Quote of the Day (Knute Rockne, on George Gipp)

"Sometime, Rock, when the team is up against it, when things are wrong and the breaks are beating the boys-tell them to go in there with all they've got and win one for the Gipper." – George Gipp, as quoted by Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne, at halftime of the team’s game against Army, November 10, 1928

I attribute this quotation to Rockne rather than George Gipp in the headline. Here’s my reason:

Heck, how can I put this gently? A master locker-room motivator, Rockne was liable to say anything to get his team fired up before or during a game. Over the years, not all of these things accorded with reality. To wit:

* His six-year-old son, he said, was hospitalized and was pleading for a victory. Didn’t happen!

* He told his team that a possible Rose Bowl bid awaited them if they won. ‘Fraid not!

* Even in the case of George Gipp, he told the Fighting Irish that their opponents one year, Indiana, might have contributed to the death of the All-American with their bruising tackling style. Only trouble was, Gipp died of pneumonia!

Okay. So now it’s eight years after Gipp’s death, at halftime in the middle of one of Notre Dame’s worst seasons under Rockne. (Many teams would regard 5-4 as a winning season, but it counted as a shipwreck at Notre Dame.) They’re playing Army and things aren’t going so good.

So Rockne comes up with this tearjerker of a story about the guy he regarded as the greatest player ever to put on a Notre Dame uniform.

He didn’t mention that Gipp was pretty carefree about discipline and all the other matters his coach regarded as important—missing curfews, playing cards and pool, and betting, even on Notre Dame games (always to win—maybe that’s why he always made sure to get into every game, no matter how ill he felt.) (In fact, when you hear just HOW blithe the first All-American at Notre Dame was about these things, he makes Plaxico Burress of the New York Giants look like the second coming of Alfred P. Sloan.)

All of this was beside the point that Rockne wanted to make. The coach might have been of Scandinavian descent, but hanging around all those Irish Catholics left him with an important lesson in life: never let a little thing like a fact get in the way of a good story. Especially if that fact was that you had been nowhere near Gipp’s bedside as he entered his last days.

Oh, did I mention that Notre Dame proceeded to pull out a 12-6 win that day? Oh, maybe you knew that story, because it became the centerpiece of Knute Rockne, All-American, starring Pat O’Brien and Ronald Reagan, in a signature role that gave him his nickname: “The Gipper.”

For a fascinating discussion of how Reagan landed this role, please see this marvelous post from “The Strange Death of Liberal America.” My progressive readers should relax – the author is liberal. I think he came up with this title when he was on the brink of suicidal despair a few years ago.

I thought that this was also his Secret Service codename, but I was wrong. Actually, it was “Rawhide,” which makes sense of a sort, given his Western roles. Jimmy Carter’s might have been even more appropriate—“Deacon.” The one I like best, though, was JFK’s: “Lancer.” It reminds me of the TV Western of the Sixties. No, Kennedy is the last guy I can imagine in a saddle, but there was something about him—dashing and unafraid of danger—that has some of the quality of the West.

Anyway, you can see why I tend to regard this little anecdote about the Gipper as a stretch of the imagination, right? But in a way, it’s appropriate that Reagan should latch onto it. Literal fact was less important to him than symbolic truth.

Sometimes politicians, like coaches, have to get people to believe in things that contradict reality, to find something inside themselves they never knew existed. If you’re lucky, as Reagan turned out to be so often, people forgive you. If not, they blame you for deceiving them.

That’s why Al Davis of pro football’s Raiders keeps saying, “Just win, baby.” So did Rockne. So did The Gipper—the real-life player and the actor who portrayed him.

Oh, did I mention that my alma mater, Columbia University, almost hired Rockne away from Notre Dame, at a salary $15,000 more than he was making—a lot in those days? News of the agreement caused such a stink, however, that the coach eventually backed out of it.

After hearing about this, I’ve tried hard not to think about how the tradition of football at my school—which might best be summed up as “first in war, first in peace, last in the Ivy League”—could have all been different if this signing had taken place.

