Flashback, September 1951: ‘Streetcar’ Brings to Hollywood ‘The Method'—and Censorship Issues

A Streetcar Named Desire wasn’t the first Hollywood adaptation of a Tennessee Williams play when it was released in the U.S. 75 years ago this month, but it left the most lasting impact on the film industry. Unlike The Glass Menagerie the year before, it was perfectly cast and adeptly directed by Elia Kazan (as he had done on Broadway).

Moreover, with Marlon Brando repeating his sensational stage turn as brutish Stanley Kowalski only a few weeks after Montgomery Clift’s acclaimed performance in A Place in the Sun, it demonstrated the full power of the style that Kazan had been advancing at New York’s Actors Studio: “The Method,” with performers encouraged to use their memories of past emotional experiences to create a character.

Critics and audiences applauded how Kazan had translated the sweaty sensuality and tragic lyricism of Williams’ Pulitzer Prize winning drama from the stage to the screen.

But the source material’s frank depiction of an offscreen gay character, nymphomania, and sexual assault, among other issues, put Warner Brothers Studio on a collision course with the movie industry’s censorship arm, the Production Code Administration (PCA).

Much of this latter story is told in a long section of Inside Warner Bros. (1935-1951), a volume of revealing letters, telegrams and memos edited by film scholar Rudy Behlmer. As much of a landmark as the film is considered in terms of its overall excellence (including, by Alex North, the first notable jazz score in a major Hollywood film, and Harry Stradling’s vivid cinematography), the pitched battle over its content represented a milestone of its own.

PCA executive Geoffrey Shurlock may have summed it up best: “For the first time we were confronted with a picture that was obviously not family entertainment. Before then we had considered Anna Karenina a big deal. Streetcar broke the barrier.”

Kazan and Williams presented a united front against the PCA. They grudgingly softened the treatment of the promiscuity of faded Southern belle Blanche DuBois and the intimate relationship between her dead husband and an older male friend. But they drew the line at the PCA’s suggestion that she could imagine her rape by Stanley because of her mental fragility.

Williams protested to PCA head Joseph Breen, vehemently and eloquently, that if the sexual assault were treated in this fashion, “the play loses its meaning, which is the ravishment of the tender, the sensitive, the delicate, by the safe and brutal forces in modern society. It is a positive plea for comprehension.” He vowed that if he and Kazan had “our backs against the wall…none of us is going to throw in the towel!”

Kazan and Williams won that round, though making one compromise (spoiler alert): Stanley would be punished by having wife Stella leave him. They were able to prevail again when Breen seemed ready to wobble about the rape scene.

What neither the director nor playwright could imagine was that the Catholic Legion of Decency would interfere just as the film was ready for release. Its threat to issue a “Condemned” rating—guaranteed box-office poison—led Warner Brothers to cancel the movie’s Radio City booking and call editor David Weisbart in, without Kazan’s knowledge, to make further excisions.

The studio refused to accede to Kazan’s plea that the film be released in two versions clearly labeled as being edited or not. In all, he estimated, the 12 cuts amounted to roughly five minutes—footage not seen until Warner Brothers restored it for the director’s version in 1993. (The deleted scenes are in this YouTube clip.)

Vivien Leigh, the only member of the central quartet at the heart of the drama who was not carried over from Broadway (producers thought she would provide a greater box-office boost than Jessica Tandy), was, unlike Brando, Kim Hunter, and Karl Malden, classically trained rather than schooled in The Method.

But she had played Blanche in a London production directed by husband Laurence Olivier, and, as author and screenwriter Logan Kelly discussed in this 2023 post on the Collider blog, she threw herself so strongly into the role onscreen that it exacerbated the bipolar disorder that was already afflicting her.

Though Brando drew favorable notices with his film debut the prior year, The Men, it was Streetcar that stunned longtime Hollywood professionals. 

His transformation into Blanche’s loutish but sensual antagonist was revelatory, in the same manner described by Truman Capote watching him in rehearsal for Broadway: “with what chameleon ease Brando acquired the character’s cruel and gaudy colors, how superbly, like a guileful salamander, he slithered into the part, how his own persona evaporated.”

Ironically, despite the effect that Brando’s performance had on cinema acting, he did not join fellow nominated cast members Leigh, Hunter, and Malden in the winner’s circle. Best Actor that year went to industry veteran Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen. Brando would have to wait another three years to collect his, for the equally electrifying On the Waterfront.

Flashback, September 2016: Musical Throwback ‘La La Land’ Builds Premature Momentum for Oscar Season

In an effort to build industry word-of-mouth before awards season, the musical dramedy La La Land premiered to North American audiences for the first time in September 2016, at the Telluride and Toronto International Film Festivals, earning such rapturous approval that it became the film to beat for Best Picture Oscar.

The film’s promoters forgot an important lesson, however: don’t peak too soon lest naysayers pick it apart and allow competitors to overtake it. So it proved in the end the following winter, when La La Land walked off with six Oscars except the one most coveted: Best Motion Picture of the Year.

All of that seemed far away when these early audiences responded positively. At Telluride, for instance, the film was greeted with two mid-movie ovations (following the freeway and Griffith Park sequences) and another 20-second one at the end.

What elicited the affection of these and later audiences? Certainly stars Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, displaying the same chemistry they brought to Crazy Stupid Love and Gangster Squad, as well as a months-long pre-shooting dedication that allowed them to surmount their lack of much prior vocal and dance training.

But the film also functioned as an irresistible double love story: not just between the two attractive young people at its center, but with the city that served as the focus of their entertainment dreams.

Writer-director Damien Chazelle and cinematographers Linus Sandgren and Tom Cross might not have produced the grittiest cinematic depiction of Los Angeles, but they did produce one of the most heartbreaking: a place that forces you to choose between love and ambition. “That's L.A.,” says Ryan Gosling’s Sebastian, a jazz pianist struggling to open his own club. “They worship everything, and they value nothing."

