DailyNewsGems

A Look at Abraham Lincoln's Private Reading List

“A capacity, and taste, for reading, gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others. It is the key, or one of the keys, to the already solved problems. And not only so. It gives a relish, and facility, for successfully pursuing the [yet] unsolved ones.”
--Abraham Lincoln, September 30, 1859 (Address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society).

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I recently devoured author and historian Jon Meacham’s latest, “And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle,” a wonderfully written book about the struggles Lincoln faced in his life, from his meager, poverty-stricken upbringing as a youth living in the harsh conditions of rural Indiana and Kentucky through the weighty challenges he confronted as president during the Civil War when the future of the Republic hung in the balance.

What fascinated me most about “And There Was Light” was that even though it was a full biography of Lincoln’s life and struggles, from cradle to grave, Meacham didn’t feel compelled to chronicle every intricate detail of every battle during the war, such as the First Battle of Bull Run or the Siege of Vicksburg. Instead, he focused on the overall morality of the Civil War, especially describing how Lincoln’s religious faith evolved and grew stronger during the most seminal events and challenges of his life.

While reading this magnificent biography, I was struck on the books Lincoln read and most liked during his lifetime; some of the books had such a profound impact on the Illinois “Railsplitter,” their fundamental lessons would, astonishingly, serve him well later in his life when confronted with the scourge of war and eventually as the moral crusader of the 19^th century.

It's been well documented that Lincoln absorbed a great deal of William Shakespeare’s work along with the King James Bible, which many believe helped him to develop the distinctive rhythm and structure of his writings and speeches. Lincoln would often recite out loud sonnets and passages from King Lear and Macbeth. A number of historians have written, for example, that just days before his assassination, Lincoln read loudly from a speech from Macbeth about the death of Duncan the king, which included the line, “after life’s fitful fever he sleeps well.”

From an early age, Lincoln was an astute reader of the Bible.

William E. Barton, one of the early twentieth century's most admired writers and lecturers on the life of Abraham Lincoln, once wrote that Lincoln “read the Bible, honored it, quoted it freely, and it became so much a part of him as visibly and permanently to give shape to his literary style and to his habits of thought.”

During his famous “House Divided” speech at the Republican State Convention (June 16, 1858), Lincoln used three biblical references, including, Luke 11:17: “Every kingdom divided against itself becomes a desert and house falls on house.”

One line from the Gettysburg address (November 19, 1863) is based on the principle of Psalm 91:1” this “Nation shall under God have a new birth of freedom.”

 

Although Lincoln read many of his favorite books well over 160 years ago during the 19^th century, I became curious about how many of these books from his personal library are still considered relevant today in the 21^st century.

Undoubtedly, many of the books cited by Meacham as works most admired by Lincoln’s still resonate today and I’m sure are still widely read; such John Bunyan’s fictional narrative, “Pilgrim’s Progress,” (the author’s dream of the trials and adventures of a man as he travels from his home); the classic travelogue, “Robinson Crusoe,” by Daniel Defoe; and “The Age of Reason” by Thomas Paine, his influential pamphlet (originally published in 1794) which challenges traditional religion and the legitimacy of the Bible.

Other favorite books of Lincoln might not be as widely read as they were in the 19^th century.

One of the books Meacham mentions that was on Lincoln’s reading list is “The English Reader” written by Lindley Murray, first published in 1799, which contains snippets of prose excerpted from popular pieces of literature, a body of work, with a strong emphasis on the basic principles of elocution and grammar. 

According to William Huntting Howell, professor in the Department of English at Boston University, “it’s pretty safe to assume that “The English Reader” has fallen out of the college English curriculum. “I think that’s partly because,” Howell explained, “the canon has changed a lot since the late 18^th century—the folks that he designates as “the Best Writers” are, if I’m remembering right, mostly out of a now deemphasized Western classical tradition—and partly because of his approach to the material, which stresses eloquent pronunciation over critical engagement; that is, the book wasn’t much interested in inviting the reader to engage critically with the material.”

Another book high on Lincoln’s reading list was “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation” by Robert Chamber, originally published in 1844; it brought together various ideas of stellar evolution (that is, how a star changes over time) and the progressive transmutation of species (the change of one species into another). The book became an international bestseller, much of its narrative, however, was strongly blasted by the clergy and eventually by leading scientists who pointed out many flaws in the book. Despite its criticisms, it was an important work, which predated Charles Darwin’s influential “Origin of the Species” by 15 years.

Jim Secord, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, thinks that “Vestiges really was very significant not only for Lincoln but for many Americans of his generation. Its main argument that nebular condensation led to the formation of the solar system and then to the development of planets, species and humans by natural laws is broadly supported by modern science.” “The book's significance,” Secord explained, “really is as the first text in English to develop a broadly evolutionary cosmology that takes into account the findings of scientific geology, astronomy and other sciences.”

“The Life of Washington” by Mason Locke Weems, a biography of George Washington, the Founding Father and first president of the United States, was another book consumed by the young Lincoln. It was first published in 1800 and became an instant bestseller. When the fifth edition of the book was published in 1806, Weems mentioned, for the first time, the story of George Washington and the cherry tree in which readers were led to believe he damaged with a hatchet and then admitted to his father what he had done: “I cannot tell a lie…” His father thanked young George for his honesty and told him his honesty was worth more than a thousand trees. By the 1830’s, the story spread like a wildfire and became imbedded into American culture. Historians today roundly dismiss the cherry tree story as pure fiction, that never happened.

According to Benjamin L. Huggins, Research Associate Professor and Associate Editor of the Pagers of George Washington at the University of Virginia, “Weems's biography was very popular in the 19^th century, but it is filled with invented material and myths, and modern historians consider it completely unreliable. It is never assigned in college classrooms, except as an example in American Studies classes that might study this genre of now unreliable 19^th-century biographies like Weems's.”

It would take quite some time to learn that Weems acquired the cherry tree story from an elderly woman, apparently, a friend of the family, who wanted to remain anonymous, casting a shadow of doubt of its accuracy.

A look at Lincoln’s favorite books indicates he craved expanding his depth of knowledge every chance he got, such as when reading “Aesop's Fables”, or the “Aesopica”, a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a slave and storyteller who lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 564 BCE.

The book chronicles 725 known parables, which were told roughly between 620 and 564 BC. Most of Aesop’s fables feature personified animals, which generally have a one-to-one figurative relationship with a vice or virtue with the fox frequently symbolizing cleverness; the hare, agility; the bull, recklessness; the donkey, fatuousness; and the ant, industriousness. Aesop throws these animals into different environments with different combinations and then suggests what effect it has on them in a social setting.

Leslie V. Kurke, Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at University of California, Berkeley, said that “by and large, the fables of Aesop are not assigned in the college classroom--though they may still be popular in primary and secondary school curricula.” “I think that occasionally, they're read in Greek,” Kurke points out, “in first-year Greek classes, since they're short and the Greek is very simple.”

In seeking a sharper understanding of 19^th century liberalism, Lincoln liked to read the “Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy,” (first published in 1785), a classic work by William Paley, an English clergyman and philosopher, who attacked the slave trade in the book and the wickedness of slavery in general. The book was considered a significant piece of writing which triggered public attention to the immoral practice of slavery. In the book, Paley additionally developed some of the leading scientific, theological, and ethical ideas of the time, including civil liberties and constitutional government.

Azis Rana, a legal scholar and Professor of Law at the Cornell University, thinks that Paley was “a major philosophical and religious figure for early Americans, given his effort to provide a rational account of the existence of God in keeping with Enlightenment principles.” “Today,” Rana explained, “he is still studied in religious studies and theology programs.  I think he tends to be less commonly found on syllabi in political theory, intellectual history, and philosophy.”

“Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy” was also on the college reading list of Thaddeus Stevens, one of the leaders of the Radical Republican faction of the Republican Party during the 1860s.

With such a keen interest of American history, it’s probably no surprise to find William Grimshaw’s “History of the United States: From Their First Settlement as Colonies” on Lincoln’s reading list. It was originally published in 1822. Grimshaw was from Greencastle, Ireland and emigrated to the United States in 1815, settling in Philadelphia. He wrote a number of history books, including revised editions of “Goldsmith’s histories of Rome and Greece,” of David Ramsay’s “Life of Washington,” and of Baine’s “History of the Wars Growing Out of the French Revolution.”

His History of the United States was his most celebrated. In his broad sweep of the United States, Grimshaw advanced the idea, among others, that large swaths of territory of the American West should be seized by the United States, an idea which would later become more broadly defined as “Manifest Destiny.”

According to David Gerleman, Professor in the History department at George Mason University, “Grimshaw's book [published 1832] has never been used in any modern classrooms nor should it be. It was written long before history as a discipline or social science was founded, not containing, for example, any source or citation record of any kind.” “Much like Parson Weems' fanciful biography of Washington,” Gerleman further explained, “it is one man's tale of what he thinks the history was and not one grounded in academic fact.”

Gerald Prokopowicz, in the History department at East Carolina University, points out that historians didn’t begin using footnotes or citing their sources until the second half of the 19^th century, several decades after Grimshaw wrote his book.

Of all the books on Lincoln’s personal reading list, arguably, the most well-known is Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” or “Life Among the Lowly” It was a best-seller and second best-selling book of the 19^th century, right behind the Bible.

Stowe, a staunch abolitionist and born into a prominent family of Northern white preachers, sketches the story of an enslaved character, Uncle Tom, described as saintly and dignified, who saves the life of Little Eva, a frail, angelic daughter of a Southern slave owner while being transported by boat to an auction in New Orleans. It more generally chronicles the harsh and punishing treatment of slaves forced to cope with the separation of families after being put up for sale by their masters.

The two volume anti-slavery novel is widely hailed as one of the most influential books of the 19^th century, which brought to light the immorality of slavery to a wider audience; and caused others, who previously remained silent, to publicly speak out against slavery.

Robert S. Levine, a scholar of American and African American Literature at the University of Maryland, College Park, tells me that Uncle Tom’s Cabin is indeed still being taught in college classrooms, “though undergraduate students these days have trouble with long works, whether Uncle Tom's Cabin or Moby-Dick.” “As editor of The Norton Anthology of American Literature,” Levine says, “I created a 100-page version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin for the anthology (volume B), which I find very teachable. Some these days find the novel racist and sentimental; others (including myself) see the novel as doing key anti-racist and anti-slavery cultural work during the 1850s.”

Whenever a discussion comes up about Lincoln and his reading of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” historians often cite the famous story, when meeting Stowe at the White House, Lincoln supposedly said, “So here’s the little lady who created this big war.”  Most consider the tale apocryphal, including Robert S. Levine, who says that one of Stowe’s sisters was with her at that meeting at the White House; and according to her, President Lincoln had no idea who Harriet Beecher Stowe was; triggering doubt whether the president read Uncle Tom’s Cabin at all.

A book not mentioned in Meacham’s book is “The Columbian Orator,” which according to Jonathan W. White, professor of American Studies at Christopher Newport University, appears to have had a meaningful impact on Lincoln.

“The Columbian Orator,” published in 1797, is a collection of political essays, poems, and dialogues collected and written by Caleb Bingham, an educator of late 18^th century New England. The striking body of work includes speeches by George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and some imagined speeches by Socrates and Cato, among other historical figures.

In addition to Lincoln, “The Columbian Orator” reportedly served as a source of inspiration for abolitionist, social reformer, statesman, and writer, Frederick Douglass.

I’m sure Lincoln read a great deal of poetry in his lifetime; one of his favorites often cited by historians, including Jon Meacham, is the poem “Mortality” by Scottish poet William Knox. Lincoln supposedly knew the poem by heart and is believed to have once said, “I would give all I am worth, and go in debt, to be able to write so fine a piece as I think that is." Knox, a descendant of reformer John Knox, published the poem in a collection called The Songs of Israel in 1824, shortly before his death at age 36. "Mortality" was printed in at least 235 newspapers during the 19^th century.

Another favorite poem of Lincoln’s was Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr’s “The Last Leaf,” written in 1831, that explores the fragility of life and the supremacy of hope; and that even in the face of death and despair, there is always something to hold on to.

William Herndon, Lincoln's law partner and biographer, in describing Lincoln’s love of the poem, wrote in 1867: "I have heard Lincoln recite it, praise it, laud it, and swear by it.”

Poet Edgar Allan Poe once described “The Last Leaf” one of the finest works in the English language.

According to David Bromwich, Professor of English at Yale University, “They (“Mortality,” and “The Last Leaf”) are good popular pieces with a fatalism very suitable to Lincoln's mood at most times,” while John Burt, Professor of American Literature at Brandeis University, thinks that these two poems are not widely read today. “I know he learned how to read and speak from The Columbian Orator (which Frederick Douglass also used). And I know he was a careful reader of Euclid, and worked out all the proofs himself.”

So, there you have it.

There weren’t many public libraries, Barnes & Noble bookstores, or ordering books online through Amazon in Lincoln’s day.  Books were largely scarce for the young Lincoln; but he did manage to get his hands on what he could; the books he did find were some of the best literature available; and by and large, it’s safe to assume some of his favorite books served him well up through his assassination in April, 1865.

His was a life well lived; and apparently well-read.

--Bill Lucey

[email protected]

July 2, 2023

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Abraham Lincoln’s Favorite Books (according to historian Jon Meacham)

• “A New Guide to the English Tongue” by Thomas Dilworth

• “Fables” by Aesop

• “Pilgrim’s Progress” by John Bunyan

• “The Life of Washington” by Mason Locke Weems

• “Robinson Crusoe” by Danie Defoe

• “An Authentic Narrative of the Loss of the American Brig Commerce” by James Riley

• “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation” by Robert Chamber

• “Origin of the Species” by Charles Darwin

• “Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind” by Thomas Brown

• “Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy” by William Paley

• “Analogy of Religion” by Joseph Butler (first published in 1736)

• “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” by Harriet Beecher Stowe

• “The Psalms” of the Bible (King James Version)--Lincoln’s favorite

• “The English Reader”, an anthology published in 1799

• “History of the United States” by William Grimshaw

• “The Ruins of Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires” by Constantin Volney

• “The Age of Reason” by Thomas Paine

• “A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Presenting the Original Facts and Documents upon Which the Story is Founded” by Harriet Beecher Stowe

• Poem, “Mortality” by William Knox (Lincoln knew it by heart).