This Day in Germany History (Nazi Thuggery Unleashed in “Kristallnacht”)

November 9, 1938—Egged on by the government of Adolf Hitler, mobs rampaged throughout Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland for two nights in shocking anti-Semitic fury. No sphere of public or private life was safe or sacred—the street, the home, the business, the synagogue.

The event came to be nicknamed Kristallnacht, or “Night of the Broken Glass”—taking its cue image from the broken windows of Jewish storefronts. One’s tendency at first is to think of this an old-fashioned pogrom, except that now we know that it was a Nazi experiment in mob psychosis whose “success” (if you want to use the term ironically) warmed the heart of Nazi progaganda chief Dr. Josef Goebbels.

The damage looked like this when all was said and done:

* At least 96 Jews killed
* Hundreds more wounded
* Hundreds of synagogues put to the torch
* Almost 7,500 Jewish businesses destroyed
* Approximately 30,000 Jews arrested and sent to concentration camps

Let’s just mention briefly here two other forms of damage: to the Nazis’ crumbling international image and to ordinary Germans’ idea of what their regime was truly about.

Only about a month after the Munich treaty, no European government could be in any doubt that they had concluded peace with a thugocracy. In America, Franklin D. Roosevelt had accepted it as an article of faith from the beginning of his administration that Hitler was mad, but the events of these nights shocked him in a way he never expected, leading him to recall the American ambassador to Germany. "I myself can scarcely believe that such things could occur in a 20th century civilization," he admitted at a press conference.

My post yesterday on Martha Gellhorn mentioned her dispatch on Dachau. Another of her articles, collected in Reporting World War II, poured scorn on the claim already being peddled by the average German that he or she didn’t have a clue what its government was doing. But even before the war, Kristallnacht was an unmistakable warning. As historian Ian Kershaw has noted: "The German public was confronted directly on a nationwide scale with the full savagery of the attack on the Jews."

One thing I’ve been much remiss in doing is highlighting the work of other bloggers with interesting posts about events that I’m covering for the day, too. This weekend—with anniversaries of two events that represented important signposts to the rise of the Nazi menace—provides an excellent opportunity to rectify this situation.

Yesterday was the 85th anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s “Beer Hall “Putsch” in Munich—something that, to most observers at the time, seemed almost like a comic opera, but which looks in retrospect only slightly premature in signaling Hitler’s deeply anti-democratic tendencies. This Beer Hall Putsch site offers a chilling photographic study of a site that should send chills up and down the spine of any German alive today.

For Kristallnacht, I direct your attention to “Kristallnacht: Murder by Euphemism,” by Rabbi Benjamin Blech, on the “Yonkers Tribune” blog. For shorthand purposes, I referred to this sickening event by its traditional name. But Rabbi Blech details how continued acceptance of this name accomplishes what the Nazis intended: the short-pedaling of mass murder. We need to think of another name that will convey the magnitude of this event's horror.

Quote of the Day (Mother Teresa, on Faithfulness)

“God doesn’t call me to be successful. God calls me to be faithful.”—Mother Teresa, when questioned at the end of her life if she felt discouraged that, despite her efforts, poverty remained in Calcutta

(We are living in the age of back to basics, folks, when verities as old as the Scriptures are being relearned through hard and bitter circumstance. I thought we might be seeing some of that after 9/11, when the vogue for businessmen-heroes like Jack Welch turned, for ever so short a time, to selfless people like firefighters. Now, with the economy in the midst of what promises to be a long downturn, people might question again the relative value of success vs. living for others, as Mother Teresa—and maybe at least one or two people in your life, if you’re lucky—did.)

Quote of the Day (Martha Gellhorn, on Dachau)

“We are not entirely guiltless, we the Allies, because it took us twelve years to open the gates of Dachau. We were blind and unbelieving and slow, and that we can never be again. We must know now that there can never be peace if there is cruelty like this in the world.

