Did You Know? 12-5-01 to 8-22-03
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What Was the Triangle Trade? (posted 8-22-03)
Libbie Payne, writing in the Boston Globe (August 17, 2003):
What was the Triangle Trade?
A. One of the most profitable international business arrangements involving Europe, the Caribbean, and North America, the Triangle Trade of rum, slaves, molasses, and goods played an important role in the early growth of this country.
The name comes from the triangular pattern of shipping routes used to transport products unavailable in one part of the world to another. While the direction of shipping could begin at any point of the triangle, the cargo remained fairly consistent.
Holland, Portugal, Spain, France, and England shipped textiles and other manufactured goods to Africa, where they were traded for slaves. The slaves were, in turn, shipped to the West Indies and put to work on British sugar cane plantations. Sugar and molasses were shipped to the Colonies, where they were traded for tobacco, fish, lumber, and rum, which was then shipped to Europe or the West Indies.
Rum was big business in the Colonies. In the 1760s there were 22 distilleries in Rhode Island and 63 in Massachusetts. Medford became especially known for its rum, an industry begun in the early 1700s by John Hall and carried into the 20th century by the Lawrence family.
The British outlawed slavery in 1772 and banned the Atlantic slave trade in 1807. The importation of slaves was declared illegal in the United States in 1808. However, the institution of slavery, and the Triangle Trade, persisted well into the 19th century.
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Why Do Suburbs Feature Grand Lawns? (posted 8-22-03)
Sam Allis, writing in the Boston Globe (August 17, 2003):
Welcome to the insanity of lawns. Our national lawn pathology, always severe, is exacerbated this summer by the monsoons that have produced our very own elephant grass. Mowing is now an even more obnoxious activity than usual, if that is possible.
So why mow? More to the point, why have lawns at all? Give me that ground cover that requires little more than a nod every morning. What does it say about us that the two neighbors in a TV ad - Scotts, I think - spend most of their waking hours competing for the better lawn? Guys, get a grip....
No other country in the world shares our lawn obsession. Lawn historians say the whole thing started when 18th-century Brit aristocrats favored manicured sweeps at their country homes, and these, in turn, spawned our particular lawn disorder. But then we've aped the Brits about almost everything, badly. (Remember our national genuflection at "Masterpiece Theatre"? Forget lawns, what the Brits are justifiably lionized for are their magnificent country gardens - confections of loose beauty, designed precisely to reject the strictures of the formal continental gardens of old, where everything looked like an Escher print.
Contrast the inspired Brit package with the stark uniformity of a suburban street around Boston, where you grow clover at your peril. Where you'd best change the locks if you don't get rid of your dandelions before the fluff blows across neighbors' lawns like pollution from a Midwest power plant. Where lawns without walls that are designed to be open affairs are, in fact, fiercely held turf.
Face it, lawns define the suburban ethos more than book groups and Fluffernutters combined.
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House-Senate Conference Committees: A Tempestuous Past (posted 8-22-03)
Bill Walsh, writing in the Times-Picayune (August 18, 2003) about the conflicts that arise between Senate and House conferees:
No one disputes that the majority party holds sway in conference. But there is a long-running debate on Capitol Hill and in academia about whether the House or Senate has an advantage. That rivalry has sometimes boiled over into petty disputes, such as on which side of the Capitol the conference committee should meet.
Things got so tense concerning the location of a spending bill conference in the early 1960s, according to Associate Senate Historian Don Ritchie, that deliberations on all federal appropriations stopped. Neither side thought its members should have to walk the length of the Capitol to meet on the "turf" of the other body.
Fortunately, Ritchie said, a new room being constructed as part of a Capitol expansion happened to fall dead center between the House and Senate. The room, EF-100, served as neutral ground for House and Senate conferees.
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Road Accidents ... Are Cars to Blame? (posted 8-21-03)
Bob Montgomery, writing in the Irish Times (August 20, 2003):
THE GOOD OLD DAYS: Road accidents, however regrettable, are by no means a peculiarity of the motor vehicle. They have been happening as long as there have been roads.Deaths on the roads of France in 1899, the first year for which comprehensive records are available, numbered the surprising total of 876 - two were the result of motors while the rest involved horse-drawn traffic. In the same year, an incredible 8,700 were injured in horse-related accidents on France's roads.
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Has a UN Official Ever Been Specifically Targeted for Assassination? (posted 8-21-03)
Steven Edwards, writing in the Montreal Gazette (August 20, 2003), about the death of Vieira de Mello, the UN representative in Iraq:
If personally targeted in yesterday's attack, Vieira de Mello, 55, would be the first UN official assassinated since 1948, though some historians have speculated Soviet operatives were responsible for causing the 1961 plane crash in Africa that killed Dag Hammarskjold, then secretary-general.
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When Did World War II End? (posted 8-14-03)
Stroube Smith, writing in the Washington Times (August 14, 2003):
There is some confusion over when we should say this cataclysmic conflict ended. The AP Stylebook says Aug. 15, the day Japanese Emperor Hirohito broadcast the news to his people. Because of that notation, that is the date most often used by newspapers. Others insist on Sept. 2, when Gen. Douglas MacArthur presided over the formal surrender signing aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.To me, though, it will always be that evening of Aug. 14 and the wild celebrations Truman's announcement set off on South Lee Street in Alexandria, in the rest of the city and across the nation. It is also the day the killing, for the most part, came to an end.
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What Is the Baath Party (posted 8-11-03)
Cameron McWhirter, writing in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution (August 10, 2003):
What is Baathism?
At one time, Baathism was a movement espousing lofty ideals of Arab brotherhood and equality, with a goal of uniting all Arabs into one powerful, secular state. But, like other "isms" of the 20th century, Baathism was twisted and corrupted by tyrants. By the time U.S. troops invaded Iraq, Baathism had degenerated into a vehicle of control for dictators, its founding principles long since abandoned.
"This party embodies all the things that went wrong in the Middle East," said Juan Cole, an historian at the University of Michigan who has written extensively about modern Islamic movements. "It was started by ideologues, but by the '90s, it was a mafia kind of thing."
In the 1950s and 1960s, Baathism had supporters in Syria, where it was founded, as well as Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Yemen and other parts of the Middle East. Today, the only nation where a Baath Party still holds power is Syria, and it long ago ceased trying to spread Baathism to other countries.
Whatever the future holds for the turbulent Middle East, scholars agree that it won't include Baathism.
Origins in Syria
The ideology grew out of discussions among intellectuals in the cafes of Damascus, the capital of French-occupied Syria, in the late 1930s. Two schoolteachers, Michel Aflaq, a Christian, and Salah al-Din Bitar, a Muslim, formed a movement that they called Baath, Arabic for "rebirth." The movement attracted students and others interested in overthrowing the French colonial government.
The principal tenet of Baathism was unifying all Arabs into one nation. The founders believed that the various colonial states in the Middle East had been imposed in part to divide Arabs and weaken them.
"The basic idea of Baathism, which was pan-Arabism, made a lot of sense," said Cole at Michigan. "If I was an Arab, I would be pan-Arabist. Imagine if there was a 'United States of Arabs.' It would be a huge powerhouse. The problem is that it's a conclusion that one comes to in the abstraction. When you try to implement it, you run into problems."
