urban transit in the early 1900s

This image, from Library of Congress Prints and Photos Division, shows Brooklyn's Atlantic Ave. station on a summer day. Taken in 1910 or a little after, it shows New Yorkers in Sunday dress, many of them headed to the boardwalk on Coney Island.

{Source: Library of Congress; click image to view full size}

This detail shows a Culver Line train pulling into the station on a return trip from Coney Island. The open siding on the cars is unusual. As you can see passengers could raise or lower the fabric screens, something like window shades.

{Source: Library of Congress; click image to view full size}

Still closer up, you can see young men riding between the cars and a modern young lady in shirt sleeves and tie, without hat.

{Source: Library of Congress; click image to view full size}

This second close up shows the driver in shirt sleeves, a lady with a big Sunday hat, and most everyone giving the scene below their full attention.

{Source: Library of Congress; click image to view full size}

Down below are pedestrians, the women in full Edwardian skirts and more Sunday headgear.

{Source: Library of Congress; click image to view full size}

It interests me that the women are in pairs, without male escorts. All the men are hatted, many in summer boaters and the police under regulation helmets. It's nice to see that not everyone wears dark clothing, though that's pretty much the norm. There are trolley tracks set into the street. This station serves the public with trolleys, a grade-level railway (the LIRR), the elevated trains of the Culver and other rapid transit lines.

This map from 1939 shows the route of the Culver Line. Part of it is labeled "South Brooklyn Line" because that line had taken over the Culver in 1912.

{Source: http://www.nycsubway.org/maps/historical.html; click image to view full size}

For a pleasant outing on a summer's day, you could board a Culver Line train at Park Row in Manhattan, cross the Brooklyn Bridge to Atlantic Ave and proceed onward to the west end of Coney Island. The Atlantic Ave. station is not marked on this map; it's a little below the Fulton St. crossing. Here's the Culver Line (Original Route). Here's a link to a pdf of a map made in 1912. In it you can see the Atlantic Ave. station (with black rectangle marking the LIRR terminal). The Culver Line is shown from its northern end at Park Row down to its southern one at Coney Island.

This old postcard shows the Coney Island terminal.

{Source: http://www.coneyisland.com/; click to view full size}

This photo shows a destination -- Dreamland -- in Coney Island about 1904.

{Source: http://www.nycsubway.org/maps/historical.html; click image to view full size}

.

This link takes you to a description of the Culver Line in its early days. Here are some
Culver Line Memories. And from the NYC subway site: BMT Culver Line.

you said it

There's a new book of quotations out. A teaser in the Telegraph (UK) gives a somewhat satisfactory excuse for yet another book in this genre. The author says: "It's all I can do to peruse the side of a packet of breakfast cereal without distraction from radio, television or phone. I have no doubt you are in the same case. You would dearly like to suck intellectual and metaphysical juice from the fruity flesh of the world's best thinkers and writers but the treetops are all out of reach and it would be too much of a fag to go and fetch a ladder. If only someone would pick, pulp and squeeze that fruit for you." The book is Advanced Banter, compiled, it appears from a Telegraph column called Quote Interesting. I've selected from the teaser's selections below. Culling them, I couldn't help feeling that pithy quotes can make you queasy when ingested in any quantity. I generally get the same feeling on reading bunches of literary anecdotes.

As for example, doing some searching on Samuel Beckett's country cottage and Paris apartments I found a page of reminiscences by one of the man's publishers. He explains how he came to meet Beckett for the first time, how they hit it off pretty well, and how they'd generally have a meal together when the publisher's business brought him to Paris. They developed a routine: "We nearly always had dinner alone together and went on to cafes, continuing to talk, but also playing chess, ping-pong and sometimes billiards. Sam was a better player than myself at nearly everything, but occasionally when be had had more to drink than I had, I might win a game." This statement leads to an anecdote that came back to me on reading the extracts from the quote book: "One evening in 1961 when we met, the newspapers were full of Hemingway’s suicide and we never got off the topic. We agreed that suicide was the best way to die, but Sam’s problem was how not to leave a mess for others to clean up, while mine was how to do it quickly and painlessly." This one little insight proved to be enough and I've not read the rest of the brief memoir in which it appears.*

{Image source: http://www.johnminihan.com/news.html, click to view full size}

Here are a few quotes from the book:

Life

There is no generally accepted definition of life.
ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA

Life is a sexually transmitted terminal disease.
LEWIS GRIZZARD (1946-94) The original "grumpy old man" and one of the South's most popular columnists and comedians. His personal life was messy: four wives, a congenital heart defect and a battle with alcoholism. He was once voted "the Author from Hell" by a publishers' conference because of his bad behaviour on tour.

We are born. We eat sweet potatoes. Then we die.
EASTER ISLAND PROVERB

Sex

It's hard for me to get used to these changing times. I can remember when the air was clean and sex was dirty.
GEORGE BURNS

Parents & Children

If you want your children to turn out well, spend twice as much time with them as you think you should and half the amount of money.
ESTHER SELSDON

Before I got married, I had six theories about bringing up children; now I have six children and no theories.
JOHN WILMOT, EARL OF ROCHESTER There are only records of Rochester having five children: Anne, Charles, Elizabeth and Mallet by his wife Anne; and a girl by his mistress Elizabeth Barry. Despite succumbing to pox and alcoholism at 33, he seems to have been a popular and attentive father.

Cats & Dogs

Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function.
GARRISON KEILLOR

Food & Drink

Ever wonder about those people who spend $2 apiece on those little bottles of Evian water? Try spelling Evian backward.
GEORGE CARLIN

Actually, it only takes one drink to get me loaded. Trouble is, I can't remember if it's the 13th or 14th.
GEORGE BURNS

He was a bold man who first swallowed an oyster
KING JAMES I

House & Garden

Anyone who has a library and a garden wants for nothing.
CICERO

To the makying of bookes of gardenyng there is noe ende.
THOMAS HYLL From 'The Profitable Arte of Gardening' in 1563, the first gardening book published in English.

Fashion

I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquillity which religion is powerless to bestow.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Once you can accept the universe as being something expanding into an infinite nothing which is something, wearing stripes with plaid is easy.
ALBERT EINSTEIN

----------------------
*Though I did locate the reference to Beckett's country cottage: "Henri and Josette Hayden had shared Sam Beckett’s wartime experiences, hiding with him and Suzanne, his resistance partner, who only married him in the sixties, and later they were living not very far from him his little house in the ‘Marne mud’, as he liked to put it, near Ussy-sur-Marne where he did most of his writing during the sixties and later."

a doffer

These photos show doffer boys, the first three were taken at the Daniel mill in Lincolnton, N.C. and the fourth at the Globe Mill, Augusta, Ga. They were taken to show the need for child labor laws in the early 20th c. In the photo that shows four boys, the one on the left in knee pants told the investigato that 'he had worked in mills for 7 years and some nights. At nights they work 12 hours, without any hour off for lunch. Eat when they can. Some of the[m] "eat a-workin'."'

My grandfather on my mother's side was one of these boys. He arrived at Ellis Island as a baby, the family having emigrated from Snek in Friesland. They came after his father had gone bankrupt running a store and had so little money that they were forced to pawn jewelry to pay for passage. The father made a start as a landscape gardener in Passaic, NJ, but died during a blizzard when my grandfather was only five. His mother heroically supported him and his six siblings by cleaning houses.

Against the wishes of his three older sisters, my grandfather left school at about age nine to help support the family. He worked first tending cows and then got jobs in the local mills. By the time he got his job as a doffer he would have been about ten or eleven.

