Thursday, February 25, 2010

Who's Who, Who's That?

As promised, I am about to list some of the names (perhaps about half of them) in the American Almanac's day calendar for 1879. I am listing all the names I could not identify for sure; some I had some vague notions about, but I held myself to a fairly rigorous standard.

Before giving the list, I only would point out that in order to fill up 356 days there is likely to have been a little stretching going on. The editors needed one name or event per day, no more and no less. So we can't say for sure that this list represents a complete idea of famous persons or events of the time. But it's not entirely random either, as becomes clear when you ask yourself how you would put together such a feature item today. You would not choose an obscure event or person over a better known one, would you? I sure wouldn't.

So, the list is good enough to get a broad picture of what fame meant to Americans, or at least to Americans in Boston, during the Hayes Administration. I have also listed the year date of death or birth. If I list both, that means the name appeared twice in the calander. I did not, of course, list "Rachel" -- see earlier post on her which led to this post.

David Garrick, b.1716; d. 1779
William H. Prescott, d. 1859
John Rogers, d. 1555
Reverdy Johnson, d. 1876
Dr. E. K. Kane, d. 1857
Henry R. Schoolcraft, b. 1793
William Ellery Channing, b. 1780
Donizetti, d. 1848
Thomas Wentworth Strafford, b. 1593
John L Motley, b. 1819
Sir John Franklin, b. 1786
Thomas Hood, d. 1845
Daniel O'Connell, d. 1847
Marie Edgeworth, d. 1849
Edward Livingstone, d. 1835
Louis Agassiz, b. 1807
Sarah Siddons, b. 1755
Houdon, d. 1828
Paul Delaroche, b. 1797
John Sterling, b. 1806
Benjamin Silliman, b. 1779
J.V. Moreau, b. 1763
C. Malte-Brun, b. 1775
Cuvier, b. 1769
Buffon, b. 1707
Lord Brougham, b. 1779
Madame Malibran, d. 1836
Louis Rene Rohan, b. 1734
Thomas Clarkson, d. 1849
Canova, d. 1822
Theophile Gautier, d. 1872
Rhinehart, d. 1874
John Leech, d. 1864
John B. McCulloch, d. 1864
Johann L. Uhland, d. 1862
Pierre Bayle, b. 1647
Madame de Maintenon, b. 1635
Emmerich Vattel, d. 1767
Thomas Gray, b. 1716
Juan Prim, d. 1870
Jules Simon, b. 1814

If you take the time to find out who these people were, you'll discover that fame in the middle of 19th century America leaned heavily toward Brits and French, besides Americans. Heavily toward the arts and sciences, with a good smattering of religious types. The political, of course, too. There are some women, more than I thought there would be.

I confess to having been embarrassed to not know some of these names, because finding out who they were instantly reminded me that I had heard of them before. Did you take the test? How many did you know? I suppose that some of the ones I did know and thus did not list above, many people would not know. But I was too lazy to list them all......there are nearly a hundred. Example: Max Muller. I did not list Max Muller, because I have a special reason for knowing who he was. Do you? How about John Henry Newman? Helps to be a Catholic on that one.

Seriously, it is interesting to reflect on what makes for fame in any given era, and what that tells us about the era. And what makes fame so fleeting, and what that tells us about human nature and society. Alas, as to the latter, we would do worse than to remember what S.J. Perelman once wrote about immortality -- that it is left to the whim of the yet unborn. Lucky, then, are most of us, who don't have to worry about the matter at all.

Monday, February 22, 2010

Alexander M. Haig. Jr.

It is appropriate, I think, to pause and reflect when another person's death finally brackets a part of one's own life. I briefly worked for Alexander Haig back in 1979-80, just before he became Secretary of State. I was a junior aide only, and he did not invite me, fresh out of graduate school as I was at the time, to go with him to Washington, as he did my friend and mentor Harvey Sicherman, six years my senior. I did not press the matter. Indeed, I neither asked nor even hinted, perhaps because I felt myself less than entitled: I was not a Republican, after all, and had not voted for Ronald Reagan in November 1980.

