Archive for the 'History' Category

Little Man, What Now?

I’ve often seen this 1932 book footnoted in histories touching on Weimar Germany; not having previously read it I had been under the vague impression that it was some sort of political screed. Actually it is a novel, and a good one. The political implications are indeed significant, but they’re mostly implicit rather than explicit.

Johannes and Emma, known to one another as Sonny and Lammchen, are a young couple who marry when Lammchen unexpectedly becomes pregnant. Their world is not the world of Weimar’s avant-garde artists and writers, or of its risque-to-outright-degenerate cabaret scene. It is far from the world of a young middle-class intellectual like Sebastian Haffner, whose invaluable memoir I reviewed here. Theirs is the world of people at the absolute bottom of anything that could be considered as even lower-middle-class, struggling to hold on by their fingernails.

When we first meet our protagonists, Sonny is working as a bookkeeper–he was previously a reasonably-successful salesman of men’s clothing, working for the kindly Jewish merchant Mr. Bergmann, but a pointless quarrel with Bergmann’s wife, coupled with a job offer from the local grain merchant (Kleinholz) led to a career change. Sonny soon finds that as a condition of continued employment he is expected to marry Kleinholz’s ugly and unpleasant daughter, never an appealing proposition and one which his marriage to Lammchen clearly makes impossible. Lammchen is from a working-class family: her father is a strong union man and Social Democrat who sees himself as superior to lower-tier white-collar men like Sonny.

When Sonny and Lammchen set up housekeeping, their economic situation continually borders on desperate. Purchasing a stew pot, or indulging in the extravagance of a few bites of salmon for dinner, represents a major financial decision. An impulsive decision on Sonny’s part to please Lammchen by acquiring the dressing table she admires will have long-lasting consequences for their budget.

The great inflation of Weimar has come and gone; the psychological damage lingers. Sonny and Lammchen’s landlady cannot comprehend what happened to her savings:

Young people, before the war, we had a comfortable fifty thousand marks. And now that money’s all gone. How can it all be gone?…I sit here reckoning it up. I’ve written it all down. I sit here, reckoning. Here it says: a pound of butter, three thousand marks…can a pound of butter cost three thousand marks?…I now know that my money’s been stolen. Someone who rented here stole it…he falsified my housekeeping book so I wouldn’t notice. He turned three into three thousand without me realizing…how can fifty thousand have all gone?

Inflation is no longer the problem, unemployment is. There are millions of unemployed, and those who do hold jobs are desperately afraid of losing them and will do anything to keep them.

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I am not quite sure when I discovered Rosemary Sutcliff’s novels; it was sometime in my teens. The public library had several copies of Rider on a White Horse, which I thought immediately was the most perfectly evocative historical fiction ever, knocking such lesser lights like Gone With the Wind effortlessly into the shade. Besides, I was a Unionist and an abolitionist; and I thought Scarlett was a spoiled, self-centered brat and Melanie a spineless simpleton and I usually wanted to throw GWTW across the room so hard that it banged against the opposite wall when Margaret Mitchell began complaining about Northern abolitionists. Anyway, the only book that came close to Rider was Sutcliff’s adult Arthurian novel – Sword at Sunset. This was the book that had me taking my poor younger brother and sister to every significant site of Rome in Britain, the summer that we spent there. Here and now I apologize here for dragging them to the remains of Galava Roman Fort, near Ambleside in the Lake District. In 1976 it was on the map, a clear and distinct quadrangle … but when we went to see it then, there was nothing but some shaped rocks edging a grassed-over stretch of ditch in a field full of cows. A thing of less interest could hardly be imagined … but I wanted to see it, anyway, being haunted by the sense that Sutcliff conveyed in Sword at Sunset and in books like Lantern Bearers – that of men and women who were living at the end of things, among the half-crumbled ruins of a great and dying empire, wistfully seeing all the evidence around that things had been better, greater, grander once, and now they weren’t – and wishing there was something that could be done to call those days back again.

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Via sportsman extraordinaire Dan from Madison, this fascinating video shows the operations of a British bicycle factory in 1945. If the factory shown is not a composite it may be the Raleigh works in Nottingham. (The video shows Rudge branded bike frames being made. Wikipedia says that the electronics — now music — company EMI bought the Rudge name and produced bikes from 1935 until 1943 when they sold the brand to Raleigh.)

The video was a promotional effort on behalf of British industry. In hindsight it shows British industry on the cusp of postwar decline. But that’s hindsight. The bicycles shown are pre-war designs, variations of which are still used in much of the world. (Many of the bikes shown in the video would have been exported, perhaps mainly to what are now the Commonwealth countries.) Updated versions of these bikes were popular in the USA until the 1970s when they began to be superseded by more modern designs. Since then the Raleigh brand has passed through multiple acquisitions, and Raleigh bicycles are no longer made in Britain (I have no idea when the Rudge brand was last used).

