John Wayne On Liberals

I'm looking for the year on this one. I left a message over on YouTube and hopefully someone will come through.

Money quotes: I always thought I was a liberal.
And: What else would there be in life if you lose optimism?

Chuck D from Public Enemy on John Wayne:

Elvis was a hero to most but he never meant shit to me you see, straight up racist that sucker was, simple and plain, mother fuck him and John Wayne.

The Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge

Last month my wife and I took the kids on a crazy road trip adventure to retrace the history of water conservation in the Great American Southwest. The trip was inspired by our reading Colossus, which retells the story of taming the Colorado River and building the Hoover Dam.

First stop was the Salton Sea which is only 100 years old and was created by accident when an irrigation canal went awry in 1906. I traced down the exact spot where the accident happened which was right outside of Yuma, Arizona. There wasn't much to see. We drove on a levee alongside the old Colorado River bed, following an old 1906 map and Google Earth. Two Border Patrol agents' trucks were parked nose-to-nose on the levee as we peered into Mexico. We drove the Chevy to the levee but the levee was bone dry. The Border Patrol guys gave us such mean looks that I was afraid to even take a photo.

We stayed overnight in Yuma which is a very old and dusty town bisected by what's left of the Colorado River. I took some high-res ("artsy") photos of an old hotel there which I'll post separately. Heading further upriver, we reached the Hoover Dam:

Hoover Dam taken from Tillman Bridge

The last time I was at Hoover Dam was pre-9/11. In the old days, the main route between Phoenix and Vegas still passed over the dam. We did that journey then with one kid and one in the oven while driving our glorious 1963 Thunderbird (that car deserves more that passing mention so I won't mention it further). There was something new this time that wasn't there in 1999--the new Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge:*

Tillman Bridge taken from Hoover Dam

The bridge is stunningly gorgeous and just opened a year or so ago. It's part of the main road now between Vegas and Phoenix, but you can park and walk it too for no charge. I felt a little acrophobic as I took that photo of the dam from the bridge.

____________________

*I dedicate this blog post to Corporal Patrick Daniel "Pat" Tillman (November 6, 1976 – April 22, 2004).

Added:  A 1930's artist captured the same view of Hoover Dam from an imaginary bridge:

The Frightening News First Heard In German...

Lise Meitner with Otto Hahn. Leitner, who was born Jewish, had fled Berlin that July 1938. She first spread the news of fission to the rest of the physics community.

Splitting the atom in 1938 was something wholly different than what had gone on with radiation since its discovery in 1896. To my mind, the news must have been like expanding the notion of arithmetic from simple addition and subtraction to suddenly include the concept of division. It really blew people's minds at the time. Soddy had explained how elements incrementally transmuted downwards in atomic number (subtraction) by shedding alpha particles and how they transmuted upwards (addition) in number by losing beta particles, but nobody was looking for this:*

original

In 1938, Otto Hahn and Fritz Straßmann bombarded uranium with neutrons and fished out the products. Neutrons were all the rage after their discovery in 1932 and physicists wanted to know what they did to all types of matter. Enrico Fermi had started this sort of work in Italy, but had been interrupted. It was only a matter of time before someone figured out what was going on. Hahn and Straßmann had expected to observe slightly lighter atoms like radium, actinium, and thorium; instead they observed the much lighter elements barium, lanthanum, and cerium:

Als Chemiker müssen wir aus den kurz dargelegten Versuchen das obengebrachte Schema eigentlich umbenennen und statt Ra, Ac, Th die Symbole Ba, La und Ce einsetzen. Als der Physik in gewisser Weise nahestehende Kernchemiker können wir uns zu diesem, allen bisherigen Erfahrungen der Kernphysik widersprechenden Sprung noch nicht entschließen. Es könnte doch noch vielleicht eine Reihe seltsamer Zufälle unsere Ergebnisse vorgetäuscht haben.

As chemists, we must rename [our] scheme and insert the symbols Ba, La, Ce in place of Ra, Ac, Th. As nuclear chemists closely associated with physics, we cannot yet convince ourselves to make this leap, which contradicts all previous experience in nuclear physics. A series of strange coincidences could still prove our results false.

This was the first published account of nuclear fission. Smart people realized that the exact chemical products required that more neutrons were coming out than were going in--this was soon verified and led physicists to realize that Leo Szilárd's chain reaction was now feasable. The news spread like fallout. And because it came from 1938 Berlin, the entire rest of the physics community panicked...and then they organized.**

Read more about the discovery of fission here.