• “The Last Leaf” by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., a poem

Additional Resources

What Abraham Lincoln Read: An Evaluative and Annotated List by Robert Bray, Professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University

Abraham Lincoln and Poetry (Cambridge University Press) by Faith Barrett (Associate Professor of English at Duquesne University) and edited by Shirley Samuels (Professor of American Studies at Cornell University).

 

Have the New York Yankees Retired Too Many Numbers?

Plaques of numbers retired by the New York Yankees in Monument Park at Yankee Stadium.

Photo Source: Wikipedia

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As of 2023, the New York Yankees have won 27 championships; so, it’s probably not much of a surprise that they’ve also retired 22 player numbers, the most in baseball. The only team that is close to retiring that many numbers are the St Louis Cardinals, with 14.

The last Yankee to have his number retired was Paul O’Neill in 2022, who patrolled the outfield for the Bronx Bombers for nine seasons, compiling a lifetime batting average of .288, 281 home runs, and 1,269 runs batted in.

In fact, the Yankees have retired so many numbers that they are now running short of jersey numbers to issue to its current roster. Derek Jeter’s no. 2, which was retired in 2017, was the last single digit number to be retired.

To make up for the scarcity of numbers, the Yankees have petitioned Major League Baseball to ask whether their coaching staff can suit up without numbers. MLB is reportedly reviewing the request.

With 22 numbers retired by the Yankees, many question whether all of these players really deserve such a distinction.

Imagine, Steve Garvey, with a lifetime batting average of .301, an MVP winner in 1974, who won four Gold Gloves, over 16 seasons, has yet to have his # 6 retired by the Dodgers.

Ditto for Detroit Tigers pitcher Mickey Lolich, a three time All-Star, who won three complete games in the 1968 World Series, including a critical win over the St Louis Cardinals future hall of famer, Bob Gibson. At the time of his retirement in 1979, Lolich held the Major League Baseball record for career strikeouts by a left-handed pitcher, even surpassing Warren Spahn. Yet, his number 29 has never been retired by the Tigers.

No wonder some joke that “it’s easier to get into the Hall of Fame than to have your number retired.”

When asked whether all 22 Yankee players numbers deserved to be retired, Washington Post columnist, political commentator, and lifelong Chicago Cubs fan, George F. Will, responded that he “would delete #1 – Billy Martin, who was neither a great player or manager.”

Dan Shaughnessy, sports columnist and associate editor for the Boston Globe, thought that retiring the number of “[Paul] O'Neill (# 21) was ridiculous.” “I guess,” Shaughnessy explained, “because he's on television with them now. So many more worthy than him.”

Others question the retiring of Reggie Jackson’s number 44 in 1993. Conceding he was most definitely Mr. October in the playoffs, Jackson averaged a ho hum .279 batting average with 29 home runs and 92 RBIs in his five years in pinstripes, which really dwarfs what he produced for the Oakland A’s, compiling 1,151 hits, 254 home runs and 733 RBI in nine seasons. Though he caused mountains of dissension in New York when it was called the “Bronx Zoo” and infamously clashed with manager Billy Martin, owner George Steinbrenner liked him, which is most likely the reason why his number was retired in the Bronx.

Interestingly, the A’s didn’t retire Jackson’s #9 until 2004.

Still others wonder whether former Yankee first baseman and team captain, Don Mattingly (no. 23) really deserved to have his number retired. In 14 seasons with the Yankees, Mattingly only won one MVP and only appeared in one round of the postseason, in 1995, his final season in pinstripes, in a wild card round against the Seattle Mariners.

It may be surprising to some that the retiring of jersey numbers wasn’t that common until the 1970s, when on June 4, 1972, the L.A. Dodgers retired three numbers simultaneously: Jackie Robinson, Sandy Koufax, and Roy Campanella.

Interestingly, for 31 years, from 1939 through 1970, only 19 MLB numbers were retired.  There are now more than 200 retired numbers in Major League Baseball, which now includes executives, broadcasters, and “fans” (as in the case of the Cleveland Indians/Guardians).

Uniform numbers were first introduced by the New York Yankees in 1929. Not until 1932 did all MLB teams adopt numbers. And when the Yankees began wearing them, it was used to designate the number of the hitter in the batting order. In 1929, for example, Earl Combs, the Yankees leadoff hitter, wore no. 1. Third sacker, Mark Koeing, wearing no. 2, was second in the lineup followed by Ruth, Gehrig, and Bob Meusel, who wore jersey numbers 3, 4, and 5 respectively.

Lou Gehrig had his number 4 retired on July 4, 1939 at Yankee Stadium, soon after being diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), later referred to as the Lou Gehrig’s Disease.

Photo Credit: BETTMANN ARCHIVE

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Lou Gehrig was the first Yankee to have his #4 retired by the Yankees on July 4, 1939 during his moving “luckiest man on the face of the earth” speech after being diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). The “Iron Horse” compiled some monster numbers for the Yankees: a .340 batting average with 493 home runs, two AL MVP Awards and the 1934 Triple Crown. Gehrig additionally played in 2,130 consecutive games; never missing a game from June 1, 1923, until he voluntarily retired during a game on May 2, 1939. A record that remained until Baltimore Orioles’ shortstop Cal Ripken Jr. broke it on September 6, 1995.

Babe Ruth had his number retired by the Yankees in 1948 and Joe DiMaggio in 1952.

One historic note: the first number officially retired by a team in professional sports was that of hockey player, Ace Bailey, whose number 6 was retired by the Toronto Maple Leafs in 1934.

The benchmarks for retiring numbers, it seems, have relaxed over the years. It used to be common practice that a player’s number wasn’t retired until other players had worn them. At least nine Yankee players, for example, wore no. 3 after Ruth left the team.

Other standards adopted by teams was that a player had to distinguish himself with other teams or until he’s been inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown before their number would be retired.

Eight players have had their numbers retired by more than one team, six by two teams, while Nolan Ryan had his retired by three teams. Nolan Ryan, along with Carlton Fisk have two different numbers retired. No. 20 is the jersey number which has been retired the most by 11 players, including Frank Robinson, Mike Schmidt, and Don Sutton.

Some players have been ignored entirely because their careers came before the adoption of numbers.

Andrew Zimbalist, an American economist and author of 24 books, including “Baseball and Billions” and “May the Best Team Win: Baseball Economics and Public Policy” thinks the Yankees retire too many numbers, to the point of diluting the honor. “One example that should not have been retired is Paul O'Neill (no. 21),” Zimbalist said.

To put the excess of retired New York Yankees numbers in proper perspective, I checked in with retired New York Times’ sports columnist George Vecsey, who explained to me that teams like the Dodgers have a more demanding policy than the Yankees. “They held off retiring Brooklyn deities like Pee Wee Reese and Gil Hodges until after they were voted into the Hall of Fame.” “I would have voted those two into the Hall much earlier,” Vecsey said, “but appreciate the strict standards.”

Vecsey additionally attributes the glut of retired numbers to George Steinbrenner, the first real Boss, long before Bruce Springsteen assumed the title. “Part of it is the ego,” Vecsey recalls, “that says he can do whatever he darn wants. But the longer he has been gone, the more I think about his sentimentality.”

If it were up to Vecsey, are there any player numbers he would not have retired?

“Definitely not Jorge Posada or Bernie Williams or Paul O'Neill, Andy Pettitte or Ron Guidry; Mattingly was hurt early.” Vecsey would also place big question marks over the retiring of Billy Martin, Roger Maris, and Phil Rizzuto’s numbers.

“If I were being strict”, Vecsey explained, “I'd have retired numbers: #3 (Ruth), #4 (Gehrig), #5, (DiMaggio) #6 (Joe Torre), #7 (Mickey Mantle), #8 (Yogi Berra & Bill Dickey), #16 (Whitey Ford), #37 (Casey Stengel), #42 (Mariano Rivera), and Jeter (# 2) -- sure—as the leader of the dynasty.”

Clearly, George Vescey is right on the money. Steinbrenner was proud of his Yankees, and admittedly, contributed to a number of its world championships. The Boss treated the Yankees like they were a Broadway show, he wasn’t interested in raw, untested talent, or solid position players--much like a Broadway show—he wanted the BIG stars who would bring fans to the Bronx, mega superstars like Reggie Jackson, Dave Winfield, Wade Boggs, and Catfish Hunter, to name just a few. Monument Park at Yankee Stadium, in Steinbrenner’s eyes, was an extension of his Broadway show mentality—when fans came to Yankee Stadium, they would feast their eyes on the vast collection of plaques and retired Yankee numbers (whether deserved or not), drumming in the impression that the Yankees are arguably the greatest sports franchise in the world.

--Bill Lucey

April 14, 2023

[email protected]

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Additional Resources

List of New York Yankee Retired Numbers (MLB)

Baseball Reference: Retired Numbers in MLB

Keith Olbermann’s biting commentary (in 2017) over whether Derek Jeter was the greatest Yankee

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NOTE: To the Sports Editor:

Publication Date: Sept. 30, 2001, New York Times

“I am a longtime Yankees fan who remembers viewing his first Yankees game and first night game in 1954. The retired numbers - 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 16, 32, 37, etc., are sitting as symbols on a fence when they would be better utilized on the backs of active players.

The numbers can still hang on the wall as a tribute to past stars. They could also be used to the Yankees' advantage by giving them to their present players.”

RUSSELL A. ROMAGIA

Woodbridge, Va.

 

118th Congress: By the Numbers

The House of Representatives holds a vote on speaker of the House on Jan. 3, the first day of the 118th Congress.

Photo Credit: Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

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How well do you know your Congress?

On January 3, the legislative branch of the United States federal government, assembled in Washington, D.C., to begin the 118^th Congress.

The bruising 2022 midterm elections (November 8) resulted in surprising wins for the Democrats in what many construed as a stinging rebuke to the possible resurgence of Donald Trump and the MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) Republicans.

Prior to the election, political analysts and pundits predicted a red wave (Republican victories) would dot the polarized electoral landscape. In addition to Joe Biden’s low approval ratings, U.S. presidents, historically, haven’t fared well during the midterms.

Still, Republicans did manage to gain control of the House, narrowly (222-213), for the first time since the 115^th Congress (2017). 

The Democrats, in the other body, picked up one seat in the Senate, giving them a 51-49 majority, while ensuring the 118^th Congress, much like the rest of country, remains deeply divided right through the stretch run to the 2024 presidential election.

Soon after the midterms, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, 82, the first female Speaker of the House in U.S. history, announced she was stepping down from her leadership position. Pelosi will still represent her San Francisco district as a member of the House. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), 52, replaced Pelosi for the Democrats top leadership post, becoming the first Black party leader in either chamber in Congress.

With the Republicans regaining control of the House, the first order of business of the new Congress was electing a new Speaker.

After 15 agonizing (almost ridiculously laughable) ballots, the Republicans finally pushed Kevin McCarthy, 58, (R-CA 20^th District) over the goal line to become the 55^th speaker of the United States House of Representatives.

So, we’re good to go.

How successful will President Biden be in pushing his ambitious $6.8 trillion budget proposal (which calls for raising taxes on the rich, boosting military spending, and increased competition with China) through the new Congress?

Stay tuned!

In the meantime, here is a membership summary of the 118^th Congress from a report recently published by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), a public policy research institute of the United States Congress.

118th Congress: By the Numbers

Party Composition

House of Representatives

Republicans: 222 (plus 2 Delegates and the Resident Commissioner of Puerto Rico)

Democrats: 213 (Plus 3 Delegates)

Senate

Republicans: 49

Democrats: 48, and 3 Independents, who all caucus with the Democrats

Age

House of Representatives

• The youngest Representative in the 118^th Congress is Maxwell Frost (D-FL), who was 25 at the beginning of the 118th Congress.
• The oldest Representative in the 118^th Congress is Grace Napolitano (D-CA) who is 89.

NOTE: The U.S. Constitution requires Representatives be at least 25 years old when they take office.

Senate

• The youngest Senator in the 118^th Congress is Jon Ossoff (D-GA), who was 35 at the beginning of the Congress.
• The oldest Senator in the 118^th Congress is Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) who is 89.

NOTE: Senators must be at least 30 years old when they take office.

