Song Lyric of the Day (Steely Dan, on ‘Any Minor World That Breaks Apart’)

“Any major dude with half a heart surely will tell you my friend
Any minor world that breaks apart falls together again.”—“Any Major Dude,” written by American songwriters and musicians Donald Fagen and Walter Becker (1950-2017), performed by Steely Dan on their Pretzel Logic LP (1974)

Quote of the Day (Damon Runyon, With a Female Example of ‘The Underworld Complex’)

“Waldo Winchester says the underworld complex is a very common complex and that Basil Valentine has it, and so has Miss Harriet Mackyle, or she will not be all the time sticking her snoot into joints where tough guys hang out. This Miss Harriet Mackyle is one of these rich dolls who wears snaky-looking evening clothes, and has her hair cut like a boy's, with her ears sticking out, and is always around the night traps, generally with some guy with a little mustache, and a way of talking like an Englishman, and come to think of it I do see her in tough joints more than somewhat, saying hello to different parties such as nobody in their right minds will say hello to, including such as Red Henry, who is just back from Dannemora, after being away for quite a spell for taking things out of somebody's safe and blowing the safe open to take these things.”—American short-story writer and sportswriter Damon Runyon (1880-1946), “Social Error,” originally printed in Furthermore (1938), republished in New York Stories, edited by Diana Secker Tesdell (2011)

If the name in that quote sounds very vaguely familiar, it’s because the socialite described here shows up as one of the characters in the not-terribly-well-known 1989 film Bloodhounds of Broadway, a mashup of several Damon Runyon short stories including “Social Error,” and featuring Julie Hagerty (pictured) as Miss Mackyle.

Runyon is best known for the musical Guys and Dolls, adapted from two of his other stories. He made a tidy sum in the Thirties and Forties with Hollywood transferring some of his properties to the screen, not always successfully.

I think you really must read his words on the page rather than seeing them on a screen to appreciate their unusual quality.  Films convey the funny patois of his characters but not the danger and menace that sneak up between the colorful phrases, like “tough joints,” “blowing the safe open” and “Dannemora” (for readers outside the tristate region, an upstate New York maximum security facility).

Runyon himself had something of an “underworld complex.”  Much of the considerable money he earned as a New York sportswriter and short-story writer was spent at the racetrack, where he met many gamblers and absorbed the speech patterns that later figured so prominently in his work.

Some of those people turned up as thinly disguised people in his stories, including:

*Bat Masterson, who became Sky Masterson;

*Walter Winchell (Waldo Winchester);

*Arnold Rothstein (Nathan Detroit);

*Texas Guinan (Miss Missouri Martin);

*Harry Morgan (The Lemon-Drop Kid);

* Otto Berman (Regret);

* Frank Costello (Dave the Dude);

*Johnny Broderick (Johnny Brannigan)

I haven’t been able to discover the original inspiration for Harriet or Red Henry, but they must have been something else.

This Day in Jazz History (Birth of Tenor Sax Titan Coleman Hawkins)

Nov. 21, 1904— Coleman Hawkins, who became the first important tenor saxophonist with his mastery of the art of vertical improvisation, was born in St. Joseph, MO.

The circumstances of Hawkins’ birth were infinitely fungible in his telling, including its location (on an ocean liner) and time (as much as eight years after the event). 

Even his formal musical education could be fudged, with biographers unable to document claims that he attended Washburn College in Topeka or the University of Chicago.

His real musical development needed no embellishment. Encouraged from an early age by his mother, a pianist and organist, Hawkins tackled the piano by age five, the cello at seven, and (an outgrowth in range and color), the tenor sax at nine. He was a natural musical talent.

In adulthood, he interacted with a galaxy of jazz talent across four decades, from Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson (whose band he joined) in 1924 to Sonny Rollins in the mid-1960s. Through vertical improvisation, he showed how to use his chosen instrument—which had earlier taken a supporting role to clarinets in jazz bands—to weave chords in a progression to improvise, rather than doing so through scales.

But the first decade in that time was spent learning the tenor sax thoroughly enough to make it do his bidding, while the last half decade was a remorseless physical decline. For all practical purposes, then, the height of his influence extended from the Thirties through the Fifties.

The year 1939 may have represented his zenith with his rendition of “Body and Soul.” Though the Eddie Hayman-Johnny Green composition had attracted attention since its release in 1930, Hawkins’ performance helped make it a standard, opening up manifold interpretations even within its strictly instrumental format.

