Quote of the Day (Laura Ingalls Wilder, on ‘Some Old-Fashioned Things’)

“Some old-fashioned things like fresh air and sunshine are hard to beat. In our mad rush for progress and modern improvements let’s be sure we take along with us all the old-fashioned things worth while.”— American author, journalist, and teacher Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957), A Family Collection: Life on the Farm and in the Country, Making a Home; the Ways of the World, a Woman's Role (1993)

The image accompanying this post shows cast members from the long-running TV series Little House on the Prairie, adapted from the Wilder books, featuring Michael Landon as star, executive producer, and director.

Quote of the Day (Hermann Hesse, on ‘People With Courage and Character’)

“People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.” — German-Swiss Nobel Prize-winning novelist Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), Demian: A Dual-Language Book, translated by Stanley Appelbaum (1919)

Quote of the Day (Barbara Kingsolver, on the Difference Between a Regional and Universal Novel)

“If a novel takes place between eight square blocks of Manhattan, it's universal. And if it happens in Kentucky, it's regional."—Kentucky native and Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, poet, and essayist Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible), quoted by Madison Darbyshire, “Lunch With the FT: Barbara Kingsolver; ‘Everyone Has Friends Impacted by the Opioid Crisis,’” The Financial Times, Jan. 7-8, 2023

The image accompanying this post is of Barbara Kingsolver speaking at BookExpo 2018 during the Adult Author Breakfast. Also on the panel (not pictured) are Nick Offerman, Megan Mullally, Jill Lepore, Nicholas Sparks, and Trevor Noah. The photo was taken May 30, 2018, by Terry Ballard.

Quote of the Day (V.S. Pritchett, on Why So Many Travel Books Fail)

“Literature is made out of the misfortunes of others. A large number of travel books fail simply because of the monotonous good luck of their authors.”—English man of letters V.S. Pritchett (1900-1997), Complete Collected Essays (1991)

TV Quote of the Day (‘Scandal,’ As Olivia Shows Why She’s an Ace Crisis Manager)

Olivia Pope [played by Kerry Washington]: “The mayor's wife is upstairs lying in a pool of blood while my team erases evidence of a crime scene. I'd say it takes a lot to surprise me.”—Scandal, Season 4, Episode 19, “I’m Just a Bill,” original air date Apr. 16, 2015, teleplay by Shonda Rhimes, Raamla Mohamed, and Paul William Davies, directed by Debbie Allen

After watching only a few episodes of Scandal a decade ago, I gave up. Its plots were getting so crazy, I figured, that they were no longer remotely close to reality.

Today, reality has overtaken anything that series showrunner Shonda Rimes could ever dream up. Even Hollis Doyle, a billionaire with Presidential ambitions invented late in the show’s run, can’t begin to suggest how his real-life original is acting these days.

Maybe around the turn of the century, no politician with national ambitions could hope to go far without an Olivia Pope to snuff out scandals. In the new Washington, who needs the likes of her? The new mantra: Be as brazen as you wanna be!

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Thomas More, With Advice on Dealing With Leaders)

“You are now entered into the service of a most noble, wise, and liberal prince. If you will follow my poor advice, you shall, in your counsel giving unto his Grace, ever tell him what he ought to do, but never what he is able to do. For if the lion knew his own strength, hard were it for any man to rule him."—English statesman, lawyer, author, and Roman Catholic martyr Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), with advice to Henry VIII’s new adviser Thomas Cromwell, quoted by William Roper, The Life of Sir Thomas More (1626)

An initial instinct of a historian, let alone an inveterate skeptic, would be to question possible bias in the source of this quote: a biography of Sir Thomas More by son-in-law William Roper.

But this sounds exactly like the kind of thing that More would say, demonstrating loyalty to King Henry VIII while increasingly conscious that the monarch, in his single-minded pursuit of a divorce from Catherine of Aragon to wed Anne Boleyn, was anything but a “most noble, wise, and liberal prince.”

It was also carefully phrased wisdom for Thomas Cromwell, the rising power in the nation because of his support of the king in Parliament. It reflected how More—resigning as Lord Chancellor and desiring to be left alone in retirement—knew that anything negative he said would be reported immediately to Henry—more likely than not, by Cromwell himself.

With Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall novel trilogy and its PBS adaptation, Cromwell has emerged as a revisionist hero of sorts, with More depicted as a religious fanatic bent on persecuting heretics.

To be sure, More did prosecute heretics. But, for all his energy, intelligence, and administrative ability, Cromwell was not only no improvement but worse than More, torturing and putting to death Catholics who opposed Henry’s break from Rome (a rupture motivated by dynastic and libidinal reasons rather than by theology). 

In transforming this ruthless minister into a sympathetic figure, Mantel engineered one of the more successful historical hijackings in recent memory.