Nor did I have any other claim on his loyalty. I was never in the Army, or on Haig's staff when he was Supreme Allied Commander of U.S. forces in Europe (SACEUR), bivouacked in Brussels. And certainly I did not know him when he was Richard Nixon's White House chief-of-staff in the early 1970s--I was a just an undergraduate college student at the time. All I knew of the Haig family came some years before that, with my occasional encounter with a younger Alex and his sister Barbara at Yorktown High School in Arlington, Virginia. Their father and mother I never met at the time.

I saw Al Haig fairly regularly only in 1979-80, during the time between his retirement from the Army and his appointment as Secretary of State by President Reagan. During those 18 or so months he was president of United Technologies and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, where I was working at the time. This was also a time when he had triple-bypass surgery, and I remember being deeply impressed by the difference between how he looked and acted before the operation and after. Before, Haig had almost preternaturally sparkling steel blue eyes, and he looked right at you with them. Afterwards, the twinkle was dulled, and I never saw it fully return, though he did otherwise recover his energy and most of the spring in his step before very long.

I did not do a great deal for him in those days; I was, as I have said, just a junior aide. I helped him write an essay for a magazine called Strategic Review. (Actually, I wrote it; he read it, approved it, made a few minor changes.) I did up a few research memoranda he asked for on various topics. Most of all, and most memorable of all for me, I helped coach him through his appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the matter of the SALT II Treaty.

As it happened, I had been seconded from Philadelphia to Washington at the time (for a second time; I'd gone before in 1977 for a little while) to help Senator Henry Jackson and, with him, Senator John Tower to interrogate that draft treaty. It was the habit, directed by Senators Jackson and Tower, and implemented by their staffers Richard Perle and Bud MacFarlane, to help prepare friendly witnesses for their testimonies when they came to town. I was instructed to help Haig.

He needed my help, too, through no fault of his own. He had nearly been blown up by terrorists on his way back from Brussels. He had arrived stateside only about 48 hours before his testimony, and had not had time to actually read the treaty carefully, let alone fully study it. It was a complicated business, too. I will say this: Haig was a very quick study, a superb gamesman with the Senators (not least a young fellow named Joe Biden.....), and generally a lot of fun to hang around with. I sat behind him in the Senate Caucus room during his testimony, passed him notes in tight spots a few times, and just generally hung around, trying to be helpful if needed. During a break, and this is something I could not forget even if I tried, John Stennis came up to me and complimented my "slick wrist action" in passing those notes. And he actually winked at me. So much for the gentleman from Mississippi; that's the first and last conversation we ever had.

All through the testimony and after Haig was ever gracious, appreciative and altogether personable. At the age of 28, I guess you could say I found the whole deal very entertaining, and even a bit gratifying.

For a certain part of this period Haig was testing out his own bid for President, which never got too far, but which touched off what I thought then and still think of now as some pretty hilarious episodes. Some of these episodes intersected with my time with Haig in Washington; others took place in Philly. I may sit down and relate these onto paper at some point or other, just for the record, and to get them off my chest in the sheer fun of story-telling. But for now, I will note only one in brief, in passing, so to speak.

One afternoon I was designated as a driver to take Haig and a man named, I think, Dixie Walker (not the old Brooklyn Dodger baseball player and not the former U.S. Ambassador to South Korea, but a third person) from the offices of the Foreign Policy Research Institute near Penn in West Philly out to the Philadelphia International Airport. Mr. Walker was an associate of Adolph Coors, and Haig was clearly trying to raise some money for his campaign from Coors. I put the two of them in the back seat of the only car I owned at the time, a 1952 Cadillac -- a Fleetwood, so thankfully a 4-door -- which I had owned for about a year. It takes about a half hour, maybe a little less depending on traffic, to drive from 36th and Market Streets out to the airport, and during that time driving Haig and Walker were talking politics and campaigns and money. They got on pretty well, it seemed to me. Their assumption, or their choice of a proper assumption for purposes of that discussion (not at all the same thing, of course), was that "when Reagan faltered", that was the exact language they both used, Haig would be "well positioned to make his move."