For one reason or another, I didn’t watch La La Land when it was released. It might have stayed that way except that, a couple of weeks ago, I noticed on YouTube a clip of an upbeat early song from the film, “Someone in the Crowd,” featuring Stone’s Mia stepping out with her roommates to attend a Hollywood party where they can be seen and network. 

I was hooked, and I’m sure you would be, too, if you haven’t seen the movie already.

Neither Stone nor Gosling are professional singers or dancers, so you won’t find the pyrotechnics in a Cabaret, All That Jazz, or Chicago. But you won’t find the cynicism rampant in those Bob Fosse musicals, either. This is unapologetic, heart-on-its-sleeve romanticism, with the lovers literally soaring above ground in Griffith Observatory in the “Dancing in the Stars” scene.

Moreover, Stone and Gosling, having trained intensively for their roles (with Gosling, a neophyte on the piano, practicing for months so he could perform the jazz tunes himself with no CGI or hand double) acquit themselves marvelously. 

And Chazelle, with help from choreographer Mandy Moore, have drawn the best possible lessons from those MGM musicals with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, as well as the poignant French 1964 “sung-through” musical, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

What led Moonlight to overtake La La Land in the Best Picture contest?

All the advance word-of-mouth for the latter also provided opportunities for backlash, focusing on how the film seemed crafted to capitalize on Academy voters' penchant for rewarding movies about actors (most notoriously, Shakespeare in Love over Saving Private Ryan); on how it was more a retro musical than a movie with original content; and how, in violation of jazz history, it depicted a white musician induced to compromise his pursuit of pure craft by an African-American tastemaker (John Legend, inexplicably playing guitar onscreen rather than his familiar piano).

On the other hand, Moonlight came to embody an underdog spirit—particularly following the November 2016 Presidential election, when the film’s entirely African-American cast (a first in the Academy’s nomination history) and its LGBTQ theme represented defiance of what Hollywood deemed Donald Trump’s reactionary politics.

I have not seen Moonlight so I can’t comment on its merits versus La La Land. But the atmosphere of fear now sweeping the entertainment industry constitutes a far different environment from what existed a decade ago, it’s possible that a different Oscar voting outcome might occur today.

I suspect that the moviegoing public would, if given a chance, vote for La La Land, in any case. Box-office grosses are never to be confused with value. 

But during their theatrical runs, La La Land grossed $504.6 million worldwide, while Moonlight pulled in a considerably more modest $65.3 million, even with the help of that Best Picture statuette from the Academy.

Flashback, August 1876: Audience Stunned by Richard Wagner’s Epic ‘Ring’ Cycle

As the opening-night audience listened to the premiere of the latest works by Richard Wagner in mid-August 1876, they got what they anticipated, and then some with his “Ring Cycle": a totally immersive musical theater experience, requiring a maximum commitment of time and devotion.

I’m not sure you will find another cultural figure who created something so enormous, so innovative, or requiring so many resources. Drawing on Norse mythology, Wagner proposed o stage four operas connected by a symbol, to which he gave the name of the whole cycle: Der Ring des Nibelungen (“The Ring of the Nibelungen”), totaling 15 to 16 hours.

Only one person he trusted to act as librettist, composer, overall artistic director, stage director, producer, prompter, and supervisor of his acoustic and seating innovations: himself.

Each of the four operas (Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung) needed not one, but two intermissions. And he wanted, and got, a theater built to his specifications in the city of Bayreuth.

Along the way, Wagner was unbelievably fortunate to have the patronage of King Ludwig II of Bavaria. I don’t think I was the only tourist ever to view the latter’s castle, Neuschwanstein, and think, “This guy was crazy.” (In fact, he was sidelined for good—after all but sinking Bavaria into bankruptcy—in 1886, and died shortly afterward under mysterious circumstances.)

In some ways, Ludwig differed from the composer. He would have preferred Munich rather than Bayreuth as the site of the Festspielhaus; he upbraided Wagner for his antisemitism; and, when the monarch compelled his genius friend to turn over the scores of the first two parts of the “Ring,” Siegfried and Die Walküre, it led to a quarrel and a temporary construction halt until Ludwig extended a loan that allowed the festival to open.

Moreover, Ludwig believed in Wagner enough to support him financially when the composer sought to fend off creditors and keep his quarter-century dream of the gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art.”

In short, it was inconceivable that Wagner would have realized his dream if not for the patron he privately nicknamed “Parsifal” after his pure, idealistic hero.

Not everyone was enamored with Wagner’s work or the mystique accruing to it. In this prior post, I noted that Mark Twain did not, contrary to belief, write that “Wagner is better than he sounds.”

But he did approvingly pass along that observation by someone else, and he did devote an extended essay, “At the Shrine of St. Wagner,” that took issue with Bayreuth’s cuisine and the composer’s songs (“Nothing can make a Wagner opera absolutely perfect and satisfactory to the untutored but to leave out the vocal parts”).

I have to admit feeling much the same as Twain. But it would also be impossible to deny that Wagner fundamentally changed musical theater—and, arguably, paved the way for so much in 20^th-century culture through his innovations, including:

*orchestral arrangements that incorporated new instruments;

*powerfully built singers who could make themselves heard over these 80-to-100 piece orchestras;

*signers as fully committed to naturalistic acting as to their vocals;

*pits covered, with orchestras unseen so audiences can concentrate on what is onstage;

*leitmotifs, or short, recurring instrumental cues associated with characters, objects, and themes, the better for audiences both to remember them over multiple hours and to subliminally signal emotions;

*continuous, “through-composed” music that blurred traditional distinctions between opera’s arias and recitative sections;

*seating “in the round,” with audience members seated democratically, without regard to pricing;

*theater lights darkened during performances so audiences would concentrate on the action and not on what others around them were doing;

*ambitious subject matter dealing with the most convulsive human emotions: greed, power, love, and salvation.

