Just a Trifle Daffy
  ¶ 5:53 PM 0 comments

  The Death of John Wilkes Booth One funny old book that I found for a quarter is Great Epochs in American History Described by Famous Writers from Columbus to Roosevelt, edited, with introductions and explanatory notes by Francis W. Halsey, volume IX, The Reconstruction Period.

There's a great account of Charles Dickens second visit to America in 1868, when he gave sold-out readings up and down the East Coast that were so popular that people camped out all night to get tickets and speculators hired as many as 50 men to wait in line for the six tickets allowed each customer.

There's also an account of the death of John Wilkes Booth written by Ray Stannard Baker for McClure's Magazine in May of 1897.

Booth was trapped by 50 Union soldiers in a barn in Virginia and refused to come out, even after they set the barn on fire. Although the soldiers were under orders to take Booth alive, Sergeant Boston Corbett shot him through a crack in the wall. The shot pierced Booth's neck and killed him within a few minutes.

"Tell mother I died for my country," Booth said as he died. "I did what I thought was best."

Corbett was charged with disobeying orders, but charges were dropped by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.

Colonel L.C. Baker, the uncle of the author, was charged with disposing of Booth's body so that it could not be recovered by his Confederate friends. Baker and another officer took the body and rowed down the Potomac watched by hundreds of people lined up on shore.

Once they were out of sight of the crowd, they rowed back and buried the body in a cell in an old pentitentiary. Booth's friends actually went out and dragged the river, but naturally they couldn't find the body.

Later the body was moved to Philadelphia and interred there.

A footnote on Sergeant Corbett. He had been a hatter as a young man and the exposure to mercury used in that trade may account for the fact that when he was 26, before he joined the army, he castrated himself with a pair of scissors.

Much later, after leaving the army, he lived in a hole in the ground in Kansas and once reportedly told a group of farmers engaged in the national pastime, "It's wicked to play baseball on the Lord's day. Don't do it."

He later became doorkeeper of the Kansas House of Representatives, but when he thought a group of representatives were making fun of the opening prayer and threatened them with a pistol, he was locked up in the Topeka Asylum for the Insane. The following year someone left a horse at the entrance to the asylum and Corbett jumped onto it and rode off to parts unknown.

Some say he became a travelling medicine salesman in Oklahoma, but no one knows and few care.  ¶ 5:17 PM 1 comments

  Christmas in Korea
  ¶ 12:04 PM 0 comments

  George F. Kennan and the Large Mean Giants Some anti-communist political figures like Joe McCarthy claimed that Franklin Roosevelt "gave away the store" to our Russian allies at the Yalta Conference at the end of World War II. George F. Kennan doesn't think so, and he ought to know. He's the guy who wrote the longest telegram in history, and it was all about the Russians.

The way he explains it in American Diplomacy 1900-1950, there were three large mean giants on the world stage at the beginning of the war. The Western democracies had no hope of defeating any of them without the help of at least one of the others.

"Before the war began the overwhelming portion of the world's armed strength in land forces and air forces had accumulated in the hands of three political entities -- Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and Imperial Japan. All these entities were deeply and dangerously hostile to the Western democracies.

"As things stood in the late thirties, if these three powers were to combine their efforts and stick together in a military enterprise, the remaining Western nations plainly had no hope of defeating them.

"I am not claiming that this was perceived, or would have been easy to perceive, by Western statesmen," Kennan writes. "But I believe it was a reality. Of the three totalitarian powers, Japan was the only one which could conceivably be defeated by the democracies without invoking for this purpose the aid of one of the other totalitarian powers.

"In the case of Germany and Russia, circumstances were bitter. Together, they could not be defeated at all. Individually, either of them could be defeated only if the democracies had the collaboration of the other.

"But such collaboration, if permited to proceed to the point of complete victory, would mean the relative strenthening of the collaborating power and its eventual appearance as a greedy and implacable claimant at the peace table...

Kennan later addresses the Moscow, Tehran and Yalta conferences with the Russians:

"If it cannot be said that the Western democracies gained very much from these talks, it would also be incorrect to say that they gave very much away. The establishment of Soviet military power in eastern Europe and the entry of Soviet forces into Manchuria was not a result of these talks; it was the result of the military operations during the concluding phases of the war.