And if ever again we tolerate such cruelty we have no right to peace.”—Martha Gellhorn, “Dachau,” in Reporting World War II: Part Two: American Journalism, 1944-1946 (Library of America, 1995)

(Elsewhere in her dispatch on the American troops’ discovery of the worst of the concentration camp Dachau, Gellhorn offered up a descriptive gem of a death-camp survivor that, in its spare but evocative detail, could have been written by her husband, Ernest Hemingway:

“What had been a man dragged himself into the doctor’s office; he was a Pole and he was about six feet tall and he weighed less than a hundred pounds and he wore a striped prison shirts, a pair of unlaced boots and a blanket which he tried to hold between his legs. His eyes were large and strange and stood out from his face, and his jawbone seemed to be cutting through his skin. He had come to Dachau from Buchenwald on the last death transport.”

Of course, Gellhorn would have hated the comparison I made between her and Hemingway—not only as a reminder of a man she was now trying to erase from her life but also as a negation of the very real achievement demonstrated in this passage. In justice, I would have to admit the justice of any annoyance she would feel toward myself or anyone else on this score.

Today’s quote is not only meant as a celebration of Gellhorn—the centennial of whose birth today passed without notice, to my knowledge, on the blogosphere—but as a good opportunity to review the choices we face if, like Gellhorn, we resolve never to permit genocide again.

Let’s start with the celebration first. Hemingway’s marriage to Gellhorn was the shortest of his four—much to the chagrin of his sons, who welcomed this fun-loving woman to the family as their stepmother with great enthusiasm. The union might have been misbegotten because the two were so alike in so many ways: driven, athletic, politically impassioned, glamorous, and competitive in their literary pursuits. They also both eventually committed suicide.

I have not read Gellhorn’s fiction, though I hope to read eventually my copy of her A Stricken Field, which was inspired by her experiences as a foreign correspondent in Czechoslovakia at the time it fell under the Nazi shadow. After reading the selections by her in Reporting World War II, however, I’m fully prepared to believe that she was Hemingway's superior as a journalist—someone who put her subject rather than herself at the center.

Now, about the resolve of “Never again” when it comes to permitting another Holocaust:

In one sense, of course, that ship has sailed. Even after the Holocaust, the twentieth century presented what former Secretary of State Warren Christopher called “a problem from hell”: the prevalence of mass, ethnic-center mass murder. Everybody of good will is against genocide, of course, but the question is, “What are you going to do about it?”

Do we try sanctions—even if they hurt the poor the hardest without really touching the rulers?

Do we engage in multinational military missions—even if that is for purposes, or using methods, with which this nation disagrees?

And what if one or only a couple of powerful nations—Russia or China, say—blocks action in international forums such as the U.N.? What do we do then? How many tens—or even hundreds of thousands—do we permit to die before we take action?

Bill Clinton has expressed regret that he did not act against Rwanda, even when his wife advised intervention. Yet rulers the world over have moved not only against their own dissidents but against ethnic minorities within their countries, as Saddam Hussein did against the Kurds. Which rulers will we act against? How? Under what circumstances? For how long?

Though the Obama camp sounds like it blanched when Joe Biden said Obama would be tested not long after taking office, our VP-to-be was, in another sense, just stating the obvious. The challenge that Martha Gellhorn posed at the end of her searing dispatch on Dachau remains more relevant than ever. The moral handwringing in which we’ve engaged since then seems less justifiable than ever.

We as a country had better discuss—and soon—what we’re going to do about this. Because you can rest assured that, in a world of scarcer resources and rising ethnic and religious tensions, genocide will appear on the world’s radar screen again.)

Quote of the Day (Albert Camus)

“It is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”—Albert Camus

(On this date in 1913, Camus was born in Mondovi, Algeria—and the powerful memories of his childhood there undoubtedly increased the anguish he felt in the years just before his death, when the colony engaged in a merciless war of independence against France.

Despite Camus’ inability to believe in God, two nuns in the English Department at my high school were especially fond of his work. They recognized in him, I think, a basic decency and belief in the fallen but redeemable nature of man—redeemable through action, in a fight against the absurdity of death, against “the side of the executioners,” that is. When it came to religion, Camus might have been a doubter but not a scoffer. I’m sure those nuns believed that this anguished seeker after truth would eventually come home to the Church.

