar humanity—with measured rather than exaggerated assessments of my life and character.

Few such assessments were in order at the Staples Center tributes to Michael Jackson. Some in the media—notably NBC’s Brian Williams—were barely able to hide their squeamishness over live coverage of the proceedings for someone who, after all, did nothing to move the nations of the world closer to world peace.

The most egregious offender was—surprise—Al Sharpton, who credited the singer’s music with helping to elect Barack Obama President. (Sorry, Rev: I think that Martin Luther King Jr., and Congressman John Lewis—not to mention countless civil-rights workers who, over the years, were despised, lost their jobs, beaten, and even killed for their efforts—had just a wee bit more to do with the election of America’s first African-American President. But I guess we should be glad you didn’t take credit for the deed.)

But Sharpton really flew into the face of reality by telling Jackson’s children (including the one that the deceased had named Prince Michael Jackson, or “Blanket”) that there “wasn’t anything weird about your daddy. It was strange what your daddy had to deal with.”

Who are we trying to kid here?

Weirdness by itself is not enough to put someone in legal jeopardy, or otherwise virtually every showbiz celeb on the stage at the Staples Center would have fallen into the clutches of the police.

But there was, as Denis Hamill noted in his Daily News column the other day, something creepy about Jackson’s “disturbing fixation on prepubescent boys.” Like Hamill, I believe that Jackson’s money and fame enabled him to settle for more than $20 million a pedophile civil suit in the 1990s, and that this saved him from jail.

The next time we want someone to celebrate, we had better look around to the people in our own lives who, whatever their very human faults, strive to live in a responsible way, demonstrating the “anonymous heroism” that Ms. Noonan celebrated. Celebrating a celebrity hopelessly ballyhooed in death sends a horrible message to children about what we value as a society.

Quote of the Day (Marcus Aurelius, on How to Tell If Something is Good)

2009-07-08T07:15:00.001-07:00

“Never regard something as doing you good if it makes you betray a trust, or lose your sense of shame, or makes you show hatred, suspicion, ill-will, or hypocrisy or a desire for things best done behind closed doors."—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (3.7), translated by Gregory Hays

This Day in Literary History (Max Perkins Lunches with “Sons” Fitzgerald and Wolfe)

2009-07-07T21:44:00.000-07:00

July 7, 1934—What game was Scribners editor Maxwell Perkins (in the photo accompanying this post) playing when he went to lunch with his first major literary discovery—F. Scott Fitzgerald—along with a younger one with his own set of emotional issues, Thomas Wolfe?

On prior occasions when he met Fitzgerald, Wolfe evidently wondered the same thing. So I think the thought had to have crossed his mind again, given what was happening between him and Max.

The two of them had been going back and forth for the last several years over Of Time and the River, Wolfe’s follow-up to his acclaimed debut, Look Homeward, Angel. Now, at last, Perkins believed he had wrestled the behemoth manuscript into shape, and he wanted to ship it out to the printer fast, before Wolfe changed his mind.

Wolfe was reluctant to go along with the decision. He thought he could add something else. Fitzgerald listened, then—and I’m not sure at this point how many drinks, if any, he had had—offered unsolicited advice to the junior novelist: “You never cut anything out of a book you regret later."

Or, as a friend of mine from a past writers’ group said, quoting his college creative writing teacher: “Kill your darlings.”

I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall during this conversation, wouldn’t you? I’m not necessarily talking about the brilliant conversation (if the trio were in their cups, how elevated could the talk get?), but even to get a look at their faces—Fitzgerald rolling his eyes over the big Southern boy, Wolfe doing a slow burn over this novelist, not doing a whole lot better than he was, offering his views and getting in the middle of his intense dealings with Perkins.

Four years after that lunch, Fitzgerald chuckled, in a letter to his long-suffering editor: “What a time you've had with your sons, Max -- Ernest gone to Spain, me gone to Hollywood, Tom Wolfe reverting to an artistic hill-billy.'' (Ernest, of course, was Scott’s frenemy, Ernest Hemingway.)

An epistolary collection edited by the indefatigable Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli with Judith S. Baughman, The Sons of Maxwell Perkins, lays out the relationship between the man dubbed the “editor of genius” by biographer A. Scott Berg and his three most famous authors. Perkins wanted these “sons” to be friends.

You can see why, in a sense: they could provide the mutual support network that creative types have always needed so badly, not to mention editorial advice. (Yes, he had the real say, but another pair of eyes never hurt.)

But if the Scribners author stable was a family, as Perkins desired, it was like a crowd of siblings at Thanksgiving.

Okay, let’s be more precise: it was less like a Waltons Thanksgiving in the Depression than like the bickering progeny of King Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine in the medieval times of The Lion in Winter, in which everyone engages in a battle of “He (or she) always loved you best!”

When the three acclaimed writers weren’t competing for readers and critical accolades, they were competing for the attention of poor Max.

The circumstances at this particular lunch were charged. Fitzgerald was feeling more raw and vulnerable than usual. The novel in which he had invested not only so much of his craft but so much of his heart, Tender is the Night, performed adequately for a Depression-era piece of fiction, but that wasn’t enough to help him reduce his mountain of debt.

The third “son,” Hemingway, didn’t make Fitzgerald feel any better with an exasperated letter about his labor of love. (“You see, Bo, you’re not a tragic character. Neither am I. All we are is writers and what we should do is write.”) So Fitzgerald, seldom disinclined to offer an opinion—and often, let it be said, generous when he did—felt he was entitled to school the junior author.
(I have to keep reminding myself, however, that though Fitzgerald was older, it wasn’t by that much—only four years. What widened the age gap, at least emotionally, was that a marriage, a child, and payments for his wife’s institutionalization had saddled Fitzgerald with a good deal more responsibility—not to mention debt—than Wolfe.)

The relationship between the two men—annoyance on one side, suspicion on the other—hadn’t always been this way. Five years before, after reading Look Homeward, Angel, Fitzgerald had been impressed enough that he wrote Perkins, “John [Peale] Bishop [a Princeton classmate and poet] told me that he [Wolfe] needed advice about cutting ect [sic], but after reading his book I thought that was nonsense. He strikes me as a man who should be let alone as to length, if he had to be published in five volumes.”

At some point, however, Fitzgerald had a change of heart. Maybe it was inevitable, given the difference between the two men in appearance, temperament and working methods.

At five-feet-six-inches, Fitzgerald was a bit undersize to achieve his college ambition—to star on the Princeton football team. He was delicate, almost feminine-looking, and when sober could be the soul of thoughtfulness and sensitivity. He scrutinized his own work relentlessly. In a fine essay in the Summer 2004 issue of Tin House (unfortunately, not linked on the Web), Susan Bell showed how, with a few hints from Perkins, Fitzgerald revised and amped up the already brilliant The Great Gatsby.

Even when sober, Wolfe could be a bear to handle with his emotional neediness. The major thing you noticed about him, inevitably, was his size. He was so large, Fitzgerald joked, that he once put out power lines in Switzerland with one of his gestures.

His manuscripts matched his height and bulk in ambition and quantity of pages. For Wolfe, writing at warp speed, revision meant less deleting or even substituting and more expanding. This put him at loggerheads with Perkins, he had to balance keeping his author happy with delivering a salable product for a firm that still possessed a somewhat stodgy, conservative reputation.