A few years later his older brother Harry taught him the carpenter trade. Somewhat in the Horatio Alger tradition, he went on to become a prosperous house builder, borrowing money to buy land and building homes on spec. In 1929, when banks failed, he insisted on paying off his debts. Though he had to revert to carpentry to earn a living, he was still able to support his wife and six children, and saw that his three sons all received college educations. Two of the three daughters got through nursing school. The youngest, my mom, was both proud and regretful that her education ended with a high school diploma. Proud because she had done well in high school and learned much; regretful because she knew she would have done well in college too.

This photo, also from LC, was taken after my grandfather had left the mills. As you can see, it shows strikers leaving a mill in Passaic. The history of child labor legislation in the US is not a proud one. At bottom, I've put some links on the struggles of reformers to achieve lasting protection against this abuse of children.

LC: photo taken between 1910 and 1915

Links:
- The Story of My Cotton Dress
- Photographs of Lewis Hine: Documentation of Child Labor
- Child Labor: A Historical Perspective (2007)
- Child Labor in U.S. History
- Child labor laws in the United States
- National Child Labor Committee
- Timeline of young people's rights in the United States

Update:

Commenter Joe Manning provided a link to his excellent site on child laborers and the photos of Lewis Hine. It's MORNINGS ON MAPLE STREET and it has an about page explaining his work. Last year Charlene Scott did an NPR piece on him and his work. A blog by Todd Wemmer gives a photo of the man and there's another in an article published in the Springfield Republican. Joe says: "For the past two years, I have been conducting a nationally known research project to track down the descendants of the child laborers that Hine photographed. So far, I have been successful for over 100 photos, interviewed the descendants, and answered, many times over, the question: What ever happened to that kid?"

Sarah and Tina, Sarah and the belugas

There's some buzz this morning about Sarah Palin's appearance on Saturday Night Live. She has an attractive TV presence; possesses nerve, poise, and charm; and has learned the politician's trick of self-deprecating humor. The shot on the right (from NYT) shows her with the show's producer watching Tina Fey perform. It's easy to find video clips of the event, as, for example, this one on Youtube.

Less news play is being given to the plight of beluga whales in Alaska's Cook Inlet. The two topics are connected because Palin has joined other Alaska politicians in criticising a decision by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to declare the whales endangered. You can read the NOAA press release for details. Most news accounts lay stress on Palin's opposition to the decision. Examples:

1. NYT: Whale Protection Is Bolstered as Palin Objects, by William Yardley.

The federal government on Friday placed beluga whales that live in Cook Inlet in Alaska on the endangered species list, rejecting efforts by Gov. Sarah Palin and others against increased protection.

The relatively small, whitish whales, sometimes visible from downtown Anchorage, declined by almost 50 percent in the late 1990s, and federal scientists say they have not rebounded despite a series of protections, including a halt to subsistence hunting by Alaska Natives. About 375 whales have been counted in Cook Inlet each of the last two years, according to scientists with the National Marine Fisheries Service.

2. AP: Government declares beluga whale endangered, by Dan Joling.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska—The beluga whales of Alaska's Cook Inlet are endangered and require additional protection to survive, the government declared Friday, contradicting Gov. Sarah Palin who has questioned whether the distinctive white whales are actually declining.

It was the Republican vice presidential candidate's second environmental slap from Washington this year. She has asked federal courts to overturn an Interior Department decision declaring polar bears threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

The government on Friday put a portion of the whales on the endangered list, rejecting Palin's argument that it lacked scientific evidence to do so. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said that a decade-long recovery program had failed to ensure the whales' survival.

3. The online-only paper efluxmedia: Palin Loses Again: Cook Inlet Beluga Whales Listed As Endangered.

As much as NOAA highlighted the importance of protecting the endangered whales, Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is a strong opponent of enlisting them as endangered. Gov. Palin has also opposed the polar bear decision earlier this year, suing the federal government for adopting it, which clearly interfered with her administration’s plans of offshore oil drilling.

Understandably, the Alaska press brings out some of the potential negative impacts from the decision. See, for example, Feds list Cook Inlet belugas as endangered species, By George Bryson And Don Hunter, Anchorage Daily News, or Cook Inlet belugas listed as endangered, by Leyla Santiago and Rebecca Palsha, KTUU TV.

Myself, I think it's inconcievable that an agency of the Bush Administration would declare an animal endangered unless the evidence were overwhelming and unavoidable.

Also, I have a great liking for the animals. During our family vacation last summer I was pleasantly mesmerized by the grace and beauty of the belugas in the giant oceanarium at Chicago's magnificent Shedd Aquarium.

Some images:


Cook Inlet beluga whales joined a long list of endangered species Friday. (KTUU-TV)


Historically, the Cook Inlet beluga population was around 1,300. But the latest reports show their numbers at 375. (KTUU-TV)


One of the few remaining Cook Inlet beluga whales (Photo courtesy NOAA)


Qannik, a 6-year-old beluga whale, swims in a tank at his new home at the Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium in Tacoma, Wash., Monday, June 11, 2007. Beluga whales in Alaska's Cook Inlet are endangered and require additional protection to survive, the government declares, contradicting Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who has questioned whether the striking white whales are declining. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

more on shirt waving

I'm sure I should just let this go. When I started on this topic, my main point was that McCain and Palin failed to confront people who shout out crazy things like "kill him" during campaign rallies. To his credit, in the past week or so McCain has been contradicting these zealots and has endured their jeering for his pains. You may may also have seen news reports about a prompt response when a visitor noticed an outrageous sign in McCain's Pompano Beach, FL, campaign office. The poster, which compared Obama to Karl Marx, Adolf Hitler and Fidel Castro, was immediately taken down and the Republican county chairman told the press he was disgusted that it had been displayed.

Still, excesses of this type persist. It's been said they persist in both camps, but there's little evidence that Democrats have tolerated negative campaigning at this extreme level and certainly haven't openly stoked overheated crowds into what are reported as frenzies of vicious chanting. Yesterday's Washington Post has a pretty well balanced piece on the subject. It's called A Rage No One Should Be Stoking and it says in part that Palin has been telling crowds Obama is "palling around with terrorists" and has been using language that implies he's friends with people out to destroy America. The author tells how at a campaign appearance in Clearwater Florida one of Palin's supporters shouted a racial epithet at a network soundman and told him, "Sit down, boy." And he quotes from interviews at a rally where people told a news reporter* such things as "keep the nigger out of office" and "I'm afraid if he wins, the black [sic] will take over. He's not a Christian. This is a Christian nation! What is our country gonna end up like?"

I mentioned email smear campaigns in my first post on this topic. These too persist, leading Obama, who had been playing them down, to mount a web site devoted to fighting them.

It's sobering to carry out simple Google searches for blog posts, Youtube links, and affinity-group discussions containing the smears. Some of the hits go back a few months, but others, like this one and this one, are current. A columnist for a Birmingham, AL, paper complains about a cousin who, she says, "has been regaling me with smear mails about Senator Obama and his wife." Our household has received only one such smear mail attacking Obama and none attacking McCain or Palin.

Before I leave the topic, here's one more item. It's an oped piece from a right-of-center paper, the Chicago Tribune and it's entitled McCain and civility. The author, Clarence Page, says, in part:

It is a great paradox of American democracy that our president might well be chosen, after all these months, by simple state-by-state majorities of the least-informed voters. It is as if a large number of Americans suddenly woke up one morning to a shocking discovery: A guy who did not share their politics or physical appearance or European name might be elected president. Leading the charge as McCain's attack puppy, Palin has answered McCain's question, "Who is Barack Obama?" as though Obama were a subversive and threatening force. "This is not a man," Palin said of Obama at a Denver fundraiser, "who sees America as you see it and how I see America."

He goes on to say he doesn't believe most Republicans think this way and adds he doesn't believe the loathsome "Abort Sarah Palin" bumper stickers are approved by most Democrats.