__________________________
*A German chemist, Ida Noddack, had suggested as early as 1934 that "it is conceivable that the nucleus breaks up into several large fragments, which would of course be isotopes of known elements but would not be neighbors of the irradiated element"---but no one took her seriously.  link

**Another frightening fact was that the Austrians had cut off everyone else's supply of uranium from the original Czech mine--the same place Marie Curie had obtained her original samples in 1896.

Titanic Centennial: Rigel, the Canine Hero

I have no clue whether this is true or not. It makes a good story though. From "The Sinking of the Titanic and Great Sea Disasters," p. 125:

Not the least among the heroes of the Titanic disaster was Rigel, a big black Newfoundland dog, belonging to the first officer, who went down with the ship.* But for Rigel, the fourth boat picked up might have been run down by the Carpathia. For three hours he swam in the icy water where the Titanic went down, evidently looking for his master, and was instrumental in guiding the boatload of survivors to the gangway of the Carpathia.

Jonas Briggs, a seaman aboard the Carpathia, now has Rigel and told the story of the dog's heroism. The Carpathia was moving slowly about, looking for boats, rafts or anything which might be afloat. Exhausted with their efforts, as well as from lack of food and exposure to the cutting wind, and terrorstriken, the men and women in the fourth boat had drifted under the Carpathia's starboard bow. They were dangerously close to the steamship, but too weak to shout a warning load enough to reach the bridge.

The boat might not have been seen were it not for the sharp barking of Rigel, who was swimming ahead of the craft, and valiantly announcing his position. The barks attracted the attention of Captain Rostron, and he went to the starboard end of the bridge to see where they came from and saw the boat. He immediately ordered the engines stopped, and the boat came alongside the starboard gangway.

Care was taken to get Rigel aboard, but he appeared little affected by his long trip through the ice-cold water. He stood by the rail and barked until Captain Rostron called Briggs and had him take the dog below.

 ________________________
*First Officer William Murdoch, who was in command of the bridge when Titanic struck the iceberg. He commited suicide in front of several witnesses before the ship went down, but that has been disputed.

Doing the aftermath of Becquerel's discovery

[continuation in part from here]

Becquerel's discovery of uranium's radioactivity led to several immediate questions:

(1) Were other elements besides uranium radioactive?
(2) What is radioactivity? Was it it like X-rays?
(3) How to square radioactivity with the Law Of Conservation of Energy.

In the mid 1890's the Periodic Table looked like this:

Original

Note that the noble gases (which had just been discovered--were absent). Also, nickel and cobalt were incorrectly ordered under group VIII as I mentioned here.

Marie Curie found that thorium (an element known since 1828) was radioactive in 1898.  There was a priority dispute with a German chemist, Gerhard Carl Schmidt which I'm still reading about. Thorium's importance briefly eclipsed uranium's, because the latter was in short supply until more sources could be found. Curie, along with her husband Pierre, began extracting uranium from samples of impure Czech pitchblende. They discovered that the purer they got the uranium, the stronger the radioactivity was in the concentrated waste left behind. This told them that something else was in there. They discovered polonium in July and radium in December of 1898, adding two new elements to the chart shown above.  In this way, radioactivity became a tool for discovering new elements.

What God Hath Wrought, Men First Wrought Of Copper*

I'm always disturbed to hear about copper wire and plumbing being ripped from abandoned and not-so abandoned properties. Thieves are motivated by commodity price inflation, or dollar devaluation--take your pick. It seems like such wanton destruction--an undoing of modern communication and sanitation.  That the copper is probably being recycled and that alternative technologies to copper wire exist for telecommunications, viz., wireless and fiber optics, is small consolation. Those newer technologies bring their own vulnerabilities.