A meeting in Paris between the two in 1930 did not go well. Wolfe, highly sensitive to imputations of provincialism, could only take so much of Fitzgerald’s prep-school, Ivy League airs, confiding in a letter:

“I finally departed from his company at ten that night in the Ritz Bar where he was entirely surrounded by Princeton boys, all nineteen years old, all drunk, and all half-raw. He was carrying on a spirited conversation with them about why Joe Zinzendorff did not get taken into the Triple-Gazzaza Club. I heard one of the lads say 'Joe's a good boy, Scotty, but you know he's a fellow that ain't got much background.' — 1 thought it was time for Wolfe to depart, and I did.”

Worse, at the height of his paranoia, Wolfe wrote in his notebook a passage about an older man (Perkins) regarded as “brave and loyal,” who had disillusioned his protégé by putting him in touch with “a drunken and malicious fellow, who tried to injure and hurt his work in every way possible.” Fitzgerald’s ulterior motive, Wolfe concluded, was not friendship but simply scouting out the youngster on Perkins’ behalf.

Perhaps Wolfe was right—perhaps Perkins was up to something. Maybe, underneath his courtliness and generosity, Wolfe’s artistic “father” was using older “son” Fitzgerald to reinforce the message, Trust me. You’ll be better for it.

If you want to understand the dynamics of the relationship, consider another strapping young galoot who showed incredible stuff on his debut before resisting good advice. Yes, I’m talking about the New York Yankees’ gifted but erratic pitcher, Joba Chamberlain.

Here, the Bronx Bombers’ manager, Joe Girardi, fills the role of a Max Perkins with more bite (all for the big lad’s good, don’t you know!). And, just as Perkins used Fitzgerald to drill his message into the youngster, Girardi employs pitching coach Dave Eiland on the same mission with their raw-boned fireballer.

Three years after the 1934 luncheon, in an increasingly desperate situation of his own (plummeting sales were sending him to Hollywood), Fitzgerald still couldn’t resist offering more unsolicited advice to Wolfe, urging him in a letter about “your necessity to cultivate an alter ego, a more conscious artist in you.” He urged the value of repression and held up Flaubert as a model of self-conscious craftsmanship: “So Mme Bovary becomes eternal while Zola already rocks with you.”

Wolfe was having none of it: “You say that the great writer like Flaubert has consciously left out the stuff that Bill or Joe will come along presently and put in. Well, don’t forget, Scott, that a great writer is not only a leaver-outer but also a putter-inner, and that Shakespeare and Cervantes and Dostoievsky were great putter-inners—greater putter-inners in fact, than taker-outers—and they will be remembered for what they put in—remembered, I venture to say, as long as Monsieur Flaubert will be remembered for what he left out.”

Wolfe continued to puzzle the older writer. Fitzgerald looked with consternation upon Wolfe’s decision to leave Scribners and Perkins. After Wolfe’s last novel, You Can’t Go Home Again, was published posthumously, Fitzgerald noted drily to daughter Scottie that Perkins must have had “mixed emotions” over his thinly disguised appearance as “Foxhall Edwards.”

(Strangely, Fitzgerald was silent about his own, briefer appearance in the book as “Hunt Conroy,” who is “very fixed in his assertion of what he calls ‘The Lost Generation.’”)

While allowing that Wolfe had “a fine inclusive mind” and could “write like a streak,” Fitzgerald finally showed his exasperation: “he did not have anything particular to say!”

Judging from the response of academe over the years, the critical establishment follows Fitzgerald’s lead on this. Wolfe can indeed be trying. And yet, I don’t think the argument ends there.

For one thing, Fitzgerald did not always practice what he preached. The Susan Bell article from Tin House showed a striking instance when Fitzgerald bulked up The Great Gatsby, much to the book’s improvement. Compare the following passage in the original manuscript submitted to Perkins:

“I was thirty—a decade of loneliness opened up suddenly before me and what had hovered between us was said at last in the pressure of a hand.

Now see how Fitzgerald recast it:

“Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, the thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age. As we passed over the dark bridge her wan face fell lazily against my coat’s shoulder and the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand.”

Wolfe, I think, was correct in one respect: A highly self-conscious style is not the only one for a writer. Leo Tolstoy would certainly not fall into the same school as Flaubert or Henry James, but Anna Karenina certainly lives as a book. He had an almost Wolfean ability to soak up details of character—and recapitulate it at startling length. His greatness lies in the fact that he, simply, a great storyteller.

Compared with Fitzgerald, Wolfe is not taught much in colleges. But in the end, his work can’t be dismissed. Fitzgerald knew it, too. In the end, he told his daughter, You Can’t Go Home Again “doesn’t commit the cardinal sin: it doesn’t fail to live.”

Quote of the Day (Martin Short, on What Musicals and the CIA Have in Common)

2009-07-07T02:48:00.000-07:00

"A musical is only as good as its director. The same can also be said for the CIA."—Comedian Martin Short at the Tony Awards, June 6, 2004

Happy 35th Anniversary to “A Prairie Home Companion”!

2009-07-06T20:15:00.000-07:00

A magnificent throwback to old-time radio—a medium that employed scripts, versatile voices, musical guests, unapologetically homey commercials (in this case, for fictitious products), and the listener’s imagination—premiered on this date 35 years ago, at the Janet Wallace Auditorium at Macalester College, in Saint Paul, Minn. Twelve people came to the show, producing total sales of less than $8, according to legend.

But, as I noted yesterday about Seinfeld, an entertainment powerhouse does not always start out big. So it has proved with Garrison Keillor, whose A Prairie Home Companion became an institution before long.

At the time of its premiere, with the airwaves dominated by mindless pop songs, broadcasting the show at all must have seemed like a hopelessly cute anachronism. Today, in the era of screaming talk-radio mavens, two hours of wit and entertainment every Saturday night from the Midwest , in a sly tribute to vintage Americana, represents an act of defiance against the fates.

The fact that Keillor can continue to pull the show off, week after week, is astonishing enough. But that he has produced several shelves’ worth of books over the years is beyond amazing. If he had never become a radio legend, these, by themselves, would have secured our respect and attention.

(Given the name of this blog, I would be much remiss in not hailing Keillor for renovating St. Paul’s World Theater and rechristening it The Fitzgerald Theater, after my great literary hero—tune in tomorrow on this point in the blogosphere for more on Great Scott, by the way.)

Several years ago, through the help of a friend, I was able to secure tickets for a broadcast at New York’s Town Hall, when the show was on tour during December. I would have been curious, in any case, to see how a radio show was put together before an audience.

But to see the whole thing done in such style, at Christmastime, with the mellifluous voice of Keillor and the great aural effects provided by his crew in conveying the news about Guy Noir and the denizens of Lake Wobegon—well, it was something to behold. My great thanks, again, to the friend responsible for putting the tickets into my lucky hands.

The web site for A Prairie Home Companion contains a cornucopia of riches—very much including podcasts of the show, in case you’re unfortunate enough to miss a segment (as happens all too often with me, since I’m usually driving somewhere when I get it on my car radio). But don’t leave the site without checking out, on the lower right-hand portion of the page, “The View From Mrs. Sundberg’s Window.”

The Web site is only partially correct in noting that “Mrs. Sundberg,” a regular listener, “shares her thoughts about Saturday’s show.” Actually, though those thoughts might start there, they quickly take you to places you never expected.

In the passage below from a couple of weeks ago, for instance, she talks about the loss of her best wooden spoon “while whipping up a batch of snickerdoodle dough.” And then she considers her loss further:

“Of course you can't hold on to everything, and even if you could, why would you want to? I think the trick is to dwell not on what you lost but on what you gained by having had it. There isn't much that lasts forever. Not childhood, not wooden spoons, not lilacs. Not memory, even. Things and people come and go, and you hold on to what you can, and let go of what you must. As long as you manage to laugh once in a while, and take a road trip now and then, everything ought to turn out just fine.”

