The Bell

 

           In 1871, 51-year-old former US Rep. Clement L. Vallandigham (D-OH) was in Lebanon, Ohio, to defend in a murder case.

           Vallandigham’s case depended on persuading the jury the victim might have killed himself. Rehearsing his argument in his hotel room, he pulled his pistol to show how that might have happened.

           The gun fired; the bullet entered his abdomen; he died the next day.  Had it existed, Vallandigham’s death would have qualified for a Darwin Award.

           Large segments of his fellow citizens in the North wouldn’t have mourned his passing.  In the light of his actions during the Civil War, they’d have seen it as deserved, suitably tainting to his memory, too long in coming.

           Reconciliation following the Civil War took a long time.  Like that in several marriages I know of, it was more formal than heartfelt.  What we are seeing in capitals throughout the country is the disintegration of that reconciliation as old battles over the scope of government are renewed, like old infidelities revived.

In his Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865, Abraham Lincoln described the national condition when he took office:

Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained.  Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding.

 Those words make me shudder.  For we seem to be in the same posture as in 1860.

           How the next reconciliation will occur is anybody’s guess.

 ***

           Vallandigham, Rick Beard points out in an essay on the New York Times superb Civil War blog, ‘Disunion’, was the leading Peace Democrat.  Called ‘Copperheads’ by their opponents, Peace Democrats are remembered, if at all, for wanting reunion with the South at any price.  That understates the complexity of their position. Says Beard:

 On Jan. 14, 1863, Vallandigham, now a lame duck, used his final speech in the House of Representatives to catalog Copperhead grievances. “It was the persistent and determined agitation in the free States of the question of abolishing slavery,” he argued, “that forced a collision of arms.” Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation meant that “war for the Negro” had “openly begun” in a nation where the violations of civil liberties had created “one of the worst despotisms on earth.” The war had brought nothing but “defeat, debt, taxation” and “sepulchres.”

 …Vallandigham discerned a plot by Eastern financial interests to prolong the conflict. “Let not Wall Street,” he exclaimed, “imagine that it shall have power enough or wealth enough to stand in the way of reunion through peace.” Vallandigham went so far as to raise the specter of a potential split within the Union. “If you of the East, who have found this war against the South, and for the negro, gratifying to your hate, or profitable to your purse, will continue it,” be prepared for “eternal divorce between the West and the East.”

 Vallandigham closed with a second warning. If peace and the work of reunion did not begin immediately, “I see nothing before us but universal political and social revolution, anarchy, and bloodshed, compared with which, the Reign of Terror in France was a merciful visitation.”

           In Vallandigham, one hears the Jacksonians who preceded him and the southern populists and Tea Partiers who followed him.  His cause may have been new, but his social and economic grievances were at least as old as the country.

***

           Vallandigham had declared in his 1862 campaign he stood for: ‘The Constitution as it is, the Union as it was.’ 

           Ponder the power in those phrases.  The broad themes in ‘Lincoln’, Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner gor right.  The Constitution had to be changed; the Union must never be as it was.  And, Lincoln knew he had only a moment in which to change both.

 ***

           The American Civil War was not simply between North and South, Blue and Gray, Abolitionists and Slavers.  ‘Lincoln’ accurately shows Northerners who backed the Union had different, sometimes differing, objectives in victory, as I discussed the other day.

           Many, if not most, Northerners who supported the Union in this war of Southern aggression, were indifferent to slavery, as was Stephen Douglas, Lincoln’s Democratic opponent for Illinois’s US Senate seat in 1858 and for President in 1860.  He wholeheartedly supported the man who defeated him for President in the months before his death in June 1861.

          Like the Revolution, the War of Rebellion saw ferocious wars at home.  ‘Neighbor vs. Neighbor’ a recent ‘Disunion’ post headlined T.R.C. Hutton’s essay on Kentucky’s own civil war – a war without heroes but with many victims.

           Abijah Gilbert, a former Kentucky state senator, a prosperous slaveholding farmer and a small entrepreneur, lost everything as a consequence both of supporting the Union and at its forces’ hands for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

           Gilbert’s story wasn’t unique.

 ***

           ‘Copperheads’ – their enemies’ term for Peace Democrats – are the only vipers found commonly in the warmer parts of the Union.  They are most associated with the southern thirds of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois – the parts served by the northern tributaries of the Ohio River.

          Like the Democrats on the Ohio’s southern tributaries, they were Scots-Irish or northern English in ancestry and fierce Jacksonians in politics.

           For what that meant in practise, take a look at ‘Today Foreshadowed:  The Confederate VP on Federal Spending’.  There, you’ll encounter Alexander H. Stevens, a ‘Fire Eater’, a third type of pre-Civil War Democrat who advocated the advancement of slavery.

 ***

           Acting under martial law, Lincoln pressed and imprisoned Copperheads.  In 1863, Vallandigham became the first and only American citizen to be exiled.