I said nothing, of course. I just drove.

When we got to the airport, I drove out -- you could in those days -- to the private area where the Lear jets were waiting. One was fueled up, waiting to take the two of them to Houston for a fundraiser. Walker was sitting behind me on the left side of the back seat; Haig on the right. I remember this because when I shut off the Caddy's engine and got out, I opened the door for Walker. I was too slow to get around the back to open the right rear door for Haig. He opened it himself, got out, and slammed the door closed a little too hard, sending the window glass off its track and down inside the body of the door with a loud clunk. Thank God, it did not break.

Haig seemed alarmed, however. "I'm sorry, Adam," he said.

"Oh never mind, sir," I answered, "It does that sometimes; no big deal." I got their luggage out of the trunk, shook Haig's hand and said, "Have a good trip, sir."

In fact, the window had never done that before, and has never done it again since. I still have the car.

I saw Haig from time to time in the years that followed his short stint as Secretary of State. He was always friendly and cordial to me. The last time I saw him was already some time ago, in the fall of 2002, I think it was. It was at the annual dinner of The National Interest magazine, which I was editing at the time. Haig was to my right at the table, and to his right his old boss Henry Kissinger. The other two or three people at our table I do not recall. We talked about this and that, though given the layout of the table I mostly listened to the crosstalk. But I remember toward the end of the evening Haig turned and asked me, "Hey, Adam, you still have that old Cadillac?" And I answered, "Yep, and it runs just fine, and the rear-right window is fine, too, even though you once tried to break it." "Yes indeed," he answered, "and I tried and failed to get some money out of that guy in Colorado, too"--all accompanied by a friendly chuckle.

And that is how I remember Al Haig -- quick with a smile, easy with an assuring hand on the shoulder. Rest in peace, sir.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Rachel and Adah.....and Joanna Angel?

As I mentioned a few posts ago, I have been making my way through some old almanacs, and finding it both fun and educational (these have often gone together in my life, and I find it something of a pity that the union is not more widely shared). Anyway, in the 1879 edition of the American Almanac there is a feature added as against those from before the Civil War. There is a day calendar on which is inscribed noteworthy anniversaries. Most are the sorts of things one would expect: the day when the constitution was ratified in 1789; the day when Martin Luther nailed his papers to a Church door in Wittenburg in 1517; the day when California was admitted to the union; and so on and so forth. Rather a lot of the anniversaries, however, record the dates of birth and/or death of famous people. So if one goes through and extracts just these names, one has a handy list of personages that the editors of the American Almanac more of less presumed would be recognized by reasonably educated Americans of that day.

So I did this, and to my surprise, there were a fair number I had never heard of. I will come back to this matter in a subsequent post; I shall, indeed, tell you, dear reader, how many names there were in the calendar, and I will list those I found the most obscure. Indeed, I may list them all. This throws some interesting light on what constituted fame in those days. For example, in the entire list there is not a single professional athlete. This is because there was no such a thing as a professional athlete in 1879. Does that just take you right out, or what? Clearly, we're not in that Kansas anymore.....

But for now, I want to make reference to just one name I did not recognize, even if by so doing I reveal my appalling ignorance to all my readers (both of them......). One name came up twice, and it was just one name. The name was "Rachel." In 1820, the Almanac says (erroneously, I think: All the biographies say 1821) she was born, and in 1858 she died. (The exact days, I hope you will agree, don't matter much anymore.)

Rachel who?, I wondered.

It did not take very long to find out, and I confess that I had an inkling of what I would find simply because of one other listing: the date of the birth of Jenny Lind. Jenny Lind, I knew (and many will know), was the best known singer of the 19th century, at least in the United States and probably Britain as well. She was, we would say today, an entertainer, though in those times female artists had a good deal more status than that conveyed by the word "entertainer". Goddess is more like it, I think. Anyway, I suspected that a woman called after only her first name, at a time when very, very few women are mentioned at all in such lists, was probably some sort of famous entertainer as well. Right I was.