Occupations

• 44 Senators served in the House
• 101 Members (78 in the House, 23 in the Senate) have worked in education, including teachers, professors, instructors, school fundraisers, counselors, administrators, or coaches.
• 4 physicians in the Senate, 16 physicians in the House in addition to 5 dentists.
• 1 psychologist in the House
• 1 optometrist in the Senate
• 2 pharmacists in the House
• 3 nurses and 1 emergency medical technician (all in the House)
• 5 ordained ministers (3 in the House, 2 in the Senate).
• 41 former mayors (34 in the House, 7 in the Senate).
• 13 former state governors (all in the Senate and 10 lieutenant governors (6 in the Senate, 4 in the House).
• 6 attorneys general of their states (all in the Senate) and 6 secretaries of state (2 in the Senate, 4 in the House).
• 16 former judges (all but 1 in the House) and 32 prosecutors (6 in the Senate, 26 in the House) who have served in the city, county, state, tribal, federal, or military capacities.
• 3 former Ambassadors (1 in the Senate, 2 in the House).
• 264 former state or territorial legislators (45 in the Senate, 219 in the House, including 2 Delegates and Resident Commissioner from Puerto Rico).
• 77 former congressional staffers (16 in the Senate, 61 in the House, including 3 Delegates).
• 4 former congressional pages (1 in the House and 3 in the Senate).
• 3 sheriffs (House)
• 4 police officers (House)
• 1 fire chief, 1 firefighter (House)
• 1 parole officer (House)
• 2 CIA employees (House).
• 1 FBI agent (House).
• 1 Peace Corps volunteer in the House and 1 AmeriCorps volunteer in the Senate.
• 2 physicists and 2 chemists (all in the House)
• 1 geologist (Senate).
• 9 engineers (8 in the House, 1 in the Senate).
• 29 public relations, marketing or communications professionals (3 in the Senate, 26 in the House) and 5 accountants (1 in the Senate and 4 in the House).
• 4 software company executives in the House and 2 in the Senate,
• 42 consultants (7 in the Senate, 35 in the House), 5 car dealership owners (all in the House), and 5 venture capitalists (1 in the House, 4 in the Senate.
• 11 bankers or bank executives (1 in the Senate, 10 in the House), 25 veterans of the real estate industry (2 in the Senate, 23 in the House), and 10 Members who have worked in the construction industry (1 in the Senate, 9 in the House).
• 6 social workers (2 in the Senate, 4 in the House) and 5 union representatives (all in the House)
• 24 nonprofit executives of founders (22 in the House, 2 in the Senate),
• 2 radio talk show hosts (both in the House); 4 radio or television broadcasters, managers, or owners (3 in the House, 1 in the Senate); 10 reporters or journalists (1 in the Senate, 9 in the House); and 2 newspaper publishers in the House.
• 17 insurance agents or executives (3 in the Senate, 14 in the House) and 16 Members who have worked in the securities and investment industries (3 in the Senate, 13 in the House)
• 1 artist, 1 book publisher, and 1 speechwriter (all in the House), and 2 documentary filmmakers in the Senate.
• 7 restaurateurs, 3 coffee shop owners, and 1 wine store owner (all in the House), and 1 brewpub owner in the Senate.
• 31 farmers, ranchers, or cattle farm owners (8 in the Senate, 23 in the House).
• 1 almond orchard owner, 1 crops nursery owner, as well as a forester, a fruit orchard worker, and a horse trainer (all in the House).
• 1 flight attendant, 4 pilots, all in the House, and 1 astronaut in the Senate.
• 2 professional football players, 1 hockey player, 1 baseball player, and 1 mixed martial arts fighter (all in the House.
• 6 current members of the military (5 in the House, 1 in the Senate) and 5 current members of the National Guard (all in the House).

Education

• 23 Members of the House have no educational degree beyond a high school diploma or GED.
• 5 Members of the House, and 1 Senator, have associate’s degrees as their highest degrees.
• 107 Members of the House and 20 Senators earned a master’s degree as their highest attained degrees.
• 132 Members of the House (30.5 % of the House) and 51 Senators (51 % of the Senate) hold law degrees.
• 22 Representatives and 4 Senators have doctoral (Ph.D., D.Phil., Ed.D., or D. Min) degrees.
• 21 Members of the House and 5 Senators have medical degrees.
• 7 Representatives and 1 Senator are graduates of the U.S. Military Academy.
• 5 Representatives and 1 Senator graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy.
• 2 Representatives graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy.
• 1 Senator graduated from the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy.
• 2 Representatives and 1 Senator were Rhodes Scholars.
• 2 Representatives were Fulbright Scholars.
• 2 Representatives were Marshall Scholars.
• 1 Representative and 1 Senator were Truman Scholars.

Religion

• 7 % of Members (247 in the House, 56 in the Senate) are Protestant, with Baptist as the most followed denomination, followed by Methodist.
• 27 % of Members (122 in the House, 26 in the Senate) are Catholic.
• 2 % Members (24 in the House, 9 in the Senate) are Jewish.
• 7 % of Members (6 in the House, 3 in the Senate) are Mormon (Church of Latter-day Saints.
• 2 Members (1 in the House, 1 in the Senate) are Buddhist, 3 Representatives are Muslim and 2 Representatives are Hindu.

Gender and Ethnicity

Women Members

• 154 women Members (28.47 % of the total membership) serve in the 118^th Congress, 6 more than the beginning of the 117^th
• 129 women, including three Delegates as well as the Resident Commissioner, serve in the House and 25 in the Senate. Of the 129 women in the House, 94 are Democrats, including 2 of the Delegates, and 35 are Republicans, including 1 Delegate as well as the Resident Commissioner.
• Of the 25 women in the Senate, 15 are Democrats, 9 are Republicans, and 1 is an Independent.

NOTE: 30 years ago, in the 103^rd Congress (1993-1994), 48 women served in the House and 7 in the Senate.

40 years ago in the 98^th Congress (1977-1978), there were 22 women in the House, and 2 in the Senate.

African American Members

• 63 African American Members (11.65 % of the total membership) in the 118^th Congress, 1 more than at the beginning of the 117^th
• 60 serve in the House, including 2 Delegates.
• 3 in the Senate
• 56 of the African-American House Members, including 2 Delegates, are Democrats, and 4 are Republicans.
• 2 Senators are Democrats and 1 is Republican.
• 30 African American women, including 2 Delegates, serve in Congress, all in the House.

NOTE: 40 years ago, in the 98^th Congress (1983-1984), 22 African American Members served in the House, 0 in the Senate.

60 years ago, in the 87th Congress (1961-1962), there were 4 African American Members of Congress, all serving in the House.

Hispanic/Latino American Members

• 62 Hispanic or Latino Members in the 118^th Congress, 11.5 % of the total membership and 10 more than in the 117^th
• 56 serve in the House, including 2 Delegates and the Resident Commissioner, and 6 in the Senate.
• 38 are Democrats (including 1 Delegate) and 18 are Republicans (including 1 Delegate and Resident Commissioner.
• 19 are women, including the Resident Commissioner.
• Of the 6 Hispanic Senators (2 Republicans, 4 Democrats) one is female.

NOTE: 40 years ago, in the 98^th Congress (1983-1984), 12 Hispanic or Latino Members served in Congress. All 12 were male Members of the House.

Asian/Pacific Islander American Members

• 21 Members of the 118^th Congress (3.9 % of the total membership) are of Asian, South Asian, or Pacific ancestry, one less than in the beginning of the 117^th
• 19 of them (15 Democrats, 4 Republicans) serve in the House, and two (both Democrats) serve in the Senate.
• 11 of the Asian, Pacific Islander, or South Asian American Members are female, 9 in the House and 2 in the Senate.

NOTE: 40 years in the 98^th Congress (1983-1984), there 5 Asian/Pacific Islander Americans in the House, and 2 in the. Senate. All were male.

American Indian Members

• 5 Native American (American Indian or Alaska Native) Members of the 118^th Congress; 4 in the House (2 Republicans and 2 Democrats) and 1, a Republican, in the Senate, representing 0.92 % of the total congressional membership.

Foreign Birth

• 27 Representatives and 5 Senators (5.9 % of the 118^th Congress) were born outside of the United States, including Cuba, Germany, Guatemala, Japan, South Korea, and Peru.

NOTE: The U.S. Constitution requires that Representatives be citizens for 7 years and Senators be citizens for 9 years before they take office.

Military Service

• 98 individuals (18.1 % of the total membership) have served in the military, 7 more than at the beginning of the 117^th Congress (91 Members).
• Congressional Quarterly (CQ) reports, the House as of January, 2023 had 82 veterans (including 5 female Members, as well as 2 Delegates).
• The Senate had 16 veterans, including 2 women. Their military service includes tours of duty in the Vietnam War and the Persian Gulf War, and combat or peacekeeping missions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Kosovo.
• 5 Members are currently serving in the National Guard.
• 4 of the 7 seven female veterans are combat veterans.

--Bill Lucey

March 17, 2023

[email protected]

Source: Congressional Research Service (CRS), Congressional Quarterly (CQ), “Member Profiles,” Pew Research Center on Religion and Public Life.

Book Review: The Cuban Missile Crisis

History appears to be staring us in the face.

While President Joe Biden and Russian president Vladimir Putin lock horns over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, historians remind us that it wasn’t all that long ago when two other East vs. West leaders flexed their muscles and came eye-ball-to-eyeball, each waiting for the other to flinch.

61 years ago, the U.S. and Soviet Union, were on the brink of a nuclear exchange over missiles in the island of Cuba.  Only after some shrewd diplomacy between both leaders, a mutual level of trust, and some skilled news management (mostly by the White House), was catastrophe avoided and a diplomatic resolution reached without war breaking out.

British historian Max Hastings' well researched and superbly written new book, "The Abyss: Nuclear Crisis Cuba 1962" recounts the high drama and nervous tension that took place between the White House and Kremlin.

The Cuban Missile Crisis might have been 61 years ago, but the skill with which Hastings revisits those 13 jittery days in October, 1962, you'd think you were watching a blockbuster Netflix drama.

Secretary of State Dean Rusk called it the "most dangerous crisis the world has ever seen." White House Counsel, Ted Sorensen, referred to it as the "Gettysburg of the Cold War"; while Kennedy Special Assistant and "Court Historian", Arthur Schlesinger Jr., described it as the "finest hour'' of the Kennedy presidency.

The drama began on October 16, 1962, when President John F. Kennedy was shocked beyond belief when he was presented with indisputable evidence that the Soviets had placed medium-range (1,100 miles) and intermediate missiles (2,200) in Cuba, a mere 100 miles off the coast of the United States.

Not only was Kennedy stunned, but he felt deceived and lied to. It was only in September of that year, after all, when Kennedy’s brother, Robert Kennedy, the U.S. Attorney-General, met with Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet Ambassador, who conveyed Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s personal guarantee that no surface-surface-missiles had been placed in Cuba.

Khrushchev was hoping to sneak the missiles into Cuba without the U.S. noticing; so that on November 7, on the 45^th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, he would announce to the world what he had done in a bold attempt to close the missile gap or “level the playing field.”

Fortunately for the U.S., the missiles were discovered early enough before they became operational. Still, Kennedy knew he had to act decisively and quickly before they became operational.

President John F. Kennedy meets with members of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (EXCOMM) regarding the crisis in Cuba.

Photo Credit: JFK Library and Presidential Museum, Boston

***

Before deciding how to respond, Kennedy formed an Executive Committee (which became known as EXCOMM), comprised of members of the National Security Council.

The committee was made of some heavy hitters, including: Robert McNamara (Secretary of Defense), Dean Rusk (Secretary of State), Maxwell D. Taylor (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), Paul Nitze (Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs) and Robert Kennedy (Attorney-General), among others.

The Cuban Missile Crisis has been held up by many historians, including Max Hastings, as classic case study of crisis management and what to do and not to do when international crisis strikes, which makes it still relevant today.

When EXCOMM first assembled, most members, took a hawkish stance, strongly advising the president that military action was needed, probably air strikes (to take out the missiles) followed by a land invasion.

From the very start, the room became uncomfortably heated. Most thought a strong offensive was the only way to send Khrushchev a message that the United States couldn’t be pushed around. Many additionally articulated the belief that if Kennedy didn’t respond aggressively to this blatant act of deception, who knows what kind of duplicity the Soviets might take in the future.

In addition to responding to the Soviets, John Kennedy, only 44 years old, needed to send his own country a message that he had the mettle for the job and couldn’t be bullied by Khrushchev despite his youth and inexperience in foreign policy.

Kennedy, after all, was coming off of the disastrous and embarrassing Bay of Pigs fiasco (April, 1961) when the U.S. military invasion in Cuba failed to overthrow Fidel Castro, the belligerent communist leader. Then, just six weeks after the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy met with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna (June, 1961), which was equally disastrous for the youthful U.S. President. He ended up engaging the Soviet leader in communist ideology and simply was unprepared (and over his head) for such a weighty discussion with the well-seasoned 61-year-old Soviet leader, who, many observed, walked all over him. Kennedy later, privately, told New York Times Washington Bureau Chief, James “Scotty” Reston, that the summit was the “worst thing in my life…he [Khrushchev] savaged me.”

So, when the Cuban Missile Crisis presented itself, you would think that Kennedy would feel the overwhelming need to take aggressive action in Cuba. The 1962 mid-term elections were looming, and many Democrats were already questioning Kennedy’s chances of re-election in the 1964 presidential election.

If Kennedy botched Cuba, he knew he was destined to be a one-term president.

Surprisingly, whatever course of action Kennedy finally decided on, politics and the upcoming elections took a back seat in his decision making.

The EXCOMM’s meetings resulted in multiple options being discussed, revised, debated, debated some more, before deciding on a course of action.

As the president’s advisors pushed for military action, it was Robert McNamara, the defense secretary, who first proposed something new, a naval blockade, as an aggressive action without having to fire a shot. When McNamara first proposed the idea, it did grab the attention of other EXCOMM members, but of all the options discussed, the naval blockade or quarantine appeared to be the weakest option.

History will look fondly on Kennedy for having the courage to weigh all the options carefully before endorsing the idea of a naval blockade, which called for the U.S. military forming a “ring of ships around Cuba” (that is, a quarantine) to prevent any Soviet ships from transporting additional cargo into Cuba.

Some of the best minds, the “best and brightest,” cheered military action, but it was Kennedy who ultimately made the decision to embrace the quarantine, giving Khrushchev time to rethink keeping missiles in Cuba before war broke out.

Kennedy would later say, “if we had to act in the first 24 hours, I don’t think probably we would have chosen as prudently as we finally did.”

The other remarkable feature of the Cuban Missile Crisis was the way Kennedy was able to manage the news, and keep his plans for a quarantine under a cloak of secrecy.

President John F. Kennedy delivers a radio and television address to the nation (October 22, 1962) regarding the Soviet Union’s military presence in Cuba. Oval Office, White House, Washington, D.C.

Photo Credit: JFK Library and Presidential Museum, Boston

***

Before taking his case to the American people in a nationally televised address on October 22, the White House was hearing whispers that the Washington Post and New York Times, in particular, were piecing things together and were planning to report on the U.S. response to Cuba.

Kennedy personally telephoned New York Times’ publisher Orville Dryfoos and Washington Post publisher Philip Graham to request they refrain from publishing any details of his ultimatum to Khrushchev. The Post agreed immediately, the New York Times, especially James “Scotty” Reston, reportedly had to think about it before deciding to hold his fire.

Philip Brenner, Professor of International Relations at American University, told me that even Kennedy’s press secretary Pierre Salinger wasn’t aware of the EXCOMM meetings (until the night of Kennedy’s televised address on October 22), because “Kennedy thought it would be easier for him to lie to the press if Salinger did not know the truth.”

Readers of Hastings book couldn’t help but wonder if the debates of the Cuban Missile Crisis had happened during Joe Biden’s administration, would the West Wing have been as successful in preventing details from leaking out?