           The same year, Edward Everett Hale, published ‘The Man Without a Country’ whose Vallandigham-like protagonist showed more regret at his treason and exile than Vallandigham ever did.  It was required reading for as long as the Civil War remained vivid.

           Union soldiers and Peace Democrats found many occasions to fight each other.  Unionist civilians harassed their Copperhead neighbors and burnt down their newspapers.

           One of those newspapers, in northwestern Ohio, belonged to my father’s grandfather, George Kinder.

 ***

           My father’s other grandfather, Thomas Duncan, was an enlisted man in a Pennsylvania regiment.  He was twice captured and paroled.  Paroled POWs gave their word they would not fight again against their captors.

           My great grandfather had the good fortune to be captured the second time in 1863 shortly before Gettysburg.  When paroled, this time from Libby Prison in Richmond he’d lost all his teeth due to malnutrition.  He observed the terms of his second parole.

           He had opposed Emancipation, a view never hidden within the family.

 ***

          After the War’s end, both great grandfathers became successful, respected figures in small towns 250 miles apart on opposite borders of Ohio.  Both remained ardent Democrats in counties that are today as they were in the post-Civil War era predominantly Republican.  Both lived long, fruitful lives.

           The Copperhead published a newspaper south of Toldeo and, late in life, served several terms as county treasurer.  A Democrat regularly re-elected by Republicans.  The Union veteran became a lawyer across the Ohio from Wheeling, West Virginia.  He was revered for his devotion to reaching amicable settlements.

           For eleven years, until Duncan’s death in 1911, they were brothers-in-law.  I’ve seen no pictures of my grandparents’ wedding where they might have met.  In my hearing, my grandfather who died in 1970 – blessed to the end with a superb mind and a raconteur’s memory – never mentioned contact between the two men.

           Is there anything in the lives of these brothers-in-law that illuminates the great reconciliation in the post-War years?  It’s too late to find out.  I knew all the facts long before my Grandfather died.  But the question never crossed my mind.

 ***

           The marriage between children whose fathers took different routes in the North seems a part of the great post-War reconciliation.  But I discern hints in my recollections of family tales – especially the silences – that relations between my grandfather and his father-in-law were colored by the War.

           Vallandigham, ‘The Man Without a Country’, and my great grandfather made disunion personal for me.

           But Vallandigham had returned to the North well before the War’s end in 1865 and resumed his political – probably treasonous – path.  Lincoln, in a move of genius, left him undisturbed, unprosecuted – an involuntary example of the victor’s magnanimity, if not forgiveness.

           From today’s perspective, the impulses – honorable in their living context – of Douglas and Vallandigham for ‘The Constitution as it is, the Union as it was’ seem tragic efforts to paper over still unresolvable sectional conflicts.

           The approach of next weekend’s unity speeches and wreath-laying reminds me that seven states have already observed Confederate Memorial Day or as it’s known in Texas, Confederate Heroes Day.

          We are a nation reconciled in the most limited sense, if in fact we are at all.

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     I liked Stephen Spielberg’s ‘Lincoln’ when I saw it.  I would like it more in retrospect had I not heard so many promotional paeans to its accuracy.

     I’m working on a blogpost prompted by Rick Beard’s essay on Clement L. Vallandigham, the leading Peace Democrat (‘Copperhead’), in the New York Times superb Civil War blog, ‘Disunion’.

     Beard made me curious about the role Walton Goggins plays in ‘Lincoln’, that of a lame duck Democratic Representative who sells his vote on the 13^th Amendment for the postmastership of Millersburg, Ohio.  Writes Emmanuel Levy in his Cinema 24/7 blog:

 Among those whose vote changes at the last minute is Ohio Congressman Clay Hawkins, portrayed by Walton Goggins, best known for his roles on “The Shield” and “Justified.” Hawkins was a Democrat who didn’t support slavery but felt it might be politically dangerous to vote for the 13th Amendment. Says Goggins of his dilemma: “For some, it was about morality—but my character was also faced with the threat of death if he went along with this vote. He had to take into consideration everything that was going on in the country, maybe the possibility of a peace offering by the Confederates and on top of that his personal safety, and finally doing what, in his heart, felt right.”

     I’ve known some Ohio politicians Spielberg and his writer, Tony Kushner, might have used for Hawkins’s role models.  But not from Millersburg or that part of central Ohio.  Seventy miles east, a hundred miles south, maybe, but not in Amish country.

     And, selling out for a postmastership in the days when they were patronage positions, changing hands when the Presidency did, seemed a stretch.  The character Lincoln says Hawkins was selling out cheap.  Right.

     Hence, I wasn’t surprised today to find Hawkins was made up.

     This Matthew Pinsker points out in a useful post, ‘How the “Lincoln” Movie Invented Its Lobbying Scenes’ on Dickinson University’s terrific Civil War website, House Divided.

