These days the vast majority of posts here are pasted in from my blog at work at The American Interest. Only from time to time do I have something I want to put down here that is not appropriate, possibly, for my (so-called) professional life. This one is probably going to end up somewhere in between, so I may do something a bit unusual: Write here and transfer some version of it over to the TAI site.
There have been some noteworthy deaths lately, two of them in baseball. Stan Musial died, and so did Earl Weaver. They were both real characters, but Musial was really special––a great player, a loyalist who played with only one team his entire career, and a man who was as outstanding off the field as he was on it. I have a friend who is a devout Cardinals fan, and of course I wrote to him to console him about the passing of Stan the Man. He was deeply appreciative. I shared with them my own musings on the death of my own boyhood hero, Harmon Killebrew, who died a year or so ago.
Earl Weaver was of course known as a manager more than as a player, so it's hard to work up quite the same feelings for him, unless you happen to be a Baltimore Orioles fan––which I have never been. But when it comes to Stan Musial, he was in his baseball prime when I was in my boyhood prime. So when someone like that dies a piece of my boyhood dies with him. I can't explain it but when I pondered the meaning of Musial last night during a bout of insomnia, into my head leapt Janice Joplin singing "Take it, take another little piece of my heart, now baby." You know you got it; that's how it feels.
Before I come to the other death I want to mention, I just have to get off my chest a brief remark about taxes. There is a connection. Somebody once asked this person, to be revealed just below, what motivated her to write. And she answered: the Internal Revenue Service.
As everybody knows, pretty much, the White House and the Congress at the last minute at the end of 2012 decided to keep the Bush-era tax cuts except for families making more than $450,000. The President and everybody else on Capitol Hill repeatedly told us that if you were below that threshold, your taxes would not rise. Well, here we are near the end of January, and most people have by now seen one paycheck or more in 2013, and guess what? That turned out to be a lie. What no one discussed that I ever heard, and I never saw a single newspaper article talk about it, was that the temporary Bush-era reduction of the FICA tax from 6.2% down to 4.2% was going to expire. And expire it did. Now that tax is back up to 6.2%. (There may be other dimensions to the lie later on when people learn that some of the deductions they have grown used to depending on are no longer available to them, but that's another story).
Maybe it's a little strong to call it a lie, but what it shows is how completely detached our political class is from the lives of ordinary people. What these guys meant was that there would be no increase in Federal income tax if you happen to be below the threshold. But the average worker, the average person, doesn't give a damn where the tax comes from. All that person knows is that they either have less, the same, or more money on account of being taxed. So I wonder what most people thought when, after having been assured that their taxes would not rise, they rose 2 percent anyway.
Now, for our politicians two percent doesn't seem like much, but people trying to make ends meet feel that 2 percent keenly. And as I say, as far as I am aware, nobody ever talked about this, nobody ever explained the logic of not allowing that tax cut to continue, nobody ever debated it in public that I know of, and nobody mentioned it during either the presidential or vice presidential debates.
I am not going to get into a long discourse here about whether United States is an overtaxed or an undertaxed country. Actually, it is both, but I don't want to take time to explain here why that is. To most people, I think it's fair to say, taxes are too high compared to the services they provide. It used to be in ancient days that a tithe was ten percent, and nobody ever imagined a government needing more than ten percent to do what it needed to do. Just the FICA tax alone, at 6.2%, is a big chunk of ten percent––nearly two-thirds of ten percent. And we haven't even gotten near all the other taxes people have to pay. Again the point: Our political class thought this 2 percent was too trivial to even mention, either that or they were afraid to do so. But it's not trivial at all to most people. So is it any wonder that the typical American ranks Congress about as popular as chickenpox.
Now I want to come to the death that has set me most to thinking. On January 16 Pauline Phillips passed away at the age of 94. Ms. Phillips wrote under the name Abigail Van Buren, and is--or was-- of course the very, very famous Dear Abby. It must've been about twenty years ago, maybe longer, that I learned to my surprise that she was the identical twin sister of Ann Landers. How odd, I thought. I was even more impressed, although not exactly surprised, to learn that these twin sisters were Jewish. I vaguely understood that between the two of them the Friedman twins had enormous social influence, but since I rarely read either one of them I really didn't give it much thought. Now with the passing of the second of the two sisters, I have given it at least some fleeting thought.
A catalyst for my doing so was the magisterial obituary in the New York Times written by Margalit Fox. For many years I have been an aficionado of obituary writing. It is an art form all its own, little pocket biographies that, when done properly, convey emotion and information in almost equal proportion. I so like them that I started a collection of obituaries, mostly from the New York Times but also from other places, of obscure but nevertheless interesting and important American Jews. I figured one day I might process all this material into a short book, because I believe firmly in what one of my mentors, Owen Harries, used to say: People are most eager to read about "flaps and chaps", by which he meant scandals and colorful personalities.
Anyway, Ms. Fox's effort on Dear Abby could hardly have been better. She introduced the subject by observing that had Damon Runyon and Groucho Marx combined talents to write an advice column, it would sound a lot like Dear Abby's. I'm not so sure about the Damon Runyon part, because I don't hear any Nathan Detroit intonations in Dear Abby, but I hear plenty of Marxism--of the Groucho wing, of course.
Anyway, to make a long story short, Pauline Esther Friedman, nicknamed Popo, and her twin sister Esther Pauline Friedman, nicknamed Essie, really did have enormous influence. As Ms. Fox points out, the two of them transformed advice columns from stuffy Victorian formalisms into sometimes quite avant-garde social commentary, personalized (usually) from woman to woman. As much of the commentary pointed out, Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren paved the way for Dr. Ruth, Oprah and many others. They had effective control over what could and could not be said about sensitive and intimate matters in public. They established not only the contours of taste with regard to such matters, but the bounds of social authority pertaining to them.