Even if you have never attended the performance of an opera, it is hard to miss the widespread influence of Wagner:

*films that either use his music directly (most famously, “The Ride of the Valkyries” in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now) or his leitmotif device (the scores of John Williams);

*J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which, despite the novelist’s denials, employed a similar plot as the “Ring Cycle”: the complications involved in possessing an object of miraculous power; and,

*most controversially, fusing romantic nationalism with antisemitism, leading to exploitation by one of his greatest admirers, Adolf Hitler. 

Flashback, August 1896: Henry Ford Meets Thomas Edison

When the obsessed 33-year-old tinkerer Henry Ford met Thomas Edison for the first time in mid-August 1896, he found encouragement from the older businessman for his gas-powered enterprise—planting the seeds for friendship that lasted to the death of “The Wizard of Menlo Park.”

Perhaps the most famous public instance of their interaction was their 1921 road trip, when they were joined for part of the way by President Warren Harding—an event depicted in Mark St. Germain’s 1995 play, Camping with Henry and Tom.

But I became far more fascinated by their mutual admiration society—and each man did to create and maintain it—while reading Edmund Morris’ 2019 biography Edison.

The occasion for their first encounter was the annual meeting of the Association of Edison Illuminating Companies, an organization founded by Thomas Edison and associates in 1885 to encourage research and the exchange of technical information, ideas and solutions.

Already employed for the last five years at the Edison Illuminating Company in Detroit, Ford first approached his hero surreptitiously, snapping a picture of the straw-hatted inventor asleep on the porch of the meeting’s venue, the Oriental Hotel in Brooklyn’s Manhattan Beach (now the location of the Kingsborough Community College’s Marine and Academic Center Building).

Later that night, he seized his chance for a more open encounter as more than 40 business executives, drinking and puffing cigars inside at a banquet, were conferring about the possibility of electric-powered vehicles. This represented a natural new area of interest for Edison, who was already changing society with, among other innovations, the electric light bulb and the electric power plant.

At one point Alex Dow from Detroit Edison pointed out Ford, his chief engineer, to the great man, and said, “There’s a young fellow who has made a gas car.”

Two months, a drive through the streets of Detroit with his new "Quadricycle" had already demonstrated Ford’s gift for self-promotion. He further evidenced it as he sat by and laid out his plan to the hearing-impaired Edison.

Despite his own interest in a storage battery for horseless carriages, Edison recognized the practical of the proposal he was hearing, telling Ford, “Keep on with your engine. If you can get what you want, I see a great future.”

It wasn’t until 1912, though, that their friendship became closer, when Ford, flush with his burgeoning success with the “Model T,” invested $1.2 million into the Edison Storage Battery Co. as a potential triggering device for automobile self-starters.

A few years later, Edison invited him down for a visit to his Fort Myers, FL, winter home, and for more than a decade the two went off on cross-country auto excursions, usually in the company of tire magnate Harvey Firestone and/or the naturalist John Burroughs.

What drew the two men into a closer friendship. The most obvious commonality, present in their first encounter, was a Midwestern plain-speaking style. But Morris also points to their “shared disdain for Ivy Leaguers, alcohol, and haute cuisine; driving energy, graphic thinking, and delight in anything new.”

They differed in subtle ways in their relationships with families, and more significantly in how they viewed politics.

While Edison maintained a complex, often demanding, even bumpy relationship with his sons, Ford was positively abusive to Edsel, publicly humiliating his ideas in front of other employees and subjecting him to so much stress that he suffered for years from severe ulcers before finally dying from stomach cancer at age 49.

And, while the workaholic Edison often neglected his two wives (and even disclaimed knowing anything about women at all), Ford, many biographers believe, engaged in adultery with his secretary, a relationship that may have resulted in a son out of wedlock.

Furthermore, although Edison expressed the sporadic anti-semitic remark, he employed Jews and other religious and ethnic minorities in his labs. 

In contrast, Ford was not content to vent virulent attitudes on camping trips with Edison and other friends, but through distributed a paper he bought, the Dearborn Independent, circulated through his company’s dealership a 91-part series based on the vicious and fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

When Ford passed along this material to his friend, Edison sent back a note acknowledging the gift, Morris notes, while being careful not to endorse its views.

From the mid-1920s on, even as many ordinary Americans began to eye Ford more critically than when he had been a rising folk hero, the auto magnate led the nationwide celebration for Edison as the grand old man of American inventive genius. In October 1929, he and President Herbert Hoover attended "Light's Golden Jubilee," a ceremony marking the 50th anniversary of Edison's incandescent lamp.

Ford paid homage to his friend that day by announcing the Thomas Edison Institute, an initiative in which he bought, dismantled, and reassembled hundreds of historic buildings and artifacts—including, notably, the legendary Menlo Park lab complex.  

Now Greenfield Village, it continues to give tourists and students, together with the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation, a vivid sense of the worlds that these two industrial giants left behind and created.

Flashback, June 1961: Elvis Flops on Film, Flies in Studio

As June 1961 moved towards its conclusion, Elvis Presley and manager “Colonel” Tom Parker tried to recover from a rare career misstep by the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll.

Earlier in the month, the latest Elvis movie, Wild in the Country, had divided critics while leaving loyal fans in little to no doubt about its lack of value. 

Not only was it his only film to lose money during its initial release, but the title song, rushed out to boost its prospects, only peaked at #26 on the US Billboard Hot 100—hardly up to his lofty commercial standards.

It all turned around on a long session at RCA Studio B in Nashville. True Elvis fans might enjoy “Kiss Me Quick,” “That’s Someone You Never Forget,” and “I’m Yours,” but the two that scored solidly with the public were “(Marie’s The Name) His Latest Flame” and “Little Sister,” which were released as a double single.

Both tunes came from the songwriting team of Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman. The duo, who managed to get hold of his attention in 1959 by sending a demo for “A Mess of Blues” while still on his Army stint in Germany, went on to write 16 songs for The King. Amazingly, though, they never met the singer who turned their compositions into hits.