Ole Holsti, a political science professor at Duke University and an expert on the Middle East, said Baathism downplayed Islam and offered what he called "Islam-lite" to supporters. Baathists argued that the Arab people chiefly were not united by religion, but by language, culture and history.
"Islam had its place, yes, but there was a clear understanding that the Baathists were going to have a secular regime," he said.
Alan Godlas, associate professor of religion at the University of Georgia and expert on Islamic and Arabic movements, said the Baathist vision was to create a unified democratic Arab state, with state control of the entire economy. "The intention was not to form dictatorships," Godlas said.
Internal squabbles
The first Baath political party was organized in Syria in 1943. By 1946, after the French left Syria, the Baath Party grew into a major player in the country's politics.
In fierce competition for supporters with the communist party, the Baath set up a tightly controlled party structure, similar to the communist concept of "cells," small groups of devoted followers.
But from its beginnings, the party suffered from internal squabbles. Baathist nationalists thought the party should take over one country and work on socialist reforms there before uniting with other states. Baathist regionalists, though, argued the countries should unite first, then work on reforms. This bickering eventually tore the movement apart.
In 1963, the Baath Party took control of Syria. As the party consolidated power, a large faction of the leadership --- led by military officers --- were nationalists. A civilian regionalist faction, led by movement founders Aflaq and Bitar, argued that the Baathists now must export their "revolution" to other Arab states.
Gaining power in Iraq
Baathist parties already operated in neighboring states, including Iraq, where a young party cadre, Saddam Hussein, was climbing up the ranks.
In 1966, a split among Syrian Baathists led the military faction to exile Aflaq and Bitar. They both denounced Syrian Baathism as a betrayal of their movement.
In 1968 a coup in Iraq brought the Baathists to power there, with the help of the military. Initially, Aflaq and Bitar hoped Iraq would follow their lead of spreading Baathist revolution, but soon party leaders focused on rooting out internal enemies. Saddam was in the top leadership from the beginning, but did not seize total control of the party and the country until 1979.
In Syria, dictator Hafez Assad had taken control of the party and the government in 1970. He ruled until his death in 2000, when his son, Bashar Assad, took over.
Georgetown University Professor Steve Heydemann, an expert in Middle East politics and the author of a book on the Syrian Baath Party, said the parties in both countries were vehicles for ambitious and ruthless men to set up dictatorships.
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Productivity Isn't Increasing Faster Now than in the Past (posted 8-11-03)
Economist Dean Baker, commenting on an article in the Washington Post (August 11, 2003):
The Post article notes the poor employment performance of the economy in the recovery thus far, which it attributes to "unusually big gains in productivity." Actually, productivity growth in this recovery has not been very different from that during past recoveries. The table below shows the average rate of productivity growth in the current recovery and the prior five recoveries, for the non-farm business sector, during the first seven quarters of each recovery.
2001:3 -- 03:2 – 4.5%
1991:1 -- 92:4 – 3.7%
1982:3 -- 84:2 – 3.8%
1975:4 -- 77:3 – 3.0%
1970:4 -- 72:3 – 4.3%
1960:4 -- 62:3 – 5.4%While the 4.5 percent rate of productivity growth in the current recovery is somewhat more rapid than the 4.0 percent average of the prior five, the difference is not large enough to explain the huge difference in employment growth. In the past, rapid productivity growth did not seem to impede employment growth. For example, the 4.3 percent rate of productivity growth following the 1970 recession did not keep the economy from creating 4.5 million jobs between November 1970 and November 1972.
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Was Duke University Built with Tobacco Money? (posted 8-6-03)
Jeff Elder, writing in the Charlotte Observer (August 6, 2003):
Q. Is it true that Duke University was built with tobacco money?
Many folks in the Carolinas -- including many Duke alums and students -- will tell you this is true.
It is not.
At least according to Robert Durden, professor emeritus of history at Duke and author of several books about the Duke family.
The Dukes certainly made plenty of money in tobacco early on. But after the turn of the century James B. Duke turned his attention to -- and invested his money in -- hydroelectric power. Duke was convinced that textile manufacturing could transform the Carolinas. All he needed was cheap, plentiful energy.
He was right. In 1905, the Dukes founded the Southern Power Co., now known as Duke Power. Within two decades, this company was supplying electricity to more than 300 cotton mills and various factories, cities and towns in the Carolinas. The Duke family earned tremendous profits, and that money is what went toward building Duke University.
Duke's scandalous love affair
There's another matter Durden says many folks might not know about James B. Duke. A quiet, private man and a devout Methodist, Duke hated personal publicity. At one point he got plenty.About the time he was investing in hydroelectricity, Duke met what professor Durden describes as "a very well-shaped, good-looking divorcee" named Lillian McCredy. He bought her a house in New York and would steal away to see her.
After a decade of this, Duke's father, Washington, fell and broke his hip. Feeling that he was dying, Washington Duke called his son to his side and made him promise to marry his mistress to make an honest woman out of her.
McCredy was "a loose lady," Durden says, and not the type Duke wanted to marry. But he felt that he had to honor his father's wishes. The marriage was a disaster. Duke quickly learned his bride was running around on him. He hired private detectives to get proof, and sued her for divorce.
The tabloids pounced on the story. The scandal literally made Duke sick, and he nursed health problems.
Later he married a widow from Atlanta, Nanaline Holt Inman, with whom he spent the rest of his life.
Durden's latest book, "Bold Entrepreneur: A Life of James B. Duke," tells much more about a man who shaped the Carolinas like few others.
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Why Don't Editors Show Dead People on TV or in Newspapers? (posted 7-31-03)
Ken Ringle, writing in the Washington Post (July 25, 2003):
War is an unpleasant business, death itself rarely less so. Therefore, if you're a government or a newspaper or broadcaster, how do you treat the visual images of the shattered corpses that war provides?
Yesterday, the allied forces in Iraq reached a Solomon-like (or maybe Kafka-like) decision regarding photographs of Uday and Qusay, the two repellent sons of Saddam Hussein who were killed in a shootout with U.S. forces near Mosul....
This squeamishness about violent death is a relatively modern sensibility. Highwaymen and bandits were once drawn and quartered, and hung in pieces at country crossroads as a cautionary display. In the early days of this republic, pirates' corpses rotted in chains on what is now Ellis Island to give mutiny-prone sailors something to think about as they left New York harbor.
Tamerlane built towers displaying the skulls of enemies who defied him. Six hundred years later, some of those towers still stand. And Pol Pot left warehouses of skulls and bones after the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s.
In the modern West, however, the industrialization of death has generally been coupled with a curious reluctance to display -- at least immediately -- photographic evidence of what that industrialization means. The famous photos of Pearl Harbor show no American dead. The government banned publication of any photos of dead U.S. servicemen until more than two years into World War II.
"Eventually they decided this was dishonest and released three photos from Buna Beach in New Guinea," said historian and critic Paul Fussell yesterday from his home in Philadelphia. "The pictures of the dead didn't show any faces, of course. The soldiers looked like they could have been asleep."