As important, I think, in that regard is that both of them combined a somewhat conservative attitude when it came to marital and family life with a somewhat progressive tilt on politics. Especially toward the beginning of their careers, the twins frowned on easy divorce, licentious behavior and promiscuous teen habits. It is fair to say, I think, that they dragged their feet on those kinds of issues, trying to slow trends they saw as destructive. But at the same time they both advanced civil rights, rights and respect for immigrants and ethnic minorities of all kinds, and in due course legal equality for homosexuals. When it came to those issues, they did not drag their feet but pushed their envelopes, and with them those of the entire nation.
Some people may find this an odd combination––to be social conservatives in some respects but political progressives in others. I don't find it at all odd, because it pretty much describes my own point of view. Now I wish I'd read more of what the twins had to say back in the day.
I can't help, too, to reflect just a bit on the Jewcentric dimension of all this. I am reasonably confident that 99 percent of the readers who devoured Ann Landers and Dear Abby on a regular basis over the years did not know they were Jews. And they weren't just ho-hum Jews, either. Hailing from a very small Jewish community in Sioux City, Iowa, which, like most such Jewish communities tend to be tight-knit, they were avowed and proud, if not especially observant, Jews. In the obituary there is a vignette about the two sisters meeting Bishop Fulton Sheen. Both of them thought he was a great man, and learned a great deal from him. But Popo was quoted as saying that the Bishop would sooner become a Jew that she'd ever be a Catholic.
My guess is that it would've made no difference to their readers, most of them anyway, had they known they were Jewish. But it's hard not to find it striking that these two pre-eminent gatekeepers of American social mores, whose cumulative influence is hard to overestimate, were Jews. Indeed, if you look up the pop cultural references to Dear Abby, in particular, but also Ann Landers, they virtually never stop. My favorite is the song called "Dear Abby" written and recorded by John Prine, but everybody can get a piece of Dear Abby culture, so widely has she been integrated into the American Geist.
The twins were first-generation American Jews at that. The family's story is so typical in most respects that it seems to come right out of central casting. The twins' parents, Abraham and Rebecca Friedman, left the domain of the Czar in 1905, the year of the Kishinev pogrom. According to the newspaper accounts, they came from Vladivostok, which of course is on the Pacific, in the Maritime provinces, about us far from the Ukraine as you can get and still be in the Russian Empire. I have no idea how Abraham and Rebecca ended up in Vladivostok, but my guess is they were in refugee transit there from much further west. Also a little odd, the obituaries mentioned that the parents never forgot their first sight of the Statue of Liberty, which means they entered the United States in New York, on the East Coast. That is not a very efficient way to get from Vladivostok to the United States, so this is kind of curious.
As to why they ended up in Sioux City, Iowa, well, that remains a mystery too--at least to me. But it's really not all that strange. My own maternal grandmother used to tell the story of how when she and her siblings came to America with their parents from Odessa they went to, as she, in her permanently affixed Yiddish accent, would say--and I will try to get this as close to the sound as written language will allow--Say-DEER ra-PEEDs e-OH-vah. Of course, she was talking about Cedar Rapids, Iowa, not all that far from Sioux City. We grandchildren thought this was about the funniest thing we had ever heard. (It was maybe 1956, so give us a break.) So there were Jews out there, a lot of them ending up ultimately in Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Detroit and St. Louis.
As to the central casting, well, Abraham and Rebecca started out in Cedar Rapids peddling chickens from a cart. Eventually they parlayed that activity into a grocery store. From the grocery store, Abraham, who evidently had a terrific sense of humor and loved the stage, bought a partial ownership in a burlesque house, right at the cusp of when movies swept the country. After a number of years he owned a chain of movie houses in and around Sioux City, and grew quite wealthy.
As for the twins (I don't know much about their two elder sisters), they got married on the same day in 1939 in the synagogue in Sioux City, and they both married wealthy––or soon to be wealthy––men. Essie married a guy who went on to found Budget Rent-a-Car. Popo married Morton Phillips, who was the heir to a large liquor business that had supposedly begun within twenty seconds after the end of Prohibition. They had plenty of money and didn't need to work. But, as Popo famously said, "It's not work unless you'd rather be doing something else."
Now this piece of information also alighted on my own family's history: My mother's father Adam, after whom I am named, did the very same thing. With one partner, I think, he founded Central Liquor in Washington, DC in 1933. Those from the Washington area may know that this was at one time, and to some extent still is, the largest and most lucrative liquor store in the city.
Unfortunately, my grandfather Adam didn't get along well with his partner (I believe he thought he was a crook, but I was not yet around and so cannot judge the matter one way or the other), and eventually sold out his share. Now how unfortunate is that? I don't know. What do I know, however, is that my grandfather did not exactly invent his business suddenly on one day in 1933. He had been making "sacramental cherry wine"--yes, folks, that's a euphemism--in the basement of the house on 16th Street for a long time. He and some associates also apparently knew the route up to Halifax in Canada like the back of their hands. In short, I suspect he was a small-time bootlegger, and, from the sound of it, I suspect that Morton Phillips's dad was, too. They did not pay taxes on that stuff, take it from me.
Stan Musial, FICA, Dear Abby..... I'm sorry. I guess I didn't get a great night's sleep.
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