Elvis tweaked “Little Sister” slightly, cutting the tempo in half and slowing it down, according to Paul Simpson’s The Rough Guide to Elvis. By the third take, he liked the groove so much that he told his backup musicians to “burn” on the next take. 

That was the one that turned out to be a keeper, confirming Pomus’ hunch that, while Bobby Darin had decided it wasn’t for him, it would be the kind of nasty blues that Elvis did so well.

“His Latest Flame” proved a harder nut to crack. Elvis and his musicians were floundering in the studio, uncertain how to proceed. 

None of the attempts to start it on different instruments seemed to click, until someone called Pomus to see what he would play the piano portion. The songwriter was surprised to hear that his intro was three bars long rather than four.

From that realization sprang the eventual solution: a Latin flavor with a Bo Diddley beat. Tom Petty, asked by Rolling Stone Magazine for the Elvis tunes that most influenced him, described how this one came together from what originally had been “kind of a mess”:

“An acoustic guitar and a snare drum played with brushes carry the rhythm, but when the six-string bass comes in and the piano goes up to the high register, the whole thing jumps out of the speaker.”

I don’t have the technical knowledge to explain this process remotely as well as Petty did. All I know is that I never grow tired of hearing this, and it is easily among my half-dozen favorite songs by The King.

(Five of those musicians, by the way, were participating at the same time and in the same RCA studio in another recording session of a classic: Roy Orbison’s “Cryin’.” Talk about catching lightning in a bottle!)

Technically, Presley’s was a cover version of this Pomus-Shuman composition: Del Shannon had already released it as a single and cut from his debut album, Runaway With Del Shannon. 

But Presley’s interpretation is the one that, more likely than not, you’ll hear on your favorite oldies station, because once the “His Latest Flame/Little Sister” double single was released in August, it shot into the top 5 in the Billboard charts and all the way up to #1 in the UK.

The following year, Elvis lured his fans back to the movies with Blue Hawaii, another formulaic profit-maker that generated additional soundtrack sales. By now, he was tiring of plots that sidetracked him from his ambition to become another James Dean.

But he felt no such ambivalence about “His Latest Flame.” Even while making it, he noted, “It’s a good song. I like it even if it takes us 32 hours.” He had no reason to revise that opinion in the years to come.

Flashback, June 2001: Early Alarm Sounds About Enron

John Olson (pictured) is not a well-known name, but when he died a few weeks ago, this retired energy analyst was remembered in obituaries for his warning 25 years ago this month about one hot stock—which the object of his skepticism tried to tamp down.

Too bad that others didn’t perform proper due diligence on Enron, which six months later collapsed, in the largest bankruptcy filing to that point in U.S. corporate history.

The initial outsized expectations about Enron’s stock reminded me of a phrase coined by the otherwise colorless former Fed chair Alan Greenspan (who also died this month): “irrational exuberance.” Though Greenspan was discussing speculative market bubbles as a group, I think it applies just as much, maybe even more so, to individual stocks today.

Take a bow, Elon Musk.

You heard about that guy, right? World’s richest person. World’s first trillionaire, courtesy of a very generous compensation plan approved by shareholders of his company, Tesla.

More about him in a minute. But first, a refresher on Enron:

Through much of the Nineties, Enron was a Wall Street darling for advancing from a natural-gas provider to an energy-trading colossus. It reported incredible returns, reaching $90.75 per share on August 23, 2000 with a market capitalization of more than $70 billion, making it the seventh-largest publicly traded corporation in the U.S.

Who wouldn’t want to invest after a management guru like Gary Hamel had praised it for creating “a capacity for perpetual innovation” with an organization consisting of “potential revolutionaries”? Even pundits across the political spectrum like Bill Kristol and Paul Krugman took fees to serve on the company’s advisory committee.

Wall Street was particularly enamored of Enron head Kenneth Lay, a corporate leader used to being listened to. That respect derived not only from the eye-popping numbers he produced but from his cozy relationship with George W. Bush, a rising politico so grateful for the $122,500 contributed to his Texas gubernatorial campaigns that he nicknamed the gray-haired businessman “Kenny Boy.”

In March 2001, Lay and his successor as Enron president, Jeffrey Skilling, were annoyed when a young financial journalist, Bethany McLean, wondering how the company made its money, asked, in a Fortune Magazine article, if Enron was overpriced.

But they really grew incensed when Olson—a local analyst with long experience monitoring the energy industry—told U.S. News and World Report three months later that Enron was "not very forthcoming about how they make their money" and said no "analyst worth his salt . . . can seriously analyze Enron."

Olson chuckled over a misspelled handwritten note that Lay dashed off to his boss in the wake of that interview. The analyst’s equanimity was justified: other observers were soon pursuing the hard questions that he and MacLean had posed about Enron’s operations.

By year’s end, it had all unraveled in a massive bankruptcy and corporate scandal. In May 2006, Lay and Skilling were convicted of fraud and conspiracy charges.

So now you may be wondering, how could Lay possibly relate to Elon Musk?

Some of you reading this might see my eyebrow lifted derisively in his direction because of my distaste for his involvement with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) at the behest of Donald Trump.

Or you might argue that, unlike Enron, Musk built something that can be seen—rockets, an AI startup fueling data centers, and, through Tesla, the EV, the most significant contribution to the American auto industry since Henry Ford’s assembly line.

You can even accept (as analyst Jeff Sommer does here, before swatting it down) that Tesla can build a successful colony on Mars and reap a bonanza from its military contracts.

But there’s a simpler yardstick for measuring how close Musk comes to the now-infamous Kenneth Lay: What did his prior financial reports promise investors, and did he achieve those goals?

That’s where matters become slippery. A New York Times analysis from earlier this month found that Musk was late or did not deliver on his company deadlines roughly 35 percent of the time. In 33 percent of his more than 600 claims, his companies did not provide a public update—or the plans were too vague to know if he succeeded.