Copper telegraph cable first linked cities beginning around the 1830's. A submarine cable was laid under the English Channel in the 1850's using a continuous length of copper coated with natural rubber. In 1858, the first of several trans-Atlantic cables was laid. A US stamp commemorated the feat:

We may think that we are now safely linked by satellite, but the bulk of Internet communication is still via cable transmission. Not copper, but fiber-optic transmission:

Link to Original

_________________
*The title is a pun/homage to Samuel F.B. Morse's first telegram: "What hath God Wrought?"

Letters Home: Vous sortez du secteur américain

July 18, 1953
Baumholder

Dear Mom, Dad and all,

I finally found time to answer your letter. I am over in the French Zone driving for an officer. [1] Some other outfit over here is having maneuvers and they are umpires.[2]

I got Marylou's letter answered finally too. Bonnie sent a letter but I haven't answered it yet. [3] It was a bad trip over here. It rained all the way and when it rains the roads are as slick as ice. Cobblestone roads.

I am sending some pictures along this time. That one of me standing by the bear was taken at a carnival.

This is Sat night and I am just laying around doing nothing.

Did you get that card I sent. I know this is a short letter but there is just nothing happening. Bye for now.

Love, V.

_______________

[1] After the Second World War, the French were understandably vindictive, just as they had been after the First World War. Many, Charles de Gaulle included, were perfectly willing to recreate a Weimar Germany or see Germany vanquished altogether. The draconian Monnet Plan would surely have weakened the nascent Western German economy. The Dutch, also eager to seek reparations from the Germans, proposed their own version called the Bakker-Shut Plan.

The US, meanwhile, had its own plan called the Morgenthau Plan, proposed by FDR's Treasury Secretary (see his signature under the blue seal in the photo below). Designed to neutralize any German resurgence, the Morgenthau Plan was harshly criticized and ultimately rejected.  Herbert Hoover, still active in politics, wrote in March 1947:

There is the illusion that the New Germany left after the annexations can be reduced to a 'pastoral state'. It cannot be done unless we exterminate or move 25,000,000 people out of it.

To our credit, the US eventually rejected all these retributive schemes because they all risked letting a weakened Germany move further to the Soviet sphere. The "Stalin Plan" was already in force in the Eastern sector.

Our Marshall Plan trumped them all.  Interestingly, an evolved version of the Monnet Plan eventually became the seed of the EEU, which eventually became the EU.

Click to enlarge. US Silver Certificate, series 1935

[2] These were tank maneuvers.
[3] His older and younger sisters.

Manganese Is Neither Transgendered Nor Racist

The words manganese and magnesium are related. Their entwined roots stem back to a place called Magnesia in ancient Greece where they were both found in abundance. Some speculate that Spartan swords were exceptionally hard because of manganese content in their iron. Manganese's word history is parsed here and van der Krogt has his take here.

Manganese has been used since antiquity both to color and to decolorize glass. The Venetians perfected "glassmaker's soap," making high art with it.  Glass always contains iron in trace amounts and this imparts a greenish "coke bottle" tinge. The addition of manganese to the molten glass produces a reddish-brown tinge which equalizes the absorption across the visible spectrum and gives so-called colorless glass. More reading on colored glass can be found here.

Manganese also demarcates an important trend in the Periodic Table. Moving from left to right across the first transition metal series, i.e., Sc -> Ti -> V -> Cr -> Mn, each element adds one more positive charge to its core (and one surrounding electron). Yet those electrons can be stripped by oxygen. A tipping point is reached between manganese and iron. Manganese is the last metal in that series to exhaustively lose all of its valence electrons to oxygen. Thus the manganese atom in permanganate MnO₄^-, is fully oxidized back to having an argon core. But moving just one element further to the right (to iron) is just enough change in electronegativity that iron retains two valence electrons: there is a ferrate but no perferrate.

Ironically, despite its reputation for rusting, iron retains an inner core of two valence electrons, even when completely surrounded by rapacious oxygen. Iron is one step closer to the noble metals.

War Letters of German and English Soldiers

Link to original

Poppy-covered fields in Flanders evoke Britain's Remembrance Day on November 11, but the original inspiring poem was written in May, closer to our American Memorial Day.

I recently discovered two new books to nurture my obsession with soldiers' letters: War Letters Of Fallen Englishmen, originally compiled by Laurence Housman and published in 1930, and German Students' War Letters, originally compiled by Phillipp Witkop and published, in German, in 1928. Both books were recently republished by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

The two books are remarkably close.  Jay M. Winter, Yale historian, wrote introductions for both volumes.  Here he captures what they both were about:

The entries in the book resemble gravestones, in a general way. There is the name, and instead of military rank, there is his academic affiliation. Then follows the date and place of his birth and his death. So far the parallel with a grave site [is] similar to that used in other similar ventures, for instance, Laurence Housman's War Letters of Fallen Englishmen. Housman's identification also includes the service arm and rank, which Witkop's book avoids. Still, the similarity to a cemetery stone is clear.