Most of Camus’ work—fiction and philosophical essay—has been extensively explored. However, another genre might also be a worthwhile avenue for studying Camus: drama. In the summer of 2007, the Chautauqua Institution staged a translation of his play The Just. I attended a cast interview during its run, in an afternoon theater enrichment program, and found its theme—terrorism—to be unexpectedly relevant in the light of recent events.)

This Day in Music History (Tchaikovsky Dies Under Mysterious Circumstances)

November 6, 1893—With 16 people (including a priest) watching, in anguished disbelief, as he expired, Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky—wildly popular composer, insomniac, backpain-sufferer, gambler, homosexual, alcoholic, manic-depressive—died in St. Petersburg, Russia, after five days of physical agony. Almost immediately, the rumor machine went into overdrive on the circumstances of his death.

I just love mysteries, don’t you? Too bad there wasn’t a real-life equivalent of the Lieutenant Columbo forerunner in Dostoyefsky’s Crime and Punishment, Porfiry Petrovich, around to make sense of the following:

* Did Tchaikovsky die of complications from cholera, as his younger brother Moleste and an attending doctor insisted?
* Did the neo-Romantic composer, already given to bouts of depression, decide to commit suicide after tiring from his constant struggle to maintain emotional equilibrium?
* Did Tchaikovsky’s pedophilia lead to threatened public exposure—even a criminal trial—that forced him to desperate measures?

Bad enough that Tchaikovsky’s own nature made him a subject for dispute. But what makes this a far more controversial musical mystery than, say, Antonio Salieri’s alleged poisoning of Mozart (an unlikely scenario given unexpected life by Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus) are the number of unexplained circumstances:

* Nobody can account for Tchaikovsky’s whereabouts at all on October 31.
* Why did Tchaikovsky even contract cholera? The overwhelming majority of Tchaikovsky’s fellow aristocrats knew the steps to take to avoid this epidemic circulating through St. Petersburg at the time.
* Why did Tchaikovsky even drain a glass of unboiled water while out dining—especially when his brother specifically warned him about it just as he did so?
* Why wouldn’t someone so fearful of death—not to mention someone whose beloved mother had died of cholera—have been more cautious about avoiding the disease?

Except for a passing reference in the 1954 edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, dismissing unnamed “sensational accounts” of the death, nothing concrete was printed until 1980, when a Soviet émigré musicologist, Alexandra Orlova, wrote an article that gave form to the inchoate rumors. In her scenario, the following happened—or might have happened:

* Tchaikovsky abandoned all discretion by seducing the nephew of one Duke Stenbock-Fermor.
* The outraged duke spoke to a lawyer named Jacobi about it. An old classmate of Tchaikovsky’s from the Imperial Law School in St. Petersburg, Jacobi convened seven other classmates in a four- or five-hour “Council of Honor” to consider the duke’s threat of taking the case straight to the Czar.
* Tchaikovsky’s classmates at the meeting told him there was only one honorable way to avoid scandal for his family and his beloved alma mater—and he dashed out of the room without a word.
* The next day, Jacobi visited the composer and convinced him to take arsenic, which would, in effect, mimic the symptoms of cholera.
* On the day that Tchaikovsky was out dining, the arsenic was already circulating through his system when he staged the public charade of drinking the unboiled water when it was presented to him by a waiter.
* On the second day after the visit from Jacobi, at lunch this time, the composer left his table, feeling nauseous and vomiting. The royal physician came to treat him, but not till 10 at night.

Other variants on the incident leading to Tchaikovsky’s despair have also been cited, by Michael Steen in his excellent précis of the composer’s life in The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, including that he seduced the son of the caretaker of his brother Modeste’s apartment block; that it was the Czar’s own nephew, even his son, that caught the composer’s eye; and that he contracted cholera from one of his pick-ups in St. Petersburg.

At first, it seemed that this revisionist account of the death would become the accepted gospel. It spoke to a new age more frank about sexual matters than Tchaikovsky’s own Victorian era. Just as important, it was a conspiracy theory. Oliver Stone would have a field day with this, if he knew even a little bit about music (though anyone who’s seen the director’s JFK can attest that ignorance of a subject is no impediment to him filming it.)