James G. Hershberg. Professor of History and International Affairs at George Washington University, doubts that it would. “There are far more extremists around in Congress, the media, social media, and blogosphere,” Hershberg explained, “who couldn't care less about being responsible, and would happily ignore or violate official pleas just to up their audience and promote their case.”

And Renata Keller, associate professor of history at the University of Nevada, Reno, who focuses on the Cold War and international history, echoes Hershberg’s sentiments. “The close relationship that previous U.S. presidents (but especially Kennedy) had with the press has declined considerably over time due to a number of factors, including the Vietnam War, Watergate, and the rise of the internet and social media. I think it's harder to keep anything secret these days.”

In addition to his deft management of the news cycle, Kennedy fostered a level of bipartisanship when planning his response to Soviet missiles in Cuba. It was important for Kennedy to inspire “unity on the home front.” He telephoned Dwight D. Eisenhower and urged that the Republicans not make the Cuban Missile Crisis partisan.

Today, the word “bipartisanship” is an ugly word and rarely invoked in the halls of Congress. But the political climate in Washington was much different 61 years ago.

Just hours before Kennedy’s October 22^nd address to the nation, Charles A. Halleck (Republican leader in Congress) and other congressional leaders were flown to the White House from all around the country (Congress was in recess) where they were informed of the Soviet missiles in Cuba. Both Halleck and GOP Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen (R-IL), among other Republicans, were shocked of the missile revelations, but pledged their support to the president on his stated course of action.

Anyone following American politics today would have a hard time believing that Republicans in the 118^th Congress today would rally around President Biden if he were faced with the same international crisis.

Six days after Kennedy’s national televised address to the nation in his call for a quarantine; and after many sleepless nights and anxious moments--he and Khrushchev struck a deal on October 28^th. The Soviets agreed to remove its missiles from Cuba in exchange for the United States agreeing not to attack Cuba.

An additional sweetener to the deal was the U.S. pledge to withdraw its nuclear arsenal from Turkey. This part of the deal, however, was agreed to privately and didn’t become public knowledge for quite some time. Khrushchev always maintained the missiles in Turkey could have destroyed Moscow, Kiev, and other major Soviet cities. The U.S. countered they were never operational and didn’t pose any danger.

Walter Lippmann, an influential columnist at the time, was reportedly the first to propose that the U.S. remove its missiles from Turkey in a New York Herald Tribune, October 25, 1962 column, three days after JFK’s television address.

In fact, many argue, the “turning point of the crisis” came when the U.S. agreed to remove its missiles from Turkey. Others contend Khrushchev already made up his mind to remove Soviet missiles from Cuba before Robert Kennedy and Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin struck a deal that both countries would remove its missiles from Cuba and Turkey.

What’s most astonishing reading about such a tense time in American diplomacy, is that the Cold War was at its zenith; one wrong move, one miscommunication, one blunder by either side, could have ignited a deadly nuclear exchange.

A misstep that practically triggered a war was when a U.S. U-2 plane, flown by Rudolf Anderson Jr., entered Cuban air space. The jittery Soviets thought he was spying on secret locations of tactical nuclear weapons near America’s Guantanamo Bay Naval Base and was prematurely shot down (and killed) on an order given by Soviet Lieutenant Stepan Grechko.

Both Khrushchev and Kennedy were quick to intervene and defuse the U-2 plane incident and avert a disastrous showdown between the two countries.

The final important lesson many come away with after reading Hastings, “The Abyss” is that both Kennedy and Khrushchev, despite being rivals, never made their confrontation personal. Unlike many of his EXCOMM advisors, Kennedy found a way to place himself in Khrushchev’s shoes. The U.S. President never wanted to embarrass or humiliate his Soviet foe. On the contrary, he wanted to give Khrushchev enough rope to extricate himself from the perilous situation without bringing his country down in a heap of flames.

Relations between Biden and Putin are so biting, bitter, and personal, you wonder whether they’re equipped with the finesse to solve their issues with reason and sound judgement (like Kennedy and Khrushchev demonstrated) and removing their personal feuds from the equation.

In lessons learned from the Cuban Missile Crisis, Robert Kennedy would later write: “Respect is central to international relations, even between adversaries.”

The big lesson learned by Robert McNamara was that the Cuban Missile Crisis was a “political problem” not a tactical problem. Kennedy’s former defense secretary stressed, going forward, nuclear weapons should never be used to solve “political problems.”

As Max Hastings so eloquently wrote, both Kennedy and Khrushchev, held fast to a motto every national leader should embrace: “BE AFRAID!”

“Neither John F. Kennedy, nor Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev,” Hastings wrote, “was deficient in personal courage, but what distinguishes them from Fidel Castro and from some military commanders on both sides of the Iron Curtain is that the two men were prudently haunted by consequences.”

--Bill Lucey

[email protected]

March 4, 2023

FOOTNOTE: To give you some idea how obsessed President John Kennedy was with controlling the news cycle, here is a heated phone conversation he had with State Department spokesman, Lincoln White, who apparently issued a press statement, suggesting further action by the U.S. would be forthcoming if a peaceful solution was not found, angering JFK, because such a threatening statement was never authorized by the White House.

Cuban Missile Crisis: Additional Resources

Audio Clips from Kennedy White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis (National Security Archive, George Washington University) 

"To The Brink: JFK and the Cuban Missile Crisis" (condensed audio with visible transcripts from EXCOMM members on what military options were being considered via Youtube)

Audio Recordings and Transcripts of advice President Kennedy received from his most trusted advisors (from The Miller Center at the University of Virginia)

 

Most Viewed Online Stories of 2022

People walk near a destroyed tank and damaged buildings in the southern port city of Mariupol, Ukraine

Photo Credit: Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters

***

Floral tributes to the late Queen Elizabeth II are seen in Green Park in London on Sept. 10, 2022, two days after she died at the age of 96.

Photo Credit: AFP

***

Lionel Messi holds up the World Cup trophy after Argentina defeated France in the tournament final on Sunday, December 18^th

^{Photo Credit: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post/Getty Images}

^***

Thankfully, 2022 is almost in the books.

It was a harsh year for the U.S. economy: inflation reached a 40-year high, gas prices shot up to over $5 a gallon in mid-June; similarly, other countries around the globe endured some of their highest inflation rates in years.

The war in Ukraine (the largest armed conflict in Europe since World War II), sparked a worldwide energy crisis, this along with strict Covid policies in China, heightened fears of a global recession.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine additionally triggered the displacement of 15.7 million Ukrainians, including 7.7 million refugees.

To combat the financial headwinds, the world's central banks, for the first time in years, raised interest rates.

The political divisiveness and hostility in the country became all the more pronounced in June when the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the landmark Roe v. Wade (1973), asserting that the constitutional right to abortion, in place for nearly 50 years, is now prohibited.

After 70 years on the throne, Queen Elizabeth II, 96, died at Balmoral Castle on September 8. She was the world’s second longest ever reigning monarch. The queen was succeeded by her son, Charles, who assumed the title: King Charles III.

Still tainted by the sign stealing scandal in 2017, the Houston Astros redeemed themselves, at least to some, by winning the World Series, beating the Philadelphia Phillies in six games.

With 25 years as a big-league manager, Astros manager Dusty Baker finally won his first World Series, becoming the seventh person in Major League history to win a World Series championship as both a player (1981 with the L.A. Dodgers) and as manager.

Many argue Argentina’s electrifying win over France in the World Cup final in Doha, Qatar, was the greatest match in its 92-year history, as the second largest country in South America (after Brazil) claimed its third World Cup by beating France on penalty kicks, 4-2, an extraordinary match, that was heightened by Lionel Messi of France scoring twice, catapulting him to rock-star status.

Business magnate and investor, Elon Musk, who bought Twitter for a staggering $44 billion in October, turned the social media tech giant on its head when the new CEO laid off about half of its 7,500 staff and reinstated the Twitter account of Donald Trump who was previously banned by Twitter for “inciting violence.”

In 2022, according to the United Nations, the world population increased to over eight billion; an increase of one billion in global population since 2010 and two billion since 1998. The world reached its first landmark of one billion people in 1803.

To get an idea of some other big stories of the year, I checked in with editors at other news sites to see which stories received the most page views on their home pages.

CNN

Live blog on February 24 covering the war in Ukraine which drew 16 million unique visitors.

Another widely read feature at CNN, centered on Matthew Chance putting on gear in front of a live audience to report the latest drama taking place in Ukraine.

FOX News

Actor Johnny Depp winning his defamation suit against Amber Heard.

Los Angeles Times

Instagram post of rapper PnB Rock at Roscoe’s may have led to killing

Here’s the complete list of top stories of the year from the Times, which includes actor Will Smith slapping comedian Chris Rock at the Academy Awards ceremony. 

Most popular column of Camilla Tominey from The Telegraph (UK)

 Duke and Duchess of Sussex find ‘new role’ is to be left in the cold. 

The Marshall Project

Prison Money Diaries: What People Really Make (and Spend) Behind Bars. 

ProPublica

White Parents Rallied to Chase a Black Educator Out of Town

Open Secrets

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis breaks gubernatorial fundraising record

FBI: Most Popular News Item

FBI Denver Provides Final Investigative Update on Gabrielle Petito Case

Non-News Item at FBI.gov: Ten Most Wanted Fugitives

New York Magazine: Top 5 Features

Meghan of Montecito

The Undoing of Joss Whedon

The Last Lonely Days of Ivana Trump

Take Another Look at the Watcher

What Happened to Maya

New York Review of Books

Letter Feedback regarding "Digging for Utopia" from the December 16, 2021 issue.

Original Post: Digging for Utopia

Most popular non-letter exchange was a tie between Why Biology is not Destiny: and These Disunited States. 

Most popular Online Only Article: How Trump Sabotaged Ukraine

Weather Channel

Winter Storm Izzy

Hurricane Ian

What’s Popping Up on Lake Mead Now

Rare Encounter Stuns Yellowstone Tourists

Watch: Huge Waves Wipe Out Wedding

Social Media:

Facebook Year in Review

Twitter Trends 2022

TikTok and Instagram Trends Reveal New Attitudes for Millennials and Gen Z

Year on TikTok, 2022

LinkedIn: 41 Big Ideas That Will Change Our World in 2023

Google: Year in Searches, 2022

YouTube: 2022

Yahoo: Year in Review

Merry Christmas! Happy Holidays! and have a happy and healthy New Year!

--Bill Lucey

December 18, 2022

[email protected]

God Save the Monarchy!

The Royal Family during the Trooping the Colour

Photo Credit: Rex Features

***

The reports of the British Monarchy’s death have been greatly exaggerated.

That became abundantly clear over the past two weeks while the world (especially Britain) was in mourning over the death of their beloved Queen Elizabeth II, the longest reigning monarch in British history. She was on the throne for 70 years, from February 6, 1952 until September 8, 2022.

The Queen was 96.

The very fact that her funeral had to take place at Westminster Abbey (the first funeral service at the Abbey for a British monarch since George II in 1760) instead of at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, attest to her popularity spanning the globe. St George’s Chapel can only hold 800 people; the Abbey’s capacity, on the other hand, is 2,000 and can hold as many as 8,000 if necessary. Ever since George III (1820), funerals of British kings and queens have been at St George’s Chapel.

Reportedly, about 500 guests from 200 countries and territories were present at the funeral for the Queen, including nearly 100 presidents and heads of government. In all, the funeral was attended by around 2,000 guests. The Queen’s funeral was additionally watched by 29.2 million people on television in the UK.

***

Across the Atlantic, solemnity wasn’t the order of the day; rather, it was pure venom.

Many leading news publications in the United States, especially the New York Times, did their best to rain on the Royal Families parade by linking the monarchy to oppressive colonialism and included one prickly opinion piece (written by a Harvard historian) which charged Queen Elizabeth II with vicious racism and “helping obscure a bloody history of decolonization.”

The New York Times editorial board, obviously, assembled after the death of the Queen and decided they were on a mission to bring down the monarchy.

“They will not succeed,” Nile Gardener of the Telegraph newspaper wrote. “The Monarchy is strong, robust and vital to Britain's future. It will remain at the heart of the British nation for centuries to come. The Queen has left a powerful legacy, and her life of service will continue to inspire the British people and the free world for generations to come.”

If you read newspapers from the United States over the last couple of weeks, readers can’t help but get the impression that the monarchy is an antiquated, crumbling relic and its citizens (fed up with all the pomp and circumstance) is aching for a Republic form of government.

The Commonwealth was first founded by George VI (the late queen’s father) in 1949 to maintain Britain’s links with the former colonies. They grew from seven to 54 countries, encompassing 2.5 billion people, during Queen Elizabeth’s reign, during a time when many of the countries of the once mighty British empire gained their independence.

What very few mention is that in June, Togo and Gabon (neither with colonial links to the UK) have joined the Commonwealth, becoming the 55^th and 56^th members to join. Both countries are former French colonies, which gained independence from France in the 1960s. Prior to that, Rwanda joined the Commonwealth in 2009; and before that, Mozambique in 1995.

There is an additional swath of nations with a total population of some 40 million currently seeking membership.

You would think there are heaps of countries heading for the exits from the Commonwealth; when, in fact, the Republic of Ireland was the only country that left and did not rejoin.

Reportedly, 60 % of Australians want to keep the monarchy, rather than opt for an elected president under a republican form of government.

I found it laughable that newspapers like The New York Times were determined to dismantle the monarchy, at a time when the United States (if the polls are any guide) is on the brink of civil war with the electorate split down the middle on the right-wing leaning U.S. Supreme Court, pervasive racism (whether real or imagined), and the revolting violence which took place on January 6, 2021, when pro-Trump supporters thundered through the Capitol building in Washington D.C. The insurrection culminated in five deaths with many injured, including 138 police officers.

A poll, recently conducted by the Economist and YouGov found that 55% of self-identified "strong" Republicans believed civil war is at least somewhat likely, while 40% of self-identified "strong" Democrats echoed that sentiment. 

Contrary to what The New York Times believes, residents in Britain would like to keep their form of government exactly the way it is.

