Dan Sharfstein wins Guggenheim

Congratulations to Dan Sharfstein, who is one of this year’s Guggenheim Fellows!  I have written before about my admiration for Dan’s book The Invisible Line, and this seems a good occasion to say again — if you’re at all interested in the long, complicated history of race in America, buy the book and read it.  His new book will be about Oliver Otis Howard and the Freedmen’s Bureau.  This is the kind of project that requires long, deep research and painstaking thought.  I don’t know if we can Kickstarter things like this, and I’m glad we have the Guggenheim Foundation to help make them possible.

 

On Thermonuclear War

This is the world we used to live in.  Herman Kahn, one of the architects of postwar US nuclear policy, from his 1960 book On Thermonuclear War:

However, our calculations indicate that even without special stockpiles, dispersal, or protection, the restoration of our prewar GNP should take place in a relatively short time — if we can hold the damage to the equivalent of something like 53 metropolitan areas destroyed.

Reassuring!

 

 

Chazen 1934

[photo by flickr user Chris Tank]

CJ and I went to the superb 1934: A New Deal for Artists show at the Chazen this weekend.  Highly recommended if you like American representational painting from the first half of the 20th century at all, or you have an inquisitive kid who likes to see what the world used to look like, or both.  Very good, historically informative title cards, too!  The best special exhibition we’ve seen there, I think.

A couple of good new pieces in the permanent contemporary collection upstairs, too:  a new Beth Cavener Stichter, this one a deer’s body with a rabbit face turned toward the viewer in an unimpressed way, and a funny Gregory Scott painting/movie about Roy Lichtenstein, which you can watch on vimeo:

 

The world language is coming

I was writing today about Ro, a language constructed by the Rev. Edward Powell Foster in the early 20th century.  You can read his 1913 manifesto, Ru Ro, online.

It starts:

Friends — I mean the entire world — I have a message for you.
It is on a subject of interest to every one, whether President,
King, Queen, Kaiser, Czar, Mikado, Shah, prince, peasant,
subject,citizen, learned or unlearned, rich or poor, in Europe,
Asia, Africa, America or the islands of the sea. 

Who am I, you may ask, who calls upon the whole world for attention.

And continues:

Friends have offered the suggestion that I let men 
who have plenty of money and plenty of time work 
out the language problem. I am surely not standing 
in their way, nor trying to hinder them. Why do 
they not carry out the work? There are multimil- 
lionaires in the United States who can hire clerks by 
the regiment. Why do they not set men to snatch 
the oratorical crown from the brow of Demosthenes? 
Why not employ painters who can make the master- 
pieces of Raphael look like daubs? Why not engage 
operators to outwizard Edison in handling electricity? 

Why ? Because they cannot. 

Neither can they pick 
up at random stenographers or typewriters who will 
dash off to order a new language, complete in all de- 
tails, and superior to English, or German, or French, 
or Spanish, or Russian, or Italian. 

But the world language is coming. That means 
that somebody must make it.

The life and opinions of a college class

I always thought of pre-WWII Harvard as a place that paid some lip service to educating the common man while mostly functioning as a finishing school for preppies.  But was it so?  The very interesting Life and Opinions of a College Class, which reports the results of an extensive survey offered to the Harvard Class of 1926 on the occasion of their 25th reunion in 1951, tells a more complicated story.  I learned there that:

• Only 54% of the class had fathers with a college degree; 26% of the class had fathers who had not finished high school.
• Only about half the class went to private high school.
• 17% were Jews.  (But only 8% were Catholic!)
• 29% of the class worked at an outside job during the school year to support themselves.

(But note:  in the appendix, we learn that while half the class came from public high schools, the officers and class marshalls were entirely drawn from the preps.)

Nothing here really tells us whether the families of the Harvard students had money, though the fact that 70% of those families were Republicans might offer some clue.  Certainly they were rich by 1951, with a median income almost four times the national median.  (That would amount to about $180,000 today — I wonder how that compares with the current incomes of the class of 1988?)