 There was a single lame duck Democratic congressman from Ohio who switched his vote in favor of the antislavery amendment in January 1865 but his name was Wells A. Hutchins and he did not receive any post-war patronage appointment in the federal government. Nor was he much recognizable in the character of Clay Hawkins. In real life, Hutchins was a reasonably tough, independent-minded Democrat who had voted to support the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia in 1862 and who had backed the Lincoln Administration on several controversial issues during the war, including the suspension of habeas corpus or civil liberties –an issue that was especially unpopular among Ohio Democrats. Understanding this background helps explain why he was a lame duck in 1865 and why he was a natural target for supporting the amendment. It had nothing to do with hunting, drinking or patronage.

     As I’ll post later, Prof. Pinsker’s accurate summary of the background holds some allusions that deserve expansion.

     Hutchins was born and raised near Warren, Ohio.  As a young lawyer, Hutchins moved nearly 300 miles into Ohio’s deep south to Portsmouth on the Ohio River across from Kentucky.  It was Portsmouth he represented.

     A fascinating profile of Hutchins in a turn of the 20^th century history of Adams County, Ohio, reveals he was one of two democrats in his home county, Scioto, to vote for a state constitutional amendment in 1867 granting negroes the right to vote.  From his return to Portsmouth in 1865 until his death there in 1895, he practised law successfully, apparently as a plaintiff’s lawyer specialising in suits against railroad companies.

     (Caveat: County histories of this type make terrific reading, but their biographies often were influenced by whether the subject or his/her family subscribed for a copy of the finished volume.  Hutchins’s does not seem to fall in that category.)

     Portsmouth and Scioto County supplied the models who came to my mind for Walton Goggins’s role.  That much, Spielberg & Kushner got right.  The implicit slur on the memory of someone more likely for a ‘profile in courage’ diminishes their movie.

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          Nine months and four days after we turned our Vermont home over to our contractor, Gary Daden, we returned to our gutted-and-rehabbed house.

           We’re in, but into a construction zone.  A black and yellow Komatsu front-end loader and a yellow-crowned blue port-a-potty frame my view down the greening valley of Vermont.

           The movers are long gone.  But from 7:00 to 4:00 we’re part of a crowd.  Three different radios soothe builders, electricians, plumbers, painters…. 

***

           Moves become, as one ages, an archaeology of storage units and feelings.

           Unopened boxes and dust-caked furniture emerge into florescent light.  Moves in 1980, 1991, 1998, 2001, 2009, 2010 and 2012 reveal themselves and their contexts.

           From the 1991 breakup of the Ohio house I grew up in is a large, filthy box labeled ‘demitasse’.  I packed it with three dozen or so cups and saucers, all lovely, many hand painted by my great Aunt Bebe.  Not even the junk man would take them.  The box, unopened, remains in storage.

           Two matching almost black late Victorian bookcases, about five feet high with a bottom drawer, attracted Claudia’s attention.  In my grandparents long living room, they’d held a mixture of contemporary books and objets graced by a small vase of cut flowers on the top shelves.  I don’t remember ever opening the drawers.

           In 1967 when my grandparents’ graceful Victorian was to be razed for a strip mall, my mother had taken the bookshelves as I had the demitasse cups.  She referred to them, derisively, as ‘bric-a-brac stands’.  But she put them to use, as was her way.

           I shared her prejudice.  But they went into my storage in 1991.  They brought back the sunny bay they bracketed where my grandparents Christmas tree always stood.

           In Vermont in a contemporary setting, they remain uncompromising, dark, but useful.  And, they held treasure.

           In one drawer Claudia found trivets and tiles my mother had used on tables and windowsills throughout our house.  I knew each.  Almost all had come from 5 cent tables at farm sales or second-hand stores.  Old friends, they were.

           In the other drawer my mother had stuffed assortments of paper cocktail napkins printed with hokey jokes she often didn’t get.  ‘Always useful,’ she’d say as she picked packets off sale tables.  More than one set her sons censored.

           Preserved among this detritus was a small, red tag with a Christmas bulb and ‘Season’s Greetings’ on it – the type she always stuck in the ribbons of presents.  To Gordon From Nannie:  she’d inserted the names in her cramped unfeminine hand.   Below her beloved first grandson’s name she’d printed G O R D O N so he could read it.   She had died in his eighth year.

           The cherry blossoms outside my warm room contrast with memories of the cold house in the gray and brown landscape where I can see her writing similar tags.  Gordon will get it again next weekend when he and his wife, Libby, introduce my mother’s first great granddaughter.

***

           Somehow Johnny Cash singing ‘Folsom Prison’ to a crowd of inmates doesn’t fit my mood.  But it’s what’s on ‘Willie’s Roadhouse’, and SiriusXM keeps the contractors – and usually me – quite happy.

           And yet, like many of the songs ‘Willie’s Roadhouse’ programs, ‘Folsom Prison’ takes me back to real and imagined haunts of my childhood and youth.  Just like the bric-a-brac stands.

           Even in a new room looking down a valley that will always be new to me.

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         Good judges are, in my experience, much more common than bad ones.  But as in any profession, exceptional judges are rare.  When one leaves the bench, it’s a loss.           One of those rarities is my friend, the Hon. Jennifer L. Sargus, for 24 years judge on the Court of Common Pleas in Belmont County, Ohio.  Her profile lists some her administrative and professional accomplishments.