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I’m sure I’m no ascetic; I’m as pleasant as can be;
You’ll always find me ready with a crushing repartee,
I’ve an irritating chuckle, I’ve a celebrated sneer, I’ve an entertaining snigger, I’ve a fascinating leer.
To ev’rybody’s prejudice I know a thing or two;
I can tell a woman’s age in half a minute — and I do. But although I try to make myself as pleasant as I can,
Yet ev’rybody says I’m such a disagreeable man!
And I can’t think why! –

From Gilbert & Sullivan’s Princess Ida

I suppose that one of the most enjoyable things about romping in the halls of historical research is getting to know people, some of whom are famous and others notorious, all of them interesting and they tickle my interest to the point where I would have very much liked to have met some of them personally. Sam Houston is one of them in Texas history that I’d have loved to meet, Jack Hays another, Angelina Eberly a third. I would have loved to have met Queen Elizabeth I of England – three of the four are complicated people, as nearly as I can judge from reading accounts of them. I just would have liked to have had the chance to form my own, independently-arrived at opinion, you see. About the only way that I can indulge this curiosity is to work them up as characters for various books – walk-on parts, usually. Assemble the various views, take a look at some known writing of theirs, consult the grave and sober historians and come up with something that I hope will be revealing, true to the historical facts, and at least a jolly good read … but now and again, in the pages of history, I encounter those that I don’t like very much at all. Some of them are so immediately disagreeable, dislikeable and all-unpleasant that I marvel they lived long enough to make a mark in history at all.
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When I started out with computers it was all Apple. We had Apple II machines and I remember the “green screens” (and then an “ochre” screen). It was quite exciting to have 2 disk drives, back in the day when you stored your programs on disk rather than on a hard drive in the machine. My father had a background in computing from the earliest days and was happy to invest in computers when hardly anyone else I knew had one and this helped me to get exposure which has been a big help in my career. The most exciting games were Choplifter which was great with the joystick (thanks to Wikipedia for helping me with all these memories), Castle Wolfenstein which startled me when the guards shouted at you, and of course the epic Wizardry game for which I have the cover sheet of the rules manual right here.

In college I had an IBM PC XT. This machine was also state of the art for the day and its casing was some sort of nearly industrial metal that you could run over with a truck. By then we had started to move on to 3.5″ disks which seemed very futuristic when compared to a 5.2″ floppy. I remember actually moving this computer around which was not simple because it was the opposite of portable.

At work we had “luggable” machines which were compacs. I am not sure which version we had it may have looked like this I do remember that it was 1) very heavy 2) if I lost it I’d probably be fired 3) it had an eerie screen color that was described as amber.

Over the years I ended up in the Windows world because this was the tool for business and in various jobs you had to program on and work with Windows laptops and desktops.  Given that, it made sense to just stay in the Windows world for my home PC’s of which I’ve had many but are quite boring so I will spare you that update.
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From an Amazon customer review of one of Tom Russell’s albums:

Twice in my life, while driving in heavy freeway traffic, I’ve heard songs so good on the radio that I had to pull off the road and collect my thoughts. Turns out Tom Russell wrote both of ‘em.

I’ve never had to actually pull off the road, but there’s no denying that TR’s songs pack a considerable emotional punch…indeed, I think Russell is one of the most talented singer/songwriters working today. I’ve been meaning to write a review of his work for some time, and was stirred into action by L C Reese’s post Grasshoppers and Frost, which reminded me of some lines from Russell’s song Ambrose Larsen:

The blackbirds and the locusts, destroyed our corn and wheat
The hawks they ate the chickens, the wolves our mutton meat
With traps and dogs and shotguns loud, we fought this old wild ground
Our children caught the fever, but no doctors were around

(listen here)

The above is from TR’s album The Man From God Knows Where, a song-cycle about the American immigrant experience based in part on the lives of his own Norwegian and Irish ancestors. “Concept albums often fall flat because they are too explicit” noted an SFGate review of this work, “…but The Man From God Knows Where triumphs by laying out the story of one man’s family in intimate detail while developing general themes that inform all our lives.”

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Link

via Instapundit

See also Claire Berlinski’s post A hidden history of evil.

