Also in this binder is my mom’s application to work for the Federal Government, which involved filling out “Standard Form 171.” In 1971, SF_171 required you to report whether you were “Mrs.” or “Miss,” your height and weight, and whether you were now, or within the last ten years had been, a member of the Communist Party, USA, or any subdivision of same.
Quomodocumque
Math, Madison, food, the Orioles, books, my kids.
Category Archives: history
The Bottom Line – A CPA Story
A typescript of about 30 pages written by my grandfather, Jacob Smith, in the summer of 1976, work towards a memoir. Just going to record some facts and details here.
He writes that he was “born more dead than alive,” the last of seven children, six years younger than the rest.
Professor Jellinghouse, a women’s specialist and sainted genius, directed the activities of several neighbors who acted as a committee of midwives. At one point, this committee decided my mother wasn’t going to make it. They prevailed on the famous professor to walk out on the society ladies in his Park Avenue office and hustle down to 452 Cherry Street, on the Lower East Side of New York. He breathed confidence and authority and no stork would dare cross him. He waved away an offered fee, left some free medicine, gave final instructions, and drove back to his Park Avenue patients. Ersht Gott — First God — then Professor Jellinghouse, is the way ma put it when she constantly retold the story.
This must have been C.F. Jellinghaus (obit here), whose office was at 440 Park Ave. I wonder what it was that brought him to do this housecall in the Lower East Side? My grandfather’s first home seems no longer to exist; Cherry Street is still there, just a couple of blocks long off FDR drive, but it doesn’t look like there are any buildings with an address there at all.
My stereotype is that New York Jews lived among other Jews, but my grandfather’s family moved to a part of the South Bronx near the 105th Field Artillery (now the Franklin Avenue Armory) that was mostly Catholic.
There was only one other Jewish boy in the neighborhood, but he was very quiet, dignified, and studious, and he never played with us. I never quite understood why this bookworm commanded so much respect — they [the kids in the neighborhood] even cleaned up their language in front him. Me they treated terrible, just as bad as if I was another old Catholic.
He went to James Monroe High School, which has a newer building, in preference to the run-down neighborhood school, Morris High, which is still there (now the Morris Academy for Collaborative Studies.) According to my grandfather, the condition of the building in the 1920s was recorded in a popular neighborhood song:
There’s an odor in the air
You can smell it everywhere
Morris High School!
Morris HIgh School!
After high school he worked as a bookkeeper, and went to accounting school at night at Pace. His graduation speaker was Harry Allan Overstreet, chair of philosophy at City College. (My mother says he would have much preferred to go to City College, and had the grades for it, but because he was working he could only go to a college he could attend at night.) Anyway, here’s what Overstreet told the graduates:
…this is 1935 and the Great Depression is still with us. I hope you all have good jobs to go to when you leave here today. If not, I surely don’t know where you can find any. With all your special skills and qualifications, the world just doesn’t want you.
Inspiring!
My grandfather records the reaction:
Pace officialdom sat pale and frozen-faced as we quietly filed out. In our next communication as alumni, we were told to pay no attention to “Self-centered, egotistical introverts,” and that we would have no trouble finding good jobs.
“God, as the Pythagoreans said, is a geometer-but not an algebraist”
A remark of Simone Weil, which I learned from Karen Olsson’s book The Weil Conjectures.
In the original, “Pour moi, je pense bien que Dieu, selon la parole pythagoricienne, est un géomètre perpétuel – mais non pas un algébriste.” Here’s the letter to her brother from which this is taken.
I wanted to write more in Shape about the complicated moral weights people assigned to the difference/tension between algebra and geometry. I wrote a little about what Poincaré thought about it, who saw the two subjects as representing two temperaments, both indispensable, though any given mathematician might possess them in different proportions.
But then there is this, from S.I. Segal’s “Topologists in Hitler’s Germany”
“the … Nazi movement saw “truly German” mathematics as intuitive and tied to nature, often geometrical, and certainly not axiomatic. Axiomatics, “logic chopping”, too great abstraction, was Franco-Jewish.”
It is grimly funny to imagine the Nazi ideologues locating in abstract algebra and the insolubility of certain equations in radicals the ultimate origins of rootless cosmopolitanism.
Am I supposed to say something about the invasion of the United States Capitol?
Or the reimpeachment of the President, a week before the end of his term?
I feel like I should, just because it’s history, and I might wonder how it seemed in real time. It is hard to understand what actually happened on January 6, even though we live in a world where everything is logged in real-time video. We still don’t know who left pipe bombs outside the offices of the Republican and Democratic National Committees. We don’t know what parts of the invasion were spontaneous and what parts were planned, and by whom. Some people are saying members of the House of Representatives collaborated with the invaders, giving them a guided tour of the building the day before the attack. Some people are saying some of the Capitol Police force collaborated, while others fought off the mob.
We don’t know what to expect next. There is said to be “chatter” about armed, angry people at all 50 statehouses. I don’t know how seriously to take that, but I won’t be going downtown this weekend. Moving trucks have been sighted at the White House and some people say the President has given up pretending he won re-election; but then again he is also said to have met with one of his favorite CEOs today to talk legal strategies for keeping up the show.
As I said last week, it is temperamentally hard for me to expect the worst. Probably Trump will slink away and the inauguration will happen without incident and the idea of renewed armed rebellion against the United States government will slink away too, albeit more slowly. But — as last week — I don’t have a good argument that it has to be that way.