And five years ago, Consumer Reports compiled a telling timeline of his continuous claims that Tesla models would shortly become fully autonomous, along with deaths of people who accepted these assurances that turned out to be—well, let’s just say premature.

In other words, if Musk were a musical, it would be Promises, Promises.

Unlike with Enron, nobody has yet proven that Tesla’s accounting practices are fraudulent. But it would be enormously difficult to decipher even if anyone tried to do so. Now with Vanity Fair, Bethany MacLean has questioned the ethics and governance behind his complicated 2019 acquisition of Solar City.

Testifying before Congress in 2002, Olson cautioned that “It is axiomatic on Wall Street that if a stock price is rising arithmetically, management egos tend to rise exponentially.”

That was the case as Lay pressured editors and analysts for better press coverage, and maybe even more so with Musk. He was only half-joking when he said, while hosting Saturday Night Live in 2021, “To anyone I’ve offended, I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?”

Put that together with his use of ketamine, a dissociative drug, and you’ll understand why in The Atlantic last year, Shayla Love wrote that Musk’s “cognitive and psychological health is of concern not only to shareholders of his companies’ stocks but to all Americans.”

One last resemblance between Lay and Musk: each backed a successful candidate who then followed through on the ballyhooed businessman’s policy prescriptions. Lay, for instance, influenced Bush’s gubernatorial policies on electricity deregulation, taxes and tort reform.

Musk’s Presidential beneficiary-patron has permitted him even more latitude. Past robber barons were content to bribe and sway officeholders, but in taking his position with DOGE, Musk joined the government, if briefly.

That takeover was so swift and audacious that observers could hardly rouse themselves to ask if self-interest might be the principal reason for his lightning strike against the agencies that regulated his enterprises. Were he alive today, Kenny Boy might be asking, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

Flashback, May 1926: General Strike Paralyzes Great Britain

A century ago this month, more than two million British workers walked off their jobs, either miners or unions in solidarity with them, over conditions already desperate and dangerous underground and only worsened by mine owners and the Conservative government. 

After nine days, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) was forced to call off the General Strike, yielding their demands but not bitterness over what one striker called “the boil that needed lancing.”

I first became aware of this tumultuous event in British labor history while reading the first volume of William Manchester’s biography of Winston Churchill, The Last Lion.

As Chancellor of the Exchequer, often considered the second most powerful figure in His Majesty’s government, Churchill was heavily responsible for hardening opposition to the TUC in the Cabinet of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and, once the work stoppage began, mounting the government’s propaganda effort against it.

For the rest of his career, union workers and their sympathizers did not regard this as Churchill’s finest hour, to say the least. In the immediate aftermath, for instance, an editorial in the progressive political and cultural magazine The New Statesman was titled, “Should We Hang Mr. Churchill or Not?”

What animated Churchill and other Conservatives in Baldwin’s Cabinet was a British equivalent of the Russian Revolution of nine years before. They feared the tumult similar to that resulting from the Bolshevik takeover: property owners dispossessed, churches closed, the royal family executed, and even the overthrow of the new, more liberal government of Alexander Kerensky.

Britain represented an even more tempting target for Communists bent on international expansion. Churchill had engaged in a poorly planned, unsuccessful 1919 Allied effort to invade Russia to, as he put it, “strangle Bolshevism at its birth," but he was determined not to allow chaos to metastasize at home.

Mining was a particular pressure point for British employment and the economy. With coal required to fuel the ships, power stations, coke ovens, home use and industry to make munitions, the government nationalized the industry during World War I. After the armistice, the Mine workers union wanted to keep the 18.5% wage increase they won during the conflict.

But in March 1921, Prime Minister David Lloyd George returned the mines to private owners. By spring 1926, they had locked one million of their employees—a tenth of the British male workforce—out of their workplaces, demanding longer hours but less money.

Even many of the Conservatives in Parliament and Baldwin’s Cabinet felt that the mine owners dealt unjustly with the workers; it’s just that they feared the Marxist bogeyman more.

In the latest issue of the British publication The Literary Review, Richard Vinen explained why another issue—safety—only added to workers’ grievances:

“About a thousand a year died in accidents. Of the three most important leaders of the miners in 1926, two had lost their fathers in accidents underground. There were many injuries. [Historian Jonathan] Schneer cites the case of Thomas Baker of Sheffield, who received ten shillings a week as compensation for having lost a leg at the age of seventeen….The life of a miner was unimaginable to most people. Driving trains or buses might, for a time, seem amusing – which is why so many young men volunteered to do it in 1926. No one would have volunteered to be a miner, which is why men had to be conscripted to dig coal during the Second World War.”

Altogether it was, according to the late Welsh actor and film producer Stanley Baker, whose father lost a leg in a cave-in, “a place where death and poverty are daily threats.”

In back of it all was the restoration of the gold standard that Churchill pushed through in 1925. The result, explains Lawrence Reed, writing for the Foundation for Economic Education, in June 2023, was “a series of destructive results. British export industries suffered hugely, especially coal, leading to strikes and slowdowns.” John Maynard Keynes’ prediction of just this eventuality, in The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill, went unheeded.

As the miners union felt increasingly pushed towards striking, they were joined by workers from other sectors walking out in sympathy, including transport and dock employees, as well as those employed in gas and electricity, printing, iron, steel and chemical jobs.

But the owners and the government were making their own preparations months in advance to stave off what Baldwin called “the road to anarchy and ruin.” A nine-month subsidy to owners to keep wages stable gave him time to:

* coordinate food and fuel availability through the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies;

* use the Emergency Powers Act of 1920 to issue regulations maintaining order; and

* establish a commission headed by Sir Herbert Samuel, which issued a report that, though critical of the mine owners, also recommended the reduction of miners’ wages.