Over the last nearly 30 years, however, a strong counterrevisionist school—led most notably by Alexander Poznansky in Tchaikovsky's Last Days: A Documentary Study--has countered these arguments.

In an act of historical ju-jitsu, it has taken the most sensational aspect of what the sterling music critic-blogger Alex Ross calls this “penny-dreadful” controversy and used it to its own advantage. Of course Tchaikovsky was a homosexual, even a pedophile, this argument goes, but that was commonly accepted in high St. Petersburg circles. Both the Russian court itself and the Imperial Law School were filled with homosexual affairs. In other words, who cared?

Poznansky and his followers pointed out other problems with the conspiracy theory:

* There was no “Duke” Stenbock-Fermor but a count by that name, who had direct access to the Czar and therefore needed no intermediary such as Jacobi.
* No poison could have duplicated the effects of cholera to the extent postulated in the conspiracy theory.
* The suicide theory requires a coverup among so many participants—in the infamous Joseph McCarthy phrase, a “conspiracy so immense”—that it could not possibly be sustained.
* Tchaikovsky had no free time even to meet with his old school friends at this time because of the premiere of his Sixth Symphony.
* At a time when the composer should have been in enervating despair, Tchaikovsky actually sat down and wrote a long letter listing possible dates for a trip to Odessa.
* The medical treatment Tchaikovsky received worked to some extent in that the effects of cholera were stemmed after treatment by the royal physician—it was, ironically, the concern of the composer and his family that the bath cure administered to his mother that had hastened her death from cholera which delayed this treatment in his own case until it was too late.

All of this sounds pretty plausible. But there are a couple of nagging aspects of this affair that render it unlikely to be resolved so quickly, in my opinion:

* As the critic Donal Henahan pointed out in the early 1980s, the penalty for homosexuality under the Czarist regime—repeated four times in criminal codes dating from 1842 to 1885—was lashing with birch rods, deportation to Siberia and loss of all civil rights.
* Rather than being blasé—gay, if you will—about his sexual tendencies, Tchaikovsky was tortured by them, even going so far as to contract a short-lived sham marriage (and advising brother Modeste, also homosexual, to do likewise).
* Tchaikovsky had already demonstrated a tendency toward self-destruction, becoming so repulsed by his wife that he’d waded into the Moskva River hoping to die.
* His final composition, the Sixth Symphony, was retitled, on the spur of the moment, “Pathetique” by the composer, startling listeners then and now with what Alex Ross calls “a dying roar of sorrow.”

Unless some new documentary evidence comes to light, my own theory is that we’ll never know for sure what happened. Add together the cloud of witnesses to Tchaikovsky’s final days, the background of the gay demimonde of Russian court and artistic circles, the true conspiracy of silence on what was deemed shameful sexuality in those days (the death by syphilis of Vincent Van Gogh’s devoted art-dealer brother Theo was not confirmed by the family until several decades later, even after publication of Irving Stone’s Lust for Life), and the introduction of modern sexual politics into the art of biography, and you have a very tangled web indeed.

Too bad. In the end, despite the natural human tendency to want to know everything, then share it in the form of gossip, what really matters is the music—something that the public has understood, even when critical opinion of Tchaikovsky’s own time (and even for a long time afterward) dismissed it as overly sentimental or bombastic rather than capturing the titanic flow of emotion at the heart of the composer’s troubled existence.

Quote of the Day (Martha Reeves, on Motown)

“You can’t really have a good house party unless you play some Motown.”—Singer Martha Reeves, quoted by Lisa Robinson, “It Happened in Hitsville,” Vanity Fair, December 2008

(Check out Lisa Robinson’s new oral history of Motown in the latest issue of Vanity Fair, now on the newsstands. Fifty years before Barack Obama, Berry Gordy Jr. founded an organization that, at a time when America badly needed it, managed to bring blacks and whites together. Yes, it was only on the dance floor, but it was as good a place to start as any—and, at a time now in the music industry when everything is hopelessly demographically segmented, this is not something to dismiss.)