Fussell, a World War II combat veteran and author of "Wartime" and "The Great War and Modern Memory," acknowledged that the photos did at least show bodies, but said, "Unless you show guts hanging from the trees like Christmas decorations, you're not showing what war is really all about."
There have been exceptions when dealing with the enemy. In April 1945, many newspapers and newsreels showed pictures of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci, after they had been shot and hung upside down in a public square while trying to escape to Switzerland.
The picture, one of the most famous of World War II, showed blood and gore aplenty, but it also showed the fastidiousness of the era: Petacci's skirt had been roped shut against any crotch display that might offend....
If the rotting detritus of war has rarely graced the front pages and television screens of the United States, some photographs taken at a particular moment of death or horror have become almost iconic: Robert Capa's Spanish Civil War soldier caught, arms flung out, at the moment of his fatal bullet's impact; Eddie Adams's famous Vietnam War shot of the pistol execution of a Viet Cong guerrilla.
These, however, have been exceptions. One looks in vain in British or American newspapers of World War I for the photographic images to match the horrific recollections of letter writers and diarists chronicling the monstrous Golgotha of trench warfare where, as historian John Keegan has noted, the most frequent foreign material encountered by surgeons treating soldiers' wounds was bits and pieces of other people....
In October 1862, Mathew Brady opened in New York one of the first exhibits of war photographs. It was called "The Dead of Antietam," and it portrayed in almost elegiac fashion the rotting and bloated human remnants of the bloodiest day of the Civil War. The pictures, of course, were in black and white, and they showed no recognizable faces. But New Yorkers found them profoundly disturbing. .
As the 20th century dawned and wore on, Americans began to fence off death verbally with euphemisms ("passed away," "passed on"), geographically with "sleep rooms" and "funeral parlors," and visually by hiding photographs of corpses as a matter of taste.
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What Event in History Cost the U.S. the Most Money? (posted 7-31-03)
Peter Hartcher, writing in the Australian Financial Review (July 26, 2003):
If you had to guess the event that cost the United States more money than any other in its history, would you choose the Civil War? World War II? Or the Wall Street Great Crash of 1929? All of these are in the top five, but none even begins to approach the scale of America's most stupendously expensive event: the stockmarket collapse that the country has just lived through. The cost to date is $US6.5 trillion in lost shareholder wealth. For proportion, World War II ranks second - in today's dollars, it cost the country $US3.4 trillion.
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Why Do Museums Now Have to Worry About the Origins of Their Artifacts? (posted 7-29-03)
Carol Kino, writing in Slate (July 28, 2003):
[Why don't museums turn a blind eye to the provenance of their artifacts as used to be the case?]
The laws that allow countries to seek restitution of what's known as "cultural property" are a byproduct of the early 20th century, when art-rich countries like Turkey, Italy, and Greece began to introduce what are known as "patrimony laws." (These essentially deem all newly discovered artifacts found within their borders to be the property of the state.)
The movement to protect world culture dramatically intensified after World War II, during which the Nazis and the Russian army confiscated unprecedented numbers of artworks from individuals and public institutions throughout Europe. 1954 saw the drafting of the Hague Convention—the first major international agreement to establish guidelines for protecting cultural property during wartime. Then, in the 1960s, the international art market heated up so much (resulting in increased trade of stolen goods) that UNESCO, in 1970, drafted another convention that encouraged countries to work together as much as possible to enforce each other's export restrictions. (By 2003, UNESCO's guidelines had been ratified by 96 countries, including the United States.) As Thomas Hoving, a former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, famously wrote in his 1993 memoir, Making the Mummies Dance, "I recognized that with the UNESCO hearings, the age of piracy had ended."
Today, trying to make sense of all the different international laws is enough to set anyone but a lawyer wailing like the tortured figure in Edvard Munch's "The Scream." In 1995, UNIDROIT (originally the legal auxiliary of the old League of Nations) drafted a convention that aims to enforce export restrictions and help unify cultural property laws worldwide. Within most countries, illegally gotten cultural property is generally covered by a nation's stolen property laws. But transport that cultural property across a border, and you may have violated civil law, criminal law, an import or an export prohibition, or a combination of the above, depending on which country we're talking about, what the object is, and who owns it—and that's just for starters. Much also depends on the particulars of the bilateral and multilateral agreements, if any, between the countries in question, which stipulate whether and to what degree one will honor another's export restrictions.
Obviously, when the dispute is between nations, national pride, politics, and political grandstanding tend to take precedence over law. That's probably why such disputes have a habit of becoming so emotional, and so unresolvable—as evidenced by the long-running brouhaha over the Elgin Marbles, which escalated about 20 years ago. Britain holds that the sculptures, removed from the Parthenon in the early 19th century, were legally purchased by Lord Elgin from the Ottoman Empire, which then controlled Greece—a move that thereby saved them from destruction during Greece's War of Independence and by modern-day Greek air pollution. Yet Greece counters that the seller was an occupying force, therefore the purchase shouldn't count. Both nations regard the sculptures as their cultural patrimony. But Greece didn't exist as an independent nation until 1832—and in any case, its 20th-century patrimony laws can't be applied retroactively. Perhaps that's why Greece, so far, has attempted to resolve the matter through diplomacy, rather than in court.
Last December, an alliance of about 40 major museums, known as the Bizot Group, issued a statement in support of the so-called "universal museum"—one whose collection brings together work from many periods and cultures. (18 museum directors signed the statement, including those of the Metropolitan, the Louvre, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Hermitage.) The statement argues that with time, objects become "part of the heritage of the nations which house them." Clearly, the signatories were also trying to protect their own backs: If the British Museum were ever to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece, the act would likely unleash a torrent of similar claims that could drain the resources—and the collections—of some of the world's great treasure-house museums.
Nonetheless, the Bizot statement has since been slammed by various museum associations and cultural watchdogs for being "Eurocentric" and for taking "a George Bush approach to international relations."
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Bush's 2 Question Rule (posted 7-16-03)
Richard W. Stevenson, writing in the NYT (July 13, 2003):
Mr. Bush almost never holds formal news conferences. Instead, he frequently takes a few questions from reporters, especially after meetings with foreign leaders. He has a strict rule: he calls on two American reporters and his counterpart calls on two reporters from the other country's press corps.
Mr. Bush is a stickler about the practice, even if it means chiding another leader on his own turf. When President Festus G. Mogae of Botswana tried to start one of these sessions on Thursday by saying, "Does anyone want to ask . . ." Mr. Bush cut him off good-naturedly and said, "That's not the way we do it."
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Did the British Invent Lasagne? (posted 7-15-03)
Fropm the BCC News (July 15, 2003):
It's so British the court of Richard II was making it in the 14th Century and most likely serving it up to ravenous knights in oak-panelled banqueting halls.
The claim has been made by researchers who found the world's oldest cookery book, The Forme of Cury, in the British Museum.
A spokesman for the Berkeley Castle medieval festival, with whom the experts were working, said: "I defy anyone to disprove it because it appeared in the first cookery book ever written."