           Being a trial court judge – hearing civil and criminal cases – is a challenge in any jurisdiction.  But it is especially hard in a county hit with the consequences of the rapid death of the steel industry, the slow death of the coal industry and the depopulation of rural townships.

           Martins Ferry Times-Leader staff writer Robert A. DeFrank has done a long interview with Jenny.  My favorite passage on what her job requires:

 “You throw a coin up in the air and the job of most people is to call heads or tails. The job of a judge is when that coin is mid-air, to see both heads and tails. To see both sides of the equation, and that requires you to a lot of times recognize when your own feelings are interfering and to the very best of your ability leave them outside.”

 Sargus described empathy as among the most important qualities a judge should cultivate.

 “The word ‘judgment’ has no good place in a court,” she said.

 “One need only grow older to grow gentler in one’s judgments,” Sargus said, quoting the philosopher Goethe.

           Jenny will continue to hear cases on assignment and to teach trial practice at Ohio State’s College of Law.

           I wish her all the best with thanks for all she’s done.

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          Why do I love Boston?

          Watch the press conference following ‘white hat’s’ capture Friday evening.

           Contrast the statements of the Boston Police Commissioner, the Watertown Police chief, the State Police Colonel, the Boston Mayor, and Watertown’s former State Senator (afterwards on WCVB-TV) with those of the US Attorney, the FBI Agent in Charge and the ATF’s Agent in Charge.

           The locals acknowledge — by name — the people due credit.  They admit their tiredness, their frustration and, most importantly, what they don’t know.

           The Feds bloviate, two of the three from prepared statements which are not used by their state and local counterparts.  Their grace notes are limited, grudging.

           No one in their right mind could want the Feds, the same people who’ve bungled — and much worse — the Swartz and Bulger cases, to handle the Marathon.  But, I guess they’re going to.

           Hence, the presser’s worst moment:  US Attorney Carmen Ortiz asserting American resident Dzhokhar Tsarnaev would not be read his Constitutional rights debased and disgraced the deaths and sacrifices we’ve witnessed since Monday.  Despicable.

           As for the best performers:  Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis for Mayor! For Governor!  Boston Mayor Tom Menino for guardian angel!  Former State Senator Warren Tolman for a come back!

           And then there was the contrast between WCVB-TV, the local ABC outlet, and CNN and MSNBC. The locals won that one big time with intelligent commentary informed by knowledge of the metro’s geography and people. The nets — especially CNN and Wolf Blitzer — were cringe-inducing.

           Still, Boston.com — the Boston Globe‘s outlet — regularly beat WCVB on developments over the day. Well done, Boston Globe. Well done!

           Of the non-locals, by leagues the most impressive was the President. He got it, in every dimension.  His call out to West, Texas, made clear the very different demands on government to respond to that horror.

           As rock-steady Governor Deval Patrick promised last evening, we in Greater Boston did sleep better last night.  Our elected officials have proven their worth, rewarded our confidence in them, yet again.

          Thank you, all.  You did your jobs in extraordinary, extreme circumstances.   Example after example over five days you gave us of ‘grace under pressure’:  Courage.

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          Jonathan Winters, the quintessential Ohioan, has died at 87.

           Comedian, actor and voice artist Jonathan Winters was versatile, emotional, complicated and Midwestern.  Out of ill-fit, off-the-bargain-rack clothes and a repressed affect – still found on the streets of Winesburg, Zenith and Gopher Prairie – sprang lunacy and social disorder.

           Like many of us, he found Ohio was a great place to be from starting in 1953.

           Yet, each of his many faces bespoke Dayton and Springfield. If you’re interested in the sources of Winters’s gentle satires, take a look at Robert McCloskey’s (‘Make way for Ducklings’) Homer Price stories. They’re based on growing up in nearby Middletown in the early 1930s. You’ll recognize their common pools of human foibles and references.

           His identity as a performer – his characters – drew from the complicated mid-century geography of the Ohio-Indiana border.  Fertile farms and small towns surround the larger towns which depended on manufacturing auto parts.  Many farmers and their wives kept their land by working in the unionized plants along what’s now the I-75 corridor.  Winters got all this.

           He mixed country and town on stages far from Ohio, so like most expat Ohioans, he projected a faint disconnection with his present surroundings.  His complicated roots, like those of his time, made it impossible to type him – just like the state he was from.

           Winters was at his best on the Andy Williams show. Williams had a knack for letting oddballs shine like cueballs, and Winters pocketed the chance.

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Within moments of the Marathon Bombing, the phone started ringing and the email notification began chiming.

Thank you all for asking how we are.  We’re fine.  A bit in shock, still, but fine.  Thank you for being there.

 ***

Riding to Brookline on the subway Tuesday morning shortly after 8, the Red Line car was strangely quiet and uncrowded.