He says that the polls showing McCain to trail Obama bring out fear in people and causes them to become uncharacteristically extreme in their speech and actions. And he criticizes Palin for her extremism. Although she "usually has treated reporters as if they were carrying the Ebola virus," he says "Her supporters say they know her well enough after only a month in the national spotlight to be comfortable with her sitting only a heartbeat away from the presidency. She's 'one of us,' they say. That 'Hussein' guy? Who's he?" Here's the close:

McCain, to his everlasting credit, has not turned a blind eye to the politics of raw ignorance and xenophobia. Maybe he's remembering the way gutter tactics were used against him in 2000. That was when a whisper campaign claimed falsely that he had fathered a black baby. The lie led to his losing the South Carolina Republican primary to then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush.

Politics ain't for sissies, but campaigns are a good test of character. It's hard to believe candidates' promises to unify the country after they win if they turn a blind eye to divisions while they're campaigning.

Addendum: The Atlantic has a piece about a Palin photograph that's worth reading: The Politics of the Retouched Headshot. The author says "Humans seem hard-wired to assume that good-looking means good and, conversely, to equate physical flaws with character flaws." It makes me wonder how much Sarah Palin's appearance contributes to her popularity.

----------------
*Note: The Washington Post columnist explains that the reporter was from an Arab newspaper out to find the most negative quotes possible but says the quotes are nonetheless accurate (they were caught on video).

Women, whether proper to be learned

In my daily grind I turned up a book by a prolific author John Dunton. He was an eccentric Londoner of Defoe's time and was fortunate to have been taken on by a capable wife. She ran his publishing business enabling him to spend his days scribbling. In the 1690s he scribbled up a periodical called Athenian Gazette which morphed into the Athenian Mercury both of which were popular magazines, the first of their kind. The Mercury had short news items and answered lots of questions sent in by readers. The book I found, Young Student's Library, gave lists of these questions in index format. Unfortunately, it didn't include the answers, but the questions themselves have interest. Here are a few from among the W's:

- Weapons, which most serviceable, Gun or Bow?
- Weed call'd Cats-tail, why does it come but once in three years?
- Weeping and Laughing, whence proceeds?
- Weeping on the Wedding night, from what it proceeds?
- Welch-light, before Persons die,
- What will make Persons wakeful?
- Whores common ones seldom have Children
- Widows more forward to marry than Maids
- Wife abus'd, how to demean her self?
- Wife doubly married, whose is she?
- Wife whither she may beat her Husband?
- Wife, taking for the Maid
- Wife, that forsakes her Husband
- Wife, whether oblig'd to discover her Husband, who has murther'd?
- Wife, whether she may dispose of her Husbands Goods?
- Wind in our Body, from whence it proceeds?
- Wind, its causes, and whether they go?
- Wind, whence it has its force?
- Wise, or the Fools, which most Happy·
- Witchcrafts, and other Possessions, whither Credited?
- Witches, whither there be any?
- Wits, why generally the greatest Sots?
- Wives, a form of Prayer for 'em
- Woman at Maryland, when she is with Child
- Woman believ'd when she says she will not marry
- Woman cloth'd with the Sun, what the meaning of it?
- Woman impoverish'd, by relieving her Relations
- Woman plagued with an ill Husband
- Woman proper to yield at first to a Man we love
- Woman taken in Adultery
- Woman with Childs longing, the Reason of marking, &c.
- Woman, how soon Marry after the death of a Husband?
- Womans Condition in Marriage, worse than Mans
- Women an Army of 'em, do more then Men
- Women supposed to have no Souls
- Women when bad, why worse than Men?
- Women, if meer Machines?
- Women, whether not Banter'd into a belief of being Angels?
- Women, whether proper to be learned?
- Women, whether they have Souls?
- Women, whether Wiser than Men?
- Women, why commonly fonder and falser than Men?
- Women, why fonder of those Men that slight 'em?
- Womens Voice shriller than Mens
- World hath it any kindness in it, besides Interest?
- World, does it hang upon nothing?
- World, what quarter of the Year it began?
- World, what was it made of?
- Worlds, are there more than one?

Here's the man's wikipedia entry and his very own home page. This is what the Cambridge History of English and American Literature has to say about him.

An engraving on the Dunton home page:


A page from the book, found on wofford.edu's library page:

stoush

I saw the word "stoush" for the first time today. It showed up in an article about plans for Lance Armstrong to return to professional bike racing in Europe. He plans to participate in the Italian national race, the Giro d'Italia, but may sit out the Tour de France. There's been plenty of reaction in the cycling press. The piece in which my word appears discusses Armstrong's relationship with the current Italian champion Filippo Simeoni, one of many in Europe who believe Armstrong used drugs to win his seven TdeF titles though never caught doing it. Here's an extract:

When asked whether there would be any uneasiness riding alongside Armstrong Simeoni replied, "Well, I certainly wouldn't ride with a spirit of revenge; I personally do not feel bitterness, hatred or revenge." At the time of their stoush in France four years ago, long-time Armstrong associate Michele Ferrari was on trial after being accused of sporting fraud and improper exercise of the profession of pharmacy. Simeoni was one of the main witnesses in the case and the emotions of the case spilled out onto proceedings on the road. Initially sentenced to one year of imprisonment, Ferrari was later acquitted in the second degree by the Court of Appeals of Bologna.

Here's a definition:

Stoush
There was a time when “stoush” (meaning “fight”) was a very common piece of Aussie slang.

But does anyone still say "stoush"?
Stoush was both a noun and a verb: to stoush someone was to bash them or fight them, while a fight was called a stoush. It probably had its highest currency in the late 19th early 20th centuries. In typical Aussie fashion the Great War of 1914-18 was called “the big stoush”. The earliest citation is from a report in the Bulletin in 1893. The source of the word remains a mystery, but the English Dialect Dictionary records a somewhat similar word “stashie” meaning “uproar” or “quarrel”. So stoush may have started life as an English dialect word that immigrated, changed, and then lived on here while it died out back in the British Isles.

I thought of my new word in connection with the stoush that McCain and Palin have been laying on (subject of my last two posts). Their street-fight approach to the campaign came back to mind on reading an article about word scientist James W. Pennebaker. He participates in a group blog where the language used by the candidates for president and VP is analyzed and has just done a brief summary of findings so far. As you'd expect, the analysis shows McCain to be more impulsive and aggressive, Obama more reflective and rational. (As an aside, it's worth noting that the blog has an analysis of Sarah Palin's speeches and interviews which suggests she's a liar.)

And I thought of it again on reading Steven Pearlstein's current column. In it, he attacks the financial managers whose actions precipitated the economic meltdown. He complains about their failure to own up to their responsibility for these actions and says there's a way in which they broadcast their guilt to the world: "Court reporters will tell you they can always tell the innocent from the guilty on these kinds of perp walks, and the Wall Street crowd yesterday looked particularly guilty, unable even to conjure up a soothing word to a nation fretting over its shrunken 401(k)s, or a simple thank you to taxpayers for having saved their bacon. Their silence and invisibility throughout this crisis attests to the moral and political bankruptcy of a financial elite that is the perfect match for the financial bankruptcy they have now visited upon their investors, their creditors and their customers."

It's Pearlstein who's making a stoush in this case but that's not his word for the day. The piece closes with this: "There's a word that captures the instinct to take bold moves in the midst of a national crisis -- it's called leadership. We've seen quite a bit of it these past few weeks from public officials like Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner, Sheila Bair, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, John Boehner -- even George Bush. Wall Street, by contrast, has served up a nothing sandwich, a lack of leadership that's been stunning."

bloody shirt update

This is a brief update to yesterday's post.