According to the British Attitudes Survey, from 1983 to 2021, a majority strongly believe it’s important for Britain to continue to have a monarchy.

Between 1994 and 2021, for example, two-thirds (67%) of respondents in Britain have expressed this view. 

And why is it so important for the monarchy to stay in place?

Clement Attlee, former British Prime Minister from 1945 to 1951, wrote an essay for the Observer on August 23, 1959 on the role of the monarchy in Britain. Many of the elements of the monarchy that Attlee highlighted 63 years ago is remarkably still significant today.

“The monarch,” Attlee wrote, “is the general representative of all the people and stands aloof from the party-political battle. A president, however popular, is bound to have been chosen as representative of some political trend, and as such is open to attack from those of a different view. A monarch is a kind of referee, although the occasions when he or she has to blow the whistle are nowadays very few.”

It's truly stunning that during her reign, Queen Elizabeth II visited 116 countries, on 261 official overseas visits, including 78 state visits, while meeting with 14 of the 15 sitting U.S. Presidents. And yet, Elizabeth rarely, if ever, tipped her hand on how she felt about certain hot-button issues. She greeted former presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump with the same grace and decorum as she would any head of state.

British writer CS Lewis, summed it up perfectly: “Where men are forbidden to honor a king, they honor millionaires, athletes, or film stars instead; even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.”

And what exactly has become of those few, those seemingly happy few countries, which have abolished monarchies during Queen Elizabeth II’s reign?

Of Afghanistan, Burundi, Egypt, Ethiopia, Greece, Iraq, Iran, Laos, Libya, Nepal, Rwanda, Tunisia, Vietnam, and Yemen, only Greece, as Daniel Hannan of The Telegraph shrewdly points out, “can be said to have made a successful change.”

It’s ironic that countries, living in monarchies, such as Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, and New Zealand sport the most open-minded and egalitarian forms of government and aren’t storming their Parliament buildings and demanding election results be overturned.

As Mathew Syed in The Times of London so beautifully wrote, “It wasn’t just her [Queen Elizabeth’s] status but her character that united us. In a world where politicians so often fall short, she rarely did.”

It’s also striking that within the British Parliament itself with all the rancor currently taking place among the political parties (Labour, Lib Dems, Conservative Party, etc.) with the awesome responsibilities the new PM, Liz Truss, inherits: a spiraling energy crisis, the falling of the pound to historic levels, and the overall financial well-being of the country up in the air, Britain and its political parties remained in harmony in their support for constitutional monarchy and the queen whose devotion to service and duty over seven decades was nothing less than spectacular.

Queen Elizabeth II bows in front of the Dublin Memorial Garden on May 17, 2011, in Ireland. Her visit was the first by a monarch since 1911.

Photo Credit: Getty Images

***

And for those who think Britain and its monarchy are wedded to a bygone era, just consider that during her reign, the queen in 2011 became the first monarch to visit Ireland in its 90 years since bloody independence, and 32 years after the IRA assassination of her husband’s (Prince Philip) uncle. When she bowed at the Garden of Remembrance in Dublin for those who died fighting for Irish independence, she became a symbol of peace.

Prior to that, she travelled to West Germany in 1965 and Moscow in 1994 to renew Britain’s friendship with World War II allies, all during an age when many thought the Queen was just an insignificant figurehead.

Imagine, there are 29 billion British coins in circulation with Queen Elizabeth II’s face on them.

Far from the hostility, vindictiveness, and toxic nature of politics among voters and political rivals in the United States, the Queen (and now King Charles III) remove themselves from the fray and rancor of the political battles and turn their attention to uniting the country by displaying dignity, discretion, and duty—all important hallmarks of the British Monarchy—in ways few world leaders are able to.

Columnist Nick Timothy of The Telegraph captured the unifying mood holding the country together so well, when he wrote: “The respect we show for the Royals reflects esteem not only for them as individuals, but as symbols of the stable constitutional settlement their family provides for us.” “It reflects,” Timothy continued, “our acceptance of their status as the protectors – not the participants – of the democratic political system that sits beneath them. It may be paradoxical, but our parliamentary democracy depends on our hereditary monarchy.”

--Bill Lucey

[email protected]

September 28, 2022

Downton Abbey Ushers in a New Era in Britain

A hearty round of applause goes to Julian Fellowes who knocked one out of the park, yet again.

The second movie spinoff of Downton Abbey hit the theaters a few weeks ago and is being met with mostly favorable reviews.

As of June 17, 2022, “Downton Abbey: A New Era” has grossed $41.6 million in the United States and Canada and $45.5 million in other countries, for a worldwide total of $87.1 million

Many passionate Downton followers, including myself, think “Downton Abbey: A New Era” was a better written, more entertaining, offering then the last motion picture.

And as an added bonus, in this second Downton Abbey movie, viewers feast their eyes on a French villa in the south of France. It was Villa Roccabella located about an hour from Saint-Tropez, which features extensive gardens, a heated outdoor pool, yoga deck and a private beach (used in the swimming scene with Tom and Lucy Branson). It was designed in the late 19th century by Hans-Georg Tersling, a Danish architect

I found it remarkable how Fellowes, the creator of Downton Abbey and the award-winning script writer, weaved its characters so meticulously into a tapestry of compelling subplots, twists and turns all in two hours and five minutes, culminating with Lady Mary Crawley (Michelle Dockery) assuming the titular head of the Downton estate.

The movie takes place in 1928.

Two topics, in particular, are covered in the movie, which reflects accurately what was taking place in Britain on the brink of the Great Depression: the emergence of talkie films and British societies icy intolerance of homosexuality. In an age of massive fact-checking, viewers of this movie can rest assured “Downton Abbey: A New Era” did get its facts correct. The film, according to historians, was meticulously researched to the point that everything represented in it is grounded in factual events, including its people and technology.

Lady Mary’s (Michelle Dockery) voice is used in order for the production company to transition from a silent film to a talkie.

Photo Credit: BEN BLACKALL/FOCUS FEATURES

***

In “Downton Abbey: A New Era,” a production company makes a hefty financial offer to use the Downton estate as a location for a new movie, titled The Gambler. After some trepidation, but knowing they have to repair a leaky roof to the Downton estate, Lady Mary Talbot agrees to the generous financial arrangement. The film, as was customary at the time, was intended as a silent film.

Almost halfway through the filming, the producer and director, Jack Barber (played by Hugh Dancy) gets word from studio execs that the film has to be scratched, because silent films are no longer profitable. After some deft maneuvering, clever strategy, and discussion, Lady Mary Talbot and the director decide to flow with the tide and make the film a talkie so they won’t have to cancel production after all.

The phasing out of silent films in favor of talkies was in fact taking place in Britain in 1928.

According to Laraine Porter, Reader in Cinema History at De Montfort University (Leicester), “1928 was significant for British cinema as it saw the implementation of the 1927 Cinematograph (Quota) Act which obliged cinemas to show a proportion of British-made films in the face of Hollywood's almost total domination.”

The British film industry hit an all-time low in 1926 when only 5 % of films screened in British cinemas were British. American films dominated the market. Films that started silent in Britain and ended as talkies was common around this time. They were referred to as “Goat Gland” films.

Since the British film industry was mired in such weak financial standing in 1928, and now were forced to invest vast amounts of money into talking technology, many of the smaller producers (who invested heavily on silent film technology) went bankrupt.

In 1927, the American produced “The Jazz Singer” represented the first motion picture which featured isolated talking scenes and synchronized dialogue, thanks to sound-on-disc technology.

The big breakthrough in Britain came in November, 1928, when the motion picture, "The Terror" reached British cinemas.

Britain’s transition to talking films came a year after the United States studios. Laraine Porter explained to me that “Britain had an established culture of popular theatre, particularly the Aldwych Farces, and a popular literary heritage which offered ready source material for the new talkies.” “These sources,” Porter explained, “had specific domestic appeal to audiences who also wanted to see and hear their favorite music-hall and Variety stars - like Gracie Fields - in film.” 

In addition, Britain had heaps of engineers and technicians from the BBC to draw from who were proficient in helping studios make the transition from silent to talking films.

Laraine Porter contends that there was “a massive urban working-class ready-made audience who supported early British talkies.”

The Terror, a murder mystery set in an English country house represented the first continuous “all-talkie” to premiere in Europe. It was released by Warner Bros, their second all talkie film. The first was “Lights of New York” also released in 1928.

Actor Guy Dexter (Dominic West) invites head butler, Thomas Barrow (Robert James-Collier),  to come live with him in America.

Photo Credit: BEN BLACKALL/FOCUS FEATURES

***

Another hot-button issue which “Downton Abbey: A New Era” nibbles around the edges at is the topic of same-sex relationships in Britain in 1928.

The dashing Thomas Barrow (played by Robert James-Collier), the head butler at the Downtown Estate, who is gay, develops an attraction to one of the actors filming a movie at the Downton estate, Guy Dexter (played wonderfully by Dominic West). Dexter offers Barrow a chance to live with him in America as his personal assistant and social secretary; a role that is described in the film as a “dresser.” The idea that this would mark the beginning of a romantic relationship between the two is gently intimated in the film. When Barrow agrees and turns in his notice to Lady Mary, she shares his happiness and says, “I wish you all the happiness this cruel world can afford.”

The “cruel world’’ which Lady Mary refers to, is, of course, gays being treated as social outcasts in Britain in the 1920s.

Back in the 16^th century, Britain considered homosexuality a criminal act.

The Buggery Act of 1533, passed by Parliament during the reign of Henry VIII targeted homosexuality for persecution. Sex between men was punishable by death in the United Kingdom. The law, strangely, never affected females.

Not until 1861 was the Offences Against the Person Act passed, which eliminated the death penalty for homosexual acts and replaced it with 10-years of imprisonment.

Things didn’t improve for the gay community in 1885. The Criminal Law Amendment Act not only made male homosexual acts illegal, they could also be prosecuted whether or not a witness was present; meaning, private acts were subject to prosecution. Usually, a handwritten letter suggesting intimacy between two men was all the court needed to prosecute. It was this ambiguously written law that Irish poet and playwright, Oscar Wilde, fell victim to in 1895.

It took well into the 20^th century, 1957, in fact, when the Wolfenden Report was issued, which recommended that “homosexual behavior between consenting adults in private should be no longer a criminal offence.”

Despite the recommendations from the Wolfenden Report, Parliament took until 1967 to pass the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 in the United Kingdom, which legalized homosexual acts in England and Wales on the condition they were at least 21 years old and the acts were consensual and in private. Penalties were, however, issued for street offenses.

Amazingly, the law was not changed for Scotland until 1980, or for Northern Ireland until 1982.

Despite the severe penalties gays were subject to at the time Downton Abbey, the movie, supposedly takes place, 1928,’’ Patrick Allitt, Professor of American History at Emory College tells me that ‘’we know from lots of literary evidence that [homosexuality] was widespread, particularly among the Bloomsbury Group intellectuals, such as Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, J. M. Keynes, and others.”

The Bloomsbury Group were a group of influential English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists, bold renegades, who opened the Victorian upper classes eyes to the LGBT point of view, a subject never discussed in Britain at the time, unless behind closed doors. Many point to the works of the Bloomsbury Group which sparked a seismic shift in Britain regarding LGBTQ rights.

According Lucy Delap, Professor of Modern British and Gender History at the University of Cambridge, “1928 was an interesting year as far as same sex relationships were concerned, because of the publication and then prosecution for obscenity of Radclyffe Hall’s “The Well of Loneliness” – a Sapphic novel that caused uproar and became iconic for many lesbian readers – but only covertly read of course, in versions smuggled in from France.”

It was in October, 1928, when Virginia Woolf published “Orlando: A Biography,” which today is considered a feminist classic. The book chronicles the escapades of a poet who changes sex from man to woman and lives for centuries, meeting the key figures of English literary history. The novel was inspired by Woolf’s lesbian lover, the poet Vita Sackville-West. Literary scholars point to this novel as one of the first novels about gender uncertainty.

Not until 1960 were the British reading public able to read an uncensored edition of D.H. Lawrence’s novel, “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”

Photo Credit: Philip Jackson/Daily Mail/Rex

***

Also in 1928, D.H. Lawrence secretly printed (in Italy) his eleventh novel, “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” about an upper-class married woman, Constance or Lady Chatterley, who is racked with internal torment when she neglects her paralyzed husband (from a war injury) and falls into the arms of a gatekeeper, a member of the working-class.

Because Lady Chatterley was filled with explicit sex scenes and four-letter words, it was banned in the United Kingdom after its publishers, Penguin, were brought to trial under the Obscene Publications Act. Not until March, 1960, did Penguin win the rights to publish the novel in its entirety. Book stores reportedly all over England sold all 200,000 copies on the first day of publication.

1928 (November 11) was also the year that Thomas Hardy, considered to be the greatest English writer, died at his home in Dorchester. He was 87.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), a reference book requiring the efforts of 1,300 people for more than 70 years was completed in 1928. The word “Zyxt” was the last word in the final volume of the dictionary.

English poets Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning were consulted about the meaning of words that appeared in their poems. J.R.R. Tolkien, in fact, was an assistant lexicographer for one year, 1919. At least six editors guided the process.

Politically, 1928 ushered in a new era for women’s voting rights.

It too nearly 60 years of campaigning, but on July 6, 1928, all women over 21 years old finally got the right to vote with the passing of the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928. Prior to that, a voting act in 1918 gave the vote to all men over age 21 and all women over age 30, tripling the electorate.

On February 15, 1928, British Liberal Prime Minister from 1908 to 1916, H. H. [Herbert Henry] Asquith, passed away at the age of 75. He resigned as leader of the Liberal Party in October, 1926.

Asquith’s finest achievement was the Parliament Act of 1911,which stripped the Lords of any veto over money bills or public legislation and became a landmark piece of legislation in paving the way for representative democracy in Great Britain.

A major medical breakthrough occurred in Britain in 1928, when Alexander Fleming, a Scottish bacteriologist, working in his laboratory at St Mary's Hospital Paddington, London discovered, by accident, a mold growing on a dish had stopped bacteria from developing. Fleming’s antibacterial effects of penicillin were described as the "single greatest victory ever achieved over disease."