What both editions add, of course, is a letter or several letters. This practice helps establish the individuality of the soldier who died; without such special individuation, he would fade into an army of the dead and therefore into oblivion. Thus these books offer two services to bereaved families. For those whose sons or husbands or brothers had no known grave, these pages provide a kind of surrogate resting place his remains never had. And second, the text of the letters does more than just list his name, date of birth, and date of death. It is a kind of portrait, like those found in East European cemeteries. The letters construct a snapshot of the mind of the fallen soldier. The prose comes to stand for the man himself, his nobility, his beliefs, his aspirations. It was as if he wrote his own epitaph.

Here is an example, chosen at random from German Students' War Letters:

EDUARD BRUHN, Student of Theology, Kiel
Born October 18th, 1890, at Schlamersdorf.
Killed September 17th, 1915, in Russia

September 17th, 1915. 

Dear Parents,---
I am lying on the battle-field badly wounded. Whether I recover is in God's hands. If I die, do not weep. I am going blissfully home. A hearty greeting to you all once more. May God soon send you peace and grant me a blessed home-coming. Jesus is with me, so it is easy to die. In heartfelt love, 

Eduard

____________________
Added:

Happy Mother's Day

From last year: Link

Mr. Faraday Was Delighted

Michael Faraday (1791-1867)

Faraday was delighted, and a little alarmed, with Maxwell's approach to his ideas and the way in which it gave his theory the same status as action at a distance theories: [1] 'I was at first almost frightened when I saw such mathematical force made to bear upon the subject and then wondered to see that the subject stood it so well.' He returned to this theme later in 1857 when he asked Maxwell why mathematical conclusions may 'not be expressed in common language as full, clearly, and definitely as in mathematical formulae...translating them out of their hieroglyphics, that we might also work upon them by experiment'.

-- Frank A.J.L. James Michael Faraday: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press (2010)
________________________

[1] Newton's law of gravitation is an example of a force at a distance:

Every point mass attracts every single other point mass by a force pointing along the line intersecting both points. The force is proportional to the product of the two masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.

Expressed mathematically:

F = G m₁m₂ /r²

Labor's Moves In Politics

Samuel Gompers (1850-1924)

From ITU Lessons in Printing. Trade Unionism Unit VI (1958), p. 97:

Throughout the centuries various political doctrines have been evolved promising, or purporting to promise, the redemption of labor. The suppression of labor in the 18th century led the Anarchists of the early 19th century to advocate abolition of all government, which was to be replaced by a system of voluntary co-operation among individuals. As developed by the French syndicalists, the basis of organization of the new state was to be the syndicate, an expanded trade union assuming full responsibility for the conduct and well-being of its members. The movement had some following in the United States during the 19th century and attained its greatest strength in the International Workers of the World, or I.W.W., which launched extensive strike movements in this country in the early 20th century.

A radically different approach was counseled by Karl Marx; namely, the violent overthrow of the government and its seizure by working class groups led by a "dictatorship of the proletariat." The Communist Manifesto, issued in 1848 at the time of widespread revolution in Germany, stated their position. Within the Socialist movement thus launched, two trends developed: one movement, authoritarian in its character, developed into the Communist Party which successfully seized power in Russia in 1918. The other, more democratic in nature, though committed to the doctrine of public ownership of the means of production, developed into the Socialist and Social Democrat movements of England, France, Germany,* and Italy. Both movements found some adherents in the United States, particularly during the depression years of the early 1930's. American labor, however, has, with few exceptions, followed the advice of Samuel Gompers: a policy of rewarding friends and punishing enemies.

______________________
*Presumably this included the National Socialists of Germany.

The Best Teacher

Like many other American high schools, mine was a hodgepodge of old and new buildings. The original three-story cream brick structure dated from the early 20th century. The town outgrew that building and cobbled on a whole new addition in the early 1960's, trebling the capacity. They added brand new sports facilities after I left in 1978. I recently looked at the Google Maps footprint of the high school and it's unrecognizable to me now.

Back in the late 1970's, the first and third floors of the original core building were mostly offices and storage. The second floor was still used for teaching--but only for English, foreign languages and some history classes--subjects that didn't require modern science or shop facilities. That's where I had a thoroughly memorable semester of English Literature taught by Mr. Van Lanen.