(See my prior post on how Simon Schama, Eamon Duffy, and other historians persuasively argue that, despite Mantel’s considerable skill as a novelist, “Just because More hardly qualifies as a perfect man does not make Cromwell a remotely good one.”)

Moreover, while More abstained from the perks of power, Cromwell relished them—not just from all the offices and titles that Henry bestowed on him (for a time), but also from confiscations related to the dissolution of Roman Catholic monasteries. Self-interest—the acquisition of power and wealth—guided his actions.

In the end, did it really profit him? More’s warning proved prophetic. In his anxiety to do the king’s bidding, Cromwell met with disaster, as—a couple of the king’s wives later—he arranged a match with Anne of Cleves, a woman the monarch found so homely that he had his counselor beheaded.

Current events should make those who look kindly on Cromwell think again on this Machiavellian counselor who pioneered the modern police state. Appeasing a capricious leader with a voracious appetite for power (“I run the country and the world”) offers only initial benefits.

Conscience may or may not be dead among his enablers. But they will continually dread the possibility that, as More warned, it may no longer be possible to persuade or “rule” their mad leader about what constitutes his real interest anymore—and he may even turn on them in the end.

This Day in Populist History (Death of William Jennings Bryan, ‘The Great Commoner’)

July 26, 1925—Less than a week after the conclusion of the trial that damaged his reputation as an advocate of liberal causes, William Jennings Bryan—whose silver tongue led him to stints in Congress and heading the State Department, not to mention a three-time Democratic nominee for President—died in his sleep at age 65 in Dayton, Tenn.

Bryan had come to this small community as the lead prosecutor in the case against John T. Scopes for teaching evolution in the public schools—a notorious trial I discussed in this post from 15 years ago. Already battling diabetes, he had suffered in the recent oppressive heat in an age lacking air conditioning, particularly during his grueling and highly unusual cross-examination by defense attorney Clarence Darrow.

The final resting place for this politician, among war veterans in Arlington National Cemetery, might surprise many. But Bryan was entitled, as a colonel of volunteers in the Third Nebraska Regiment in the Spanish-American War—though his widow kept in mind his profound aversion to war (evidenced in his opposition to imperialism) by eschewing a full military funeral.

In his lifetime, because of his tireless dedication to the ordinary citizen, Bryan earned the nickname “The Great Commoner,” and even politicians who disagreed strongly with him, such as the Republican incumbent in the White House, Calvin Coolidge, paid tribute to him at his death.

But since then, the meaning and value of his career have been called into question primarily because of three men: iconoclastic journalist H.L. Mencken, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Richard Hofstadter, and Donald Trump.

Throughout the Scopes “Monkey Trial,” Mencken had poured scorn on Dayton as a symbol of backward, anti-scientific ignorance and Bryan as its unworthy champion. Bryan’s death provoked the Baltimore Sun columnist and American Mercury editor into writing an obituary that has become legendary for its vitriol. This sample will give a sense of its tone:

“If the fellow was sincere, then so was P. T. Barnum. The word is disgraced and degraded by such uses. He was, in fact, a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without sense or dignity. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses.”

With a blizzard of canceled subscriptions and pulled advertisements over the incendiary post mortem, Mencken was forced to revise it after the first edition hit the streets of Baltimore, according to Glenn Branch’s July 2014 account on the Website of the National Center for Science Education. Nevertheless, the journalist left those passages intact when the article was reprinted in The American Mercury, a publication influential in the kind of urban intellectual circles already unsympathetic to Bryan’s embrace of creationism and Prohibition.

Mencken’s brief was given scholarly heft by way of Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter in The Age of Reform, an examination of the Populist and Progressive movements, and especially his chapter on Bryan as “The Democrat as Revivalist” in the even more widely read The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It.

More coolly ironic than Mencken, Hofstadter ended up just as dismissive towards Bryan, and for many of the same reasons: “He closed his career in much the same role as he had begun it in 1896: a provincial politician following a provincial populace in provincial prejudices.”

The growing intellectual disaffection expressed by Mencken and Hofstadter took more widely seen creative form in the Jerome Lawrence-Robert E. Lee play Inherit the Wind.

Written at the height of the McCarthy Era, it highlighted the Scopes trial as a distant mirror of the threats to freedom of inquiry posed by anti-Communist hysteria. Its heavy use of the transcript of the Bryan-Darrow courtroom clash, however, blinded many viewers to its deviations from fact concerning other aspects of the trial and its participants.

Lastly, I would argue, Donald Trump’s domination of the political arena has led to countless facile interpretations of the meaning of “populism.” Characteristics of the term, springing from the writings of Mencken and Hofstadter, include anti-elitism, anti-intellectualism, suspicion of large institutional forces, nativism, anti-Semitism, and conspiratorialism.