It is not known whether he has dared put the claim to outspoken Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.
But the Italian embassy in London reportedly responded: "Whatever this old dish was called, it was not lasagne as we make it."
I think it must have been the Romans who brought it over
And Bristol restaurateur Antonio Piscopo fired an emphatic warning shot.
"I think it's rubbish. I think it must have been the Romans who brought it over. It is definitely Italian."
The recipe book does not mention meat - a staple of a good lasagne.
And such an early use of tomatoes in food would have had medieval cooks spluttering into their espressos.
But it does describe making a base of pasta and laying cheese over the top.
It calls this "loseyns", which is apparently pronounced "lasan", although it fails to mention whether it should be followed with a sweet tiramasu and a glass of Amaretto.
Pasta faded from the British diet when potatoes arrived, according to the researchers. The hearty roast dinner soon swept all before it.
Britain would be well advised not to make a meal of the claim, because Italy's track record on food fights is impressive.
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Putting the Death Toll of Saddam's Victims in Perspective (posted 7-9-03)
Sharon Waxman, writing in the Washington Post (July 7, 2003):
An estimated 290,000 people are missing and believed to be buried in mass graves throughout Iraq. In a country of 22 million, that is more than 1 percent of the population, the equivalent of about 3.5 million people in the United States. The vast majority of these bodies have not been found.By comparison, forensic experts working in the former Yugoslavia estimated that "ethnic cleansing" left 30,000 dead in mass burial pits. It was there that the specialty of forensic archaeology emerged and proved its worth, as the careful evidence-gathering of experts was later used in trials that succeeded in convicting war criminals. In the Iraq war, the U.S. government did not wait long to recruit a group of forensic archaeologists with expertise in things like human anatomy and geophysics. Most of them are in their twenties and come from universities around the globe or from other projects involving crimes of war. Since the fall of Saddam Hussein in April, these researchers have identified 80 to 100 mass graves in Iraq. The number depends upon how one counts, since some sites include several mass graves in close proximity.
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The Story of the Only Enlisted Man to Be Honored with a Memorial at Gettysburg (posted 7-9-03)
Mark Roth, writing in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (July 6, 2003):
Amos Humiston is the only enlisted man at Gettysburg who has his own monument on the battlefield. It wasn't because of his heroism in the battle. A Union sergeant in New York's 154th "Hardtack" regiment, Humiston was killed on the first day of fighting in Gettysburg, after Confederate troops overwhelmed his company at a spot known as Kuhn's Brickyard.
What earned him a permanent marker was his love for Frank, Freddie and Alice.
Humiston was just one of more than 3,000 Union soldiers who died in the monumental three-day conflict. But when his body was found later that week, lying in a secluded spot at York and Stratton streets in Gettysburg, he was holding an ambrotype -- an early kind of photograph -- and on it were the serious, round faces of his three adored children: 8-year-old Frank, 6-year-old Alice and 4-year-old Freddie.
Somehow, historians believe, Amos Humiston had managed to drag himself to this patch of ground after he had been wounded, and was probably looking at his children's faces when he died.
Even then, Humiston might have faded into obscurity, because there was nothing on his body to identify him and the few soldiers from his unit who survived the battle had moved on before he was found.
Somehow, though, the image of his children ended up in the possession of Dr. John Francis Bourns, a 49-year-old Philadelphia physician who helped care for the wounded at Gettysburg. Months after wrapping up his volunteer work there, he decided to try to find out the identity of the children's father.
His efforts produced a wave of publicity that swept the North and became the People magazine cover story of its day.
It began quietly enough, on Oct. 19, 1863, when the Philadelphia Inquirer published a story under the provocative headline: "Whose Father Was He?"
"After the battle of Gettysburg," the article read, "a Union soldier was found in a secluded spot on the battlefield, where, wounded, he had laid himself down to die. In his hands, tightly clasped, was an ambrotype containing the portraits of three small children ... and as he silently gazed upon them his soul passed away. How touching! How solemn! ..."
"It is earnestly desired that all papers in the country will draw attention to the discovery of this picture and its attendant circumstances, so that, if possible, the family of the dead hero may come into possession of it. Of what inestimable value will it be to these children, proving, as it does, that the last thought of their dying father was for them, and them only."
When the article appeared 140 years ago, newspapers were not able to publish photographs, and so the story, subsequently reprinted in dozens of newspapers and magazines throughout the North, had to rely on a detailed description of the children. The eldest boy, it said, was wearing a shirt made of the same fabric as his sister's dress. The younger boy in the middle was sitting on a chair, wearing a dark suit. It estimated their ages at 9, 7, and 5, only a year off the mark.
One of the reprints appeared in the American Presbyterian, a church magazine. That is where Philinda Humiston, living in Portville, N.Y., first saw word of the ambrotype and the dead soldier. She hadn't heard from Amos since weeks before Gettysburg, and when she saw the description of the children, she feared the worst.
But she couldn't be sure. So she contacted Bourns through a letter written by the town postmaster.
Bourns had printed copy upon copy of the children's picture to respond to inquiries, but so far, none of the people who had contacted him had turned out to be the right family. He replied to Philinda's inquiry as he had to the others.
And so it was that one mid-November day, four months after the battle, she opened the envelope from Philadelphia and knew for sure that she had been widowed for a second time, and that her children were fatherless.
The story might have ended there if it weren't for another idea Bourns had. He believed he could capitalize on the outpouring of sympathy toward the Humistons to raise funds for an orphanage in Gettysburg, to house the children of fallen Union soldiers.
And so a second publicity campaign began, appealing for donations.
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The Origins of the Great Seal (posted 7-9-03)
Linda Hales, writing in the Washington Post (July 4, 2003):
The Continental Congress named three of the best minds in the new country -- Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams -- to devise an emblem for a free people with great aspirations. The imagery that now seems so obvious -- 13 stars and stripes and an American bald eagle carrying weapons of war but facing an olive branch -- required multiple committees, with consultants in tow, over six years. The deliberative process went on so long that the worst ideas were weeded out. An important and timely symbol -- the olive branch of peace -- survived.
The results can be judged by glancing at the back of the $ 1 bill. The actual working seal, which resembles a large silver dollar, resides in a faded mahogany cabinet in a plexiglass cage in the State Department's Exhibition Hall. It is put to use almost weekly in the time-honored ritual of stamping presidential appointments and envelopes bearing ambassadorial credentials, plus the occasional peace treaty.
"This is history," said Sharon L. Hardy, chief of the State Department's presidential appointments staff, as she executed a perfect seal on a document....
As a coat of arms, the Great Seal decorates military uniform buttons and plaques over entrances at embassies and consulates abroad. It also served as the model for the Presidential Seal, but history records that the original designer of that later seal, in 1880, got one of the most important details wrong: the direction of the eagle's gaze. Instead of facing to its right -- in heraldry, the direction of honor -- the presidential bird was made to face left, toward the sinister side and the talon holding the arrows of war. In an ironic quirk of White House history, the error is preserved in a bronze seal that once graced the entrance to the mansion. According to the White House curator's office, the eagle now hangs over the entrance to the Diplomatic Reception Room on the ground floor of the residence.