Central to the effort, exactly where he wanted to be, was Churchill, who throughout the strike edited a four-page daily newspaper, the British Gazette. A blatant tool of government propaganda, it falsely assailed the TUC for attacking the constitution and threatening order while simultaneously jeering that the effort was for nought.

More crucial, Baldwin had also mobilized the army and volunteers to protect transportation services. Many volunteers who assumed the strikers’ roles may have felt they were engaging in what the American philosopher William James called “the moral equivalent of war”—the discipline engendered by armed conflict. Keeping Britain functioning called for reserves of idealism that the past brutal conflict had vastly reduced.

Considering the bitter emotions involved, it was surprising that casualties were comparatively limited during the strike: 41 people treated for injuries at the hands of baton-wielding mounted police. But it would be a mistake to say there was no damage.

Several train crashes occurred, with nonprofessional drivers—volunteers to fill vacancies left by those out in sympathy with the strikers—at the helm. One such accident at the Edinburgh Waverley station—a train hitting wagons in the tunnel—left three people dead.

Though Baldwin called for no reprisals—and the General Strike was over in little more than a week, with no concessions won by the strikers—the miners whose desperate plight sparked this epic owner-union capitalist tried to tough it out for another half year, when they were forced to yield to their bosses’ implacable demand: longer hours, less pay.

The hard heel on their necks was reinforced by government action in 1927 in the form of the Trade Disputes and Trade Unions Act, which outlawed sympathy strikes—legislation so seemingly successful that to this day, Britain has experienced no other general strike. 

By 1928, TUC membership had plummeted to half a million, and to maintain future electoral viability, the Labour Party felt forced—at least for a while—to moderate its more militant elements.

It took more than a decade, but British sympathy for the strikers increased markedly by the end of World War II, as reflected in the books (and film adaptations) The Stars Look Down by A.J. Cronin and How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn.

Flashback, May 1966: Floundering NY Yankees Replace Keane With Houk

Only a year and a half from managing the St. Louis Cardinals to a seven-game World Series championship over the New York Yankees, then resigning to take over the team he defeated, Johnny Keane (pictured) was fired 60 years ago this month after enduring a sixth-place finish in the American League in 1965 and a 4-16 start to the next season.

The Bronx Bombers may have felt confident that replacement Ralph Houk—who had managed the squad to three straight pennants and two world championships before becoming general manager for two seasons—would turn the club around. Indeed, the team proceeded to win 13 of the first 17 games after the return of “The Major” (a reference to his World War II service).

It was all a mirage, however. By the end of the year, the team had fallen into last place—a finish predicted by fading slugger Mickey Mantle in a private conversation with a reporter in spring training—and the first time the team had sunk to this level since 1912.

That ugly denouement was in keeping with the way the team’s top brass terminated Keane (not to mention his predecessor, beloved icon Yogi Berra, dropped after losing the 1964 World Series). 

It happened on a Friday—within 24 hours of now-minority owner Dan Topping scorning the rumors of the skipper’s departure as ridiculous—and, following a loss in Anaheim, Calif., conveniently timed so that most fans would not hear the bad news until they opened their Sunday papers.

Nobody realized that the team’s precipitous slide was not a temporary blip but the start of a decade in the wilderness before it returned to the postseason.

The days when the team’s fans could rely on seeing their team in October—when fans in other cities would grumble that cheering for them was like rooting for U.S. Steel—were long gone. “A sequence of historic events and bad decisions in 1964 changed the course of baseball history, ending four decades of Yankee dominance,” wrote sportswriter Leonard Koppett.

Those multiple, interlocking forces included:

*A bad managerial fit: In his memoir Uppity, St. Louis Cardinals first baseman (and future Yankee broadcaster) Bill White bluntly stated that Keane, the former manager he had come to admire, “tried to apply a National League hard-work ethic to an American League team of complacent, aging superstars and was resented for it.” The Yankees saw what White and others recognized—that he demanded much from players—and missed, beneath his strait-lacked, religious exterior, what they well knew: that he respected and rewarded effort. The team was particularly incensed when Keane fined clubhouse leader Mantle for showing up to a game hung over. Despite the players’ pro-forma statements to the press after Keane’s termination that they felt their underperformance had let him down, they admitted years later that he’d effectively lost control of the locker room.

*Injuries: It was bad enough that the team’s cornerstones in pitching (Whitey Ford, blocked artery in his pitching arm) and the plate (Mantle, hurt shoulder and pulled hamstring; Roger Maris, broken right hand) were sidelined for much of 1965 and still adversely affected in 1966. But the squad was also reeling from ailments that debilitated shortstop Tony Kubek, starting pitcher Jim Bouton, and catcher Elston Howard—and the team was on notice that second baseman Bobby Richardson, though still young at 31, would retire by the end of the season.

*A lost advantage in the new amateur draft system: The draft gave underperforming teams a better chance at picking prized prospects, undercounting powerhouse franchises like the Yankees.

*New ownership in the Kansas City Athletics: In the 1950s and early 1960s, the Yankees and A’s engaged in several trades that were so lopsided in the Bombers’ favor that many observers suspected something nefarious, even charging that the Midwestern team was, in effect, a “farm team” for the Bombers, giving them key players like Maris, Ralph Terry, and Clete Boyer. Whatever the truth of the arrangement, new A’s owner Charles O. Finley was so annoyed by what he heard that, in February 1961, he had a “Shuttle Bus to Yankee Stadium” burned as a not-so-subtle indication that the old ways were over.

*New ownership in the Yankees: In 1964, owners Dan Topping and Del Webb sold an 80% share in the Yankees to CBS. The transaction, shifting control of the club to the number-one television network, signaled a shift from a sportsman model of ownership to one owned by a conglomerate. (David Halberstam’s October 1964 is especially good at explaining the shock this represented to the baseball establishment.) As it happened, CBS had not done as much due diligence as they should have into the problems associated with the most famous franchise in sports.