What was especially noteworthy was how, after the first two bars, Hawkins largely dispensed with the melody in favor of a riff and variations. (“It’s Coleman Hawkins superimposed on Johnny Green, if you will,” the composer told Fred Hall in a January 1986 interview that was later collected in an anthology edited by Robert Gottlieb, Reading Jazz.)

Having already inspired the likes of Lester Young and Ben Webster by disclosing how the unique, full-bodied sound of the tenor sax, Hawkins quickly also recognized its potential through the fast tempos, complex chord progressions and improvisational lines of bebop.

It was Hawkins who in 1944 made the first recording of young Dizzy Gillespie’s “Woody ‘n’ You” (see this blog post from the independent public radio station KUVO) and Hawkins who in that same year employed pianist-composer Thelonious Monk as part of his quartet.

In his younger years, even with his short, compact frame, Hawkins dominated virtually every room where he was present with his dapper attire, attractive dates, and cosmopolitan manner.

By the mid-1960s, as his increased drinking affected his appearance, Hawkins looked more like a jazz Methuselah. In a Spring 1998 reminiscence in The Antioch Review, jazz historian and critic Gary Giddins described his physical impact in a 1966 performance at New York’s Village Vanguard:

“The grizzled, full-bearded patriarch still looked sharp and slightly forbidding, even if he had receded a bit into his tailored gray silk-mohair. He gazed over the crowd with sad but alert eyes, his tight-lipped smile implying bemusement and perhaps disdain. When he greeted someone between sets, his voice was stately and deep, a match for his sound on tenor. He exuded dignity.”

Quote of the Day (Margaret Renkl, on the Paradoxical Faith of the Bluebirds)

“Take your cue from the bluebirds, who have no faith in the future but who build the future nevertheless, leaf by leaf and straw by straw, shaping them into the roundness of the world.”— American essayist and New York Times opinion writer Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year (2023)

The image accompanying this post, of a pair of Eastern Bluebirds in Michigan, was taken Apr. 14, 2010, by Sandysphotos2009.

Flashback, November 1959: ‘Ben-Hur’ Remake Charges to Front of Nation’s Box Offices

Sixty-five years ago this week, struggling MGM bet that the market for cinematic biblical epics was not yet exhausted. The game paid off handsomely when the release of Ben-Hur—the sound adaptation of the best-selling novel of the 19^th century—reaped box-office gold, saving the studio from bankruptcy.

In looking through my past blog posts, I was surprised to discover that, though I had written about much connected to this property—General Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel, a director whose one-reel 1907 short triggered a landmark copyright decision, and a 1925 budget-busting silent epic—I’d never written about the version that thousands have seen, in theaters and on television, for the past three generations.

This post, then, is my attempt to rectify this situation and to give this movie all the honor it deserves.

The 1959 remake became one of the most honored films in Hollywood history, netting Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director (William Wyler), and Best Actor (Charlton Heston). The 11 it netted in all set a record for the time that has only been equaled since then by Titanic in 1997 and The Return of the King in 2003.

It is also among the most influential movies in screen history. Most recently, Francis Ford Coppola listed it among the 20 films that inspired the epic he released a few months ago, Megalopolis.

Yet another director-producer’s debt to the film is more obvious. The first installment in “Star Wars” saga, The Phantom Menace, features a pod race that is a homage to the archetypal chariot race of Ben-Hur.

Even more so, the first trilogy in George Lucas’ bestselling series, focusing on Anakin Skywalker, bears strong similarities to Lew Wallace’s hero: another slave who makes a splash by competing in a great race, but never really feels entirely at home in the society that now embraces him, and is consumed by revenge for much of the action.

Ben-Hur also left its mark on the evolution of the film epic itself. Without ever stinting on pyrotechnics (it became the first film shot with Panavision lenses to win the Best Cinematography Oscar), it veered sharply from the sword-and-sandals movies associated with Cecil B. DeMille (The Ten Commandments), Howard Hawks (Land of the Pharoahs), and King Vidor (Solomon and Sheba).

Wyler delegated direction of the chariot race sequence to Andrew Marton and Yakima Canutt, while concentrating with his usual perfectionism on the actors’ performances. His creation of a more intimate, character-driven epic would release later releases such as Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, Young Winston, Reds, and, only a year later, Spartacus.

(In fact, Kirk Douglas only pursued the latter property when he lost out in the competition to play Ben-Hur to Heston, being offered instead the consolation prize of the titular hero’s friend-turned-enemy, Messala—a role that he considered nothing more than a second-rate villain.)