Already in 1951, proponents of the liberal arts were anxious about becoming antique in a world ruled by science:

Only 13 percent were sufficiently prophetic of the shape of things to come to prepare in any of the physical or human Sciences; another 10 percent chose Engineering and/or Mathematics.

But one alum stuck up for tradition:

Admitted this is an age of specialization, then a boy should go to M.I.T. and do it up brown.  If he is going to Harvard, let him get a good liberal grounding which I think will make him a better citizen, and then concentrate later when he can put his whole mind on it.  He will undoubtedly be surpassed by many of the trade school boys but he will have something they will never have and to hell with his dinner pail.

One of my favorite moments in the book is the list of responses to the question, “What is the biggest mistake you have made in life?”

The catalogue of miscellaneous major blunders includes:  ill-advised speculation in 1929; getting back into the market too soon after the crash; failure to sell short; overeating; starting to smoke; neglecting the home for business; voting for Franklin D. Roosevelt and not voting for Franklin D. Roosevelt; wasting time; taking too little part in community life; too much diversification of interests; relying too much on the advice of older people; placing too much confidence in business associates; joining the Communist party; too much sex in earlier years; buying too large a house; drinking too much; a youthful indulgence in arson; and, in one instance, misappropriation of funds.

The irrevocable change brought about by the Civil War

From the Harvard reunion book entry of Edward Learoyd Cutter ’06, a coal dealer in Boston, concerning his vacation trips to Charleston, SC:

We have been extremely fortunate in knowing a few of the old plantation families, and in having been included in some of their good times, which has given us a viewpoint that few Northerners can ever have.  When one sees and understands a little the irrevocable change brought about by the Civil War, one cannot escape the sensation of guiltiness for having been born a Yankee.

Was this a respectable view to assert in public in 1931?  If so, when it it start being respectable to talk this way (surely it took some time after the end of the war) and when did it stop?

Possibly relevant is the testimony of Cutter’s classmate, Floyd Andrews Brown, of Deposit, NY:

I am now in the my thirteenth year as clerk of the Board of Education, a matter in which I take some pride by reason of having survived the period when every other elective or appointive officer in the village, township, and school district was at least in sympathy with, if not an active member of, the Ku Klux Klan.  This domination of a community by the Klan, now happily past, is a fair measure of the benightedness of the section of rural New York in which I seem fated to spend my declining years.

Aside, directed mainly at Harvard coevals:  Whatever happened to Bridget Kerrigan?

Harvard Class of 1906, P-S

More from the 25th anniverary report.

Sad people sounded then much as they sound now.  Howard Frank Shurtleff:

“As I try to put down something vivid and revealing about my last twenty-five years, the conviction grows that the promise I gave at graduation has not been realized.  Five years of teaching in Wisconsin and Connecticut ended with my return to the locality where I was born, chiefly because it was necessary for me to be in the open, and my taking up the work of tobacco growing.  The thing has not prospered, seems destined in fact not to prosper, as we produce mostly binders for cigars, and cigarettes are now rapidly replacing cigars.  I have been writing all these years, but I have printed but little.  My friends ask me what I am waiting for.  I don’t know.  I suppose I must remain to the end a puzzle to myself and to my friends, and consider myself lucky if there are any who really wish to call themselves my friends.”

Theron Finlay Pierce died in 1930, just before the book was compiled.  The editors wrote:

“Business was a secondary consideration in his life.  His nature was affectionate and whimsical, and his real interests social and intellectual.  He was particularly fond of travel.  After leaving college he went around the world with his brother and classmate, Roy, and later made frequent trips abroad.  During the last six or seven years of his life he became deeply absorbed in psychic research.  In 1927 he retired from active business for the purpose of devoting his entire time to this subject.

From 1927 to 1929 he lived at Prides Crossing, Mass., and there entertained many of the leaders in the psychic field.  He became greatly interested in the phenomenon of the Margery mediumship.  In 1929 he visited England and succeeded in arranging the test sittings for this medium which took place that fall under the observation of the British Society for Psychical Research.  During his trip he had the pleasure of being entertained by the late Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and other distinguished members of the London Society.”