Writing that good is so much more than the result of talent; it’s also the product of someone observing everything she can, mulling it all over, and, most important, getting the tone just right. Passages like this, once you get over the lump in your throat, also leave you gasping in admiration.

And somehow, without ever meeting this person, you sense an infinitely warm and wise heart to go with the obvious intelligence. Not a bad addition to the universe encapsulated by A Prairie Home Companion.

Movie Quote of the Day (Ringo Starr, in “A Hard Day’s Night,” Defying Pigeonholes)

2009-07-06T03:01:00.000-07:00

Female Reporter (played by Marianne Stone): “Are you a Mod or a Rocker?”

Ringo Starr (played by himself, of course!): “Um, no. I’m a Mocker.”—A Hard Day’s Night (1964), screenplay by Alun Owen, directed by Richard Lester

In the year of Beatlemania, is it any wonder, when A Hard Day’s Night premiered on this date in the London Pavilion Theatre, that Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon were in the audience? Or that the Fab Four film produced such a mob of fans that Piccadilly Circus and surrounding streets had to be temporarily closed?

Every generation has to create its own musical heroes. So, if my niece and nephews were ever to ask me what the Beatles were all about, I’d point to this movie—one that, like the group itself, left the world, to borrow a phrase from C.S. Lewis in a far different context, “surprised by joy.”

Yes, yes—of course the film features performances of “Can't Buy Me Love,” “If I Fell,” “And I Love Her,” “Tell Me Why, “All My Lovin',” “She Loves You,” the title track, and six other tunes. But offhand, I simply can’t recall another motion picture (and the Beatles are always in motion here!) filled with so much infectious fun.

The direction by the American Richard Lester was rightly lauded for its innovations (including, as noted by Roger Ebert, the first time movie titles had been intercut by the title song and action—in this case, of course, the boys’ madcap dash through a train station with a mob of crazed fans right behind). He certainly performed miracles with his black-and-white medium and a budget of only 175,000 pounds, creating, in effect, a precursor of the music-video format.

But we should note here the contribution of screenwriter Alun Owen. Partly because he had only three movie credits (counting this one) to his name, with most of his work confined to TV and radio, he has been largely forgotten—including by The New York Times, which dispatched him with an 81-word obituary. He deserves far better.

Nobody, but nobody, had any idea what the Beatles would be like onscreen. Could they act? Could they say normal lines?

Nobody knew for sure, which is why no single sentence spoken by any Beatle was intended to be longer than six words. That is, until Owen had a chance not only to hang around with the group, catching their cheeky attitude and rapid quips, but to see them interact with the media.

While fleshing out the resulting scenario, Owen created a Seinfeldian universe that blended reality and fantasy in entertainers’ lives.

Yes, the four group members all go by their own names. But their road manager, “Norm,” was played by a character actor, Norman Rossington. More prominently, the film featured the sublimely silly scenario involving Paul’s fake “grandfather” (played by Wilfrid Brambell). (The Beatle’s grandfather was named Joe, not John, and he played the tuba.)

The above quote is as good a place to start as any in seeing the unexpected exuberance of the script in action. Now, in doing this, we have to proceed cautiously, recalling E.B. White’s stern admonition: “Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.” Still, let’s have a go at it, shall we?

The reporter asking her question can barely disguise her boredom with—even ignorance about--her assignment. Her question is binary—either/or. Her story is already written in her head, the way so many reporters’ often are to beat deadlines. Ringo’s response will merely trigger which scenario she already has planned.

Then the drummer upsets the whole apple cart.

In a way, the gulf between uncomprehending reporter and these new young entertainers symbolizes the generation gap that would dominate headlines throughout the rest of the decade.

Ringo’s response represents an unanticipated third way totally unanticipated by reporters used to the careful, noncommittal “yes, ma’ams” of, for instance, Elvis Presley. We are beyond category, Ringo is telling her. We’ll blend traditions and make something new, different, and, if we’re lucky, better. See?

At the same time, Ringo’s deadpan answer is subversive. The group is “mocking” solemnity (including the media’s).

You can argue that the more appropriate person to deliver the dialogue would have been John Lennon, the musician with the sharpest wit and the most delight in Joycean wordplay of anyone in the group. But putting the answer in the mouth of Ringo (who, as it happened, got most of the film’s funniest lines, and who, in a Yogi Berra-ish burst of brilliance, even came up with the title after one concert) turns out to be inspired precisely because it is so startling.

Several years ago, I was surprised and moved to hear Ringo Starr describe the Beatles simply as “four guys who loved each other.” Years before the end of the innocence, that joy in each other shows in this box-office smash.

This Day in Television History (“Seinfeld” Pilot Debuts)

2009-07-05T16:36:00.000-07:00

July 5, 1989—It had a lackluster beginning and a downright horrible finale, but in between, Seinfeld—airing as an NBC summer pilot 20 years ago today—took wing with some of the most artfully constructed scripts in sitcom history.

Even at its best, Seinfeld did not appeal to all tastes. One naysayer, my Uncle Pete, blinked in astonishment one night when he saw me watching Jerry Seinfeld and his merry crew.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “You like that show?”

“What, you don’t?”

“Ehh…” He grimaced. “What’s that show about, anyway? Nothing.” He waved his right hand in the air, practically spitting out three words that were the ultimate dismissive epithet from his Bronx childhood decades ago: “He’s a bum.”

I suspect that more than a few people watching the sitcom that night shared my uncle’s poor opinion, because The Seinfeld Chronicles (as it was known in that initial incarnation) earned an okay but not great Nielsen rating (21st for the week, tying it with Totally Hidden Video). The show was, in essence, in a larvae state. Kramer possessed nothing like the hyperkinetic energy with which Michael Richards would later endow him, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Elaine didn’t appear at all.

Even now, fans of the show admit that not just the plot (Jerry doesn’t know if a woman coming to visit him has romance in mind or not) but the execution of the show leave something to be desired.

But in another sense, upon hearing that withering insult from my uncle—“nothing”—Seinfeld and series co-creator Larry David might have smiled. My uncle had gotten it, they might have reasoned. The show was, indeed, about “nothing.” In fact, they even advertised the fact in future scripts!

A bit of trivia: Paul Shaffer of Late Night With David Letterman was originally offered the role of George Costanza. He never got back to Seinfeld on the offer. Well, good thing his gig lasted!

Movie Quote of the Day (Karl Malden in “On the Waterfront,” On Contemporary Crucifixions)

2009-07-05T16:05:00.000-07:00

Father Pete Barry (played by Karl Malden): “Some people think the Crucifixion only took place on Calvary. Well, they better wise up!”—On the Waterfront (1954), screenplay by Budd Schulberg, directed by Elia Kazan

The American Express commercials that Karl Malden made for two decades might have earned him financial security for his old age. And his performance as Blanche DuBois’ lonely suitor Mitch in A Streetcar Named Desire might have won him his Best Supporting Actor Oscar.

But for me, the versatile character actor—who died four days ago, following the far-more publicized celebrity deaths of Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett-Majors and, of course, Michael Jackson-- is inextricably linked with On the Waterfront, which ranks with A Man for All Seasons as my favorite film.

For all the latter’s brilliance, though, Elia Kazan’s movie has a far more tangible claim on my affection and interests: at times, it feels like a documentary of the milieu and times associated with my mother and her siblings in the first half of this century.