The link between Trump and Bryan was surely cinched when Steve Bannon told a CPAC audience in 2017 that the former reality TV star was “probably the greatest public speaker in those large arenas since William Jennings Bryan.”

But Trump’s dark whisperer has even less reason to link the New York plutocrat to the heartland populist than he does to associate him with Andrew Jackson. More balanced—and, I would argue, more accurate—assessments of Bryan can be found in this 2017 Politico article by Michael Kazin and especially in Garry Wills’ scintillating 1990 study, Under God: Religion and American Politics.

Following Bryan’s electrifying “Cross of Gold” address at the 1896 Democratic National Convention, he had become over the next 30 years “the most important figure in the reform politics of America,” Wills observes, with his three Presidential campaigns “the most leftist mounted by a major party’s candidate in our entire history.”

The list of causes that Bryan championed early on are especially telling: “women’s suffrage, the federal income tax, railroad regulation, currency reform, state initiative and referendum, a Department of Labor, campaign fund disclosure, and opposition to capital punishment.”

In trying to curb the excesses of the Gilded Age—and in disdaining the lure of easy money, even when it might have bolstered his bank account and Presidential prospects—Bryan contrasts as dramatically with Trump as any other politician in Hofstadter’s “American Political Tradition.” We do a disservice to him and to the desperate people looking for a similar champion in likening him to Trump.

Quote of the Day (Mike Lofgren, on a Longtime Excuse from Lobbyists)

“They keep moving the goal posts on us. Another hoary sports metaphor implying unfair treatment of the lobbyist’s client. In reality, what it means is that the government procurement organization has the temerity to demand that the client meet the required cost, schedule, and performance criteria in the contract.”— Historian, writer, and former congressional staff member Mike Lofgren, “The Washington Lobbyist’s Phrasebook,” Washington Monthly, July/August 2018 issue

As I read this quote, I chuckled at business executives’ lament about “moving the goal posts.” These days, after President Trump permitted Elon Musk to bulldoze multiple federal regulatory agencies, there are few if any goal posts, let alone yardsticks, for the business world to complain about.

That may turn out to be a mixed blessing not just for American society but for corporate libertarians.

For one thing, CEOs will no longer have an excuse for their underperformance. (Not that they won’t try to create new ones, anyway.)

Worse, though, is the blizzard of changes to the procurement process resulting from Trump’s aggressive use of executive orders—150 from his inauguration through early May, according to a “Government Contracts Update” issued that month by the international law firm Vinson & Elkins. Who can imagine what the longtime bible of the procurement process, the Federal Register (pictured), will look like a year from now?

Uncertainty is the new coin of the realm in a Washington dominated by a certain “stable genius.”

The “Update” focuses on four of those executive orders, laying out, in admirably cogent detail, their impacts. But even before that, it surely leaves many readers in a sweat by cautioning them to brace for “an increased risk of terminations, changes, delays, and disputes.”

How bad could this be? How about Executive Order 14275 (“Restoring Common Sense to Federal Procurement”), sharply reducing and narrowing compliance obligations—but also eliminating the uniformity and predictability derived from long experience with relevant agencies?

What George Wallace memorably derided as “pointy-headed bureaucrats” are going to look much more appealing than a new class of officials, all trying to guess at the intentions of a mercurial President.

Trump and Musk promoted their changes as a means of cutting a swath through the “deep state” of unelected bureaucrats who thwart Presidential will. That’s much to the chagrin of Lofgren, a conservative Republican who coined the term and even wrote a book on the subject, only to see it co-opted in ways he never intended.

By this June, Lofgren, having long since vowed not to vote for the GOP again until it would “demonstrate to me that they've purged Trumpism," was starkly warning, in an essay for Salon, that the term “authoritarian” was insufficient to describe how the administration is now “distinctly moving toward the principal goal of the totalitarian project: erasing the distinction between civil society and the state”—i.e., inserting itself into “every facet of American life,” including “dictating prices to retail businesses.”

The chances of what Michael Waldman, head of the Brennan Center for Justice, foresaw with the second coming of Trump in November—the rise of “crony capitalism” due to the widespread imposition of tariffs—can only double now with the new helter-skelter procurement regime in Washington.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Yes, Minister,’ With the Transatlantic ‘Golden Rule’ of Scandal Containment)

Bernard Woolley, the Minister’s principal private secretary [played by Derek Fowlds, left]: “So what do we believe in?”

Sir Humphrey Appleby, the Permanent Secretary for the Ministry of Administrative Affairs [played by Nigel Hawthorne, right]: “At this moment, Bernard, we believe in stopping the minister from informing the Prime Minister.”