Across the car from me sat a young woman with long brown hair spreading over the shoulders of her office coat.  She stared intently at the floor.  She sat in the angular posture of a nine-year-old awaiting a lecture, her feet turned inward.  The beauty of the view from the Longfellow Bridge passed before her unnoticed.

 ***

At Park Street, a couple of soldiers in desert camouflage walked the in-bound platform.  They had communication equipment but no visible weapons.  They and the transit cops at Park Street Over seemed relaxed though watchful.

Just right, I thought.

 ***

As I waited at Park Street for the C Train, five high school boys larked about trying to attract the attention of two girls standing on the platform.  Unsuccessfully.

We all got on the same car.  They continued nattering happily, loudly.  They attracted my attention, which they wouldn’t any other morning.  Their fun contrasted with the blankness of the two women in Marathon 2013 blue and yellow who stood in the middle of the car.

The boys got off at the Hynes Convention Center.  The car became silent and remained so to Coolidge Corner.

***

I’m proud to live and pay taxes in Massachusetts and Vermont.  They are states that work.  Massachusetts would work better had it not been afflicted with a string of small-minded, self-seeking governors named Weld, Celluci and Romney.  But the harm they did was not irremediable, and it did not destroy the great good Michael Dukakis had done in his three terms.

Charles Pierce published a wonderful piece yesterday about his pride in living in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  Read it!

He begins by quoting Barney Frank, our now retired – and much-missed – Congressman on the Marathon Bombing.  Here is Pierce’s source in full.  Barney Frank sure speaks for me.  As reported by VideoCafe:

Former Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank (D) on Tuesday warned that Monday’s twin bombings in Boston were an example of why lawmakers should proceed with caution when considering cutting taxes and slashing the budget.

 In an interview with on CNN, host John Berman posited to Frank that “in some ways, the recovery is based on the response.”

 ”Let’s be very grateful that we had a well-funded, functioning government,” Frank agreed. “It is very fashionable in America and has been for some time to criticize government, belittle public employees, talk about their pensions, talk about what people think is their excessive health care, here we saw government in two ways perform very well.”

 The former congressman pointed out that both local and federal government had worked together in “seamless cooperation.”

 ”You know, I never was as a member of Congress, one of the cheerleaders for less government, lower taxes,” he explained. “No tax cut would have helped us deal with this — or will help us recover. This is very expensive.”

“We’re not asking people, ‘Do you have have private health insurance or not? Can you afford this or not?’ Maybe the government is going to have to pay for it. And this is an example of why we need — if we want to be a civilized people — to put some of our resources into a common pool so we are able to deal with this. And to deal with it, you can’t simply be responsive once it happens.” [Bold in original]

 Frank added that that “this is a terrible day for our society, but a day when I hope people will understand the centrality of having a government in place with the resources.”

 ”At a time like this, no one thinks about saving pennies. But going forward, I hope people aren’t going to think, you spent these tens and tens of millions of dollars — that would probably be a low estimate — let’s just take that out of everything we have going forward. This is an example of why we need to provide the resources for our common good.”

           And, thank you Barney Frank whose 30+ years as a state and federal legislator helped make the good in Massachusetts today.

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          In eastern Massachusetts, it’s Patriots Day Weekend, the annual celebration of the ‘Shot Heard Round the World’, fired in Concord (the irony of its name goes unmentioned) on April 19, 1775.

***

           Wednesday, I had a few minutes following lunch with a friend to amble in Lexington, just east of Concord along the Redcoats’ long line of retreat to Boston.  I found The Old Burying Ground just off the Green behind the First Parish church.

           By New England standards, its setting is unprepossessing and its grounds unkempt.  Like so many graveyards dating to the 18^th century and before, at some point its headstones were rationalised and alined.  The east entrance is walled on one side with uprooted stones.

 

          Still, this is a burying ground worth visiting.  I found no one famous, but much fascinating.

***

           The iconography on many of the 18^th and early 19^th century is so familiar I took it for granted.  I won’t again.

           For a period, evidently, of 50 years, between the early 1750s and early 1800s, gifted stone carvers supplied headstones that are remarkable in their decoration.

 

           The joint headstone of Benjamin and Patiance Muzzy[1], who died, respectively, in 1764 and 1767 is in itself uncommon.  Individual stones were the rule.

           The winged head above Benjamin’s half is quite common.  The head above Patiance’s half is unlike anything I’ve seen, except on the woman’s half of another joint stone a few yards away and a decade later.  No wings, just finely carved flowers.

           The tree that separates the halves is not the weeping willow which graces so many early 19^th century stones but suggests it.  Still, it seems more the tree of life leading to ‘Memento Mori’, ‘Remember that You Will Die’.

 ***

           A few feet away are the remarkable headstones of a couple named Green.  They died in the 1750s; the final digit on both stones is illegible.

           I can’t say the Greens’ headstones are unique, only that I’ve never seen anything like them.  The stylised heads, as on Samuel Green’s, seem a thousand years older than they are – or two hundred years newer.