The parochial schools that Terry Malloy (played by Marlon Brandon) and Edie Doyle (Eva Marie Saint, pictured here with Malden) recall attending as children were the kind that the Lenihans attended in New York. The pigeon coops that fascinate Terry also provided a rooftop hobby for my Uncle Pete. Another one of my uncles, Ben, witnessed some of the 36-day location shooting in Hoboken, N.J., as a Port Authority cop. The dispiriting “shape-up” routine and corrupt dock union bosses in the film also drained the energy of my grandfather Michael on a daily basis.

And the priest, Fr. Barry, would have wielded the same moral authority that other clerics did in the South Bronx churches where the family worshipped from the Twenties to the Fifties. The quote above is part of his powerful sermon calling shamed but scared laborers to account as they behold their own version of martyrdom: the corpse of a co-worker who tried to tell the truth about the brutality they faced every day.

Malden passed away on the 25th anniversary of the death of the tough priest who inspired his character Fr. Barry, Fr. John Corridan. When they met Corridan as they hunted for background details to flesh out a story based on Malcolm Johnson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning expose of waterfront extortion and violence, Kazan and Schulberg couldn’t believe at first that such a committed, street-smart figure could be a cleric. (Fr. Barry’s “Crucifixion” speech is, in fact, largely based on Corridan’s speech to union workers after one of them took his advice by standing up to the bosses.)

The presence of two other cast members, Lee J. Cobb (union boss Johnny Friendly) and Rod Steiger (Terry Malloy’s mobbed-up brother Charlie) in the Best Supporting Actor category made it well-nigh impossible for Malden to put another Oscar on his mantelpiece. Yet, perhaps more than the other two, he possessed the crucial role in the film’s plot.

If Johnny Friendly is the brutish force that lays waste to everything and Charlie is the compromiser who loses his soul and his life in the bargain, then Fr. Barry is the prodding, indomitable conscience of the movie.

The brilliance of On the Waterfront as sheer craft—Leonard Bernstein’s powerful score, the much-imitated dialogue (“I coulda been a contender), and Kazan’s always adept hand with actors—blinds many students of film to a perhaps more important aspect of the movie: In insisting that we cannot escape the consequences of our actions or inactions, its high moral seriousness stands as a continuing rebuke to today’s film industry of multimillion-dollar blockbusters and crude, brain-dead “bromances.”

Terry Malloy would rather stay in his chicken coop than face up to the choice that awaits him on the docks. The moral ambiguity of informing—a horror bred into the bones of Irish-Americans from one failed rebellion in their homeland after another—is only reinforced by the ostracism he experiences from co-workers and even from neighborhood kids who despise him as a “stool pigeon.”

The “thorn in the flesh” in St. Paul is manifested in Terry’s anguish over involvement with the death of Joey, the brother of Eva Marie Saint’s character Edie. But, though his "thorn" might save Terry, like the apostle, from self-righteousness, he also cannot let it prevent him from doing what he must: suffer humiliation and mortification of the flesh on his own road to Calvary.

Beaten to a pulp by Friendly’s thugs, Terry stumbles and falls, like Christ carrying his cross. Even Brando’s face in this final scene replicates Christian imagery in its multiple bloody wounds.

Malden liked to joke about his unglamorous looks and blue-collar background (he was the only ex-milkman that Vivien Leigh ever kissed, he claimed), but it served him well in embodying how a distinctly ordinary man could rise up and inspire others to perform extraordinary deeds.

The man he emulated (even to the point of wearing his hat and coat), Fr. Corridan, changed the perceptions of everyone with whom he came in contact, and what it meant to be a priest and even a Christian. Not a bad example for the rest of us Terry Malloys.

This Day in Massachusetts History (William Lloyd Garrison Enters Public Life with 4th of July Address)

2009-07-04T22:47:00.000-07:00

July 4, 1829—Three years after the author of the Declaration of Independence passed from the American scene, throwing up his hands at the prospect of ending slavery in this country or even freeing all of his own “servants,” the 23-year-old newspaper editor William Lloyd Garrison decided to press home the task of fulfilling Thomas Jefferson’s belief that “all men are created equal” with a fiery Fourth of July address.

Abolitionism was a loathed, even dangerous cause to support, not merely in the South but even in the North, when Garrison accepted the invitation to speak at the Park Street Church in Boston. Even eight years after Garrison spoke, an abolitionist newspaper editor in Illinois—a free state, mind you—named Elijah Lovejoy was murdered for his blistering attacks on the “peculiar institution.”

A number of Americans—even Southerners such as the “Virginian Dynasty” of Jefferson, Madison and Monroe—professed profound unease with slavery but were disinclined to ween the nation from it. The best thing that Americans could do for blacks, they felt, was colonize them elsewhere. African-Americans, in this view, had no place in American life.

Garrison was part of what has been termed the “second wave” of abolitionism. The first wave of the movement, from the founding of the republic through roughly the early 1820s, had been marked by polite, intellectually based strategies, including appeals to Congress by the likes of the Pennsylvania Abolitionist Society.

In the second wave, however, abolitionists such as Garrison, taking their cue from African-American ministers such as Philadelphia’s Richard Allen, decided that this incrementalist approach had reached a dead end. Now, the thinking went, you had to get in the faces of anyone who dared to turn their eyes away from slavery.

That meant eyewitness testimonies about the abuses of slavery. It meant constant, impassioned attacks in newspapers. It meant mock slave auctions. It meant defying the law of the land when adverse rulings such as the Dred Scott decision came down from the Supreme Court. It could even mean resorting to violence, as John Brown did in “bleeding Kansas” and at Harper’s Ferry in the 1850s.

Under these circumstances, many Northerners for the longest period regarded the abolitionists as troublemakers. If you want a contemporary analogy to the philosophical divisions arising, think of the battle now between activist pro-lifers and pro-choicers. Pro-lifers advocate for the right of the fetus in the womb, while pro-choicers push for maximum reproductive freedom, with no limit on how they view their body.

Similarly, fire-eating Southerners attempted to set up an impregnable judicial and legislative consensus against any limitations on their “right to property,” while abolitionists saw any compromise on this point as violating the rights expressed in the Declaration.

The more radical members of the movement, it’s now forgotten, even shared something in common with plantation aristocrats: they were prepared to tear the Union apart, if it meant they could start all over and get everything right this time by banning slavery, even if the new country was only confined to the North.

Garrison was an abolitionist disunion advocate. Twenty-five years to the day after his outspoken entrance onto the public stage, he burnt a copy of the Constitution, urging his followers to respond “Amen.” Many people who agreed with his insistence that the current union was a “devil’s pact”—including his protégé, Frederick Douglass—parted ways with him, believing that saving the Union was necessary to destroying slavery.

But much of that controversy lay in the future. Garrison’s achievement in 1829 lay in fracturing the sense of self-congratulation and complacency that had ensued in America following the War of 1812 (in effect, a second war for American independence), the survival of the nation after a half-century, and the passing of a generation of Founding Fathers already achieving the stature of demi-gods (a sentiment furthered by the passing of Jefferson and John Adams 50 years to the day after the adoption of the Declaration).

In 1829, Park Street Church was concluding an anti-slavery lecture series it had held annually on Independence Day six years before. It was the nerve center of an entire New England reform movement—one that Garrison, because of his background, was temperamentally inclined to support.

Garrison’s father had been engaged in the West Indian trade—in other words, a link in the system that kept slavery alive—before becoming a hopeless alcoholic and abandoning his family. The shame and privation he felt as a child spurred Garrison’s full-throated involvement in the temperance and abolitionist movements.