This desire to focus on characters rather than spectacle has led some viewers to regard the hour-and-a-half remaining after the chariot race to be anticlimactic. But this misunderstands the nature of the property.

The movie took its cue from the subtitle of the Wallace novel, “A Tale of the Christ,” tracking the miracle following Christ’s crucifixion that eventually frees Judah of the bitterness that has spurred his quest even as it deformed his life.

In their quest for character development, Wyler and producer Sam Zimbalist (who died of a heart attack in Rome just as the movie neared completion) employed six different screenwriters: Karl Tunberg, Gore Vidal, Christopher Fry, S. N. Behrman, Maxwell Anderson, and Ben Hecht.

Decades after the film’s release, Vidal caused a stir with his suggestion of a gay subtext in the Judah-Messala relationship. Audiences at the time were less likely to notice such elements than today, and in any case both Wyler and Heston denied them when asked about it in later years.

More likely, contemporary audiences would have responded to the Cold War resonance of the plot.

Judah’s refusal to renounce his Jewish heritage and pursue Roman glory with Messala triggers his family’s fall from wealth and influence, not unlike how rejection of informing consigned a host of Hollywood talent to blacklisting in the McCarthy Era.

At the same time, the presence of Rome as an authoritarian power imposing its will on a restless foreign people would have reminded many of the similar role played by the Soviet Union.

Quote of the Day (Hara Estroff Marano, on Resilience, ‘The Capacity to Adapt’)

“At its core, resilience is the capacity to adapt, to update ourselves, to adjust to new conditions after an unexpected and almost invariably unwanted experience has disrupted our old moorings. It is a necessary capacity for setting up the human tent in an unrelentingly dynamic and often unpredictable world.”— Writer and editor-at-large Hara Estroff Marano, “9 Ways to Overcome Adversity,” Psychology Today, November/December 2024

Quote of the Day (Henry Adams, on Friendship)

“One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.” — U.S. historian (and descendant of Presidents) Henry Adams (1838-1918), The Education of Henry Adams (1907; posthumously published 1918)

Quote of the Day (Juan Ramírez, on Shakespeare and the Theater’s Hardiest Superstition)

“Perhaps the industry’s best-known bylaw is that, unless acting in Shakespeare’s early 17th-century play, one should never say the word ‘Macbeth’ inside a theater — otherwise you risk ruining the current production. The origins of this are predictably murky. The play traffics in things that might very well incur a hex — witches, hauntings, grisly murders — but one possible source could be the simple fact that, in an era when most theater companies operated in repertory (performing a rotating selection of popular works), ‘the Scottish play,’ as the piece can be safely referred to, was a guaranteed moneymaker. If your season was failing, it might be time to stage ‘Macbeth.’”— New York-based Venezuelan-American writer and critic Juan Ramírez, “Don’t Say ‘Macbeth,” in T (The New York Times Style Magazine), Nov. 17, 2024

I noticed the above article, with its explanation for the bad luck associated with saying the word “Macbeth,” on the same weekend that one of my local PBS stations was re-running a charming indie production from a few years ago, called—yes, The Scottish Play.

But even before writer-director Keith Boynton had alluded to this curse in comic cinematic fashion, someone else had beaten him to it in the early oughts: the creators of the fun Canadian TV series Slings and Arrows, set in a fictional Shakespearean festival like the real-world Stratford Festival.

One episode from its second season, “Rarer Monsters,” sends up the whole jinx with tongue in cheek, much like the rest of this series.

Some readers of this post—those who have a real sense of theatrical history—are likely to protest: “But, Mike, the curse is real!” 

They’ll point to a legendary British production of the play starring Sir John Gielgud, when three actors died during the show’s run and a costume designer killed himself right after the premiere.

And what about poor Charlton Heston, who, in a 1953 production, had severe burns to his legs—the result of his tights being soaked in kerosene?

“Fie!” as The Bard would say (and as I do now). Did that stop Gielgud from directing a 1952 production of the play with the Royal Shakespeare Company? And did the curse stop Heston from coming back to the play for the fifth time in a 1975 staging with Vanessa Redgrave?

Well, I will give the skeptics this: Those witches at the start of the show, if costumed and lit correctly (maybe like the image accompanying this post), are definitely enough to give one…the Willies.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Cheers,’ As Sam Gets to Meet Diane’s Mom)

 

Sam Malone [played by Ted Danson]: “I just want to say it's nice to finally meet you, Mrs. Chambers.”