Van Lanen's class met on the second floor in the old building. His voluminous room--with its creaky old wooden floor and a ceiling high enough to hang light fixtures--perfectly suited his old fashioned (classical?) emphasis on learning through participation. The whole south-facing wall of his classroom was completely windowed with multi-paned sliding windows. Fenestration like that was endangered even then. The school district considered only the heat loss index of such windows and not any warmth and light they passed onto the students. Already in the offices on the other floors, such windows had been plywood-paneled down to a tiny square where an air conditioner hung as the only connection between indoors and out. 

Mr. Van Lanen had a ruddy complexion and wisps of red-gone-white hair sparsely covered his head (he must have been around 50 then). He wore gold-rimmed spectacles and kept his hair slightly longer than most men his age. He also wore a moustache. He carried himself with a supple--almost athletic--agility. We heard rumors that he had been a running back at Marquette University in his college days. He wasn't a particularly large man for a running back, but it was easy to imagine him outrunning his opponents. It was his methods and manner though that were most memorable.

He certainly taught differently than other teachers--at least ones that I had had up to then. For starters, he arranged all the wooden desks into a semi-circle, so as not to encourage favorites. We were all equal to him and were all equally liable for discussion. And did he stress discussion! I took him for Prose Lit. the last semester of my senior year after I had belatedly thought it a good idea to go to college.

From the very beginning, as soon as he learned our names, he was calling on us to analyze and discuss our reading assignments. Some dreaded this and wished themselves less visible, but he'd make it all the worse for them—they were the ones who would get called on the most. I recall once discussing a passage of D.H. Lawrence’s Sons And Lovers. Mr. Van Lanen. read aloud:

...there was a jenny wren’s nest in the hedge by the orchard…He crouched down and carefully put his finger through the thorns into the round door of the nest. ‘It’s almost as if you were feeling inside the live body of the bird, it’s so warm.'

He stopped reading, looked up and aimed a question at one of the shyest girls in class: “Now Julie, what would a Freudian say about that?" She blushed and fell silent. Birds twittered outside the open windows and we heard traffic two blocks away on University Avenue until at long last a more outspoken student raised his hand to answer. That sort of Socratic methodology made him some enemies amongst other students. I have a distinct recollection of some calling him a pervert--what with the way he threatened traditional values having us read Camus’s existentialism and John Barth’s nihilism. But they forgot that he equally taught us the beautiful language of Shakespeare and Brontë, the styles of Hemingway and Lawrence, numerous poems & short stories, and even two books of the Bible. Yeah they forgot all about that.

He made us open up. The whole semester was themed "Love" but he encouraged us to talk and discuss anything in class that pertained to literature: love and hate, men and women, life and death, good and evil -- all the usual "heavy" stuff for high school literature. I suppose that some of us were starved for conversation because we sure weren't getting that stuff at home.

Mr. Van Lanen was like an inquisitor, but when someone was on fire with ideas, he would sit back with his arms folded across his chest, his head cocked to one side, grinning, just knowing he was partly responsible.

“It’s like Heathcliff’s soul just took off out the window to be with Cathy and he just left his cold body behind” somebody said. “Yeah, that’s what I thought too” said another.

He pushed us too. When one person said something worth discussing and our faces sat mute, he’d cup his hands around his mouth and feign a PA loudspeaker voice to make the one student's point, to bring us all a bit closer together and onto the same page.  He'd keep asking each of us one-by-one what we were thinking until each of us picked up on something our own. He loved to stir the pot. That’s the way it went the whole semester. I suppose that to him we were not buckets to be filled but little fires to be lit.*

The school board tried to dismiss him a few years later. Not for what or how he taught but for his union activities of all things. Apparently he refused to back down on some negotiation with the district. I was not privy to the details. I did go back to my high school one evening while in college in Madison to attend one of the public hearings and to show him support. To me, the union activities were not the issue—it was the threat to the best teacher that the school had. The hearings never got anywhere. They did take his space though. Some years later, they razed the entire the old building and raised a newer more energy efficient wing instead.
_______________________

*The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled

— Plutarch

I am grateful to commenter named MamaM at Trooper York's blog for inspiring me to seek out the Plutarch quote and to apply it here. link

Conversations with Henry: She Was A Piece Of Work

[continued from back here]


Henry: Jake didn't really discover kinetic isotope effects -- he just explained them first. Plus I think he had some help.