When he stepped up to the pulpit of Park Street Church, Garrison didn’t waste time on the platitudes to which speakers of the time were becoming increasingly prone. By the start of his third paragraph, he had denounced America’s slave-based politics as “rotten to the core.” He protested the condition of “two millions of wretched, degraded beings, who are pining in hopeless bondage.”

In other words, it was hypocritical to praise freedom in a land that permitted slavery, especially on such a far-reaching scale.

But Garrison did not confine himself to denunciations of slavery, or even to explanations for why it was immoral. The importance of his address to the future progress of abolitionism lay in the four propositions (yes, the same word Lincoln would invoke in the Gettysburg Address) he set out for doing battle against slavery:

* American slaves deserved “the prayers, and sympathies, and charities of the American people.”

* Non-slave-holding states are “constitutionally involved in the guilt of slavery,” and are obligated “to assist in its overthrow.”

* There was no valid legal or religious justification for the preservation of slavery.

* The “colored population” of America needed to be freed, educated, and accepted as equals by whites.

Garrison would go on to establish the foremost abolitionist publication, The Liberator, finally wrapping up publication after the Civil War and Emancipation. In one way, it is surprising that he left the public scene with the last of his propositions still very much in question.

In the larger sense, though, Garrison's career--and his address at the Park Avenue Church--call into question one of the more prevalent truisms of American politics--i.e., that moral questions are so divisive and counterproductive that they have no place in the public realm.

To be sure, Garrison's constant hectoring in The Liberator agitated pro-slavery forces. Yet who is prepared to say now that his polemics and his confrontational strategies did not serve their purpose?

This Day in Religious History (Debate With Eck Marks Martin Luther’s Crossing of Rubicon)

2009-07-04T20:34:00.000-07:00

July 4, 1519—In the television age, everyone at home acts as a judge during the quadrennial American Presidential debates. But these contests, even since the fabled Nixon-Kennedy faceoffs, have invariably been marked by trivia and an obsession with appearance.

Such was not the case with the theological thrust-and-parry that began on this date in Leipzig, Germany, between Catholic theologian Johann Eck and his opponent, a monk whose arguments with the Church had grown more pointed over the last couple of years: Martin Luther.

The quest for American freedom neither began nor ended with July 4, 1776. In my post later today, I’ll take up the issue of how the banner of liberty was raised well after the Declaration of Independence, in an era of complacency.

For now, though, I thought it would be useful to examine an event that is not only little remembered among chroniclers of American freedom, but that does not even receive as much attention as it should where you think it might: in histories of Europe.

The Folly of Teaching European History

Everybody knows that the teaching of American history at the elementary and high school level is ridiculous. To cover two centuries (even more, if you count from the Columbia encounter with the New World) in two years was silly when I was going to school more than 30 years ago—the more contemporary period inevitably got short shrift. It’s even worse now with an added generation and a half to account for.

Okay, now imagine European history. Only Mel Brooks or Monty Python could cover the high (or make that low) points of nearly a millennium of events. Even chopping it up in smaller periods—say, the Renaissance and Reformation—only gets you so far.

That’s what I found out in reviewing my college notes, from a class I took at Columbia University, on this period. (I’m far from knocking the course, by the way: it remains one of the most fondly recalled that I had in college.)

But for all the talk in class about the causes and consequences of the Reformation, even of the biases involved with the term (coined, of course, by Protestants, and grumbled at by Catholics for years), I found no mention in the notes of this landmark event in Luther’s movement away from the Church.

Point of No Return

Until this point, despite nailing his 95 theses to the church door at Wittenberg (it probably didn’t happen quite this way, but that’s a story for another time), Luther had been careful mostly to confine himself to abuses loudly denounced even by mainstream defenders of Catholicism. As he defended himself against Eck, however, Luther was forced to depart ever more seriously, on a wider range of substantive issues, than before.

In other words, this was Luther’s point of no return, after which he and the Church were doomed irretrievably for conflict.

Although Eck began speaking against an opponent on June 27, it wasn’t against Luther himself at first but against his friend Andreas Karlstadt. For a week, Eck—who had started out as a somewhat friendly correspondent with Luther before becoming increasingly critical of him—used Karlstadt as a substitute for the man who had accepted his invitation to debate, going back and forth on the question of free will.

Luther’s Declaration of Independence From Rome

The date when Luther directly took up the cudgels against Eck is resonant: July 4. Despite the contention of some secularists that religion was largely missing in action in the thought of the men who led the American Revolution, the fact was that the majority of them were animated by the spirit of dissenting Protestantism.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. Look to a contemporary of theirs from across the Atlantic, a Member of Parliament deeply sympathetic to their aspirations but at one remove from it, a politician who, if we are to believe his later biographer, Irish historian-politician-literary gadfly Conor Cruise O’Brien, was a secret Catholic: Edmund Burke.

In his Speech on Conciliation With America, Burke tried to warn the hard-liners in His Majesty’s government and their enablers in Parliament that punitive measures to bring American colonists to heel were futile. Among the reasons for this, he observed, was the Americans’ energetic pursuit of liberty, and a principal reason for this “free spirit” was their predominant religion: “The people are Protestants; and of that kind which is the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion. This is a persuasion not only favourable to liberty, but built upon it.”

If it is in fact the case that Burke held practiced Catholicism covertly, he must have felt uncomfortable saying—just as uncomfortable as I, a cradle Catholic, am in reading—the following: “Every one knows that the Roman Catholic religion is at least coeval with most of the governments where it prevails; that it has generally gone hand in hand with them, and received great favour and every kind of support from authority.”

Lest his audience grow too self-satisfied, Burke immediately admonished that the Church of English also “was formed from her cradle under the nursing care of regular government.” In contrast, what had taken root in America was “a refinement on the principle of resistance; it is the dissidence of dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion.”

Luther would have understood the spirit of “natural liberty” from which American liberty sprang, as well as the principle of dissent that acted like fission in threatening to split apart the young nation. By calling for an interpretation of Scripture by individual believers, he introduced a spirit of individualism into Christianity, undermining not only the authority of the Pope to rule on policy but of the scholastic elites that had sprung up in universities.

At the same time, individualism also threatened to undermine the unity of anti-Roman forces in Christianity. Dissenters not only could pull away from the Church but from any institution formed against it. In other words, let a thousand sects bloom.

I’m not sure that Luther ever understood this implication of his defiance. But that’s often how it goes with revolutionaries, isn’t it? They take one half-step toward disagreement until, through a combination of their own personalities and ideological environments they never expected to find, they come to a place they could never imagine.

(We’re seeing something like this in the Iranian Revolution now, where the opposition leadership might have begun with few differences with the country’s theocracy on the nature of Islam and the state but now find themselves far removed from where they started.)

Leipzig as the Site of the Disputation

Speaking of places, how did Luther and Eck find themselves at Leipzig in the first place? Luther undoubtedly would have preferred Wittenberg in northern Germany, which not only had demonstrated receptiveness to his quarrel with the Vatican but also, in the form of Frederick the Wise, the Elector of Saxony, would have meant protection in case his life were threatened.

Leipzig, on the other hand, was more congenial for Eck. It was under the jurisdiction of Duke George, Frederick’s cousin, who loathed Luther. Even the university of Leipzig was not congenial territory for Luther—the faculty didn’t like him much.

According to Richard Marius’ biography Martin Luther: The Christian Between God and Death (1999), Luther had agreed not to speak during the debate between Eck and Karlstadt, on one condition: if he himself weren’t attacked. Duke George agreed to the proviso, probably wanting for the university the distinction of having put this troublesome priest in his place.