           The four whirls surrounding the head look like the many Anglo-Saxon brooches in the crammed cases of the British Museum.    They faces remind me of Anglo-Saxon helmets, the vertical line suggesting the nose, the horizontal box suggesting a mouth, the eyes deeply recessed.  Nonetheless, the abstraction and the shape of the heads seem very 20^th century.

           I felt as if I were looking at something primal, something far more terrifying than winged heads.  I didn’t need a ‘memento mori’.

***

           Near the Old Burying Ground’s east entrance is a monument unlike any I’ve seen in Colonial graveyards.  It memorialises the six children of Abijah and Sarah Childs who died in the course of eighteen days in 1778.

          Abijah and Sarah lived on for twenty years, their nearby headstones say.  How, any parent would wonder.

           The smallpox epidemic of 1775-82 which swept North America affected and killed more than the war with which it coincided.  And, it affected the Revolution’s outcome, as Elizabeth A. Feen writes in her excellent Pox Americana: the Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82 (2001).

           The Childs’s memorial made me aware of the disproportionate number of graves from those years.

***

           A family named Harrington occupies a large part of the Old Burying Grounds’ northeast quarter.

           One stone which seemed to have been slashed across its top quarter hinted at the willow and urn motif so common in New England in the 19^th century’s first half.  It remembers Lydia Harrington who died at 23 in 1803.

           I remain uncertain quite what to make of the verse on the stone:

Death grasps all
No tears nor sighs nor prayers could save
The lovely Lydia from her early grave

 

Notes

           1.  Spelling as on headstone.

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         How differently we experience of professional sports than our grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ did.  A delightful exhibit at the Boston Public Library on Boston Sports Temples (BPL Main Branch in Copley Square through May 31) makes the point.

           In crowd scenes from Red Sox and Braves games in the 1910s and 1920s, hats top every head.  None has a ‘B’ on it.

           It is difficult – impossible? – to find a woman’s hat.  Like the athletes they came to watch, the spectators were uniformed and uniformly male – and white.  They dressed as for the office.

           Ostensibly, the BPL’s exhibit centers on buildings.  But it’s really about the people who filled them and the closeness of the athletes to them.

           Even the largest setting – Braves Field seating 45,000 – is intimate.  As late as the 1910s, fans stood on the warning track.

           A surprisingly large number of venues still exist in recognisable form.  A portion of Braves Field survives as Boston University’s Nickerson Field.

           Yes, the Boston Garden disappeared in favor of the This-Could-Be-Anywhere Bank Center/Garden.  But its predecessor, the Boston Arena, now over 100 years old, flourishes as Northeastern University’s Matthews Arena.

           Matthews’s two layers of seats almost on top of the ice suggests a closeness to helmetless heroes our generation hasn’t experienced.  Its staircases and sightlines preserve those of the Boston Garden.  All that’s missing from the final moments of a basketball game is a pall of tobacco smoke refracting the bright lights.

           Because the BPL has chosen to focus on professional sports – a logical choice – it omits a college football venue for a time 25% larger than Braves Field:  Harvard Stadium.  Football hardly figures in the story of Boston’s professional sports before 1960.  The five-year-old Boston Braves/Redskins left for Washington in 1937.

          Only Chicago, perhaps, can approach the wealth of ‘sports temples’ of the turn of the 20^th century that Boston has.  And three of them – Fenway Park, Matthews Arena and Harvard Stadium – are recognisable for what they were.

           Hints of other venues remain.  Just west of Harvard Stadium, the odd shaped park along the Charles River’s south bank hints at the Charles River Speedway that ran for a mile.  Bicycles, sulkies and chariots(!) raced there.

           The BPL makes maximal use of scarce space by mounting photo shows on monitors mounted in front of murals.  These shows are well-selected.  I would have wished them longer, but for most visitors, four or five minutes at each monitor will suffice.

           The bulk of the photos come from the more than 35,000 images taken by Leslie Jones during the first five and a half decades of the last century.  Two years ago, the BPL began publishing Jones’s baseball pictures.

           It is a thrill to learn the journeyman newspaper photographer brought the same gifts to Suffolk Downs.  He had a great eye for art in the ordinary.

           Sometimes, I wished for more detail in the captions.  A fine shot of two teenage brothers, jockeys from Nebraska, notes that one won the 1936 Derby on Bold Venture (the fixture’s most aptly named victor) but neglects to mention the other brother made the Racing Hall of Fame as a trainer largely on Kelso’s career (1960-66).

           Even if your interest in sports is non-existent, Jones’s artistry makes a trip to Copley Square worthwhile.  My favorite:  A line of Suffolk Downs bettors, just after WW II waiting to cash $2 tickets, the last of whom looks like every primary schooler’s nightmare teacher.

           Jones’s picture of Rin Tin Tin visiting a Thoroughbred’s stall at Suffolk Downs reminded me of how much space newspapers once had to fill every day.

           One mural has no monitor in front of it.  It shows a group of young men, amateur ballplayers, about 1900.  From across the lobby, one can see a couple with faces ‘like the map of Ireland’.  Close up, the dozen or so faces suggest how many counties Ireland has.