(Source: NYT}

(1) The Sunday Times (UK) has a longish article on McCain's belated effort to tone down his campaign's viciousness: McCain tussles with Palin over whipping up a mob mentality. Here's the lede:

With his electoral prospects fading by the day, Senator John McCain has fallen out with his vice-presidential running mate about the direction of his White House campaign. McCain has become alarmed about the fury unleashed by Sarah Palin, the moose-hunting “pitbull in lipstick”, against Senator Barack Obama. Cries of “terrorist” and “kill him” have accompanied the tirades by the governor of Alaska against the Democratic nominee at Republican rallies. Mark Salter, McCain’s long-serving chief of staff, is understood to have told campaign insiders that he would prefer his boss, a former Vietnam prisoner of war, to suffer an “honourable defeat” rather than conduct a campaign that would be out of character – and likely to lose him the election.

The article suggests that Palin doesn't care about the damage she's doing to McCain since she's positioning herself for the future. It quotes a former McCain campain advisor as saying the attacks do not do anything to persuade undecided voters: "please find me a swing voter, an undecided independent, or a torn female voter that finds an angry mob mentality attractive."

(2) In an opinion piece in the New York Times, Frank Rich rips into Palin not just for outrageous attacks but for failure to distance herself from inflammatory threats made by her supporters (The Terrorist Barack Hussein Obama).

(3) Henry Farrell has updated the blog post I cited on rumors the RNC will be redirecting some of its advertising from the presidential contest to senatorial races: Horserace addendum. He gives some additional evidence why, as he puts it, "the Republican money people are trying to figure out who to chuck out of the lifeboat before it breaches."

(4) Not surprisingly, the polls are showing growing strength for the Democrats in general and Obama in particular. One report of the Washington Post-ABC News poll -- released today -- says "Registered voters, by 59 to 35 percent, now say McCain is more focused on attacking his opponent rather than addressing the issues. That's grown from a 48 to 45 percent split on this question in late August. Voters, by 68 to 26 percent, say Obama is mainly addressing the issues."

waving the bloody shirt

I'm shocked by the degree of viciousness that the McCain campaign is belatedly trying to control. The Washington Post reports a campaign rally in Waukesha, WI, in which "there were shouts of "Nobama" and "Socialist" at the mention of the Democratic presidential nominee. There were boos, middle fingers turned up and thumbs turned down as a media caravan moved through the crowd."

Articles in the current press say people have shouted "off with his head." They have chanted "terrorist" and "kill him." An article in the BBC says a town hall audience recently called Obama "an Arab" and a "traitor" and said they were afraid of him. An article in the Washington Post says twice last week speakers stressed Obama's middle name in referring to him and one called him to a "man of the street." The Washintgon Times says

Mr. McCain reportedly ousted the Buchanan County, Va., chairman of his campaign for a newspaper column in which he said that if Mr. Obama was elected, he would have the White House painted black and would replace the stars on the U.S. flag "with a star and crescent logo."

One reporter writes of McCain supporters "drunk on rage and anger." Outrageous accusations in pro-McCain blogs are being spread by email campaigns, including this one: Barack the Black Hitler. Newspapers are reporting that an audience booed McCain when, in an effort to restrain the vitriol, he said Obama was a decent family man and voters should not be afraid of him. They're also giving heavy coverage to remarks by congressman John Lewis about the dangers of fomenting an "atmosphere of hate" (see for example this piece in the New York Times). Lewis, who McCain had previously praised as one of three people on whom he depends for sage advice, warned that "toxic language can lead to destructive behavior." In Salon, Glenn Greenwald says this is unprecedented nastiness:

TNR’s Michael Crowley: McCain lynch mobs are no different than Bush critics

The mass accusations of “terrorist” and “Arab traitor” against Obama didn’t just get randomly blurted out by a few hard-core, isolated ideologues.  Rather, that is exactly the message being spewed systematically from McCain and Palin themselves (“pallin’ around with terrorists”), their parade of ads, and the coordinated efforts of opinion-leaders on the Right.  Even veteran campaign reporters for whom Balance is a religion have been acknowledging that the McCain/Palin rallies are unique in their mass-crowd vitriol and intense rage.

An article in the Baltimore Sun agrees. It quotes the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at Penn who says the vitriol has been encouraged by inflammatory words from the stage. She says "Red-meat rhetoric elicits emotional responses in those already disposed by ads using words such as 'dangerous' 'dishonorable' and 'risky' to believe that the country would be endangered by election of the opposing candidate." I'm happy to see the McCain campaign is now trying to tone down the rhetoric, although, as Lewis suggested, it may be a little late. Stirring up fury among voters who are already committed to a candidate makes little sense. Raising the irrational fear level of people who are uncommitted would seem to be a good tactic, though amoral. As McCain seems belatedly to have realized a country that is stunned by the onslaught of a recession (one that may yet prove to be a first class global depression) does not need to its fear-level jacked up. It needs reassurance. It needs a way to calm panic, not exacerbate it. His new restraint now seems to indicate a kind of desperation, however. And, among Republicans, the sense of foreboding may be growing, as this blog post suggests: A bit of horserace commentary (the lede: "So I hear (via a prominent member of the sane Republican faction) that the word on the right side of the street is that the Republican National Committee is about to pull the plug on its joint ads with the McCain campaign, and devote its resources instead to trying to save a couple of the senators who are at serious risk of losing their seats.") For the good of the country, we all have to hope that the polarization of the electorate can be mended whatever the outcome of the election.

Margaret Atwood and me

Margaret Atwood was born a few years earlier than me and somewhat northward. She's also of the other sex and is one of the best writers in the world. These differences between the two of us suggest we have little in common. All the same some of her memories tally fairly closely with mine. They're in excerpts from her new book: Payback in FT: Forgive us our debts. Her topics are things that are on my mind these days: debt and debtors; banks and interest; revenge and forgiveness; and what can happen when you let your reptilian brain control the somewhat more rational one upstairs. But she leads with the reminiscences and they are what resonated sympathetically this bright Sunday morning.

She remembers the allowance she got (a nickel for her, a quarter for me) and how its spending -- in those primitive days -- led to much tooth decay. She remembers the tactics we used for accumulating wealth in comic books, glass marbles, and cards. (She recalls cigarette cards while mine mostly came from bubble gum packs.) She remembers the bank where she deposited money earned on her first paying job -- the fear of the tellers behind their high counters and the mystery of money "earning" more money in interest that showed up in the little savings book with its dark blue cover and light blue pages. About bank interest she asks "How could a fiction generate real objects? I knew from Peter Pan that if you ceased to believe in fairies they would drop dead: if I stopped believing in banks, would they too expire? The adult view was that fairies were unreal and banks were real. But was that true?" I never asked myself that question. But -- although I couldn't slake my addiction to candy or discipline myself to frequent and thorough tooth brushing, my first experience of banking did lead me to understand that you could save and, much later, buy things much more expensive than a ten-cent ice cream cone.

My first real job was a paper route. It was 1956 and I was 14-15. The route was long: out-and-back, about 4 mi. each way. It took me over the biggest hills our village possessed and it passed through none of the new housing "developments" with their closely-set newspaper customers. It must have been one of the least desirable I think now, but then it just was what it was. I was proud to learn the ways of shouldering the loaded bag on my Rudge Whitworth and was mostly conscientious -- in my own shy way -- in making my weekday afternoon round. I plagued my mom to drive me (in snow, ice, or pouring rain) as little as might be.

{A Rudge Whitworth, courtesy flickr}

{The red line shows the route; I left from and returned to our home, just about where the "e" is on Dalmeny Rd. -- upper right; Kemey's Cove (mentioned below) is left of the square by Revolutionary Rd.}

I earned money and remembered who paid up on time and who didn't, who tipped in coins and who in candy bars. I banked much of my take. And I observed.

I knew the mom's, some of the kids, and all of the dogs. And, because it was in the blood of boys my age at the time, I knew every car in every driveway.

Those were the years when performance and efficiency mattered little, style much. Cars were V8 powered, chromed, finned, and huge. I appreciated the cars of that time though never thought to own one. (My first car, bought 3 years later for $50, was a '50 Chev, all black with rusted out floorboards.)