The pageantry and procession involved with the three-week “Leipzig Disputation” involving Eck, Karlstadt and Luther were enormous. I’m not sure Marius exaggerates all that much in claiming that it was accompanied by “the zest and ceremony that might attend an intercollegiate game in America today.” They certainly hearkened back to the spirit of ancient gladiatorial contests, with the following characteristics:

* Eck came into the city several days before, accompanied by a youth who would write an account of the proceedings, and feted along with the way with numerous honors.

* A couple of days later, Luther and his party came in on a carriage and various chariots.

* The disputation began with a mass at St. Thomas Church (later the work- and burial place of composer Johann Sebastian Bach), which was followed by a long procession that included abbots, counts, knights, and academics, then giving way to the singing of a church hymn in the great hall of Pleissenburg Castle.

* The castle was specially outfitted by Duke George for the occasion, with spectators sitting on benches hung with tapestry and the two intellectual combatants standing at opposite pulpits.
Luther’s pulpit stood under the portrait of St. Martin, Eck’s under the portrait of St. George.

When Eck, true to his instincts, went after Luther, the gloves came off.

Spiritual and Intellectual Heat

The air might have been still cool at 7 am on July 4, when the monks and university community gathered to watch Eck and Luther take their positions in their pulpits. But before long, they’d be witnesses to intellectual heat and fireworks.

Eck now disliked Luther, who returned the feeling, and then some (“a glory-hungry little beast,” Luther wrote of his opponent, in one of those bursts of invective that make for lively reading if not Christian charity.)

In physical appearance and style of disputation, Eck and Luther were near-polar opposites.

Eck, at least according to the description provided by Leipzig professor Peter Mosellan, was broad-shouldered, with “a strong German voice, fit for the stage—fit for a public crier.” His manner sounds common, even coarse: “His mouth, eyes and countenance gave the impression of his being a soldier or a butcher, rather than a divine.”

That plebeian appearance (like Luther, Eck sprang from peasant stock) concealed a scholar with a phenomenal memory and an ability to lure opponents onto extremely dangerous ground.

Portraits painted of Luther later in life left me unprepared for the figure conjured up by Mosellan, one who held a nosegay while in his pulpit and possessed of “a body so wasted with cares and study that you can almost count his bones.” In contrast to the guttural tones of Eck, Luther had “a clear and penetrating voice.” Rather than Eck’s source of authority--the pope and the entire line of Fathers of the Church--Luther had become increasingly wedded to sola scriptura, or reliance on scripture alone.

Thick slugger versus lean counterpuncher, Douglas vs. Lincoln: it’s easy to see the role Luther assumes.

The debate between Luther and Eck began on July 4th and ended on the 8th. The ground they covered included the papal authority, church infallibility, purgatory, the sale of indulgences, and penance.

Despite forensic rules designed to ensure courtesy, the two debaters continually irritated each other. Eck became annoyed with Luther for stopping to read notes passed along in mid-debate by good friend Philip Melanchthon, mostly citing biblical passages that contradicted Eck’s appeal to papal authority.

For his part, Eck sought to live up to the Germanic origin of his surname—“corner”—by placing Luther in a theological tight spot. The monk’s debating style, which could turn sarcastic when challenged (an intemperance that led pacifistic humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam to fear Luther would spark division and violence within Christendom), provided numerous opportunities for Eck to trap him.

In one such moment, Eck accused Luther of espousing doctrines on salvation and papal authority that were associated with John Wycliffe and John Hus, both denounced as heretics by the Church.

If Luther’s Adam’s apple didn’t throb when he heard the last name, he had the sang froid of a cat burglar. To counter critics of his positions, Hus had come to a debate, just as Luther had now, only to be seized by authorities and executed.

During a lunch break, Luther slipped into the library and found that in fact Eck was right: He did agree with Hus. When they returned to the forum, the monk admitted it.

Luther’s admission provided Eck with the goal he had in mind for the debate. In relatively short order, he obtained from the Vatican a papal bull excommunicating Luther. This time, however, Luther would not follow the path to martyrdom followed by Hus.

The Protestant and American Revolutions Compared

The rebellious monk was able to make his stand—to achieve independence, if you will—in ways followed by the American colonists 250 years later:

* Exploiting the power of print—Unlike Hus, Luther could resort to a revolutionary invention—the printing press—that disseminated his ideas throughout Germany in no time. American colonists carried this even further in the form of newspapers that attacked British abuses.

* Using the power of his pen—Luther’s translation of the Bible into German fed the development of that language, and his works—not just sermons and polemical statements but hymns—powerfully propagated his message. The American revolutionaries had several powerful penmen—the two Thomases (Jefferson and Paine) and even a conservative, John Dickinson (who, before he abstained from signing the Declaration, was continually called on by the Continental Congress to write many of its most important statements).

* Alliances with powerful forces—Luther was lucky enough to fall under the protection of Frederick the Wise, who, though he remained at least nominally a Catholic, felt that Luther had committed no religious crime that required Church intervention. The colonists were able to call on France and Spain as allies after the Battle of Saratoga convinced those countries that the Americans had a fighting chance—and that King George’s military could be bled dry in a foreign war.

Luther was, as a PBS documentary put it, a “Reluctant Revolutionary,” and in certain ways he staked out positions that were antithetical to the stance of individual freedom that he advocated. His furious denunciation of the German Peasants’ Revolt of 1524, for instance, let down a group inspired by his ideas. Even more dismaying, he made his last journey—one on which he took ill and died—in order to denounce Jews.

The revolution Luther created became a mighty river in European intellectual and political developments. One of its important tributaries flowed through Philadelphia in 1776.

Movie Quote of the Day (Sean Penn in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” on the Meaning of Independence)

2009-07-04T06:25:00.000-07:00

Surfer-stoner Jeff Spicoli (played by Sean Penn): “What Jefferson was saying was, ‘Hey! You know, we left this England place 'cause it was bogus; so if we don't get some cool rules ourselves - pronto - we'll just be bogus too!’ Get it?”—Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), screenplay by Cameron Crowe based on his book, directed by Amy Heckerling

I doubt that this is exactly the history lesson that much-put-upon Mr. Hand (played by a wonderfully incredulous Ray Walston) had in mind, but hey! It’s a start, dude!

This Day in Rock History (Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones in a Mysterious “Death by Misadventure”)

2009-07-03T23:42:00.000-07:00

July 3, 1969—A midnight swim in the pool on his Sussex, England, estate might have seemed a good idea, but it ended the life of Brian Jones, whose exit from the world proved to be even more messy and controversial than his departure from the rock ‘n’ roll band he founded, The Rolling Stones.

People of impassioned political beliefs entertain all manner of conspiracy theories, most with little relation to reality. In the world of entertainment, however, the death of the 27-year-old guitarist has led to far more justified questioning of the official verdict of what happened on his last fateful night.

The case has figured in any number of TV documentaries and nonfiction accounts. It even inspired one of the plot developments in Peter Robinson’s marvelous murder mystery from a couple of years ago, A Piece of My Heart (which I reviewed here).

What has fascinated me is the official cause of death, made by coroner Angus Sommerville four days after Jones’ demise. “Death by misadventure” sounds like the title of a novel, a description of what happens to little boys when they take childhood fantasy too seriously.

Actually, the phrase is a British legal term for death by accident. In some ways, it seemed more probable than any other coming from a national legal judicial establishment that had been at pains to crack Jones, his former bandmates and their women for open and flagrant drug use.