Fleming published his findings in 1929 in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology.

Tragically, 1928 was the year of a major flood in London. The Thames flooded a large swath of central London. The high waters were triggered by a depression in the North Sea which sent a storm surge up the tidal river.

The Houses of Parliament, the Tate Gallery and the Tower of London were all overwhelmed with high waters. The slums on the Westminster side of Lambeth Bridge, suffered the worst of it, where 10 of the 14 victims lost their lives. At one inquest, a man named Alfred Harding identified the bodies of his four daughters - Florence Emily, 18, Lillian Maude, 16, Rosina, six, and Doris Irene, two.

Taken together, the Thames flood left 14 people dead and an estimated 4,000 people homeless across London.

The flood of 1928, together with the disastrous North Sea Flood of 1953, inspired the construction of Thames Barrier in the 1970s.

1928 certainly wasn’t a good time for the working class in general, with high unemployment “especially in old industrial areas of northern England southern Scotland and South Wales. It got worse in the financial crisis of 1929-31,” Professor Patricia Thane, Visiting Professor in History at Birkbeck College, London said.

Politically, Conservatives were in power in the UK from 1924 through 1929, which contributed to the working-class plight of low wages and deteriorating economic conditions. Lucy Delap observed that “a Labour government had been in power as a minority in 1924 (briefly), and were to be voted in again in 1929 – so working-class voters were I think quite aware of the new political landscape and the possibility of change. When the second minority Labour government came in 1929, high hopes were dashed by the economic recession, and the government only lasted until 1931.”

So, the title of the movie: “Downton Abbey: A New Era” might not have been referring to a ‘’new era’’ only as it applies to the Crawley family at the Downton estate. A new era, to be sure, could be witnessed all over Britain in 1928 with social and economic conditions, the political landscape, and most certainly with movies and British literature.

 

--Bill Lucey

[email protected]

June 18, 2022

The Legacy of The Godfather--50-Year Anniversary

 

Al Pacino, Marlon Brando, James Caan, John Cazale

Photo Credit: Everett Collection

***

Lost in the sheer madness during the 94^th Academy Awards on March 27, was an epic milestone in motion picture history.

The Godfather, the 1972 American crime film directed by Francis Ford Coppola celebrated its 50-year anniversary.

Sean "Diddy" Combs introduced Francis Ford Coppola, Robert De Niro, and Al Pacino in a tribute to the Godfather Trilogy that was (in my opinion) much too brief for such a brilliant masterpiece.

During the 1973 Academy Awards, The Godfather was nominated for 10 awards, coming away with three, including Best Picture and Best Actor (Marlon Brando).

Prior to the tribute, chaos and confusion took place at the Dolby Theatre, right in the heart of Hollywood, when actor Will Smith (who would later that night win an Oscar) approached comedian Chris Rock on stage and delivered a hard slap to his face for his insensitive joke about his wife's bald head. Smith's wife, Jada Pinkett Smith (unbeknownst to Chris Rock) suffers from alopecia, a medical term for hair loss.

Whatever took place after the Will Smith slap, to many it’s just a hazy memory. The slap heard round the world took center stage and devoured the news cycle for days after the awards ceremony. It certainly overshadowed the milestone of the Godfather hitting its 50-year mark.

Despite The Godfather being released 50 years ago, so many of its memorable lines and scenes of the film are still very much with us and pop up in our everyday language. The Internet Movie Database, (IMDb) for example, lists more than three hundred films and television shows that have referenced “The Godfather.”

Imagine, 132 million people had seen the Godfather by January, 1975. The movie earned more than $250 million worldwide, a figure that continues to grow.

There’s a famous story that former New York Governor Mario Cuomo refused to see “The Godfather” for its depiction of Italian-American stereotypes which he found repulsive. Finally, Cuomo broke down and saw it and he considered it a masterpiece.

Singer Vic Damone had initially been cast in The Godfather for the role of Johnny Fontane, but reportedly bowed out. “As an American of Italian descent,” Damone said, “I could not in good conscience continue in that role.” The role of Johnny Fontane was filled by singer Al Martino.

Brendan Hennessey, Associate Professor of Italian in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Binghamton University, says Cuomo’s initial rejection of the film “was probably typical of Italian Americans of a certain age, definitely in New York state. That generation was still very close to the anti-Italian discrimination of their parents and grandparents who worked hard to distance themselves from stereotypes of Italian criminality and racial inferiority that were very common in the early 20th century through the end of WWII.” “More recent controversies,” Hennessey explained, “over serious representations like 'The Sopranos' or silly ones like 'Jersey Shore' and the non-controversy over renaming Columbus Day are all remnants of that era of assimilation.”  Hennessey contends that the current generation of Italian-Americans are not as outraged by these stereotypes as much as their parents and grandparents were.

Marlon Brando and Francis Ford Coppola discuss a ‘Godfather’ scene on location in Little Italy.

Photo Credit: Anthony Pescatore/NY Daily News via Getty Images

***

So, exactly why is The Godfather considered such a cinematic masterpiece to this very day? 

Former New York Times op-ed columnist and currently writer-at-large for New York Magazine, Frank Rich, tells me “as King Lear exemplifies, classic drama so often involves a family battling over love and power. In The Godfather, Coppola wedded those basics to memorable, original characters, an epic shadow history of America, bravura filmmaking, and pitch-perfect casting that called on the talents of several generations of great American actors, among them stars in-the-making like Pacino.”

John Mosier, Professor of English (Emeritus) at Loyola University, New Orleans, thinks that The Godfather was a compelling Italian immigrant saga; one that chronicles the importance of family and loyalty when all other traditional levers of power in America fails them.

Additionally, “it told a story about two aspects of American life,” Mosier says, “that everyone knew existed, but had never been talked about: Sicilian culture here and criminal activity.  So, it used a typical story device—young idealistic man who’s drawn into a life of violence.  It did so in a way that was neither moralistic nor tragic—the ending was a very fine touch.  He should have stopped, basically.”

For serious film buffs, I compiled a selection of facts about The Godfather, along with a collection of original film reviews from 1972.

***

Robert Duvall holds cue cards for Marlon Brando to read 

Source: Paramount Studios

***

The Godfather: Facts, Feats, and Historic Firsts

• Mario Puzo was born in 1920 in Hell’s Kitchen (West Side of Midtown Manhattan), the son of Italian born parents.
• His first two novels, “Dark Arena” and “Fortunate Pilgrim” though critically acclaimed, earned him only $6,500. At age 45, he owed $20,000 in gambling debts, so he wrote a ten-page book outline-entitled Mafia, hoping for more commercial appeal. The Godfather was a pulp novel about sex, violence and crime. Eight publishers turned him down.
• The Godfather book was a rousing success, spending 67 weeks on the New York Times' Best Sellers List
• On March 5, 1967, Paramount bought the rights to Mario Puzo’s book, “Mafia,” later renamed “The Godfather.”
• In 1969, according to Robert Evans (head of production at Paramount), "there wasn’t a single Italian director with any credibility to be found.”
• 12 directors turned down the opportunity to direct The Godfather.
• September 27, 1970: Francis Ford Coppola was officially announced as The Godfather director with an anticipated release at Christmas, 1971.
• The final draft of the screenplay ran 158 pages and was dated March 29, 1971.
• Coppola reportedly made The Godfather because he was Italian and desperate for work. He was offered and accepted $125,000 and 6% of the profits.
• Hollywood heavyweights, Anthony Quinn, George C. Scott, Laurence Olivier, and Ernest Borgnine were rumored to be vying for the part of Don Corleone.
• Anne Bancroft was briefly considered for the part of Carmella “Mama’’ Corleone.
• Al Pacino failed his screen test, he forgot his lines.
• Ryan O’Neal, Dustin Hoffman, Warren Beatty, Robert Redford, Jack Nicholson, Frank Langella, Martin Sheen, and David Carrradine, were all considered for the role of Michael Corleone before settling on Al Pacino. For a short time, James Caan was the frontrunner to play Michael Corleone.
• Casting for The Godfather formally began in New York at THE GODFATHER Production Offices on the 28^th floor #1 Gulf and Western Plaza on November 20, 1970.
• Pacino was 31 years old when he finally secured the role of Michael Corleone.
• At 5:30 a.m. on March 23, 1971, filming for The Godfather began.
• The Godfather was shot in 120 New York area locations over 67 days.
• Gianni Russo (who played Carlo Rizzi in the Godfather) claims that he worked in organized crime early in his life, serving as an errand boy and mob associate for Frank Costello.
• Marlon Brando was 47 years old when he was cast in the Godfather. He was viewed in the industry as washed up. Prior to The Godfather, Marlon Brando was in a series of flops and was considered box office poison.
• Brando was paid $50,000, plus $10,000 a week in expenses during his contractual six weeks of shooting, and a percentage after the picture brought in $10 million.
• Coppola was certain he was about to be fired. His insistence over casting Pacino and the rest of his chosen cast member had earned him the hostility of almost all the top executives at Paramount.
• New York crime boss, Frank Colombo assembled tens of thousands of protestors to march through the streets of New York, to protest the making of The Godfather and its distorted depiction of Italian-Americans.  A benefit concert was organized, headlined by Frank Sinatra, and raised roughly $600,000—which he used, according to Al Ruddy (The Godfather producer), for “the sole express purpose of stopping the filming of The Godfather.”
• At the request of the Italian-American Civil Rights League, all references to the Mafia and Cosa Nostra from its screenplay, were eliminated.
• In The Godfather, Coppola sought to express how Americans as a whole must rely on their family for what America fails to provide them, and in the case of the movie that family is Don Corleone.
• Among the most pressing obstacles facing Coppola was financing: the film’s budget, originally set at $2 million, quickly leaped toward $6 million.
• The gruesome scene with the dead horse’s head was a real horse, obtained from a rendering plant in New Jersey, where they located a horse ready for slaughter. The horse’s head was smeared with Karo blood. The horse’s head in blood stemmed from Sicilian folklore: they nailed your favorite dog’s head to your door if you didn’t pay up.
• For Marlon Brando, the production crew created “dental plumpers,” flesh-colored blobs of acrylic that fit into the sides of Brando’s mouth and flush up against his teeth. To hold the appliances in place, a metal band attached to the plumpers was wrapped around the base of his teeth, with the ends wrapped around his molars like a piece of bridgework. On each foot, Brando wore a ten-pound weight to slow his movements, and padding was added around his waist for a belly grown fat from sumptuous eating.
• The name of Tony Soprano’s strip club in the HBO series, The Sopranos. “ Bada-bing” came from a line in The Godfather spoken by James Caan.
• Sonny (James Caan) beating of Carlo Rizzi (Gianni Russo) for harming his sister was filmed on Pleasant Avenue in East Harlem.
• The assassination of Sonny was considered a technical masterpiece; 200 bullet holes were drilled into the car and filled with squibs—tiny explosive rounds that could be remotely detonated—and another hundred were attached to the tollbooth. 
• A suite in the Americana of New York, on Sixth Avenue, served as a substitute for Las Vegas.
• Vegas casino chief Moe Greene (Alex Rocco,) the Jewish gangster, was based on the real-life American gangster, Bugsy Siegel. 
• The Godfather opened nationwide on March 24, 1972.
• The Godfather brought in $465,148 in its first week alone from just the five Manhattan theaters, considered (at the time) the largest one-week total ever for a motion picture.
• By the following week, the movie had racked up $7,397,164 across 322 theaters in the US and Canada. In less than a month after the opening, The Godfather was grossing $1 million a day, the first film ever to break the magical million-dollar mark.
• During the 1973 Academy Awards, The Godfather was nominated for ten awards: Best Picture; Brando as Best Actor; Coppola for Best Director; Coppola and Puzo for Best Adapted Screenplay; Pacino, Caan, Duvall each for Best Supporting Actor; along with nominations for costumes, editing, and sound.
• The Godfather met with so much box office success, a sequel was quickly worked out with a release date of April, 1974.
• Francis Ford Coppola eventually became a five-time Oscar winner and the recipient of the Academy’s 2010 Irving G. Thalberg Award.
• The Johnny Fontane character is thought to be inspired by Frank Sinatra.
• Francis Ford Coppola and James Caan were classmates at Hofstra University.
• Pacino and Caan signed onto the Godfather for $35,000. Robert Duvall made $36,000 in the Godfather

Italian phrases in The Godfather

Caporegime is a Mafia term for a lieutenant, or second in command.

            Strunz is derived from an Italian term, stronzo, the vulgar translation for which is “a piece of shit.”

            Lupara is a double-barreled sawed-off shotgun that is often homemade. It’s a traditional Cosa Nostra weapon in Sicily.

            Pezzonovante means someone who is powerful, a big shot.

Michael calls Apollonia (the young Sicilian woman) “pazzo,” meaning “crazy”.