In the beginning, the design committee wandered through an intellectual forest of classical and biblical themes. At one point, Franklin and Jefferson are said to have favored a design with Moses crossing the Red Sea chased by the pharaoh. They consulted with a portrait artist, Pierre Eugene du Simitiere, and managed to wrap up their assignment in 46 days. But the proposal they submitted to the Continental Congress was an unwieldy amalgam of 13 shields and two heraldic figures. Congress dismissed it with an order to "lie on the table."
The effort was not a total failure. The committee's motto, "E Pluribus Unum" ("Out of Many, One"), has survived for eternity. And an unfinished pyramid under the eye of Providence found its way onto the reverse side of the die, and to the dollar bill.
Four years later, a second committee was named, and Francis Hopkinson, designer of the American flag, signed up. But Congress was not swayed by his proposal for an oversize red-white-and-blue shield flanked by two 18th-century figurines. Hopkinson deserves credit for adding the olive branch, which endures as a symbol of peace.
The first eagle appeared two years later, when a third committee, working with a heraldry expert from Philadelphia, William Barton, produced a design with a small imperial bird. Again, the Continental Congress was underwhelmed.
The following month, in June 1782, lawmakers turned to one of their own, Charles Thomson, secretary of the Congress. He was the official who would wield the seal. Thomson, neither an artist nor a designer, sifted through his predecessors' ideas before adding his own. He liked Barton's idea of a bird but decided the native American bald eagle was more appropriate. He kept the motto, a shield and the olive branch. After sketching a fresh concept, he asked for Barton's help. Their joint description was presented to the Continental Congress without a sketch.
Essentially, it called for a red-white-and-blue shield floating in front of an eagle that was carrying a ribbon inscribed with a motto in its beak, an olive branch in one talon and 13 arrows in the other, under a constellation of 13 stars.
Congress adopted the words June 20, 1782. The design sounds more complicated than it became in the hands of a skilled Philadelphia engraver. The name of the man who cast the first die in brass was not recorded, but his work was in use for nearly 60 years. The die is preserved at the National Archives, along with illustrations of preliminary committee designs.
The current die, at least the sixth in a series, was engraved by Bailey Banks & Biddle based on a highly regarded, but short-lived version produced by Tiffany in 1885. Over time, the eagle has become more muscular, the olive leaves more numerous and the 13 arrows very finely tuned.
"The arrows are my guide," Hardy said as she worked. "If the arrows are clear, I know that we have a good seal."
The Great Seal has always portrayed the eagle facing toward the olive branch, in keeping with heraldic custom. How the presidential eagle came to face the arrows remains a mystery. But in 1945, Harry S. Truman gave the order to change it.
A 1978 book, "The Eagle and the Shield," by the late State Department historian Richardson Dougall and Richard Patterson, includes an account from Clark Clifford, who served as a naval aide to Truman. Clifford reported that Truman considered the dropping of the atomic bomb to be so momentous that he wanted a symbolic reference incorporated into the seal.
"What Truman did was to turn the eagle's head to face the olive branch," said Milton Gustafson, a National Archives expert who has the out-of-print book.
Washingtonian George M. Elsey, the naval aide assigned to sketch a new presidential flag and seal for Franklin D. Roosevelt, remembers the story differently. In the winter of 1944, generals had just been offered an upgraded ranking of five stars, and Roosevelt thought the president's flag should rise from four to five stars, too. The flag's central element was the presidential seal.
The project languished with FDR's death, but was resurrected by Truman. Elsey called on Arthur E. DuBois, the U.S. Army's heraldic expert. He credits DuBois with noticing the errant eagle, which had no basis in heraldic tradition. He also pointed out to Truman that the design had no basis in law.
"DuBois was a purist," Elsey said. "Truman said okay."
Presidential aides were left to explain the shift to the public in symbolic terms. Elsey still recalls the line written for the announcement in October 1945: "Truman is now changing from the arrows of war to the olive branch of peace."
Although presidents have the power to redesign their seals, the nation's Great Seal is sacrosanct. Dies wear out. But there is no worry about what its replacement might look like. In 1986, the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing made a master copy so that future seals will bear the elegant detail of a 1903-04 engraving.
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Wright Brothers Didn't Hail from North Carolina (posted 7-8-03)
On a recent trip to Dayton, Ohio President Bush took pains to point out the importance of the Wright Brothers in history. Why? Because the Wright Brothers were from Dayton. And as the NYT account explained, "Much to the annoyance of Dayton residents, there is a mistaken impression that the airplane was invented in Kitty Hawk, NC, because that is where Wilbur and Orville Wright first flew their plane, on Dec. 17, 1903."
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Ohio's Importance in the Presidential Sweepstakes (posted 7-8-03)
NYT July 4, 2003:
According to the Almanac of American Politics, no Republican has ever won the presidency without winning Ohio, where registered Republicans outnum,bered Democrats by about 400,000 in the 2000 election. Mr. Bush, who is up for re-election in 2004, won Ohio in 2000 with 50 percent of the vote, compared to 46 percent for his opponent, Al Gore.
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Paul Revere's Ride: A Team Effort (posted 7-1-03)
Rod Paschall, writing for thehistorynet (July 1, 2003):
According to Paul Revere’s account of his historic 1775 ride, warning the countryside of the approach of the British was more a team effort than is generally realized.
The enduring image of a lone Patriot nightrider rousing the countryside to arms has been burnished in American poems, books, and movies for two and a quarter centuries. The underlying message is always the same: A single brave man can make all the difference. In a letter written in 1798 to Massachusetts Historical Society founder Dr. Jeremy Belknap, Paul Revere described his actual adventures during his "Midnight Ride" of April 18-19, 1775.
His mission was to warn of danger to Patriots outside Boston, particularly to two leaders who were opposing the government -- Samuel Adams and John Hancock. Revere began his account by recalling suspicious activities of British forces in Boston during the week preceding April 18. His original letter to Belknap is the property of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
On Tuesday evening, the 18th, it was observed that a number of soldiers were marching towards the bottom of the Common. About 10 o’clock, Dr. Warren [Joseph Warren, one of the few Patriot leaders who had remained in Boston] sent in great haste for me and begged that I would immediately set off for Lexington, where Messrs. Hancock and Adams were, and acquaint them of the movement, and that it was thought they were the objects.
When I got to Dr. Warren’s house, I found he had sent an express [fast messenger] by land to Lexington -- a Mr. William Daws [Dawes]. The Sunday before, by desire of Dr. Warren, I had been to Lexington, to Messrs. Hancock and Adams, who were at the Rev. Mr. Clark’s. I returned at night through Charlestown; there I agreed with a Colonel Conant [provincial militia veteran William Conant] and some other gentlemen that if the British went out by water, we would show two lanthorns [lanterns] in the North Church steeple; and if by land, one, as a signal; for we were apprehensive it would be difficult to cross the Charles River or get over Boston Neck. I left Dr. Warren, called upon a friend and desired him to make the signals.