That never-ceasing substance abuse, the coroner decided—capped on the night of Jones' death with the consumption of several liquor bottles and pills—led the singer to ignore a warning from a nurse friend that hot night that he was in no condition for a dip—and to drown before anyone could reach him.

Many observers had a difficulty time accepting this verdict. The most outlandish of the conspiracy theories holds that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, each of whom had supplanted Jones as the prime forces in the band, wanted him done away with once and for all, only three weeks after they had requested his removal from the popular group because of his general unreliability in the studio.

Two of the more popular alternative theories of his death are: a) he got into some horseplay with the construction crew on his estate, Cotchford Farm, which had once belonged to his idol, Winnie the Pooh author A.A. Milne, then died accidentally when the rowdiness got out of hand; and b) he was murdered by the head of this crew, Frank Thorogood, for falling behind on his payments.

Particularly over the last decade, the latter two theories have gained ground, because of the following press reports:

* Thorogood allegedly confessed to his role in the death shortly before his own demise in 1993—though the man to whom he confessed, a Rolling Stones chaffeur, contradicted this account.

* Just before her own death from cancer last year, the nurse friend on the property that night, Janet Lawson, recanted her testimony in an interview with a Daily Mail reporter, revealing two things she had not mentioned at the inquest: that there had already been tension between Jones and Thorogood, and that the look on the builder’s face when he returned from the pool led her to fear instantly that something terrible had happened.

* Jones’ girlfriend, Anna Wohlin, gave her view in a memoir called The Murder of Brian Jones, again tagging Thorogood as the culprit—though she admitted that she was in the kitchen at the time and did not witness the event itself.

* An account by Ernest Hemingway biographer A.E. Hotchner, citing anonymous sources, offered this scenario: Two members of the work crew, resenting Jones for his wealth and women, decided to have a little fun at his expense in the pool, first preventing him from getting out, then holding him under water until he accidentally drowned. (Suffering from asthma, Jones would have had an already weakened bronchial condition.)

Two days after the death, his stunned former bandmates gave a free concert dedicated in Jones’ honor at Britain’s Hyde Park.

Not all of the Stones showed up at his funeral, though: Jagger and girlfriend Marianne Faithfull were scheduled to shoot a film in location and are believed to have been threatened with legal action if they missed any days. Richards and his girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg, had no public explanation, though their feelings about Jones were likely to have been ambivalent, given that Pallenberg had left Jones for Richards.

Reading the accounts of Jones’ passing, I was struck by the comments of the minister offering the eulogy, Canon Hugh Evan Hopkins: “He had little patience with authority, convention and tradition. In this he was typical of many of his generation who have come to see in the Stones an expression of their whole attitude to life. Much that this ancient church has stood for in 900 years seems totally irrelevant to them.”

It’s inconceivable to me that such a thing would be said today. Not only has the Anglican Church become more liberal, but the Stones themselves are no longer a threat to “authority, convention and tradition.” (Jagger, in fact, was even knighted six years ago.)

Moreover, there would probably be greater speculation about the elements in Jones’ own psychological background that led perhaps the most musically skillful member of the group, a man who could master virtually any instrument he picked up, to embark on a path of self-destruction.

In the end, the death of Brian Jones seems like a real-life counterpart to Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1965 film Blow-Up, with the blond, hedonistic, swinging (five children born out of wedlock, none that he supported) Jones at the heart of an inexplicable mystery. The dark energies symbolized by his demise would echo later in the year, in the band’s fateful concert at Altamont Speedway in December.

Song Lyric of the Day (From “1776,” The Tune That Richard Nixon Nixed)

2009-07-03T14:50:00.000-07:00

“To the right, ever to the right

Never to the left, forever to the right

We have gold, a market that will hold

Tradition that is old, a reluctance to be bold.”—“Cool, Cool, Considerate Men,” from 1776, book by Peter Stone, music and lyrics by Sherman Edwards (1969)

For a long time, I remembered incorrectly the title of this song, substituting “Conservative” for “Considerate”—but you really can’t blame me.

First, there are those lyrics—which, the intention of the Second Continental Congress delegates who sing it in the musical to the contrary, are less about reason than about reactionary tendencies.

Second, though I’ve seen the film 1776 a half-dozen times since its release in 1972, it was only about a year ago, when I caught it again on Turner Classic Movies, that I saw this song performed. It had been included in the original Broadway show, but didn’t make it into the finished film. And therein lies a tale in itself, exciting equal parts dark humor, pathos and terror, because it involves an American President at the height of his power: Richard Nixon.

Wary Warner and Tricky Dick

The film adaptation of 1776 was the last major production to be associated with Jack L. Warner, perhaps the most colorful member of the siblings that ran Warner Brothers in its glory years in the Thirties and Forties. On Broadway, the musical ran for more than 1,200 performances, netting a Tony as best musical.

The 79-year-old Warner, now an independent producer, saw a chance to burnish credits that already included such triumphs as Yankee Doodle Dandy, My Fair Lady, and Camelot. He did everything he could to duplicate the play’s success, hiring just about every member of the original cast (with the notable exception of Betty Buckley as Martha Jefferson, replaced by Blythe Danner) and sticking as close as possible to the original book of the musical by Peter Stone.

With one exception…

Warner took the film to the White House, where he previewed it for his friend Richard M. Nixon. (Remember that Warner was a throwback to the days when studio heads tended to be politically conservative, unlike today.)

Previously, Nixon had gotten a special performance at the White House of the stage version—the first time a Broadway musical had ever been staged at the President’s mansion in its entirety. At that time, much to the astonishment of cast members, he stood up and applauded at the end of “Cool, Cool Considerate Men.”

At some point, though, either while watching the film or very shortly afterward, Tricky Dick itched, glowered, and got that puss on his face that bothered so many viewers when he debated Jack Kennedy in 1960.

What had happened? Maybe prior objections of some members of his administration and Secret Service detail to this song and to the anti-war “Mama, Look Sharp” (songwriter Sherman Edwards had turned them down) had finally begun to register.

But in the commentary for the DVD release a few years ago, Peter Stone suggested an alternative that makes more sense—at least because it involved more immediate cause and effect. It involved a pain-in-the-neck cast member whose politics annoyed the President.

A Not-So-Fun-Loving Ben Franklin

Though most original cast members had been retained, producers had given serious thought to getting another Ben Franklin. Howard Da Silva had been wonderful in the role on Broadway, but behind the scenes he had given the show’s creators all-around agita.

The actor’s heart attack, suffered at the time of the recording of the original-cast album, could have given the producers an out had they wished. They could have said that uncertainty about his health was spelling trouble with the insurance companies who made filming possible. But the ruse would have been too transparent.

Da Silva caught onto their unease and implored them to cast him. He loved his great part, of course, but he also saw his appearance on film as a vindication of sorts for his refusal to “name names” before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which had resulted in his blacklisting by Hollywood. Even his appearances onscreen in the 1960s, when the blacklist was lifted, had been infrequent and low-profile.

In short, Da Silva couldn’t bear to pass up a plum role. He promised to be on his best behavior, and, throughout the filming, he was as good as his word.

But fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly, and Da Silva, liberal/leftist that he was, couldn’t abide the idea of the current occupant of the White House. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he believed, Nixon wasn’t just a politician with views that differed from his own, but the demagogue who had whipped up Californians and the nation into hysteria about Communism.

In other words, Da Silva concluded, Nixon was directly responsible for his unemployment during the blacklist era.