Mrs. Helen Chambers [played by Glynis Johns]: “It's nice to meet you, Sam. Diane's told me about you. You're almost as handsome as she says you think you are.”

Sam [feeling insulted]: “There's a compliment in there someplace, I'm sure.”—Cheers, Season 1, Episode 20, “Someone Single, Someone Blue,” original air date Mar. 3, 1983, teleplay by David Angell, directed by James Burrows

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Mary Oliver, on ‘The Piece of God That Is Inside Each of Us’)

“Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually.
Maybe the desire to make something beautiful 
is the piece of God that is inside each of us.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019), “Franz Marc's Blue Horses,” in Blue Horses: Poems (2014)

Quote of the Day (John Williams, on Recalling ‘The Significance of What You Are Doing’)

“You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history. Remember that while you're trying to decide what to do.” —American novelist John Williams (1922-1994), Stoner (1965)

Flashback, November 1959: Kansas Murders Inspire Capote’s ‘In Cold Blood’

The brutal murder of four members of the Clutter family in mid-November 1959 reverberated not only throughout the village of Holcomb in western Kansas, but across the United States—enough to bring a horde of out-of-town reporters to this quiet community in the American heartland.

One non-journalistic observer who arrived within a week, New Yorker contributor Truman Capote, initially startled the community—including the case’s investigators—with his high-pitched, almost squeaky, whine, a scarf that nearly trailed to the floor, and visits to big-city gay and lesbian bars that shocked straitlaced area residents.

Six years later, after gaining the confidence of these locals—along with the two ex-cons eventually apprehended and executed for the Clutter murders—Capote would publish a classic of the true-crime genre and a pioneering example of “The New Journalism” combining fact with fiction, In Cold Blood.

Over the course of more than half a century, this so-called “nonfiction novel” on the crime and punishment of Dick Hickock and Perry Smith (who, ironically, killed the Clutters for a safe full of cash that didn’t exist) retains its gruesome fascination.

The events were also recounted in a 1967 movie and 1996 TV miniseries based on Capote’s book, two biopics (Capote and Infamous) on how the author wrote his account, and a four-part Sundance TV documentary that tracked the case in more in-depth detail.

When the book came out, there was some low-level buzz of curiosity about how Capote could remember so much dialogue and so many details with such seeming accuracy.

He did have a good deal of solid documentation: the transcript of the killers’ trial; boxes of letters and newspaper clippings in his home; notebooks filled with on-scene descriptions; and interviews that either he or his childhood friend, To Kill a Mockingbird author Harper Lee, conducted.

But especially after Capote’s death in 1984, more questions have been raised about the book’s accuracy—everything from the relative importance of key figures to scenes and dialogue entirely invented.

The first person I knew who disputed Capote’s claim that he didn’t take notes during interviews because of his great memory was Norman Mailer, at a winter 1981 talk to writing graduate students at Columbia University’s School of the Arts that I covered for the college newspaper.

"I love Truman Capote in 82 ways, but he's a terrible liar," the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner said, provoking laughter from the class. "I know he doesn't remember conversations we've had two or three days ago."

Interviewees for George Plimpton’s 1997 oral history biography, Truman Capote, differed with the subject’s account on several details, including that Hickock intended to rape teenage victim Nancy Clutter; that Capote exaggerated the role of lead detective Alvin Dewey in tracking down the killers; and that Dewey closed his eyes during one of the executions.

Nearly two decades later, Ben Yagoda’s Slate article, using contemporaneous notes by an initial fact-checker from The New Yorker, thoroughly deconstructed the masterful publicity claims that, “despite having the stylistic and thematic attributes of great literature, the account of four brutal murders in Kansas was completely true.”

Among the outright departures from truth taken by Capote were:

*a poignant final scene between Dewey and a teenage friend of Nancy Clutter, completely invented to provide closure for the narrative;

* describing the actions of someone who was alone, and later killed in the multiple murders;

*claiming that the Kansas Bureau of Investigation had immediately acted upon a crucial lead, when in fact its five-day wait gave Hickoff and Smith time to reach Florida;

*interior monologues to which neither Capote nor anyone else could be privy.

A few years after Yagoda’s article, in focusing on the Clutters rather than their killers, the Sundance TV documentary Cold-Blooded highlighted how Capote had sensationalized the crime and split the community of Holcomb in half over his account.