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How Easy Would It Be for a PhD to Make an Atomic Bomb? (posted 6-25-03)
Oliver Burkeman, writing in the Guardian (June 24, 2003):
Its one of the burning questions of the moment: how easy would it be for a country with no nuclear expertise to build an A-bomb? Forty years ago in a top-secret project, the US military set about finding out....
Dave Dobson's past is not a secret. Not technically, anyway - not since the relevant US government intelligence documents were declassified and placed in the vaults of the National Security Archive, in Washington DC. But Dobson, now 65, is a modest man, and once he had discovered his vocation - teaching physics at Beloit College, in Wisconsin - he felt no need to drop dark hints about his earlier life. You could have taken any number of classes at Beloit with Professor Dobson, until his recent retirement, without having any reason to know that in his mid-20s, working entirely as an amateur and equipped with little more than a notebook and a library card, he designed a nuclear bomb. Today his experiences in 1964 - the year he was enlisted into a covert Pentagon operation known as the Nth Country Project - suddenly seem as terrifyingly relevant as ever. The question the project was designed to answer was a simple one: could a couple of non-experts, with brains but no access to classified research, crack the "nuclear secret"? In the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, panic had seeped into the arms debate. Only Britain, America, France and the Soviet Union had the bomb; the US military desperately hoped that if the instructions for building it could be kept secret, proliferation - to a fifth country, a sixth country, an "Nth country", hence the project's name - could be averted. Today, the fear is back: with al-Qaida resurgent, North Korea out of control, and nuclear rumours emanating from any number of "rogue states", we cling, at least, to the belief that not just anyone could figure out how to make an atom bomb. The trouble is that, 40 years ago, anyone did.
The quest to discover whether an amateur was up to the task presented the US Army with the profoundly bizarre challenge of trying to find people with exactly the right lack of qualifications, recalls Bob Selden, who eventually became the other half of the two-man project. (Another early participant, David Pipkorn, soon left.) Both men had physics PhDs - the hypothetical Nth country would have access to those, it was assumed - but they had no nuclear expertise, let alone access to secret research.
"It's a very strange story," says Selden, then a lowly 28-year-old soldier drafted into the army and wondering how to put his talents to use, when he received a message that Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb and the grumpy commanding figure in the US atomic programme, wanted to see him. "I went to DC and we spent an evening together. But he began to question me in great detail about the physics of making a nuclear weapon, and I didn't know anything. As the evening wore on, I knew less and less. I went away very, very discouraged. Two days later a call comes through: they want you to come to Livermore."
Livermore was the Livermore Radiation Laboratory, a fabled army facility in California, and the place where Dave Dobson, in a similarly surreal fashion, was initiated into the project. The institution's head offered him a job. The work would be "interesting", he promised, but he couldn't say more until Dobson had the required security clearance. And he couldn't get the clearance unless he accepted the job. He only learned afterwards what he was expected to do. "My first thought," he says today, with characteristic understatement, "was, 'Oh, my. That sounds like a bit of a challenge.'"
They would be working in a murky limbo between the world of military secrets and the public domain. They would have an office at Livermore, but no access to its warrens of restricted offices and corridors; they would be banned from consulting classified research but, on the other hand, anything they produced - diagrams in sketchbooks, notes on the backs of envelopes - would be automatically top secret. And since the bomb that they were designing wouldn't, of course, actually be built and detonated, they would have to follow an arcane, precisely choreographed ritual for having their work tested as they went along. They were to explain at length, on paper, what part of their developing design they wanted to test, and they would pass it, through an assigned lab worker, into Livermore's restricted world. Days later, the results would come back - though whether as the result of real tests or hypothetical calculations, they would never know.
"The goal of the participants should be to design an explosive with a militarily significant yield," read the "operating rules", unearthed by the nuclear historian Dan Stober in a recent study of the project published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences. "A working context for the experiment might be that the participants have been asked to design a nuclear explosive which, if built in small numbers, would give a small nation a significant effect on their foreign relations." ...
Eventually, towards the end of 1966, two and a half years after they began, they were finished. "We produced a short document that described precisely, in engineering terms, what we proposed to build and what materials were involved," says Selden. "The whole works, in great detail, so that this thing could have been made by Joe's Machine Shop downtown."
Agonisingly, though, at the moment they believed they had triumphed, Dobson and Selden were kept in the dark about whether they had succeeded. Instead, for two weeks, the army put them on the lecture circuit, touring them around the upper echelons of Washington, presenting them for cross-questioning at defence and scientific agencies. Their questioners, people with the highest levels of security clearance, were instructed not to ask questions that would reveal secret information. They fell into two camps, Selden says: "One had been holding on to the hope that designing a bomb would be very difficult. The other argued that it was essentially trivial - that a high-school science student could do it in their garage." If the two physics postdocs had pulled it off, their result, it seemed, would fall somewhere between the two - "a straightforward technical problem, but one that involves some rather sophisticated physics". ...
Einstein was famously said to have commented that if he had only known that his theories would lead to the development of the atom bomb, he would have been a locksmith. Dave Dobson, having designed one, got a job as a teacher.
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Do You Know the Story Behind the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria? (posted 6-23-03)
Alfred Van Peteghem, writing in the Montreal Gazette (June 23, 2003):
Everybody remembers the names of Columbus's ships were the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria, for example, but few know that before the church censored the names, his rotting caravels were called the Nina (the girl, or rather, the "working" girl); the Pintada (or the "painted" one; i.e. the girl wearing make-up, in other words, the prostitute) and the Maria Galante (the surname of another "lady of leisure").
In other words, we never really learned historical characters were just that - characters, and very colourful ones at that. We might learn of their greatness as an edifying example, but we almost never learned of their faults, foibles and oddities.
It's only mentioned in passing, for example, that when Champlain married Helene Boulle (after whom St. Helen's Island is named), she was 11 years old and he was over 50.
And you'd never know from high-school history books "the first truly Canadian hero," Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville, was first and foremost a man who believed "the end justified the means." His career as a fighting man began just as the guardians of one Jeanne-Genevieve Picote de Belestre brought a paternity suit against him, indicating his heroics were not confined to the battlefield. When he died suddenly in Havana in 1706, he'd been trying to dispose of iron ore he'd taken from France for the purpose of illicit trade with the Spaniards. What better proof of this great man's belief in the spirit of free enterprise?
Madeleine de Vercheres is well known for fighting off Indian attacks. Not so well known, however, is that she spent far more time fighting her neighbours in court. Archivist Andre Vachon wrote she and her husband had bad tempers and that they threatened their tenants and even beat them up.
In 1730, their parish priest took the couple to court, claiming Madeleine had accused him of having composed burlesque litanies full of impious, obscene and defamatory terms.
The priest lost his case, but appealed to the Superior Council and won. In 1732, Madeleine went to France to plead her case before the King's Council, but was rejected. Finally, the matter was settled amicably in 1733; both parties were ordered to pay their costs and to refrain from talking about the matter.
One of my favourite heroes was Martine Messier, who had the odd nickname of "Parmanda" - or "I swear" in her dialect. She earned it in 1652 for something she said after she'd fought off three Iroquois who attacked her about 100 yards outside Montreal's city walls.