To make a fairly long story short, this "Rachel" was Eliza Rachel Felix, a Jewish girl born to a large family in, of all places, Switzerland. Her parents took the family to Paris where Rachel's older sister Sophia (Sarah) sang at cafes and Rachel, then age 4, collected the coins. Before long, Rachel developed some talents of her own, the sisters were discovered, subsidized into the music conservatory, and Rachel emerged as the most talented and transformative female tragedian of the day. Rather than simply stand on stage rigid as a ramrod and deliver her lines, Rachel humanized her roles. She was animated, vivid, different. She became a star. Parts were written for her. She went to London for the 1841-42 season and conquered all, a total sensation. Her fame spread, and she traveled to America in 1855, specifically (for some unknown reason) to Charleston, South Carolina. Alas, by then the tuberculosis that took her life three years later had already sharply curtailed her energy and artistic powers. And so the queen of tragedy was herself the victim of a tragic death.

The Almanac from 1859, as it happens, also recorded Rachel's death in its "foreign obituary" section. And there what seemed to me a cryptic remark appeared. After praising her peerless artistic talents, the editors wrote that aside from her theatrical skills, her life was not commendable -- or words to that effect. Whatever did that mean? I found out later: Rachel gave birth to two daughters, but never married. She was the mistress of an illegitimate child of none other than Napoleon, and she was the mistress of other men, too. This was pretty scandalous for the time, even in France. In America it was, as the Almanac entry showed, literally unprintable.

Now in 1855, when Rachel came to America, already a great Transatlantic star, Adah Isaacs Menken was only 20 years old. She was in New Orleans, not all that far from Charleston. Did she go to Charleston to see Rachel? I don't know; it seems impossible that an aspiring entertainer, and another Jewess to boot, would not have known about Rachel's visit.

Adah Isaacs Menken was America's first celebrity, in the sense that, as David Kirby explained it in the pages of The American Interest, she was the first performer to deliberately conflate her private personality with her stage personality, thus laying the groundwork for the career strategy of, say, Madonna. And what a personality it was. Adah Menken became famous--some would say, and did then say, infamous--for her performance of an adapted Byron poem called Mazeppa. In her act she donned a flesh-toned body suit, a leotard of the day, and strapped herself to a horse that walked up a steep ramp. Some people fainted when they saw this.

Menken was married four times, if I remember right. When she hit her stride of fame, she also went to Europe as Rachel had come to America. She befriended Dickens, was the mistress of the elder Dumas, and scandalized her way across both shores of the Atlantic. Is it possible that she was influenced by the famous Rachel? Seems to me it was impossible that she was not. Alas, Menken too died at a very young age, also of tuberculosis.

One can only imagine what proper Methodist and Congregationalist matrons thought of Jewish woman in those days, with the like of Rachel and Menken being the most famous among them.

So when, just the other day, my daughter's boyfriend, Ben Margolis, sent me an article proclaiming that Jewish women were now considered "hot stuff" by gentile men--"The Rise of the Hot Jewish Girl", by Christopher Noxon, in an online magazine called Details--I was not surprised. I though of Rachel and Adah Isaacs Menken and said, "So, what's new?" But Noxon informed his readers that a porn star named Joanna Angel was raised in an Orthodox home. If this is really true, it is a rarity, if not something genuinely new.

There was a photo. Joanna Angel is hot, no doubt about it. My oh my, I thought, what will the Methodist matrons think now? Same thing they thought 150 years ago, I guess. Le meme chose...., Rachel.

Sunday, February 14, 2010

Curmudgeon alert: Power lines and salt

Consider today's post in the nature of a blowing-off-steam item, a getting-it-off-one's-chest sort of thing. I thought if I waited a few days it would just go away; alas, it didn't.