Me: From whom?

Henry: Maria Mayer. Boy she was piece of work. Smart as a whip. She was the poster girl for how badly science used to treat women.

Me: Really?


Henry: Yes. She won the Nobel Prize eventually. Not in Chemistry though, but Physics. She developed the shell structure model of atomic nuclei. She ended up down by you you know.


Me: You mean UCSD?


Henry: Yep. But she started out in Germany -- as Maria Goeppert. She was friends with all the big time physicists back then. You should look her up. Interesting story. But if you're interested in isotope effects, why don't you just write Jake -- he's a nice guy.  


Me: Thanks, I will. Can I mention you?


Henry: Please do and give him my regards.

I look at my cards and frown. I discard two and ask for two more.

[story continued here]

Heroes On Stamps



1942-1970



Sometimes Being Cool Is Just Uncool

Back in 1977, Elvis came through Madison, Wisconsin on what turned out to be his last tour.  My mom and dad went and my dad asked me if I wanted to go too -- my brother was in the navy at the time -- but I declined because at age seventeen, I was just too cool to go see Elvis.

We openly mocked Elvis then. We were just too young to remember what he had done by fusing white hillbilly music with black rhythm and blues. We couldn't see past his bloated 1970's image.  Instead, we paid dearly to go see bands like Led Zeppelin play Whole Lotta Love, unknowingly helping them to pay off the settlement they made with Willie Dixon over plagiarism.  Still, our derision of Elvis never rose to the outright animus of Public Enemy's Chuck D in Fight The Power:

Elvis was a hero to most but he never meant shit to me you see, straight up racist that sucker was, simple and plain, mother fuck him and John Wayne.

Elvis never lost something, even in the months before his death: watch him flash that boyish smile at the 1 min 15 sec mark here in Unchained Melody. Then back it up and watch the whole thing.

Who Was Hot In 1952?

My Letters Home and 50 years of Mytunes series got me to thinking about popular music back in 1952. At the time, the music markets (like most everything else) were still racially segregated, targeting and selling to different markets. Two notable musical artists were at their peak in 1952: Muddy Waters and Hank Williams.

Muddy Waters charted two hit songs that year with She Moves Me and All Night Long, but would go on to greater heights and would inspire an entire generation of white blues artists. Hank Williams had seven successful singles in 1952: Jambalaya (On The Bayou), You Win Again, The Wild Side Of Live, Honky Tonk Blues, Settin' The Woods On Fire, Half As Much, and the eerily prescient I'll Never Get Out Of This World Alive.  Hank Williams died the following year at the age of 29.

Letters Home: "through the Mississippi darkness rolling down to the sea"

The time finally came when my dad finished basic training at Fort Campbell. Still a teenager, he went off to Europe as part of the 141^st Tank Battalion in the US 3^rd Army to help oppose Russian troops that had deployed along the Iron Curtain. 

Back then, interstate troop transport meant trains because there was still plenty of WW II troop transport rolling stock. He left Fort Campbell headed for New Orleans to embark on a troop transport ship to Europe--he and about 4,000 others:

July 22nd, 1952
Fort Campbell, KY


Dear Mom, Dad and all,


By the time you get this letter I will be on my way.  We are leaving thur. noon for New Orleans and will get there about 10:00 Fri. morning (by Pullman). [1]

Friday afternoon at 4:30 we are leaving New Orleans for Paris. [2] From France we are going to Bremershaven Germany. From there someplace in Germany. We will be on the boat 18 days. 2 Bn. of Air Force are getting off in Paris. [3]

I got the $10.00 Sunday morning. You can take it out of my next check.
I suppose Jr. is out of the Army now.
I got and sent back that form from the Motor Vehicle Dept., so the licence should be coming. [4] You can put them in my box because I won’t need them.

I can write on the ship if I ain’t too sick. I don’t think it will affect me any. I guess this is all for now.


Love,

V.

________________________

[1]  At the time, troops travelled by special Pullman cars on overnight trains. Given Appalachian geography, it's likely that he first headed west to Memphis and then linked up with or transferred to a train heading south along the Mississippi flood plain to New Orleans.

