Monday, February 18, 2008
Quote of the Day
“Our progress in degeneracy appears to me pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it, ‘all men are created equal, except Negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except Negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for example, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.” – Abraham Lincoln, to longtime friend Joshua F. Speed, August 24, 1855
Sunday, February 17, 2008
This Day in Civil War History
February 17, 1865 – Columbia, South Carolina became engulfed in flames as Union troops under the command of General William Tecumseh Sherman occupied the capital of the first Southern state to secede from the Union.
During the same 24 hours, the Confederate flag was lowered on Fort Sumter for the last time, as Charleston, which regarded itself as the “Cradle of the Confederacy,” awaited its fate. General P.G.T. Beauregard, a commander with strong engineering and logistical instincts if an overly high regard for his offensive capabilities, had created defenses for fort and city that held out against Federal forces possessing not just superior manpower but also an ironclad fleet. But after 22 months, the Union was lifting the siege.
Charleston fully expected to meet the fate of everything along the way of Sherman’s infamous “March to the Sea” from Atlanta to Savannah--absolute destruction. The Northern general now had the means to guarantee the South that it would finally meet the desolate fate he had warned his Confederate-leaning military friends about in the months leading up to the war.
Yet amazingly, Charleston was to escape relatively unscathed when it was occupied by Federal troops on the 18th. What happened?
Some people, with a bent for the romantic, believe that Charleston was spared Sherman’s rage because of tender feelings he still felt for a woman while a young soldier at nearby Fort Moultrie. Take a look at any picture of this hard-eyed modern man of war, though. Does this strike you as very likely? I didn’t think so.
More likely, what happened, as hard to believe as it was to Charlestonians, was that the city was just not as important to the defense of the South as Columbia. Not only a major munitions center, the state capital also possessed major stores of food.
Moreover, Charleston’s location in the Low Country made it a mess for marching. “We must all turn amphibious,” Sherman wrote, for the country is half under weather.”
Nothing could distract him from his first priority—Richmond, where he would join forces with boss and friend General Ulysses S. Grant, and preventing Robert E. from slipping away to the West and conducting a guerrilla war. That meant Sherman turned inland, toward Columbia.
By that night, while lying down to rest in a home he was occupying, Sherman “became conscious that a bright light was shining on the walls,” he later wrote in his memoirs. The high wind he had noticed in the morning was spreading burning cotton.
Responsibility for what happened next has been debated ever since. Before long, Columbia met the fate of Atlanta: utter ruination by fire.
A bitter South castigated Sherman for the conflagration, while he claimed neither motive nor responsibility for the act—though he did not help his credibility by admitting in his memoirs that his official report blamed Confederate General Wade Hampton, “for he was in my opinion boastful, and professed to be the special champion of South Carolina.”
Southerners sought any possibility means to avoid the wrath of the now-infamous Northern general, with one of the more unusual—and, probably, mistaken—avenues being an appeal to his religion—or what they thought was his religion.
At the death of his father, when he was nine years old, Sherman had been adopted by a prominent, politically connected lawyer, Thomas Ewing, who had converted to Roman Catholicism at the behest of his wife. The Ewings, having raised all their own children in their faith, also had their foster son baptized in the faith.
Since the baptism took place on the feast day of St. William of Montevergine, the boy was given the first name of William. However, Sherman’s deceased parents had been nominally Episcopalian. In adult life he not only was not a churchgoer in any faith but would not answer to his given first name, preferring instead the nickname “Cump,” a shortened version of “Tecumseh.”
Differences over religion, however, did not prevent Sherman from marrying the Ewings’ daughter, Eleanor. The general permitted their children to be raised Catholic, and in later years one son, much to his father’s annoyance, became a Catholic priest.
Somehow all of this tangled family history became submerged, and all that people in the Protestant-dominated South could seem to recall was that he had some association and perhaps sympathy with Catholicism. A southern-born co-worker related to me, not too long ago that, according to legend, an Episcopalian church in her home city (Savannah, I believe), to forestall any chance of pillage at the hands of Sherman, put up a sign reading, “Roman Catholic.”
Sherman’s memoir related a more direct and truthful entreaty. On the morning of his entry into Columbia, while sitting on a log watching his engineers complete a pontoon bridge, he received a penciled note from the head of an Ursuline convent in Columbia. She “claimed to have been a teacher in a convent in Brown County, Ohio, at the time my daughter Minnie was a pupil there, and asking my special protection.”