The main target of today's rant is the imbecility, the total lack of imagination, of the so-called 5th estate, particularly of the local variety. I know well that anecdotes ain't data. But they ain't nothing either, so here are two of them, introduced by a brief prolegomenon.

Now, during the recent Snowmegeddon here in the Washington area, a term coined, I am led to believe, by the President himself (more of him in a moment), the local news types have had a lot of air time to fill and not a lot to fill it with, since it sort of follows that when the weather derails normal business and professional activities, there are not a lot of those activities to talk about. So they filled it with stories about the weather, and their favorite sub-species of those stories: stories about the press getting stories about the weather.

Well, what the heck, why not?: Everyone loves stories about the weather, the network types know, because the viewer is in a sense part of the story, or implicitly assumes himself to be. Nothing wrong with manipulating superficial mass narcissism for fun and profit, right?

It's a matter of taste, I suppose. But, as I have said, two little episodes reveal how irritating this can be.

In episode one, a local anchor was interviewing the head of PEPCO, the local electrical utility. A lot of people lost power during the storms, as always happens when there are even halfway serious storms around here, and just about everywhere else in the United States, too. So this senior local anchor has the Big Guy on a phone interview, and the interview goes on for a long time by network TV standards--something on the order to seven to ten minutes. And it never occurs to the anchor to ask the Big Guy why all these damned power lines are still strung up in the air after all these years. If they had been buried, as they are in most civilized countries, this wouldn't happen to us every damned time the wind fixes to blow hard.

Now, I know, this is a complicated subject. It costs more up-front to bury the lines, and burying the lines does not obviate all maintenance and system costs. And I know, too, that we're often talking great distances here, and that helps to explain why we still so often stick our lines up in the air while the countries of Western Europe, for example, do not.

Helps to explain, but in fact does not wholly explain. It is also explained by derangements of federalism, our inability to plan as we once did, the venality of developers and corruption of local government, and more besides. All that said, if President Obama is looking for a major project that could create decent jobs, and that would do a world of good economically, aesthetically and even in terms of national security, he would vow to have all of our power and communications networks underground by the end of the decade. (Better still, we could use innovation to decentralize our power and communications grids to a considerable extent, saving even more money and grief, but that's probably two generations away.)

I know, as I say, that this is a complicated technical issue. We have lots of legacy infrastructure to deal with, and doing that is both expensive and generates turf spats among government jurisdictions, utilities and businesses. But we don't even know the actual numbers here of what a national project to modernize our systems would cost in the shorter run and save in the longer run. Repairing miles and miles of downed wires is expensive; it is part of the whole-system costs of the way we do things, but these costs are rarely if ever figured into our assessments. Lots of engineers have used models to make estimates of costs to do fractions of the job, but no one, as far as I know, has ever systematically worked up a plan to examine scaled-up costs and financing.

Of course, if we had in this country a Department of Infrastructure, or something like it, where we did anything like serious planning about our transportation and communication systems, maybe someone would have thought to do this. No one has, because we have no such capacity. We have a Department of Transportation, but long-term planning seems not to be among its duties. We have the FCC, but ditto as far as I can tell. And as far as I can tell, there is no place in the U.S. government that relates the disparate parts of this infrastructure to a whole.

It's way past time we do this. Until we do, I am not inclined to be the slightest bit sympathetic when wails of complaint rise after major storms, and so many people lose power--which is not just an inconvenience for many people, but a life-and-death ordeal when elderly or ill people lose heat and the ability to communicate for days on end. This is our own damned fault. Stupidity, laziness and corruption (yes, unfortunately, that's part of the problem, too) have their wages. We're still paying them.

Second episode, from the selfsame day: a weather anchor fretting about the possibility that we might run out of salt for the roads. The news showed a huge truck being loaded at the port of Baltimore with salt imported from Chile and Mexico. And so I learned that we buy this product from abroad; an interesting fact in its own right, seeing as how the state of Utah is full of the stuff. But the weather anchor never asked the simple question: What happens to all this salt when the snow and ice melts and the spring rains come? What does it do to the soil and the water, and all the life that depends on both? Never asked; never raised.