"These was nothing the Western democracies could have done to prevent the Russians from entering these areas except to get there first, and this they were not in a position to do."  ¶ 5:49 PM 0 comments

  Claims to Fame and Coals to Newcastle If someone discovered the Gulf Stream, that would be a pretty good claim to fame, wouldn't it? Not a great one, but still a modest claim to fame.

How about if someone, back in colonial times, invented a heating device that more than tripled the energy output of a wood fire? Another minor claim to fame.

Now, what if someone invented a musical instrument and Wolgang Amadeus Mozart wrote a piece of music expressly for that instrument? Now that's a serious claim to fame.

What if that same guy won independence for the American colonies and hammered out their constitution? And discovered the flow of electricity? And invented bifocals and started the first volunteer fire department and the first public library?

What if this same guy endowed two trusts, one in Boston and one in Philadelphia, to assist aspiring craftsmen which are still not only solvent, but flush more than two hundred years later in our own day and age?

What if this same guy, in his eighties, shocked stodgy old John Adams by his dissolute behavior in -- where else -- Paris, France?

One reason Adams was shocked was that this is the same guy who authored most of the sturdy old adages from Poor Richard's Almanac that govern the industrious to this day -- "Early to bed, early to rise," "A Penny saved is a penny earned," etc. Either one of them would be a claim to fame in itself, and there are lots more.

Well with all these claims to fame, don't you have to concede that Benjamin Franklin is a pretty remarkable guy? If you haven't read The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin you're missing out on a lot of good advice and interesting reading. He was a vegetarian, you know.

Well the modest chore of this blog entry is to add yet another claim to fame to this imposing list, one I discovered in Robert Heilbronner's book about the great economists called The Wordly Philosphers.

It turns out that while he was in England before the Revolution, Benjamin Franklin had lots of long conversations with Adam Smith while Smith was writing The Wealth of Nations. Indeed, you could almost say he was a collaborator in this seminal work of economics whose influence on people and events is still evident today.

Of course we all know that Franklin was the central figure in Max Weber's treatise The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, a work based almost entirely on his Autobiography.

So in addition to inventing the glass armonica and the Franklin stove, Benjamin Franklin was one of the most influential founders of the infant science of economics.  ¶ 12:44 PM 0 comments

  Shattered Empires and Exploded Continents Lord John Maynard Keynes wrote, "The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. "

"Practical men," Lord Keynes continues, "who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas."

Writing about the great economists in his book The Worldly Philosophers, Robert Heilbronner says, "Few of them ever lifted a finger in action; they worked, in the main, as scholars -- quietly, inconspiculously, and without much regard for what the world had to say about them.

"But they left in their train shattered empires and exploded continents, they buttressed and undermined political regimes, they set class against class and even nation against nation -- not because they plotted mischief, but because of the extraordinary power of their ideas."

Who says economics is boring?  ¶ 3:12 PM 1 comments

  Don't You Dare Read Coniston I'm asking all the readers of my blog not to read Coniston by the other Winston Chuchill. That's because this book is my private sanctuary. It is a brilliant work of literature that is entirely undiscovered. It's like walking in a forest after a snowfall. No one has been there before.

You would find no interest in this story of an ignorant New Hampshire tanner who came to control the purse strings of state government. How he took the orphan child of a woman he once loved and raised her as his own. It wouldn't be of the slightest interest to you, I guarantee.

This guy has nothing to commend himself as a character. He eats nothing but biscuits and milk.

The other Winston Churchill wrote scads of other books. Read those. You can get them for about seven bucks. They all have red covers with gilt finish.

You don't want to know how the railroads got out of paying for fires started by their locomotives and people killed at unmarked crossings by giving free passes to state legislators. That was more than a century ago. That kind of thing never happens anymore.

In this antiquated volume, the laws of the State of New Hamsphire are hammered out in the back rooms of a nearby hotel. That couldn't happen in today's world. I know. I worked in the N.H. Senate for six years.

So please, don't read Coniston. It's where I go to be alone.  ¶ 11:14 AM 0 comments

  Two and a Half Cheers for Salmon P. Chase There are only three guys on the money who did not serve as President: Alexander Hamilton on the ten, Ben Franklin on the hundred and... if you get the other one, you're really knowledgeable or else really rich. His name is Salmon P. Chase and he's on the ten thousand dollar bill.