           The ballplayers represented ‘3rd Base, Your Last Stop Before Home’, a bar on Columbus Avenue owned by one of Boston’s great characters, Michael T. “Nuf Ced” McGreevey.

           McGreevey led ‘the Royal Rooters’, a legion of rabid Red Sox fans.  Their band, songs and hijinks (bordering on criminal mischief) seem like English football lads rather than today’s Red Sox NESN Nation.

           A jockey-sized man, black Irish, with a thick mustache drooping to his chin, McGreevey had a personality that could rule the unruly with his trade-mark, argument-ending:  ‘Nuf Ced’!

           His 3^rd Base, his band and his Royal Rooters disappeared from Boston, with Babe Ruth, on Prohibition’s arrival in 1918.  ‘The Last Stop Before Home’ McGreevy leased to the BPL for a branch, and the pictures that covered its walls and the season passes the Red Sox issued him, he gave to the Library.

           Much as I loved the entire exhibit, much as I admire Leslie Jones’s skill, it’s to the corner devoted to Michael McGreevey and his friends that my mind keeps returning.

           Under those masses of hats were real people, the people who gave this wonderful city its life and character – and made the BPL the institution it is.  Nuf Ced!

  

H/T: In researching this piece, I discovered more fascinating articles – well written, well researched – than I could have imagined.  I’ve linked to the best of them, but there are so many more.

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          Let’s talk about breaking up institutions, maybe even Evil Empires.

           ‘Break up the Yankees!’  How many times I heard that in my first 14 years.  Two years after the 1960 Pirates proved there was no need any more to break them up, the replacement players in the old NY Giants’ Polo Grounds heard fans jeering, ‘Break up the Mets!’

           In the Reagan-Bush I years ‘shareholder value’ became the all-purpose gage for defining a corporation’s worth.  Companies whose stock prices didn’t hit maximum estimates became candidates for sale and break up.

           Harvard professor Joseph Schumpeter in 1942 had offered the rationale: ‘Creative destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.  Stabilized capitalism is a contradiction in terms.’[1]

           And so it continues, as Pensions & Investments reported on April 3, the California State Teachers Retirement System and the institutional hedge fund, Relational Investors LLC want to split the Timken Corporation into its steel and bearings components and thereby, they guess, raise its shareholders’ value by a bit over 20 percent.

 ***

           A candidate in greater need of restructuring than the $5 billion, 114 year-old Timken Corp. is Harvard Inc., a real estate, investment banking and consulting firm that also offers academic degrees.

           The only part of Harvard to which one can assign a value is its endowment: reportedly about $31 billion.  The worth of Harvard’s other assets – real estate, art, consulting contracts, patents, rare books, copyrights, etc., etc. – is largely unreported, even unacknowledged.  So, one can’t justly estimate its value after break up.

           Indeed, Harvard’s worth is incalculable.  Four times its endowment?  Ten times?  No number between $100 and $500 billion seems far-fetched.

          Unquestionably, however, Harvard’s most valuable asset is its name, its status as ‘the World’s Greatest University (WGU)’ as Yalie Alex Beam has dubbed it.

           Its educational end (again, a pretty small operation within Harvard, Inc.) is important for its license to raise tens of millions annually from alumni and foundations without having to do anything in particular for it apart from what it wants to do.  Its cachet supports WGU’s numerous businesses, including logo licensing.

           But mismanagement of WGU’s undergraduate line has made ‘Harvard’ dangerously close to a punch line.

 ***

           Leave aside things like the lecture in The Social Network (2010) on undergraduate ethics former Harvard president Larry Summers gives the Winklevoss twins, which I quoted at length here.

           And the phalanx of professors a decade ago aiding and comforting Libya’s greater Ghadafi family….

           Just focus on the last month or so.  Let’s go to the tape!

 ***

           On March 20, its D-1 Quiz Bowl team was stripped of four national championships for cheating.

           A day later, its D-1 basketball team won a first round NCAA game.  Harvard junior Abhi Chintapalli told the Boston Globe, ‘It’s nice to finally say, “Oh, look, Harvard is on a channel that you watch.”’[2]

           But I’m told, the broadcasts reminded viewers that two of Harvard’s best players had to withdraw from school for fear of being suspended for cheating on an exam and losing a year’s NCAA eligibility.

           In this light, consider Yahoo’s Dan Wetzel on March 3 discussing Harvard’s recruiting:

 The all-time [college basketball] coaching rogue heard the news and couldn’t decide whether to be stunned or entertained.

“Harvard?” Jerry Tarkanian kept saying with a laugh. “Harvard’s cheating?”

 So alleges The New York Times, which Sunday unveiled one of the most unlikely, telling and, at least to some of us, humorous potential college basketball scandals by bringing to light a number of questionable [recruiting] practices by no less than Harvard Basketball….

 “We used to joke we were the Harvard of southern Nevada,” Tarkanian laughed of his legendary run at UNLV that featured a national title, four Final Fours and endless fights with NCAA investigators.