In Cold Blood represented a problematic literary triumph. Its commercial and critical success encouraged other writers to follow Capote’s departures from accuracy in service to a more novelistic approach—all of which makes readers mistrustful of the basic facts of journalism.

That is a shame, because, as a painstaking stylist, Capote created a haunting meditation on lives blighted and snuffed out—that of upstanding local businessman Herbert Clutter and his family, of course, as well as Smith, who suffered through a nearly Dickensian childhood before his descent into darkness.

Capote fully achieved his intention of depicting what he called, in an interview with The New York Times, “this collision between the desperate, ruthless, wandering, savage part of American life, and the other, which is insular and safe.”

(The image accompanying this post comes from the 1967 film adaptation of In Cold Blood, with Scott Wilson and Robert Blake as, respectively, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith.)

Quote of the Day (Richard Price, on Fans, The Crimson Tide, and Contact Sports)

“In our dissociated culture—despite whatever grace, glory and beauty they evoke in the best teams and players—contact sports serve two functions: They allay boredom, divert people from thinking about the dreariness of their lives; and they help people channel their rage. You can go to a revival in Selma on Friday or you can scream your lungs out in Bryant-Denny Stadium in Tuscaloosa on Saturday. The bottom line at both is transference of a lot of anger into a socially acceptable outlet….As coach Karl Marx once said, football is the opiate of the people.” —Novelist-screenwriter Richard Price, “Bear Bryant’s Miracles,” originally published in Playboy, October 1979, reprinted in Football: Great Writing About the National Sport, edited by John Schulian (2014)

This post is dedicated to two especially enthusiastic Crimson Tide fans: my friend Bridget and her husband Jim—both of whom, I am sure, disagree vehemently with Mr. Price’s contention in this quote.

The image accompanying this post, of University of Alabama football fans wearing crimson and white with the name of the football team on their garments (at the annual spring practice scrimmage game called “A-Day”), was taken on Apr. 17, 2010, by Carol M. Highsmith.

Quote of the Day (Eric Levitz, With an Election Prediction That Actually Came to Pass)

“[T]he Trump era indicated that its coalition has more room to grow than liberals tend to think. The GOP improved with Hispanics nationwide as well as with Black and Asian American voters. Historically, immigrant communities have grown more conservative in their later generations, and Hispanic and Asian immigrant groups may follow a similar trajectory. At the same time, as the Black church declines, and young African-Americans enter more integrated social networks than their forebears, the Democrats' capacity to unite 90-plus percent of the demographic behind their banner is likely to diminish.

“If the Republicans make minuscule expansions to their base, they will likely control all three branches of the federal government by 2025 while boasting a hammerlock on the Senate for a decade or more.”—American political and economics reporter Eric Levitz, “The Big Rig,” New York Magazine, June 7-20, 2021

With Wednesday’s news that Republicans have maintained their hold on the House of Representatives, the Democratic nightmare envisioned by Levitz has come to pass.

All those 2002 predictions about demographic trends spelling “An Emerging Democratic Majority,” one of those generational “realignments” so beloved by political scientists, have turned out to be electoral fools’ gold—and even that optimistic book’s authors, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira, saw fit to revise their estimate last year with Where Have All the Democrats Gone?

Well, no matter. First things first: how the Democrats plan to block the worst Trump appointments and actions, right now.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Curb Your Enthusiasm,’ With Larry Overjoyed About Figuring Out His Navigation System)

Larry David [played by Larry David]: “I can't wait to call my parents. They are gonna be so proud of me! When I tell my father I figured out that navigation system, he's gonna flip his wig! And he's got one too!”

Cheryl [played by Cheryl Hines]: “Can we turn on the radio?”

Larry: “Oh, he's gonna be very proud of Larry figuring out the navigation system!”

Cheryl: “Please!”

Larry: "‘Daddy, I'm not so stupid!’"—Curb Your Enthusiasm, Season 1, Episode 9, “Affirmative Action,” original air date Dec. 10, 2000, teleplay by Larry David, directed by Bryan Gordon

Quote of the Day (Joan Didion, on Hollywood’s Spirit)

“The place [Hollywood] makes everyone a gambler. Its spirit is speedy, obsessive, immaterial. The action itself is the art form.”—American essayist, novelist, and screenwriter Joan Didion (1934-2021), “Hollywood: Having Fun,” The New York Review of Books, Mar. 22, 1973

Flashback, November 1874: GOP Midterm Losses Sound Uncertain Trumpet for Civil Rights

Stunned and staggered by the midterm elections, the Republican Party wrestled 150 years ago this month with what to do after losing control of the House of Representatives for the first time since before the Civil War.