I can just picture the scene—the general sitting there, in a hurry to get his men across that bridge and stop Lee and this infernal war—and now this. Sherman’s reaction? He passed the note along to brother-in-law Charles, an inspector-general on his staff, with orders to see the nun and let her know personally “that we contemplated no destruction of any private property in Columbia at all.”
Two cities and two different fates at the hands of one conqueror. Quite a day.
During the same 24 hours, the Confederate flag was lowered on Fort Sumter for the last time, as Charleston, which regarded itself as the “Cradle of the Confederacy,” awaited its fate. General P.G.T. Beauregard, a commander with strong engineering and logistical instincts if an overly high regard for his offensive capabilities, had created defenses for fort and city that held out against Federal forces possessing not just superior manpower but also an ironclad fleet. But after 22 months, the Union was lifting the siege.
Charleston fully expected to meet the fate of everything along the way of Sherman’s infamous “March to the Sea” from Atlanta to Savannah--absolute destruction. The Northern general now had the means to guarantee the South that it would finally meet the desolate fate he had warned his Confederate-leaning military friends about in the months leading up to the war.
Yet amazingly, Charleston was to escape relatively unscathed when it was occupied by Federal troops on the 18th. What happened?
Some people, with a bent for the romantic, believe that Charleston was spared Sherman’s rage because of tender feelings he still felt for a woman while a young soldier at nearby Fort Moultrie. Take a look at any picture of this hard-eyed modern man of war, though. Does this strike you as very likely? I didn’t think so.
More likely, what happened, as hard to believe as it was to Charlestonians, was that the city was just not as important to the defense of the South as Columbia. Not only a major munitions center, the state capital also possessed major stores of food.
Moreover, Charleston’s location in the Low Country made it a mess for marching. “We must all turn amphibious,” Sherman wrote, for the country is half under weather.”
Nothing could distract him from his first priority—Richmond, where he would join forces with boss and friend General Ulysses S. Grant, and preventing Robert E. from slipping away to the West and conducting a guerrilla war. That meant Sherman turned inland, toward Columbia.
By that night, while lying down to rest in a home he was occupying, Sherman “became conscious that a bright light was shining on the walls,” he later wrote in his memoirs. The high wind he had noticed in the morning was spreading burning cotton.
Responsibility for what happened next has been debated ever since. Before long, Columbia met the fate of Atlanta: utter ruination by fire.
A bitter South castigated Sherman for the conflagration, while he claimed neither motive nor responsibility for the act—though he did not help his credibility by admitting in his memoirs that his official report blamed Confederate General Wade Hampton, “for he was in my opinion boastful, and professed to be the special champion of South Carolina.”
Southerners sought any possibility means to avoid the wrath of the now-infamous Northern general, with one of the more unusual—and, probably, mistaken—avenues being an appeal to his religion—or what they thought was his religion.
At the death of his father, when he was nine years old, Sherman had been adopted by a prominent, politically connected lawyer, Thomas Ewing, who had converted to Roman Catholicism at the behest of his wife. The Ewings, having raised all their own children in their faith, also had their foster son baptized in the faith.
Since the baptism took place on the feast day of St. William of Montevergine, the boy was given the first name of William. However, Sherman’s deceased parents had been nominally Episcopalian. In adult life he not only was not a churchgoer in any faith but would not answer to his given first name, preferring instead the nickname “Cump,” a shortened version of “Tecumseh.”
Differences over religion, however, did not prevent Sherman from marrying the Ewings’ daughter, Eleanor. The general permitted their children to be raised Catholic, and in later years one son, much to his father’s annoyance, became a Catholic priest.
Somehow all of this tangled family history became submerged, and all that people in the Protestant-dominated South could seem to recall was that he had some association and perhaps sympathy with Catholicism. A southern-born co-worker related to me, not too long ago that, according to legend, an Episcopalian church in her home city (Savannah, I believe), to forestall any chance of pillage at the hands of Sherman, put up a sign reading, “Roman Catholic.”
Sherman’s memoir related a more direct and truthful entreaty. On the morning of his entry into Columbia, while sitting on a log watching his engineers complete a pontoon bridge, he received a penciled note from the head of an Ursuline convent in Columbia. She “claimed to have been a teacher in a convent in Brown County, Ohio, at the time my daughter Minnie was a pupil there, and asking my special protection.”
I can just picture the scene—the general sitting there, in a hurry to get his men across that bridge and stop Lee and this infernal war—and now this. Sherman’s reaction? He passed the note along to brother-in-law Charles, an inspector-general on his staff, with orders to see the nun and let her know personally “that we contemplated no destruction of any private property in Columbia at all.”