And so, the day after the performance at the White House, there was Da Silva, bound and determined that the President wouldn’t ruin other lives as he had his own, joining a line of anti-Vietnam picketers outside the executive mansion, where Nixon, Haldeman, Ehrlichman and their whole gang could see him.

Nixon’s appointments calendar shows that he dined with Warner two months before the film’s release on November 7. By this time, the President’s paranoia had been ramped up to a fever pitch by the effort to win a second term and to silence critics of his Vietnam policy (not to mention two inquisitive young whelps from the Washington Post asking questions about a third-rate break-in at the Watergate Hotel). As a favor to Nixon, Warner edited out the scene.

Fat White Guys in Wigs: A Formula for Success?

If he had wanted to, I suppose, Warner could have reasoned that the scene, featuring a minuet among the anti-independence forces in the Continental Congress, was terribly slow, not helped much by chunky middle-aged actors in wigs.

This was not a formula for success in a film that, unlike most musicals in the genre’s golden age, leaned far more heavily on words than moving images. You can bet your bottom dollar that he must have wondered if 18th-century feminine attire could allow for the likes of Cyd Charisse.

But in reality, Warner’s move was nothing but a cave-in to a powerful man. Or, as he put it: “He who fights and runs away lives to fight another day."

There the matter would have ended, with the footage irretrievably lost. But Warner’s loss of his former might and power in the industry (a situation that would be paralleled within two years by Nixon’s fall from grace) actually ensured that the scene would not be destroyed.

You see, in his salad days, as head of his family-run studio, Warner had customarily destroyed unused footage. A prime example of this was George Cukor’s sterling 1954 version of A Star is Born, starring Judy Garland. Despite ecstatic previews, Warner Brothers execs felt that the long running time would limit showings of the film and, thus, box office.

It was bad enough that the consequent cuts—two musical numbers and some crucial dramatic scenes—probably deprived Judy Garland of a Best Actress Oscar. But much of the footage fell permanently by the wayside, too. Years later, when the film was restored, much of this footage could not be re-inserted as originally shot, but had to feature dialogue running over production stills that represented the only visual record of what had been deleted.

I’m not going to argue here that “Cool, Cool Considerate Men” is a golden find compared with Garland’s show-stopping “Lose That Long Face.” But it did represent the one point in the film where the other side of the story of independence was told (even though that side was treated satirically).

Now, no longer heading a studio, Warner had no say on what happened to the footage—which, in this instance, the film’s editor put into unmarked boxes and buried in what Dick Cheney (a later “cool, cool considerate man”) might call “a secure, undisclosed location.” That location turned out to be 645 feet below ground in a salt mine warehouse near Lyons, Kansas. It was eventually rediscovered in readying the DVD release.

Today's GOP Reenacts Discarded Continental Congress Scenario

Today, on Capitol Hill, the GOP seems hell-bent on staging its own contemporary version of “Cool, Cool Considerate Men.”

Again, there’s a mystical, misplaced faith in “the market.”

Again, the leaders of the right-wing would rather go “never to the left,” no matter the circumstances affecting the country nor the real risk to their survival as a national party.

Most shamefully, there is “a reluctance to be bold,” even though the virtually unprecedented challenges facing the nation often require nothing less.

The irony in all of this is that the leader of the “Cool, Cool Considerate Men” in the Second Continental Congress, John Dickinson, later left by the wayside his “reluctance to be bold.” It wasn’t just, as 1776 indicated, that even though he couldn’t sign the Declaration of Independence, he joined the Continental Army to fight the British government he had once loyally believed in.

No, after the war—when he went back to Philadelphia, this time as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention from Delaware—Dickinson showed that he was a Burkean conservative—opposed to “change” but not to “reform.”

The convention almost foundered because of the split between large states, who wanted proportional representation in Congress, and small states, who wanted an equal number of votes for each state.

Then Dickinson advocated a solution that had never been tried before, but proved a brilliant solution to the problem at hand. It was a bicameral, or two-house, legislature in which the House of Representatives would be apportioned by population while the Senate would contain equal numbers for each state.

The idea came to be eagerly embraced not just within the federal branch or even by the individual states (Nebraska remains the lone holdout for a unicameral legislature) but even among foreign governments.

Today’s Republicans would do well to think how, for instance, they might embrace the Dickinson approach by formulating their own innovative yet practical approach to health care, rather than simply saying no all the time.

Sometimes, “a reluctance to be bold” only loses a revered “tradition that is old.”

Flashback, July 1859: Amherst Crushes Williams in First Intercollegiate Baseball Game

2009-07-02T22:19:00.000-07:00

The national pastime notched a milestone indicating its growing appeal, as Amherst pulverized Williams College in what seems more like a basketball score (albeit a lopsided one) than the first intercollegiate baseball game: 73-32.

Nearly two months ago, The New York Times ran an account of a reenactment of the game, occurring at Wacomah Stadium in Pittsfield, Mass., within walking distance of the original site on North and Maplewood Streets.

Before this, all I knew about Pittsfield was that at one time it housed the home of Moby Dick author Herman Melville. Little did I realize that it has become known as “Baseball’s Garden of Eden”—the place offering the greatest amount of documentation for the very early origins of the game. (A 1791 ordinance forbade the playing of baseball within 80 yards of the new Meeting House "for the Preservation of the Windows.”)

Longtime baseball fans fed up with a number of aspects of the modern game—the designated hitter, the closer, the umpteenth middle relievers, the starters that have to be yanked after 100 pitches lest their arms fall off or they turn into pumpkins at the stroke of midnight, the rock-show antics (and I didn’t even mention steroids!)—would have been interested in that reenactment.

Actually, in another sense, it’s becoming extremely likely that they’re going to do so soon, if you haven’t already, because an entire league exists with rules similar to how the game was played in 1859.

It’s something called the Vintage Base Ball Federation (no, the two words for “baseball” are not a misprint—that’s how it was spelled in the 19th century). The league has been around for 13 years, but it first came to my attention because of a former New York Yankee who had helped organize its first two regional playoffs and World Series: Jim Bouton.

The pitcher earned a reputation, in a Village Voice headline which captured the spirit of a feeling more than the reality of the situation, as a “Baseball Bolshevik" with the publication of Ball Four in 1970. It turns out, however, that when it comes to what’s on the diamond as opposed to what happens in the dugout, Bouton is as much, maybe even more (perish the thought!) of an advocate of “original intent,” than Antonin Scalia.

Earlier this year, Bouton announced that, because businesses have been devastated by the recession, the regional playoffs and World Series would go on hiatus this year. Nevertheless, the game is so unique—and sounds like such fun—that I think it’ll return stronger than ever.

The following were features of the 1859 intercollegiate game—and, in reading recent accounts of the VBBF, it struck me that players in this new league would find much congenial about the earlier contest, which were played under rules that were labeled “Boston Base Ball” or “Massachusetts Base Ball”:

* Hurlers (not pitchers) tossed the ball underhanded while only 35 feet away from batters.
* Thirteen men were on the field.
* Innings lasted for only one out.
* There was no such thing as a foul ball.
* The rectangular infield was marked not with bases but with four four-foot poles.
* Players caught the ball barehanded—no gloves.
* The ball was heavier.
* Batters stood halfway between first and home—a distance of only 30 feet.
* The sartorial style consisted of short-billed caps and long-sleeved jerseys.
* The tonsorial style consisted of waxed moustaches and flamboyant flaring sideburns.

Oh, by the way, at the same time Williams was losing on the diamond, they dropped a chess match, too, to Amherst. Obviously, it wasn’t their day.