Bernard: “But why?”

Sir Humphrey: “Because once the Prime Minister knows, there will have to be an enquiry, like Watergate. The investigation of a trivial break-in led to one ghastly revelation after another and finally the downfall of a president. The golden rule is don't lift lids off cans of worms. Everything is connected to everything else. Who said that?”

Bernard: “The Cabinet Secretary?”

Sir Humphrey: “Nearly right. Actually, it was Lenin.” —Yes, Minister, Season 3, Episode 6, “The Whisky Priest,” original air date Dec. 16, 1982, teleplay by Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, directed by Peter Whitmore

These days, the Trump Administration is well past the “golden rule” propounded by Sir Humphrey, let alone Jesus Christ. As he looks around the fast-developing wreckage of the Epstein scandal, the President must wonder, “How did I ever get into this mess?”

So now, the Orange Menace is resorting to what may be thought of as his 3D Defense. You know: Deny, Distract, Delay, then repeat, till events break your way.

It’s worked before. Let’s see if the old Trump Voodoo gets him out of this latest doo-doo. With Congress closing sooner this week (courtesy of House Speaker Mike Johnson), anything can happen.

Quote of the Day (Henry James, on a Beach in Summer)

“As you recline upon the beach, you may observe Mademoiselle X… the actress of the Palais Royal Theater, whom you have seen and applauded behind the footlights. She wears a bathing dress in which, as regards the trousers, even what I have called the minimum has been appreciably scanted; but she trips down, surveying her breezy nether limbs. ‘C'est convemable, j'espere, eh?’ says Mademoiselle, and trots up the springboard which projects over the waves with one end uppermost, like a great seesaw. She balances a moment, and then gives a great aerial dive, executing on the way the most graceful of somersaults. This performance Mademoiselle X repeats during the ensuing hour, at intervals of five minutes, and leaves you, as you lie tossing little stones into the water, to ponder the curious and delicate question why a lady may go so far as to put herself into a single scant, clinging garment and take a straight leap, head downward, before 300 spectators, without violation of propriety, leaving the impropriety to begin with her turning over in the air in such a way that for five seconds her head is upward. The logic of the matter is mysterious; white and black are divided by a hair. But the fact remains that virtue is on one side of the hair and vice on the other. There are some days here so still and radiant, however, that it seems as if vice itself, steeped in such an air and such a sea, might be diluted into innocence.” — American expatriate novelist-essayist Henry James (1843-1916), Parisian Sketches: Letters to the “New York Tribune,”1875-1876, edited by Leon Edel (1957)

Quote of the Day (John Newton, on the Christian’s ‘Many Difficulties He Has Had to Struggle With’)

“The exercised and experienced Christian, by the knowledge he has gained of his own heart and the many difficulties he has had to struggle with, acquires a skill and compassion in dealing with others; and without such exercise, all our study, diligence, and gifts in other ways, would leave us much at a loss in some of the most important parts of our calling.”— English Anglican clergyman, hymn writer, and slavery abolitionist John Newton (1725-1807), Aug. 30, 1770 letter, in Cardiphonia: or, The Utterance of the Heart (1780)

John Newton—born 300 years ago today in London—knew all about a Christian’s “difficulties.” Before his conversion, his days, as a young sailor on a slave ship, been filled with drinking, gambling, and profanity. Nor was his radical change of heart the product of a single day: it would be some years before he gave up how he made money, as the captain of several slave ships and an investor in the slave trade.

But when the change was complete, it was remarkable. He became one of the most prominent proponents of the African slave trade, and lived to see Great Britain abolish the practice just a few months before his death.

Long after his death, Newton has continued to influence lives. Among his compositions is “Amazing Grace,” perhaps the best-known Christian hymn. It has sustained movements, notably for civil rights, and, at the most personal level, individuals struggling with substance abuse, as related in this March 2018 blog post on the Website for the Council on Recovery.

One of those individuals is singer Judy Collins, who began singing the hymn in concert in 1964 and recorded it in 1970. In an interview with Beliefnet, she told how the song offers “a spiritual message which anybody can relate to, because people understand that transformation happens. And that it comes as a surprise and is often inexplicable, which means grace has to have something to do with it.”