• Pacino sprained an ankle ligament when he raced out of the Louis Restaurant (after gunning down Mark McCluskey, the corrupt Irish-American police captain and Virgil "The Turk" Sollozzo, the top narcotics man, who became associated with the Tattaglia family) to catch a getaway car in a scene that never made the final cut. Pacino was sidelined for a few days and had to rely on crutches and a cane when shooting resumed along with plenty of painkillers.
• Pacino’s grandparents were genuine Sicilians. He was born in East Harlem but moved to the Bronx at a young age.
• After Marlon Brando passed away (2004), his own annotated script of “The Godfather” fetched $312,800 at a New York auction, which is believed to be the highest amount paid for a film script.
• The baptism scene in The Godfather was filmed at Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Mulberry Street, Manhattan. The exteriors of the baptism scene were filmed at Mount Loretto Church in Staten Island. The church burned down in 1973.
• Filming for the shootings during the baptism: (the barbershop, the revolving doors, and the walk up the stairs) was filmed at the St Regis Hotel in Manhattan. Moe Greene’s massage took place in the steam room in the McBurney YMCA, West 23^rd Street, Manhattan.
• On March 15, 1972, five New York theaters screened the world premiere of The Godfather for the public. That night, the film took in a record $57,000. In the first week, the take was $465,000, also a record.
• Paramount pre booked The Godfather in 350 theaters. The film, which costs $6.2 million to make, earned $13.8 million from those bookings alone before the film hit all theaters nationwide.
• In 1972, the average ticket price in the United States was around $1.60. With the high demand over The Godfather, Paramount boosted ticket prices to $3.50, then weekend prices went up to $4.00
• In the film’s initial release, Paramount made $85.7 million. It was the first movie in motion picture history to gross an average of $1 million a day. It was the highest-grossing film of all time, until Jaws surpassed it in 1975. To date, it has grossed nearly $135 million domestically, and an estimated $250 million worldwide.
• NBC paid $10 million to air “The Godfather” over two nights in November of 1974. An estimated 42,400,000 households watched a slightly abridged version of the movie.
• Brando worked on the Godfather for six weeks.
• The Godfather won three Oscars.
• There are 16 hugs, kisses, and squeezes in the Godfather.
• 132 million people had seen the Godfather by January, 1975.
• The Godfather ran for two hours and fifty-six minutes.
• The Godfather film opens in August, 1945

--Bill Lucey

April 7, 2022

[email protected]

Source: “The Annotated Godfather” By Jenny M. Jones; “Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli: The Epic Story of the Making of The Godfather” by Mark Seal; “The Godfather: A Pictorial History” By Gerald Gardner; “The Godfather Legacy” by Harlan Lebo

 

Original Movie Reviews of The Godfather (1972)

• “Far from surviving …as the Gone with the Wind of gangster movies, my guess is The Godfather will be as quickly forgotten as it deserves to be.”

--William F. Buckley, The New York Post, March 14, 1972

• “The Godfather is as good as the novel—and essentially as immoral and therefore in its new incarnation and availability to the illiterate, far more dangerous…The whole function of this film is to show us that Hitler is a grand sort of family man, gentle with children, daring and ruthless with enemies, implacable in the matter of honor and so loyal to the ties of blood that even a brother-in-law, to a sister’s sorrow, must go (juicily garroted) if he happens to have betrayed a son of the house.”

--Judith Crist, New York Magazine, March 20, 1972

• The Godfather” rediscovers the marvelous possibilities existing in the straightforward narrative movie that refuses to acknowledge it's about anything more than its plot, and whose characters are revealed entirely in terms of events. The Godfather moves so quickly, in such a tightly organized series of interlocking events, that the film, like its characters (who are not the sort to muse very long about their fates), doesn't have time to be introspective—to betray the excitement of the immediately felt emotion or of an explicit action by somehow commenting on it.

--Vincent Canby, The New York Times, March 12, 1972

•  “Coppola has found a style and a visual look for all this material so “The Godfather” becomes something of a rarity: a really good movie squeezed from a bestseller. The decision to shoot everything in period decor (the middle and late 1940s) was crucial; if they’d tried to save money as they originally planned, by bringing everything up-to-date, the movie simply wouldn’t have worked. But it’s uncannily successful as a period piece, filled with sleek, bulging limousines and postwar fedoras. “

--Roger Ebert, January 1, 1972, Chicago Sun-Times

• “It’s an extraordinary achievement: a new classic in a classic American film genre: a richly ironic example of how crude popular fiction maybe be transformed into great popular art; a fresh source of both legend and optimism, reviving the career of Marlon Brando and probably making the career of Marlon Brando and probably making the careers of young actor Al Pacino, young screenwriter director Francis Ford Coppola, and several others. And last but hardly least, it is a product of almost limitless commercial potential.”

--Gary Arnold, The Washington Post, March 22, 1972

• “Director Coppola, whose Hollywood record so far has been undistinguished, tells The Godfather with a kind of brilliant low-keyed virtuosity, with one particularly effective use of symbolism: the underworld dealings are conducted in thickly darkened rooms, usually in murmurous tones, and these scenes are contrasted with the pastoral, open-air semi-freedom of Corleone family life.”

--Kevin Kelly, The Boston Globe, March 23, 1972

• “The Godfather is a baptism in blood, a ripping, tearing blockbuster of a movie, as charged with excitement as a hoodlum using a machine gun, as shocking as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre,”

--Joyce Haber, Los Angeles Times, 1972 

• “This is a curious film. One comes to understand, even to condone, the activities of the Godfather and his clan. And even though it frankly portrays the underworld’s influence in the sacrosanct worlds of Hollywood and Las Vegas, there is the feeling that, with young Michael there, these will be better worlds. Essentially, The Godfather is the projection of a myth, not a fact. But it is myths — not facts — that make a fortune. “

--Arthur Knight, The Hollywood Reporter, March 8, 1972

• “It takes a masterful presentation of a gripping story to hold a man in his seat for 2 hours and 55 minutes with a minimum of squirming. This is what The Godfather does.”

--Emerson Batdorff, The Plain Dealer, March 23, 1972

 

What to Know About Ukraine's History

Ukrainians desperately trying to board trains at Kyiv-Pasazhyrskyi Central Station.

Photo Credit: Pete Kiehart/The Guardian/BuzzFeed

***

Over a week into Russia’s incursion into Ukraine, turmoil and bloodshed remains, with residents of Kyiv rushing to the train station in order to escape Russia’s wrath.

More than one million Ukrainians have been displaced, adding to the humanitarian crisis.

Russian troops, according to a Human Rights Watch report, have fired cluster munitions into at least three residential neighborhoods.

More threatening still, Russia has captured the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe after shelling part of the complex, raising fears of a nuclear disaster; others equate it to a “war crime.” For now, the power plant’s six reactors reportedly remain intact and undamaged.

The Associated Press reported that the head of Ukraine’s security council called on Russia to create humanitarian corridors to allow children, women and the elderly to escape the fighting. The United Nations has reported 752 civilian casualties across Ukraine, with 227 killed and 525 injured. Since February 24, 28 children have been killed.

In February 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden ordered three thousand U.S. troops to position near Poland and Romania—NATO countries that border Ukraine—to counter Russian troops stationed near its border.

A Russian air strike on a rural residential area in Kyiv region killed at least seven people on Friday, including two children.

Photo Credit: Twitter/@rustem_umerov)

***

Since the Ukraine conflict continues to grow more ominous by the hour, I compiled some historical facts about the Eastern European country.

• Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, was founded about 1,500 years ago by proto-Ukrainian Slavic tribes.
• Historically, in December 1922, Ukraine together with Russia and Belarus, and Trans-Caucasian Federation were the founding members of the Soviet Union.
• Ukraine is home to more than 100 different national or ethnic groups.
• Ukraine's population is overwhelmingly Christian; the vast majority - up to two thirds - identify themselves as Orthodox.
• Since the 17^th century, Ukraine was divided among three Empires - by Austrians in the West, by Turks in the South, and by Russians in the East.
• The Ukrainian national anthem is called ‘Shche ne vmerla Ukraina’ which translates in English to ‘Ukraine’s glory has not yet perished’
• Ukraine’s name derives from the Old East Slavic word "ukraina" meaning "borderland or march (militarized border region)" and began to be used extensively in the 19th century; originally Ukrainians referred to themselves as Rusyny (Rusyns, Ruthenians, or Ruthenes), an endonym derived from the medieval Rus state (Kyivan Rus)
• At the end of the World War I, Ukraine was divided into two: Western Ukraine became part of Poland and Eastern Ukraine, the larger part was absorbed by into the Soviet Union and renamed the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Both governments imposed their own language and government.
• The Second World War claimed the lives of 5.5 million Ukrainians, including at least one million Ukrainian Jews.
• Most Ukrainians live in cities (67.2 %). The largest metropolitan area in Ukraine is Kiev (3.2 million), Kharkiv (1.7 million), Donetsk (1.7 million), Dnipropetrovsk (1.5 million), and Odessa (1.1 million). The largest ethnic group are ethnic Ukrainians (78%) and ethnic Russians (17 %).
• The state language is Ukrainian, an east Slavic language that uses the Cyrillic alphabet, composed of a mixture of Latin, Greek, and Slavic letters.
• The famous Carol of the Bells Christmas carol is based on a Ukrainian folk tune.
• In the 8th-10th centuries, parts of what is now Ukraine were ruled by the Khazars, a Turkic tribe which converted to Judaism.
• The territory of Ukraine became the site of almost constant warfare between Poles, Muscovites, Ottomans, Tatars, and Ukrainian Cossacks in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. According to Alexander Motyl, professor of political science at Rutgers-Newark, “the subsequent incorporation of most Ukrainian territories into the Muscovite State and its successor, the Russian Empire, cut off Ukraine from its roots in Europe and had ruinous consequences for Ukrainian religion, language, and culture, which were progressively Russified or banned.”
• During the 16^th and 17^th centuries, tens of thousands of Ukrainians were captured annually and shipped to and sold in Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman empire, as slaves.
• Ukraine experienced a major cultural, political, and economic revival in the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries, when the charismatic Ivan Mazepa served as leader of an autonomous Cossack polity known as the Hetmanate—until his defeat by Peter the Great at the Battle of Poltava in 1709.
• Ukraine’s national poet, Taras Shevchenko, was born a serf in 1814 in a small village south of Kyiv
• Ukraine was the birthplace of many prominent Jews—among many others the writers Joseph Roth, Paul Celan, Bruno Schulz, Sholom Aleichem, Vasily Grossman, Isaac Babel, and Shmuel Agnon. Zionist leader Vladimir Zhabotinsky and former Israeli Prime Minster Golda Meir were also born in Ukraine, as was the founder of Hasidism, Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer.
• Twentieth-century Ukraine was the site of two genocides—the Holodomor of 1932-1933, during which millions of Ukrainians were mercilessly killed in an artificial famine engineered by Joseph Stalin and his henchmen, and the Holocaust, which took the lives of millions of Jews. Ukraine suffered 15 million “excess” deaths between 1914 and 1948, due to wars, genocides, and Stalin’s repressive policies.
• Ukrainians formed the majority of Soviet political prisoners; they staged revolts in the concentration camps of the Soviet Gulag; they fought bravely against Stalin and Hitler; they resisted Muscovite and Russian imperialism for centuries.
• The Ukrainian diaspora in the United States consists of about 1.25 million people, who, while concentrated in the formerly industrial Northeast and Midwest, are found in all 50 states.
• Prominent Americans of Ukrainian descent include astronaut Heide Marie Stefanyshyn-Piper, actors Jack Palance, Natalie Wood, Vera Farmiga, and Liev Schreiber, policymaker Paula Dobriansky, Metropolitan Opera singer Paul Plishka, football great Bronko Nagurski, economist Greg Mankiw, inventor Igor Sikorsky, journalist Mike Royko, and writer Chuck Palahniuk. 
• The first literary tradition of the Ukrainian language was created by Ivan Kotliarevskyi at the end of 18^th century and developed at the beginning of the 19^th century by the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevechnko. According to Sergei Zhuk, Professor of History at Ball State University, since a publication of Shevchnko's collection of poetry Kobzar in 1940, Ukraine witnessed a rise of nationalist movement which eventually untied Western part (Austrian) and Eastern (Russian) part of Ukrainians in one large patriotic movement, resulting in an independent state in 1991.
• A peaceful mass protest, the "Orange Revolution" in 2004 forced the authorities to overturn a rigged presidential election and to allow a new internationally monitored vote that swept into power a reformist slate under Viktor YUSHCHENKO. 
• Ukraine celebrated its 30^th anniversary of independence in 2021.

--Bill Lucey

[email protected]

March 4, 2022

Source:  Congressional Research Service (CRS); Sergei Zhuk, professor of History at Ball State University; Alexander Motyl, professor of political science at Rutgers-Newark; Monica White, Associate Professor of Russian & Slavonic Studies at the University of Nottingham; Robert W. Orttung Research Director, Sustainable George Washington University Research Professor of International Affairs (IERES); “A History of Ukraine: It’s Land and Peoples” by Paul R. Magocsi

Old and New Money Collide on HBO's "The Gilded Age"

 

That Julian Fellowes is at it again.

The screenplay writer of the Academy Award winning film “Gosford Park” and creator, writer, and executive producer of the Award-Winning PBS series “Downton Abbey” recently premiered (January 24^th) on HBO with his latest period piece: “The Gilded Age,” a miniseries set in New York in 1882. The drama depicts the old money established families (like the Astor’s) having to contend with the bluster of families with new money (nouveau riche) invading New York, such as the Vanderbilt’s, Carnegies, Rockefeller’s and other major titans of 19^th century industry.

Fans of Fellowes will most likely be welcoming with open arms the lavish dresses, extravagant hats, and enormous mansions that became so emblematic of the Gilded Age on his new HBO creation. It will remind them so much of the magnificence of Downton Abbey which ran on PBS from 2010-2015.

The Gilded Age in the United States spanned from 1870 through 1900, roughly speaking.

Whether the “The Gilded Age’’ matches the cult following popularity of “Downton Abbey” remains to be seen. Prior to its debut on HBO, reviewers took a rather dim view of Fellowes new drama.

Inkoo Kang, television critic of the Washington Post wrote: if “The Gilded Age isn’t a serious show, it’s not a reliably entertaining one, either. Sure, the sets and costumes and gewgaws are fun to look at. But it’s also dispiriting to watch so many talented stars get so little meat to chew on. “

Mike Hale, television critic for The New York Times wasn’t too enthusiastic about the show either. “In general,” Hale wrote, “the conservatism and provincialism of the old guard is so overdrawn, and presented with such little context, that the society women seem like they’re from outer space, and the actresses playing them can’t do much to make them human.”

At this early juncture, some historians were hoping for a little more to chew on from Mr. Fellowes latest offering.

Daniel Czitrom, Professor of History at Mount Holyoke College (South Hadley, Massachusetts) and author of "New York Exposed: The Gilded Age Police Scandal that Launched the Progressive Era"  says, “with all the money spent on sets, costumes, furniture, hair styling, etc., too bad there wasn't any left for the script, which is full of cliched, boring dialogue, and conveys little dramatic tension.”

Czitrom additionally wondered whether “it would be asking too much to portray people who work for a living (the vast majority) who are not house servants, such as the immigrant neighborhoods full of creative energy and family life in the tenements?” “What about,” Czitrom thundered, “the real class struggle, visible everywhere on 1880s New York City streetcar lines, the docks, tenement cigar factories, and many other such examples.”