 So maybe now Harvard is the UNLV of eastern Massachusetts. [Links added.]

           The cynic in me asks: why does the WGU want to be a college basketball power?  From what is it diverting attention?  Does it plan to become a Jesuit round-ball school, like Georgetown, Marquette or Gonzaga? 

           After its roll in the mud with Russian oligarches and politicians in the 1990s, Harvard now wants to roll in the hay with the NCAA? 

***

           And then there’s the drip, drip, drip of poison from the WGU’s handling of alleged cheating in a civics course favored by athletes.

           The details of this fiasco defy summary, but it is at least probable the students were victims of an inexperienced junior professor whom Harvard decided it had to back up.

           The exam took place last May.  In August the story broke when an administrator leaked a document describing how Harvard would handle the student prosecutions.  A number of varsity football, basketball and hockey players then dropped out to preserve their NCAA-defined eligibility.  About 70 others, a Harvard disciplinary tribunal forced to withdraw last fall.

           Over the winter, Harvard revealed it had searched the emails of its 20 or so resident deans to learn who had leaked.  As the employer of untenured administrators, WGU was within its rights here. But how smart was it to exercise them?

           What’s unquestionable is the botch Harvard made of revealing its searches.

***

           According to the Boston Globe, Harvard’s president, Drew Faust, told a faculty meeting on April 2, ‘different choices should have been made’.[3] The recipient of the Parkman and the Bancroft prizes for her historical writings on the Civil War, one might assume she knew how to take and assign responsibility.

           At the same faculty meeting, Evelynn Hammonds, Dean of the College (the undergraduate school) admitted she’d authorized more – and more comprehensive – email searches than she’d disclosed.[4]

           The Harvard Crimson, WGU’s fine undergraduate newspaper, quoted Hammonds:

Although I consulted with legal counsel, I did not inform [Faculty of Arts & Sciences] Dean [Michael D.] Smith about the two additional queries. This was a mistake.  I also regret the inaccuracies in our March 11 communication resulting from my failure to recollect the additional searches at the time of that communication.

 Two days after the faculty meeting came an extraordinary Crimson editorial:

Dean of the College Evelynn M. Hammonds’s admission that she ordered two … previously unreported searches of a resident dean’s email accounts comes as shocking, disappointing, and disheartening news….  Hammonds not only authorized the second round of searches without necessary permission of … Dean … Smith but also made a false statement to the press in which she and Smith said no additional searches had taken place.  Nearly a year after the now-infamous Government 1310: “Introduction to Congress” final exam took place, the University community continues to receive news of missteps….  For the good of the University, Hammonds must resign.

 …Yet the inescapable fact is that Hammonds ordered two email searches—searches which are said to be conducted “very, very rarely”—and then “fail[ed] to recollect” her own, highly unusual authorization at the time of her March 11 statement on the first round of searches in March.  After those searches, she inexplicably circumvented the requirement that Smith approve faculty email searches, and then promptly forgot about it….

 Why President ‘different choices should have been made’ and her Big Apple Circus still have their ‘phony, baloney jobs‘ only Mel Brooks could imagine.

 ***

           Harvard received its corporate charter in 1650.  Its mission: ‘the education of the English and Indian youth of this country, in knowledge and godliness….’  Its website asserts, ‘Harvard continues to operate under the authority of the 1650 charter to this day.’  Ah, but the mission….

           Fifty years earlier, in 1600, the Crown had chartered the first modern for-profit, the East India Company.  Two hundred and seventy-four years later, the Crown dissolved the Company which had brought England its Indian empire and in the process defined much of corporate law as we know it.[5] 

           In its three hundred and sixty-three years, Harvard has had a similar effect on the US.  It has defined education as we know it – from its undergraduate curriculum to its innovations in business and legal education.  In cases such as Harvard College v. Amory, (which it fortunately lost), it has shaped the American law of fiduciary duties.

           Like the East India company in its final century, Harvard no longer can manage the empire it has haphazardly created.  For the past 20 years, at least, it has stumbled around the groves of academe like a drunken Paul Bunyan.

           Before it does further damage to its constituent parts and to the state that chartered it and to the nation it grew up with, the WGU should be divided into manageable companies.  It must focus as never before on its education business.

           Break up Harvard!

  

Notes

           1. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper & Bros., 1942), p. 83, as quoted in Thomas K. McCraw, Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter & Creative Destruction [2007] (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap/Harvard Univ. Press, 2009), p. 3.

           2.  Shira Springer, ‘Crimson Pride’, Boston Globe, Mar. 23, 2013, p. B1.

           3.  Mary Carmichael & Peter Schworm, ‘Harvard’s “regret” grows’, Boston Globe, April 3, 2013, p. B1.  The Globe acknowledged it had not attended the meeting, so the quotation may be suspect.

           4.  Id., pp. B1, B4.

           5.  This is a grossly inadequate summary of the most important UK or American corporation between 1600 and 1850.  Ditto, the following description of Harvard.

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