Quote of the Day (Billy Joel, on Being ‘Realtor to the Stars’)

“I never went without a meal. I just didn’t have the money I was supposed to have. I know what poor is. When I was a kid, we didn’t have anything. There was a rumor that I filed for bankruptcy — that never happened, either. I owed Uncle Sam a couple of million bucks in income tax, and the money that I thought was there, wasn’t there. I had to sell a place in the city. I was building a house out here in the Hamptons, and I owned a place on Central Park West. I sold it to Sting. I was praying for a rock star. They don’t care what their accountant says. If they want something, they buy it. Then I sold the house that I was building to Seinfeld. I keep exchanging star homes. I bought Roy Scheider’s house. Mickey Drexler bought my old place in Martha’s Vineyard. I’m the Realtor to the stars.” —American rock ‘n’ roll singer-songwriter Billy Joel quoted by Andrew Goldman, “Billy Joel on Not Working, Not Giving Up Drinking and Not Caring What Elton John Says About Any of It,” The New York Times Sunday Magazine, May 26, 2013

I don’t have HBO Max, so I don’t have access to its new two-part documentary on Billy Joel, And So It Goes. But a close relative who saw Part I had excellent things to say about it.

Anyway, recently I came across an interview containing the quote above from the Piano Man. Maybe, in one way or another, he’ll discuss in the documentary his assorted financial messes that led him to his adventures in real estate. Above all, I hope he recovers quickly from his recent health scare, and that we’ll hear him play and sing again, in one form or another.

Quote of the Day (George Orwell, on The Party’s ‘Final, Most Essential Command’)

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”—English novelist essayist Eric Blair, a.k.a. George Orwell (1904-1950), 1984 (1949)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Clueless,’ Comparing Two Forms of Futility)

Cher Horowitz [played by Alicia Silverstone]: “Searching for a boy in high school is as useless as searching for meaning in a Pauly Shore movie.”—Clueless (1995), written and directed by Amy Heckerling (1995)

Thirty years ago this month, Amy Heckerling’s loose contemporary version of Jane Austen’s novel Emma was released. It remains clever in its own right, well worth watching and re-watching (unlike, say, Pauly Shore movies). 

And, if it gets kids interested in reading Austen, as well as Hamlet (a play that Cher, astonishingly, knows well enough to identify the source of a famous quote), so much the better.

Quote of the Day (Paul Volcker, on Threats to the Federal Reserve’s Independence)

“The credibility of the Federal Reserve, its commitment to maintaining price stability, and its ability to stand up against partisan political pressures are critical. Independence can’t just be a slogan. Nor does the language of the Federal Reserve Act itself assure protection.”—Economist and former Federal Reserve Board chair Paul Volcker (1927-2019), “The Fed and Big Banking at the Crossroads,” The New York Review of Books, Aug. 15, 2013

Before he died six years after writing the above, many of the fears of Paul Volcker (pictured) about the Fed’s loss of independence were being borne out. As Donald Trump rained down insults on his own appointee to head the financial institution, Jerome Powell, Volcker warned in even starker terms about the consequences of these threats:

“Not since just after the second world war have we seen a president so openly seek to dictate policy to the Fed,” Volcker and Christine Harper wrote in Keeping At It: The Quest for Sound Money and Good Government. “That is a matter of great concern, given that the central bank is one of our key governmental institutions, carefully designed to be free of purely partisan attacks.”

Volcker also placed this within the larger context of “nihilistic forces” that not only aim to roll back environmental regulations, but also “to discredit the pillars of our democracy: voting rights and fair elections, the rule of law, the free press, the separation of powers, the belief in science, and the concept of truth itself.”

Any resemblance to the Presidential administration at that time was anything but coincidental.

Today, another half-dozen years after what amounted to Volcker’s valedictory, everything he tried to alert Americans about has come closer to reality.

Not content to badger an inflation-conscious Powell into lowering interest rates, Trump now seems bent on forcing him out before the Fed chair’s term expires next year—even to the point of surprising members of Congress, meeting him on an unrelated matter, by waving before them a draft letter firing him.

Since by law the Fed chair can only be removed “for cause”—i.e., malfeasance—Trump’s Cabinet and Capitol Hill stooges are braying for an investigation of what they regard as inordinate renovation expenses at its headquarters.

I would call the evidence for this “paper thin,” except that it doesn’t even deserve this phrase. How this renovation is more egregious than questionable outlaws at other buildings—including Pete Hegseth’s space next to the Defense Department’s press briefing room, modified into a make-up studio—goes unexplained.

In May, the Supreme Court, in a ruling that temporarily allowed Trump to terminate board members of other independent agencies such as the National Labor Relations Board, hinted that he could not wield that power against the Fed. Why Powell would enjoy such security, unlike other heads of agencies created by Congress, the conservative majority did not say.

In any case, I don’t think the Supremes can be counted on to aid Powell if he’s dismissed. 

Four decades ago, “Doonesbury” cartoonist Garry Trudeau annoyed then-Vice President George H.W. Bush, then trying to placate the GOP right wing by changing some of his prior positions, with a strip on how he'd been persuaded to “place his embattled manhood in a blind trust,” to be “restored to him only in times of national emergency."