Pierce had the opportunity to retire from active business because his father was the oil baron Henry Clay Pierce, who famously battled antitrust laws as a member of the Standard Oil cartel.  As for Mina Crandon, the Margery medium, she was a sensation so widely believed in that Houdini himself made it a special mission to debunk her psychic claims.  Houdini went so far as to accuse Crandon’s husband, a surgeon, of altering Crandon’s body to afford her hiding places on her person for the “ectoplasm” she produced in her seances.

Once again, I find myself wondering — where’s the historical costume drama about this story?  Dissipated oil heir, controversial psychic (who often worked nude), Arthur Conan Doyle, Houdini…

Anyway, here’s Otto Henry Seiffert:

“Cooking is also my accomplishment.  I have never issued any publications but if I do, it will be a cook book, which I confidently expect will be translated into all the foreign languages, including Hindustani.  I have laid down the violin forever in favor of the saucepan, which I find in my own particular circle of low-brow acquaintances is much the more popular instrument.  I never lack for an audience and am generous about encores.  I can build up an architectural sauce that makes flounder or whitefish better than the choicest sole a chef ever dreamed of.  They say my Princeton orange cake is a song without words, and my scallops smothered in spaghetti an impromptu that should bring me a niche three feet wide in the Hall of Fame.

I can also mix a cocktail.”

Who knew Smoove B was alive in 1931?

 

Baseball’s triumph in Japan

I always thought the popularity of baseball in Japan was a post-WWII thing, but no — “Baseball’s Triumph in Japan,” part of the LA84 Foundation’s collection of digitized back issues of Baseball Magazine, tells me that Japanese baseball is much older.  According to this 1918 article, baseball teams in Japan were made up of sumo wrestlers who wanted to keep up with Western trends in sport!  If you want to see a bunch of sumo wrestlers in baseball uniforms, click through — there’s a photo.  It looks about as you’d expect.

The wrestler-baseball teams in Japan would look pretty crude, I suppose, to an American audience. Perhaps it will take the wrestler two or three generations to develop teams of skilled ball players who will be able to compete on an equality with crack American nines. But, after all, the beginning is the main thing. The Japanese have begun to take baseball seriously. They play it everywhere and with increasing interest and enthusiasm. Who can say that in some future decade the champion baseball club of the world can justly claim that honor without a trial of strength with the crack nine of Nagasaki or Tokio?

In case you were wondering how I happened to be looking at old numbers of Baseball Magazine, it’s because one of the founders was a member of the Harvard class of 1906.  More Harvard ’06 blogging upcoming — there’s some crazy stuff in this book.

The Harvard Class of 1906

I recently had to turn in my 20th reunion writeup for my upcoming Harvard Reunion, and that spurred me to pick up and go through the 25th reunion book of the class of 1906, one of a few Harvard redbooks I have in the house.  I’ve just looked at letters G-K so far.