Most people accept as conventional wisdom about the Texas frontier, that Anglo settlers were always the consummate horsemen, cowboys and cavalrymen that they were at the height of the cattle boom years. But that was not so: there was a learning curve involved. The wealthier Texas settlers who came from the Southern states of course valued fine horseflesh. Horse-races were always a popular amusement, and the more down-to-earth farmers and tradesmen who came to Texas used horses as draft animals. But the Anglo element was not accustomed to working cattle – the long-horned and wilderness adapted descendents of Spanish cattle – from horseback. Their eastern cattle were slow, tame and lumbering. Nor were many of them as accustomed to making war from the saddle as the Comanche were. Most of Sam Houston’s army who won victory at San Jacinto, were foot-soldiers: his scouts and cavalry was a comparatively small component of his force. It was a deliberate part of Sam Houston’s strategy to fall back into East Texas, where the lay of the land worked in the favor of his army. The Anglos’ preferred weapon in those early days in Texas the long Kentucky rifle, a muzzle-loading weapon, impossible to use effectively in the saddle, more suited to their preferred cover of woods – not the rolling grasslands interspersed with occasional clumps of trees which afforded Mexican lancers such grand maneuvering room.
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While organizing my old photos I came across 2007 pictures from a visit to Castillo de San Marcos, a fort in St. Augustine, Florida. The fortress was built by the Spanish as part of the time they occupied Florida.

The fortress is of the typical “bastion” type. I am not an expert in this era so I relied on wikipedia which had a nice description. Apparently the grades were built so that cannon would be more effective aiming downward as attackers neared the fortress.

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Like a great many locations of note to the tumultuous years of the Republic of Texas, the site of the battle of Salado Creek doesn’t look today much like it did in 1842 . . . however, it is not so much changed that it is hard to picture in the minds’ eye what it would have looked like then. The creek is dryer and seasonal, more dependant now upon rainfall than the massive amount of water drawn into the aquifer by the limestone sponge of the Hill Country, to the north. Then – before the aquifer was tapped and drilled and drained in a thousand places – the water came up in spectacular natural fountains in many places below the Balcones Escarpment. The Salado was a substantial landmark in the countryside north of San Antonio, a deep and regular torrent, running between steep banks lined with oak and pecan trees, thickly quilted with deep brush and the banks scored by shallow ravines that ran down to water-level. Otherwise, the countryside around was gently rolling grasslands, dotted with more stands of oak trees. There was a low hill a little east of the creek, with a house built on the heights. Perhaps it might have had a view of San Antonio de Bexar, seven miles away to the south and west.
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On September 22, 1859, Edmund Rees, wife Margaret, and the five Rees children (ages 12-18 months) arrived in Great Salt Lake City, twelve-year old capital of the nine-year old Utah Territory. Edmund and Margaret were natives of Monmouthshire in the southeastern corner of Wales. While they’d both joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the early 1850s, they didn’t gather to Zion and emigrate to Utah until Edmund developed asthma from years spent cutting coal in the Monmouthshire mines that fueled the early Industrial Revolution.

The Rees family started their journey with $500, the results of selling their home. $100 got them from Wales to Iowa. They left the old country on April 11, 1859, sailed across the Atlantic on the John Talbot, landed at New Orleans, and sailed up the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers to Council Bluffs, Iowa by steam boat. Another $100 got them two oxen, a covered wagon, a milk cow, and safely across the Plains to Utah.

Edmund was unfamiliar with handling livestock: the first time he put the yoke on the oxen, he put it on upside down.

So Margaret took over.

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Eighteen minutes, by the clock – in that furious eighteen minutes, a strategic battle was won. Eventually it would prove that more than just an errant and rebellious state had been lost to a central governing authority – and worse yet, lost under the personal supervision of a charismatic and able leader. In an open meadow with a slight rise across the middle of it, fringed with tall trees, bounded on two sides by a river and a third by a swampy lake (or a lakey swamp – descriptions are elastic) the dreams of one nation-state died and another was born.

The dreams of one of those nation-states died along with a fair number of its soldiers; ironically, the long-term political career of the man who had led them there was not one of them. He was the prototypical general on a white horse, following a willow-the-wisp of his enemy. He would not die in the swamp around Peggy’s Lake, or in the waters where Vince’s Bridge had been cut down. He would – like his adversary – die of old age, in bed of more or less natural causes, after a lifetime of scheming, treachery and showmanship. This probably came as a great surprise to everyone who had taken part on either side of the 1835-36 Texas War of Independence; that General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna would live a long and erratically prosperous life –and his cause of death did not involve a hangman’s rope, a firing squad or an outraged husband. Which, given his career of double-cross, astounding brutality and corruption, should give confidence and inspiration to prospective caudillos everywhere. That is the end of the story, however – the beginning was in Texas, in the mid 1830s.
Which beginning is more tangled than anyone could imagine, from just knowing of it through the medium of pop-culture. For most people, Americans and foreigners alike, that is pretty well limited to movies about the Alamo, and the Disney version of Davy Crockett. Act One – American settlers take over Texas; Act Two – many of them hole up in the Alamo; Act Three – a lot of swarthy and nattily-dressed Mexican soldiers kill them all; Act Four – somehow, the Americans win Texas after all, and in spite of that. Garnish with any number of fashionable intellectual flourishes, conceits and concepts and salt to taste.
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Today is Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Memorial Day. Screenwriter Robert Avrech has posted the first part of his Emmy-award-winning film The Devil’s Arithmetic, which is based on Jane Yolen’s book of the same name, for on-line viewing.