That phenomenon seems to be occurring on the court of last appeal, with the only opposition to Trump’s assault on the Constitution coming from the females on the bench—the three Democrats joined, very occasionally, by the only Republican-appointed woman, Amy Comey Barrett. The men? Missing in action during our current "national emergency."

With densely presented data and periodic oracular pronouncements, the Fed has often seemed remote to most Americans. (No surprise that William Greider’s history of the institution was entitled Secrets of the Temple.)

But observers of central banks the world over are doing little to hide their anxiety over Trump’s latest attempt at winning through intimidation. Among the dreaded possibilities:

*Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent adding the Fed to his responsibilities, in much the same way that Secretary of State Marco Rubio now functions as effective head of agencies closed via Elon Musk’s DOGE order;

*Trump naming a replacement months before Powell actually steps down, diluting the authority of the current Fed chair;

*Destabilizing foreign markets because of rising yields on long-term U.S. government debt;

*Sinking the value of the dollar;

*Whipping up uncertainty in a market guessing at the government’s intentions;

*Creating a revolving door of central bank heads directly controlled by a leader with authoritarian aspirations—similar to Turkey, home of one of Trump’s favorite foreign allies, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan; and, 

*Yielding to such leaders’ demand for low interest rates, no matter the circumstances—which, in Erdogan’s case, has meant five central bank governors in the past six years, who collectively have watched Turkey’s inflation rate climb to its current 35%.

Ultimately, the Powell controversy revolves around two mindsets: Trump’s and the collective mental calculus of those who could drive up prices. 

The question of Presidential mental acuity that ultimately unraveled Joe Biden’s reelection chances should, by rights, now come into play in assessing Trump’s economic policy. Last week, listener eyebrows shot up involuntarily when Trump said he was “surprised” Powell was appointed Fed chair, blaming the nomination on Biden—somehow forgetting that he was the one who made the decision in 2017.

Together, management and employees could factor in inflation permitted by a Trump-cowed Fed into their own strategies, noted Josh Bivens’ “Working Economics Blog” post last week on the Economic Policy Institute’s Website:

“If Trump degrades confidence in the Fed’s political independence, any future inflation burst (say, one driven by a large increase in budget deficits) could well get embedded quickly into expectations, as workers and firms assume the Fed would not be effective in constraining inflation going forward. People will begin planning with inflation in mind and it could well begin accelerating.”

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Albert Schweitzer, on Those Who Rekindle Our Inner Light)

“As a rule there are in everyone all sorts of good ideas, ready like tinder. But much of this tinder catches fire, or catches it successfully, only when it meets some flame or spark from outside, i.e. from some other person. Often, too, our own light goes out, and is rekindled by some experience we go through with a fellow man. Thus we have each of us cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flames within us.”— Nobel Peace Prize-winning German-French theologian, organist, musicologist, writer, humanitarian, philosopher, and physician Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), Memoirs of Childhood and Youth, translated by C. T. Campion (1924)

Quote of the Day (Poet Denise Levertov, With Thoughts in a Garden)

“In a garden grene whenas I lay—

you set the words to a tune so plaintive
it plucks its way through my life as through a wood.

As through a wood, shadows and light between birches,
gliding a moment in open glades, hidden by thickets of holly
your life winds in me.” — British-born American poet and Roman Catholic convert Denise Levertov (1923-1997), “Olga Poems,” in The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov, edited by Paul A. Lacey and Anne Dewey (2013)

Flashback, July 1905: Leaders Protest US Civil-Rights Reverses at Niagara Meeting

Frustrated alike by reversals of hard-won rights and by accommodation to the injustice by the most prominent African-American leader in the United States, public intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois (pictured) and 29 other activists concluded a meeting at Niagara Falls 120 years ago this week with a ringing call to end racial discrimination and disenfranchisement.

That last sentence contains two words that require additional explanation. By “Niagara Falls,” I refer not to the wonderful waterfall in the United States but the one over the border in Canada. That’s because the organizers’ hope for an American site was immediately foiled by one of the conditions they were protesting: unequal accommodations. Unable to find lodging, the group had to look north, to the Erie Beach Hotel in Ontario.

In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Du Bois argued that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.” The struggle to erase the color line would consume his attention for the remaining six decades of his life.

But at this point, it led to a sharper break with the educator he had till now gingerly blamed for not pressing more aggressively to advance their race: Tuskegee Institute President Booker T. Washington.

At the simplest level, their differences involved economic (Washington) versus political (DuBois) strategies. Washington’s emphasis on industrial-based education, DuBois believed, siphoned money from liberal-arts program.