What I find really chilling is this. Imagine it had been much worse and some number of Democratic senators, known for opposing Trump, had been kidnapped or killed. Mitch McConnell would have somberly denounced the crimes. But he would also have allowed Republican governors to appoint those senators’ replacements, and reclaimed his role as majority leader, and do everything he could to prevent the new government from governing, saying, what happened on January 6 was terrible, to be deplored and mourned, but we have to move on.
Pandemic blog 9: The Class of 1895
I was wondering about what the last major pandemic, the Spanish flu of 1918, looked like in real time, so I looked at the 25th anniversary report of the Harvard Class of 1895, published in June 1920 and written in 1919. To my surprise, the flu is barely mentioned. Henry Adsit Bull lost his oldest daughter to it. A couple of classmates worked in influenza hospitals. Morton Aldrich used it as an excuse for being late with his report. Paul Washburn reported being quite ill with it, and emphasizing that it might be his last report, demanded that the editors print his curriculum vitae with no editorial changes. (Nope — he was still alive and well and banking in the 1935 report.) I thought 1894, whose report was written more in the thick of the epidemic, might have more to say, but not really. Two men died of it, including one who made it through hideous battles of the Great War only to succumb to flu in November 1918. Another lost daughter.
But no one weighs in on it; I have read a lot of old Harvard class reports, and if there’s one thing I can tell you about an early 20th century Harvard man, it’s that he likes to weigh in. Not sure what to make of this. Maybe the pandemic didn’t much touch the lives of the elite. Or maybe people just died of stuff more and the Spanish flu didn’t make much of an impression. Or maybe it was just too rough to talk about (but I don’t think so — people recount pretty grisly material about the war.)
Back to the present. The Wisconsin Supreme Court ordered all jury trials halted for two months for the safety of jurors, witnesses, and officers of the court; an extremely overwrought dissent from Justice Rebecca Bradley insists that if a right is in the constitution it can’t be put on pause, even for a couple of months, even in a pandemic, which will be news to the people in every state whose governors have suspended their right to assemble.
CJ made a blueberry bundt cake, the best thing he’s made so far, aided by the fact that at the Regent Market Co-op I found a box of pectin, an ingredient I didn’t even know existed. Powdered sugar there was not, but it turns out that powdered sugar is literally nothing but regular sugar ground fine and mixed with a little cornstarch! You can make it yourself if you have a good blender. And we do have a good blender. We love to blend.
Walked around the neighborhood a bit. Ran into the owner of a popular local restaurant and talked to him from across the street. He’s been spending days and days working to renegotiate his loan with the bank. He thinks we ought to be on the “Denmark plan” where the government straight up pays worker’s salaries rather than make businesses apply to loans so they can eventually get reimbursed for the money they’re losing right now. (I did not check whether this is actually the Denmark plan.) Also saw my kids’ pediatrician, who told me that regular pediatrics has been suspended except for babies and they’ve closed the regular clinic, everything is consolidated in 20 S. Park.
I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about different groups’ COVID projections, claims and counterclaims. I’ll write about it a little in the next entry to show how little I know. But I think nobody knows anything.
Tomorrow it’ll be two weeks since the last time I was more than a quarter-mile from my house. We are told to be ready for another month. It won’t be that hard for us, but it’ll be hard for a lot of people.
The great qualities with which dullness takes lead in the world
He firmly believed that everything he did was right, that he ought on all occasions to have his own way — and like the sting of a wasp or serpent his hatred rushed out armed and poisonous against anything like opposition. He was proud of his hatred as of everything else. Always to be right, always to trample forward, and never to doubt, are not these the great qualities with which dullness takes lead in the world?
(William Makepeace Thackeray, from Vanity Fair)
Look how much I saved you on this goddamn vacuum cleaner
I wrote this on Facebook about a year and a half ago.
Thought of it today when I saw this tweet from Donald Trump Jr.
American Revolution
I was in Philadelphia a couple of weeks ago with AB and we went to the brand-new Museum of the American Revolution. It’s a great work of public history. Every American, and everybody else who cares about America, should see it.
The museum scrapes away the layer of inevitability and myth around our founding. Its Revolution is something that might easily not have succeeded. Or that might have succeeded but with different aims. There were deep contemporary disagreements about what kind of nation we should be. The museum puts you face to face with them.
E Pluribus Unum was an aspiration, not a fact. There was a lot of pluribus. The gentility in Massachusetts and the Oneida and frontierspeople in Maryland and the French and the enslaved Africans and their American slavemasters were different people with different interests and each had their own revolution in mind.
Somehow it came together. George Washington gets his due. The museum presents him as a real person, not just a face on the money. A person who knew that the decisions he made, in a hurry and under duress, would reverberate through the lifespan of the new country. We were lucky to have him. And yes, I choked up, seeing his tent, fragile and beaten-up and confined to a climate-controlled chamber, but somehow still here and standing.
The Haggadah tells us that every generation of Jews has to read the story of Exodus as if we, ourselves, personally, were among those brought out from Egypt. The museum reminded me of that commandment. It demands that we find the General Washington in ourselves. In each generation we have to tell the story of the American Revolution as if we, ourselves, personally, are fighting for our freedom, and are responsible for what America will be.
Because we are! We are still in the course of human events. The American Revolution isn’t over. It won’t ever be over. It’s right that we call it a “revolution” and not an “overthrow” or a “liberation.” We’re still revolving, still turning this place over, we’re still plural, we’re still arguing. We still have the chance, and so we still have the obligation, to make the lives of our children more free than our own.
Happy Independence Day.
Quomodocumque 