The DVD is available from the usual sources, including Amazon and Netflix. Highly recommended.

The 70th anniversary of the Doolittle Toyko raid is being marked at the National Museum of the USAF near Dayton, OH. Four of the original raiders will be present.

Video here.

Speaking of the Titanic….there must have been at least a thousand books written about this ship, and quite a few of these books have been getting a marketing push from the 100th anniversary of the sinking. One worthy book that could have done with a little marketing assistance is this 1998 novel, which currently stands at #5,797,127 on Amazon.

Passenger Sumner Jordan is a 12-year-old from a wealthy Boston family, returning from a visit to his father in England. Sumner was named for the abolitionist Charles Sumner, who was beaten and nearly killed–on the Senate floor–by a proponent of slavery, and he desperately wants to live up to the level of courage shown by his namesake. He has a crush on 19-year-old Ivy Earhshaw, a dedicated suffragette.

When the ship hits the iceberg, each of them will have some decisions to make about ideals versus personal safety.

(Writing this review from memory and information on Amazon, since I can’t find my copy and it’s not available on Kindle.)

I am almost sure that telling a historical story through a movie is fraught with as many perils for the story-teller as doing so through the medium of historical fiction – it’s just that the movie-maker’s pratfalls are so much more … public, I guess is the word that I’m fishing for. There are big-name, serious historical fiction writers who abuse history almost beyond recognition in their attempt to weave a tale of the past – Philippa Gregory, anyone? – but to my mind, the really, really egregious mainstream offenses are committed in the service of movie-making.

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Ran across some information about a project to create an open-source Jacquard loom. A Jacquard has the ability to weave elaborately-patterned fabrics by controlling each individual warp thread in the weaving process. Machines that can handle a large number of threads are pretty costly…numbers I’ve seen are in the $30K-60K range…and there are evidently a lot of hobbyists and small businesspeople who would like such a loom but are unable to afford one. Hence, the open-source loom project.

The Jacquard is important in the history of technology, and I’ve been intending to write about this topic for a while. A good source is Jacquard’s Web: How a Hand-Loom Led to the Birth of the Information Age, by James Essinger. (I’m not a weaver, so hope that those who are will forgive and correct any inaccuracies or incorrect use of terminology in this post.)

Traditionally, the weaving of patterned fabric was a very labor intensive process requiring that for each throw of the shuttle, a number of cords must be pulled or not pulled in order to lift or not lift specific threads. Essinger estimates only 1 inch of fabric per day, for a weaver and his assistant, could be produced–so these fabrics were definitely luxury goods.

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I can blame my intense, not to say passionate interest in 19th century American history – specifically, to the Western frontier to being exposed at a very impressionable age to two things, and both of them the fault of my parents. One of them was Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series of books, which Mom and Dad began giving me as gifts at around the age of eight … by which time I could read confidently and omnivorously. I would get a single volume for Christmas or a birthday present, dated and inscribed – and I very clearly remember sitting down and reading them from cover to cover almost immediately. They gave me a pretty good sense of domestic life in the small-town mid-West, and what work was involved in keeping house, home and family together on the late 19th century frontier. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week Ginny critiqued an article by a University of Iowa professor, in which said professor (who moved to Iowa from San Francisco 20 years ago) had some not-terribly-positive things to say about the people among whom he has spent the last two decades and remarked that of the places he has lived, many of them foreign countries, “none has been more foreign to me than Iowa.”

Coincidentally, while resorting documents in my office I ran into the July/August 04 issue of the (sadly now defunct) magazine The American Enterprise, which has several articles on the theme “Plain America,” that is, western, midwestern, and rural America. Happily, the whole issue is online, and these essays are thoughtful and thought-provoking. They include:

–a piece on the cowboy archetype, by Andrew and Judith Kleinfield
–growing up in Fargo, by James Lileks
–culture in Inner America, by Bill Kauffman
–rediscovering our Midwest, by Joel Kotkin
–small lives well-lived in small places, by Blake Hurst
–the significance of the Lewis and Clark expedition, by Karl Zinsmeister
–some thoughts by the then-governor of Colorado, Bill Owens

These essays make a good complement to Ginny’s post. The text display format used at the linked site is not greatly to my liking, but it is readable, and it’s well worth doing so.