In his “Of Booker T. Washington and Others” section of The Souls of Black Folk, DuBois, while crediting his sincerity and acknowledging his sensitive position vis-à-vis whites, had outlined the damage he had done, noting that “so far as Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, North or South, does not rightly value the privilege and duty of voting, belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinctions, and opposes the higher training and ambition of our brighter minds,—so far as he, the South, or the Nation, does this,—we must unceasingly and firmly oppose them.”

Now, at the Niagara meeting, he and other activists dissatisfied with Washington--a leader, they were increasingly coming to believe, was trying to crush his critics in the movement--presented a more wide-ranging, militant program of reform—a “Declaration of Principles” encompassing suffrage, education, justice, courts, public opinion, segregated railroad cars, the military, Christian preachers’ acquiescence to curtailing civil rights, and labor unions.

The West, unlike the other three regions of the country, was not represented at the meeting. Neither were women, to their considerable consternation.

(Eventually, when pressed by outraged female activists, DuBois offered a compromise for the next meeting: women could attend, but without congregating with male delegates—an ironic gender equivalent of “separate but equal.”)

The Niagara organizers’ problems with Democrats were of long standing; this was, after all, the party that won back the South through sustained resistance to Reconstruction in the 1870s, then began to slip away at all the gains won by blacks in the Civil War.

But their anger was now also aroused by the Republican Party, which, despite assurances to the contrary, had done nothing to advance the cause of civil rights in Congress.

The following year, interest in the cause had grown, which the attendees now meeting in Harpers Ferry, WV, the site of John Brown’s raid on a federal armory that, the activists felt, was his “martyrdom.”

Such was the segregationist state of American news, however, that the Niagara Movement could only publicize the cause within the African-American community.

Lack of financial support led to the dissolution of the movement by the end of the decade. But it had achieved its purpose by setting an ambitious civil-rights agenda and by throwing down a challenge to Washington.

In 1909 Niagara movement members joined forces with other civil-rights organizations and white allies to form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which presented a more high-profile platform for the cause.

In helping to form the NAACP, DuBois insisted on a lesson he had learned through leading the Niagara movement: the structure of the organization should be bottom-up rather than top-down, including affordable fees to encourage membership. Such changes would be helpful in rallying African-Americans to defend their rights and to change white opinion.

Quote of the Day (Peter Schuck, Prematurely Taking Issue With the Notion of a ‘New Nativism’)

“Americans will tolerate relatively high levels of immigration, and even increases in certain categories, as long as they are satisfied that newcomers pay their own way, don't get special breaks, and obey the law. And the policies enacted by the Congress in 1996 and 1997 are largely consistent with this. Congress has tempered the high annual quota of legal immigrants set in the liberal 1990 immigration law with strong measures to exclude illegal aliens, deport criminals, reduce aliens’ access to welfare, and limit their procedural rights. This is a hard balance to strike, and there have been some harsh, unjust, and downright foolish excesses. But it's absurd to speak of ‘a new nativism.’”—American legal scholar Peter H. Schuck, “The Open Society,” The New Republic, Apr. 13, 1998

When I finished reading this article I came across recently, it was hard not to shake my head. Twenty-seven years after retired Yale law professor Peter Schuck wrote the words above, it certainly is the case that a “new nativism” is afoot in America.

Immigration is one of the key issues that sundered the former Republican Establishment from the party base. It even provoked consternation among the MAGA faithful when Donald Trump briefly suggested in his first term that he could back “Dreamers” (i.e., undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children and desire a path to legal status) in exchange for stricter immigration policies.

It's possible to argue that events and personalities of the last quarter-century have fundamentally altered the atmosphere that Schuck so confidently surveyed: 

*The 9/11 attacks brought to a boil many Americans’ suspicions about a new “other”—Moslem immigrants. Just before the turn of the millennium;

*Lou Dobbs was still primarily concerned with economic prognostications rather than with an increasingly hysterical anti-immigrant agenda. 

*Fox News, still just a few years old, was only beginning to flex strength with its right-wing audience.

But I can’t help feeling that a contrarian mindset, not to mention wishful thinking, blinded Professor Schuck—and not a few liberals in Bill Clinton’s second term—to rising anti-immigrant sentiment expressed in California’s Proposition 187 restricting illegal immigrants from using non-emergency health care, public education, and other services, not to mention Pat Buchanan’s 1992 Presidential campaign.

The only requirements for sparking the fire were fears—of attacks on our soil be fire and of jobs lost to other foreigners. Both arrived in the new century.

And now, we have plenty more "harsh, unjust, and downright foolish excesses" in immigration law.

TV Quote of the Day (‘WKRP in Cincinnati,’ on Innovative Weather Forecasting and Traffic Reporting)

Andy Travis [played by Gary Sandy]: “Now, you have this thing you call ‘Eyewitness Weather.’ What is that?”