"The woman defended herself like a lioness," wrote Montreal's parish priest and first historian, Dollier de Casson, "but as she had no weapons but hands and feet, at the third or fourth blow they felled her as if dead. Immediately one of the Iroquois flung himself upon her to scalp her and escape with this shameful trophy. But as our amazon felt herself so seized, she at once recovered her senses, raised herself and, more fierce than ever, caught hold of this monster so forcibly by a place which modesty forbids us to mention that he could not free himself. He beat her with his hatchet over the head, but she maintained her hold steadily until once again she fell unconscious to the earth, and so allowed this Iroquois to flee as fast as he could, that being all he thought of at the moment, for he was nearly caught by our Frenchmen, who were racing to the spot from all directions.
"In addition this episode was followed by a most amusing thing. When these Frenchmen who came to her help had lifted up this woman, one of them embraced her in token of compassion and affection. But she, coming round, and feeling herself embraced, delivered a heavy blow to this warm-hearted helper, which made the others say to her: 'What are you doing? This man but wished to show his friendly feeling for you with no thought of evil, why do you hit him?'
'Parmanda,' she answered, 'I thought he wanted to kiss me.'" (The French text reads: "Je croyois qu'il me vouloit baiser," which is not entirely covered, in my opinion, by Ralph Flenley's translation.)
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How Much Do States and Localities Spend? (posted 6-23-03)
Paul Overberg, writing in USA Today (June 23, 2003):
Economic historian Richard Vedder says the public has signaled how much government it wants. State and local spending has accounted for roughly 11% or 12% of gross domestic product for the past 30 years.
"When we get to the top of the range, there's a tax revolt," says Vedder, of Ohio University. "When we get to the bottom, there's a push for more spending. We revert back to the middle."
Last year, state and local spending reached 13% of gross domestic product, the highest since record-keeping began in 1929.
That could indicate that states will now emphasize spending cuts more than tax increases. Or it could represent a fundamental shift in what people expect from state and local governments. Similar changes have occurred twice before: in the Depression and during the 1960s, when new social programs added to state and local spending.
Over the next few years, states will determine whether a new era has begun: Will citizens pay permanently higher taxes in exchange for better-funded public schools and health care? Or will they demand that taxes return to a more comfortable level?
The narrow question is: Tax increases or spending cuts? The broader question is: What do citizens want from government? In the boom, governors and legislatures gave people what they wanted. In the downturn, people will decide whether to pay for it.
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What War Since World War II Has Been the Deadliest? (posted 6-20-03)
From the Atlantic Monthly (July/August, 2003):
What conflict has taken more lives than any other since World War II? Don't look to Asia, the Balkans, the Middle East, or even Rwanda for the answer. According to a recent mortality study released by the International Rescue Committee, the record breaker-by far-is the ongoing and under-reported war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire).The IRC estimates that since the conflict began, in 1998, some 3.3 million "excess deaths" have occurred--that is, deaths from combat and from "easily treatable diseases and malnutrition, linked to displacement and the collapse of much of the country's health system and economy." (The rate of deaths in the second category rises and falls pro-portionally with the rate in the fust) Young children in particular have suffered: in three of the ten zones described in the IRC report, more than half of all children born since the conflict began have died by the age of two. As a result of the conflict the DRC now has a mortality rate of at least 2.2 people per thousand per month--the highest in the world, according to UN figures, and twice the African average.
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Is the American Economy Really the Best Off in the World? (posted 6-13-03)
Philippe Legrain, chief economist of "Britain in Europe," the campaign for Britain to join the euro; writing in the New Republic (June 11, 2003):
Pause for a second. Allow some awkward facts to intrude. Which economy has performed better in recent years--Europe's or America's? Surprise: According to the International Monetary Fund, an institution more often accused of imposing Washington's ways than of knocking them, Europe's has. Over the past three years, living standards, as measured by GDP per person, have risen by 5.8 percent in the European Union but by only 1 percent in the United States. An unfair comparison, perhaps, given America's recent recession? Then look at how the European Union and the United States size up since 1995, a period that includes the go-go late '90s, when America apparently advanced by leaps and bounds. While living standards in the United States have risen by a healthy 16.1 percent over the past eight years, they are up by 18.3 percent in the European Union. Another statistical sleight of hand? Not at all. Pick any year between 1995 and 2000 as your starting point, and the conclusion is the same: Europe's economy has outperformed America's.
To be fair, on a different measure, the United States has outpaced Europe. Its economy has grown by an average of 3.2 percent per year since 1995, whereas Europe's economy has swelled by only 2.3 percent. These headline figures transfix pundits and policymakers alike. But this apparent success is deceptive. Not only are U.S. growth figures inflated because American number-crunchers have done more than their European counterparts to take into account improvements in the quality of goods and services, but America's population is also growing much faster than Europe's. It has increased by nearly one-tenth in the past eight years, whereas Europe's population has scarcely grown at all. So, although America's pie is growing faster than Europe's, so too is the number of mouths it has to feed. Most people, though, care about higher living standards, not higher economic growth. If size were all that mattered, the United States could simply annex Canada and, presto, its economy would be larger, whether people in Peoria felt any better or not.
U.S. economic triumphalism is based on more than just GDP growth, of course. Boosters claim that it has enjoyed markedly faster productivity growth, too. Really? It is tough enough to measure how fast productivity is growing in the United States--remember all those wrangles about whether the step up in productivity in the late '90s was a giant leap, a modest bounce, or an illusion. International comparisons are harder still. Even so, the Conference Board, a New York-based business-research group that is hardly a fan of European ways, has taken a stab at it. Their figures show that, although the average U.S. labor-productivity growth of 1.9 percent per year since 1995 exceeds the EU average of 1.3 percent, five individual European countries have done better than the United States. Belgium managed 2.2 percent per year, Austria 2.4 percent, Finland 2.6 percent, Greece 3.2 percent, and Ireland 5.1 percent. If you take a longer time span, 1990 to 2002, not only does the European Union as a whole outpace the United States, so do ten of the 14 individual EU member states for which statistics are available. (The Conference Board does not include figures for Luxembourg.)
Not only is productivity growth higher in several European countries than in the United States--so too are absolute productivity levels. The average American produces $38.83 of output per hour, measured in 1999 dollars, according to the Conference Board. Average productivity in the European Union is still 8 percent less, largely because of lower productivity in Britain, Spain, Greece, and Portugal--although the gap has closed over the past decade. But six European countries have overtaken the United States: Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland, France, Belgium, and Norway, where output per hour is $45.55, over one-sixth higher than in the United States.
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Just How Badly in Debt is the United States? (posted 6-9-03)
Economist Dean Baker, commenting on an article in the Washington Post (June 9, 2003):
This article reports on a new set of budget projections from the Democrats on the House Budget Committee. It refers to a projected deficit for 2003 of $416 billion as a new record, exceeding the $290 billion deficit of 1992 even after adjusting for inflation. The more relevant measure is the deficit to GDP ratio, which measures the economic impact of the deficit. By this measure, the post-World-War- II record was 6.0 percent of GDP in 1983, with the 2003 deficit coming in at approximately 3.9 percent of GDP. The present deficit would be closer to the record if one used the "on-budget" deficit, which excludes the Social Security surplus. This deficit in 2003 will be approximately $600 billion, or 5.6 percent of GDP.