Two cities and two different fates at the hands of one conqueror. Quite a day.
Quote of the Day
“It is a strange enterprise to make respectable people laugh.” – Moliere
(The French playwright died on this date in 1673, age 51, a few hours after playing the lead in his own Imaginary Invalid)
(The French playwright died on this date in 1673, age 51, a few hours after playing the lead in his own Imaginary Invalid)
Saturday, February 16, 2008
This Day in Sports History (Chamberlain Sets Points,Rebounds Records)
February 16, 1972 –A narrow 110-109 loss to the Phoenix Suns was mitigated to some extent for Wilt Chamberlain as he became the first player in NBA history to reach 30,000 points. In the same game, the Los Angeles Laker big man also gained an additional measure of satisfaction by erasing the old league record for rebounds held by Bill Russell, the Boston Celtic center who had continually stood between him and an NBA title while the 7 ft.-1-in. giant was with the Philadelphia Warriors and, later, the Philadelphia 76ers.
Less than three months later, Chamberlain was named Most Valuable Player of the NBA Championship Series as the Lakers defeated the New York Knicks in five games. It was the second title won by a Chamberlain-led team throughout his career.
Some critics scoffed at Chamberlain’s amazing achievements (including, of course, his 100-point game against the New York Knicks), pointing to his significant size advantage, particularly early in his career, over opponents, as well as the relative lack of success his teams achieved against the Russell-led Celtics (only one title for Chamberlain during that period). For that reason, he became very territorial about his achievements and anyone who threatened to eclipse them.
When Chamberlain began to be compared, sometimes unfavorably, to the next dominating big man who came along, Lew Alcindor (later known, of course, as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), “Wilt the Stilt” was quite annoyed and deprecated the younger player. (When his career came to an end, Kareem had some choices things to say about his older competitor in his memoir, Kareem.)
I remember that after Chamberlain’s death in 1999, Bill Russell appeared on Charlie Rose’s talk show and related a long-distance call that Wilt made in the past several years. A publication had just appeared asking if Dennis Rodman might be the best rebounder of all time. “Can you believe this?” an outraged Chamberlain yelled at his old rival, thinking—probably correctly—that the two of them could eat Rodman’s lunch.
Wilt claimed as much mastery of the bedroom as the basketball court. In his 1991 autobiography, A View From Above, he shocked the sports world with his assertion that he had slept with 20,000 women. (This almost matched his career record for rebounds.) The claim was silly and, because it was made at the time of Magic Johnson’s announcement that he had contracted the AIDS virus, viewed as irresponsible.
Chamberlain’s official cause of death was listed as congestive heart failure, but he had experienced tremendous weight loss only a few months before after dental surgery and had been suffering from the complications since then. (This worried me when I went in for similar surgery.)
Just think—nothing could take down the mightiest offensive force in basketball history but an errant tooth!
Less than three months later, Chamberlain was named Most Valuable Player of the NBA Championship Series as the Lakers defeated the New York Knicks in five games. It was the second title won by a Chamberlain-led team throughout his career.
Some critics scoffed at Chamberlain’s amazing achievements (including, of course, his 100-point game against the New York Knicks), pointing to his significant size advantage, particularly early in his career, over opponents, as well as the relative lack of success his teams achieved against the Russell-led Celtics (only one title for Chamberlain during that period). For that reason, he became very territorial about his achievements and anyone who threatened to eclipse them.
When Chamberlain began to be compared, sometimes unfavorably, to the next dominating big man who came along, Lew Alcindor (later known, of course, as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), “Wilt the Stilt” was quite annoyed and deprecated the younger player. (When his career came to an end, Kareem had some choices things to say about his older competitor in his memoir, Kareem.)
I remember that after Chamberlain’s death in 1999, Bill Russell appeared on Charlie Rose’s talk show and related a long-distance call that Wilt made in the past several years. A publication had just appeared asking if Dennis Rodman might be the best rebounder of all time. “Can you believe this?” an outraged Chamberlain yelled at his old rival, thinking—probably correctly—that the two of them could eat Rodman’s lunch.
Wilt claimed as much mastery of the bedroom as the basketball court. In his 1991 autobiography, A View From Above, he shocked the sports world with his assertion that he had slept with 20,000 women. (This almost matched his career record for rebounds.) The claim was silly and, because it was made at the time of Magic Johnson’s announcement that he had contracted the AIDS virus, viewed as irresponsible.