Les Nessman [played by Richard Sanders]: “Well, I just look out the window and witness the weather.”

Andy: “Uh-huh. And what about this station's traffic helicopter?”

Les: “We don't have one.”

Andy: “So why do we have helicopter reports?”

Les: “Well, that's just me. See, I just get on the air and do this..”[standing at attention, beating his chest to make propeller sounds] "…The traffic today is light to heavy..."—  WKRP in Cincinnati, Season 1, Episode 1, “Pilot: Part 1,” original air date Sept. 18, 1978, teleplay by Hugh Wilson, directed by Jay Sandrich

The way things are going in this country with federal budget cuts—including at the National Weather Service—that “Eyewitness Weather” in which Les takes such pride might be spreading across the country.

Gee, I wonder how he would account for climate change?

Quote of the Day (Erle Stanley Gardner, With a Most Un-Perry Mason-Like Character)

“I’m Ed Jenkins, known from end one of the country to the other as ‘the phantom crook,’ and proud of it too. I’m not a second-story bird or a yeggman. I sit tight, watching the game and asking nothing but to let alone. They won’t leave me alone, though. Crooked politicians, ham detectives, cheap crooks, local bosses of the tenderloin, all of ‘em tie into me at times, thinking I can’t raise a how. By the time the smoke blows away, I’m usually sitting somewhere near the top of the heap, a little richer in money, and a little farther removed from any possible police protection. The cops don’t figure they’re hired to protect me. They think it’s up to them to pinch me….Oh, well, it’s all in a lifetime.”—American crime-fiction writer Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1970), “Three O’Clock in the Morning,” originally published in Black Mask Magazine, July 1925, reprinted in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, November/December 2023 

Well, I could have written about Erle Stanley Gardner because today is the 136^th anniversary of his birth (see my blog post from 16 years ago).

But I have been meaning to write about him for a while, because 100 years ago this month, his short story “Three O’Clock in the Morning” was published in the pulp magazine Black Mask.

When I read the reprint of this tale in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, I was struck by its low-life lingo, a far cry from the later seasons of the much-loved TV series adaptation of his Perry Mason mysteries. 

The tone was closer to the show in its first few seasons, when Gardner’s great lawyer-detective was ready to pull a stunt so unorthodox that it invariably left prosecutor Hamilton Burger sputtering about “tricks,” and  the extensive location shooting and shadowy night-time scenes suggested a TV counterpart to film noir.

The short story also made me think a bit more about the limited-series reboot of the attorney starring Matthew Rhys that HBO pulled the plug on after only two seasons.

While this more recent version viewed early 20^th-century characters through 21st-century eyes, in ways that often diverged dramatically from how Gardner conceived Perry, devoted secretary Della Street, and private detective Paul Drake, it did capture something fundamental about the era when this amazingly prolific author first began writing.

At this time, Prohibition unwittingly unleashed dark forces in which the lines between "good"  ("the cops") and evil ("Crooked politicians, ham detectives, cheap crooks, local bosses of the tenderloin") became far more tenuous.

Reading this story made me wonder how much of it was based on scruffy types whom Gardner, still maintaining his legal practice at this point, might have met, versus how much “Ed Jenkins” was meant to meet the expectations of the “hard-boiled” crime market that Black Mask helped create by publishing Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Cornell Woolrich, among others?

To me, this just goes to show how, over a long career, a writer can evolve, even when trying to fit into the conventions of genre fiction, as Gardner was clearly trying to do.

Quote of the Day (Adam Smith, on ‘The Virtues of Sensitivity and Self-Control’)

“Just as taste and good judgment, when considered as qualities that deserve praise and admiration, are supposed to imply an uncommon delicacy of sentiment and acuteness of understanding, so the virtues of sensitivity and self-control are thought of as consisting in uncommon degrees of those qualities. The likeable virtue of humaneness requires, surely, a level of sensitivity far higher than is possessed by crude ordinary people. The great and exalted virtue of magnanimity undoubtedly demands a much higher degree of self-control than the weakest of mortals could exert. Just as the common level of intellect doesn’t involve any notable talents, so the common level of moral qualities doesn’t involve any virtues. Virtue is excellence—something uncommonly great and beautiful, rising far above what is vulgar and ordinary. The likeable virtues consist in a degree of sensitivity that surprises us by its exquisite and unexpected delicacy and tenderness. The awe-inspiring and respectworthy virtues consist in a degree of self-control that astonishes us by its amazing superiority over the most ungovernable passions of human nature.”— Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith (1723-1790), The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)

These days, Adam Smith’s economic precepts in The Wealth of Nations (1776) are much more likely to be followed than the moral ones propounded here. Indeed, those virtues may be more flouted by the rich, famous, and powerful than by ordinary citizens. So much the worse for all of us.