The article goes on to discuss projections for the national debt. It reports that the publicly held debt is projected to reach $7.9 trillion, or 44 percent of GDP in 2013. For purposes of assessing the nation's overall debt burden, the total federal debt (including the debt owned by the Social Security trust fund) would probably be more appropriate. This is projected to be close to $12 trillion in 2013, just under 69 percent of GDP.
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What Kind of Gas Mileage Did the Model T Get? (posted 6-6-03)
From Reuters (June 4, 2003):
The Sierra Club, a leading U.S. environmentalist group, plans to run advertisements criticizing Ford Motor Co. for making vehicles that are less fuel-efficient now -- on its 100th birthday -- than when it began.
The ads, scheduled to run in The New York Times and BusinessWeek, note that the Model T got 25 miles to the gallon nearly a century ago. The headline reads, "1903-2003 A Century of Innovation ... except at Ford." Dearborn, Michigan-based Ford's average vehicle now gets 22.6 miles per gallon, with its popular Explorer sports utility vehicle getting 16 miles per gallon, according to the Sierra Club ad.
Ford, which will observe its 100th birthday on June 16, countered that it has three models that are best in class for fuel economy and another three that produce almost no emissions. The company also said its Ford Focus has almost half the tail-pipe emissions level of the Model T.
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The Gay Betsy Ross (posted 5-30-03)
Steven W. Anderson, writing in PlanetOut.com, about the origins of the gay Rainbow Flag:
Color has long played an important role in our community's expression of pride. In Victorian England, for example, the color green was associated with homosexuality. The color purple (or, more accurately, lavender) became popularized as a symbol for pride in the late 1960s -- a frequent post-Stonewall catchword for the gay community was "Purple Power." And, of course, there's the pink triangle. Although it was first used in Nazi Germany to identify gay males in concentration camps, the pink triangle only received widespread use as a gay pop icon in the early 1980s. But the most colorful of our symbols is the Rainbow Flag, and its rainbow of colors -- red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple -- represents the diversity of our community.
The first Rainbow Flag was designed in 1978 by Gilbert Baker, a San Francisco artist, who created the flag in response to a local activist's call for a community symbol. (This was before the pink triangle was popularly used as a symbol of pride.) Using the five-striped "Flag of the Race" as his inspiration, Baker designed a flag with eight stripes: pink, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. According to Baker, those colors represented, respectively: sexuality, life, healing, sun, nature, art, harmony and spirit. In the true spirit of Betsy Ross, Baker dyed and sewed the material for the first flag himself.
Baker soon approached San Francisco's Paramount Flag Company about mass producing and selling his "gay flag." Unfortunately, Baker had hand-dyed all the colors, and since the color "hot pink" was not commercially available, mass production of his eight-striped version became impossible. The flag was thus reduced to seven stripes.
In November 1978, San Francisco's gay community was stunned when the city's first openly gay supervisor, Harvey Milk, was assassinated. Wishing to demonstrate the gay community's strength and solidarity in the aftermath of this tragedy, the 1979 Pride Parade Committee decided to use Baker's flag. The committee eliminated the indigo stripe so they could divide the colors evenly along the parade route -- three colors on one side of the street and three on the other. Soon the six colors were incorporated into a six-striped version that became popularized and that, today, is recognized by the International Congress of Flag Makers.
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How Did St. Petersburg Come into Existence? (posted 5-29-03)
Neal Ascherson, writing in the Independent (London) (May 29, 2003):
Most cities have a reason. St Petersburg only has a cause. Most capital cities - and this one was Russia's capital for over two centuries - grew up around a ford on a river, or a steep crag easy to defend. But St Petersburg did not grow up round anything. Instead, it was created by a sudden bayonet-thrust of will.
The will was Peter's. On 16 May (in the Old Style calendar, 27 May in the new) 1703, he snatched a bayonet from one of his soldiers and made two cross-shaped cuts in the soggy turf of an island in the middle of the Neva river. "Here a city begins!" he is supposed to have said, but probably didn't. What he wanted, at this point, was a fort and then a harbour. It was later that he decided on a town as well.
Why here? There was nothing to be seen but a huge, shallow, racing river, a flock of low islands, an endless scrubby pine forest on both banks. There were no people to speak of, only a handful of Finnish-speaking fishermen and some Swedish prisoners that he had just captured. But Peter the Great said "Here!" because this was where he was that day. In his war against the Swedes, he had reached the banks of the Neva near its outfall into the Baltic. He looked happily at the wide waters, breathed in the moist air, and said: "Now!" If he had waited a bit, he could have captured the ancient port-city of Riga, a few hundred miles to the west, whose harbour stays ice-free for much longer than the Neva. But Peter was not a man for waiting.
So, the foundations for what would become the Peter-Paul fortress were dug. The Tsar lived in a log-cabin on the island, still preserved. Soon he moved his naval shipyard down from Lake Ladoga and built a naval base on the south bank of the river, the "Admiralty". Then, Peter wanted proper permanent stone buildings, including a cathedral, and he brought in the first of the foreign architects who designed St Petersburg over the centuries. Domenico Trezzini set to work, in the Dutch-baroque manner. The Peter- Paul cathedral began to rise, with its 400ft spire (more of a spike dipped in blinding gold). Other impressive buildings followed. Peter sent for his family and then for the court nobility from Moscow. They were ordered to settle in, and pay for the construction of their own mansions.
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Does the Stock Market Affect Presidential Elections (Or At Least Reflect Economic Conditions that Decide Elections)? (posted 5-1-03)
Stephen Moore, president of the Club for Growth, writing in the Weekly Standard (May 5, 2003):
Not long ago, I sat through a Ted Kennedy slideshow presentation on the economy. It was depressingly persuasive. To summarize a 20-minute talk in two sentences: Under Clinton, the budget deficit and unemployment went way down, while the GDP, jobs, and the stock market soared upward. Under Bush, the deficit and unemployment went up, while the GDP, jobs, and the stock market went down. The Democrats are preparing to Herbert Hooverize George W., and they've got a lot of ammunition to do it with.
In particular, if the stock market doesn't recover soon, Bush will be running headlong against history in his reelection bid. Since Bush was inaugurated in January 2001, the Dow Jones has fallen 20 percent and the Nasdaq has tumbled 45 percent--though the mini-rally since the end of the Iraq war is helping to reverse these declines. Still, the stock market collapse has led to a liquidation of $5 trillion in wealth--some of which has been absorbed by foreigners, but most of it by American shareholders. These losses are bigger than the GDP of virtually every country in the world.
So I got to wondering how many times in the last 100 years a president has been reelected when the stock market fell during his first term, as it has under George W. Bush. Not once has this happened. Twice a president came up for reelection after a term in which the stock market fell, and both incumbents got the boot. They were Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter--not the kind of company Bush wants to keep.