Personally, after watching only two episodes of “The Gilded Age," I’ll reserve judgement whether it’s a smashing success or a major flop so early into the miniseries.  “The Gilded Age” includes nine episodes with each episode released on Monday’s. 

What viewers might find interesting, and even helpful, is “The Official Gilded Age Podcast” hosted by Alicia Malone (host on Turner Classic Movies) and Tom Meyers (host of the Bowery Boys podcast) who dissect each episode and provide some historical context to what viewers just saw. I found the first two episodes of the podcasts extremely informative and entertaining.

In episode one of the podcast, “The Gilded Age’’ creator Julian Fellowes discusses the hills and valleys he went through in getting his latest drama on to HBO. And Tony Award winning actress, Christine Baranski, who plays Agnes Van Rhijn, the embodiment of the old New York socialite, discusses how she prepared for the role.

In the second episode of the podcast, Morgan Spector who plays George Russell, a ruthless robber baron of the new money in New York, gives voice to the research he undertook to better understand a 19^th industrialist.  Spector is joined by Location Manager at HBO, Lauri Pitkus, who discusses all the different locations the show had to travel to in order to find the right mansion, since most of the Gilded Age mansions in New York City no longer exist.

Since it took Julian Fellowes nearly ten years to get the “Gilded Age” made, it would be a shame if his efforts didn’t match the high expectations. The Gilded Age, after all, was an incredibly momentous period in American history.

To many, the Gilded Age conjures up images of robber barons, corrupt politicians, and unscrupulous business practices with limited interference from the federal government.

That much is certainly true.

The term “robber baron” dates back to the Middle Ages, and was used to describe individuals who employed unscrupulous business methods to eliminate competition in order to develop a monopoly in their industry. Most of these industrial titans of the Gilded Age demonstrated little compassion for workers.

David S. Tanenhaus, Professor of History and Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said “The Gilded Age is a fascinating period in American History, which historians have described as the Great Barbeque during which the few feasted while the many were roasted.”  According to Tanenhaus, 35,000 workers died in factories and mines every year from 1880 to 1900, the total deaths (700,000) are equivalent to the number of Americans who died in the Civil War.  “During the Gilded Age,” Tanenhaus further explained, “the United States had the highest rate of industrial accidents and deaths in the world.”

While the movers and shakers of industry accumulated mass fortunes, 40% of industrial workers during this time earned measly incomes, well below the poverty line.

“Protectors of our Industries” was created by Bernhard Gillam and published in 1883 by Keppler and Schwarzmann in The Puck, a satirical magazine.

***

Who coined the term Gilded Age?

The Gilded Age was widely popularized with the publication of Mark Twain’s 1873 novel: “The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today” written along with his friend, Charles Dudley Warner, in which they lampoon the personal greed and political corruption of the era. As Twain saw it, the age wasn’t a golden age, rather, it was a gilded age. To gild is to cover something of lesser value, giving it an attractive but deceptive look.

Carrie Coon and Morgan Spector star as wealthy social climbers in “The Gilded Age,” a new series created by Julian Fellowes on HBO.

Photo Credit: Alison Cohen Rosa/HBO

***

One feature of accumulating great wealth during this era, was the way in which the industrial titans flaunted their prestige and power by living in magnificent brownstones and palatial mansions (influenced by Europeans and Persians) with huge billiard rooms and libraries, European antiques and stunning art collections and riding in gold-trimmed carriages, while average workers (including a gush of immigrants lured to America by the high demand for jobs) lived in filthy, wretched conditions, squeezed like sardines in tenements, without much living space or sometimes not even running water.

In one scene from HBO’s “Gilded Age,’’ someone mentions to social climber Bertha Russell (played splendidly by Carrie Coon) at a dinner party that she hears that she has a French cook. “Doesn’t everyone”? Russell quipped.

Jacob Riis, a social reformer and muckraker, once estimated in 1890 that about 330,000 persons were living in one square mile on the lower East Side of New York City.

As bad as it was for many economically deprived workers and new immigrants to the city, the Gilded Age transformed American society in many positive ways that is often overlooked.

The steel industry expanding from 77,000 tons in 1870 to nearly 11.4 million tons by 1900 is often cited by historians as one of the chief reasons for the Industrial Revolution of the Gilded Age. Imagine, between 1870 and 1890 both money and real wages increased by more than ten percent.

The infrastructure of the big city also changed drastically during this time, especially with the invention of electricity, which brought light to homes and streets and added to the luster of nightlife. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876; this was followed by typewriters, adding machines, and cash registers, which served as a boon to the advancement of a burgeoning, industrial society. Houses were better built, sanitation improved as did the quality of food.

The Brooklyn Bridge opened in 1883, which linked the five boroughs together, and helped make New York the biggest city in America and the second largest city in the world.

Mark Summers, Professor of History at the University of Kentucky, thinks that “in so many ways, the Gilded Age was a hard, unjust time.”  “But another part of me thinks,” Summers continued “what must it have been like to be the first generation to walk the streets under electric lights? Or be able to call across town on the telephone? Or to eat green peas and pineapple in the wintertime, with the coming of canned goods? Or drink pasteurized milk? Or, in the 1890s, to see the first few movies on a screen? To be able to go from New York to Chicago in barely a day, from New York to California in less than a week when your grandparents took five or six months to make the same trip?  To read a newspaper not just stuffed with political speeches, but sports news and human-interest features, and the very first comic strips? To be able to type a letter, rather than have to write one? “

Thinking along the same lines as Mark Summers, Caroline E. Janney, Professor of History at the University of Virginia, summed up the developments of the era by observing, the Gilded Age was “an urban transformation - skyscrapers and streetcars, but also a period marked by recurring strife around issues of race, class, gender, ethnicity, religion. It was time that saw the rise of college and spectator sports from boxing to football. Finally, it was likewise a period when the US’s material progress led it toward empire building (Spanish-American War, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, etc.).”

Though the nouveau riche were known for their extravagant lifestyle and wasting money on frivolous and gaudy artifacts, many of the super-rich, especially the wives of industrial titans, used their money to help the less fortunate. Some of the rich, for example, created homes for destitute immigrants. Others helped advance temperance societies, so convinced were they that alcohol was the root of all evil especially among the poorer inhabitants of society. And still others sponsored the right to vote through women’s suffrage campaigns.

The monopolies, social inequality, obscene corruption, and lack of government interference that industrialists treasured so much when their wealth grew by leaps and bounds, came crashing down in the Panic of 1893. The Philadelphia and Reading Railroad (both overextended) failed, which sparked an economic depression, lasting four years. The result was the stock market plunged, millions were suddenly unemployed and homeless. In some states, unemployment shot up to 50%

This ushered in a Progressive era, which put in motion federal controls, the curbing of corporate greed and most importantly--eliminating industrial giants from making vast amounts of money at the expense of the working poor.

Some of the reforms implemented, included: trust busting, labor reform, women’s suffrage, the formation of trade unions, tax reform, election reform, fair labor standards, and food and medicine regulations, among others.

Another critical slice of the Progressive era was the revolutionary reporting journalists and muckrakers championed in uncovering abuse and greed from the filthy rich. In 1890, reporter and photographer, Jacob Riis, exposed the horrors of the tenements in his ground-breaking book, “How the Other Half Lives.”  McClure Magazine journalist Lincoln Steffens (in 1902) exposed the corruption between city officials and crooked businessmen. Journalist, Ida Tarbell, investigated the scheming machinations of oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, which brought Rockefeller’s monopoly (of the Standard Oil Company) to a screeching halt.

And, of course, Upton Sinclair’s highly celebrated 1906 book, “The Jungle” exposed the hideous working conditions of the meatpacking industry.

Like others, I look forward to see what the other seven episodes of the HBO’s the “Gilded Age” has to offer.  I roundly applaud Julian Fellowes for tackling such an ambitious project centering on such a significant time in America’s social history, when the obscene social economic gap between the rich and poor grew wider and wider.

--Bill Lucey

February 5, 2022

[email protected]

Recommended Reading

• “The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age” by Alan Trachtenberg

• “New York City in the Gilded Age” by Esther Crain

• “The Gilded Age: 1876-1912, Overture to the American Century” by Alan Axelrod

 

Debategate or Republican Paranoia?

President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden face off in Cleveland, Ohio for the first 2020 presidential debate.

Photo Credit: Associated Press

***

If you haven’t heard by now, Republicans have gotten their dander up over how presidential debates are run, railing they’re blatantly unfair, such as their chief argument that most of the panelists are composed of beltway eastern elite liberals out to make the Grand Old Party look foolish in front of a nationwide television audience.

White House correspondent for The New York Times, Maggie Haberman, was the first to report that the Republican National Committee (RNC) recently notified the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) that it plans to require GOP presidential nominees not to attend debates run by the commission going forward. 

Haberman did tweet out, however, that “none of this is binding—a nominee can do what they want, and the nominee controls the party. But unlike previous cycles, there is far more energy among GOP base behind it.”

"The RNC will initiate the process of amending the Rules of the Republican Party at our upcoming Winter Meeting to prohibit future Republican nominees from participating in CPD-sponsored debates," Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel wrote in a letter.

The Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) was founded in 1987 under the joint sponsorship of the Democratic and Republican political parties in the United States. It has hosted general-election debates since 1988.

So, what exactly troubles the Republicans about the debates?

Former President Donald Trump has been one of the most vocal ring leaders in charging the debates are biased, anti-Trump, and saturated with liberal leaning panelists.

In 2020, Trump tweeted that the commission is “stacked with Trump Haters & Never Trumpers.”

On another occasion, Trump complained about the selection of moderators of the debate, especially Steve Scully of C-SPAN (no longer with the network), who consulted with former Trump adviser Anthony Scaramucci on how best to question Trump.  What made it worse for Scully was that when the meeting was first reported, he lied about it. He ended up backing out of hosting the debate.

Trump additionally complained that former Fox News anchor Chris Wallace and the NBC News reporter Kristen Welker were biased against him.

Trump and other Republicans pushed to have the debates held earlier in the election cycle, but that request was roundly rejected by the CPD. Also rejected by the commission was having nonvoting representatives of either the RNC or the Democratic National Committee at the commission’s board meetings.

It’s worth noting that Republicans are still fuming that CNN’s debate moderator, Candy Crowley, (no longer with the network), corrected Mitt Romney during his town hall debate with President Obama in 2012. Her interruption of the Republican nominee was taken by many Republicans as displaying flagrant favoritism with the president.

Many contend that the reason Republicans are leery of debates is that we are now living in an age of instant fact-checkers. On a number of occasions, some Republican candidates have made outlandish charges, only to have their statements thrown back at them as ridiculous falsehoods.

Eugene Mazo, a nationally recognized scholar of election law at Seton Hall University doesn’t think there's any bias, but does think the CPD is a problematic organization. “It is privately run, and it has come under criticism in the past of all sorts.”  

Norman Ornstein, an emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), thinks two things are going on with the Republican complaints. “The whole idea here is victimhood-- make your base feel like you are being oppressed and discriminated against, and they will turn out in anger” “So the elites running the debate commission,” from the Republicans perspective, “have stacked the deck against us, and we are not going to take it anymore. And second, they don't really want to debate, at least it if is fair in any way.”

Whether the Republican charges of bias has merit or not, I think it’s time for a major change in the selection of debate panelists.

I suggest a panel consisting of people like Bill Gates, Peyton Manning, Keechant Sewell (Chief of Police of NYC) and other prominent newsmakers. There's no reason why they can't meet with fact checkers and researchers, like journalists do, to make sure they're asking the right questions and be prepared for follow up questions.  The panelists can flesh out their questions with each other by meeting, via Zoom, for a couple of weeks leading up to the debate.

Why should journalists be removed as debate panelists?

Not through any fault of their own, many times a small cluster of journalists during their long careers have had some working relationship with candidates. Steve Scully, for example, former C-SPAN anchor, was an intern for Joe Biden when he was in the Senate in 1978.

George Stephanopoulos, currently co-anchor on Good Morning America (GMA), was Bill Clinton’s communications director during the 1992 presidential campaign. He was also an active Democratic advisor before landing at ABC.

In 2015, it was reported that the then ABC News chief anchor, made three contributions to the Clinton Foundation, which was seen by many as a conflict of interest with his duties as a journalist. This revelation came before he was scheduled to moderate a debate among Republican presidential contenders in February, 2016. After the admission caused such an uproar, Stephanopoulos withdrew from moderating the debate.

Another compelling argument for removing journalists as debate panelists stems from the notion that most questions asked at these debates are mere “food fight” questions, asked to spark malice among the candidates instead of focusing on policy driven questions, questions that undecided voters hope to help them better understand issues facing them in their own lives. Networks, after all, are in a ratings war; the more questions they ask that will spark conflict, the more viewers they’ll generate. These short combative exchanges by the candidates make nice sound bites for the Twitter pages, but do little to resolve challenging issues facing the country.

A Pew Research survey, for example, reported that in 2016, only 10% of voters said they had conclusively made up their minds “during or just after” the presidential debates.

Many argue that the style of the debates too often resembles a “joint press conference” rather than a serious debate. Critics additionally charge that the panelists take too much time away from the candidates themselves.

Still others contend journalists tend to focus on the negative features of a particular candidate rather than zero in on a fundamental policy issue. Again, focusing on the negative, will most likely generate a ratings bonanza.

In 1992, the commission introduced a town hall format in which candidates are asked questions by undecided voters. Though this was a fine idea to hear the concerns of the average voter, the questions too often are softball questions, which the candidates spin by transitioning to their partisan viewpoint.

Having panelists comprised of prominent members of the country like Bill Gates (with his well-known climate change concerns) or Keechant Sewell (Chief of Police of NYC) asking how candidates hope to deal with police profiling or gun shootings within major cities, would go a long way in addressing some of the major concerns facing the country.  The “food fight” questions would significantly be removed from the equation.

The United States has evolved in many ways over the last ten to twenty years.

Abraham Lincoln once said “as our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.”

So too with presidential debates. I think it’s time for journalists to pass the baton and remove themselves from the debate forum.

Just a thought!

--Bill Lucey

[email protected]

January 15, 2022

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