He's mentioned in Carl Sandburg's biography of Lincoln The Prairie Years, the other half of which is called The War Years.

"He [Lincoln] had heard," Sandburg writes, "of the auction sale in Lexington [Kentucky] of Eliza, a beautiful girl with dark lustrous eyes, straight black hair, rich olive complexion, only one sixty-fourth African, white yet a slave.

"A young Methodist minister, Calvin Fairbank, bid higher and higher against a thick-necked Frenchman from New Orleans. Reaching $1,200, the Frenchman asked, 'How high are you going?' and Fairbank, 'Higher than you, Monsieur.'

"Seeing the Frenchman hesitating, the sweating auctioneer pulled Eliza's dress back from her shoulders and cried, 'Who is going to lose a chance like this?' To the Frenchman's bid of $1,465, the minister bid $1,475.

"Hearing no more bids, the auctioneer shocked the crowd by lifting her skirts and slapping her thighs as he called, 'Who is going to be the winner of this prize?'

The Frenchman bid $1,580 and the clergyman bid $1,585.

"The auctioneer: 'I'm going to sell this girl. Are you going to bid?' The Frenchman shook his head.

"The auctioneer to Fairbank: 'You've got her damned cheap sir. What are you going to do with her?' and Fairbank cried, 'Free her!' Most of the crowd shouted and yelled in glee.

"Fairbank was there by arrangement with Salmon P. Chase and Nicholas Longworth of Cincinnati, who had authorized him to bid as high as $25,000."

The reason Salmon P. Chase gets only two and a half cheers is that the woman was beautiful and mostly white, which when you think about it kind of sends the wrong message. Why only her?

In fairness Chase was an ardent abolitionist who represented many former slaves in court, even if they weren't beautiful and mostly white, and was known (derisively at the time) as "the Attorney General of fugitive slaves."

As Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury, Chase figured out how to finance the Civil War. And Lincoln named him Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

As for Fairbank, he gets the full three cheers, and good hearty ones at that. He spent a total of seventeen years in prison for antislavery activity.  ¶ 3:07 PM 2 comments

  Love is Where You Find It You've got to hand it to Sue Grafton. She really does her homework. With all the research she puts into her Kinsey Milhonne series A is for Alibi, etc. I would recommend it to anyone working in or wishing to work in the criminal justice system.

But I would recommend it to the reading public at large, too, because the Kinsey Milhonne series is so well conceived and masterfully executed. It is a near-perfect microcosm of modern America, like a dewdrop that reflects the world around it.

Kinsey is a private investigator in Santa Barbara, California. Her parents died in a car accident when she was five and she was brought up by her Aunt Gin, who passed away. So Kinsey's on her own. But she finds a home and a family in a uniquely American, perhaps a uniquely West-Coast way.

She meets her landlord, Henry, a retired baker in his eighties and the lady who runs the Hungarian restaurant/sports bar down the street. Henry's in his eighties, and he has all these brothers and sisters older than he is.

At some point in the alphabet Kinsey's little garage apartment gets blown to bits by a bomb, and Henry has it lovingly recontructed with a kind of ship's-cabin motif.

Kinsey finds her home and her family in this wonderful, loving old man and his whacky sibilings who get together all the time and fight about funny things. And they fix one brother up with the lady at the Hungarian restaurant.

In Kinsey Milhonne's world, love is where you find it. All these personal developments I've just summed up actually happen as slowly as a glacier over the course of these great alphabet mysteries which have exquisitely drawn characters from every walk of life tangled up in cleverly conceived webs of hatred and violence and greed.

The irony I often find is that Kinsey, who has no family, at least at the beginning of the series, is always investigating murders which have resulted from the evils created by bad family dynamics.

And Grafton's baddies are real bad. If they're after you, you should be afraid. She sketches them from life through exhaustive research. They're real. Look in any one of her books at the people she's thanking -- you see sheriff's deputies, state policemen, judges, correctional officers, forensic scientists -- this is the kind of craftsmanship I deeply admire. This is the true way to authenticity.

This is what makes Dashiell Hammett and Georges Simenon and Per Wahloo so great, this scholarly connection to everyday law enforcement and criminal justice.

But with Sue Grafton's books, you also have this gutsy young woman constructing her world from the inside out, finding out what matters in life. In the first book, Kinsey finds a guy who gives good head and shoots him dead.