*Corporate disinvestment in baseball operations: In trying to maximize the worth of the ball club in the late 1950s in preparation for an eventual sale, Topping and Webb had been told that, to stay on top, the team had spent heavily in several areas. The partners then cut their expenses in areas such as the farm system, scouting, and roving instructors. After a year or two, the realization dawned on CBS that Topping and Webb that, with their top stars aging—and even younger ones unexpectedly hurt—they had few options coming up who could replace them.

The nadir of the Bombers came on September 22, when only 413 fans showed up at Yankee Stadium for a drizzly weekly makeup game with the Chicago White Sox. Announcer Red Barber lost his job for highlighting the empty stands during the game.

The visual impact of all of this might have been embarrassing, but not any more so than the Yankees’ fall from contention and grace. The team would not appear in the postseason again until two more seismic forces appeared in the Seventies: free agency and the new owner who exploited it, George Steinbrenner.

Flashback, May 1926: Miffed Sinclair Lewis Nixes Pulitzer for ‘Arrowsmith’

After bypassing Sinclair Lewis twice in the past half-dozen years, the Pulitzer Prize board –whether in recognition of present merit or compensation for past mistakes—awarded him the fiction prize for Arrowsmith in early May 1926.

Whether out of genuine principle or annoyance over his Main Street being passed over in 1920 for Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence or, in 1922, his Babbitt for Willa Cather’s One of Ours, Lewis rejected the citation. It may have been the most resounding rebuke of a cultural institution before George C. Scott and Marlon Brando refused to accept their Best Actor Oscars in the early 1970s.

Privately, Lewis told publisher Alfred Harcourt that he intended to turn it down because of “the Main Street burglary.” While some observers suspected peevishness on his part, Lewis gave a more high-minded public justification.

The terms of the Pulitzer called for the award to go to work that represented “the wholesome atmosphere of American life, and the highest standard of American manners and manhood”—precisely the grounds on which Main Street and Babbitt, with their withering satire, had been bypassed before.

Those terms, Lewis wrote in his letter of rejection, “would appear to mean that the appraisal of the novels shall be made not according to their actual literary merit but in obedience to whatever code of Good Form may chance to be popular at the moment.”

With three bestselling, highly acclaimed novels to his credit, Lewis wielded a great deal of credibility, particularly when he framed his rejection in the context of his also declining election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. His refusal of the Pulitzer and the $1,000 that went with it earned front-page notice in The New York Times.

As there always are in such cases, cynics wondered if there was more to the situation than Lewis explained, and their case was bolstered four years later, when he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature—particularly because, in turning down the Pulitzer, he had stated that “All prizes, like all titles, are dangerous.” [emphasis added]

Arrowsmith may have been the most universally appealing of Lewis’ novels to this point, featuring a protagonist who, though flawed, was an idealistic, science-oriented doctor dedicated wholly to the pursuit of knowledge and truth.

While not dispensing with the author’s gift for satire (in this case, targeting medical quackery, public-health bureaucrats, and doctors who shamelessly pursuit financial success at the expense of patients), it gave readers a chance to admire a major character unreservedly.

As the son and brother of doctors, Lewis came by his interest in the medical profession naturally. But what many critics and ordinary readers may not have realized at the time is that the career of Martin Arrowsmith drew on Lewis’ recent friendship with 35-year-old microbiologist and pathologist Paul De Kruif—one that became so close that it evolved into a genuine working collaboration.

As James Tobin explains in this blog post, Lewis even suggested to De Kruif that he be listed as co-author, with the two splitting royalties 50-50. The doctor, as much stunned by the generous offer as aware that Lewis’ name constituted the proposed project’s main selling point, thought that the split should be 75% to 25% in Lewis’ favor.

In the end, either Lewis’s publisher or the author himself rejected the microbiologist’s request for a single line on the title page: “In collaboration with Paul De Kruif.”

Instead, Lewis set out his debt to De Kruif in a different fashion, acknowledging his help “not only for most of the bacteriological and medical material in this tale but equally for his suggestions in the planning of the fable itself  – for his realization of the characters as living people, for his philosophy as a scientist.”

In the end, it wasn’t insufficient acknowledgement of his creative input that fractured De Kruif’s relationship with Lewis, but at least several incidents of the latter’s erratic, often alcohol-fueled misbehavior that at last couldn’t be ignored.

Nevertheless, his association with the now-prizing author benefited De Kruif enough that he came to write a bestselling nonfiction account of medicine later that year, Microbe Hunters, launching a second career for him as a popular writer of medical histories, biographies, and public-health advocacy.

After winning the Nobel Prize, as his alcoholism worsened, most critics agreed that the quality of Lewis’ work suffered, and his reputation took a further hit with Mark Schorer’s 1961 biography. But periodically, readers who have returned to the novels written at his peak discover their continuing relevance, and Arrowsmith is no exception.

As I mentioned in this post from late last year, though not read as widely as two other novels published in 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, it shared with them a searing criticism of American materialism at the height of the Roaring Twenties.

More than a few 21^st-century patients will nod appreciatively at how, in med school, Arrowsmith listens to a professor who extols the value of salesmanship to his students—including the value of convincing patients of the need for dubious small but money-making operations.

They will also detect the early baleful influence of Big Pharma in the Hunziker Company’s harassment of Arrowsmith’s mentor, the German scientist Max Gottlieb, for his reluctance to market an antitoxin he’s developed until he’s absolutely certain of its effectiveness—and, since COVID-19, they will shudder on the enormous pressures and responsibilities felt by Arrowsmith as he battles the outbreak of bubonic plague on an island in the West Indies.

Flashback, April 1966: Ulster Unionist Bigot Ian Paisley Starts Political Ascent

Within a week of his 40^th birthday, Rev. Ian Paisley moved decisively from fire-and-brimstone pulpit pounding in Northern Ireland to incendiary political partisanship in April 1966.

The ostensible cause of his agitation was Ulster Prime Minister Terence O’Neill’s commemoration of the 50^th anniversary of the Easter Rising, a well-meaning but toothless gesture that Paisley interpreted as a dangerous concession to the province’s Roman Catholic minority.