I am reminded of the Steve Goodman song The City Of New Orleans (made famous by Arlo Guthrie):

Night time on The City of New Orleans,

Changing cars in Memphis, Tennessee.

Half way home, we'll be there by morning

Through the Mississippi darkness

Rolling down to the sea.

[2] Apparently he didn't realize that Paris wasn't a seaport. :)

[3] One battalion is approximately a thousand men. Unlike the Army, the US Air Force was based in France during that stage of the Cold War. A NATO directive stipulated that all air bases be located west of the Rhine, out of the zone of occupation, for strategic reasons (link).  American air power also had a long historical connection with France dating from the First World War. Lafayette Escadrille was a squadron of American volunteers during WW I. Race car driver-turned flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker flew French-made airplanes like Nieuports and SPAD VIIIs (pictured below).

[4] He lost his billfold as described back here. 

Letters Home: "We Saw A Parade For Taft"

The rather personal narrative of my dad's letters occasionally runs across concurrent American history.  Here is one such letter.  He mentions passing through Chicago on the day before the historic 1952 Republican Convention, a crucial event in mainstream American politics.  It's not clear from his letter if he even knew that the convention was happening--he was never overtly political and being only 19 at the time wasn't yet old enough to vote--but I'm fairly certain that my grandfather was keenly interested in that election, hence the mention of seeing a parade for Robert Taft:

July 7, 1952 
Fort Campbell, KY

Dear Mom and Dad and all,

I got back Monday morning at 1:00 o’clock so I got 4 hours sleep. [1] We had good luck all the way. A new Hudson brought us about 300 miles. [2]  We didn’t start hitchhiking till 2:00 Sunday afternoon from Hammond Ind. [3]  When we went through Chicago, we saw a parade for Taft. [4] He was going to be there at 3:30 Sunday afternoon.

We aren’t doing anything today so I’m resting up, and writing this. I am going to Clarksville Tenn. tonight and get Jr. a muffler for his pickup. It’s 9 miles away. Sure is hot down here today, about 100.  Maybe after I get overseas there will be more to write. The way it is there is nothing new here. We have to go through the infiltration course again. [5] I went through it at Ft. Knox, but you have to do it at least within 3 months before you go overseas. It’s been more than 3 months since I went through it. That’s where you crawl on your back and belly and a machine gun is shooting over your head.

Love,

V.

_________________________

[1] Apparently, he had been to Wisconsin on leave over the Fourth of July and had hitchhiked back to Ft. Campbell.

[2]  A 1952 Hudson looked like this: Link

[3] Hammond, Indiana was another Route 41 town on the southeastern side of Chicago, just west of Gary, Indiana.

[4] Taft was of course Sen. Robert A. Taft, eldest son of William Howard Taft (27th President and later the 10th Chief Justice).  Taft had represented Ohio in the US Senate since 1938 and had twice before sought the Republican nomination. An outspoken critic of FDR's New Deal legislation, Taft often led efforts to curb its excesses, for example, via the Taft-Hartley Act which had overridden President Truman's veto. Taft-Hartley remains in force today. Taft also opposed unchecked deficit spending, high farm subsidies, excess governmental bureaucracy, the National Labor Relations Board, and nationalized health insurance.

Robert Taft was unloved by the eastern Republican establishment, personified by his arch rival, New York Governor (and three-time presidential candidate) Thomas E. Dewey. Taft was harshly criticized in the press for opposing the execution of Nazi War criminals at Nuremberg; he considered it ex post facto law and a precedent that we would later regret. Taft also opposed the Korean War, basing his opposition not on softness towards communism but instead on the way in which the conflict began--Taft simply opposed the usurpation of Congressional War Powers by President Truman. Again Taft called it a precedent that we would later regret.

JFK posthumously lauded Taft (along with seven others) in his Profiles In Courage, calling him "Mr. Republican" and "Mr. Integrity." And while Taft inspired respect from both sides of politics and loyalty from Republican partisans, he was ultimately considered unelectable to the Presidency by his own party.

The outcome of the Republican Presidential primary in Chicago was still uncertain that first weekend in early July, 1952.  Those were still the days when conventions were decided by men in smoke-filled rooms.  Neither Eisenhower nor Taft had a majority of delegate votes needed going into the convention. Each man represented differing factions within the same party, yet nothing seemed to be a deciding factor other than the inchoate "electability" factor of Eisenhower.  And that was just it.  Ike was liked. Well liked. The general had famously rejected candidacy four years before in 1948, despite a nascent and popular "draft Ike" movement. Hardcore Republican delegates were loyal to Taft, but in the end they listened to their constituents.  One-by-one during the next week of the convention they found ways to switch from Taft to Eisenhower.