Observing the newer models on my paper route, I noticed the three-tone jobs and in particular the three-tone Desoto. It's now hard to find images of this car. Here's one:

{Desoto three-tone 1955 on allpar.com}

Here is a shot of the much-finned 1956 Fireflite, two-tone:

{1956 Desoto from a geocities page}

(If you care, there's a A Full History of DeSoto.)

Though I didn't really aspire to own a Desoto, I did have plans for my paper route savings. For $110 I bought a kit to make a 10-foot racing pram much like this.
"

{This comes from jimshotwellboats.com; I have a photo of mine somewhere or other which I'll post if ever found*}

Typically, I researched the purchase, carefully made the boat, and then didn't find much use for it. The river wasn't all that close to home and I couldn't drive myself there. I had no local friends with boats. So it sat down on Kemey's Cove while I found other things to do with my adolescent life and later became an embarrassment to my parents while I stored it in our next door neighbor's garage.

You'd think there was a lesson for me in this -- one about spending as wisely as you save, but I think I got all I really wished for in saving for, purchasing, and building the kit into a seaworthy racer.

------------------
* I found it:

photojournalism

The Boston Globe appears to be in a small class of city papers that isn't afraid to face the future. Case in point the excellent photojournalism blog by its website developer Alan Taylor. This comes from a current post:

Here's a direct link: The sapphire mines of Madagascar
The blog itself:

The blog says: "The Big Picture is a photo blog for the Boston Globe/boston.com, compiled semi-regularly by Alan Taylor. Inspired by publications like Life Magazine (of old), National Geographic, and online experiences like MSNBC.com's Picture Stories galleries and Brian Storm's MediaStorm, The Big Picture is intended to highlight high-quality, amazing imagery - with a focus on current events, lesser-known stories and, well, just about anything that comes across the wire that looks really interesting."

Photo by Buster McLeod

The blog's FAQ is here. I think it's significant that the BG hasn't walled off its web developers. I think it's pretty common for papers to treat the web as another piece of equipment (like their presses) and the developers as cerebral mechanics. It might be a better model for the news rooms and the tech rooms to merge, as seems to be the BG model.

There's more here: Interview with Alan Taylor, Creator of Boston Globe's The Big Picture

democracy

Representative government -- so awfully frustrating. It's as Churchill said

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

Citizens complained about the cost of the financial rescue bill, its failure to punish wrongdoers, and the new powers it gave the Treasury Secretary. In consequence the House of Representatives voted it down. The Senate took it up and passed much more expensive package.

Here are some links:

• From the Washington Post: Explainer: How the Senate Rescue Bill Is Different, by Ben Pershing, Oct. 2, 2008
• From Politico: Senate bailout bill keeps growing, by DAVID ROGERS | 10/1/08
• From the Financial Times: Republicans cannot spend their way out of crisis, by Grover Norquist, October 1 2008
• From Steven Pearlstein, who explains some of the complex financial aspects: No Silver Bullets Here, October 2, 2008

Who knows what our Representatives will do now?

• Despite sweetening, measure faces stiff fight in House, Baltimore Sun
• Bail-out bill: Still a bitter pill?, BBC News
• House members being sweet-talked into passing financial rescue bill, WTTE, OH
• Texas House members see opposition to bailout bill weakening, Dallas Morning News

When the bill is taken up in the House there surely will be lots of hold-outs. For some, the legislation is simply unthinkable. During House debate, Jeb Hensarling of Texas said it was "the slippery slope to socialism." Thaddeus McCotter of Michigan said "It was no mistake that, during the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, the slogan was, 'Peace, land, and bread.' Today, you are being asked to choose between bread and freedom." Paul Broun of Georgia said "Madam Speaker, this is a huge cow patty with a piece of marshmallow stuck in the middle of it, and I'm not going to eat that cow patty." And John Boehner, the Republican minority leader himself, referred to the bill as a "crap sandwich."

Read this opinion piece in the Guardian. It's good.

The US democratic-capitalist model is on trial. No schadenfreude, please, This week the demands of American democracy clashed with those of American capitalism. And China's premier smiled, by Timothy Garton Ash, October 2 2008

Excerpts: A quarter-century ago, near the beginning of what came to be known as the Reagan revolution, the American Catholic social theorist Michael Novak published an influential book, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. It argued that capitalism is "compatible only with democracy". "While bastard forms of capitalism do seem able for a time to endure without democracy," wrote Novak, "the natural logic of capitalism leads to democracy." And true capitalism requires moral virtues such as "temperance and prudence, fortitude and justice".

To adapt Churchill, democratic capitalism is the worst possible system, apart from all the others that have been tried from time to time.

The challenge to American democracy today is nothing less than to prove it can reform its whole model of democratic capitalism, and make it better.

Pray that it can.

a book

I saw this blog post and almost let it tempt me to carp about the distortion that ideology can bring to the writing of history. Too often I encounter articles and whole books that are long on imagination and way too short on citations to primary sources, or even citations to good secondary ones. These histories don't usually contain too many PoMo terms with the exception of one that always makes my skin crawl: hermeneutics. It shows up in constructions such as Hermeneutics: "Analytical" and "Dialectical"; Hume, Hermeneutics, and History: A "Sympathetic" Account; Galileo and Spinoza: Heroes, Heretics, and Hermeneutics; and Erasmus and the Hermeneutics of Linguistic Praxis. I know the definition of the word, but I can't see that it's used as much more than BS in the stuff I read.

OK so I did carp a little, but my goal is to celebrate the generosity of some publishers. I've lately been struggling with a stage-setting segment of the thesis I'm drafting and wish to say something about the well-being of certain segments of the population of London in the middle of the seventeenth century. I found reviews of a book that looks like it contains information that would be helpful. It didn't seem so important that I should spend big bucks ordering a copy and then waiting for it to arrive. I couldn't look it over in Google Book Search since it hasn't showed up there yet. Amazon doesn't give snippets in its Search Inside service. I started looking to see what I'd have to pay for a used copy and, on doing an author/title search in Google was very pleasantly surprised to find that that the publisher, U of Calif Press, has made the whole thing available in a very nice format on the eScholarship site.

So ... I'm happily perusing the book, copying bits into my note-taking wiki (wikidpad), and making tactical decisions on how to make use of them in the draft.

financial pundits of the FT

I've got myself a free subscription to the Financial Times courtesy my UK student status. FT is considered to be right-of-center so its comments on the US election might be thought to slant toward the Republican candidate. But as with conservative columnist George Will this does not seem to be the case.

Before last night's debate the FT leader writer assessed the candidates on the financial crisis and gave Obama the edge: "Ordinary economic competence, which Mr McCain particularly appears to lack, may be less important than grace under pressure. Readiness to take charge and ability to inspire some confidence will be the real test. In this, Mr Obama has done better than his rival. Mr McCain’s instinct for decisive action has led him astray: his initial interventions were ill-judged and poorly received. Mr Obama’s tendency to intellectual detachment has been much criticised hitherto, including by many Democrats, but has now come into its own. Whereas Mr McCain has seemed rattled, Mr Obama has seemed calm and methodical. The Democrat’s impeccable taste in advisers – men such as Paul Volcker, whom voters are inclined to trust in an economic emergency – has also served him well."

This morning two FT columnists tip the same way.

Gideon Rachman says McCain showed his age while rambling about the economy but seemed more on top of things when the subject turned to "stuff he actually cares and knows about." He says Obama wasn't much better on the crisis but did have four succinct points to make at the beginning; contrast McCain who "gave the impression that he thought that the source of the problem is excessive spending in Congress."