In later books we learn more about her mother's family, and Kinsey meets some of her cousins, and we're introduced to her ex-husband the pianist and she kind of has a thing with a policeman who goes back to his wife and then gets dumped by his wife and wants to get back together, but Kinsey's not buying.

Then she finds love on her terms with an ex-FBI guy, but... Well you can read all about it yourself. You won't be disappointed. I'd suggest starting at the begining of the alphabet, but if you see one at a tag sale grab it and read it. That's what I did.

I can almost guarantee you'll wind up reading them all.  ¶ 12:10 PM 0 comments

  The Genius of Langston Hughes II In my last entry I quoted from "Home" a story by Langston Hughes included in his collection The Ways of White Folks, which, I'm suggesting, is the best short story in the English language.

The story is about a black violinist named Roy who travels around Europe in the 1930s and returns to his home in Missouri because he thinks he is dying and he wants to see his mother.

Last time I cited a moving passage about all the poverty and starvation Roy had seen in Vienna and Berlin while there were people spending money on champagne and caviar in the nighclubs where his orchestra played.

But the story is chiefly about his return to Missouri. The loafers on the train platform when he arrives notice the strange stickers and tags on his luggage that they can't read.

"The eyes of the white men about the station were not kind. He heard some one mutter, 'Nigger.' His skin burned. For the first time in half a dozen years he felt his color. He was home."

It's hard to sum this story up, because it's so brilliantly written, but here goes: Roy sees his mom and gives a benefit performance at her church "for the glory of God." Many white people come, including a teacher from the white high school.

She invites Roy to perform for her students. "The students went home that afternoon and told their parents that a dressed-up nigger had come to school with a violin and played a lot of funny pieces that only Miss Reese liked. They went on to say that Miss Reese had grinned all over herself and cried, 'Wonderful!' And had even bowed to the nigger when he went out."

Roy is used to playing in clubs until the wee hours of the morning, so he can't sleep and goes out for a walk. He meets Miss Reese in the street and she says, "Good evening."

"Roy started, bowed, nodded, 'Good evening, Miss Reese,' and was glad to see her. Forgetting that he wasn't in Europe, he took off his hat and his gloves and held out his hand to this lady who understood music.

"They smiled at each other, the sick young colored man and the aging music teacher in the light of the main street. Then she asked him if he was still working on the Sarasate [a piece of music].

"'Yes,' Roy said. 'It's lovely.'

"'And have you heard that marvellous Heifetz record of it?' Miss Reese inquired.

"Roy opened his mouth to reply when he saw the woman's face suddenly grow pale with horror. Before he could turn around to learn what her eyes had seen, he felt a fist like a ton of bricks strike his jaw. There was a flash of lightning in his brain as his head hit the edge of the plate glass window of the drug store.

"Miss Reese screamed. The sidewalk filled with white young ruffians with red-necks, open sweaters, and fists doubled up to strike. The movies had just let out and the crowd, passing by and seeing, objected to a Negro talking to a white woman - insulting a white woman - attacking a WHITE woman - RAPING A WHITE WOMAN.

"They saw Roy remove his gloves and bow. When Miss Reese screamed after Roy had been struck, they were sure he had been making love to her. And before the story got beyond the rim of the crowd, Roy had been trying to rape her, right there on the main street in front of the brightly-lighted windows of the drug store. Yes, he did, too! Yes sir!

"So they knocked Roy down. They trampled on his hat and cane and gloves as a dozen men tried to get to him to pick him up - so some one else could have the pleasure of knocking him down again. They struggled over the privilege of knocking him down.

"Roy looked up from the sidewalk at the white mob around him. His mouth was full of blood and his eyes burned. His clothes were dirty. He wondered why Miss Reese had stopped to ask him about Sarasate. He knew he would never get home to his mother now.

"Some one jerked him to his feet. Some one spat in his face. (It looked like his old playmate, Charlie Mumford.) Somebody cussed him for being a nigger and another kicked him from behind.

"And all the men and boys in the lighted street began to yell and scream like mad people and to snarl like dogs, and to pull at the little Negro in spats they were dragging through the town towards the woods..."

Okay so I've given away the ending. Go read the story anyway and all the other great stories in this book.  ¶ 2:12 PM 0 comments