The following passage is from William Manchester's historical narrative, The Glory And The Dream. Manchester describes the pivotal (televised!) moment as the convention delegates decisively turned against Taft, switching to Eisenhower:

He [Eisenhower] had watched it on television in his suite at the Blackstone Hotel, standing with his four brothers and nervously fingering two good luck charms, a Salvation Army coin and a Boy Scout souvenir. As Minnesota switched, Herbert Brownell rushed up and embraced him. The general’s eyes filled. Too moved to speak, he sought out Mamie for a private moment. Then he picked up a phone and asked to speak to Taft. It was precisely the right thing to do, and he, the presumed amateur in politics, was the one who had thought of it. He asked the senator if he could pay his respects. Fighting crowds all the way, he made his way to Taft’s lair in the Conrad Hilton. Both men were exhausted, stunned and dazed. Photographers begged them to smile. They complied, though Taft was clearly in agony.  He was going through this for the sake of the party, and his devotion to it had never made a greater demand. Though his eyes were bleak with pain, he managed to keep on grinning. He said huskily, “I want to congratulate General Eisenhower.  I shall do everything possible in the campaign to secure his election and to cooperate with him in his administration."

Eisenhower emerged victorious from Chicago and Richard Nixon of California was unanimously selected as his running mate. Of course Ike went on to win the 1952 Presidential election, defeating Adlai Stevenson that November (and again in 1956).

Taft enjoyed a brief stint as Senate Majority leader as the Republicans swept back into power with Eisenhower, but he died unexpectedly of cancer the following year, aged 63.

An inscription at the Robert A. Taft Memorial and Carillon in Washington DC reads:

This Memorial to Robert A. Taft, presented by the people to the Congress of the United States, stands as a tribute to the honesty, indomitable courage, and high principles of free government symbolized by his life.

[5] My dad had described the infiltration course back here.

Sorry Mr. Wright, Cash And Carry Only

My stepfather told me a great story.  In 1948 he was working at a department store on the Capitol Square in Madison. In those days, there were no malls and all the major stores were still downtown on the Square. My stepfather was about 18 or 19 and was working his first job. He worked on the third floor where dry goods were stored and unpacked before moving them down to the retail space on the ground floor and second story. It sounds kind of inefficient but the customers didn't want to climb to the third floor (where it was also hotter in the summer) and so it was used in lieu of a basement for storage.

One day, a rather odd-looking man (a dapper Dan my stepfather called  him) came in with a couple other younger guys. My stepfather's supervisor nudged him and said:

"Hey you know who that is?"
 
"No" 

"That's Frank Lloyd Wright" 

Wright had driven over to Madison on Highway 14 with a couple students and was shopping for housewares for the school he ran back in Spring Green. Wright was dressed in a full-length overcoat and "that hat" (my stepfather called it a "sombrero" and recognized "it" when I showed him the photo that I pasted in above).  [Aside: I'm not sure if that hat was really so different from what other distinguished men wore at the time-Robert Oppenheimer for example was famous for his pork pie hat--so famous that the journal Physics Today honored him by posing a photo of just a pork pie hat for its cover in 1948 (link)].

Wright must have been about 80 years old in 1948. He came up to the third floor, avoiding the retail space and went to where houseware items were stored.  Wright carried a cane too and used it to point out things that he wanted as he moved amongst the shelved housewares. He selected three or four wicker basketfuls of dishes--cups, saucers, plates, silver, cookware, etc. My stepfather watched him and then packed up the stuff for him. Afterwards, his boss nudged him again and said:

 "Watch, I bet they make him pay in cash." 

And they did. Wright had an awful reputation for not paying bills. It seems that in his lifetime, the little people were never grateful enough to forgive him his pecuniary trespasses. Just as well. The townspeople in Richland Center dithered for decades before deciding to even recognize their native son. They still haven't put up any kind of civic memorial that I know of--they're still waiting for the memory of unpaid debts to fade.  So far as I know, the best memorial is the one Wright made himself: the old German Warehouse, which I saw and wondered at many times as a kid when we visited that town.