We used to use sand and ash to treat the roads, much less pressure on the environment; how come we don't do this anymore? Maybe there's a good answer, but I don't know what it is, since not one of our genius local TV journalists has seemed ever to ask. I am not asking for anything so exalted as "investigative journalism", which seems to have pretty much disappeared. I'm just hoping for a scintilla of ordinary curiosity, fortified with just a smidgen of imagination. It'll never happen, I know. Pfrzghtwskzczxuuumph......

Thursday, February 4, 2010

Et tu, Denmark?!

I've been reading through a sizable collection of old American (and a few British) Almanacs lately, a trove of stuff my wife recovered some 30 years ago from the dumpster behind the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, where she used to work (in the education department, not in the dumpster, of course). The FI Librarians, for some reason, tossed them out. We are both veteran dumpster divers, and it was a no-brainer to save these. There are about 50 of them altogether, stretching from 1828 to around 1887. The years 1838-1859 are pretty complete for the American Almanac.

Over the years I have taken them out, one here and there at random, now and again for no particular reason. But now I decided to go through them systematically, just for the heck of it. It has been a very rewarding little evening's activity, I must say--lots more fun than watching the idiot box, and less demanding on my fingers and brain than trying to get the right sounds out of my old F-4 mandolin. I have learned a lot. It's like finding little treasures lying about on the rug, that quite apart from the tactile pleasure of reading through books so old that anyone who had anything to do with them when they were new, whether as author, publisher, binder, merchant or reader, has been dead for more than a century.

I've learned, for example, about the origins of Groundhog's Day (see post of January 26, below....or above, or wherever and however it works on a blog). I've learned who created the Julian Calendar (no, not someone named Julian -- but someone named Joseph Scalinger, in the 16th century) and why. I've learned, or re-learned, how American presidents were elected before around 1824 -- NOT by any popular vote..... I've learned a lot about the American economy, largely from the census data of 1840. From the 1842 edition, which was published in late 1841 of course, one notes that the big news is the death of President Harrison. Also a series of bank failures, particularly in Pennsylvania. There were no bail-outs. And President Tyler subsequently vetoed legislation aiming to create a new national bank. Someone should go study this stuff; one gets the feeling it's not entirely irrelevant to some of today's concerns.

I've learned more about how deeply racist the country was, too, from sketches of various then-contemporary incidents -- about Elijah Parrish Lovejoy and his press in Illinois; Lucretia Mott and the burning of Pennsylvania Hall; and race riots--Irishmen-led anti-black pogroms, really--in Cincinnati. The Almanac from 1860 has a pretty interesting account of what happened at Harper's Ferry on October 16-18, 1859. It says nothing about John Brown's motives. It does mention that the Governor of Virginia called upon the citizens of the state not to wander far from home on the day of Brown's hanging in December, to protect their property. Earlier Almanacs, like the 1842 item, suggest why: The number of white people and free "colored" just about equaled (not quite) the number of slaves in the Old Dominion. (One learns, too, that some free colored people also owned slaves, but we're not supposed to know or talk about that.....)

But last night I learned something I never knew about at all. I was perusing the data on world population (it had yet to reach one billion in 1841) and noticed an entry for Danish colonies in Africa. That stopped me short; I never knew there were any Danish colonies in Africa. There were, and in southern India as well. They go back to the 17th century, and were very much involved with the slave trade before it was made illegal. So that subject comes around again....

They were small and ultimately unsuccessful efforts, these Danish outposts. The Danes ultimately sold most of their holding to the British in the middle of the 19th century, just as they sold the Virgin Islands to the United States during World War I. Their African holdings were centered in what is today Ghana. It turns out that a fort of sorts the Danes built in 1811 or thereabouts is used still today, as the official residence of the Ghanaian president! I did not know that. Now I do, and you do, too.

Tonight I'll go through 1844 and 1845 I guess. And if it really snows a lot this weekend, as predicted, heck, I may make it all the way to the Hayes Administration. Such fun....