Its solution—failing to enforce civil-rights measures that they themselves had enacted—was the opening note in a retreat from the Reconstruction program that President Ulysses S. Grant (pictured) had championed in the defeated Confederate states.

Their surrender would be formalized in the controversial Compromise of 1877 that enabled them to hold onto the White House for Rutherford B. Hayes at the price of withdrawing federal troops from the South.

The surprising magnitude of the GOP losses—"the greatest reversal of partisan alignments in the entire nineteenth century,” according to prominent Reconstruction historian Eric Foner—will feel uncannily familiar to Democrats this month: thinner margins of victory in regions they once won going away, and outright losses in other places considered party strongholds.

Dissatisfaction spread rapidly with the so-called Radical Republican faction, just as moderate Democrats have been heaping scorn on the “woke” segment of their party in the wake of Kamala Harris’ loss of the Presidency to Donald Trump.

Yet the 1874 Republicans, like the 2024 Democrats, fell victim to larger forces with often interlocking impacts on the electorate.

Midterm elections in Presidents’ second terms have been nicknamed “the six-year itch” because of voters’ unease with the party in power. 

The most significant of such losses have, in the case of 1874 as well as 1918, 1938, and 1966, abruptly curtailed reform eras. These epitomized the down points in what the late historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called “the cycles of American history.”

The 1874 midterms were particularly consequential, though, because they spelled the premature end of a biracial coalition that redefined the nature of citizenship, expanded voting rights, and sought to increase economic opportunity—with especially significant achievements in passing the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

But southern whites rebelled at African-Americans gaining the right to vote and, even more so, winning public office. Despite President Grant’s crackdowns on the Ku Klux Klan, fraud, intimidation, and domestic terrorism had become openly practiced, even institutionalized.

The midterms—which converted the party’s 110-vote margin in the House into a Democratic majority of sixty seats, while giving the Democrats a net gain of 10 seats in the Senate— concluded an awful year for the Republicans and for the freedmen they had made it a point to protect:

*The Panic of 1873 (which I discussed in this prior post) carried over into the next year, resulting in reduced state budgets and lower tax rates, private contractors who leased convicts (the start of the “chain gang” system), and slashed funding for the public schools that had been a major achievement of biracial legislatures.

*Grant’s veto of an “inflation bill,” which had been passed by Congress to mitigate the impact of the depression, gave the Democrats a wedge among eastern immigrants and western farmers.

*The “Sanborn incident,” involving private collection of taxes and excises, engulfed Treasury Secretary William Richardson in scandal and solidified the Grant cabinet’s reputation for corruption.

*The July 1874 collapse of the Freedman’s Bank, with operations promoted by the federal government but assets not regulated or guaranteed by it, depleted the wealth of thousands of African-Americans, left them distrustful of the private sector in the long term, and fueled specious white racist claims that blacks were too ignorant and financially feckless to be trusted with state fiscal responsibility.

*The 1873 Colfax Massacre in Louisiana, precipitated by the contested gubernatorial election the year before, set off a firestorm of fraud, intimidation, and domestic terrorism by Democrats—as well as tensions among competing Republican factions— in southern states in 1874, most notably through the White League paramilitary organization that, in perpetrating violence against black officeholders and their white allies, effectively overthrew the governments of Louisiana and Alabama.

* Before the Civil War, white Northerners who went south to own, build, or manage slave plantations suffered little or no obloquy from their new neighbors. Now, however, because of their political alliance with blacks, they were stigmatized as “carpetbaggers” and, through the “Mississippi Plan”—devised in 1874 and implemented the following year—forced them either to switch from the Republicans to Democrats or leave the state.

When a political party loses its will, it runs the risk of losing its way—and that is exactly the situation in which the Republicans found themselves in the aftermath of the midterms.

The Radical Republicans, the party faction that had most zealously pursued racial equality and sought to enforce it in the South through the use of federal troops, increasingly lost favor with a Northern public that, with its minimal goals for the Civil War achieved (the end of slavery, restoration of the union), had no desire for racial equality.