Clive Crook liked Obama's performance much better than McCain's: "After the last couple of days, McCain badly needed to win Friday’s debate. My immediate feeling was that he didn’t even manage a draw. Obama was on fine form. He did not meander. His responses were calm and focused. He never looked rattled. He seemed comfortable with the issues and unthreatened by his opponent — sufficiently unthreatened to be generous to McCain now and then, an effective Clintonian (Bill) touch. McCain was prickly, rarely looking in Obama’s direction, repeatedly accusing him of failing to understand the issues — a difficult charge to make stick with Obama looking so assured. McCain’s aggression seemed to me at times to betray a lack of confidence. He had his moments; still, I thought it was a comfortable win on points for Obama."

I read the news today oh boy

Pearlstein says some things that have been on my mind lately. His column today -- Gut Check -- says:

1. It's not a good time for vindictiveness, for revenge, for playing the blame game. He says: "You can try to prevent a financial meltdown or you can teach Wall Street a lesson, but you can't do both at the same time."

2. The US is really close to a massive cascade of bank failures. He says: "All it would take is one more hit to trigger the modern-day equivalent of a nationwide bank run. Financial institutions would fail, part of your savings would be wiped out, jobs would be lost and a lot of economic activity would grind to a halt. Such a debacle would cost us a lot more than $700 billion."

3. The bailout involves sales as well as purchases. He says: "The latest proposal hammered out between the Treasury and Democratic leaders won't cost anywhere near $700 billion unless we get a 1930s-like Depression, in which case we'll have much bigger problems to worry about."

4. Legislators should not pretend they are members of the executive branch. Nor should they use legislative oversight and the power of legislation to hamstring executive branch specialists. He says: "It is important to give the Treasury secretary and the people he hires a good deal of flexibility in designing and experimenting with the mechanics of this rescue."

The head of Bank of America gives weight to point 2. He says banks are hoarding cash, refusing to extend credit, and credit is what makes the economy run. His bank is sound and will benefit from the failure of weak banks (by buying up assets cheaply). Nonetheless he doesn't want banks to fail. There's a serious risk that the current economic pessimism will escalate into panic. He says: "Right now, the flow of funds that makes our economy run is threatened by a lack of confidence in the value of financial assets, particularly mortgage assets. Financial institutions are extremely hesitant to purchase assets or lend money to one another to fund the system. Just as optimism in times of growth encourages an upward trend, pessimism in uncertain times can feed a downward trend. Allowing such a trend to gain strength is our great risk." (Main Street Needs the Treasury Plan)

A Wall Street Journal blog says the political posturing of Southern Republicans in congress -- a populist melange of vindictiveness combined with grasping for a share in the payout -- is being quietly supported by McCain: "McCain didn’t create the House rebellion, but at least temporarily, we are seeing an interesting partnership between House Republicans and John McCain. When I asked one GOP Hill staffer whether McCain was serving as a proxy for House Republicans, I was told that such a claim would be too strong but that McCain is, at the very least, trying to give voice to House Republicans skeptical of the bailout. And if that’s true, McCain will have an opportunity to bring them along–or some of them–to get a deal.” (Political Wisdom: A Wild Day Spawns Questions About McCain)

whom do you trust?

I've been interested in the expansion of commerce in 17th-century England; particularly interested in the importance of credit, and, with regard to credit, particularly interested in the importance of trust. Partly for that reason I recently read Jane Jacobs's Systems of Survival which sets out to explain a pair of competing moral systems: the guardian syndrome and the commerce syndrome. She derives these syndromes from the behaviors two occupational groups: the one evolved from aristocratic moral structures and the other from the moral structures of businessmen. It's a good read. The guardians are those who govern, who run the bureaucracy, and who dispense justice. They trust only their own kind and strictly by the rules of honor (which give plenty of latitude for deception). In contrast, commercial people treasure honesty, not for its own sake but because trading requires trust.

Jacobs isn't saying these moral codes are observed by everyone all the time, but that each group has ways to enforce its own precepts. They both try to minimize deviation from their own specific norms. She also isn't saying that these two competing syndromes comprise all the rules that people strive to follow in their attempts to lead good lives. These are simply the ones that separate the one group from the other. I've put a table showing the two lists at bottom.

Jacobs points out that guardian group must step in when the morals of the commerce group break down. That is to say governments regulate commerce for the good of citizens. Though there are ideologies that regret this intervention, almost everyone regards it as necessary. She also says governments can't actually perform the functions of the commercial group -- government run business operations rarely succeed. (She says they never do). That's because the moral structures are inimicable. It's an interesting way of looking at things; basically an update on a position that Plato has Socrates take. There's a quick summary in this pdf document.

So now we're seeing government debate what to do to correct the mess created by the big New York banks (and others). You can look at the arguments from a Systems-of-Survival point of view.

But I'm more interested in one aspect: the betrayal of trust. Steven Pearlstein writes about the subject today. In an article called The Words Left Unspoken in the Bailout Debate he says:

Political systems, communities, markets all share one common characteristic -- at their core, they all require a level of trust among the participants if they are going to work. In recent years, we have allowed that trust to erode to the point that our political system is paralyzed by partisan bickering and communities are fractured into enclaves of race and class. Now markets are collapsing because investors realize they have been misled by corporate executives, investment banks, ratings agencies and regulators. As a country, there is an urgent need to rebuild that trust. In different ways, that is what both the McCain and Obama campaigns are all about. And it is the same challenge that now faces us in this financial crisis.

Where Pearlstein writes about the trust we should be able to place in large financial institutions, an academic blogger writes, indirectly, about the trust we should be able to place in our military. In a post called Counterinsurgency Comes Home, he writes about an Iraq-seasoned infantry brigade being deployed to "help the people at home" through sophisticated military action to counter civil unrest. The blogger has first-hand knowledge since he's currently serving in the Army in Kuwait. (He writes for Cliopatria, a group blog, and is a historian in graduate school at UCLA.) If you read the whole article from which he quotes, the unit sound more helpful than threatening (Brigade homeland tours start Oct. 1). But, in light of the misplaced trust that has produced so many horrors in recent years, including the current financial crisis, you have to wonder. Why do we need Army specialists to do the job the National Guard is tasked to perform? There used to be fears of large standing armies which might subvert the rights of citizens. As James Madison put it in Anti-Federalist Papers No. 10 of 24 January 1788,

The liberties of a people are in danger from a large standing army, not only because the rulers may employ them for the purposes of supporting themselves in any usurpations of power, which they may see proper to exercise, but there is great hazard, that an army will subvert the forms of the government, under whose authority, they are raised, and establish one, according to the pleasure of their leader.

We no longer have quite that fear, but with the drastic undermining of civil liberties in the current war on terror and the embracing of torture as a judicial tool, and all else that increases the power of the state to coerce its citizens, there is very good reason to withhold trust when the Army says its deploying a seasoned combat-ready force on our own territory for our own good.

Here are Jacobs's two syndromes:

Guardian Syndrome's Moral Precepts	Commerce Syndrome's Moral Precepts
Shun trading Exert prowess Be obedient and disciplined Adhere to tradition Respect hierarchy Be loyal Take vengeance Deceive for the sake of the task Make rich use of leisure Be ostentatious Dispense largesse Be exclusive Show fortitude Be fatalistic Treasure honor	Shun force Compete Be efficient Be open to inventiveness and novelty Use initiative and enterprise Come to voluntary agreements Respect contracts Dissent for the sake of the task Be industrious Be thrifty Invest for productive purposes Collaborate easily with strangers and aliens Promote comfort and convenience Be optimistic Be honest

who are we that this happened to us?

Who's to blame for the financial crisis that the US Treasury is now trying to mitigate? Its seriousness is obvious enough. How else explain the restraint our politicians are struggling to achieve? How even comprehend the quantities of money involved -- a trillion dollars or more in Federal payments and guarantees?