Protests planned by Paisley led O’Neill to restrict the Easter rising commemoration parades on April 17^th. Those security measures, without equal countervailing measures against Protestant marchers, reduced Catholic support for a Prime Minister perceived as timorous and condescending while emboldening Paisley and his associates.

Through size and the passion of a true believer, Paisley dominated the groups he founded or transformed in adulthood. In 1951, at age 25—only five years after ordination—he set up his own fundamentalist Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster.

By 1966 he organized opposition more aggressively against O’Neill, by:

*founding the Ulster Constitutional Defence Committee;

*establishing the Ulster Protestant Volunteers, who would use the motto “For God and Ulster,” formerly associated with the notorious Ulster Defence Force;

*co-founding The Protestant Telegraph, an answer to the more mainstream unionist newspaper, the Belfast Telegraph (sample headline from late October 1966: “Were the Reformers Right in Separating From the Church of Rome at Reformation?”; and

*street protests and rallies, often proceeding through Catholic neighborhoods as provocative gestures.

What came to be known as “The Troubles”—the three-decade sectarian conflict that cost 3,000 lives in Ulster—did not arise in a vacuum, nor even solely through social, economic, or political differences. Their destructive heat derived from rhetorical tropes that gave currency to ancient grievances and prejudices.

Paisley was not the sole purveyor of this bombast, but as an increasingly visible minister—and, ultimately, the politician with the most formidable base—he bore the heaviest responsibility for its use.

In journalist Tim Pat Coogan’s memorable summary from The I.R.A., Paisley possessed “a doctorate from Bob Jones’s Bible Belt University, lungs like the Bull of Bashan and a theology from the Apocalypse…In terms of bigotry he would stand, were he a Muslim, 359 degrees to the right of the Ayatollah Khomeini.”

Kenneth Branagh’s Oscar-winning screenplay for Belfast includes a brief scene with a screaming Protestant minister who is more than a little reminiscent of Paisley. Many YouTube viewers reacted with amusement at the over-the-top deliver y of this bilious rhetoric, but there was nothing remotely humorous about it at the time.

Denunciations of Vatican II’s ecumenical statements, including on an October 1962 visit to Rome where he intended to distribute pamphlets, led to him being detained for questioning when he and other clerics arrived at the Eternal City. 

He viewed O’Neill’s outreach to the Catholic minority as a political counterpart to this, even having gone so far as to lead a 1965 march by 1,000 loyalists to Ulster’s government seat, Stormont, to protest the historic first official visit to Northern Ireland by an Irish taoiseach (prime minister), Sean Lemass.

(Two years later, when Lemass’s successor Jack Lynch arrived in Ulster, Paisley pelted his car with snowballs.)

With pressure groups that could quickly be turned into mobs at his disposal, Paisley ramped up his anti-O’Neill, anti-Catholic campaign. In June 1966, he led members of his Free Presbyterian Church to picket and harass delegates to the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Ireland for its openness to ecumenism.

Instead of curtailing his fanaticism, his arrest and subsequent three-month imprisonment only conferred martyrdom status on him within the loyalist movement. 

His vehement opposition to the Catholic civil-rights marches of 1968 and early 1969 lifted his visibility, and when he finally plunged into the political arena in the latter year, his better-than-expected polling results in O’Neill’s own Bannside constituency helped trigger the Prime Minister’s resignation.

At this point, he began the modus operandi to which he would adhere for most of the rest of his life: whip followers up into a murderous frenzy, while vanishing before violence inevitably occurred.

In 1971, Paisley formed the Democratic Unionist Party, with considerable overlap from adherents to his own Free Presbyterian church. He now held a seat in Westminster as a Member of Parliament and by decade’s end would also start a quarter-century stint in the European Parliament. 

Many of his colleagues may have grown chary of his antics (e.g., denouncing Pope John Paul II as the Antichrist when the pontiff visited the European Parliament in 1988). But there was seemingly little they could, or would, do about them.

Paisley continued to obstruct the peace process, including by opposing the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that effectively ended 30 years of The Troubles. When he assumed power in 2007, it was as part of a power-sharing agreement with Sinn Fein –the same kind of pace he had denounced and torpedoed in the 1973 Sunningdale Agreement.

Longtime Ulster observers couldn’t get over the jovial relationship he now enjoyed with the Deputy First Minister in the government, Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness. But the realities of power can only be denied for so long.

In the same sense that only Cold Warrior Richard Nixon could have gone to Red China, only an incendiary bigot like Paisley could have agreed to peace negotiations with the IRA.

Upon his death, many Paisley admirers hailed what he had done for peace. They overlooked the irony that he had, in effect, engaged in the same reconciliation process with Catholics that provoked his outrage against Captain O’Neill—and that he had to detoxify the very environment he had inflamed with his rhetoric three decades earlier.

Paisley’s damage to the province was not only heinous but also injurious to the Unionist cause he espoused.

When he took umbrage at Captain O’Neill’s tentative attempt to ameliorate tensions between Ulster’s two faith communities, the Irish Republican Army stood at its lowest point since the six Protestant-dominated counties of Ulster were partitioned from the 26 counties of the republic to the south. Its 1956-62 offensive was so disastrous that the paramilitary organization’s acronym was spelled out to spawn a derisive nickname: “I Ran Away.”

Though gerrymandering and discrimination raged on, growing educational opportunities and the generous social welfare programs of Great Britain led many Catholics to accept control by the crown.

This month’s centenary of Paisley’s birth should lead to reflection, but hardly celebration, about his legacy. His career holds implications beyond the British Isles, to an entire political world with similar personalities.

Like demagogues across the globe and ages, he stirred atavistic prejudices into current socioeconomic grievances to advance his political interests. With such people, decades of peace and civil rights advances are provisional, always vulnerable to bigotry and backlash.