As Ron Chernow noted in his biography Grant, the stinging setback his party was dealt at the polls meant that the new congressional Democratic majority, flashing its investigative powers, “turned a glaring searchlight on executive departments to ferret out corruption, a tactic used to discredit the administration on Reconstruction.” The new House Democratic committee chairs were now also empowered to stall additional pro-civil rights measures by the administration.

With his energy increasingly spent on combating this Congressional mischief and his anxiety rising that the Republicans would be punished further at the polls, President Grant now hesitated to employ federal troops on an indefinite basis against marauding Southern whites lest he be accused of “bayonet rule.”

With this backlash unpunished, Southern Democrats were well-launched on their program of “Redemption” of state governments from Republican rule. They were further aided by a Supreme Court that interpreted the 14^th Amendment broadly in one direction (defining corporations as “persons”) while narrowly construing its civil-rights protections for African-Americans.

It is well-known that, despite losing the popular vote, Republicans retained the White House in the 1876 election with a deal that secured an Electoral College victory in exchange for ending occupation of the Southern states. 

Yet corruption existed on the Democratic side, too, in a campaign of violence that further loosened Republican control of the Southern states.

“Time would reveal that 1874 inaugurated a new era in national politics,” writes Foner, “although one of stalemate rather than Democratic ascendancy.” With control of Congress split between the two parties, little important could get done in the next couple of decades.

As the ancillary rewards of an industrial economy beckoned, Republicans doffed their mantle as the rights-protecting “party of Lincoln” in favor of becoming the electoral home of Gilded Age robber barons.

Lacking the right to vote, blacks also were unable to gain patronage jobs that might have provided a ladder into the middle class, as well as informal welfare to cushion their losses in economic reversals.

The end of Reconstruction marked the dawn of legalized “Jim Crow” segregation—most entrenched politically in the South, but even economically in the North. It also gave rise to a disgraceful school of historiography that greatly exaggerated the failings of the Republican-led Southern governments in Reconstruction.

It would take W.E.B. DuBois’ 1935 masterful reassessment of the post-Civil War period, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880, and especially the revisionist historians who more assiduously investigated the period beginning 20 years later, before the successes and failures of these governments could be more fairly weighed.

The residue of the failure to achieve genuine racial equality, however, continues to poison American politics, stymieing economic progress and encouraging extremism.

Quote of the Day (William Dean Howells, on November)

“How often, in how many a far November,
Of childhood and my children's childhood I was glad,
With the wild rapture of the Fall,
Of all the beauty, and of all
The ruin, now so intolerably sad.”—American man of letters William Dean Howells (1837-1920), “November,” originally printed in Stops of Various Quills (1895), republished in American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Vol. 2: Herman Melville to Stickney, American Indian Poetry, Folk Songs and Spirituals, edited by John Hollander (1993)

I took the image accompanying this post, of the Smithsonian Butterfield Habitat Garden, outside the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, when I was on vacation in Washington, DC, nine years ago this month.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Arrested Development,’ on the Unlikely Start of a Video Franchise)

Lindsay Bluth Funke [played by Portia de Rossi]: “You two have always fought. I think I have a video tape of that.”

Michael [played by Jason Bateman]: “You and half of Orange County.”

Narrator [voice of Ron Howard]: “As children, George Sr. would often provoke the boys to fight one another. He believed it created a competitive spirit. He also thought tapes of the footage would be a big hit in the burgeoning home video market. He soon franchised the concept with such titles as ‘Boyfights 2,’ ‘A Boyfights Cookout,’ and ‘Backseat Boyfights: The Trip To Uncle Jack's 70.’"—Arrested Development, Season 3, Episode 8, "Making a Stand," original air date Dec. 19, 2005, teleplay by Mitchell Hurwitz, Chuck Tatham and Karey Dornetto, directed by Peter Lauer

Quote of the Day (Albert Einstein, on Weak Character and ‘The Destruction of Our Intellectual Life’)

“Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character; it becomes lack of power to act with courage proportionate to danger. All this must lead to the destruction of our intellectual life unless the danger summons up strong personalities able to fill the lukewarm and discouraged with new strength and resolution.”— Nobel Prize-winning physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955), speech in honor of Thomas Mann, January 1939, quoted by Abraham Pais, Einstein Lived Here (1994)

Quote of the Day (Elizabeth Samet, on the Use of Force)

“The way we think and talk about force will influence not only the use of American military might abroad, but also our response to the violence that has increasingly been used as a tool of insurrection at home.”— American essayist and historian Elizabeth Samet, Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness (2021)

This Veterans Day, even as we honor their service, let us remember to bind up their wounds—emotional as well as physical.