Press coverage is, understandably, vast. I note only three: two by a Washington Post business columnist and one by a hedge fund operator. Reading them I wonder what's happened to us? What's happened to US citizens, we who once prided ourselves on thrift and now are overwhelmed with mortgage and credit card debt? What happened between the Depression generation of tightwads and those intervening generations of more and more laid back consumers?

The press writes as if Americans who spend the earnings tomorrow may never bring are simply victims. What does that say about our collective intelligence and integrity, our collective power as voters in this democracy? Many of us seem to have caved in, given up, stopped t_h_i_n_k_i_n_g.

I also wonder about the rest of the world, so intertwined with the US economy that they suffer with us, some even more than us. And the rest of the world, too, who sustain our outrageous debt -- our government, household, and and corporate debt that cannot be funded without this foreign support. Have they become so dependent on the US as the world engine of prosperity that they cannot do otherwise?

I wonder but am unable to predict what will happen.

After my comments on the three commentators, I've put some info on Charles MacKay's old and interesting book.

In the first article, commentator Steven Pearlstein says that "when you strip away all the complexity and trappings from the magnificent new global infrastructure, finance is still a confidence game." But he says the bankers wouldn't have been able to work their con if the US economy hadn't been artificially buoyed up by low interest rates over the last decade. And he says Greenspan and the Fed were able to keep interest rates so low because foreigners remained willing to buy American debt instruments, American securities, American real estate and other assets of all sorts. Low interest rates provided Americans with cheap money. Households borrowed heavily "to buy houses, cars and college educations, along with more health care, extra vacations and all manner of consumer goods and governments used the cheap money to pay for services and benefits that citizens were not willing to pay for with higher taxes." When this credit bubble began to frighten foreign investors, the big New York banks found a way to keep these investors happy by inventing new credit instruments and working their con to keep the bubble growing. That meant that the inevitable bursting was a much more serious event than almost any previous meltdown (it's being compared to the 1929 crash of course).

Pearlstein says that the financial restructuring that we're now seeing should "force some financial discipline on the majority of U.S. households that relied on borrowed money to maintain their lifestyles," but he says it probably won't.

In the second article Pearlstein says the scale of the event is mind boggling but not so great that it can't be controlled. This week should show us life being lived normally in most US households and most companies outside Wall Street. The securities markets should return to normal. The main effect will prove to be a new way of looking at free market ideology: "There is little doubt we are witnessing a once-in-a-generation sea change. It will no longer be an easy applause line for a politician to declare that government is the problem and that markets always know better than regulators and politicians. Debates about the competitiveness of U.S. financial markets will focus less on how little regulated they are and more on how much protection and transparency they offer to investors. It will be harder to deny essential government agencies the talent, money and respect they need to do the job right."

He closes by addressing the confidence of foreign investors in the US economy: "No doubt there will be those who see in this crisis further proof of the inevitable decline of the United States as a world economic power. In fact, it may be just the opposite. The wild swings over the past week in financial markets from Moscow to Mumbai, were only the most recent reminder of the increasingly global nature of capital flows and the risks of financial contagion. They also were a reminder that, in times of stress, global investors still seek refuge in the safety of the U.S. dollar, U.S. Treasuries and the skillful crisis management of U.S. policy makers."

The opinion piece by the hedge fund operator is Calling Out the Culprits Who Caused the Crisis, by Eric D. Hovde. He's an interesting character. A financier who's wealthy enough to own both an investment bank and commercial banks, and also runs a hedge fund, he's not a sleazy character, but rather one who strongly supports charitable activity here and abroad. It's also obvious from this article that he's one who is blunt in his criticisms of his own industry.

Like Pearlstein he says the historically low interest rates put in place by the Greenspan Fed created a toxic environment for the US economy. The New York bankers who took advantage of this environment simple threw away all the internal checks that traditionally kept the banking business sound. He say the price of all this greed is an estimated $1 trillion and more in losses. While giving Greenspan much of the blame, he also says "One has to wonder why Treasury secretaries under Presidents Clinton and Bush -- Robert Rubin and Hank Paulson, respectively -- took no action to curb these abuses."

He says we might have gotten some help from congressional oversight if the financial industry hadn't corrupted congress: "The Wall Street investment banking firms, their executives, their families and their political action committees contribute more to U.S. Senate and House campaigns than any other industry in America. By sprinkling some of its massive gains into the pockets of our elected officials, Wall Street bought itself protection from any tough government enforcement."

He leaves us with no prognosis but only a wish: "there has not been a time since the 1920s when Wall Street has enjoyed as much influence over Washington as it has for the last 12 years. Let's hope that this influence fades rapidly -- and that this financial crisis doesn't end the same way as the one of nearly 80 years ago."

Here's the old and ever-popular book I mentioned at top. MacKay was one of the first to notice how easily people get carried away and how dreadful the results can be.

Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

Prefaces

1. Money Mania.—The Mississippi Scheme

2. The South Sea Bubble

3. The Tulipomania

4. The Alchymists (file a.) 4. (cont.) The Alchymists (file b.)

5. Modern Prophecies

6. Fortune-Telling

7. The Magnetisers

8. Influence of Politics and Religion on the Hair and Beard

9. The Crusades (file a.) 9. (cont.) The Crusades (file b.)

10. The Witch Mania

11. The Slow Poisoners

12. Haunted Houses

13. Popular Follies of Great Cities

14. Popular Admiration of Great Thieves

15. Duels and Ordeals

16. Relics

Footnotes

About the Book and Author

Illustrations

what a way to earn a living

PezCycling News has some good photos of the climax of yesterday's demanding stage in the Vuelta, Spain's version of the Tour de France.

The race narrative on the Pez site gives an indication of just how demanding is the climb to the finish: "Billed as the hardest day on the hardest climb of this year's La Vuelta a España, in fact it’s been billed as the hardest climb anywhere in any stage race." Its winding track of a road is steep, of course. The weather is commonly abominable, thought yesterday it was only cold, not cold, wet, and windy. And the altitude is way up there. The summit is 1,570 metres (5,200 ft) above sea level, from bottom to top, racers had to ascend 1,248 m (4,090 ft), and near the summit the slope is over 20%.

Today, a Pez article by Ed Hood gives some nice photos, including these. Note the helicopter in the background of the first one. The second one shows the race leader coming through on his own.

Angliru seen from Monsacro peak. Click to view full size. Photographer: Alfonso Fernandez - 2003.

those who meddle in the making of marriages

Lately I've been reading -- or at least skimming -- lots of math texts from the 17th-century and occasionally something interesting catches my eye. The books and the culture of technical education in which they nest were both monotonously masculine. There were advocates for teaching math to women but the objective of authors and students alike was mostly the preparation of young men for jobs in merchants' offices and trademen's shops.

This morning I was looking at one of the most popular of all these books, William Mather's Young Man's Companion, a comprehensive work of instruction and reference that went through 24 editions between 1681 and 1775. What caught my eye was a reference to a pamphlet he wrote about the invidious meddling of women in the affairs of men. It's called A Novelty: Or, A Government Of Women Distinct From Men, Erected Amoungst Some Of The People, Call'd Quakers. Published in 1694, it complains about the power held by Quaker women in Bedfordshire at the time.

{The image shows a Quaker woman preaching ca. 1675.}

The worst offense, in Mather's view, was that these women would interview young couples who wished to marry. In the words of one who defended the practice, the women would "enquire and see that things be clear on all parts on so weighty a concern as marriage." Susan Dinan explains the purpose of these interviews in a recent monograph.

Mather devotes a couple dozen pages to his reasons why it was improper for a woman to "meddle in the making of marriages unless of her own children and servants." Likening the meeting to an official court of inquiry, he says "the greatest wonder of all is, that such a government should be practised amonst a people that profess that every individual man and woman should have no other guide besides Christ's inward and spiritual grace," and he says he is proud to have earned the rebuke of George Fox himself: "But if you now say to me, as G.F. [i.e., George Fox] said to me ... in a discourse with him, till near mid-night, about the said arbitrary government, 'you do not deserve to have wives,' (saith he) 'you speak too much against women.' to say the truth, this was the best argument he could give us, for his unscriptual female government."