Chamberlain’s official cause of death was listed as congestive heart failure, but he had experienced tremendous weight loss only a few months before after dental surgery and had been suffering from the complications since then. (This worried me when I went in for similar surgery.)
Just think—nothing could take down the mightiest offensive force in basketball history but an errant tooth!
Quote of the Day
“I know well what I am fleeing from but not what I am in search of.” -- Michel de Montaigne
Friday, February 15, 2008
This Day in Music History (Birth of Great American Songbook Fixture Harold Arlen)
At age 19, having taken up jazz instead of the Hebraic melodies and Italian operas his father favored, the cantor’s son adopted a new name for his first copyrighted melody: Harold Arlen.
Who would have thought that a hackneyed story like the Al Jolson film The Jazz Singer could echo real life?
Who would have thought that a hackneyed story like the Al Jolson film The Jazz Singer could echo real life?
Yet, no matter what elements of environment, genetics, and ambition could have produced his alchemy of talent, the fact remains that Harold Arlen composed for stage and screen, in a career spanning five decades, more than 400 melodies, many of which have entered the Great American Songbook: “Get Happy,” “Stormy Weather,” “Let’s Fall in Love,” “Lydia the Tattooed Lady” (a particular favorite of one of my friends!), “Come Rain or Come Shine,” and “My Shining Hour.”
To my mind, there are three career-defining Judy Garland musical sequences on screen: “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” from Meet Me in St. Louis; “Over the Rainbow,” from The Wizard of Oz; and “The Man That Got Away,” from A Star is Born. Arlen was at least partly responsible for the last two.
To my mind, there are three career-defining Judy Garland musical sequences on screen: “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” from Meet Me in St. Louis; “Over the Rainbow,” from The Wizard of Oz; and “The Man That Got Away,” from A Star is Born. Arlen was at least partly responsible for the last two.
Though composed with two different lyricists as collaborators (E.Y. “Yip” Harburg and Ira Gershwin), both songs featured strong undercurrents of yearning and loss—qualities not only innate to Garland but also to Arlen, a decent man trapped in a long, tormented, sometimes dangerous marriage.
Perhaps the most unusual lyricist that Arlen—or, perhaps, any composer—had was Truman Capote. I first became aware of their partnership while attending a 1993 Berkshire Theatre Festival performance of Sweet and Hot, a revue of Arlen songs.
One song in the revue was “A Sleepin' Bee,” from the Broadway musical House of Flowers. It’s doubtful that Arlen’s long and fruitful collaboration with the good-natured Southerner Johnny Mercer could have prepared him for writing with Truman Capote, a man who asked, when the idea of a collaboration was broached, “Who’s Harold Arlen?” (What rock was Truman sleeping under when The Wizard of Oz came out?)
At the best of times, Capote was—what’s the best phrase?—high maintenance. But I could only imagine what it must have been like for Arlen to begin composing songs with a guy stuck in Rome, frantically rewriting Beat the Devil for John Huston, and forced to send lyrics by mail.
A particularly fine profile of Arlen was written by a theater critic for The New Yorker, John Lahr. If the last name sounds familiar, it should—he’s the son of Bert Lahr, who played the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, lending his indelible presence to the songwriter’s tunes of glory.
Perhaps the most unusual lyricist that Arlen—or, perhaps, any composer—had was Truman Capote. I first became aware of their partnership while attending a 1993 Berkshire Theatre Festival performance of Sweet and Hot, a revue of Arlen songs.
One song in the revue was “A Sleepin' Bee,” from the Broadway musical House of Flowers. It’s doubtful that Arlen’s long and fruitful collaboration with the good-natured Southerner Johnny Mercer could have prepared him for writing with Truman Capote, a man who asked, when the idea of a collaboration was broached, “Who’s Harold Arlen?” (What rock was Truman sleeping under when The Wizard of Oz came out?)
At the best of times, Capote was—what’s the best phrase?—high maintenance. But I could only imagine what it must have been like for Arlen to begin composing songs with a guy stuck in Rome, frantically rewriting Beat the Devil for John Huston, and forced to send lyrics by mail.
A particularly fine profile of Arlen was written by a theater critic for The New Yorker, John Lahr. If the last name sounds familiar, it should—he’s the son of Bert Lahr, who played the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, lending his indelible presence to the songwriter’s tunes of glory.
Quote of the Day
“An alcoholic is someone you don't like who drinks as much as you do.”
-- Dylan Thomas
(Thanks to Brian for the suggestion)
-- Dylan Thomas
(Thanks to Brian for the suggestion)
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