• William Eugene Hartwell writes “Nineteen hundred and thirty is not the year in which to ask a business man to write, in light mood, the history of twenty-five years.”  But this is the only person I found who referred, even obliquely, to the stock market crash.  How can it be?  It turns out that it wasn’t really clear in 1930 that there was going to be a Great Depression.  The stock market had recouped a great deal of its losses — the real plunge of the market was still ahead.  As far as economic history goes, the class of 1906 was much more concerned about industrial relations, strikes, and riots than about an impending depression.
• Robert Lee Hale:  ”I have no “war record.”  This causes me neither shame nor pride.  I never was carried very far on the mob feeling which prevailed, and trust that in any future war I may be still more skeptical of official myths, and that many others will be so too.”  Hale, an economics professor at Columbia, goes on to express his belief that Sacco and Vanzetti’s guilt had not been proved, but speculates that his classmates won’t agree on this point.  ”That is perhaps why, though I know Harvard has many virtues, I have lost all emotional love for it as an institution.”
• Speaking of academics:  Arthur Holcombe was chair of the Harvard government department by 1930, the author of six books, and seems somewhat apologetic about the whole thing.  ”I did not really succeed in leaving, but have been in Harvard, for better for worse, ever since…. I have generally been not far from the Yard, and, if I am permitted to have another twenty-five years, I hope to learn something about the art of life… I like my job, though it is not what I dreamed of doing twenty-five years ago, and I like my classmates’ sons.  They and their classmates are making a new Harvard, even more promising than the old.”
• Robert Fellows Gowen reports bringing to Harvard “the first radio set seen in that institution,” in 1903.
• Many modern-sounding sentiments, like this from Charles Francis Hovey:  ”On account of the social changes in the last decade, the speed of modern life, the many demands on the time and purse of the individual, art and culture have been somewhat at a disadvantage.  In this scientific age of the machine, with everything so highly commercialized and the many temptations, there appears to be a greater need than ever before for the development of character.”
• Few class members fought in the war (most of the class was already in its mid-30s when the US entered.)  Most play golf.  Lots of lawyers.  Lots of Masons.  It is very common for the alumni to assert the undistinguishedness of their lives and achievements.  Many mention the fascination of California and no small number have actually moved there.  One recounts a joke which must have been popular at the time:  ”I shall, however, stop here and not act as did the gentleman at the funeral who, when the ceremonies were over, rose to his feet and said, “Now may I speak a few words about California.”"
• Clifford Millburn Holland was in the class of 1906.  Know who he was?  Does it help if I tell you he was the chief engineer on what, before his death, was to be known as the Hudson River Vehicular Tunnel?  Holland started working on the tunnel in 1919, and in 1924 was admitted to the Battle Creek Sanitarium (the one run by the Kellogg brothers) with what sounds like a nervous breakdown.  On October 27, he died there, of a heart attack, just two days before the New York tunnelers broke through to meet the New Jerseyans.  How can there not have already been a historical novel based on this story?

 

 

Historical textbook collection

I’m working in the math department library today and have gotten distracted by a collection of historical math textbooks that’s just gone on the shelves.

From College Mathematics:  A First Course (1940), by W. W. Elliott and E. Roy C. Miles:

The authors believe that college students who take only one year of mathematics should acquire a knowledge of the essentials of several of the traditional subjects.  From teaching experience, however, they are convinced that a better understanding is gained if these subjects are presented in the traditional order.  Students who take only one year of college mathematics are usually primarily interested in the natural sciences or in business administration.

The book covers algebra, trigonometry, Cartesian geometry, and calculus.  The definition of the derivative as a limit is given, but the epsilon-delta definition of limit is not.  Startling to think that science majors came to college never having taken algebra or analytic geometry.

Further back in time we get Milne’s Progressive Arithmetic, from 1906.  This copy was used by Maggie Rappel, of Reedsville, WI, and is dated January 15th, 1908.  Someone — Maggie or a later owner — wrote in the flyleaf, “Look on page 133.”

On the top of p .133 is written

Auh!  Shut up your gab you big lobster, you c?

You got me, Maggie!

I can’t tell what grades this book is intended for, but certainly a wide range; it starts with addition of single digits and ends with reduction of fractions to lowest terms.  What’s interesting is that the book doesn’t really fit our stereotype that math instruction in olden times was pure drill with no attention paid to conceptual instruction and explanation.  Here’s a problem from early in the book:

How many ones are 3 ones and 4 ones?  Write the sum of the ones under the ones.  How many tens are 6 tens and 2 tens?  Write the sum of the tens under the tens.  How do you read 8 tens and 7 ones?  What, then, is the sum of 24 and 63?  Tell what you did to find the sum.

From the introduction:

Yet the book is not merely a book of exercises.  Each new concept is carefully presented by questions designed to bring to the understanding of the pupil the ideas he should grasp, and then his knowledge is applied.  The formal statement of principles and definitions is, however, reserved for a later stage of the pupil’s progress.

Would these sentiments be so out of place in a contemporary “discovery” curriculum?