Mather had become a Quaker nearly 35 years before writing this and was to return to the Church of England the next year. George Fox was of course the founder of the Religious Society of Friends. As bold as he was peaceful, his writings make for very interesting reading. Answering Mather and other critics, he strongly defended the right of women to participate in decision-making via Monthly and Quarterly Meetings and to interview couples who wished to marry.

{The image shows Fox in an engraving taken from a contemporary painting.}

Here is the text of a letter -- which Mather quotes -- which summarizes the immediate object of his displeasure:

Friends in Bedford-shire,

Here came Stephen Scarborrow, to acquaint Friends of his Intention of Marriage with Marry Samm, Daughter of Nathaniel Stamm of Litlington, in Bedford-shire; as also he did to our Quarterly Meeting about a Month ago, and Friends did tenderly advise him to acquaint our Women Friends therewith, who attend Meetings to serve Truth in their Day Age, and Generation, and to enquire and see that things be clear on all parts on so weighty a Concern as Marriage; but he refusing to follow Friend's Advice herein, I know not what the Women-Friends may have to say in this Matter: Now I being one that have had some Exercise and Concern in these our Meetings, I do testifie, That that Spirit that doth oppose the good Order in publishing Marriage in Men and Women's Meetings, is not of God, and am sorry for the Young Man, and desire he may live to see his Weakness, and amend; so with Love to all Friends of Truth, rest a Friend to the same Truth. -- Tobias Hardmeat.

Here is the title page of the pamphlet:


Here is the catalog entry for it:

Mather, W., fl. 1695.

A novelty: or, a government of vvomen distinct from men, erected amoungst some of the people, call'd Quakers. Detected in an epistle, occasionally written to a man-judge, upon a young man's refusing (for good conscience sake) to submit to their authority in marriage, seeing that relations and friends were already satisfied. To which is added, a lamentation for the fall of so many of that people. Published for no other end, but to deter all honest hearts of the said people, from erecting the like unscriptural government. Tho' this may not so far prevail with such women as has a secret command of their husbands purses; together with those preachers that reap profit by such a female government, as to consent to the disanulling the same. Written by William Mather, a dear lover of the said people, who has for several years been much troubled, that some of them should fall from there primitive institution, as to set up women's and men's meetings, as guides in government, ... . , London : printed for Sarah Howkins, in George-yard, Lumbard-street, [1694?]
Date: 1694
Bib name / number: Wing (2nd ed.) / M1284C
Bib name / number: Smith, J. Catalogue of Friends' Books / II, p. 162
No. pages: 23, [1] p.
Copy from: Friends' Library, London, England

unjustice

Today, Sept 12, the Washington Post gives new evidence of perjury used to convict and then execute Ethel Rosenberg some 55 years ago. I was 11 when she was put to death. She was my Mom's age. She and her husband Julius had two sons one of whom later became a college classmate of mine. Her electrocution was ugly, an ugly event at a time when immorally ambitious men put themselves at the head of a mob of frightened citizens not caring what damage they would do to the Constitution and the ideals on which the United States was founded. Our home was only a few miles from Sing Sing Prison. At the time they pulled the switch to kill Ethel Rosenberg we said we could see the lights dim. That is not a literal fact, but -- more powerfully I think -- a metaphorical one.

Here is the citation for the WaPo article:
Witness Changed Her Story During Rosenberg Spy Case
By Holly Watt
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 12, 2008; Page A04


Link to the Wikipedia article on the Rosenbergs: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg



Ethel Rosenberg's mug shot.

Image source: Wikimedia

Web page on a film about the family.
HEIR TO AN EXECUTION: The Rosenbergs’ Granddaughter Makes a Film about Their Legacy

The son my age, Michael, is on the left.

Emanuel “Manny” Block, the Rosenbergs’ attorney, with Michael & Robbie at Sing Sing. After the Rosenbergs were executed, the boys were adopted by Abel & Anne Meeropol. (Associated Press – 1953)

Picasso, untitled lithograph of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, 1952; souce: www.graphicwitness.org.

The following photos come from http://mujeresriot.webcindario.com/Ethel_Rosenberg.htm

This is Ruth Greenglass, Ethel Rosenberg's sister in law.


Ethel Rosenberg in 1950






Funeral cortege in Brooklin

the transformational power of abundance

This is a brief follow-up to yesterday's post.

The betrayal of public trust which is a main topic of that post seems ordinarily to lead to re-establishment of public trust via government regulation. This happened in the case of the South Sea Bubble, the Crash of '29, and the abuses of which G.B.S. wrote. It's happening as government agencies work to mitigate the damage of the sub-prime loans crisis and it's happening in an outfall of that crisis: the near collapse of the two largest US mortgage organizations, Freddie and Fannie.

Steven Paulson, author of the piece on pin-stripe immorality I wrote about yesterday, has today a good summary of the F&F takeover. Notice that he makes connection to the New Deal policies of FDR. (There's an indirect connection here with the founding of the Greenbelt community in Maryland, part of the context of yesterday's post.) Notice also that he tells us market regulation is not only necessary to correct problems created by the workings of the market, but also that regulation is needed to prevent future crises of a like nature.

In Crisis, Paulson's Stunning Use of Federal Power
By Steven Pearlstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 8, 2008; Page A01

Extracts:

Fannie and then Freddie began promising Wall Street double-digit earnings growth, which required them to grow their balance sheets well beyond what was necessary to assure liquidity in the mortgage market. Instead of just buying mortgages, insuring them and selling them in packages to investors, they bought more of them for their own portfolios, using ever-increasing amounts of borrowed money. Buying their own securities was profitable, but it left them highly exposed if anything went really wrong with the housing market, which is exactly what has happened.

Not since the early days of the Roosevelt administration, at the depth of the Great Depression, has the government taken such a direct role in the workings of the financial system.

Paulson only implicitly notices something that's the subject of another post that caught my attention this morning: people do not generally respond well when some resource that has been scarce suddenly becomes abundant. In the case of the South Sea Bubble, the industrial expansion of he late 19th-century, the stock market expansion that ended in 1929, and other economic excesses, governments stepped in to correct abuses and restore order.

In the following blog post Chris Anderson writes about other sorts of over-abundance and their consequences:

The Long Tail; Clay Shirky on the weird things that happen when things suddenly become abundant.

Extracts:

It takes a generation or two to figure out how to properly use some resource that used to be scarce but is now abundant. [For example the resource of] time, which we got more of in the prosperous decades after the Second World War. For the first few generations, we chose to fill that time with television. Only now are we learning to fill it more productively, and to greater satisfaction. To use Clay's term, it took fifty years for us to learn how to tap the cognitive surplus that came after the five-day work week.

[Chris quotes Clay: Another example is the 18th-century rush of agricultural populations to cities. In that case] "the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin. The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing—there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

"And it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders—a lot of things we like—didn't happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset."

[Chris says:] This is the same phenomena that I described earlier, using a computer science analogy rather than an economic one, as the "awesome power of spare cycles."

A commenter adds: "Now consider this from the perspective of the developing world and especially China/India. What happens when the majority of the population shifts from spending 24 hours a day just surviving to having spare cycles to do something else?"

I find this very perceptive. We're seeing the consequences of that abundance with increasing frequency: huge increases in energy consumption, corresponding huge increases in pressure on the environment, acceleration of global warming, an agricultural crisis partly spawned by changes in the daily diet of Asians,.... And probably also an eventual shift in cultural dominance accompanying the shift in economic and political dominance from West to East.