Quote of the Day (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, on ‘A Steady Purpose’)

“Nothing contributes so much to tranquillize the mind as a steady purpose—a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.”— English novelist Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851), Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. Thomas Aquinas, on ‘God's Love for Things’)

“God's love for things is better than ours. For our will is not the cause of goodness, but responds to goodness. Our liking does not produce the good of the thing we love; it is the other way round—the goodness, real or apparent, of the thing calls forth our love, whether that love be a love which rests content with its object as it finds it or a love which seeks to improve it. But God’s love, which makes things out of nothingness, impregnates all the goodness they have.”— Italian theologian and Doctor of the Church St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), Selected Writings, translated by George N. Shuster and translated by Thomas Gilby (1971)

Quote of the Day (Alexander Lawrence Posey, on Blowing Autumn Leaves)

“The air is filled with
Scarlet leaves, that, dropping,
Rise again, as ever,
With a useless sigh for
Rest—and it is Autumn.”— Muskogee Creek poet, journalist, and humorist Alexander Lawrence Posey (1873 –1908), “Autumn,” originally published in The Poems of Alexander Lawrence Posey (1910), reprinted in American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century (Vol II: Melville to Stickney, American Indian Poetry, Folk Songs and Spirituals), edited by John Hollander (1993).
 
For several hours last night, the wind was as wild as I could remember at any time so far this fall. So fast did the leaves blow and scatter in the path of my car that I couldn’t imagine any leaf could remain in any tree in my neck of the woods of northern New Jersey.
 
(I took the image accompanying this post 12 years ago this month at State Line Lookout, Palisades Interstate Park, in Alpine, NJ.)

TV Quote of the Day (‘McHale’s Navy,’ As an Officer Laments His Eternal Plight)

Captain Wallace Binghamton [played by Joe Flynn] [repeated line, with eyes thrust towards the heavens]: “Why is it me? Why is it always me?”—McHale’s Navy (1962-1966)

In the late Sixties and early Seventies, on what seemed never-running reruns at the time but are much harder to find now, the sitcom McHale’s Navy poked lighthearted fun at the often-deadly business of fighting World War II.

Much like other military service comedies of the era such as Sgt. Bilko and Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.—and in stark contrast to the later M*A*S*H—it was only mildly anti-authority, with much of the humor directed not at the top U.S. naval brass so much as at a middle manager: bespectacled, by-the-book, beleaguered Captain Binghamton.

Character actor Joe Flynn, who perfected a snarl in front of the cameras that was nothing like his warm offscreen personality, was born 100 years ago today in Youngstown, Ohio—and, whenever possible, the show’s writers dropped references to his hometown into their scripts.

An even more constant feature of the show’s 138 episodes in which Flynn appeared was the quote above—a signature line as characteristic and inevitable as Jimmie Walker’s “"Dyn-o-mite!" on Good Times or Peter Falk’s “Just one more thing…” on Columbo.

Poor Binghamton: It was bad enough that a war wound in his backside earned him the nickname "Old Leadbottom," or that he was allergic to goldenrods. He also had to put up with what he waspishly termed the “gang of pirates” of PT-73, who always foiled his inept attempts at harsh discipline.

Forget about Albert Camus with his myth of Sisyphus, or Job railing against God. Binghamton was the person who taught millions of baby boomers about an unfair universe—and all they could do was laugh at his predicament.

Life was ultimately unfair to Joe Flynn, too. Unlike other cast members of McHale’s Navy who lived into their 80s and 90s like Ernest Borgnine, Tim Conway, Carl Ballantine, Bob Hastings, and Gavin Macleod, Flynn died when he was only 49. He had suffered a heart attack and was found at the bottom of his swimming pool, weighed down by a cast on his broken leg.

Well, while he was alive he enjoyed favor from casting directors. Though typecast by his short stature and great near-sightedness (during indoor shooting, he did without lenses in his thick glasses to minimize glare from lighting), he made the most of his opportunities, claiming to have acted in more Disney films (13) than anyone else in the history of the company, and appearing even more often as a guest on Merv Griffin’s talk show (52).

He also maintained warm friendships with other actors, notably Conway, with whom he co-starred in another (short-lived) sitcom several years after McHale's Navy went off the air.

A fine summary of Flynn’s life and career can be found in this December 2020 post on the blog “Silver Scenes.”